ROIG: Videogames are placed in the context of other practices related to the cultural industries and media consumption.

Videogame as Media Practice: An Exploration of the Intersections Between Play and Audiovisual Culture
Antoni Roig, Gemma San Cornelio, Elisenda Ardèvol, Pau Alsina and Ruth Pagès
Convergence 2009; 15; 89 

DOI: 10.1177/1354856508097019
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Abstract

Our aim in this article is to explore videogames as new media practices, not in isolation but as part of broader media transformations related to the development of current digital technologies. 

Videogames are the product of a hybridization process between audiovisual media forms and game cultures, rapidly gaining popularity among kids and the elderly population. The experience of audiovisual consumption and aesthetic pleasure is enhanced by interactive and game amusement components not found in previous audiovisual genres such as cinema or TV. In fact, videogames situate ‘play’ at the core of the audiovisual experience, introducing innovative changes in audiovisual production and reception patterns. 

Our proposal is that videogames introduce a new relationship between subject and representation that goes far beyond the ‘spectatorship’ position, pointing to a playful relationship with images that may be useful for understanding new forms of media practices. Videogames, thus, as a new media practice, can be seen as an exponent of greater change not only regarding how media are produced and consumed, but also in the way leisure is organized and in the role of play in our everyday life.


From Videogames to Playful Media Practices

As it has been extensively argued, the notions of play and playfulness constitute key concepts regarding new media. 

This argument has been developed through videogame theoretical approaches intersected with new media theories. This seemingly heterodox approach has allowed us to pay special attention to the notions of pleasure and payability as features applicable to other new media practices. 

Furthermore, the structura aspects that videogames share with other media regarding their industrial context of production also reveal that videogames should not be conceptualized as an isolated issue, but as part of a broader context of media.

In this sense, practice theories have provided us with a general framework that allows us to examine how play is a dispersed practice as a part of the integrative practices present in videogames and other new media forms. Going somewhat further, we have demonstrated that the integrative playful practices of videogames have also transformed the ways we understand audiovisual narratives, introducing innovative practices in the spheres of producing and consuming films. 

Even more, a practice approach is also usefu for understanding the cross-over of videogames and other new media forms, such as Second Life virtual world, but also playful practices developed by users in sites such as YouTube (see Ardèvol et al., forthcoming) or Flickr, designed by their creators as a never-ending game (see Vayreda and Estalella, 2007).

At this point, understanding videogames in the framework of practice and media theories has some relevant implications: 

first, it allows locating videogames in the context of other practices related to the cultural industries and media consumption. As commodities, videogames are related to other commodities and audiovisual forms (Marshall’s intertextual commodity - 2002). 

Second, it also allows understanding them as a specific media practice that is defined in leisure time, and that is characterized by hybridizing audiovisual representational practices and game cultures. 

Finally, Videogame as a media practice should be understood, this way, as a part of broader social practices, that is, socially organized and meaningful for social actors (players and non players).

As we have been suggesting throughout the article, from a theoretical point of view ‘games’ are ‘integrative’ practices as defined by Schatzki (cited by Warde, 2005: 135) who compares them to farming, cooking or business practices, which include some kind of specialized understanding, explicit rules and teleoaffective structures. 

Furthermore, Ann Swidler introduces some essential issues regarding practice organization and hierarchy, defining what she calls anchoring practices as those practices that express the constitutive rules of a social activity; these anchoring practices, consequently, would govern - at least in some ways - other practices. In this sense, it could be said that a videogame constitutes an anchoring practice that organizes meanings, rules and pleasures and that orients how the play practice will be integrated and transformed (Swidler, 2001).

In addition, Knorr Cetina refers to some ‘knowledge oriented practices’ or ‘creative practices’, that supersede the identification between practices and the ‘ordinary’ and are mainly based on pleasure and affection (Knorr Cetina, 2001: 175-6). This is a very important point as it covers a whole different family of practices involved with creative activities, ranging from science to media and gaming, where stages of dissociation between object and subject take place, as it is usual in the unfolding of the gaming experience or, in general, in our interaction with a media object. We consider that it is essential to take into account Knorr Cetina’s complementary observations about practices related to symbolic objects in order to try to better understand what people do (and say they do), or even could be doing in relation to media.

In our social hierarchy of practices, videogaming seems to be in a lower position regarding other more ‘serious’ ones, but as Warde argues, from a consumption perspective, ‘no matter where a practice fits in a hierarchy of social prestige, there are interna goods to be derived from it for individual practitioners’ (Warde, 2005: 148). 

Videogames, as games in general, are still socially evaluated as non-productive, notwithstanding the amount of money and enterprises they mobilize. This lack of legitimation also ignores that game practitioners are engaged in two fundamental social practices: first, they are constructing communities through play, with internal goals and identity values, and second, they have a social role in the production and reproduction of symbolic worlds. Thus, videogames must be taken seriously. As Mihai Coman has stated for mass media (2006: 19), they are not a simple channel through which cultural symbols circulate, they are part of the very cultural system. Videogames, as traditional games, are cultural forms that generate our own sense of reality and fiction. As playful practices, they are at the centre of the social construction of what is real (and non-real) as any other rituals, cultura dramas or narratives.

Finally, to study media as practice implies paying attention to what people do with media, what people say about media and about media experience, and to follow related media practices across a whole range of situations and contexts (Couldry, 2004). This would mean, that empirically, we must analyse public observable activities instead of searching for meanings ‘in the text’ or in the videogame as an object itself.

We definitely agree with Tom Boellstorf in the fact that understanding the nterrelation between media and games and how it shapes current cultural practices represents an open line of research (Boellstorf, 2006: 33). We have explored these relationships from a general scope, through taking videogames as the main object of study; in any case, as we have pointed out, there are other particular cases of transformations of media use to be studied from the point of view of practices. We believe that this line of research might be significant not only to game studies but also to media studies in general, especially those focused on new media, with which videogames are closely related.