Online Games, Social Narratives

Online gaming is changing. It is no longer enough to analyse one type of online community in order to understand the phenomenon of players who take part in online worlds, or to generalise about their behaviour by looking at one single type of online gaming. This book looks at different types of games in the online gaming genre. MacCallum-Stewart studies the different ways in which online games create social environments, and how players choose to interpret these. These games vary from the immensely popular social networking games on Facebook such as Farmville to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to "Free to Play" online gaming and to console communities such as players of Xbox Live and PS3 games. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of social gaming online, examining how it is changing the way that players respond to games. This is one of the central issues that MacCallum-Stewart explores: When are games social, and what narrative devices make them so?