Introduction

For many years, digital gaming has been portrayed as being on the fringes of media and communication studies. While there were always some more or less diverse forms of digital games research, even in the early days of digital gaming, most of it was only loosely connected to traditional media and communication research. The existing social-scientific research has arguably focused on problematic uses and stereotypical user groups. The interest in problematic aspects of new media is not uncommon, and it follows the logic of protecting society from the harmful effects of yet unknown (media) influences.