Worlds in Play, a map of the «state of play» in digital games research today, illustrates the great variety and extreme contrasts in the landscape cleft by contemporary digital games research. The chapters in this volume are the work of an international review board of seventy game-study specialists from fields spanning social sciences, arts, and humanities to the physical and applied sciences and technologies. A wellspring of inspiring concepts, models, protocols, data, methods, tools, critical perspectives, and directions for future work, Worlds in Play will support and assist in reading not only within, but across fields of play – disciplinary, temporal, and geographical – and encourage all of us to widen our focus to encompass the omni-dimensional phenomenon of «worlds in play.»

The Editors: Suzanne de Castell is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, where she researches literacies, media studies, and game-based educational technologies. She is completing a three-year study of new attentional economies for learning, and chaired the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) 2005 International Conference, from which this collection of papers was drawn. Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education at York University. Working with Suzanne de Castell and a team of students, she is co-designing an educational game, Contagion, and she is completing a three-year study of gender and digital gameplay.