Breidenbach, et al.
Paul Breidenbach and Talmadge Wright
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, Loyola University Chicago
PBREIDE@LUC.EDU and TWRIGHT@LUC.EDU
ABSTRACT
THE VIDEO "GAME OVER:" SOME PROBLEMS WITH A RE-PRESENTATION BY EXPERTS OF WHAT VIDEO GAMES RE-PRESENT
This paper deals with the popular representation of video games as sources of violent, racist, and sexist behavior. It will focus on a video documentary called "Game Over," from the Media Educational Foundation, as emblematic of such forms of representation. While video games are subject to being unpacked for embedded and presumably influential messages (valorizing violence, racism, and sexism), the documentary format is often felt to be somehow transparent. Documentaries are therefore taken as a vehicle for straightforward "truth telling" as opposed to fiction and myth. Yet as surely as video games have a rhetorical form, which valorizes some dimensions of reality and suppresses others, so too do documentaries. This paper deals with the characteristics of what Bill Nichols calls the "expository"documentary form, used in "Game Over: Violence, Gender, and Race in Video Games." Simply stated this form validates verbal discursive arguments with edited visual confirmation of the truth of such scripted arguments. The video under consideration attempts, through the use of this "expository" form, to convince the viewer of links between video games and the occurrence of violence, sexism, and racism, plus the " impact" such visualizations make upon young, impressionable, mostly male players. The absence of information from the culture, language, and conventional behavior of players is striking in such documentaries. We show how this lack of the player perspective predisposes an "expert" interpretation of digital games and contest this with material gathered by our own research on game insiders, the players of Counter-Strike. We conclude with the idea that player-generated practices and understandings may mediate and thereby ameliorate and even subvert the assumptions embodied in the film "Game Over."
Talmadge Wright and Paul Breidenbach,
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, Loyola University Chicago
ABSTRACT
Digital Game Play-Space and "Shooter Games":
Creating Social Meaning Among Participants
Our paper works to illuminate the differences between three types of digital game spaces, 1) game play-space, 2) physical space, and 3) social-symbolic space, and the meanings that players give to game playing through these spaces. In the first instance, game play-space, game setups, whether a LAN or on a public server, influences the meaning that players make of each other's actions and of the game itself through negotiations over trust and language. The second, physical space, directly effects how game players experience the game and experience communication with each other, either sitting close to each other or far apart. The third, social-symbolic spaces are those spaces created within the game, via the playing of the game, including styles of play, language, and interest. This is also the space within which gender and ethnic assumptions and political ideologies are constructed via the in-game language and visuals.
We present the complexities of these three forms of game space as the realm within which players experience pleasure, pain, game flow, rejection and or accommodation. Many critiques of games often examine one or another of these spaces we have outlined. This paper is an attempt to integrate these levels in order to look at how social meaning is created through the playing of "shooter" games. Insights produced by our in-depth examination of 24 players of "shooter" games, participant observation of LAN and on-line players, and 70 hours of text analysis on 50 servers running the multiplayer game, Counter-Strike, will be informed by the anthropological framework of symbolic inversion, the role of the Trickster and the concept of symbolic condensation. The symbolic interaction theories of Erving Goffman and Howard Becker will also be used in examining how these micro behaviors work to cement player meanings.
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