"Preface" [2010] ELECD 135; in Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira (eds), "Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity

Editor(s): Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446830

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 4

Extract:

Preface
As the economic value of digital game environments grows, now easily
exceeding the gross domestic product of some middle-sized countries, and
as their intertwining into cultural and societal activities progresses, so the
interest of policymakers, academia and the wider public intensifies. Yet,
although digital games and virtual worlds have gained prominence as a topic
in academic scholarship in the past few years, we are still far from a compre-
hensive understanding of their nature, dynamics and impact. This is a short-
coming, which is particularly distracting when translated into current law-
and policymaking. In fact, many of today's regulatory interventions merely
transplant models from conventional media regulation and reveal that
policy- and rulemakers are at a loss when approaching these novel digital
spaces.
While an invaluable and sizeable amount of knowledge on digital games
and virtual worlds has already been gathered and is continuously being
enriched in the fields of media, communications and cultural studies, as well
as in sociology and psychology, very little of it has flowed into legal analyses.
The profound understanding of the complex phenomena and processes occur-
ring in-play, such as avatar representation, role-playing, community and repu-
tation building, incentives and dynamics of play, individual and group
creativity, has found no (or insufficient) reflection in the design of regulatory
intervention. Very interestingly, this occurs precisely at a time when we are
observing an expansion of regulatory efforts at national, regional and interna-
tional levels that have a serious impact upon game ...