[-empyre-] culture, counter-culture and hardcore Farmville players

[Simon Biggs]

I'm confused by this discussion of gaming as a sub-cultural domain. The
games industry has a larger base of active users than the film industry and
has significantly higher turn over. If gaming is a marginal culture then
what is film? I would suggest that gaming is, like film, part of the
mainstream and fully assimilated, economically and socially. Gaming is
normal to the point of the quotidian and has been for over a decade, maybe
longer. It engages people from all aspects of society, internationally and
across cultural contexts. They play Gameboy on the streets in Mumbai as well
as Seoul or New York.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research in CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: Julian Raul Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:18:49 +0100
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] culture, counter-culture and hardcore Farmville
> players
> 
> Am 30.11.2010 14:04, schrieb Gabriel Menotti:
>> Hence, is gaming culture going mainstream in the same way that punk
>> rock did? Does all this casual gaming represent the commodification of
>> its dynamics and values?
>> 
>> But wasn¹t punk rock defined exactly by its technical crudeness? And
>> aren¹t arcade parlours commercial venues in the first place?
> 
> Interesting point. It's probably not very useful to compare gaming
> culture to something like punk rock, because punk rock was based on an
> anti-aesthetic which deliberately positioned itself against the
> mainstream. Gaming culture was never positioned against anything else,
> although it might have been antagonized by practitioners in other media.
> What we see happening now is that "hardcore" gamers bemoan the
> "sell-out" of games through increased accessibility and less demanding
> gameplay, as typified by games such as FarmVille. So vis-a-vis
> established gaming culture, social games are the new punk rock: easy to
> produce, with much more emphasis on "spreadability" than gameplay, and
> reaching out to audiences who would never pay 60 euros for a AAA console
> game.
> 
> Julian.
> 
> dr julian raul kuecklich
> 
> http://playability.de
> 
> 
> 
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