Digital Play offers a uniquely critical analysis of interactive media. Inspired by the work of Raymond Williams,
the book traces the development of video gaming from its humble origins in hacker circles to its current status
as a $20 billion global cultural industry. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter systematically
debunk cyber-guru optimism about globally networked digital communications by analysing the management practices
of the corporations that designed and marketed video games to youthful audiences. They reveal that the ascent of
this new communications industry has been anything but smooth and inevitable. From Atari to Microsoft, Space Invaders
to The Sims, the authors uncover the successive crises that forced game makers, faced with constant instabilities
in the global entertainment sector, to become increasingly innovative.
In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit
management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest
a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case
study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the
information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of
interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist
management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not
of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure
in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification
and free play in the cultural industries.