Around the world, people in enormous and growing numbers---kids to adults of all ages---are playing electronic games (Egames). On the one hand, Egames) are new, quickly spreading, engaging, community-based, and participative forms of art, literature, commerce, learning, and fun for children and adults. Egames can also be complex sociotechnical phenomena that confuse players, raise moral, medical and legal issues, divert resources, tax infrastructures and complicate policy. They already play significant roles in entertainment, certainly (home PC games, cell phone games, web-based massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORGs)), but also education and life-long learning (educational games, business simulations, military training), commerce (movie tie-ins, website promotion, game sales), design (character and world design, game "mods", interactive storytelling and participative drama), scientific innovation (graphics, multimedia, miniaturization, scalable distributed and P2P information systems, open-source game "mod" processes) and more. The wide array and social embeddedness of Egame platforms (consoles, PCs, websites, hand-held games, cell phones, PDAs, shared corporate, educational, museum, and library datacenters) means that Egames appear across virtually all social settings: schools, libraries, museums, businesses, military, conferences, homes, cafes, subways, buses, cars, and the street.
Did you realize that:
Egames are global communities: Over 1 million people regularly participate in each of several online games. For example, on 30 March 2005 at 1 PM, csports.net reported that 8,775,667 players had participated in the online game "Counterstrike" in the previous 31 days, and 107,277 players were "online now."
Women game:A recent AOL survey found that women over 40 were among the most avid gamers, and in May 2004 Nielsen/NetRatings found that 35 to 49-year-old females spent the most time of any demographic group at online gaming sites. [Robyn Greenspan, "Online Gaming Revenue to Quadruple", clickz.com, September 7, 2004]
People learn with Egames: James Paul Gee examines how computer and video games can help people learn skills of perception, identity construction, and understanding the meaning of events and instructions, in his new book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy." Businesses, too, are using digital games as training aids, and the military is has funded the development of a "prototype training environment, focusing on the domain of decision-making training for military peacekeeping operations." How do game environments, philosophies, and techniques change how people learn and what they learn about?
Egames are commerce drivers: Microsoft reported 2.38 million copies of Halo2 sold in the first 24 hours of release (11/2004), with revenues higher than the best US cinema box-office opening to date. Overall, NPD reports that approxmately $10 billion in console game hardware, software, and accessories were sold in 2003 and again in 2004. (This doesn't include PC games or online games).
Egames raise complex policy and scientific issues: In the popular "Grand Theft Auto/San Andreas" (5.2 million console (not including PC) units sold in 2004) players can pretend they're on a crime spree. According to gamesindustry.biz, in Sen. Hilary Clinton's view, "Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them. This is a silent epidemic of media desensitisation that teaches kids it's OK to diss people because they are a woman, they're a different colour or they're from a different place." Sen. Clinton "wants a $90 million investigation to be launched into the impact of games and other electronic media on the 'cognitive, social, emotional and physical development' of children." From another perspective, K. Subrahmanyam, et al. report "cognitive research suggests that playing computer games can be an important building block to computer literacy because it enhances children's ability to read and visualize images in three-dimensional space and track multiple images simultaneously."
It's clear, then, that Egames are pervasive and they're having big impacts in culture, science/technology, business, art, information/telecommunications (ICT) infrastructure, and policy.
This course will survey this landscape, analyzing Egame cultures, Egame forms and delivery, and their social settings, using the integrated perspective of social informatics. The course format will include readings, lectures, group projects, and visits from developers and analysts of the Egame world. The course will be especially useful to:
Information professionals and librarians who want to understand the fit and impacts of Egames in their worlds.
Egame designers who need insights on Egame culture and context to think through and create more responsive offerings.
Students of modern practices of art, culture, technology, and information.