Abstract
The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning—all within spaces that are deeply game-like—makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither as wholly determined by outside factors nor as utterly sui generis, they aim to account for the contingent and emergent relationship that these spaces have with other domains of human experience.