Gaming Rhythms

This book is about digital games, the people who play digital games, and how they play them. This poses a large problem: even when discussing one game, each instance of play is different. Combine this with the thousands of digital games, and the millions of players, and it is apparent that the number of individual instances of game play is unfathomably large. What these instantiations do have in common is that they are enacted locally. There are many variables involved in establishing the local - which is always a contested and shifting site - experience of digital game play: drink, food, friends, hardware, light, mobile phones, music, and software. The mundane reality of classes, commitments, deadlines, homework, internet bills, sleep, and work, must also be negotiated. This book aims to demonstrate the significance of nexus of the everyday and the local instantiation of game play as starting point for concept building in the study of digital games. Through case studies of two internet cafés, in Melbourne, Australia and Caracas, Venezuela, this project demonstrates how useful and generalizable concepts can be developed from understanding digital games as they are played. The specific localized experience of play can be connected to a global experience of digital game play, which ameliorates, exacerbates, and rescales the unease about the dynamic between games and players.