ABSTRACT
With the arrival and expansiveness of digital gaming a new contingent of anthropologists has appeared, giving fresh attention both at the general level to the cultural form of the game itself and specifically to the way the situated practices of gaming trouble our understandings of governance, institutions, immersion, creativity and other issues. The opening up of territory for inquiry that is the aim of digital anthropology is a project that occurs amidst broader and long-standing anthropological hesitations about high technology and the interactions mediated by it. The use of digital games to accomplish institutional projects makes the position of their makers particularly important to understand, while recognizing that this group itself is actually a complex mix of programmers of various specialties, game designers, ‘community managers’ (for online games), marketing staff, system administrators and others.
