ABSTRACT
The increasing necessity to include videogames within discourses around new media has resulted in the proliferation of videogame theory in the past fifteen years. Despite attempts to include the gamer, then, one of the critiques leveled at videogame theory is that it continues to produce technologically-deterministic accounts of gaming, ignoring, or undermining the fact that 'the context in which the game is used or played affects and shapes its value'. As Wolf and Perron note, much of the earlier work within videogame theory, and their earlier edited collection, was concerned with 'justifying the existence of videogame theory in academia'. Indeed, as James Newman argues, the merging of the PC and videogame assumes a one-to-one and solitary relationship with the technology as the norm. The videogame, as both a virtual reality and a domestic technology, sits uneasily within discourses of the PC and discourses of domestic technologies.
