Video games and insightful gameplay
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
Compaso’s special issue on “Insightful Gameplay” looks at the insights we can win from playing and analyzing games and their players from a multitude of perspectives and before various disciplinary backgrounds. It explores games as social spaces where players form lasting relationships; it looks at games through the lens of philosophical concepts to investigate their contribution to relevant social discourses such as militarism and ethics; related to that, it investigates gameplay of philosophically-minded titles as a way to reflect on life; it probes the factors of meaning-generation in games – what makes a game, or genre of games, meaningful to players, where does meaning come from and what different kinds of meaning are there in gameplay? It proposes immersive strategies of gameplay as a fruitful method of studying games; it shines a light on the notion of paratext (e.g. game title, game description and readme file particularly in indie games) as interpretative clue to a game’s meaning and a framing device for gameplay experience; it explores representation of gender in different videogame genres and how players – e.g. three-year-old children – make sense of their own gender roles through gameplay; it inquires how games can evoke empathy, foster learning and stimulate self-reflection about social issues such as immigration or war; it examines ludic identities – how identities are at play, constituted, defined and redefined through different gaming practices. To me, this is as thrilling as it is amazing. It wasn’t too long ago that a US court ruled that games were not worthy of first amendment protection. They were not understood as adequately expressive or communicative to justify it. Now, games are seen and studied as vehicles for meaning generation. They are a corner stone of our social practices and play a large role in our identity formation. Tell me what you play, and I tell you who you are. They make us think about life in ways that are just as profound as reading poetry or philosophical source texts. Games are truly coming of age and the articles in this journal are a testament to that.
Authors and Affiliations
Doris C. Rusch
Keywords
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