Leisure, Play, and Gaming Cultures

While videogames have become the largest global media industry, play is part of a longer lineage of human (and animal) activities. This subject challenges students to rethink their perspectives on leisure, play, and games. Learning materials, theories, and approaches from Game Studies, Cultural Studies, Screen Studies, Media studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Sciences, Gender Studies, and Human-Computer Interaction, are applied to examine the heavily racialised and gendered socio-economic political implications of topics such as popular self-care discourses, Australian beer drinking culture, playbour and creative labour, playful protest and youth subcultures, consumer identities and fandom communities, eSports and spectatorship, dress up and dollhouse play, mobility and urban playable cities. Case study texts include Barbie Fashion Designer (1996), Pokémon GO (2016), and Untitled Goose Game (2019). Students are expected to play games as they would watch films in Screen Studies, since engaging with games as study texts is necessary to develop critical literacy.

• 1Recognise and identify power structures that shape and create barriers to leisure, play, and gaming in everyday life.
• 2Demonstrate a developing critical gaming literacy that challenges normative assumptions.
• 3Summarise and explain the relationship between historical developments and current approaches to understanding videogames as a creative industry and a critical area of research.
• 4Examine, synthesise, and apply key concepts and theories from Game Studies, Cultural Studies, Screen Studies, and related intersecting fields.
• 5Produce, evaluate and justify sound and compelling arguments that shed meaningful light on leisure, play, and gaming.