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Accursed Play: The Economic Imaginary of Early Game Studies

Revisiting early critical responses to computer and video games as a cultural form—before the establishment of games studies as an academic field in the early 2000s—reveals a consistent fascination with games as economic phenomena. Not just as a new commercial competitor in the established popular media marketplace but as models of economies in their own right, models that mesh with player’s everyday lives, constraining, facilitating, and forming gameplay. This article will identify and explore some of the most salient themes and phenomena in this early games scholarship and will follow them through subsequent enquiry into games as economies either isomorphic with the systems of consumer capitalism and neoliberalism from which they issue or metamorphic—phantasmagorical or ironic inversions of prevailing social and industrial conditions.