The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play

Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments.