Digital game culture(s) as prototype(s) of mediatization and commercialization of society: The World Cyber Games 2008 in Cologne as an Example

In terms of communication and media studies, gaming constitutes an incredibly complex phenomenon of mediated communication that is based on a global, multilayer, and mostly only virtual game culture. This chapter presents a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of digital game culture(s), which was exemplarily applied empirically in the context of a case study on the World Cyber Games 2008 (WCG) in Cologne. Digital game cultures are defined as an aspect of the current media culture with increasing significance, whose primary resources of meaning are manifested in digital games that are mostly mediated or provided through technical communication media such as handhelds or consoles. The results show that digital game cultures nowadays refer to fields of identity, characterized by a complicated interdependence of both deterritorializating and reterritorializating effects. The experience of individual gaming in a local and everyday context is structurally connected to a transnational and highly commercialized game system. For many gamers, this process is a sign of social acceptance and establishment of gaming.