Culture at Play: How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our World

What is video game culture and video games as culture? Culture at Play avoids easy answers and deceitful single definitions. Instead, the collected essays included here navigate the messy and exciting waters of video games, of culture, and of the meeting of video games and culture, and do so from four perspectives: Players: Types and Identities; The Human/The Machine: Agents, Ethics, and Affect; Compassion, Recognition, and the Interpersonal; and Learning through Play. As a form of play, video games can greatly affect our lives. As digital objects, they participate in our digital lives. As both, they have a noticeable impact on our relationships with others, with society, and with ourselves, and this is the scope of this book.

Lindsey Joyce, Ph.D., is a former lecturer of Game Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her work focuses primarily on digital interactive narrative system design and can be found via Inter-Disciplinary Press, Brill, and McFarland Press.

Víctor Navarro-Remesal, Ph.D., is a researcher in Game Studies and assistant professor at CESAG (Comillas Pontifical University), and a specialist in East Asian Studies. He has published books and papers on freedom, ethics, and narrative in videogames.