Session Information
SES G 08, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
Videogames are primarily produced and marketed for children and young adults. The educational research mainly focuses on two issues: On negative aspects like arousing addiction and/or aggression and second on positive effects of gaming such as social and cognitive training. Both research fields thereby observe processes of interaction that seem to be situated solely between the player and the game. However, since some Online-Games do have impacts on systems outside of the game, videogames can be used to serve players purposes beyond “just playing”, but to master different needs of life. This is a main pedagogical issue, since in-between this conditions of playing/not playing the game, being in the game/being outside the game, the world is being perceived and acted on in unequal and varying ways. As Luhman says ‘Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through (…) media.’
In my paper I investigate the preconditions, range and characteristics of individual actions beyond the scope of just playing.
The paper focuses on three Online-Games, that do have impacts on systems outside of the game (World of Warcraft, Americas Army and Second Life). Their impacts on systems like economy, warfare and politics can be seen in the matter of so called online recruiting, real money trade, but also in aesthetic or political agendas. Concerning these impacts, videogames can be seen as tools of intermedia strategies, as functional platforms in different real life contexts. It`s important to get access and comprehension of these emerging spaces of socialization.
The paper therefore presents an instrument of analysis, which primarily exposes the degrees of freedom of action any videogame offers and secondary how these ingame actions are being transfered to non-game systems.
In order to theoretically conceptualize the problem, I refer on Gregory Batesons idea of the context, a semantic enclosure of acting, which is indicated and defined by metacommunicative signals. However, since all videogames offer/allow different modes of metacommunicational activity, the player has more or less oppurtunities of creating and actualizing his or her own frame of meaningful activity.
But - considering that videogames are ergodic literature that do allow, forbid and demand certain actions, not every idea can be played out. In order to analyze these functional spectra of Online-Games, I rely on concepts of informational theory. The polarity of entropy and information is being applied onto videogames and sets up the categories, in which the degree of the users determination or qualification as to certain actions can be analyzed.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Gregory Bateson Villem Flusser Niklas Luhmann Espen Aarseth Jesper Juul Michel Foucault
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