Introduction: Masculinity and Gaming: Mediated Masculinities in Play

This introduction to the edited volume Masculinities in Play demonstrates that gaming constitutes one key site in a broader apparatus of contemporary governmentality reconstituting and reconfiguring our (ever-precarious) understandings of masculinity and manliness. The chapter first situates the volume at the intersections of game studies, masculinity studies, and cultural studies before providing a framework for theorizing masculinity as an apparatus that provides not only the symbolic resources but also the material and institutional conditions that enable masculine subjects to shape their selves in relation to games and their attendant technologies, practices, and contexts.