This article examines the form and function of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in terms of social engagement. Combining conclusions from media effects research informed by the communication effects literature with those from ethnographic research informed by a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning, we present a shared theoretical framework for understanding (a) the extent to which such virtual worlds are structurally similar to “third places” (Oldenburg, 1999) for informal sociability, and (b) their potential function in terms of social capital (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000). Our conclusion is that by providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new “third place” for informal sociability. Participation in such virtual “third places” appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital—social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews.

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Accompanying esports’ explosion in popularity, the amount of academic research focused on organized, competitive gaming has grown rapidly. From 2002 through March 2018, esports research has developed from nonexistent into a field of study spread across seven academic disciplines. We review work in business, sports science, cognitive science, informatics, law, media studies, and sociology to understand the current state of academic research of esports and to identify convergent research questions, findings, and trends across fields.

The claim that video games are replacing literacy activities that is bandied about in the American mainstream press is based not only on unspecified definitions of both 'games' and 'literacy' but also on a surprising lack of research on what children actually do when they play video games. In this article, the author examines some of the practices that comprise game play in the context of one genre of video games in particular-massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Based on data culled from a two-year online cognitive ethnography of the MMOG Lineage (both I and II), the author argues that forms of video game play such as those entailed in MMOGs are not replacing literacy activities but rather are literacy activities. In order to make this argument, the author surveys the literacy practices that MMOGamers routinely participate in, both within the game's virtual world (e.g. social interaction, in-game letters) and beyond (e.g. online game forums, the creation of fan sites and fan fiction). Then, with this argument in place, she attempts to historicize this popular contempt toward electronic 'pop culture' media such as video games and suggest a potentially more productive (and accurate) framing of the literacy practices of today's generation of adolescents and young adults. Based on media coverage, one would think that the United States were in a modern-day literacy crisis, thanks particularly to new digital technologies such as video games. Recent publications include books with titles such as A is for Ox: the collapse of literacy and the rise of violence in the electronic age (Sanders, 1995).[1] Survey experts report that video games are now 'the fourth most dominant medium, displacing print media' (Mandese, 2004). Meanwhile, news reports quote researchers as stating, 'students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud' (Wearden, 2001, emphasis added).[2] This concern about video games somehow replacing literacy activities is perhaps best summed up in a recent New York Times editorial by Solomon (2004), who states that electronic activities-video games given as the quintessential example-are 'torpid', 'by and large invite inert reception', and are one of the primary causes behind the 'closing of the American book' (Weber, 2004). Yet, all the while, video gaming is only becoming more and more ubiquitous in contemporary American youth culture, with more than eight out of every ten children in America having a video game console in the home, and over half having two or more (Rideout et al, 2005). Based on claims such as these, one might indeed feel cause for alarm. There are two problems, however, with such arguments. The first is a lack of specificity about the 'cause' of the purported problem. While video games are often singled out as a (if not the) primary technological culprit of the supposed 'literacy crisis', which games are being referred to is left chronically underspecified. Even when we ignore, for sake of argument, the fact that gam...

In this essay, I discuss the ways in which, in the context of Lineage, the game that’s actually played by participants is not the game that designers originally had in mind, but rather one that is the outcome of an interactively stabilized (Pickering, 1995) “mangle of practice” of designers, players, in-game currency farmers, and broader social norms.

Games are an extremely valuable context for the study of cognition as inter(action) in the social and material world. They provide a representational trace of both individual and collective activity and how it changes over time, enabling the researcher to unpack the bidirectional influence of self and society. As both designed object and emergent culture, g/Games (a) consist of overlapping well-defined problems enveloped in ill-defined problems that render their solutions meaningful; (b) function as naturally occurring, selfsustaining, indigenous versions of online learning communities; and (c) simultaneously function as both culture and cultural object—as microcosms for studying the emergence, maintenance, transformation, and even collapse of online affinity groups and as talkaboutable objects that function as tokens in public conversations of broader societal issues within contemporary offline society. In this article, the author unpacks each of these claims in the context of the massively multiplayer online games.