Sports Videogames

by Mia Consalvo (Editor), Konstantin Mitgutsch (Editor), Abe Stein (Editor)

From "Pong" to "Madden NFL" to "Wii Fit," "Sports Videogames" argues for the multiple ways that sports videogames-alongside televised and physical sports-impact one another, and how players and viewers make sense of these multiple forms of play and information in their daily lives. Through case studies, ethnographic explorations, interviews and surveys, and by analyzing games, players, and the sports media industry, contributors from a wide variety of disciplines demonstrate the depth and complexity of games that were once considered simply sports simulations. Contributors also tackle key topics including the rise of online play and its implications for access to games, as well as how regulations surrounding player likenesses present challenges to the industry. Whether you're a scholar or a gamer, "Sports Videogames" offers a grounded, theory-building approach to how millions make sense of videogames today.

Genres: Sports

312 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games and Atari to Zelda: Japan's Videogames in Global Contexts, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This impressive collection is an oddity in the literature surrounding video gaming for two reasons: first it explores issues relating both to games and to their players, and second it is humanities based rather than technical, presuming some kind of detailer player knowledge. These two things matter because sports video games are both commercially very significant in both sectors – sport and gaming – and because they have a life of their own, separate from the sports industries that they link to. The collection also explores an essential element of the sport-player-videogames dynamic, which is the fan centred engagement and at what the editors call the ‘level of the imagination’. This leads contributors such as Miguel Sicart to argue that sports videogames are not simulacra, digital impersonations of the sport they represent, but often become new games in and of themselves, with player autonomy independent of any association with playing or doing ‘sport’. These are rich and challenging arguments that disrupt many of the presumptions about videogames as imitation or nothing more than faux-competitive big business.

The really good thing about the collection though is that because there is so little humanities-based work around sports videogaming that not only do they not try to define what those games are, there are contributors who take almost exactly the opposite position to others. This means that not only is there good dialogue between essays, there is lots of good stuff about the dialogues between the worlds in which we live and those that we make when gaming. It is this absence of a single, or in some cases even broadly shared (beyond an agreement on the significance of games), position that enriches this collection; this openness is all too rare in too many areas of scholarly work. And this is a powerfully scholarly collection.

The papers themselves range from the semiotic, of the ‘what is the meaning of this ‘text’’, style to the applied, exploring the tangled issue of the impact of ‘fitness’ gaming on physical activity participation. Consalvo points to one obvious but seldom explicitly explored issue in her discussion of the parallels between the gendered characteristics of both sport and gaming in the ways they marginalise women. There are industry analyses, including for instance the relationships between sport-media corporations such as ESPN and gaming companies such as EA, and the ways these relations impact on both gaming and sport. In an intriguing parallel there is also an exploration of gaming, celebrity and privacy issues, centred on the juicy issue of licensing agreements for images in the context of digital activities that may also transform that image (I accept that I am being a bit nerdy there). There are also some great, insider and ethnographic, explorations of gamer lives and gamer engagements.

This collection is now a few years old and it is surprising how little humanities based scholarly work has been subsequently published around videogames and videogamers, sport or otherwise. I know from my own work in and around play that there is some great work being done exploring gaming philosophically (and have published some in work I have had a hand in) and elsewhere in respect of sport more specifically in work by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe, but there is little else out there in book form. What is also surprising is that despite the rate of change in the gaming industry the collection remains current.

The collection also has good teaching potential (I use it with my undergraduates) and opens up significant issues for debate, discussion and further research.