Academic Gaming Studies

This from a recently published academic study (summarized here):

"First and foremost, P2P game piracy is extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed [at least it was during the period analyzed]. However, the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high," Drachen adds. "It also appears that some common myths are wrong, e.g. that it is only shooters that get pirated, as we see a lot of activity for children's

...

It is not often that I encounter across myself when researching a topic. I found the following in a recent article on the uses of ethnography in virtual environments:

Virtual Video Ethnography

Neither the virtual ethnography nor netnography seem to pay special attention to the visual aspect of cyberspace, which seems contradictory, since the great popularization of the online medium is mostly due to its visual appeal, both in the use of the graphic interface and in

...

With my third book for the University of Toronto Press now in the hands of my editor I am turning my attention back to my hobby, the ethnography of online military gaming. This will probably culminate in yet another book down the road.

I recently taught a course at the University of Ottawa on online virtual environments, using Celia Pearce's text, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. A good introduction to the kind of autoethnographic project ...

This from the Globe and Mail:

A woman seeking to expose misogyny in video games has suffered a harsh lesson in the extent of Internet viciousness, as a campaign of harassment escalated to a Canadian man creating a game that let people batter an image of her face.

Anita Sarkeesian, who blogs from California but was born near Toronto and identifies as Canadian-American, had her Wikipedia page locked after it was hacked repeatedly with profanity, lies and pornography.

...

As a result of posting videos to Battlelog individuals try to prove themselves against me because of my different playstyle. This leads to players trying to hunt me down and kill me and make a film of the event. Like this one:



A curious aspect of "micro-celebrity" culture in online gaming? Certainly something new to me and, I think, rather rare in the genre of virtual videography.

Of course, it is ...