Week 9

This week we looked at more video game related material, particularly online and fan culture.

The first reading we had to do this week was on alternate reality games, mystery games that take place in both a fictional setting and the real world and are often used to promote other media products such as TV shows or games.

There are a few points that I gathered and the class gathered;

•          It contradicts Jenkins views on decentralization as ARGs partly take place in the real world and are kept relatively local. Also if it’s marketing a TV show, many TV shows don’t air at the same time in different countries so an ARG that runs concurrent with the TV show (like ALIAS) will make little sense to someone from another country who isn’t receiving the TV episodes at the same time.
•          ARGs are made by the industry and can also be made by fans. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
•          ARGs teach participants to work together to achieve a goal, such as solving a mystery together. Some can affect how they live. (World without oil).
•         ARGs make the TV show more interactive by encouraging the users to participate with the fictional world.

The other reading named Playing on the Digital Commons discussed gaming, piracy and fan culture and the affects of these.

•         The first video game was actually a hack of a computer system. Wow!
•        It discusses the ease of piracy thanks to the Internet and the prevention of piracy as well. Gamers are quite often fairly tech savvy so this can cause gaming to be a very pirated medium.
•         It assumes that the gaming industry gets significant losses due to piracy. Being a gamer I can say this is not necessarily the case, many of the last generation of video games had ways to prevent piracy over the internet (the Gamecube being one example with it’s stupid tiny discs) and the current generation has numerous countermeasures against game piracy. PC games are the easiest to pirate however the majority of PC gamers don’t actually pirate games and so the losses are not particularly significant.
•          Machinima creation= promotion of the product. I think I’ve discussed this before. It’s true, some games actually give gamers the tools to make their own michinima as it is seen as a profitable idea. However film makers have to be careful with copyright issues.
•          Virtual trading. I can’t remember what this was written for but I’m going to say “Godammit I hate virtual trading cause I like having a cover come with all my games, it makes my game collection look awesome when I’ve got like, a million covers. Virtual trading will ruin that for me. And it ends up costing more cause they take up so much of your god damn internet download limit. Virtual trading is lame. But it’s the future so... L

Other things we looked at in class was participatory culture in games. This can include modding (which is very popular with PC gamers), machinima, cosplay (eurgh), everything else that can be done with movies and books and I wrote down Halo because it’s a good example of getting gamers to come online to share each others experiences.

We were asked if there is any constraints to this to which I answered legal constrains and if there are tools included in the game code to aid you participate with it your are limited to what the game allows you to do.

And is the economic model different?

Well, most user-made media is low budget but that applies to nearly every form of user made media…

Till next week!