“Now, smartphones and tablets are quickly approaching the resolution and computing power of today’s consoles, and that’s opened up a whole new market for games. There are about 223 million game-console owners in the world right now—but there are 500 million smartphone owners walking around, and that’s expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2015.”
JEFF BEER, CANADIAN BUSINESS, APRIL 2012
To fully explore the larger media playground, we need to look beyond electronic gaming’s technical aspects and consider the human faces of gaming. The attractions of this interactive playground validate electronic gaming’s status as one of today’s most powerful social media. Electronic games occupy an enormous range of styles, from casual games like Tetris, Angry Birds, Bejeweled, and Fruit Ninja, etc.—what one writer called “stupid games”—that are typically “a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation,” to the full-blown, Hollywood-like immersive adventures and stories of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.12 No matter what the style, digital games are compelling entertainment and mass media because they pose challenges (mental and physical), allow us to engage in situations both realistic and fantastical, and allow us to socialize with others as we play with friends and form communities inside and outside of games. (See “Case Study: Thoughts on Video Game Narrative” for more on the narrative power of video games.)