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Approaching fantasy gaming as a cultural phenomenon is not a new idea. On the contrary, fantasy gaming has been understood primarily in cultural terms since table-top fantasy role-playing games emerged in the 1970s. Unfortunately, much of the attention fantasy gaming has received is one-sided: fantasy gamers have been characterized and caricatured in popular media as socially inept, psychologically unstable, or occultist. At the same time, however, there has been a steady growth of fantasy gamers over the last quarter century and a growing awareness and appreciation of fantasy in mainstream popular culture. Likewise, there is an emerging field of game studies called ludology, “the study of play.” Many researchers, however have limited their application of the term to a specific perspective within videogame studies. In this book, we offer a corrective to this relatively narrow trajectory and offer insights into a wider range of studies on contemporary games and gaming culture.
Three changes in material culture over the past thirty years help explain the explosion of popular and academic interest in fantasy games. First are the new game genres, such as role-playing, collectible, and online video and computer games, whose markets have steadily grown in the past decade. Second, advances in information and communication technologies have facilitated the expansion of advertising about games as well as fostering communities in and around virtual game worlds. Third, the growth of fantasy gaming is witnessed and supported by the success of television programs and films based on fantasy and sci-fi (such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings). In short, what once could be strongly characterized as fantasy gaming subculture is now becoming distinctively less subcultural, as the fields of role-playing games, fantasy and sci-fi literature and film, and video and computer games continue to dialectically shape one another.
In spite of the growth of fantasy games and gaming culture, there has been little systematic investigation of fantasy games in contemporary social life that attends to the cultural and constructionist dimensions of fantasy gaming as a leisure activity. This has remained true despite the assertion that fantasy “games provide a unique form of entertainment that novels, comic books, sports, movies, television or theater cannot replace or substitute for [and they] deserve further study in determining their unique place in our culture.” Further, there are no research volumes that take the breadth of ludology into account. As an important step toward mapping out the boundaries of both fantasy games and ludology as they exist at the beginning of the 21st century, as well as moving beyond pejorative journalistic work on the topic, this book offers a collection of original research that investigates the relationship between fantasy games, players, and larger social processes from various social constructionist perspectives.
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