The Grounds of Gaming

Auteur

Nicholas (Nick) Taylor is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is editor (with Gerald Voorhees) of Masculinities in Play and editor (with Chris Ingraham) of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media.

Texte du rabat

Stark gender disparities characterize the places where digital gameplay often takes place remote gaming setups, campus computer labs, esports arenas, and convention centers, for instance as well as the overall cultures of video gameplay, spectatorship, and game production. Despite new franchises, platforms, and initiatives expanding games beyond their conventional audience of young, cis-het white men, gaming still feels off-limits or unsafe for many.
The Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic gender politics. Through a series of case studies that document the gender dynamics of the various sites where video games literally take and make place, author Nicholas Taylor unpacks questions about how place matters to digital play, how issues in gaming cultures and politics are perpetuated through particular arrangements of bodies, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures.
In charting the connections between place, masculinities, and play, The Grounds of Gaming makes space for marginalized perspectives, practices, and populations in gaming cultures.

Contenu

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Men, Place, and Games

1. Frames: Extractive Logics in Play
2. Circles: It All Starts at Home
3. Grids: LAN Parties and the Infrastructural Grounds of Gaming
4. Platforms: Making Space for Collegiate Esports
5. Pockets: Practicing Safe Storage at Games Industry Conventions
   Conclusion: Boundaries, (Re)taking the Field
   Bibliography
   Index