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Electronic gaming no longer appeals only to a cult of enthusiasts. For the first few decades after these games were invented, that cult tended to be identified as young and male. But recently, advances in technology and a broader range of games-from massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft to so-called casual games like Angry Birds-have made electronic gaming appealing to a wider spectrum of players. Today, the average gamer age is thirty, 47 percent of gamers are female, and there are as many avid gamers over age thirty-six as under eighteen.¹ And with increased Internet access worldwide, gaming has become a truly global phenomenon-in fact, in some places it's become even more culturally central than it is in the United States. South Korea, for example, has become the epicenter of electronic sports (or eSports), with gaming stars held in esteem comparable to that of NASCAR legends in the United States.

One of the world's most wired societies, South Korea is home to nearly thirty thousand PC bangs, or Internet gaming cafés. Most of them are open twenty-four hours a day and serve food, giving their customers no reason to leave. These cafés generate an estimated $6 billion a year in revenue. One of South Korea's most popular eSports players, Lim Yo-Hwan, began his career at PC baangs because he couldn't afford his own computer. Eventually, his creative play of real-time strategy games like StarCraft: Brood War fueled the popularity of two South Korean broadcast channels devoted to eSports. Lim won more than four hundred televised matches and became the first professional Korean gamer to be signed to a salaried corporate sponsorship contract when South Korea's largest cell phone company hired him to captain its now legendary gaming team, SK Telecom T1.²

Lim Yo-Hwan also claimed two gold medals at the World Cyber Games (WCG), a competitive gaming event that now includes finalists from ninety countries spread across six continents. The existence of the WCG and the stardom of players like Lim Yo-Hwan speak to gaming's new status. Electronic gaming's history, range of genres, and level of fandom today rival older mass media like books and film.

ELECTRONIC GAMES offer play, entertainment, and social interaction. Like the Internet, they combine text, audio, and moving images. But they go even further than the Internet by enabling players to interact with aspects of the medium in the context of the game-from deciding when an on-screen character jumps or punches to controlling the direction of the "story" in games such as World of Warcraft. This creates an experience so compelling that vibrant communities of fans have cropped up around the globe. And the games have powerfully shaped the everyday lives of millions of people worldwide.

Players can now choose from a massive range of games designed to satisfy almost any taste. Today, electronic gaming and the media playground encompass classic video games like Super Mario Bros., virtual sports-management games like ESPN's Fantasy Football, and more physically interactive games like those found on the Wii Fit-to say nothing of massively multiplayer online role-playing games and casual games like Angry Birds. Indeed, for players around the world, electronic gaming has become a social medium-as compelling and distracting as other social media. The U.S. Supreme Court has even granted electronic gaming First Amendment freedom of speech rights, ensuring its place as a mass medium.

In this chapter, we take a look at the evolving mass medium of electronic gaming by: