Online Games

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Peichi Chung, whose focus is on digital labour in the context of e-sports. This is a rapidly growing area of digital entertainment, with an inaugural e-sports Olympics to be held in Dubai in 2027.

Past work on e-sports has focussed on e-sports as fan-based digital labour, and linked this to emerging worker identities in the gig economy. This is further disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its embedding into video games, and the gamification of digital work; overall, video gaming becomes a form of …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

Twitch has made the individual easier to reach (and achieve reach) than ever before; most streamers are not backed by major gaming companies, but act as single agents who create gaming broadcast content and in doing so must adopt and follow certain performance practices: this may …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Carlos Ballesteros, whose focus is on news games as a vehicle for digital journalism. Such news games have been around for some time, but they exist in many different forms, and there’s still a lack of conceptual clarity with respect to this term. The general hope is that such games might increase the amount of time people spend with the news media.

But how are such games used to convey journalistic messages? Carlos examined some 84 news games from 48 mass media outlets in 17 countries, classifying these across a number …

The final speaker in this WebSci 2016 session is Ramine Tinati, whose focus is on citizen science platforms. Citizen science itself has been around for hundreds of years, but more recent developments in online crowdsourcing techniques have enabled even greater mass participation in such scientific activities; one early success in this was Zooniverse, which asks users for help in classifying galaxy types.

The platform studied by this paper is Eyewire, which asks users to complete puzzles that help in visually mapping the human brain. The platform also includes a real-time chat interface that connects players with each other …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Chris Paul and Mia Consalvo, who shift our interest towards games. What is a game, in the first place? Game styles now vary wildly, and address many different communities of gamers; this is a matter of constitutive rhetoric as the language being used brings distinctions into existence through repetition.

One element that defines games is their payment structure: in mobile gaming, are they free to play or do we pay to win, for instance? Which companies create fair and good or exploitative and greedy games?

There are many genres now emerging, such as …

The next speaker at this AoIR 2013 panel is T.L. Taylor, focussing here on spectatorship in gaming. The mix of playing and watching has always been central to gaming as a social activity, but game studies has always privileged the hands on the controller; spectatorship has traditionally also relied on physical co-presence (e.g. at gaming championships).

But now there are sites like Twitch, which enable gamers to make their private play public as a livestream, and even to make money in doing so, as a spinoff from JustIn.tv. The site currently has some 600 unique broadcasters per month …

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The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Birgit Blättel-Mink, who focusses on the case of German games developer Crytek (which developed Far Cry, Crysis, and other games), based in Frankfurt, which engages with its users as innovators. The company has some 600 employees distributed across five international studios and two distribution centres; its core product is the Cry games engine.

Crytek’s user community includes casual gamers (on social networks), hardcore gamers (in the Crytek Mycrisis community and other online communities), and modders who generate modified games modules and take part in various specialist communities. Casual gamers …