Yu-Gi-Oh! Mixes the Real with Fantasy.

Trading cards, Game Boys, and character merchandise create what Anne Allison (2004) has called “pocket fantasies,” “digitized icons . . . that children carry with them wherever they go,” and “that straddle the border between phantasm and everyday life” (p. 42). The imagination of Yu-Gi-Oh! pervades the everyday settings of childhood as it is channeled through these portable and intimate media forms. These forms of play are one part of a broader set of shifts toward intimate and portable techn...

 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 argue...