ABSTRACT
The introduction tries to situate the practice of gaming under a broader umbrella of digital leisure activities. It foregrounds the growth of both gaming as an industry and gaming as an activity in order to understand both video games as media forms and cultural artifacts. The chapter also looks at the various ways video games have been studied by various disciplines, and the various schools of thought in game studies, and then tries to answer some basic questions such as “What does it mean to be a gamer?” - and in the process grapples with a lot of existing literature from the emerging subfield of game studies.
By building on the premise that in an everyday context, specific repetitive acts, when performed over time, acquire new contextual meanings and cease to remain merely acts of habit but become practices; this book charts the gaming practices of fourteen individuals and captures their individual gaming journeys. The purpose is to understand and arrive at a “culture of gaming” in an Indian context by capturing players’ experiences with video games from a participant pool of video game players from urban India.
