As an increasingly popular pastime, video gaming is big business. Well-founded claims of gaming's economic and social importance still begin the many academic books appearing now on the subject--including the book under review--suggesting that video gaming's legitimacy as a research topic is still a source of anxiety. Most work in this burgeoning field is devoted to games as objects--their genres, aesthetics, and technologies. In contrast, this collection of essays investigates the gamers--their motivations, habits, and interactions. Embrick, Wright, and Lukacs (all, Loyola Univ., Chicago) are, respectively, sociologists (Embrick and Wright) and an informatics specialist. They organize the 12 main essays, most by young scholars, into sections that look at "social-psychological implications," "social inequalities" (e.g., gender), and "game fans." Though they have different disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors share a focus on players' social construction--as group actors in World of Warcraft, as individual consciousnesses, as concerned consumers. The power and social exclusion discussed in the text takes place in the worlds of gaming. Thinking about the relation of those ludic politics to the more painful ones of the real world is left largely to the reader. Summing Up: Recommended.

Choice Reviews

Social Exclusion, Power, and Video Game Play is a timely collection of essays on virtual worlds and online games. The contributors challenge sociologists (and others) to take these spaces of social interaction seriously, as both revealing and shaping broader cultural dynamics. By exploring issues including the psychology of online identity, the impact of racism and sexism, and relationships between design, play, and fandom, this book helps bring questions of power and inequality to the fore in debates over the impact of online games in virtual-world and physical-world contexts, both very 'real.'

Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine