Playing with Videogames

James Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415385220
• eBook ISBN: 9781134173006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Playing with Videogames documents the richly productive, playful and social cultures of videogaming that support, surround and sustain this most important of digital media forms and yet which remain largely invisible within existing studies.

James Newman details the rich array of activities that surround game-playing, charting the vibrant and productive practices of the vast number of videogame players and the extensive 'shadow' economy of walkthroughs, FAQs, art, narratives, online discussion boards and fan games, as well as the cultures of cheating, copying and piracy that have emerged.

Playing with Videogames offers the reader a comprehensive understanding of the meanings of videogames and videogaming within the contemporary media environment.

Chapter 1
Everybody hates videogames

‘Junk culture’: the Prince and the paper

Videogames have not enjoyed an easy ride in the popular press which has long concerned itself with the negative influences of their representations and the consequences of play. For many commentators, if videogames are worth considering at all, they can be easily and readily dismissed as little more than inconsequential trivialities. Indeed, so pervasive is this discourse of videogaming as worthless diversion that many gamers recount the experiences to which they devote many hours of puzzling, dedication and creative effort as shameful, guilty pleasures (see Cragg et al. 2007). In what may be the apotheosis of this position, Richard Abanes (2006: 11) recounts the influential child psychologist Dr Benjamin Spock’s brief and dismissive analysis of videogames as nothing more than a ‘colossal waste of time’. Not everybody has been this sanguine in their assessment, however.

More recently, throughout the myriad column inches that have been set aside to investigations of the form, two types of story have come to dominate. The first centres on the apparently universally violent nature of videogames, though the focus is on a small number of key titles such as DOOM, Manhunt and the Grand Theft Auto series. The substance of such stories deals with the putative effects on players’ behaviour and psychology that arise from engaging and interacting with the brutal narratives and images contained within these games. Among the more notable headlines this line of enquiry has generated are the recounting of a ‘Murder by Playstation’ (Daily Mail, 29 July 2004) and exaltations to ‘Ban These Evil Games’ (Daily Mail, 30 July 2004). A number of academics and critics have pointed to the lack of a credible basis upon which to make these bold assertions of causation and the absence of any substantive discussion of the mechanism by which gameplay might affect post-play behaviour (see Gunter 1998, Durkin and Aisbett 1999, Griffiths 1999, Harris 2001, Unsworth and Ward 2001; and Heins and Bertin 2002, for example, on the inconsistencies in the empirical research base). However, while it is true that a weak evidential base does not negate the very possibility of a case to answer, scholars of media and cultural studies well versed in the considerable body of active audience and reception theory will, without doubt, be more than a little exacerbated by the voracity with which the media effects tradition is discussed and the lack of criticality in the assumptions surrounding causation and the power of media messages over audiences that underpins the reporting in these stories. It is certainly true that this kind of popular discourse has ensured that effects claims based on fairly crude hypodermic models of media and audience remain some of the most popular lay-theories of media and that videogames have, for some time, been subjected to the kind of panicky responses seen earlier in relation to ‘video nasties’, ‘comic books’, or more recently, Internet chatrooms (see Cumberbatch 1998 for a concise history of media panics). It is not within the remit of the current book to tackle the complex issues of media effects and influences, audiences and the making of textual meaning as they relate to so-called ‘violent videogames’ (the difficulty of arriving at an adequate and transferable definition of media ‘violence’ is a problematic issue in itself, as Scott 1995 notes). The reader wishing to pursue this subject further would be well advised to trawl the extensive literature in this field both in terms of game-specific studies that attempt to account for the interactivity and participatory nature of videogame play (e.g. Gunter 1998; Jones 2002; Cumberbatch 2004; Newman and Oram 2006) as well as more general investigations of media forms (e.g. Barker and Petley 1997; Johnson 2005).

In this volume, instead we shall focus on the second type of story which, unlike those concerned with the violent and aggressive behaviour that is seen to stem from gameplay and that tend to focus on specific videogame titles deemed to be to blame (such as Rockstar’s Manhunt, for instance, to which the two Daily Mail pieces noted above explicitly refer), treats videogames en masse. This second type of story treats these experientially, technologically and structurally identical ‘videogames’ as both symptomatic of and the partial or even sole cause of social, cultural and educational decline. From standards of child literacy through sociality to imagination and creativity, videogames are seen to exert a singularly deleterious effect. In 2001, Prince Charles summed up the situation succinctly in claiming:

One of the great battles we face today is to persuade our children away from the computer games towards what can only be described as worthwhile books … None of us can underestimate the importance of books in an age dominated by the computer screen and the constant wish for immediate gratification.

(‘Prince Battles Video Games’ 2001)

Writing for the Telegraph.co.uk, Boris Johnson elucidates while ramping up the vitriol to a most impressive level:

We demand that teachers provide our children with reading skills; we expect the schools to fill them with a love of books; and yet at home we let them slump in front of the consoles. We get on with our hedonistic 21st-century lives while in some other room the nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.

They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious. These machines teach them nothing. They stimulate no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory – though some of them may cunningly pretend to be educational.

(Johnson 2006 [online])

The charge here, then, is an oddly counter-intuitive one. Videogames, a form defined best by their interactivity, are accused of reducing their players to a near-deathly passivity. More than that, games appear to exercise a powerful hold over players who play for evidently excessive periods of time in single sessions. The notion of the gamer captivated and absorbed by the game conjures images of obsessives or, as others such as David Grossman (2001) would have it, ‘addicts’. The language has made its way into scholarly investigations also with discussions of ‘fixes’ and allusions to videogame players as cocaine addicts in Klein (1984), Braun and Giroux (1989), and Zimbardo (1982, cited in Klein 1984).

It is worth noting that, because critiques like Johnson’s or Grossman’s (2001) do not seek to pin the blame on any particular game, their authors are freed from the tyrannical grip of detail, nuance and accuracy and find themselves at liberty to discuss videogames as a homogenous group of experiences that centre on the mindless blasting and zapping of enemies and reduce the player to a soporific state of near trance-like zombification. Here, though, the concern is not the blasting and zapping, per se. That the player is engaged in killing is of less importance than the fact that they are engaged in an apparently thoughtless, monotonous repetitive activity that occupies them in the entirety of their being but that offers absolutely no positive benefit. Moreover, because the vision of videogames that is activated in such discussions is one in which a single player plays alone for many hours on end, to distraction and to the exclusion of all other (presumably more valuable) alternative activities, the player not only fails to develop as a social being, but becomes yet more reclusive and isolated. Videogames, then, may be both an antisocial and asocial force that simultaneously encourages violence and aggression against others along with withdrawal and seclusion. In fact, as we begin to see here, while I have separated them out for the purposes of this discussion, the two types of story highlighted here and the version of gameplay and gamers that they trade in often become difficult to disentangle. One can be effectively used to reinforce the other in building a powerful stereotype of the medium and its followers.

Interestingly, the incidence of stories in the popular media that associate videogames and gameplay with cultural decline, falling standards of literacy and educational achievement, and that denounce them as a modern scourge has become more prevalent in recent years perhaps mirroring the increasing penetration of gaming into mainstream popular culture. The most damning of these public whippings is to be found in a front-page piece in The Daily Telegraph on 12 September 2006. Prompted by a letter from a ‘powerful lobby of academics and children’s experts’, the piece entitled ‘Junk culture “is poisoning our children” ’ details the experts’ claims that fast food, computer games and competitive schooling are to blame for a rise in depression. This ‘sinister cocktail’ of ‘virtual play’ (sedentary, screen-based entertainment) is evidently intrinsically harmful and a poor substitute for the bucolic simulacrum of childhood that is evoked in the imagery of ‘real play’. Among the somewhat confusing and unfocused, scatter-gun attack on junk food and target-based education, videogames find themselves labelled as part of a scarily toxic future whose coming to pass must be fought at all costs by all reasonable people.

Lumping videogames and gameplay in with the consumption of ‘junk food’ in this wholly undifferentiated manner conveniently constructs a scenario in which both the physical and mental health of young people is systemically threatened by the irretrievably evil products of a faceless, and in this case nameless, corporate capitalism. The conjuring of a vision of videogaming that is dominated by mindless routines and something akin to a base, Pavlovian response to stimuli relies on an uncomplicated image of videogames that sees them as carefully measured doses of Huxley’s soma, satisfying the simple needs of the duped players. The erosion of traditional values and the replacement of the natural and the real with the synthetic and the virtual are accompanied, inevitably, by the collapse of standards and well-being. The surprisingly well-balanced and reasoned discussion contained within Richard Abanes’ (2006) alarmist-sounding What Every Parent Needs to Know about Video Games: A Gamer Explores the Good, Bad and Ugly of the Virtual World concludes its survey of popular concerns and fears with a six-point checklist that seeks to encourage the non-acolyte used only to reading about videogames in the popular media to consider them in a fresh light. Point 1 is particularly eye-opening, if not jaw-dropping. ‘Video games are not inherently evil, destructive or lacking in positive benefits’ (ibid.: 104). That one should even feel the need to write these words, or to address a preconception of this severity and extremity, seems incredible. Were we to read nothing but the popular press, we could be forgiven for thinking that everybody hates videogames. Or, at the very least, that everybody should.

The case against videogames

For all their well-documented popularity and their growing visibility within popular culture, videogames remain the subject of considerable and sustained criticism. In addition to the ongoing debates about the effects of violent media content on post-play behaviour, we can break down the various charges against the medium into four distinct but related categories. According to their detractors, videogames are responsible for damaging effects on sociality, creativity, productivity, and literacy.

Sociality

Videogame players play in isolation because videogames are ultimately a lonely medium. The stereotype of the videogame player is that of a maladjusted, withdrawn ‘geek’ more at home with engagements with technology than with other people. As Kline (1997, cited in Kline 1999: 19) notes:

What seems to differentiate the gamer is the absence of friends and alternative leisure opportunities; heavy gamers resort to solitary media for distraction and entertainment … Family and sibling play is infrequent, mostly involves playing with brothers, and is more frequent in the occasional player groups.

(Kline 1999: 19)

The idea of the isolated, socially inept player is so pervasive and so inexorably bound up in the vision of the obsessive, unbalanced, dangerous gamer, that it is often seamlessly invoked in the discussion and reporting of acts of violence and aggression such as the school shootings in Columbine and Paducah (see Video Nasties, Channel 4 Television, 2000, for the apotheosis of this position and tabloid journalism at its most scurrilous and unbalanced). The player is not merely socially withdrawn and incapable because of videogames. Rather, their condition is caused by videogames.

Creativity

This criticism centres on the fact that the videogame is an utterly inconsequential activity that neither requires nor develops imagination. We might recall Boris Johnson’s portrait of videogame play as endlessly repetitive ‘blasting and zapping’ that sends players into a ‘speechless rapture’. The triviality of this activity is clearly problematic as it offers no stimulation or variation from the reflex response (though Johnson goes on to endorse the principle of iteration and repetition in learning how to write). Pleasures and rewards are offered in spoon-fed fashion and with immediate effect for instant gratification. There is no sense that rewards are earned or that gameplay may involve effort or work, let alone strategy or planning. Indeed, in the assertion that gameplay is dominated by blasting and zapping, we might also note that, at the crudest possible level, the activity described here is literally destructive. Gameplay, then, is concerned with destroying what has been created by another.

Productivity

If we are to believe the image of players transfixed by the events on-screen, all but comatosed by the hypnotic stimuli and wholly absorbed in an unbreakable loop of mindless and inconsequential reflexes and twitches, then it will come as no surprise to learn that videogame players are unproductive sorts. We have already learned from Dr Spock that gameplay offers nothing of any consequence in and of itself and is, at best, a colossal waste of time. However, we also know that videogames are seen to exert a considerable hold over their players who play with an apparently unhealthy frequency and for lengthy periods of time. We might then assume that this is time that could be better spent participating in more valuable and enriching activities especially those that encourage activity rather than the ‘passivity’ that characterises engagements with interactive media (see also Kirriemuir and McFarlane 2004, on the fear that videogames may supplant other activities).

Literacy

The criticisms of videogames we have noted at the beginning of this chapter trade in a somewhat limited definition of literacy that concerns the written word and that does not concede the possibility or value of other kinds of skills or competencies. Similarly, the argument forwarded by Boris Johnson, the letter writers to The Daily Telegraph and Prince Charles implies that videogame play not only supplants reading in young people’s lives but is wholly incompatible with it. To play videogames appears to be to reject books as they sit in stark, polar opposition in this argument. The desperate nature of this situation is compounded yet further if we think of the game as a closed system that ends when the console or PC is switched off. Just as the gameplay itself is meaningless, it offers nothing to take away that can be of use or value beyond the contained world of the game.

In the call to promote books over videogames we note the putative link between reading and writing, consumption and production. To read is to promote literacy and to encourage the creation of new texts. This is presumably why apparently solitary activities such as book reading are preferred and valorised. Ultimately, videogames offer no opportunity for creativity and present no raw materials for creativity, imagination and productivity to be developed.

It will be clear to most players of videogames that the nature of the criticisms outlined here are greatly flawed and trade in grotesquely parodic versions of videogames, gameplay and players. However, the voracity of the criticisms is considerable and the continued currency of the stereotypes in the popular media means a corrective is still required. This is particularly true given that, as Livingstone (2002) and Facer et al. (2003) note, the research agenda in this field is largely set by the popular discourse. Given that videogames have become increasingly subject to scholarly scrutiny, it is useful to briefly consider the ways in which these various academic perspectives might assist us in better appreciating videogames and tackling the presuppositions and misapprehensions of the naysayers we have encountered.

Game Studies and beyond

While even a cursory knowledge of the history of moral panics might leave us unsurprised to learn that the popular press has all but abandoned videogames, rejecting them as a near-constant source of harm, what is most interesting to note is that videogames have found a new and loyal, if perhaps unexpected, ally. The academy has become home to a body of critics and commentators who, though by no means apologists for videogames, are among the keenest supporters and advocates of the form. As Rutter and Bryce (2006:1) correctly observe, while some scholarly research into videogames has been conducted for some time, there has been a surge in publications in the last few years and a more visible and sustained effort to investigate the form has emerged. Espen Aarseth similarly notes that it was not until the early part of the twenty-first century, many decades after the first videogames broke out of university research labs and into arcades and living rooms across the world, that the form shifted from ‘media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition’ (2004: 45). Certainly, recent years have seen a rapid warming of the relationship between academics, particularly those in the arts and humanities, and videogames. Countless conferences across the world such as the DiGRA International Conference (Digital Games Research Association) and Women in Games are dedicated to exploring various aspects of cutting edge research into electronic entertainment, while the publication of numerous books, journal articles, and even journals (e.g. Game Studies and Games and Culture) all manifestly demonstrate the ways in which academics have begun to embrace videogames – or at least have begun to publicly admit to embracing videogames.

The diversity of what has become known as the discipline of ‘game studies’ is quite impressive. Enquiries range from investigations of the economics of the videogames industry (e.g. Kerr 2006) through large-scale ethnographic surveys of online communities and Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (e.g. Taylor 2006; Castranova 2005), to interrogations of the representations of gender in games (e.g. Cassell and Jenkins 1998) as well as more general introductions to the field (e.g. Newman 2004; Carr et al. 2006; Dovey and Kennedy 2006) and readers that attempt to bring together a range of diverse perspectives sometimes combining academic and practitioner approaches and commentaries (e.g. Wolf and Perron 2003) in a refreshingly and helpfully multidisciplinary manner. While each piece of work treated individually does much to advance the understanding and appreciation of the richness of videogames as a form, by drawing attention to the intricacy of narrative structures and representations or by foregrounding the simulation that is activated and mutated by the act of playing, it is when we consider these studies collectively, as a body of scholarship offering differing analytical and methodological techniques that draw upon a wide range of scholarly traditions, that we see the way in which game studies can present a considerable ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Everybody hates videogames
• PART 1 Videogames as representational systems
• 2 Talking about videogames
• 3 Videogames and/as stories
• 4 Things to make and do: fanart, music and cosplay
• PART 2 Videogames as configurative performances
• 5 Game Guides, walkthroughs and FAQs
• 6 Superplay, sequence breaking and speedrunning
• PART 3 Videogames as technology
• 7 Codemining, modding and gamemaking
• Notes
• References