The Hypersociality of Collectible Card Games

Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity. Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted, and hypersocial, reflecting forms of sociality augmented by dense sets of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange. David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green (2004) have arg...