Video games and Electronic Media

Abstract

Videogames and gameplay, and young people's engagement with them, are of considerable interest to literacy educators and researchers concerned with digital literacies, the place of videogames and digital culture in young people's lives, and the literate and social practices they that surround them. However, challenges remain about how to understand and conceptualize videogames, and what approaches to use in their analysis, that will capture the active nature of games and the hybrid nature of the form. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of Literacy and Games Studies, this chapter describes Steinkuehler's adaptation of Gee's account of 'big' and 'little' D Discourse to provide a basis for the analysis of massively multiplayer online games and game-play that bridge the differing epistemological perspectives and traditions effectively. The chapter concludes with brief discussion of other media- and literacy-oriented approaches to the analysis of online games and game-play.