Context Matters!

The activity of play is situated within different contextual constraints. Games contextualize the way we play and, vice versa, our play recontextualizes the rules and goals of games. Our culture, society and history contextualizes the way we create and experience games and our language and communication are situating how we play and what games mean to us. The context of play matters and influences the impact games have on their players, on our society and culture. The study of context and frames that impact play raises the following questions: How can we understand the contextual characteristic of play? What forms of contexts and frames matter and why? What are constructive or problematic contexts of play? Within this book readers will find different and innovative approaches tackling challenges arising in the contextual dimension of play and games. For seven years Vienna’s annual Games Conference “FROG” has offered an open and international platform for leading game studies researchers and scholars, game designers, education professionals, researchers and scholars from various other fields and gamers from around the world. The multi-disciplinary contributions of the 2013 FROG conference covers all aspects of cutting-edge research on digital gaming, game design, game culture, game studies, therapy and economy within or across academic disciplines with focus on the contexts of the games we play.