Game-Studies

I recently tweeted a high-profile article on the Guardian about Felicia Day and GamerGate, the online movement mostly visible on Twitter, but also making waves visible enough that big news outlets like the Guardian see it newsworthy. Soon after, I received messages from GamerGate proponents (and that’s both great and terrible about Twitter – anyone can message anyone), telling me how that is not what GamerGate is about. I understand their concern: they identify with GamerGate and when others write that GamerGate is about something they don’t identify with, they feel misrepresented. The feeling is understandable: “They say I stand for harassment, but I don’t. They need to stop saying those things about me.” ...

So, are you a gamer? I probably am, but the answer is easy for me. I am what has been the target demographic for games since their birth as a form of commercial entertainment: a straight, white male. I’m also in my 30’s, which makes me representative of the current core of how gamers are usually identified. However, ‘gamer’ does not equal ‘player’. While the word ‘player’ denotes somebody who plays, the word ‘gamer’ has a more specific meaning. It refers to people who are both playing games and identifying through that activity. ...

I recently presented a paper at the Internet Privacy summer school. While preparing for that, I looked at how government agencies viewed games as tools for surveillance. The focus of this short summary is on the 2007 NSA report leaked by Edward Snowden. Looking at the report from the present shows that NSA’s hopes for the power of games might have been a bit overstated. ...

I participated at the Critical Evaluation of Game Studies conference at Tampere this week. As the name implies, the theme was very meta, with commentary about the state of the discipline. ...

I’ve recently had to reflect on my attitude towards free-to-play games. I recognise there are two sides to the issue, and I’ve been trying hard to reconcile them. ...

The concepts real, fiction and virtual get tossed around pretty casually around game studies. It seems that “virtual” is a lasting favorite, used to rescue any ontologically vague situation by slapping a seemingly clear category on it. The problem is that calling something virtual is far from clear, as the whole category of virtual seems to be a mess of different things only vaguely related to each other. ...