Online Gaming in Context The social and cultural significance of online games Routledge Advances in Sociology Series

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet.

This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

Part I: Introduction 1. The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Gaming Part II: Production and Play 2. Player Production and Innovation in Online Games: Time for New Rules? 3. Conflict, Thought Communities and Textual Appropriation in MMORPGs 4. Thrift Players in a Twisted Game World? A Study of Private Online Game Servers 5. The Only (End)Game in Town: Designing for Retention in 'World of Warcraft' 6. The Boardgame Online: Simulating the Experience of Physical Games 7. Games in the Mobile Internet: Understanding Contextual Play in Flickr and Facebook 8. The Whereabouts of Play, or How the Magic Circle Helps Create Social Identities in Virtual Worlds 9. Framing the Game: Four Game-related Approaches to Goffman's Frames Part III: Communities and Communication 10. Identity-as-Place: The Construction of Game Refugees and Fictive Ethnicities 11. The Rise and Fall of 'Cardboard Tube Samurai': Kenneth Burke Identifying with the 'World of Warcraft' 12. Analyzing Player Communication in Multi-player Games 13. Recallin' Fagin: Linguistic Accents, Intertextuality and Othering in Narrative Offline and Online Video Games 14. 'Second Life' as a Digitally Mediated Third Place: Social Capital in Virtual World Communities 15. Representations of Race and Gender within the Gamespace of the MMO 'Everquest' 16. 'Wordslinger': Visualizing Physical Abuse in a Virtual Environment Part IV: Conclusion 17. It's Not Just a Game: Contemporary Challenges for Games Research and the Internet

Garry Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford, UK. His teaching and research primarily focus upon audiences, fan cultures and the everyday uses of media technologies. He is the author of Consuming Sport (2004), and the co-author of the second edition of Introducing Cultural Studies (2008, with B. Longhurst, G. Smith, G. Bagnall, and M. Osborn) and the Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies (forthcoming 2009, with T. Blackshaw).

Victoria K. Gosling is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Salford, UK. Her teaching and research interests encompass gender, urban regeneration, social exclusion, leisure, popular culture and digital games. She is the current editor of the British Sociological Association newsletter Network, an editorial board member for the journal Sociology, and the former post-graduate forum convenor of the BSA.

Ben Light is Professor of Digital Media in the School of Media, Music and Performance, and a member of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre at the University of Salford, UK. His current research interests centre on analysing the development and use of social media in everyday life.