Helen Thornton, (2009). Claiming a stake in the videogame: what grown-ups say to rationalise and normalise gaming. Convergence 15 (2), 135-139.

This reading investigates adult gamers within an ethnographic study into over 100 respondents in the UK and presents the thesis that there is a political and social necessity to include gamers, and there discourse into the research on gaming in order to properly understand its significance in our political and social lives. By doing this Thornham proposes that we will be able to identify certain social structure and thus better understand society and culture as a whole.

In the UK the average age of gamers is 28 with over 51% of gamers in the age bracket of 35-50. To me this lends credence to the tactic discussed last week of Pokémon targeting children with a cultural product which they then continue to consume in later life as presumably these adults played computer /console games in their youth and continued into their adult lives.

There is a paradox present in this reading where games are seen by the industry as part on escapism, fantasy and play, whilst gamers see them as serious rational and logical pastimes. Adult gamers appear to rationalize their game play due to an uneasy relationship between play and adulthood.

In the normalization of gaming by adults there seems to be a stereo type being constructed for the kinds of people or groups who play games. This may relate to Becker’s labeling theory where deviants from societal norms are negatively labeled and then as society solves the issues surrounding this deviances they are indoctrinated back into society and commodified. Once it is commodified it can then converge with many different forms of pop culture to maximize its economic returns.

The quote by Newman is interesting where it is posited that games are culturally complex media artifacts that only function truly within a network of social complexity and thus cannot always be easily manipulated by economic or industry concerns, which I think relates to when strong communities form around games they develop particular sub-cultures which cannot be easily manipulated by business to maximize profit as the participants will rebel against it.

The article focuses on three key points:

1.       How gamers initially rationalize the possession of a console

2.       The way in which they humanize the technology

3.       The way the socialize the technology

RATIONALIZATION:

·         Gaming begins at earlier ages and then develops over a lifetime and thus players have sense of nostalgia

·         There is peer pressure to play within social groups

·         Adults play to fill in blocks of empty time caused by social change etc (move to new city, work)

·         Gaming devices are now converged technological devices capable of allowing access too many different medias (DVD, music, photos, game, internet, TV, film). So frequently a console is rationalized as it is financially better a single console then multiple media devices.

·         Social status – being seen to have the latest new technology. This indicated that gaming is embedded in youth culture as a method of social categorization.

·         The pleasure of gaming seems to be within defined social parameters as only in a social context can you enjoy the pleasure of gaming via the interactions present in social environments.

·         Gamers want to be seen as rational, authoritarian and knowledgeable about gaming media in order to distance themselves from the pleasure and play aspects of gaming and present a more critical reflective viewpoint.

·         Different values are placed on different media – High complexity PC games Vs. less complex Console games

·         Attitudes towards gaming can be shaped by the social frameworks in which a person acts out their role. These frameworks can affect discourses of power and performance as proposed by Goffman.

HUMANIZE:

·         In order for adults to justify gaming users needs to talk about the pleasures in a rational way at a human level by creating a relationship between themselves and the machine and how they interact

·         The power relationships that differ with the game progression and variety keep gamers involved.

·         The game is seen as the more powerful part of the relationship. It is the master which you are trying to learn more about so you can form engagement strategies to progress within the game.

·         The relationship is based on a perceived mutual desire of the gamer and machine to keep on playing.  I think this is how games are intentionally designed to ensure that the media holds the consumers attention though engaging game design.

·         By figuring gaming as a relationship the pleasures gained become non-threatening and thus socially normal an equated with pleasure present within any other relationship.

·         Pleasure is vital for the completion of the game even if adult gamers try to rationalize this pleasure away

SOCIALIZING:

·         Social gaming does not only refer to gaming technology as a social support, but attempts to draw a distinct line between ‘normal’ (social) and ‘geek’ (solo) gamers.

·         Modes of play – solo or social determines this difference as the mode of plays seems significant as the pleasure derived from the play itself.

·         Social gaming is seen as normal as it is inclusive of more than just the game itself, and that any immersion into a solo play fantasy world, to replace the ties in social gaming, is seen as abnormal and a trait of geek gamers who are deviants from rigid socio-cultural codes around gaming and negatively labeled as such.

·         Games like other media are able to be remediated across different cultures as previously seen with TV and film but perhaps have more flexibility in cross cultural mediations due to their educational and learning structures. Games can thus simulate other cultures for users from outside to investigate and evaluate and thus enrich our own culture via a gaming pop cosmopolitanism.

·         By rationalizing and humanizing gaming users are positioning gaming as a social norm.

·         Normal gamers take pleasure out of the real world affects of social gaming (social ties),in contrast to the fantasy realm of the ‘geeks’ who get pleasure the fantasy whilst neglecting the real world

·         Gaming can take a role in social identity through the two roles of the “normal” and “geek”. One is a social insider and one is an outsider.

·         In adult life a person’s working day to day life has to have meaning or purpose. Gaming play however calls into questions these basic structures of adulthood and thus could be a reason why there is a need to justify game play. As an adult they feel they should be doing something that is perceived as meaningful.

The justification of gaming as an adult I can’t really understand within a culture which is largely a pop culture filled with disposable media for participant’s largley from a bourgeois middle class.

I see gaming as a media preference that usually takes place as part of a an interaction with other media types such as film and TV as it already has pre-existing cultural value from the source media. I myself am not a large game player although I do play games related to other media I enjoy such as sports simulations, games related to film narratives, and the like. Perhaps I do this to reinforce my own identity against the original source media to justify my game play. I understand the social aspects of gaming but I think this is where, as Stewart Woods raided in the lecture, that play moves from playing for no real reason or goal, to playing for reasons which are both social and competitive as a way of framing our own identity.

·         Media has moved from a spectatorial activity to a participatory one, driven by new technology facilitated by gaming culture (better PC tech driven by more realistic games)

·         Play has been defined as being voluntary, not serious, separate from the real, unproductive. Promote social groupings

·         All games have ‘rules’ but not all have ‘goals’

-          Rules – mediated environment, customs within game

-          Goals – most adult games have goals to provide a sense of achievement; most games of youth are goalless (i.e. playing house, etc.)

·         Codified – When a set of rules are easily replicated everywhere to the same rules (i.e. sports such as soccer have the same rules globally, as does chess etc)

·         TV killed the innovation of the gaming industry by the remediation of different games with brands from television (i.e. the Simpsons games of life, different versions of monopoly etc) – meaning games stop being created and were just rebranded/remediated.

·         Board games later evolved into new complex simulation/scenario games which drove an innovation into role playing games such as dungeons and dragons. These games have endless goalless scenarios which is still today’s underlying paradigm in modern computerized RPGs.

·         Games are transmedial – can shift between media

·         Computers are excellent at simulation which is what makes then perfectly suited to gaming

·         First games were simulations  of pre-existing games that you played with other people not versus AI

·         Convergence of game players and programmers

·         Computer games also enabled the simulation of AI players which sparked a move from multiplayer to solo play which was the subject of moral panic of people disconnecting from the real world and to machines

·         Gaming is the most popular form of media entertainment and has resulted in a specific culture

·         Games were originally integrated into culture by placing them on TV (game shows, sports) – spectatorial gaming where consumers watch games being played

·         Participation of the audience became important for game play – mediated interaction. And has taken shape in the form of reality TV structured as games (big brother, survivor). These shows provide interaction between audience and program.

·         Game structure was used to create narrative for film as seen in momento where as in a game the main role starts the game not knowing who or where he is and must find out things much like in many games.

·         Almost any successful media no gets remediated into a game so the audience is able to play out the own scenarios and outcomes of the characters they like.

·         Overflow media – Lost example. Books, websites, puzzles, games, DVD all were specifically designed to form a collaborative puzzle that would not have been able to exist before the internet as they are all small pieces of the overall narrative which are easily accessible, distributable amongst individuals and communities online.

·         These overflows form complex narratives which require collaborative problem solving

·         ARG (Alternative Reality Games) - By solving these problems within a game players are in fact uncovering parts of the hidden narrative and are designed to be solved only via a networked community of people.

·         Games can be designed to simulate the behaviors of social systems via virtual scenario play to figure out solutions to real world issues using the affordability’s of a virtual space to play out successful and unsuccessful tactics.

·         Play isn’t a manifestation of culture; it precedes civilization and culture and shapes how they form through the laws, institutions, societal structures which are played out in games first.

·         Gaming is a new form of language that is orientated towards the future – new modes of discourse are possible through games

Media texts from other cultures which I enjoy:

I enjoy manga films from Japan such as Vampire Hunter D, Akira, Star Blazers but usually they are dubbed to English. I would call myself a “pop-cos” though as I don’t really immerse myself in the surrounding cultures of these media and their creation.

I mainly I seem to watch a lot of British and American content and occasionally a German film or TV show with subtitles although these are easily understood via the use of body language and the fact that Germany is a western nation.

What does it mean to live in an era of global media entertainment?

I think it means that within any multicultural region diasporic communities will form that will overflow into one another a more and more pop cosmopolitans form meaning that these seemingly minor cultural niches will overflow into the dominant culture of a particular region as they come to understand the value present within each other cultures. This is a 2-way process that seems to me to be a natural progression in learning and development present in many cultures.

In a time of media abundance in the shift from push to pull media it seems only natural that these overflows are more visible as the barriers to media creation and distribution are lowered and participatory cultures develop within both grassroots communities and the dominant cultural paradigms which surround them.

How does globalization change the ways in which media is produced, distributed and consumed?

Globalization allows participants of different cultures to discover and learn about new cultures. It enables them then to either recontextualize decontextulaize or share these media freely online thus lessening the barriers for entry to these cultural materials that they would have disconnected from either geographically, or disconnected through the old media gate keeping process.

How can specific cultures use the internet to maintain their systems of social organization, language and beliefs?

The interne can be used to maintain systems of social organization, language and beliefs by empowering members of specific cultures to reconnect to their cultural identity free of the restraints of time and space with low barriers to entry in the access and production of media, and without the gate keeping present of an overriding political structure.

Participants can easily set-up a repository of information online which enables the sharing and discussion of these materials building upon the “wisdom of crowds “which enables them to reconnect with their cultures and preserve the information digitally for future generations.

Users from outside of these cultures also have the ability to immerse themselves if different cultural artifacts so that they can be understood within different cultural contexts and enrich their overall world views.

The Srinivasan reading argues that community can no longer be solely thought of in geographical terms.

This ties in with the content of the lecture and reaffirms the diasporic society described in the Jenkins reading. It outlines how some traditional social spaces such as cafes, public squares etc no longer fulfill the same social roles as they once did as meeting places due to the increasing amount of time being spent developing ties in online communities. I don’t think this necessarily means are large change from social norms, but rather it might indicate a rationalization of social norms where people prefer to perform some of societies roles online now. This has perhaps happened before and thus is not new, before the telephone much interpersonal communication was done face to face, and then changed to over the phone with little negative effect on society other than bringing dispersed communities closer together.

In this reading Srinivasan quote Putnam to support the argument social disconnection from traditional social affirmations. I think these traditional affirmation have been rationalized and simplified online, as mentioned above, allowing for greater access to groups from different social categories, religions and political views. The argument in favour of disconnection seems to be based around a seemingly lessoned involvement in the US political systems however the involvement in the Obama campaign and the political activism it seems to be promoting especially in the Middle East seems to discount this to me. The purported losses in social capital presented could also be a result of the homogeneous ideals being broadcast to the masses leading to rebellion against these as youth culture strives for their own generational identity.

New media can be used as a catalyst for new interpretations, view points and alternative paradigms by different social categories and groups although this is obviously currently restricted by the current copyright laws.

But by creating these works producers can preserve particular cultural traits and reconnect people to them, and introduce them to others from outside a particular culture. Allowing other cultures to discover and understand these cultures so that its own world view will be broadened in a 2-way process on cultural exchange. This process I think would have been near impossible in the mass broadcast model of old media where content creation and distribution was in the hands of corporate media producers – in today’s model grassroots media can be produced and distributed more easily due to the removal of old media gate keeping and low barriers to entry. Meaning that grassroots media exhibits community media which has been created under locally specific cultural controls. The example presented in the reading show how new technologies can be used to achieve community focused cultural, political, educational and social objectives.

Media is a locus of the public sphere in modern culture:

·         Where cultural identity is shaped

·         The development of the self can be investigated (post-modernism)

·         The audience is connected by technological (digital) mediation

These ideas of community need to be thought of not only around geographic bounds as cultures are now blending around the online ethnoscapes (described in this week’s lecture) which create a Diaspora of connections free of any geographical bounds thus creating online communities with which users can still attach their cultural identities.

Those in a diasporic community are usually deemed to be migrants or expats who originate from another homeland but migrated to a new host country and maintain social and political ties through online communities. Networked new media means that migration is no longer representative of a social disconnection from ones homeland culture and strengthens ones cultural identification in their new homeland.  Thus a culture is no longer tied via the space you are in.

Across both diasporic and indigenous cultures the new networked nature of online communities enables strong identity formation, communication, publication, distribution – all free of the restraint of time and space. These online tools allow participants to create a specific cultural niche or paradigm that represents them via a particular mode of discourse.

The “Tribal Peace” example given how when an online community is built to meet specific cultural needs, by the community itself, how this has the power to reconnect previously displace social ties and cultural artifacts (language, customs, art etc). A hub of shared cultural information can be built, and owned, by these community interests via the use of new media platforms and easily accessible technologies. This could be viewed as a part of Suroweikis “Wisdom of Crowds” as the community works together to form the best solution and is thus applicable on a global scale when looking at cultural communities being linked across the globe.

The Jenkins reading discusses Pop Cosmopolitanism which embraces global pop medias as a break away from local, parochial cultural medias. It has lessened the effectiveness of geographic boundaries as online medias free consumers from the constraints of time and space leading to a more multicultural online experience as proposed by Gitlin (pg2).

Pop Cosmopolitanism allows for:

1.       Rapid Flow of media across national borders which is facilitated by strategies of old media institutions by the syndication of old media over broadcast channels, or via the web 2.0 platforms available to new media.

2.       These flows are bi-directional as cultures both consume and produce different cultural products – something which has been heighten without the gate keeping of production and distribution houses in the old media model.

3.       Media viewed in a different culture than the culture in which it was created can be both decontextualised and recontextualised by consumers – leading to a participatory remix culture where their cultural understandings are applied to these media.

4.       The new media generation can lead to global circulation of online works from media sources such as blogs, images, video clips allowing media to be shred and spread virally across new media platforms.

·         Reinforces the idea from the lecture that Media convergence is not an end point, rather it is an ongoing process occurring at various intersections between media technologies, industries, content and audiences which are distributed everywhere thanks to computers and telecommunication networks.

1.       CORPORATE CONVERGENCE – Concentration of media ownership resulting in smaller and smaller numbers of media creating and disturbing conglomerates to keep the flow of media alive. Seem to me to be a result of economic rationalism where systems are put in place with cultural and societal structures to allow a concentrated flow of media across many cultures.

2.       GRASSROOTS CONVERGENCE – Digitally powered consumers are given the power to shape production techniques, distribution, and reception of media content. This I think can be best applied to the vidding discussions in earlier weeks of MED104 where a community form around common interests and create their own sub-cultural rules regarding to how media is created, distributed and how it is received.

·         Theses global convergences, both corporate and grassroots, empower the audience into pop cosmopolitanism which enables consumers of media to experience a wider range of cultural experiences  though corporations selling more cultural products on a global market, and grassroots creators sharing more information on web2.0 platforms.

·         In the reading there are fears presented about a possible economic imperialism being created due to the economic dominance of western media institutions, and that this power means western cultural goods are being imprinted globally creating a global culture with similar societal ideals. However I think does not consider how these media are read within the context of different cultures and that only those which have some context will succeed and perhaps present an already existing facet of that culture in a slightly different context, or present a new media that the gatekeepers of the that culture had blocked from society despite the societies want for such cultural artifacts. With the ability for grassroots consumers to distribute media freely online these gatekeepers are now largely negated.

·         Different cultural media are being remediated within the context of different cultures, and is a two way relationship (not only west to the rest)

§  The Ring (Japanese original to western cinema)

§  Steig Larson novels from Sweden to Hollywood cinema

§  Big Brother across many nations around the world in different contexts

§  Ditto with Pop Idol

§  Iron Chef from Asia being recreated in western markets such as Australia and the USA

These different cultures give birth to different sparks of creativity which are them remediated in some way to different cultural contexts (subtitles, remakes, different formats) – which then enriches these new cultures with different creative viewpoints – although I think some people may also see it as profiteering by strong western economic media institutions bereft of new ideas to hold the audience’s attention, and also being challenged by grassroots media creations for that attention in participatory culture.

·         In this reading Jenkins looks a little more deeply at what drives the economic interests behind pop cosmopolitanism:

1.       Producers see global circulation as expanding revenue streams and actively promoting their own culture

2.       Multinational conglomerates seeking to find entertaining new content that can be pushed into multiple markets (vanilla media)

3.       Niche distributors looking definitive points of difference for specific target markets.

An example was given in the reading where Japan has deliberately target manga cartoons such as Pokémon and recontextualised to western children, who then grow up with this media type and introducing them to a different cultural medium which they will take onto their adult lives thus removing any cultural stigmas that would have resisted their cultural products in earlier generations.

It is also presented that westernized media such as Disney seems to be more highly valued and so when sent to different markets is not remediated or recontextualised as much. However in these cultural markets Disney is distinctive to them as not being from their culture; Disney also use traditional narrative structures to ensure media crosses over as well as possible but still not all narratives will crossover effectively.

·         Jenkins then moves on to look at grassroots interests in convergence and pop cosmopolitanism. At the grassroots there is a pressure to preserve cultural differences instead of a perceived shift to homogeneity.

1.       Grassroots convergence allows for cultural traditions to be maintained and curated to maintain the cultural integrity of the media, whilst allowing access to pop cosmopolitans.

2.       Grassroots trends can, and tend to, precede commercial interests and then are remediated for commercial purposes later as they become popular.

3.       Grassroots media tends to investigate and interpreted different forms of locally produced media through the lens of a different culture (remix).

4.       Allows migrating cultures to retain a link back to their cultural traditions whilst in the midst of their new diasporic culture – although this would lend itself to a different experience for those entering it as they do not have the deep knowledge of the traditional culture and thus diasporic culture could become the dominant culture over a period of time – but at least the traditional culture would be preserved digitally.

·         What these cross cultural exchanges generate is not a global culture, but a rather a global perspective which creates a global world view that takes into account the many cultural differences present in society.

This global world view will be required for corporate hybridity to work as it depends on consumers to have certain cultural competencies only impossible through global media convergences. These cultural competencies will hence allow corporations to export and import more cultural products.

My question on this would be one of authenticity of the media as media producers in different cultures may start producing content to fit into different cultural contexts and thus in away be making very westernized non-western films for example.

·         Pop cosmopolitans may create a thirst for knowledge that should protect authenticity to maintain global awareness and respect of different cultures thus creating a media marketplace that is more like  a local media bazaars rather than global cultural media franchises

Week 5 Entertaining the world Lecture summary

·         Media must entertain to hold audience attention and sustain audience size

·         In popular culture we use media ratings systems (TV & Radio) to maintain and monitor advertising revenue.

·         Media is now crossing many cultural boundaries and is now consumed globally with shows such as Sesame St, CNN, Disney, Pokémon, Warner Bros, Bollywood, films, etc having global access

·         5 Dimensions of media:

1.       Ethnoscapes – flow of migration and tourism

2.       Technoscapes – rapid movement of information

3.       Financescapes – rapid flow of money i.e. stock exchange, PayPal

4.       Mediascapes – flows of images and information via newspapers, magazines, TV, film etc

5.       Ideoscapes – flow of western world view (i.e. democracy), but also flowing east to west

·         Types of audience by geographic position:

1.       Local audience consuming local media

2.       Diasporic audience – migrants consuming media from their home culture

3.       Thos who consume media not produced locally – foreign film, TV, music

·         Media convergence: Is not an end point, rather it is an ongoing process occurring at various intersections between media technologies, industries, content and audiences.

·         Overflow of central media creation into other media creations (i.e. Pokémon cartoon into trading cards, toys, games, movies). Japanese cultural product with global success.

·         Imported programs are not only those which are viewed as is, but also those whose concepts are used and then adapted to the local market (i.e. local versions of big brother, survivor, etc)

·         This however can create a perceived clash between local traditions and cultures and the new cultural past times being presented in a modern global media – raising fears that a generic, or homogenous, culture is forming.

·         TV shows are now leaving geographical borders more often;

1.       To fill voids in content of the schedules of media broadcasters

2.       Cheaper than producing locally created content

3.       Generic narratives that can apply across many different cultures

·         Media can affect the identity of consumers. By promoting consumerism, commodifcations, sexuality, fashion, politics that can shape society and attitudes towards changes within it, what we think of ourselves and how we relate to the everyday life presented in media.

1.       New cultural content can be separate from traditional societal values

2.       Australia has a set % of content which must be Australian made to protect our cultural value, however the internet allows access to cultural media which surpasses this, and the remediation of non-Australian cultural products also negates this as it is not originally Australian.

·         TV, video, film teaches us about culture, society, history through the interpersonal relationships it presents to us as we learn customs through these interactions in everyday life as per Goffman. Thus the semiotic value of video can be of great affect on one cultural and societal attitude as they are partly shaped by the media.

·         But this can both build and break cultural traditions.

·         As media is created sand shared globally I wonder if we are seeing the economic rationalization of consumer culture where media is trying to shape markets where overflow materials can be sold into. I don’t think it is a total cultural shift but they are trying to create global niches for media within Andersons long tail.