This book offers insight into one of the most problematic and universal issues within multiplayer videogames: antisocial and oppositional play forms such as cheating, player harassment, the use of exploits, illicit game modifications, and system hacking, known collectively as counterplay. Using ethnographic research, Alan Meades not only to gives voice to counterplayers, but reframes counterplay as a complex practice with contradictory motivations that is anything but reducible to simply being hostile to play, players, or commercial videogames. The book offers a grounded and pragmatic exploration of counterplay, framing it as an unavoidable by-product of interaction of mass audiences with compelling and culturally important texts.
Contents:
1. Oppositional Play and the Discourses of Legitimacy 2. Watching from Beyond - The Challenges of Studying Oppositional User Generated Content 3. Griefing - Dominating and Controlling other Players 4. Glitching - (Bending) Finding, Sharing and Using Videogame Exploits 5. Hacking - The Production of Modified Consoles 6. Modding and System Hacking - The Utilisation of Modified Consoles 7. Contextualising Oppositional Play
Author Biography: Alan Meades is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Art and Design at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
