Social Constructionism and Ludology

Markus Montola

Simulation & Gaming, 2012, vol. 43, issue 3, 300-320

Abstract: This article combines the paradigm of social constructionism with the developing field of ludology. As games are intersubjective meaning-making activities, their study requires understanding of the nature of social constructions, and how such constructions are produced and interpreted: The formalist nature of ludological core concepts such as game world and game rules is often taken for granted, even though such structures exist only as social constructions. The article also considers the implications of the constructionist approach on the research of games: Such a perspective is especially important for the study of nonrepeatable, irreversible, distributed, and emergent forms of play.

Keywords: constructionist approach; ephemera; game studies; intersubjectivity; larp; ludology; MMORPGs; pervasive games; play; replayability; role-playing; social constructionism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1046878111422111 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:simgam:v:43:y:2012:i:3:p:300-320

DOI: 10.1177/1046878111422111

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Simulation & Gaming
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().