This panel reports ethnographic approaches to play practices and digital gameplay in different sites in Cape Town, in the context of the regulation of the games industry in South Africa. Contributors explore the significance of games as commodities in the local context, identify digital literacies shaped by local socio-technical practices and differential levels of access, and theorize how commercial games produced in the North are being interpreted, reconfigured and appropriated in these South African contexts.

I’ve always been impressed by the way Henry Jenkins makes connections between computer games and broader issues of children’s culture, I find this infinitely preferable to the psychological studies which treat children’s media use as a purely individual matter — (psychological studies of children and the “effects” of violence in the media etc tend to [...]

I’d not paid much attention to the MySpace debates until recently. I get very bored with the American paranoia about children online, since US parents are so good at being afraid for all the wrong reasons. Their reasons predictably involve teen sex, pedophiles, and (when they need some variety) computer games. Remember that these same [...]