The active audience, again: Player-centric game studies and the problem of binarism

Abstract

This article intervenes in video game studies' recent turn to (and enthusiasm for) playercentered approaches to understanding video games' social, cultural, political, and economic implications. Such approaches repudiate ostensibly formalist or 'structural' game studies and insist that analyses of gaming situations emphasize ways in which gaming subjects' playful acts of appropriation or subversion allow those subjects to resist complete determination by game-structures and act ultimately as arbiters of a video game's meaning, utility, or effectivity. The author demonstrates how player-centered discourses in video game studies participate in a rich history of 'active audience' research in media and cultural studies. Arguing that research on player practices does not completely escape the forms of reductionism it sets out to avoid, the author offers additional conceptual tools for engaging the complexity of contemporary gaming situations. The article concludes with a discussion of ways in which one such situation − gold farming − might be examined as an assemblage through an approach that responds to this complexity and avoids a particularly constraining model of agency inherent in player-centric game studies.

‘Seeing isn’t doing’: Examining tensions between bodies, videogames and technologies ‘beyond’ the game

“…Beyond scholars interested in esports, and the way that the ubiquitous and ultrafast capture and relay of esports information conditions gameplay activity, this article is expected to be pertinent to scholars studying games with phenomenological themes in mind. In this way, this article further contributes to discussions of the body that have occupied research about videogames, particularly over the last decade or so (of interest to this journal – see, for example, Behrenshausen, 2014; Schneier and Taylor, 2018). More specifically, this article contributes to existing scholarship about the ‘negative’ embodiments that emerge in videogame play – including discussions of failure, anger and fatigue (see Apperley, 2009; Ash, 2013; Keogh, 2018; Kirkpatrick, 2009; Sudnow, 1983; Taylor, 2012).…”

Interactivity, user-generated content and video game: an ethnographic study ofAnimal Crossing: Wild World

“…'User-generated content' means media content produced by amateurs who are not employed by government or company (OECD 2007;Van Dijck 2009). Video game studies have pointed out that players are participatory and productive because they can create develop not only artefacts and texts but also sites of community (Banks and Potts 2010;Behrenshausen 2013;Taylor 2006).…”

“…According to celebratory stances, gamers are productive (Taylor 2006) in participatory culture (Jenkins 2006) and interactivity in video games is underpinned by 'democratisation of participation ' (Cover 2004, 174). While video game interactivity is saluted with its liberating potentials, there are concerns on limitations of user interactivity (Behrenshausen 2013;Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). Andrejevic (2009, 35) argues, 'democratizing power of interactivity have coincided, arguably, with increasing economic and political inequality', and Jarrett (2008) points out seducing and condescending strategy of interactivity, 'a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy'.…”

Reconsidering passivity and activity in children’s digital play

“…Conceptually, they are often posited as opposites, as if consumption would be a passive process and production an active one (e.g. Behrenshausen, 2012;Buckingham et al, 2011;Kruikemeier et al, 2014). The current trend within media education is toward a more active use of media.…”

“…Many scholars have already suggested that children's interaction with digital media can be seen as a form of play rather than in terms of the moral panic and discourse of passivity (Jenkins, 2006;McClure and Sweeny, 2015), as acts of creative interpretation and negotiation (Behrenshausen, 2012), as production of meaning and pleasure (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 2003), or as an exploration and resistance of dominant values as children act as social agents in their daily lifeworld (Hadley and Nenga, 2004;Marsh and Richards, 2013: 8). For decades, there have been debates on the active audience which shifted the emphasis from what the media do for people to what people do with media (Ross and Nightingale, 2003: 31).…”