Bloomsbury Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children's Everyday Play

Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world. Review Seth Giddings has long been one of the most astute observers of the complexities of digital play and this book offers a compelling, sophisticated look at gaming. Anchored in evocative analysis across a variety of 'gameworlds,' he beautifully shows of how everyday play lives are interwoven between the virtual and the material. This is a must read for anyone interested not only children and gaming, but media technology more broadly. --T.L. Taylor, Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USAThis timely study is at once specific in its ethnographic attention to the micro-detail of childrens play and excitingly ambitious in its theoretical range. Seth Giddings connects the work of the Opies to contemporary game studies, and worries away productively at the complex overlap between the virtual worlds children fabricate in gardens and playgrounds and those they inhabit in digital games. He acknowledges pre-digital play cultures, and valuably posits post-digital play. All students of games, childhood, media and play should keep this book open on their desk. --Andrew Burn, Professor of Media Education, Institute of Education, University of London, UKThis timely study is at once specific in its ethnographic attention to the micro-detail of childrens play and excitingly ambitious in its theoretical range. Seth Giddings connects the work of the Opies to contemporary game studies, and worries away productively at the complex overlap between the virtual worlds children fabricate in gardens and playgrounds and those they inhabit in digital games. He acknowledges pre-digital play cultures, and valuably posits post-digital play. All students of games, childhood, media and play should keep this book open on their desk. --Andrew Burn, Professor of Media Education, Institute of Education, University of London, UK About the Author <b style=""mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"">Seth Giddings teaches theory and practice of digital media at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.