Introduction

Abstract

To study games is to also study the forms and cultures of play that develop around and give meaning to the acts of playing games. In its most abstract structure of play, or paidia, is the unconstrained use of imagination to engage with the world. It is here that paidia offers individuals the freedom to “play” and to “play with” the world around them. However, these acts are always imbued with deep social meanings that are simultaneously expressed through and developed during that act of play.¹ From the early games of Mancala, Go, and Chess to the acts of playing house or dolls, individuals learn to navigate social structures from agriculture and warfare to domesticity and gender.² In sum, as individuals learn to play, they also learn to understand, and reinforce, a variety of social practices, making play a formative activity in the construction of the individual, society, and culture.³ The activity play, or paidia, is however balanced between ludus, or the controlled rules of play.⁴ Rule systems provide players with the formal design challenges, outcomes, and goals that form the parameters of the game, and “players accept the rules because they make the game activity possible.”⁵ From this perspective, it is equally important to understand the larger social, cultural, and national contexts that influence and control the design of game structures. It is therefore between the act of playing and the formally designed systems of the game that meaning is created, maintained, and controlled, making games an evocative cultural object.⁶ It is at this intersection of paidia and ludus that games interpellate individuals into the socially constructed environment of the game,⁷ and which this book seeks to explore the socio-cultural dynamics of video games.