10.1177/1555412005281911ARTICLEGames and CultureSteinkuehler / Why Game (Culture) Studies Now? Why Game (Culture) Studies Now?

Games are an extremely valuable context for the study of cognition as inter(action) in the social and material world. They provide a representational trace of both individual and collective activity and how it changes over time, enabling the researcher to unpack the bidirectional influence of self and society. As both designed object and emergent culture, g/Games (a) consist of overlapping well-defined problems enveloped in ill-defined prob-lems that render their solutions meaningful; (b) function as naturally occurring, self-sustaining, indigenous versions of online learning communities; and (c) simultaneously function as both culture and cultural object—as microcosms for studying the emergence, maintenance, transformation, and even collapse of online affinity groups and as talk-about-able objects that function as tokens in public conversations of broader societal issues within contemporary offline society. In this article, the author unpacks each of these claims in the context of the massively multiplayer online games