Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
0

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (46-50)

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 27.7.15 / , , , , , ,
This is the tenth round of Pic of the day RECAP (46-50). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

46 - Max Payne:  The American dream

 Proud and confident. Almost invincible. That's how Max Payne felt before everything went south for him. Because it seems that when things take a turn for the worse they just go south, where all that is bad happens. "Is the American dream dead?" asked Crish Cillizza in a article published on the Washington Post. There's every likelihood that it is indeed dead. Over, like in the Rob Orbison's song. Kaput, like The Weimar Republic in 1933. In the end, all that middle class canned happiness was mostly bullshit. Advanced liberalism and post-Fordist capitalism are like those free-to-play games; you only win if you pay enough. And by enough I mean a lot.

47 - Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs  This world is a machine! A machine for pigs!
This world is a machine! Is that good or bad? Wait a moment, there is more. A machine for pigs! Well, that is more accurate. The world is a big, monstrous, relentless, and ruthless machinery inclined to crush any being that happens to inhabit its entrails. Don't be fooled. A machine for pigs is a more poetical way to refer to a slaughterhouse. And if it wasn't enough wrecking our bodies mercilessly, the machine also wants to break our souls, minds, wishes, ideas, hopes and anything that resembles humanity - that suspicious notion. Just watch all those greedy fascists governing and operating the machine. They're also pigs that will be equally devoured by the machine eventually; they have just decided to buy a little more time sacrificing everyone else in the process. 

48 - Octodad:  BLRBRLBLBRLBLRBLOOOOOOOO
BLRBR LBLBRLBL RBLOOO OOOOOBLR BRLBLB RLBL RBL OOOOOOO OWeberBL RBRLB LBR LBLRBL OOOO OOOOLatourBL RBR LBL BRLB LRBLO OOOOO OOSocialisationBLRB RLBL BR LBLRBL OOOO OOO ODurkheimBL RBRLB LBRL BLRBLOOO OO OO OETABLRBRL BLBR LBL RBLO OOO OOO OAgencyBLR BRLBL BRLB LRB LOO OOO OOOBourdieuBLR BRLBL BRLBL RBLOO OOOO OO BL RBRLBLB RLBL RBLO OOO OO OOMediationsBL RBRLBL BRLBLR BLOOO OOO OO BLRB RLBLBR LBLRB LOOO OOO OOB LRBR LBL BRLBLR BLOOOO OOOORajoyBL RBR LB LBR LBLRB LOOO OOO OOB LRBR LBLB RLBLRBLO OOO OOO OStructuractionBLRBR LBLB RLB LRBL OOOOOO OOBLR BRLBL BRLB LRBLOO OOOO OOEpistemology BLR BRLBL BRLBL RBLOO OOOO OOGiddensB LRBR LBLB RLBLR BLO OO OOO O

49 - Metro 2033: Light! Someone must be there
Have your ever heard that epistemological crap about the smoke and the fire? You know, if there is smoke, that will be the sign of the existence of a fire and so on and so forth. Well, we tend, not always fortunately, to interpret reality in those terms. Look! Light! Someone must be there. Look! Water! There must be a leak. Look! Lipsticks traces! A woman must have been drinking from this glass. Listen! A dog is barking! Someone must be trespassing. We should deal with those signs as the character in the screenshot: with suspicion and, preferably, drawing a firearm.

50 - The Binding of Isaac:  Faith Up!
I often think that video games just copy their mechanics from reality. After all, is not what really happens in real life? Whenever we finish counting the beads of our rosary, faith up! Wherever we visit a church, faith up! Whoever prays to a god, faith up! Whichever sermon you hear, faith up! That also works in the opposite direction, all those things that make our faith go down. All in all, we all have a lifebar or a certain amount of health points, we collect coins and have keys. Some even have guns and bombs. And we try to level up as much as we can in order to overcome any barrier we might find in our paths and to defeat the new boss (sometimes literally) that impedes our progression in life. Doubtlessly, we need as much faith as we can get.

Previous entries:
Read More
0

Sociology of short facts: Watch Dogs and the post-identity

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 5.5.15 / , , ,


It was one the first weeks of my - recently then - move to Manchester in 2014. The, I cannot recall the number, new edition of Big Brother was on TV. The show barely amuses me anymore, but my attention was grasped by a particular set of events I was witnessing. I'm not sure if this is something that has been happening in recent editions of the show, but surely it was new for me. Every time someone entered the house, it was preceded by a description of the future guest using three short facts that were also superimposed on the screen. Things like 'he is afraid of failure' or 'she loves dogs'. Can we be defined by a number of short statements? Is that how identity formation works today? Far from letting the thought cast away, I lingered on it.

I've been playing Watch Dogs lately, and the question of how identities are constructed nowadays - what I've been asking myself all my whole career as academic - has strongly come back to me with new arguments. In the universe of Watch Dogs, there this Orwellian surveillance system called ctOS (of course, this is not how they promote it to the general public), which can access and control any electronic device or element that is digitally governed (from smartphones and computers to steam pipes and explosives). The system is constantly recording and storing what you say, what you do, what you write; everything that can be grasped through those devices that surround us in our everyday lives. Any similarity with reality is... mere coincidence? We live in a postpanopticon era, indeed. The Foucauldian panopticon - thanks to its success - has exploded, as if had been shattered into countless little fragments that would still maintain intact their ability to watch. Nothing escape the multiple and fragmented eye of this particular Big Brother.

 What really caught my eye in the game was, again, those defining short facts. Whenever I used my profiler (a hacking tool that allows you to access the guts of ctOS), a myriad of information about the people who was around me was popping up on my screen. Yet again, sentences such as 'Joined aerophobia group', 'Dyslexic', 'Cited for animal cruelty' or 'Explosives expert' were frantically appearing and disappearing in front of my eyes. Everything was also accompanied by information on their age, occupation and income. Matching all this data would be very interesting, but in this case I'm going to focus on those short facts.

Let's have a closer look at the issue by delving deeper into some examples. I've decided to group them in different categories to facilitate the analysis. It's important to notice that the way I classified the cases is not excluding and may feel clumsy, but it's part of the point I will make. This is only a rough summary of a more detailed analysis I will carry out in a future entry. Keep an eye on it because it's a very interesting sociological experiment.

Old(-ish) modalities of identity
This category encompasses those cases I consider they are part of the old pool of identity: nationality, ethnicity, family, work, gender, class, and so forth. However, we will find that something has changed; even the old modalities of identity show flaws, they are not as closed, strong and indisputable as they were. It reflects the profound changes and contradictions in the process of identity construction nowadays. There are no more taken for granted positions. It includes things like class ('Descended from aristocracy', 'Owns a castle in Wales'), ethnicity ('One-eight Kickapoo'), nationality ('Romanian immigrant', 'Dual citizen'), work ('Freelancer', 'Part-time paparazzi') or family ('Divorced', 'Single parent'). 

Beliefs, and political and religious stances
This could have been one of the categories within the traditional modes of identity, but the game seems to pay especial attention to political and religious content. We have here, then, a sample of the complex and disarranged system of beliefs that belongs to Watch Dogs' universe. This includes religion ('Religious conservative', 'Listed as agnostic on census', 'Jainist'), political stances ('Islamophobe', 'Member of eugenics group', 'Anti-capitalist blogger', 'Advocate for euthanasia'), and philosophical and existential views ('Objectivist', 'Nihilist', 'Superstitious').


Skills and abilities
To define someone by his or her expertise is a sign of how identities are constructed nowadays. Actually, this only makes sense in a widely extended expert culture that permeates society. In the end, people who are defined by what they know or what they can do.

The skills and abilities stressed by ctOS perfectly fit in the context of our contemporary societies. If we live in a digital age (Kirby, 2009; Gere, 2008), it seems to be reasonable to be defined by facts like 'Proficient with computers' or 'Amateur App Programmer'. Of course, there is still place for old modes of expertise ('European history expert') along with useful multi-purpose skills for the world of globalisation like 'Explosives expert' and 'Speaks multiple languages'.
Hobbies and passions
In a world where play and work are intertwined in different ways, and the time and space for leisure and other activities are less differentiated than ever, hobbies and passions are likely to be relevant when it comes to defining our identities. Depending on the level of engagement and experience acquired through these hobbies, individuals might develop a particular expertise in the field. In a way, this is strongly linked to skills and abilities but I will focus on the idea of what we love and are passionate about, which includes spectacles ('Amateur magician', 'Amateur choir soubrette'), the occult ('Cthulhu enthusiast', 'Amateur ghost hunter'), the unique ('Foreign film enthusiast', 'Renaissance fair enthusiast'), the banal ('Car enthusiast', 'Yoga enthusiast', 'Knitting enthusiast'), fandom ('Soccer fan', 'Basketball season pass holder'),  and collectionism ('Comic book collector', 'Collects arcade cabinets').

Illegalisms and other faults
When Foucault, in his Discipline and Punish (1995), approached how western societies have historically dealt with illegalisms, he came to a (maybe not that) shocking conclusion: despite the dominant discourse that shrouds imprisonment institutions (as any other confinement institution), the final aim of prisons is not to rehabilitate the convicted but to mark them as criminals as part of an economy of bodies that maintains them under control. It serves more as a tool to govern society as a whole than to help to  those who enter the prison system. Therefore, do illegalisms have an impact on our identities? More than that; they brand the individual by leaving a mark on the deep skin of their identity. 

 In a world obsessed with surveillance and crime prevention, slowly slipping towards a dystopic future not even imagined by Orwell or Huxley, this looks like a very appropriate way to categorise people. This includes bans ('Banned for local gym', 'Banned from local church'), driving issues ('Multiple unpaid tickets', 'Drives without license'), documents ('Expired work visa', 'False identity on library card', 'Holds a fake degree'), suspicions ('Suspect in hit-and-run',  'Suspected arsonist'), justified crimes ('Assaulted high school bully', 'Assaulted client for refusing to pay'), and financial debts and fines ('Multiple outstanding loans', 'Fined for indecent exposure').

Defined by your past
As someone who has studied the links between cultural heritage and identity, I am in the position to state that we are what we are thanks to, up to a great extent, what we were (or what we think we were). The fact that we can identify what we used to be is actually demarcating what we are now or what we are starting to become (even if it's not clear at the moment). ctOS seems to characterise some people according to what they were in the past, as though it were so overwhelming that it would not let space for new identity formations. Among these past definitions we find things such us 'Made porn film in college', 'Former child prodigy', 'Ex-military' and 'Former chess champion'.


Traumatic events
Traumatic events are a subset of particular incidents from the past that define yourself today. Identities are, more or less, the set of marks imprinted on our bodies, minds and souls. We are born with some of them; others are acquired and disposed during our lifetime. There are those that are deep and indelible, while others are superficial and fleeting. Traumatic events are scarring and leave ugly and irreversible marks on the surface of our identities. Examples of this are 'Victim of childhood abuse', 'Got his niece killed', 'Grandparents fled East Germany', 'Attempted suicide', and 'Disaster survivor'.

Losses, absences and non-existences
In the same way that you can be defined by what you were as much as what you are, you can be defined for what you lack as much as for what you have. Absences can be trivial or traumatic, but all of them have substantial defining properties. It's the significant absence. Sometimes, the emptiness left by a loss is more powerful than any presence. Events ranging from 'Lost front teeth in a fight', or 'Phone reported stolen' to 'Presumed dead' (your existence defined by a non-existence) belong to this group.

Illnesses and other health conditions
Illnesses, like illegalisms, are part of those taxonomic operations that segregate the abnormal from the normal (Gordon, 1991: 37) in the collective imagination of the modern citizenship. We living in societies that have a vast knowledge of thousands of different illnesses and other health conditions, it is almost impossible not to suffer from one or several conditions during our lifetime. We are so traversed by these diseases nowadays that illnesses do not play that segregating role typical of modern societies anymore. The healthy and the sick are not easily told apart; there are different shades of healthiness or sickness. 

It seems that ctOS has an interest in highlighting particular illnesses and conditions: sex related ('Dignosed with STD', 'Medicated for low libido'), phobias ('Self-diganosed with aquaphobia, 'Gymnophobic'), addictions ('Alcoholic'), potentially deadly illnesses ('Terminally ill', 'HIV positive', 'Diagnosed with hepatitis C', 'Undergoing chemotherapy', 'Early stages of sclerosis multiple'), allergies ('Allergic to bee stings', 'Lactose intolerant', 'Alergic to chocolate'), mental illness ('Diagnosed manic depresive', 'On medication for schizophrenia', 'Dignosed bipolar', 'Sociopathic tendencies'), other health conditions ('Myopic', 'Narcoleptic', 'Haemophilia carrier', 'Suffers from motion sickness', 'Dyslexic', 'Medicated for blood pressure'). 

Sex and relationship issues
Sexual practices and the way we engage in relationships are fundamental parts of what we are and how we think of ourselves. It implies one of the most carnal and affective activities of human beings. They shake our bodies and minds; they are feral and cerebral at the same time. This includes the modes of building sexual or affective relationships ('Engages in prostitution', 'Speed dater'), affairs ('Having affair with married woman', 'Having affair with co-worker'), or sexual practices ('Self-proclaimed necrophiliac', 'Practices S&M').




The specific and the regular
Even if it sounds contradictory, individuals can be identified both  for very particular episodes (the specific) and for what they normally do (the regular). The regular encompasses things like 'Meditates regularly', 'Collects coupons', 'Runs DDoS attacks',  or 'Habitual steroid user'. The specific, however, is more volatile and makes reference to things such as 'Attacked by drunk patron', 'Negotiating rent with landlord', 'Recently ordered human tissue samples', and 'Has multiple computer viruses'.
Consumption and searches
Consumerism and consumer culture are one of the most noticeable features of postmodernity. According to Bauman, the 'way present-day society shapes up its members is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer' (2005: 24). Therefore, our identities are increasingly demarcated by what we consume. That also explains why identities have become fragmented, multiple and ephemeral. Watch Dogs is not oblivious to this global tendency and thus shows us consumption patterns ('Purchases penis enlargement pills', 'Downloads pirated media', 'Frequent purchases: mask', 'Frequently purchases condoms'), what is frequently watched ('Frequently watches torture porn', 'Frequently watches documentaries', 'Frequently watches westerns', 'Frequently watches reality shows'). Furthermore, and bringing this practice to digital age, ctOS also displays frequently visited websites ('Frequents paranormal sites', 'Frequents hacker sites', 'Posts voyeur videos online') and online searches ('Frequent online searches: "Rape"', ''Frequent online searches: "Blume"', "'Frequent online searches: "how to cook meth"', 'Frequent online searches: "Bicurious"').

Video games
Although all of the following short facts could be easily placed within other categories, I've decided to introduce them in this particular section because of its reflexivity (it's a video game after all!). Here we can find things such as 'NVZN beta tester', 'Attends games conference', 'MMORPG enthusiast', 'Addicted to social gaming', and 'Avid video game player'.
Extreme and absurd 
As if the very idea of defining someone by a short fact was not (sort of) absurd enough, I've created this group to highlight those descriptions that seemed to be especially extreme ('Buried victims beneath his house', 'Experiment with cannibalism', 'Fishes with dynamite'), absurd ('Maintains blog about "bucket lists"', 'Runs with the bulls in Spain', 'Sober') or irrelevant ('Uses computer library for internet', 'Uses birthday as password').



Before I continue with my argument, let's have a look at the following classification:
In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies (Borges, 1999: 231).
I have to admit that every time I read this classification of animals (a fictional account extracted from the vivid imagination of Borges,  who attribute it to a a certain Chinese encyclopaedia) it makes me laugh. The list is disconcerting, if not hilarious. Why does this classification have that effect on us? Foucault, at the beginning of his The Order of Things and after bringing up this delirious classification, concludes that, when confronted with other systems of thought, we start to understand the limits of our own: 'the stark impossibility of thinking that' (1989: xvi). That extravagant classification belongs to a different fundamental form of knowledge, what Foucault called episteme, which makes think within its limits impossible for us:
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice (Foucault, 1989: 183).
The episteme delimits the space of the thinkable inside a particular society at a specific time. The further you move from those temporal and spatial coordinates, the greater is the possibility of coming across a different ground of positivity. In a way, the astonishment that probably most people feel when they read some of the short facts that ctOS insist on throwing to our screens could be explained by that approach. It shows the seams of our old episteme in its transition to the new conditions of possibility, where the way we think about identities is radically changing. That's also why the cases I selected could have been classified differently and they would have made equal (non)sense. In fact, the central issue here is that those solitaire descriptions escape any attempt to classify them.

Thus, why does a system like CToS, which knows everything about everybody, highlights those specific facts? In terms of identity, why should very specific aspects of someone's life define them or be relevant aspects of him or her? My hypothesis here is there are no longer core elements that define identity in contemporary societies; the old coordinates by which people was understood (nation, gender, class) have been decentred, and now new elements, almost randomly, are becoming as important as them in order to define someone's identity. That would explain, for instance, why our most frequent searches on the Internet might be as important for our processes of identity formation as the illnesses we have. Or why having our computer infested with viruses is as relevant as being a suspected arsonist.

The important question is, then, whether it is possible to be defined by one short fact or not. Once our identities seem not to be attached to specific meta-narratives, other fragments of meaning, more and more specific and global at the same time, are occupying the stage of identity. That's the reason we are defined by what pops up in that moment, by what is relevant at that point: it can change at any time, with new events, when you are in different contexts, with different people; it can change the same day several times, in a continuous overlapping process. What ctOS does is to highlight what matters in that moment, what is relevant for the time and place being. Precisely because we cannot be defined by something that encompasses everything we are, we can be defined by anything that describes us in particular moment. The very notion of identity is being challenged. We are entering in a post-identity era.

I don't know who the people behind the sociological design of Watch Dogs are. How did they come up with that almost infinite list of possible identity definitions? I would be more than pleased to meet them. There has been some criticism about the game's story, depicting it as dull and not appealing enough. In this sense, some of the mechanics have been criticised for not being completely original and for not having made the most of the hacking features in the game. That might be the case, I am not a video game critic. What I am sure of is Watch Dogs has perfectly understood how identity, or what comes after it, works these days.

 Bibliography

  • Bauman, Zygmunt (2005). Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
  • Borges, Jorge Luis (1999). Selected Non-Fictions. London: Penguin.
  • Foucault, Michel (1989). The Order of Things. London: Routledge.
  • Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish. London: Vintage Books.
  • Gere, Charlie (2008). Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books
  • Kirby, Alan (2009). Digimodernism. New York: Continuum
Read More
0

Candy Crush Parliament: video game culture in the age of multitasking

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 28.2.15 / , , ,

Recently, I have come across two interesting pieces of news. The first one, from December 2014, related how the conservative Amber Valley MP, Nigel Mills, was playing Candy Crush Saga on his iPad while in a parliamentary committee meeting on pension reforms. The second one described how the Deputy Speaker of the Spanish Parliament, Celia Villalobos, was also playing a game on her tablet during the 2015 State of the Nation Debate, which took place on 24 and 25 February (it seems that, in the end, she was  playing Frozen Free Fall instead of Candy Crush Saga). There is even a video of her playing it:


Beyond the reproachable behaviour of these members of the public who are supposed to represent the citizens of their nations, those situations are symptomatic of two, in a way, interrelated things: video game culture is a growing reality nowadays and we live in an age of multitasking that consists of an infinite lapse of undifferentiated time.

 It is widely accepted that mobile devices have brought video gaming to a new level, expanding the formerly reserved territory of gamers to new social spaces where more varied sorts of people play video games. Those articles are a good example of it. Two conservative politicians, one a middle age man and the other a senior woman, play on their tablets. But they don't play Candy Crush Saga or Frozen Free Fall anywhere; they are doing it in the parliament, where the sovereignty of the people resides. Moreover, they're playing while working.

 This is one of the most noticeable features of this growing video game culture; people play video games everywhere at any time: commuting, watching TV, between classes, in the bathroom, waiting for something or someone, and during any other spare moment they have. We fill those inter-times - the moments we have between the significant and proper tasks - tapping or swiping on our smartphones or tablets. However, consciously or not, we went further. We have started playing while we are doing - or pretending to do - important and relevant things. The multitasking age has arrived.

Our lives have become a set of open tasks that are happening at the same time. We continually jump from one to another in the same fashion as we do between tabs in front of our computer. We don't need to finish a task to initiate another one or to continue with others that are already in progress. Time has lost its linearity and usefulness as a tool for organising our lives:
Without a doubt, modernity was progressively founded on a very mechanical conception of time. Useful time, strictly lineal time, projective time. Time of individual and social history. Time with a beginning and an end, and whose hegemony seems to have done tabula rasa with any other notion of time (Maffesoli, 2001: 66-67).
It seems that today's world has done tabula rasa with time itself. According to Maffesoli, presentism has been installed in our societies, in which we don't consider that 'there are things that are more important than others' (2001: 68). In everyday life, if nothing is important, then, everything is important. We cannot differentiate between spaces, times and activities anymore. We play while working, we work while play. It is even difficult to say what belongs to the field of work or what is supposed to be playful. As Maffesoli states, a ludic conception of society has been generalised: 'The game of the world, or the world as a game. Life as a game is the acceptance of a world as it is' (2001: 80). 

 In the end, our reality has turned into a perpetual sequence of overlapped inter-times. Time without beginning or end. Irrelevant time, only disturbed by the next deadline. An eternal deadline that nobody meets. And in the meantime, we play video games.

 'I shall try not to do it in the future,' declared the MP Nigel Milles when questioned about his slip-up. He didn't say 'I won't do it again' or 'It won't happen again'. He will try. We know what will happen, don't we?

 Bibliography

  • Maffesoli, Michel (2001). El instante eterno [The Eternal Instant]. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Read More
0

The construction of a video gaming audience

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 19.2.15 / , , , , , , ,

A sign that video games are becoming central to understand our contemporary cultural forms is their increasing presence in the media. Not only have the specialised magazines on video games grown in numbers - particularly online, but also the traditional press already includes specific sections dedicated to video games. 

 Magazines have historically played an important role in the formation of early gaming culture, as it was stated by Kirkpatrick (2012) in his Bourdieusian analysis of UK's video game magazines in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Through the development of a discourse of game evaluation, gaming acquires independence and begins to define itself as a cultural practice’. When this discourse is broaden and inserted into the general-interest newspapers and media, the specific gaming culture starts to blur its boundaries and to affect larger portions of society, generating multitude of video game-related cultures and practices. Nevertheless, if there is a media on which video games have naturally proliferated, that should be, undoubtedly, the Internet.

 YouTube, for instance, is packed with gaming channels. In fact, the YouTube channel that has more subscribers is a gaming related one, which is owned by the user PewDiePie, that is, the Swedish Youtuber personality Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg. Currently, his Let’s Play - and many other things to be honest - focused channel has more than 34 million subscribers.

Ramdurai states on Think with Google that among the top 100 YouTube channels worldwide are more than 20 that are gaming related. He shows more data that demonstrates video games are one of the most important audiovisual apparatuses nowadays: ‘YouTube data shows that six of the top ten most-viewed channels in the U.S. are about gaming’. Video games are a central aspect of today’s YouTube generation.

 More relevant is the relatively recent creation of a specific broadcasting platform for video games on the Internet: Twitch. I already wrote about it on this post. It was launched on June 2011 and was purchased by Amazon in August 2014 for $970 million. According to Twitch, they have an average of 60 million visitors per month. Twitch basically consists in people watching other people playing video games. Someone creates a channel, starts playing a video game and broadcasts it live. Then, other people can join the channel and watch him or her playing, while they comment on a chat with other viewers (and the person who is playing, who might make references to those comments) and have the opportunity of following, subscribing (paying) or donating to the broadcaster. Moreover, in December 2014, the biggest digital distribution platform in the world, Steam, launched its own broadcasting service.

All of these examples are suggesting that a video game audience has been created. Not only is there an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) of potential gamers that can be represented as an audience of players in a broad sense, the ones who consume and receive a product, but there is also a very particular audience who explicitly seek to watch others play and know more about video games by becoming knowledgeable in that area. It is, indeed, the construction of a more traditional notion of audience, that is, ‘watching others perform’ (Crawford, 2012: 34).

 This undermines, as if it was not already undermined enough, the idea that video games do not have an audience. When Eskelinen and Tronstad affirm that video games are audienceless is because they consider that video games ‘don’t need audiences as an integral part of their “communication” structure’ (2003: 196). This reluctance to admit the existence of video game audiences relies on a strict ergodic - the requirement of nontrivial efforts beyond mere interpretations (2003: 197) - approach to video games, which refuses to conceive them as media or to admit that video games can have some characteristics that have been traditionally associated with media such as television, cinema, music or literature. This approach is ignoring essential aspects of video games that are not ergodic or purely interactive (a problematic notion, why should not we consider interpretation as a kind of interactive action?), like ‘map screens, score or lap-time feedback screens and so on’ (Newman, 2002). Crawford expands this not just to cut-scenes and on-rail video game experiences, classic examples of players as simple spectators, but also to the ‘visual- and audio-scapes present in standard video game play’ (Crawford, 2012: 34). Players watch at least as much as, but probably more than, interact with the game. Even the act of watching could be considered a form of interactivity and, undoubtedly, watching is an indissociable part of playing a video game.
The idea of video games as audienceless has always been weak, but now, there are powerful reasons to affirm that there is a vast and massive audience of video gamers. It is also noteworthy to mention that this video game audience goes beyond the specific, yet large, group of video gamers. According to a Google Consumer Survey  (cited in Ramdurai) fielded in October 2014, only a 37% of a group of people who watched gaming videos on YouTube considered themselves gamers. Video game culture is reaching society as a whole. The fact that video games are starting to occupy a central position in the media, especially those that belong to the so called new information and communication technologies, is another argument to support the idea of the emergence and consolidation of video game culture.


 Bibliography
[An extended version of this post in Spanish can be found here at Zenhgames]
Read More
0

Videogames and Sociology: Twitter's pic of the day summary (41-45)

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 15.12.14 / , , , , , ,
This is the ninth round of Pic of the day RECAP (41-45). To understand what all of this is about, check out the original entry.

41 - Max Payne 3:  There was always something rotten in the air
In one of the most wonderfully unsettling scenes in the history of TV series, an aged agent Cooper sits in the centre of the Red Room accompanied by The Man from Another Place (a dwarf in a red suit) and a ghostly Laura Palmer. Actually, it's not the most unnerving sequence of Twin Peaks, but in that weird dream-like state takes place a very chilling short conversation: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air". Is this a metaphor of the fact that Laura Palmer lies in her grave? Are the birds the ones singing in the cemetery? Is the music in the air the cracking sound of the casket slowly collapsing under the weight of soil? When an also aged Max Payne pronounced those similar words, "there is always something rotten in the air", everything became crystalline. "Of course," I thought, "there are always music and something rotten in the air because we all are living in our own grave". And that grave is society.

42 - Moebius: Empire Rising:  What exactly is my destiny?

Destiny is about the future. What will I be doing? With whom?  Where? In sum, who I will be? Destiny is fate, ergo, it belongs to the realm of what remains uncertain. And uncertainty is a powerful emotion. It makes us anxious, restless, frightened. That's the reason why we keep asking the question to ourselves, even if we do it out loud in front of one of our peers. The question is aimed at us and we already know we can't answer it. But we keep trying, in the fond hope that its reverberation echoes through our daily life anxieties and helps us to overcome the deep feel of uncertainty that once was shallow but now is almost unbearable. What has this to do with sociology? Almost everything. A sociologist is, among other things but mainly, a tracker of destinies. The problem is we are better tracking actors' past and present destinies than the future ones. The real destinies are for fortune-tellers, prophets, groundhogs, meteorologists, peasants and, sometimes, for deputy directors and ministers for pensions.   

43 - Arma III:  Keep landing zone clear at all times

There are several reasons why we should keep a landing zone clear at all times. The main reason, though, seems to be pretty obvious: to avoid uncomfortable encounters between aircraft and whatever might be on the landing zone. However, the command falls into a paradox. If the landing zone must be clear at all times, how are aeroplanes and helicopters supposed to land on the designated area? In case they touched down, they would be occupying the landing zone and, here's the paradox, it wouldn't be clear anymore. Therefore, the landing zone is both a physical space where aircraft land and a symbolic one where there is the possibility of aircraft landing. When an actual plane lands, it uses the physical space, fulfilling (and destroying temporarily) the potentiality of the symbolic space. The social is quite similar, physical and symbolic at the same time, and full of paradoxes that sustain the fundamental fabric of what we call society, identity, meaning or individuality. Hence, keep the ground of the social clear at all times but don't forget to always occupy it as well.

44 - Catachresis: If only you were not under that veil

If only you were not under that veil. If only you were not so far away. In only you were not underground. If only you were not on the other side. If only you were not occupied. If only you were not afraid. If only you were not married. If only you were not a policeman. If only you were not dead. If only you were not saying if only at all times. All these are wishes that yearn for a particular reality to be different. They all have in common that are enunciated using a negative structure, wishing that things were not as they are right now. This reminds me of all those sociologists who are always projecting their wishes over reality, trying to get rid of those aspects they interpret as being a nuisance for their work. The most common metaphor used is that of the veil. These sociologists insist on unveiling what is behind the mask, erasing the layer that distorts the truth hidden by reality. It is surprising how these scholars haven't found yet that there is nothing beneath the veil; that reality is wide open and available to whomever wants to have a look.

45 - Injustice: God Among Us:  But Let's think bigger
There is a global tendency in the circles of self-help gurus that encourage us to think always bigger. We live our meaningless and aimless lives without knowing that we could (and should) think bigger. Escape from one of Weber's worst fears, the iron cage in which we are confined nowadays. It might not be the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that he envisaged in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2003), too far to foresee the havoc created by financial capitalism and its neoliberal political rationalities, but it is still a symbolic prison, in the end, the worst kind of jail for an individual. Then, we think bigger, but after doing so, we are still inside the cage. What did we do wrong? Well, just focusing on the bigger picture is not enough. Sometimes it's good to think bigger; we must know the things that surround us can only be explained by other things that are somewhere else both in space and time. However, we should also think smaller: the iron cage exit is not beyond its bars, it's closer than we think, in the details. Those details that explain and make possible those big ideas. Once you master how to think bigger and smaller at the same time, only then, you will be free.

Previous entries:
Read More
3

The normalisation of video gaming

By Daniel Muriel / Posted on 5.12.14 / , , , , ,
Edited June 2019: as the 2014 ESA report has been removed from their website, I included the closest report available (2015) and changed the data accordingly. Thanks to Anna Gryshko for making me aware of this.

 Today, I'm going to back up my hypothesis on the existence of a growing video game culture crunching some numbers that show how the act of video gaming is becoming a normalised activity.


One of the most notable indications that hints there is more than an incipient video game culture is the increasing numbers of people playing video games. It seems that more and more individuals, of different backgrounds, ages and gender, are becoming players (or at least have played once in their lives). Two examples of groups of population that are not usually linked to the generalised representations of video gamers can help me to introduce the debate.

In the first one, Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. consider that the number of 'people who have never played a video game, from first graders to retirees, seem to be inexorably dwindling' (2008: 134). They illustrate their affirmation with a New York Times article in which the author (Schiesel, 2007) explains how video games are being regularly played in compounds for retirees. A generation of people who did not grow up in a world where video games existed - not at least as a cultural relevant phenomenon - is entering in the dynamic of playing video games.

 The second example emphasises the fact that women play more video games than men. Historically, research done in the 1980s and 1990s have suggested that women have been marginalised as video gamers (Crawford, 2012: 53), but in the last years it seems to have changed dramatically. The Guardian published the main findings of the research conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK (Stuart, 2014), where they assert that women account for the 52% of gamers.

 These two snapshots of how more people are playing video games regardless of their demographics, convey the idea that video gaming is not a subculture anymore and has become mainstream culture. 

 This growing tendency of video game culture sneaking into Western society households seems to be confirmed by more recent surveys. According to the Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry report of 2015 produced by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the most important video game industry association in the United States, the 42% of Americans play video games. In their report they also state that the 51% of American households own a dedicated game console. Other data of interest shows that the average game player is 35 years old, 44% of gamers are women, and 44% of video gamers are over the age of 35.

 If we turn now to the data gathered by the UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie), the principal video game industry association in the UK, it shows similar figures for the British households. In their UK Video Games Fact Sheet of 2014, which draws on various research reports from different sources, Ukie estimates that 55% of the United Kingdom population plays video games. Depending on the source cited, the distribution of male players and female players in the UK varies between 55% males-45% females and 48% males-52% females.

 All the data points to the same facts: around half of people in Western countries play video games, the number of women who play games is almost the same as men, and even those who were not socialised in a video game culture have started to play video games. That would be the general portrait of video gamers, which quantitatively corroborates the hypothesis of an existing and growing video game culture. 

 However, the brush strokes are so vaguely defined that there is still a great deal of detail missed in that data. Not only do they tend to miss information about who plays what video game on what device - although in fairness some of the reports provide partial data on those issues, but there is also a lack of elaboration on critical aspects of their research. For instance, they define a video gamer as someone who has just played at least once in the last year or in the last six months. This approach quickly overlooks what the implications of that assumption in terms of identity and community construction are. This will be a topic which I will come back to in the future, because it directly affects the controversy about what a video gamer is and who belongs to the community of gamers.

 In any case, those are not the only concerns that can be raised against this data. The fact that the ‘original sources are often poorly referenced’ (Crawford, 2012: 51) and that they seem to mix the information from different reports without taking into account the methodological differences between them does not help to figure out how to weight their importance and reliability. Being representatives of the video game industry, these organisations are expected to ‘convey a very particular image of video gaming as normal, social and healthy pursuit’ (Crawford, 2012: 51). In contrast, it can be argued that these organisations seek to accurately represent video gamers because they want to provide the best information for marketing reasons.

 Even if the information selected is biased to stress the most spectacular figures in order to give a certain impression of the product they are trying to sell, it is still a valid information that tells us how video game culture has burst into our contemporary societies. Whether this is caused by the rise of new kinds of video games and platforms (the so called casual games, to be played on browsers, consoles like Nintendo Wii or Ouya, mobile phones and tablets) as it has been suggested by authors like Jesper Juul (2010) or by any other factors, the fact is the normalisation of video games and video gaming in our society is now an unavoidable reality:
Video games are becoming normal (...). The rise of casual games is the end of that small historical anomaly of the 1980s and 1990s when video games were played only by only a small part of the population (Juul, 2010: 20).
This is what Juul considers a casual revolution among the world of video games, which in the last years have reached - and keep reaching - a broader audience. The definitions of hardcore gamers and casual gamers will be deal with in other blog entries in order to explain how identities of video gamers are constructed, but it is important to recognise that the expansion of the universe of video games and video gamers is fundamental to understanding the constitution of video game culture: ‘Video games are fast becoming games for everyone’ (Juul, 2010: 152). And if video games are for everyone, that means they are an essential part of our society and not just a subset of it: 
Certainly some gamers do seem to belong to a culture distinct from mainstream society. The term subculture, however, is too limited to adequately explain the broader world of games and game players that currently exists (Consalvo, 2007: 3).
All in all, the emergence and consolidation of video game culture in contemporary societies may be best reflected, though not solely, by the inexorable growth of different people playing video games regardless of their age, gender or social status. It is one of the most notable characteristics of this video game culture and is an important evidence of its normalisation in today’s world.

Bibliography
Read More