Understanding Digital Games

Jason Rutter, Jo Bryce, Jason Rutter, Jo Bryce

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446235966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

There are an increasing number of courses on digital games and gaming, following the rise in the popularity of games themselves. Amongst these practical courses, there are now theoretical courses appearing on gaming on media, film and cultural studies degree programmes.

The aim of this book is to satisfy the need for a single accessible textbook which offers a broad introductions to the range of literatures and approaches currently contributing to digital game research.

Each of the chapters will outline key theoretical perspectives, theorists and literatures to demonstrate their relevance to, and use in, the study of digital games.

1 An introduction to understanding digital games

Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter

Academic interest in digital games has a history dating back to the early 1980s. Papers such as Hemnes’ (1982) consideration of the application of copyright to support creativity in the digital games industry; the work of Sedlak et al. (1982) exploring the development of social integration through recreational programming for people with learning disabilities; the case report by McCowan (1981) of ‘Space Invader wrist’ (a minor ligament strain which we would probably now refer to as repetitive strain injury [RSI]); and Sudnow’s (1983) much neglected book on the process of acquiring ‘digital skill’, indicate how rapidly researchers were responding to the new leisure technologies. There is also a pre-history that dates back as far as Alexander Douglas’ PhD – part of which involved what appears to be the development of the first computer game in the early 1950s (see Kirriemuir, Chapter 2) – concerned less with social and cultural factors than elements of technology innovation and system design.

Unfortunately, this resource of digital games analysis is often not fully credited by contemporary authors. For example, Wolf and Perron (2003) suggest that their collection would not have previously been possible because of a lack of academics working on digital games and Newman (2004) suggests that academics have ignored digital games. The trope that digital games have been neglected by researchers and marginalized by the academy is problematic given the lack of substantive evidence provided. There is, of course, a difference between a topic being overlooked and being ignored – there is no malice or intentionality in the former. Suggesting that digital games have not received the academic attention they deserve because they have been framed as ‘a children’s medium’ or ‘mere trifles’ (Newman 2004: 5) is difficult to accept without sources for these accusations. Neither does such a position help us explain how digital games are notably different from other ephemera and mundane practices that researchers have engaged with, such as music (Hatch and Watson, 1974; Sudnow, 1978) or humour (Jefferson, 1979; Sacks, 1978 – even Rutter, 2000).

Despite claims concerning a lack of research on digital games, examining the digital games bibliographies available on the Internet¹ makes it clear that research on digital games has for some time been thematically and disciplinarily diverse. Perhaps rather than a shift in the structure of academia, the recent surge in publications about digital games reflects the entry of researchers who grew up in the Pong, Atari, NES and BBC Micro years into academia.

A failure to address these existing bodies of digital games literature in contemporary research carries with it a number of consequences. First, it removes our ability to build upon this work or, to draw on the sociologist Robert Merton’s phraseology, removes from us the possibility to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ (1965: 9).² Second, by not situating research in what has preceded, work runs the risk of unquestioningly assuming that this research has no precedents. This is a tenuous assumption and one which, unless critically evaluated, runs the risk of undermining contemporary academic research on digital gaming. Exploring a similar theme in the introduction to her collection, Virtual Methods, Hine writes about Internet research:

Perspectives for the sociology of scientific knowledge are an important reminder not to take for granted the discontinuities between what we are doing now and what has gone before. These distinctions are achieved in the ways we research and write about the new technologies and the ways in which we organize our disciplinary boundaries. (Hine, 2005: 6–7)

Through recognizing previous work as well as discontinuities and understanding these as a process of academic development and evolution it is, however, possible to show that the amount of research on digital games is growing. A simple search of articles in the ISI Web of Knowledge’s database of journal publication shows an almost twofold increase in peer reviewed papers on digital games when comparing the periods 1995–1999 and 2000–2004. In the earlier years there were 275 articles containing the phrases computer games(s) or video games(s) and this rose to a total of 535 during the following five years. While such a comparison may not be scientifically rigorous, it does offer an indication of a significant rise in research and publication activity in the area of digital games. This is growth we can expect to be maintained for sometime, especially as research begins to include developments in new areas of technological innovation that have game relevance such as digital television and mobile telecommunications.

Figure 1.1 Number of digital games articles published, 1995–2004

This publishing has taken place across disciplines. The growth in papers about digital games across the sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities serves to highlight the rich diversity of interest in digital games, as well as the great potential for work that involves cooperation between different disciplines and methodological perspectives. As Wolf and Perron convincingly point out:

[T]he emerging field of video game theory is itself a convergence of a wide variety of approaches including film and television theory, semiotics, performance theory game studies, literary theory, computer science, theories of hypertext, cybertext, interactivity, identity, postmodernism, ludology, media theory, narratology, aesthetics and art theory, psychology, theories of simulacra, and others. (2003: 2)

We could spend time adding systematically to this list but it is perhaps more practical to adopt Aarseth’s approach which suggests that interest in digital games is so broad that a ‘more or less complete list reads like the A–Z list of subjects from a major university’ (Aarseth, 2003: 1). Such a perspective highlights how digital games have become of empirical and theoretical interest for an impressively wide range of researchers, each of whom bring to the debate a different set of methodologies, theoretical perspectives and questions they seek to answer about/with digital games.

This book is an attempt to pull together the diversity and richness of research on digital games, and the disciplinary tools and approaches that can be used to investigate them. This collection celebrates the fact that research on digital games provides great opportunities for exploring the potential links and divisions between the different academic areas, which characterize this emerging disciplinarily diverse field. It attempts to avoid being over prescriptive about developing a single approach or set of methods or theoretical assumptions and is structured to encourage reading across chapters in order to explore the ways in which different disciplines investigate digital games. This approach, we hope, will encourage readers to explore both familiar and innovative paths of research and develop a broad background knowledge with which to investigate digital games, the practices of gaming, and the socio-economic and political factors that facilitate and control it. Our aim is that the chapters will provide the intellectual resources for multidisciplinary digital games research. We hope that the variety of theoretical and methodological approaches outlined by the included authors will provide knowledge of the various disciplinary perspectives available to those exploring the field, and encourage the reader to formulate their own research interests in digital games.

A market context to digital games research

The growth in digital games research may be a reflection of changes outside academic research. Indeed, the placing of digital games research against the backdrop of the global digital games market is not unusual in writing in the area. The combination of impressive market value and increasingly powerful technology is a frequent starting point in a substantial amount of writing on digital games (Bryce and Rutter, 2003; Kline et al. 2003; Provenzo, 1991).

According to data published by the American-based Entertainment Software Association (ESA, 2005), the US digital games market was worth US $7.3 billion dollars³ in 2004. Similar figures suggest that the value of digital games for Europe was €5.6 billion.⁴ (ELSPA, 2005b) and highlight the UK as the world’s third largest market for digital games (after the USA and Japan). In the UK software and hardware combined are worth more than £2.2 billion⁵ (ELSPA, 2005a), with software accounting for £1.2 billion⁶ of that figure (ELSPA, 2005b). In the UK, digital games account for approximately half of the market for toys and games (Euromonitor, 2004) and, for 2003, the market was estimated at being worth between £1.26 billion (ELSPA, 2004) and £2.1 billion (Euromonitor, 2004).

Such figures are almost ritually introduced at the beginning of many publications on digital games research and these figures are indeed impressively large. However, these figures are less frequently placed within a comparative context through which one can understand their implications. As research into digital games continues to grow it is useful to revisit these market overviews and question whether they actually demonstrate as much as we might hope or assume.

To support the idea of digital games as a cultural revolution represented by market worth, headlines in the press and some academic discourses claim that digital gaming is now ‘worth more than the television or film industry’ (Dimitrov, 2005). However, like many eye catching headlines, such claims only show part of the picture and report data in a slightly more spectacular manner than the generators of the data might be entirely comfortable with. The digital games market is indeed comparable to box office receipts – but this is just one element of revenue generated by the film industry. Recognizing that the market for pre-recorded DVDs in the USA was approximately equal to the global market for box office takings during 2002 places such claims into context. When other film industry revenues are added including hardware sales, video sales and rentals, licences, merchandizing, and so forth, on a global scale, the total market values become much less symmetrical.

Although a rationale for studying digital games is often based upon the reported size of the market, it is seldom made clear that the figures quoted compare to more mundane markets such as insurance, credit card services, large kitchen appliances or fast food. Comparing figures from Euromonitor and other industry sources gives a backdrop to the relative UK and global markets for consumer and business products and services. In the UK, digital games are worth approximately half as much again as ‘paints and coatings’, while the fast food market is worth about three and a half times more.

Such rankings of market values do not necessarily convert neatly into a similar ordering for unit sales, so we must be careful not to take market value as a proxy for number of people involved in an activity. For example, whereas the average ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to understanding digital games
• Part one: History and production
• Part two: Theories and approaches
• Part three: Key debates
• Index