Introduction

In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick, argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. This book argues that closer attention to games and gaming, adds an important dimension to our understanding of society and contemporary culture.

Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960’s counter culture, Computer Games and the Social imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a world of color and fun. Computer games have played a central role in the development of the digital technologies that are widely known to have transformed the global economy over the past decades. Computer games were central to the emergence of personal computers, to the diffusion of easy-to-use interfaces on technologies and to the rise of the Internet and naturalizing our experience of ‘virtual’ space.

Gaming is also an important force in fundamental social and cultural processes because the gaming industry has been a leading role in developing new working practices. Computer games have become a driving force behind the “network society” which Jan van Djik states in his text, Social Structure, that the network society eliminates constraints between time and space and connects the public and private spheres of living. “In the network society, new social structures seem to fill the void (depth) of traditional communities and associations that are lost in modern society” (van Djik, 2006, p.156).  Gaming is vital to the applications of technology that have become definitive of the modern organization in networked capitalism and modern consumption. This book describes the ways in which gaming technology, computer design and technology change has shifted the way we think about society.