"This book asks whether video games have the power to transform a player and his or her beliefs from a sociopolitical perspective, allowing users to immerse themselves in new worlds, situations, and politics"--

With complex stories and stunning visuals eliciting intense emotional responses, coupled with opportunities for self-expression and problem solving, video games are a powerful medium to foster empathy, critical thinking, and creativity in players. As these games grow in popularity, ambition, and technological prowess, they become a legitimate art form, shedding old attitudes and misconceptions along the way. Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives asks whether videogames have the power to transform a player and his or her beliefs from a sociopolitical perspective. Unlike traditional forms of storytelling, videogames allow users to immerse themselves in new worlds, situations, and politics. This publication surveys the landscape of videogames and analyzes the emergent gaming that shifts the definition and cultural effects of videogames. This book is a valuable resource to game designers and developers, sociologists, students of gaming, and researchers in relevant fields.

Animal Crossing is an innovative virtual world with a global audience beyond traditional online gamers. The book is the first major study, offering an interdisciplinary exploration of copyright and other laws, user creativity and sociability, psychology, the virtual world’s economic and technological basis, uptake during COVID-19, gamification of offline brands, relationships with past/contemporary computer games, and Animal Crossing as an example of the Japanification of online popular culture. The book provides insights for students, researchers and non-specialist readers.

Organized into two sections, Studying Gaming Literacies explores the rich methodological approaches to gaming literacies scholarship as well as the possibilities of engaging in research in both classrooms and informal learning settings.

At a time when rapidly evolving technologies, political turmoil, and the tensions inherent in multiculturalism and globalization are reshaping historical consciousness, what is the proper role for historians and their work? By way of an answer, the contributors to this volume offer up an illuminating collective meditation on the idea of ethos and its relevance for historical practice. These intellectually adventurous essays demonstrate how ethos—a term evoking a society’s “fundamental character” as well as an ethical appeal to knowledge and commitment—can serve as a conceptual lodestar for history today, not only as a narrative, but as a form of consciousness and an ethical-political orientation.

This book formulates a new theological approach to the study of religion in gaming. Video games have become one of the most important cultural artifacts of modern society, both as mediators of cultural, social, and religious values and in terms of commercial success. This has led to a significant increase in the critical analysis of this relatively new medium, but theology as an academic discipline is noticeably behind the other humanities on this subject. The book first covers the fundamentals of cultural theology and video games. It then moves on to set out a Christian systematic theology of gaming, focusing on creational theology, Christology, anthropology, evil, moral theology, and thanatology. Each chapter introduces case studies from video games connected to the specific theme. In contrast to many studies which focus on online multiplayer games, the examples considered are largely single player games with distinct narratives and ‘end of game’ moments. The book concludes by synthesizing these themes into a new theology of video games. This study addresses a significant aspect of contemporary society that has yet to be discussed in any depth by theologians. It is, therefore, a fantastic resource for any scholar engaging with the religious aspects of digital and popular culture.

Doctoral researchers are increasingly focusing on the social justice aspects of dissertation research problems and are often uncertain on how to incorporate societal change issues within a dissertation format. Due to the current climate, this interest in social justice is likely to continue to increase. Many aim to affect change within their discipline, workplace, or communities as they conduct dissertation research across doctoral program areas. Social Justice Research Methods for Doctoral Research presents contemporary social justice research method strategies and incorporates the aspects of social justice into research design. This major reference work illustrates how, why, and where to incorporate conventional and creative social justice research methodologies across both qualitative and quantitative approaches from various theoretical and conceptual perspectives. Covering topics such as community-based research, educational leadership, and cancel culture, this book serves as a dynamic resource for researchers, post-graduate students, researcher supervisors, librarians, methodologists, research program developers, and education administrators.

​Digital Capabilities is a first-of-its-kind exploration of the capabilities that communities in positions of inequality in Israel and the West Bank seek to realize by utilizing information and communication technologies (ICT), the opportunities they have to communicate, and the way ICTs serve their desire to do so. It is the outcome of an eight-year research project in which the nine authors of this book, some of whom came from within the studied communities, conducted their work among the studied populations over an extended period of time. The capabilities approach, much discussed theoretically, takes on a life in this project and is presented as an empirically observable phenomenon for assessing whether ICTs are serving actual needs, whether communication resources are justly allocated and distributed and whether they serve the goal of a universally accessible right to communicate.

This book provides education scholars insight into current theoretical and methodological approaches to conceptualize, facilitate, and examine learning and identity in virtual learning environments such as games and simulations. Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are being increasingly designed, implemented, and researched because they offer opportunities for learning that are embodied, enactive (i.e., learning by doing), extended into the learners’ environment, and embedded in authentic and potentially valuable contexts for identity exploration. Each chapter in this book uniquely illustrates the learning and identity processes, characteristics, and outcomes that VLEs can facilitate. Together, these approaches provide a foundation for use-inspired research that guides how individuals intentionally, continually, and dynamically reinvent the self for a future that requires flexibility and adaptability in both career and academic spaces. The volume will be a key resource for researchers, scholars, and practitioners engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of learning sciences, learning analytics, and learning design. It was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Education.

From podiums on international stages to mainstream media coverage, from crowds of youth marching in streets, to social media feeds, everywhere we look we can see girls rising in the climate justice movement. Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall examine these climate activists from the intersection of gender studies, new media studies, and environmental activism. Chapters include cases about iconic climate girls such as Greta Thunberg, Mari Copeny, and Autumn Peltier (Wiikwemkoong First Nation) and lesser-known climate girl activists who design technologies, global non-profit organizations, and lawsuits against governments. Cunningham and Crandall reveal that climate girls are intersectional activists aware of how systems of oppression—including racism, heterosexism, and capitalism—impact the climate crisis. Individuals interested in women’s and gender studies, environmental studies, and communications studies will find this book of particular interest.