Page 108 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

GAMES (COMPUTER/VIDEO)

converging with movie versions of games such as Tomb Raider or
Dungeons and Dragons, and games versions of movies.
The earliest home video game is thought to have been Pong,
launched by Atari in 1972. An electronic table-tennis game, its
rudimentary design was superseded at the beginning of the following
decade by more graphically sophisticated arcade games such as Space
Invaders and Pac-man.
It is surprising to note the lack of critical inquiry into this medium.
What work has been done, however, suggests that, like other media
before them, computer games reveal the ways in which society deals
with the introduction of new technologies. Research began in the early
1980s with psychological studies, undertaken (as one would expect) to
investigate the effects of game playing on children (see, for instance,
Cooper and Mackie, 1986). While not all studies revealed the same
response, popular public discourse at the time replayed the media effects
tradition, suggesting links between game playing and violence among
boys, attention disorders and anti-social behaviour. Here was a
continuation of the very same rhetoric that had greeted the popular
press in the early days of the nineteenth-century, Hollywood, comics
and television in the 1950s, ‘video-nasties’ in the 1970s and the Internet
in the 1990s. In other words, games continue to provide evidence that
newpopular media are greeted with anxiety by control cultures.
Other researchers have investigated the relationship between games
and gender. Some chose to examine the representation of women in
games (for example, Provenzo, 1991). Others were more concerned
with the gender-specific nature of the games industry (see Cassell and
Jenkins, 1998). The concern here was that game playing appeared to
be a masculine activity: games were developed by males for males.
Girls and women were ostracised by technological development and
computers, giving their male counterparts an unfair advantage in later
life (Cassell and Jenkins, 1998a: 14). Here again, the anxiety about
access and skills acquisition related to technology rather than to games
themselves. And the gender divide in games is no longer so starkly
one-sided: women and girls now both design and play them.
Media studies has used analytical tools designed for previous forms
of media to analyse newforms – much like the application of film
theory to television in its early years. The same is true of games. Using
narrative analysis Skirrow(1990) has argued that games share elements
that are common to most literature and film narratives. But as Darley
(2000: 160) argues, gaming is about puzzle-solving leading to further
spectacle, rather than to narrative closure of the traditional kind.
Narrative analysis may not be appropriate to games; certainly when

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