About the Journal
Videogames now represent one of the most significant ways that values are negotiated, constructed and communicated in today’s deeply mediatized societies. The cultural and social influence not only of videogaming but of gaming's influence on other media, calls for an original, specific, and analytical discourse. Our academic, peer-reviewed, online journal aims at establishing and fostering a platform for these discussions. The journal seeks to explore both established approaches and new frontiers of researching video gaming in relation to value formations in culture and society.
Our concept of value formations derives from a social-constructivist approach, which understands values not as timeless, essential, universal or static, but rather as constructed by and within specific social constellations. Values are therefore discourses and practices that are constantly (re)defined and (re)negotiated by competing actors according to time, context and skill. These actors can be individuals, groups or organizations. Our goal is not to evaluate these values, but rather to analyze how the different individual and collective actors (re)define and understand values.
This journal encourages submissions that taking an actor-centered approach. Many games play with values or construct symbolic universes that are related to values and, accordingly, numerous existing studies on video gaming focus on deciphering and interpreting value formations within game narratives. These media-centered approaches are significant, especially when studying the role of values for games and the intentions of game designers. This journal, however, argues that we need to widen the perspective. While we are primarily interested in the cultural and social implications of gaming and in studying gaming as practice, it is important to also include the recipients’ perspectives. We acknowledge this by focusing on the actors in their respective mediatized and gametized life-worlds.
The journal's title – gamevironments – refers to an actor-centered approach which highlights how games are part of larger media environments. Gamevironments as a concept and lens encompasses the technical as well as the cultural environments of video games and gaming. The journal welcomes contributions applying all approaches and highlighting all fields of investigation related to video gaming in relation to culture and society. The journal also explicitly seeks to acknowledge the steadily increasing impact of video gaming’s global aspects. In order to actively contribute towards establishing and maintaining a critical dialogue including perspectives beyond the so-far dominant regional contexts, the journal encourages contributions which address the diverse global gaming landscapes.
Gamevironments is hosted at the University of Bremen, Germany. The journal is an international and multidisciplinary collaboration effort led by the two editors-in-chief, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler from the University of Bremen in Germany and Lissa Holloway-Attaway from the University of
