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.