Unit 4: Culture

Chapter List

Chapter 29: Defining Culture
Chapter 30: Games as Cultural Rhetoric
Chapter 31: Games as Open Culture
Chapter 32: Games as Cultural Resistance
Chapter 33: Games as Cultural Environment
Commissioned Game: Caribbean Star

…media never functions in a vacuum. Playing a game in an arcade is a very different experience than playing it in one's own home or as part of a military training exercise. Media consumption gains its meaning through association with a range of other activities that constitute our everyday life.—Henry Jenkins, "Lessons from Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want to Hear About Youth and Media"

No game is an island.

Games are always played somewhere, by someone, for some reason or another. They exist, in other words, in a context, a surrounding cultural milieu. The magic circle is an environment for play, the space in which the rules take on special meaning. But the magic circle itself exists within an environment, the greater sphere of culture at large. In the following chapters, we continue our outward movement from the heart of the magic circle, beyond RULES and PLAY, into the vast and colorful expanse of CULTURE.