Interactivity, Interdependence, and Intertextuality: The Meaning of Video Games in American Civil Society

Аннотация

In recent years the video game community has undergone a drastic transformation. What began as a communal pastime for programmers in federally-funded research laboratories during the late 1950s and 1960s has erupted into a multi-billion dollar industry enjoyed by millions of Americans. Reflecting this transformation, social scientists from a wide variety of fields have begun to explore video games’ social significance. Sadly, so far very little work has examined video games from a sociological viewpoint. In this work I attempt to remedy this serious omission by adopting a cultural sociology framework to study video games’ social meanings in three different mediated spaces, including The New York Times, the popular video game media outlet Kotaku, and the internet discussion forum NeoGAF. Consistent with recent work on entertainment commentary’s capacity to function as an aesthetic public sphere, my analysis demonstrates that discussions occurring in all three spaces address broader sociopolitical concerns.