Week 7 : Games

Raessens(2005) believes that there are three sections or domains of participation that characterise computer games as participatory media culture. These three sections or domains are interpretation, reconfiguration and construction. He states that all these three link together to exemplify computer games as a form of participatory medial culture.

A lot of people play video games to escape from reality and the troubles of their actual life. Virtual worlds are equally as important as the real world for many obsessed gamers. You can be whoever you want to be when you play a video game. You can design how you look, your attitude, what your good at, where you live and several other factors to create the ‘perfect you’. The person that you want to be but maybe cant be.

In this weeks tute we talked about designing our own game and what we would have to consider when designing our own game. Who were we going to target? Was the game going to be a real life scenario game, a racing game or a game (which our group decided on) that involved a spider on a mission to survive in an everyday human household. We had to think about thing like gender roles within the game and how the players of the game would re act to that. I found it particularly interesting studying gender roles within cartoon games, particularly the Princess Peach example. We had to think about settings, ratings consoles and hundred’s of things that make a successfully game. A game which may bring so much joy to someone’s virtual world that it becomes equality as important as reality as they sit on their couch.

I drew the comparison between social media and games through how people utilise the two outlets. On social media outlets like Facebook and Instagram, people are more often then not removing stuff from their sites to protect their external image from others. In games, rather then removing information or photos for example, people add scenarios, which please them and not the whole of the world like social media must.

Social media often relates to protecting the individual’s image, whereas games do quite the opposite and allow the individual to let free and not have to worry.

References:

Raessens, J 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of computer game studies 2005, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388