Games and Gaming - Notes

Games and Gaming: An Introduction

  • Games and gaming, like the field of game studies, employs interdisciplinary frameworks drawing upon theoretical analyses from:

    • Media sociology
    • Ethnography (in case studies of locations, empirical studies of players and studying the virtual and digital worlds as cultures)
    • Cultural studies
    • Media and communication (examining the creative industries, the impact of games on other industries such as film and the relationship between online communities and social capital).

  • Gaming is informed by various factors such as socioeconomic, political, techno-national, cultural and linguistic influences.

  • Global gaming is characterised by divergent localities, communities and practices.

  • The role of networked, social media and technologies such as İphone and Nintendo are having an impact upon the ways in which games are experienced and consumed.

  • Games have transformed and transgressed genres and associated player stereotypes to become one of the dominant media cultures of the twenty-first century since the 1970s.

  • Games can be ‘read’ (or understood) as:

    • Cultural artefacts
    • Industries
    • Social communities
    • Material cultures (i.e. the psychological dimension of objects as part of one’s cultural identity)
    • Media practices

Do Games Change Us?

  • Two main approaches to technology and culture:
    • Technological determinism (substantive)
    • Social constructivism (SCOT - social construction of technology)
  • Games, as a form of ‘youth media’, have faced concerns about social problems, with their ‘effects’ being framed within simplistic definitions of childhood (i.e. children seen by adults as vulnerable and passive).
  • Debate around violence in games is often embroiled within technological determinist approaches, assuming technologies directly affect and change people.
  • The ‘us’ in these models is viewed as homogeneous, fixed, and without agency, implying media dictates ideologies that are passively consumed without interpretation or filtering.
  • Criticism:
    • Ignores the diversity of experiences individuals bring to a text.
    • Disregards how context (place, time, etc.) affects participation and engagement with certain media.
  • New media perpetually becomes a scapegoat for wider social issues.
  • The ‘media effects’ model assumes:
    • Media unthinkingly changes behavior (e.g., copying violence).
    • Media imposes ideologies and beliefs upon the consumer/audience/user.

Play Groups: Learning, Power, Fantasy and Self

  • Game studies draws from a rich history of studies around play from disciplines such as anthropology and psychology.
  • Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) categorized play activities within four ‘play’ groups: learning, power, fantasy, and self.
  • While interrelated, play often draws on one or more of these facets at different times.
  • Sutton-Smith (1997) saw play as an integral part of socialization, stating that ‘play can cure children of the hypocrisies of adult life’.
  • Johan Huizinga noted that play shapes, and is shaped by, social rituals.
  • Huizinga contends that play creates its own ‘magic circle’ as a closed space differentiated ‘either materially or ideally . . . from the everyday surroundings’ (1938: 38–9).

Games & Social Rituals

  • Games afford a type of role-playing situation useful for learning skills for real-world scenarios.
  • Games differ dramatically from other media such as TV in terms of two key attributes:
    • Interactivity
    • Simulation
  • These unique features led to the development of game studies in the form of the ludology versus narratology debate heralded by three theorists—Gonzalo Frasca, Jesper Juul and Espen Aarseth—in the early 2000s.

Ludology

  • Ludology can be defined as a discipline that studies games in general, and videogames in particular.
  • Ludology does not disdain the narrative element of games, but claims they are not held together by a narrative structure. (2003: 212)
  • Games have a history that predates video games, and appreciating this background is useful for understanding the ways in which games can teach and inspire creativity as well as sociality.
  • Exploring older games can help us grasp the importance of games within cultural practices.
  • By conceptualizing games within the context of play, we can examine some of the rules and rituals that inform and bind us to particular meanings.
  • One way to examine this is through the analysis of ludus (games) and paidia (play) more broadly.

Remediation & Games

  • Games are the product of art, new media and media arts discourses. They inform, at the same time as they are informed by, these practices.
  • Despite this, an exploration of the relationship between these three areas is still relatively overlooked in the literature.
  • Games, like new media, should be conceptualized as being remediated; that is, there is a cyclic relationship between old and new technologies and content.

Ethnography & Games

  • Drawing from the tradition of anthropology and its redeployment in internet studies, ethnography has become a dominant model for studying online games.
  • Ethnography conceives of technologies as embedded in social and cultural practice, what can be understood as ‘techno-culture’.
  • Through this type of qualitative research, game studies is informing new models of ethnographic practice. Some researchers have coined their own terms—such as cyberethnography (Pearce 2009)—to account for this shift.
  • The debate over whether to conceptualize the internet as a series of networks or communities takes a particular role in online games studies.
  • Online gaming practices, along with SNSs, are revising notions of community as first defined by Tönnies.
  • Communities are informed by various factors such as locality and, like cultures, they evolve and change.
  • Once associated with hardcore gaming, social media have transformed online gaming into a popular activity recruiting many non-traditional players.

Game Culture

  • The place of the online is increasingly becoming an important site for defining one’s self-expression, identity and community with the growth in the deployment of the internet in everyday life globally.
  • Expressions, representations and ‘presentations of self ’ online are undeniably informed by the user’s offline identity and techno-cultural context.
  • As a portal, alter ego or a form of prothesis, the avatar not only operates as an online construction of self but also plays a part in the social fabric of the online game space.
  • Avatars are defined as personal representations used by individuals in digital environments.
  • Often, people have multiple avatars that reflect different parts of their personality, different times in their lives, as well as their relationship to the techno-cultural fabric of the online space they inhabit.

Avatar Identities

  • In personal home pages, blogs, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, photographs and text can carefully be selected and edited to present the individual’s desired persona within that particular environment.
  • With avatar identities, even more ‘impression management’ is possible, as the individual can control and transform his or her visual identity beyond their real life specificities of age, gender, race, and appearance.
  • In online environments, the individual’s real-world physical appearance and physical environment can remain completely hidden ‘back-stage’ so that only the desired ‘front-stage’ avatar identity is visible.
  • Individuals can also move seamlessly between different online ‘windows’ or ‘social frames’, where they can activate and play out different performative identities. (2009: 221)

Tokyo and Seoul

  • To understand the reasons why particular games cultures occur, it is important to comprehend the cultural context from which they sprang.
  • As gaming centres, Tokyo and Seoul have complex techno -cultures that have ensured the success of games.
  • Within each context, particular factors such as the cultural, social, economic, political and governmental all inform the associated gaming culture.
  • In Tokyo and Seoul we can see two very different examples of gaming cultures. They mark the two directions of gaming—online and mobile.
  • In these locations, we can find different forms of mobility and immobility that manifest within the types of games, as well as the dominant context of play.
  • Games can be transnational but they also serve to highlight the differences between localities of gameplay.
  • For example, the consumption of Korean games in China is transnational; however, the ways in which it is played and consumed operate to reinforce the local.

Gaming in the Asia-Pacific: Two futures for gaming- Online Gaming vs. Electronic Individualism

  • In some locations, where an emphasis is placed on collectivity and community, games are often played in semi-public realms with other (online) players also present offline.
  • In South Korea (henceforth Korea), the history of bangs (rooms) for a variety of functions has played a pivotal role in the uptake and success of online games (Chee 2005; Huhh 2009).
  • These bang spaces operate in between the public and the private, highlighting the significance of collectivity and community in Korean culture, which, in turn, informs the types of games played.
  • In other locations, in which long periods of time are spent in confined public spaces and travelling, such as Tokyo, the significance of the mobile, individuated device is apparent.
  • Here, the importance of the mobile device remains on one having a sense of individual space that does not intrude upon others—a notion that has been encapsulated by Japanese personal technologies and their focus upon ‘electronic individualism’ (Kogawa 1984)

Korea and Japan

  • Adorned with over 20,000 PC bangs in Seoul alone, and with professional players (pro-leagues) making as much as US11 million per year, locations such as Korea have been lauded as an example of gaming as a mainstream social activity.
  • In a period marked by convergent technologies, Korea and Japan represent two opposing directions for gaming—Korea emphasizes MMO games played on stationary PCs in social spaces (PC bangs), whilst Japan pioneers the mobile (privatized) convergent devices.
  • These two distinct examples, with histories embroiled in conflict and imperialism, clearly demonstrate the importance of locality in the uptake of specific games and gameplay.
  • In the case of Japan, mobility, personalization and individualization are three key factors influencing the types of evolving game consoles and communities.
  • Alternatively, in Korea, immobility and collectivity are central features in the current burgeoning of online games, the rise of which cannot be separated from the emergence of the group spaces of the PC bang (Huhh 2009; Chee 2005).
  • Behind the global images of techno-savvy youth adorned with the latest technological gadgets in ‘electric cities’ such as Akihabara, Japan’s role in producing and consuming new technologies, from the Sony Walkman and Atari games console to PlayStation and the keitai (mobile) IT revolution, has been crucial.
  • The market success of Japanese technologies can be best explained by characteristics of the aforementioned three P’s—Pedestrian, Personal and Portable. The significance of these three P’s is that they transform technological gadgets into sociocultural artefacts by relocating them within the dynamic space of cultural production.
  • These three P’s have played a key role, ensuring Japan’s success in global gaming cultures, through orchestrating a type of electronic individualism around mobile and personalized media devices.