[4] His first book, Critical Technology: a social theory of personal computing,[5][6][7] won the 2005 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize[8] from the British Sociological Association.
This overlooks the most important part of the experience of gameplay and the fact that we can often enjoy a game without ever thinking about what it, or the activity of playing it, ‘means’.
Kirkpatrick has argued that the distinctive properties of computer games are not only important to understanding them and their culture but have been instrumental in wider social changes.
This is related to his theory of digital culture, according to which it is more playful than previous phases in history but not, for all that, an inherently nicer or fairer place to be.
2015 ‘Game studies, Aesthetics and active objects: an interview’ (with Ben Nicoll) in Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 6(2) pp108–118.