The DOI matches its Crossref record; 54 of the 55 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games
Abstract
Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date, in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society.
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“In analyzing different types of contingencies, Malaby (2007, pp. 107-108) finds games to contain four different varieties: stochastic, social, performative and semiotic.”
From Real-time hermeneutics: meaning-making in ludonarrative digital games (2018) · cites this paper as Malaby (2007, pp. 107-108)
In the citing paper
“Games are activities that are present and participated in throughout human society—by those of all ages, genders, and socio-economic statuses (Bateson and Martin 2013; Huizinga 1949; Malaby 2007).”
From Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration: Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills for the Future of Work and Education (2023) · cites this paper as Malaby 2007
Citations
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“…the range of contingency operating on the ground, beyond adaptation (as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin continued to argue more recently; see Gould & Lewontin, 1979), instead of contenting themselves with “plausible stories” that reflected assumptions about categories of species (and their…”
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification"
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011) · Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments · doi:10.1145/2181037.2181040 · Cited by 8,402
The Rise of Motivational Information Systems: A Review of Gamification Research
Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2017) · International Journal of Information Management · doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.10.013 · Cited by 2,229
Thornhill-Miller, B., Camarda, A., Mercier, M., Burkhardt, J.-M., Morisseau, T., Bourgeois-Bougrine, S., Vinchon, F., El Hayek, S., Augereau-Landais, M., Mourey, F., et al. (2023) · Journal of Intelligence · doi:10.3390/jintelligence11030054 · Cited by 768
“Games are activities that are present and participated in throughout human society—by those of all ages, genders, and socio-economic statuses (Bateson and Martin 2013; Huizinga 1949; Malaby 2007).”
BackgroundFrom game design elements to gamefulness
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. E. (2011) · Cited by 367
Whitson, J. R. (2013) · Surveillance & Society · doi:10.24908/ss.v11i1/2.4454 · Cited by 300
Metadata
- Authors
- Malaby, T. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (US)
- Corresponding author
- Malaby, Thomas M.
- ORCID
- Malaby, Thomas M.
- Venue
- Games and Culture
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-04
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 95-113
- ISSN
- 1555-4120 (ISSN-L)
- 1555-4139
- OpenAlex
- W2116669853
- Cited by
- 434
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 23 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 22 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 61.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Games and Culture (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Games and Media
- Social Sciences › Education › Physical education and sports games research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Games and Gamification
- Keywords
- games, play, emergent practices, everyday life, games and society, social theory, pragmatism
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