FIN.

I realised a few days after making this blog and just passed the point where I could change my mind, that this subject might not have been the best idea, mainly because I was never going to be able to define or "finish" my view as well as I would like. I don't think that it is possible to define culture in one box. It doesn't live in a box it lives in everything that we do and make and as I do firmly believe that Games are a genuine culture I was not going to be able to define that either. Originally I want to look at Culture, then at games and their culture and then at how culture was represented in games. The last part of this seemed to get lost amongst the culture and looking back at my introduction post I don't think I have succeeded in what I wanted to do, however I think that this is more to do with how little I considered the subject Game Culture before I started, once I had begun my research I realised that it wasn't the best way to handle this subject. So in the beginning of this blog I had great difficulty finding anything to say, I decided to begin at the bottom with culture in what I believe is it's simplest form, a dictionary definition. A controlled, set view of what culture is. It became clear very soon after that culture isn't something that can be understood through a definition in a dictionary, it is far more complex than that and Cultures themselves are difficult to study and document without risking losing an important part of what those cultures are or miss-representation of a group of people. Through secondary media we can interpret others lives however we like and surely the only people who can truly say what a culture is about are the people deep within it, or everyone involved in it.
Of course that doesn't make it easier. As I learnt through my own research you can't just ask a gamer if game culture exists and leave it at that, there are so many different types of gamers and levels of connections with the culture and some don't even considered it to be a culture. So with the increasing size of the gaming world the amount of different opinions would be astounding. Too much to try and filter out or attempt to define, but this didn't help with the progress of my work because if I couldn't define game culture at all how could I prove/present it's existence, would it all come down to being a matter of opinion. So I found it difficult to lead my research in a certain way instead I felt that I was just letting it take me wherever it might go. I feel that I have a better understanding of culture and how to look at it and I have found what I have seen to be very interesting but at the same time quite frustrating, Game culture is a large subject, too much area to cover in a blog like this within the time given.
This quote from one of my posts - "Attitudes are elusive. Try to define them and you lose their essense, their special colour and tone. They have to be apprehended in their concrete and living formulation." - Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870, New Haven: Yale University Press 1957, p xv. - to me says that by trying to define something as huge as culture you are attempting to control it and lose so much of what it truly is in its most natural form. So the act of studying culture and applying games to those definitions feels like going backwards and as culture is something that changes and develops as we do it seems like you could keep writing about it forever and never come to an end.
So for a more accurate study it requires you to experience, in this case, the world of gaming, but there is so much to see and hear, so many different people involved and so many ways to interact with gaming culture. I think that this course is also a part of that culture and so to a certain extent my own view would be bias, or at least could be classed so purely because I am within the culture that I am studying in many ways. I play, study, love and design games and highly approve of their existence and the culture surrounding them, I think that it is very clear and easy to see that Game Culture is just as valid as a culture as things like film, television and even our world cultures. Reading through this website http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/culture/ about defining culture and propagating culture it seems even more clear that culture is all over the place. There are so many different groups of people all with many of their own sub-cultures, with there being so much of it I have found it difficult to have structure to my blog and I feel like I have explored a tiny drop from the massive ocean of Game Culture.
I don't think that I have a final conclusion to come to as there is much more about culture and game culture to learn and I do intend to keep following this, as game culture continues to expand as develop as I believe it will I hope to also develop my understanding and knowledge of the culture, even if this means that I can never find a definitive conclusion to the subject.

Houselife

A photo made up of Dr. Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie from the TV show "House" and the main character Gordon Freeman from the Half Life videogame series. Two "Iconic" figures both with many fans.

• http://www.housefans.net/
• http://www.fanpop.com/spots/house-md
• http://planethalflife.gamespy.com/
• http://www.halflifeportal.com/fanfiction/

Both of these characters mean just as much to their fans. Like television games have their "heroes" and to a certain extent can be "better". More idealised as they can be created completely from scratch, we can make them whoever we want them to be.

"Who owns culture and who decides?"

Fans, followers and consumers. People who enjoy an activity/product and repeatedly take part in this. There are many things like this that aren't widely experienced enough to have and affect on society. They are not connected enough with other parts of life within that culture, so even though people enjoy these things they remain smaller sub-sections, sub-cultures. Does gaming stretch beyond that? And who decides...
Can the people within the culture declare it to be so or does it depend on an outside view. For gaming would that mean someone who had never played a game or experienced them in any form. Would they be able to understand/see the level of enjoyment that gamers experience, what that world might mean to some people and the work and care by designers that create the games. There are so many sides to the gaming world and not all of them would agree with each other so who is allowed to decide if it is a culture. If someone was to look at everything that games have ever affected and studied this would they be able to give an accurate definition of the culture of gaming, just from looking at articles, books, videos and any other secondary media. I think that it would require a more hands on approach.

"One way to document cultural heritage and "freeze" it, at least at the moment of capturing it on camera, and thus preserving that moment, is to use digital video. As with text and image "collecting," the ethical dilemma in conducting folkloristic visual recording is determining what is to be recorded, and what approach the fieldworker might take. Since the story does not exist without performance, performance is more significant than the story alone. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett noted, "Repertoire is passed on through performance. This is different from recording and preserving the repertoire as documentation in an archive" (2004:60). A list is not relevant without the people whose cultural knowledge is catalogued. "It is not easy," she notes, " to treat such manifestations as proxies for persons, even with the recording technologies that can separate performances from performers and consign the repertoire to the archive" (2004:60)."Spring 2008 by Sherman, Sharon R http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3732/is_200804/ai_n31109720/pg_6/?tag=content;col1



To me it seems that what's being said here is that it is better to view a culture in it's active form than through secondary media such as film or books. I think that it is important to preserve past cultures and not forget where our current cultures and societies have evolved from, so we should be documenting and studying these cultures, but definitely remain aware of the difference between primary and secondary experience.
Quite often people I know who don't have much contact with the gaming world are much more interested when watching a game being played that just hearing about it.

Geek - Gamer - Geek?

I game therefore I am geek?

I am geek therefore I game?


These two articles both address the question - If you play games are you a geek? but from very different views. The first article, entitled, "Gamers, yes. Geeks? Hardly, for many E3 is the ultimate cool." talks about how gaming used to be just for geeks and losers, a view that could be seen as quite offensive, but now gaming has gone mainstream and "cool" people play them too. Although to a certain extent I do agree with some of what they say about how not all gamers are geeks but their view seems too prejudice towards people who would class themselves or are classed as geeks, I don't think it was ever that black and white that only "losers" played games before and "cool" people were to busy growing up.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/GAMERS,+YES.+GEEKS%3F+HARDLY+FOR+MANY,+E3+IS+THE+ULTIMATE+COOL+EXPO...-a0145805880



The second article, entitled "Games aren't just for geeks anymore, sadly." also talks about how games are far more mainstream than they used to be, but that this isn't such a great thing now that games are "quite popular with normal people." Also a very one sided view yet possibly not as offensive as the first article.

http://www.the-pamphleteer.com/2009/02/games-arent-just-for-geeks-any-more-sadly/

"This is all well and good: now that video games are fluffy and inclusive maybe the Daily Mail will stop screaming for them to be banned, and maybe some of us old-school gamers might finally be able to shake off the ‘anti-social dork’ stigma. But for all that, it does kind of feel like the grown-ups have crashed our party. Just like your favourite band selling out and going mainstream, now that the industry has found a much wider audience it seems inevitable that games will never be quite as cool as they were in the early days and mass-market appeal will take priority over the edgy creativity that made it all so much fun to begin with."

This third article also looks at gaming becoming more mainstream, but in what I believe to be a less bias fashion. "blowing away the myth that computers ain't cool."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1513353.stm

It definitely has a more positive view on the development of gaming into the rest of the world. I think this is a much better way to look at it rather than worrying about how games are going to change or attempting to alter their market completely. We shouldn't be trying to change the culture, just expand it.
"It will be the Olympics of the joystick world and Jones predicts gaming will become a televised sport within five years."

More of my research..

Here are some of the answers given to my questionnaire that I found most interesting.

“I don't really think that computer games are going to have a major effect on our cultures any more or less than they do already. That said, I've heard about people getting jobs based on the fact that they've played certain games...”

This was an answer to question 7. I believe that it's very possible that people could take inspiration from games when making bigger life choices, with both positive and negative effects.

“Games will continue to improve at the same time only mildly effecting the world around. Until one day they become too good too immersive and a “better than life” scenario happens.
People start dying all over the world from not eating or drinking , governments will then ban all gaming causing all gamers and geeks to rise up and fight, how ever in doing so they will accidentally create an AI that will threaten to annihilate civilisation as we know it.
In response to this the worlds remaining governments use cloning to recreate raptors and necromancy to raise zombies.
The ensuing battle will decimate the world leaving only remnants of the robot army a zombie raptor horde and a small pocket of geeks left fighting for humanity.
After 87 years the geeks will eventually win out and create a new utopian society.”

This is another answer to question 7, and the same person said the following to question 5.

“I think it exists but I wouldn't call it a culture.”

This was very interesting as I would say that the answer to number 7 was a good representation of a "stereotypical" gamer/geek answer. Although I don't like to use the word stereotypical to describe a type of gamer. Not everyone within the "gaming world" would agree it was a culture. Personally I find this a little odd because people within the culture can see so much more of it, they are more connected to its true meaning.

My own research.

After looking at the BBC research I wrote my own short questionnaire. The questions are very brief and I haven't posed it to a lot of people. Mostly because I don't want to see how many people play games because I already know that there are a lot, instead I want to see what people think of game culture, do people even consider it at all like other cultures and does it effect other world cultures.

1. Do you play computer games? - This would be the most logical question to have first, being very likely that if the person didn't play games they would have quite different answers to the rest.

2. Do you consider yourself to be a gamer? - I think that although identity can be seen from an outside view it can only really be completely decided by the person themselves what they are.

3. Would you say you knew much about the gaming world? - It was drawn to my attention that this question may not be worded very well as it's very open, if you didn't know something then how would you know..and so on. However I feel that was my point, how much do you think you know?

4. Are you familiar with the phrase "Game Culture"? - A very simple question however I was uncertain if "phrase" would be the correct term for Game Culture. Everyone I asked said yes to this question except one answer which was - "the phrase game culture can be interpreted in different ways but yes game culture is something that in some social groups has more of an influence than others." - I found this interesting because it made me wonder if Game Culture although it exists for "gamers"could ever be considered a genuine culture, or perhaps it would always be classed more as a sub-culture.

5. Do you think that game culture exists? - A very important question but a difficult one, I got a lot of conflicting answers to this. It seems that most gamers believe game culture exists, but some think "it's still growing", "it hasn't been around long enough" and one answer was "I think it exists but i wouldn't call it a culture." This answer was from someone who had also said yes to questions 1, 2 and 4. Does it depend on what you consider a culture to be and is there a scale to measure that.

6. Do you think that Game Culture is expanding? - All of the answers to these questions were yes, of course, definitely. I think it's very clear that it is expanding, but possibly "developing" would be a better word as although games are becoming more popular it isn't clear at what point they will reach the height of their popularity, as I don't think they have yet.

7. How do you think games will/could affect our cultures in the future? - I got some very interesting/amusing answers from this question. It's a very broad question and I don't think I've phrased it as well as I could. I would like to see how much value people place on games and if they consider them to be able to change and affect the world outside of gaming and gamers. Quite a few people do think that games will keep advancing and I do think that the technology in games and computers will and already has started to effect other parts of life.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121358204084776309.html - "Two rival chip makers are about to deliver the next advance in technology to improve the realism of video games. But this time their efforts could have a broader impact."

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume41/DigitalGameBasedLearningItsNot/158041 - "Digital gaming is a $10 billion per year industry, and in 2004, nearly as many digital games were sold as there are people in the United States"

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture by John Storey

"Attitudes are elusive. Try to define them and you lose their essense, their special colour and tone. They have to be apprehended in their concrete and living formulation." - Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870, New Haven: Yale University Press 1957, p xv.

In the preface to Culteral Theory and popular culture John Storey says that he is agreement with the view expressed by Walter E. Houghton.

Foreword from Cultural studies - Theory and practice by Chris Barker, foreword by Paul Willis.

"'Culture' is a strange and capacious category. It's one of those concepts, perhaps the best example, that we simply cannot do without - it is used everywhere - but which is also very unsatisfactory and cries out for betterment. No one can define it exactly, say what it 'really' means. That's partly why it's so useful of course, because we can always say later we meant something slightly different whilst getting on for now saying something nearly right of great importance. So many things are contained in the word."

Culteral Studies - Theory and practice. Chris Barker, foreword by Paul Willis.

Game Culture - BBC Research

Game Culture seems to be a very general term encircling the gaming world. From the beginnings of the creation of a game to the people that play as a lifestyle choice, those that play a few games now and then, stretching out to merchandise, the effect that games have on the media and people that don't play games but read about them, the technology involved in creating better games and the many other places that games touch within our own cultures and daily lives. Nearly everyone knows of games, even if they don't know anything about them and most people have an opinion on them. These are the things that create Game Culture, how much people play games, how much they talk and think about them, how prominent they are within media and on our high streets.

I found some research done by the BBC in the summer 2005 on gamers in the UK.
They were looking at:

• How many people are playing games in the UK?
• How, where, when and why they play games?
• When is the family television used as a monitor for a console?
• The context in which gaming plays a role in people’s lives?
• Do people play games in isolation, or in a social situation?
• How does the public’s relationship with radio, television and mobile devices affect the games they play?
• What value do people place on the time spent playing?

I was interested in how many people are playing games in the UK and what value people place on the time spent playing. I hope that this would help me to gain a better understanding of what makes a gamer and how widespread gaming culture is.

Their results were gained using the following rules:

• Total of 3442 6-65 year-olds "from a spread of demographic and ethnic backgrounds."

• They defined a gamer as someone who has played a game across any media (mobile, handheld, console, PC, Internet or interactive TV) in the last six months.

• How often people played were sorted into the following:
  
• • Every day
  • 5-6 times a week.
  • 3-4 times a week.
  • 1-2 times a week.
  • 2-3 times a month.
  • 1-2 times a month.
  • Every couple of months.
  • less often.
• They looked at what people play their games on.
  

• What motivates them to play games.

• Where they play games:

• • Home – In the living room
  • Home – In the study room
  • Home – In the bedroom
  • While travelling
  • At a friends/relatives home
  • Whilst travelling
  • At an Internet café
  • At school/college/university
  • At a library
  • At work
  
  
• If they are only playings games or using other media as well.

• The value that they place on gaming, asking people to organise the following into order of preference.
  
• • Playing video games (on any device)
  • Watching TV
  • Films – DVD, Video
  • Films – Cinema
  • Talking to friends on the phone
  • Reading Books
  • Reading comic/magazines (Reading Newspapers was added for 11-65 yr-olds.)
    
  • Listening to music (e.g.MP3s, CDs)
  • Surfing Internet websites (non-e-mail)
  • Mobile (non-phone calls e.g. texting)
  • Listening to the Radio
  • Reading/Writing e-mails

• Their attitudes towards gaming, using nine statements with a score of 1-5 of how much they agreed with that statement:
• • I get more enjoyment out of videogames than any other forms of entertainment.
  • I spend more time playing videogames than watching TV.
  • I spend more time than I should playing videogames.
  • I prefer playing games as a social activity, rather than playing on my own.
  • Games are part of my identity.
  • I’ve made some good friends through games that are online.
  • I think that games could be used for education as well as entertainment.
  • There are too many racing, shooting and fighting games.
  • I am not really interested in videogames although I do play sometimes.

They divided the research into groups of age.

• 6 - 10
• 11 - 15
• 16 - 24
• 25 - 35
• 36 - 50
• 51 - 60
  

This is their graph showing the results of their first question, how many people are playing games in the UK.

I was surprised to see such a high percentage for the first age group, but there are so many different platforms to access games from now and with the results varying from someone who has played just one game in the last six months to people that play everyday the scope for who is classed as a gamer is much wider than people may argue it should be.
I think it's very difficult to know exactly where you can start classing people as gamers, do the need to play every day, or every week. Should it be based on how they feel about games or is it something that we can only decide for ourselves, if you class yourself as a gamer you are one?

The results for how much value people placed on playing games showed that the two youngest age groups, 6 - 10 and 11- 15, placed the most importance on playing games above the other activities and this gradually decreases as the ages go up, but playing games was still placed at a higher value than six out of the 13 choices.

The following is taken from the conclusion in the article:

Understanding UK Gamers
• 59% of 6-65 year olds in the UK are gamers: this is equivalent to 26.5 million people
• 48% of the UK aged 6-65 plays games at least once a week (21.6 million people)
• 100% of 6-10s consider themselves to be gamers
• A quarter of UK game players are aged 36-50
• 18% (or 1.7 million gamers) are aged between 51-65
• The average age of UK gamer is approximately 28
• 45% of all gamers are female
• 52% are ABC1 social grade, 48% are C2De social grade

A lot more people play games throughout all the age groups than I would have guessed and the average age is also higher than I would have placed it purely from my own experience of games and gamers.



*http://open.bbc.co.uk/newmediaresearch/files/BBC_UK_Games_Research_2005.pdf

Game.

All of the images below, to me, help answer the question what is game culture, and within that, what is gamer culture. I think that gamer culture could be separate from Game culture, or possibly seen as a sub-culture. Gamers have their own world within Game culture and there are many different types of gamers, sub-cultures within sub-cultures.

People queuing for the release of the Playstation3. Playing games whilst waiting.

Concept art for the game Mass Effect.

Crowds at E3 trade show.

Cosplay for Halo.

Xbox360 with a built in LCD screen.
http://kotaku.com/gaming/hardware/portable-xbox-360-lcd-screen-252900.php - this site also has an image of a detachable screen for the 360.

Halo3 Mountain Dew.

Thrustmaster Wii wireless controller.

A giant, playable, Super Nintendo controller.

A custom Xbox360 controller designed for a Hummer.

A very odd design for a PS3 sony controller.

Gamer comics.

http://www.little-gamers.com/

Little Gamers is an online webcomic about a warped version of the lives of the people who write it, or at least that's what it appears to be. Although they aren't always talking about games I think it would be safe to say these people are gamers.

http://megatokyo.com/

Megatokyo is about two friends who by a series of random events (including attempting to get into E3) end up in Japan with no way to get home. One of them gets a job working in a store called Mega Gamers and the other "teaching" English at a Japanese high school and their lives unfold in hilarious situations.


More...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/

http://grumpygamer.com/

Game Culture thoughts.

Dictionary Definition of Culture.
•The totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.
•These patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population: Edwardian culture; Japanese culture; the culture of poverty.
•The predominating attitudes and behaviour that characterise the functioning of a group or organisation.

Culture is something that we create through the things that we do/make how we live and what we class as our traditions/rules how our society functions and the order of our "worlds". This can be easily warped from an outside view. For example the culture of one country can appear very different to someone that does not live within it. I think this is the same for games. Gamers would mostly have a different opinion of what game culture is compared to someone that does not consider themselves a gamer in any way. So I want to look at what game culture is through different eyes. Gamers, academic views, non-gamers and people who are against games. I think that in order to understand a culture it must be viewed from all angles.
New media culture - can it also be linked back to other games like chess, draughts, not just video games.
Game culture has affected popular culture. Games are talked about world wide, for enjoyment, interest, study, all of the different ways that people discuss games creates/changes their culture.
In the beginning when video games were "born" they weren't considered to be a productive business that would go anywhere and this was quickly proven wrong, but still there was a wide view that they were a waste of time, and a bad influence on younger people. These views still exist today maybe even more so as games are more violent and more people play them. Like other cultures games have their positive and negative sides.

Game as Culture

Raymond Williams calls culture "One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language." Raymond Williams, Keywords, London: Fortana, 1983, p 87. I agree with this, I think that Culture is very hard to define and any thought or opinion on it would have to change as culture does.
In Cultural theory and popular culture by John Storey he talks about Williams broad definitions of culture.
"Williams suggest three broad definitions. First of all, culture can be used to refer to "a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development". We could, for example, speak about the cultural development of Western Europe and be referring only to intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors - great philosophers, great artist and great poets. This would be a perfectly understandable formulation. A second use of the word culture might be to suggest "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group". Using this definition, if we speak of the cultural development of Western Europe, we would have in mind not just intellectual and aesthetic factors, but the development of literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals. Finally Williams suggests that culture can be used to refer to "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity". In other words, those texts and practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning. Culture in this third definition is synonymous with that structuralists and post structuralists call 'signifying practices. Using this definition, we would probably think of examples such as poetry, the novel, ballet, opera, fine art. To speak of popular culture usually means to mobilize the second and third meanings of the word 'culture'. The second meaning - culture as a particular was of life - would allow us to speak of such practices as the seaside holiday, the celebration of Christmas, and youth subcultures, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as lived cultures or cultural practices. The third meaning - culture as signifying practices - would allow us to speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics, as examples of culture. These are usually referred to as cultural texts. Few people would imagine Williams's first definition when thinking about popular culture."

• "a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development"
• "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group"
  

Final Fantasy VII.

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/3075/418640-aeris_super.jpg

Aesthetic development of games.
The quality of graphics in video games has increased massive amounts in the last decade, for example Final Fantasy VII was made over ten years ago and the more recent game Crisis Core by Square Enix shows how they are more aesthetically pleasing.

Crisis Core.

http://o.aolcdn.com/gd-media/games/crisis-core--final-fantasy-vii/psp/2.jpg

Final Fantasy XIII.

http://nekoe.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/final-fantasy-xiii-lightning-render.jpg

Final fantasy XIII is to be the next game in the long running series and still Final Fantasy VII has been considered as influential in more than just the gaming world. This article looks at the dialog of the game, something that I don't think many people would consider to be a topic for academic study, but the scripting in game is just as important as in films and television.


"This article examines the way that Final Fantasy VII reshapes the conventions of mainstream Hollywood film dialogue. Dialogue, of course, is not a distinguishing characteristic of film; it is a shared inheritance from television, the cinema, novels, and the theater. Games, however, do not borrow equally from these media because they have need for particular kinds of dialogue." - http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/smith/

Okami.

"especially artistic activity"








Okami concept art. - I personally believe that these two images are art, this sort of work is essential to the development of games and then enjoyed by players after release. This is part of gaming culture


http://uk.gamespot.com/users/Archon_basic/view_image_original?id=OIQJ70sj7h2b4Rnj
http://uk.gamespot.com/users/Archon_basic/view_image_original?id=PIcI4hR37h2b4Rnu

Halo 3.

http://www.stuffwelike.com/stuffwelike/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/halo3_450x360.jpg

Halo 3 has been played online more than most other online games that have been out for much longer. http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/19026/Halo-3-Online-Matches-One-Billion-Served/ - This site has an article about "Halo 3's one billionth match."

"Halo 2 has yet to achieve one billion games played. As of right now, it's sitting pretty at 798 million total matches played" This is quite surprising as Halo 2 was released in 2004 and Halo 3 in 2007.
The increase in the amount of players and the time spent on the game clearly shows how popular it is and the massive following that it has. Maybe it's possible for games to create their own sub-cultures.

Game culture and the representation of culture within games.

I will be looking at the world of Game culture, and how our own world cultures are represented in games. I hope to address what culture means, what is game culture and where has it evolved from. How it changes, how it effects the games that we play and how much of game culture is represented within games.

My research will involve looking at academic and public views of game culture and how an outside view of game culture changes, if at all, the general world views of games and gamers.