This subject explores the broader spaces and nature of play online, and how it relates to the development of digital forms of gaming. The nature of immersion is questioned and the role of interactivity investigated, along with critical perspectives on the popular but controversial notion of 'gamification.' It examines a series of gaming tropes and themes, games as texts, and the ways that games enter social frameworks to convey, refract, engage with, and resist power structures. An ongoing focus is on the function of rules in framing play, particularly in relation to how players cheat, hack and mod their games to break those rules.
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