With complex stories and stunning visuals eliciting intense emotional responses, coupled with opportunities for self-expression and problem solving, video games are a powerful medium to foster empathy, critical thinking, and creativity in players. As these games grow in popularity, ambition, and technological prowess, they become a legitimate art form, shedding old attitudes and misconceptions along the way. Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives asks whether videogames have the power to transform a player and his or her beliefs from a sociopolitical perspective. Unlike traditional forms of storytelling, videogames allow users to immerse themselves in new worlds, situations, and politics. This publication surveys the landscape of videogames and analyzes the emergent gaming that shifts the definition and cultural effects of videogames. This book is a valuable resource to game designers and developers, sociologists, students of gaming, and researchers in relevant fields.

Animal Crossing is an innovative virtual world with a global audience beyond traditional online gamers. The book is the first major study, offering an interdisciplinary exploration of copyright and other laws, user creativity and sociability, psychology, the virtual world’s economic and technological basis, uptake during COVID-19, gamification of offline brands, relationships with past/contemporary computer games, and Animal Crossing as an example of the Japanification of online popular culture. The book provides insights for students, researchers and non-specialist readers.

Organized into two sections, Studying Gaming Literacies explores the rich methodological approaches to gaming literacies scholarship as well as the possibilities of engaging in research in both classrooms and informal learning settings.

Doctoral researchers are increasingly focusing on the social justice aspects of dissertation research problems and are often uncertain on how to incorporate societal change issues within a dissertation format. Due to the current climate, this interest in social justice is likely to continue to increase. Many aim to affect change within their discipline, workplace, or communities as they conduct dissertation research across doctoral program areas. Social Justice Research Methods for Doctoral Research presents contemporary social justice research method strategies and incorporates the aspects of social justice into research design. This major reference work illustrates how, why, and where to incorporate conventional and creative social justice research methodologies across both qualitative and quantitative approaches from various theoretical and conceptual perspectives. Covering topics such as community-based research, educational leadership, and cancel culture, this book serves as a dynamic resource for researchers, post-graduate students, researcher supervisors, librarians, methodologists, research program developers, and education administrators.

​Digital Capabilities is a first-of-its-kind exploration of the capabilities that communities in positions of inequality in Israel and the West Bank seek to realize by utilizing information and communication technologies (ICT), the opportunities they have to communicate, and the way ICTs serve their desire to do so. It is the outcome of an eight-year research project in which the nine authors of this book, some of whom came from within the studied communities, conducted their work among the studied populations over an extended period of time. The capabilities approach, much discussed theoretically, takes on a life in this project and is presented as an empirically observable phenomenon for assessing whether ICTs are serving actual needs, whether communication resources are justly allocated and distributed and whether they serve the goal of a universally accessible right to communicate.

This book provides education scholars insight into current theoretical and methodological approaches to conceptualize, facilitate, and examine learning and identity in virtual learning environments such as games and simulations. Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are being increasingly designed, implemented, and researched because they offer opportunities for learning that are embodied, enactive (i.e., learning by doing), extended into the learners’ environment, and embedded in authentic and potentially valuable contexts for identity exploration. Each chapter in this book uniquely illustrates the learning and identity processes, characteristics, and outcomes that VLEs can facilitate. Together, these approaches provide a foundation for use-inspired research that guides how individuals intentionally, continually, and dynamically reinvent the self for a future that requires flexibility and adaptability in both career and academic spaces. The volume will be a key resource for researchers, scholars, and practitioners engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of learning sciences, learning analytics, and learning design. It was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Education.

How do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game’s history. The access to this history is often granted by so-called paratexts, which are accompanying elements orbiting texts. Exploring this fully, case studies in this work move the focus of debate from the games themselves to wider, ancillary materials and ask how history is used in, and how we can use history to study games.