Games and Culture 28th of September 2018

Shaw, Adrienne (2014). Gaming at the Edge; sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pages 147-199.

Adrienne Shaw has written about the importance of representation in games, and she starts with talking about recognition and identity politics. She underlines that representation in popular media does not correct lived experience, and it will not reorganise lived experience. Her example of this is from the game Diner Dash, which has black and asian characters in independent roles, but where the only character with real agency and ability to act is white. She also points out that the conventional approach to media representation is an assumption that all girls/women or all boys/men will have similar approaches to a medium under similar conditions.

Further, shaw points out that representation and identity does not live in texts alone, but is performance and action. Gamer identity is mutable, and has shifted over time. It has a complex relationship with media representation, consumption and identification. People playing and enjoying games may not self-identify as gamers in all contexts, and so will be missed by research on self-identified gamers. Media consumption also ebbs and flows, and the gamer identity may be more fitting in some periods than in others.

Two examples from Shaw's research: Rusty, while, plays to escape his boring self and does not wish for self-like characters. Gregory, black, sees himself as visible, acknowledge and present when he sees self-like representations. Straight Kat is troubled by the lack of represented diversity, queer and black Julia is not. Julia is troubled by the limitations in the assumed representations of people like her.

What this shows is how designers shape the potential for identification. This is a potential often cropped by marketing logic. In marketing there are no pluralist versions, as it is important to reduce large segments to their most general markers, in order to appeal to as many as possible without being offensive. And so representations is important for social reasons, not individualistic market logic.

A common argument in representations is realism vs fantasy. Recognition requires a reference to reality, but many assume that fiction is immune to recognition requirements. Also, games are systems of virtual representations, so the question of "real" becomes very complex indeed. But in such systems it is increasingly clear that the choice of which "real" the designers choose to follow and represent is a choice, often presented as aesthetic, but inherently politic.

At some points the subjects of Shaw's research also pointed out that representation did not matter. Among these were the lack of a strong sense of being ”different”: Ex. black queer women do not miss women in general, as their sense of being marginalised is so overwhelming, they do not think of themselves in large categories like black, queer or woman. Ex. south asians grown up in Asia do not consider themselves marginalised, and think of whiteness as American, not something that excludes them.

Other topics was how the market logic of targeting through clichés is not representation - offering girls pink games does not represent women in games. This reveals a significant difference in ways to think about representation: the consumer as a set of selected data points from market studies, or the player as individual sets of experiences, knowledge, desire and circumstances, the information that creates our identities.

This also adresses tokenism, how some particular characters are added in for representation rather than for any particular function, much like when boards add one single woman in order to meet accusations of discrimination.

Disabilities and gaming: The secret world of disabled gamers.

The Ablegamers Charity

26th of September Transmedial Storytelling

Barthes: Readerly and writerly texts explained.
Transmedial texts - are they readerly or writerly?

War of the worlds by Orson Welles, full broadcast - YouTube.
About the reaction to the broadcast.
And about the myth of the broadcast - a panic that didn't really happen.

Rudolph Glaber - A monk who wrote much of the older history of France.

Genette and Maclean, introduction to paratext.

By definition, anybody claiming to be Rosicrucians cannot be Rosicrucians.
The world's most well known secret society - the freemasons.

19th of September, Transmedial storytelling

Giovagnoli vs Jenkins: Starting from the audience vs starting from a strong, existing franchise.

Question: What is the direction of the story you are designing? Audience vs franchise, distributed authoring vs centralised authoring?

Who wants to be a superhero? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Superhero%3F

Youtube, low quality version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anY8wI2swe8&list=PLWRk46-nbgr-zBtHPddgbG3qgWUU70UmC

Which of these characters are designed in a way that can make them superheroes, and why? Or why not?

Plot-driven vs character driven stories: Can you give examples from games, books, series or movies for each of these positions of story generation?

Tosca and Klastrup:

Cosplay – what does it tell us about the characters? See Game of Thrones cosplay and discuss what it reveals about the show and how people receive it.

https://www.ranker.com/list/game-of-thrones-cosplay/ranker-of-thrones

http://www.hvafanblog.dk/2017/07/15/game-of-thrones-cosplay-i-danmark/

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/07/whats-so-different-about-game-of-thrones-cosplay/

Worldness:

What is worldness, how is it created, can characters be part of creating worldness?

Game worlds vs transmedial worlds, what is the difference?

Creating worldness

We will watch TinTin, episode 1, season 1, and talk about developing worlds.

Knowledge:

What determines who would like to play a game of a book about to become a series? Why would some be interested in exploring, while others are not? What makes people feel invested enough for puzzle solving? Why would sharing be spamming?

What are collapsed contexts?

Tosca: Retelling little red riding hood

Well known stories: Give us examples of the smallest hints you need in order to recognize little red riding hood.

Stories and structures

Kuleshov's effect - the power of montage

Twine: Tool for text based games and storytelling.

Movie interconnectedness

Movie Galaxies - plotting social relationships in movies.

Transmedia: Commercial use and strategy

Today's texts:

Freeman, M. (2014). Transmedia Critical| Advertising the Yellow Brick Road: Historicizing the Industrial Emergence of Transmedia Storytelling. International Journal Of Communication, 8(19). Retrieved from http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2486/1200

Freeman points out that stories were transmedial before the computer, and their trans-mediation was not a result of technology, but of economy, consumer culture and rationalisation. As an example to demonstrate this he uses The Wizard of Oz, describing it as a franchise.

About the 1902 Wizard of Oz musical by Frank Baum.
Wizard of Oz Universe of books.
Adaptions of the Wizard of Oz.

Marlboro - the ad campaign that taught us about lifestyle advertising.

Buster Brown - selling newspapers and advertising.

The Yellow Kid - naming yellow journalism


Bolter, J., & Grusin, R. (1998). Convergence, in Remediation; Understanding New Media (pp. 220-229). Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

This brief chapter starts with listing some vital terms:

Transparency: to achieve transparency, linear perspective was regarded as necessary but not sufficient, for the artist must also work the surface to erase his brush strokes. P. 25.

 Immediacy is supposed to make this computer interface ”natural” rather than arbitrary. P. 23

Hypermediacy: Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window to the world, but rather as ”windowed" itself – with windows that open on to other representations or other media. P. 34.

Remediation: the representation of one medium in another… p. 45




Jenkins, H. (2006). Searching for the origami unicorn: the matrix and transmedia storytelling, in Convergence Culture; Where Old and New Media Collide (pp. 93-130). New York, NY and London: New York University Press.

This article discusses The Matrix, and Jenkins' first statement about the film is that in order to appreciate it, we need to do our homework. The Matrix throws viewers into the universe with no build-up or gentle learning curve. This is a movie that creates its world through many different media, and to understand it fully, fans had to watch animated films, play the game, and search for clips online. The kind of effort needed to grasp the full story is definitely not mundane, and Jenkins calls it "entertainment for the age of media convergence" and "also entertainment for the era of collective intelligence" (2006:95).

Cultural attractor: drawing together and creating common group between communities.
Cultural activator: making people speculate about, elaborate on and decipher the work.

Franchise: Et system for markedsføring.
Marvel Universe franchise: en tidslinje.

Cult movie example
Time warp from Rocky Horror - with Italian subtitles! :)
Rocky horror picture show guide for callbacks
Rocky horror picture show participation scene from Fame.

Intertextuality, references
Matrix white rabbit clip
Matrix red pill clip
Animatrix historical archive

Modern transmedial advertising campaigns: I love bees - Halo 2
Jane McGonigal as "Dana" in the advergame.
About I love bees on Wikipedia.

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Advertising examples
Mailchimp campaign:
Jailblimp
Mailshrimp
Kalelimp
Failchips

Stranger Things: Snapchat Filter

Halo Top Ice cream

Dunkin donuts multi platform campaign

World water month

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Journalism examples

Washington Post on Reddit

Silk Road NY Times

Dagbladet.no - gutten i plastposen

London Bridge terror attacks
Sky News
BBC