Games and Contemporary Culture

Games and Contemporary Culture seeks to further examinations of gaming forms, functions, and practices within a wide variety of cultural contexts. The volumes in this series will enable new ways of understanding games from sociological and humanistic standpoints while staying committed to the understanding of specific trends, events, and moments in time when gaming acts and practices emerge. The need to study acts and practices in video game design, production, distribution, and play is now more urgent than ever as the medium cements its position as one of the world’s predominant digital leisure activities. Market research conducted by firms like Newzoo and Niko indicate that nearly two in every three people in the world engage with digital games, a number that is likely to continue rising in a post-pandemic reality where everyday lives are inherently required to incorporate digitally-mediated online interactions several times in any given day. We aim to situate game making, play, and the resultant practices that emanate from these acts, within the constantly mutating phenomenon of danah boyd’s ‘always on’ global society.  

This series is conceived as inclusive, allowing for the showcasing and nurturing of novel ways to understand games. It therefore serves as an opportunity to examine gaming practices in contexts and locales deserving of more attention than they have previously received. By situating this series both in the UK and in India, we welcome new ideas and methods that will help to understand what play means contextually. We also hope to create a space that has room for practices of game making and play that straddle the Global North and the Global South. As such, the scholarship in this series must attempt to not just build bridges between the contextual interpretations that emerge through engagements with games but also offer a broader and inclusive understanding of gaming as a practice that is attuned to and representative of our complex online and offline realities.