Engaging Media - Week Eight

Reading for this week...



Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in video game culture - Sarah Colman and Nick Dyer-Witheford

Examines the concept of a media commons and how that operates against a global backdrop of information capitalism.

Commons - “resources that all in a specified community may use, but none can own”. Contrasts directly with a commodity and has no profit agenda.

Commons concept is popular with those that buck against the trend of capitalism and corporate globalisation and has grown alongside the growth of new media.

Anti-piracy laws are breeding new resistance from those who resent the financial cost and cost to system performance that anti-copying technology brings.

Element of “unavoidable co-existence” between game pirates and the game industry.

Modding - generating new forms of game production and expanding current games, builds on the concept of hacking and “digital tinkering”. Gained popularity in the 1990s. Excellent example is the adaptation of Half- Life to create Counter-Strike. Mods are circulated free of charge and are welcome to some extent by the game industry as they generate publicity.

Machinima - adapting games to create movies, a concept that is developing rapidly as computer hardware and software becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Both modding and machinima “represent a return of the digital ‘DIY’ practices at the root of game culture” and serve to re-purpose games for collective use.

MMOGS - Massively-Multiplayer Online Games. Follow on from MUDS (Multi-User Domains) and essentially create a synthetic game world in which thousands can interact. MMOGS represent a shift from commons to commodity and usually entail both initial outlay and ongoing expense for the player e.g. World of Warcraft nets its developer Blizzard $1.5 billion annually. MMOGS have their own behaviour patterns and social rules and largely fail or succeed based on the vibrancy of the player community. Players may not own them, but the direction of MMOGS is very much determined by the consumer.

MMOGS have led to practice of virtual trading, in which useful objects within the game are traded in real life for actual currency. “Virtual trading shows how paradoxically intertwined commons and commodities have become”.

We live in an era of multi-dimensional media in which the roles of creator and consumer are blurred. This is apparent in the world of digital game play, where the defining feature is interactivity and the consumer very much shapes the game and determines its success.