Mia Consalvo Books

A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.

In Players and Their Pets, Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy chartthe brief life of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) calledFaunasphere, examining how the game evolved over the course of its entire lifecycle from 2009 to 2011 in terms of design as well as how its player communityresponded to changes and events.

Women & Everyday Uses of the Internet investigates the forms and codes of the Internet as a popular medium and the ways in which women figure as users, content producers, and target audiences. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, this book addresses issues of gendered identity and agency in the wider framework of consumer culture and uses of new media. Individual chapters explore personal and commercial web sites for women, constructions of lesbian identity, communities of female consumers and Vietnam veterans, women’s web cam sites, educational experiences and information society agendas, the possibilities of design, conceptions of digital television, as well as wider media attention to the Internet and women. These case studies provide rich insights into the uses of the Internet as an everyday medium and the varying locations and forms of its gendered use.

The cross-cultural interactions of Japanese videogames and the West, from DIY localization by fans to corporate strategies of Japaneseness.

How we talk about games as real or not-real, and how that shapes what games are made and who is invited to play them.