Social gaming and the culture of videogames: competition and collaboration on and off screen

It is commonplace, in both popular and academic discourse, to consider videogaming as a solitary activity. We have noted in Chapter 4, for example, that the overwhelming majority of videogame ‘effects’ studies focus on the lone player and take little or no account of the presence, let alone the influence, of either simultaneous collaborative play or the social contexts that surround and support videogames. Though the consequences of this misunderstanding of videogame play and the culture in which it is located are far-reaching, it is perhaps understandable given the text-centred nature of the methodologies deployed in these studies.