Editor's Introduction

摘要

This issue of Communication Research Trends looks at a relatively new area of communication study. Though people have played games since time immemorial, scholars have considered games and game playing only for the last 80 years. Dependent on technological advances, video games moved from laboratories to public places only in the 1970s and into the home in the late 1980s. As Cunningham notes in her review essay, communication researchers began to study these games in the late 1990s. Before that, games formed only a peripheral interest for communication.