Video games offer opportunities for creative play, moral reasoning, and examinations of representation, making them ideal for studying heroism.

Video gaming encompasses a growing body of literature that establishes it as a pertinent and crucial field in contemporary media studies. Far from being frivolous time-wasting or objects of obsession for niche communities, video games are a dominant media industry, an insightful strand of media studies, and a useful conduit for interpreting and enacting real and virtual forms of heroism. Video games are sites of play for creativity, identity, ethics, and moral reasoning and are thus apt for heroism studies. This entry assesses games from multiple genres and modes, including First-Person Shooters (FPS), Roleplaying Games (RPG), Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO), Action-Adventure games, and Open World games. It also considers heroism as a diffuse field, acknowledging there are multiple modes and representations of heroism endemic to video game play, offering a variety of methods to construct, interpret, and perceive heroic action (Goethals and Allison 2012).