While social media platforms continue to dominate the ways in which people connect using computational devices and digital media, a transition towards more immersive platforms and experiences is underway. Extended reality (XR) is the umbrella term for media that enable experiences in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality. Through XR technologies, new digital spaces are being developed that combine features of existing digital platforms with elements of the immersiveness of gaming, sometimes referred to informally as ‘the metaverse’. Notably, many of the corporations behind the dominant social media platforms are active in the XR economy. Meta has garnered much attention in this regard, but Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Sony have all either entered the market or have been reported as having XR/metaverse ambitions. Through a multiple-case study of three companies—Meta, Epic Games/Unity Engine and ROBLOX—this paper maps out key dimensions of the emerging metaverse economy and shows how the platform characteristics of XR providers, similar to the current social media economy, can enable the concentration of social and economic power around a few actors. We propose that in the transition to a more immersive digital era, to enable a competitive, vibrant and fair XR economy, policymaking and governance must proactively address the issue of concentrated platform power. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential policy and regulatory pathways for taking up this challenge.

In recent research, video games have been implicated as vehicles for feelings of nostalgia. Retrogames present a unique context in which to explore the elicitation of nostalgia, especially historical nostalgia among younger gamers who may lack first-hand experience with older games and gaming technologies. As part of a larger study investigating nostalgia and retrogames, n = 102 younger individuals wrote briefly about their thoughts and feelings after playing the game Double Dragon II, a video game representative of the “Beat ‘em Up” genre popular in the 1990s. Via a thematic analysis, we identified eight themes clustered into three groups: retrogames as unique experiences, retrogames and important others, and retrogames and the self. Players connected their feelings of nostalgia to distinctive features of retrogames and the experience of playing them, social thoughts, and recollections (mostly involving close friends and family), and their own personal identities via autobiographical memory. The present findings align with previous research on nostalgia more broadly and illustrate some unique aspects of nostalgic experiences evoked by retrogames. Our data have implications for how younger players take up and experience video game history through replaying retrogames of yesteryear, and might explain the enduring and increasing popularity of retrogames among myriad gaming cohorts. Furthermore, this research adds conceptual refinement to historical nostalgia (nostalgia for bygone eras), and introduces the notion of vicarious nostalgia as a perception of how others (such as parents and older siblings) would experience and make sense of older media content from their respective generations.

In the post-gamergate era, much has been written about the toxicity of online multiplayer video gamespaces. Yet, game scholars agree that the actual definition of the term ‘toxic’ is slippery. There is also consensus that toxicity is a highly context-dependent phenomenon reliant on the relation of players to one another but extending further to include the technical elements of the game (Canossa et al., 2021; Hilvert-Bruce & Neill, 2020; Kou, 2020; Kowert, 2020). Past scholarship in this area also illustrates that these spaces are deeply gendered and center masculine normativity (Cote, 2020; Gray, 2020; Ruberg, 2019; Shaw, 2015). Players from various positionalities may enter conflict when there is dissent over the definition and norms of the space. In these instances of conflict there is the potential for agonism (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). We employed cultural probes in tandem with focus groups and interviews to better understand how players experience toxicity in online gaming spaces. Emerging from participants’ conversations, this paper explores performative behaviours which are emblematic of performing toxicity or ‘counterplay’. We propose three common instances of counterplay: antagonistic counterattack, when a player reciprocates or matches the toxic behaviour of an antagonist; ludic mithridatism, when a player develops a threshold for tolerating toxicity in a gamespace; and playful transgression, when a player or group of players performs counter-hegemonic identity-work.

This research uses a content analysis approach to analyze the nature of Critical Role in the spectrum of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) and role-playing fandoms. Critical Role is a vanguard to the actual play genre; while streamers of video games have been common on services such as Twitch and YouTube Live, the fact of a tabletop role-playing session attracting the vast audience enjoyed by this production has helped to evolve the image and nature of Dungeons & Dragons itself. Actual play involves centering the tabletop game, allowing individuals to view the scaffolding work occurring at the game table. Initially, it was believed by most that tabletop play was an interaction of engagement, and that very few who were watching the endeavor would be interested in it from the perspective of an audience. However, actual play (AP) has exploded, led in many ways by the popularity of Critical Role, which springboards off the keen interest involved in watching skilled players on Twitch.