7. Video games and the engaged citizen : On the ambiguity of digital play

Abstract

The mission to keep young people interested and engaged in a variety of forms of civic participation certainly seems to be a laudable enterprise for any self-respecting progressive and democratic society. Hard-won democratic rewards and virtues like voting, volunteering, and giving to charity, would appear to be rights and responsibilities that need to be inculcated in the young as soon as their proper socialization sets in. Especially when in the 1970s and 1980s it seemed that young people’s participation in civic behavior was declining in many Western countries—leading to perhaps overwrought claims of supposed youthful political apathy (Ghosh 2011)