Chapter Review

COMMON THREADS

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Chapter1 of this book contains one of our favorite quotes. It’s from writer Joan Didion, in her book The White Album. She wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Telling stories is one of the constants of cultural expression across the mass media. But, with digital games, is it still a story—or, better yet, what is it that is being communicated—if we are crafting our own individual narrative as we play through a game?

Books, television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and even musical recordings tell us stories about the human experience. Digital games, especially ones where we play as a character or an avatar, offer perhaps the most immersive storytelling experiences of any medium.

Gamers have already shifted away from traditional media stories to those of video games. The Entertainment Software Association reported in 2012 that gamers who played more video games than they had three years earlier were spending less time going to the movies (50 percent of respondents), watching TV (47 percent), and watching movies at home (47 percent).49 Clearly, video games are in competition with movies and television for consumers’ attention. But, as we move from the kind of storytelling as audience members of TV and movies to the storytelling as players of games, what happens to the story? Is it still a mass mediated story, or something else?

Jon Spaihts, screenwriter of the science fiction film Prometheus (2012), identified an essential difference between the stories and storytelling in games and films. “The central character of a game is most often a cipher—an avatar into which the player projects himself or herself. The story has to have a looseness to accommodate the player’s choices,” Spaihts said. Conversely, “A filmmaker is trying to make you look at something a certain way—almost to force an experience on you,” he added.50 Thus, the question of who is doing the storytelling—a producer/director or the game player—is a significant one.

Such was the case in the furor over Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After players spent from 120 to 150 hours advancing through the trilogy in which they could make hundreds of choices in the sequence of events, the final act took that power away from them with a tightly scripted finish. The players complained loudly, and the cofounder of BioWare, the game’s developer, issued an apology: “Mass Effect 3 concludes a trilogy with so much player control and ownership of the story that it was hard for us to predict the range of emotions players would feel when they finished playing through it. The journey you undertake in Mass Effect provokes an intense range of highly personal emotions in the player; even so, the passionate reaction of some of our most loyal players to the current endings in Mass Effect 3 is something that has genuinely surprised us.” BioWare said that they would create a new ending with “a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey.” 51

Certainly the audience of a movie will have a range of interpretations of the movie’s story. But what of the stories we are telling ourselves as players of games like Mass Effect? Is such personally immersive storytelling better, worse, or just different? And who is doing the storytelling?

KEY TERMS

The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

penny arcade, 81

pinball machine, 81

arcades, 82

avatar, 83

consoles, 83

massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 86

online fantasy sports, 86

gameplay, 88

action games, 90

first-person shooter (FPS), 90

adventure games, 92

role-playing games (RPGs), 92

strategy games, 92

simulation games, 92

casual games, 93

PUGs, 94

noobs, 94

ninjas, 94

trolls, 94

guilds or clans, 94

collective intelligence, 95

modding, 95

advergames, 97

in-game advertisements, 97

Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), 103

cartridge, 105

development, 108

intellectual properties, 108

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

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REVIEW QUESTIONS

The Development of Digital Gaming

  1. What sparked the creation of mechanical games in the nineteenth and then the twentieth centuries?
  2. What technology enabled the evolution of the first video games?
  3. How are classic arcade games and the culture of the arcade similar to today’s popular console games and gaming culture?
  4. What are the three major consoles, and what distinguishes them from each other?
  5. What advantages did personal computers have over video game consoles in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s?

The Internet Transforms Gaming

  1. How are MMORPGs, virtual worlds, and online fantasy sports built around online social interaction?
  2. How has digital convergence changed the function of gaming consoles?

The Media Playground

  1. What are the main genres within digital gaming?
  2. What are the two basic kinds of virtual communities?
  3. How do collective intelligence, gaming Web sites, and game conventions enhance the social experience of gaming, and make games different from other mass media?

Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming

  1. How have digital games influenced media culture, and vice versa?
  2. In what ways has advertising become incorporated into electronic games?
  3. To what extent are video game addiction and violent and misogynistic representations problems for the gaming industry?
  4. How are digital games regulated?
  5. What might video games be like in the future?

The Business of Digital Gaming

  1. What are the roles of two major components of the gaming industry—console makers and game publishers?
  2. How do game publishers develop, license, and market new titles?
  3. What are the three major pay models for selling video games today?
  4. How can small, independent game developers get their start in the industry?

Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy

  1. Why did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that games count as speech?
  2. Why does the game industry still rate digital games, even if they aren’t required by law to do so?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA

  1. Do you have any strong memories from playing early video games? To what extent did these games define your childhood?
  2. What role does digital gaming play in your life today? Are you more inclined to play casual games or more involved games, and why?
  3. Do you have a story about game addiction, either your own or from someone you know? Explain.
  4. Have you ever been appalled at the level of violence, misogyny, or racism in a video game you played (or watched being played)? Discuss the game narrative and what made it problematic.
  5. Most electronic games produced have a white, male, heterosexual point of view. Why is that? If you were a game developer, what kinds of game narratives would you like to see developed?

ADDITIONAL VIDEOS

Visit the image VideoCentral: Mass Communication section at bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture for additional exclusive videos related to Chapter 3.