Transnational flows: media use by Poles in Ireland

This chapter focuses attention on the sources, patterns of use and attitudes of Polish migrants in Ireland to the locally available mix of media and telecommunications. It also starts to explore the cultural implications of their media use. Does the available mix of media and communications help to preserve social relationships with friends and family elsewhere and a sense of Polish cultural identity or serve to pluralise and develop new identities? More specifically what role do transnational, international, national and local media play in the migration process to Ireland

The UK and Irish Game Industries

This chapter will look at the origins, present state and key policy issues facing the games industry in the United Kingdom (UK), including Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (R. of Ireland); home to memorable titles like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, SingStar and Little Big Planet and middleware technology by companies like Havok. The growth of new mobile platforms, the diffusion of the Internet and the increase in state financial support for game development in Canada and South East Asia have introduced both challenges and opportunities over the last decade

The Business of Making Games

The aim of this chapter is to give the reader an insight into the growing economic significance of the global games industry, to explore the process by which games get produced and to examine the dynamics operating in each sub-sector of the industry. Thus the ‘business’ of making games is defined rather broadly

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Live Life to the Power of PS2: Locating the Digital Games Industry in the New Media Environment

The digital games industry is a global entertainment business stretching from Tokyo to San Francisco to London. In May each year, game developers from around the world meet in Los Angeles to pitch their ideas to publishers, sneak a preview of other games and do licensing deals with hardware companies and Hollywood studios. The show has much in common with Melia and Cannes: it has all the glitz, the hype and the stars. The main difference is that the stars are non-human, the digital game producers are relatively unknown and this form of popular culture has been largely ignored by established university media programmes and media researchers

Girls/Women Just Want to Have Fun - A Study of Adult Female Players of Digital Games.

In the past twenty-five years, the production of digital games has become a global media industry stretching from Japan, to the UK, France and the US. Despite this growth playing digital games, particularly computer games, is still seen by many as a boy’s pastime and part of boy’s bedroom culture. While these perceptions may serve to exclude, this paper set out to explore the experiences of women who game despite these perceptions. This paper addresses the topic of gender and games from two perspectives:the producer’s and the consumer’s. The first part of the paper explores how Sony represented the PS2 in advertisements in Ireland and how adult female game players interpreted these representations. The second part goes on to chart the gaming biographies of these women and how this leisure activity is incorporated into their adult everyday life. It also discuses their views about the gendered nature of game culture, public game spaces and game content; and how these influence their enjoyment of game playing and their views of themselves as women. These research findings are based on semi-structured interviews with two marketing professionals and ten female game players aged 18 and over. The paper concludes that the construction of both gender and digital games are highly contested and even when access is difficult, and representations in the media, in console design and in games are strongly masculine these interviewees were able to contest and appropriate the technology for their own means. Indeed ‘social networks’ were important in relation to their recruitment into, and sustained playing of, digital games. At the same time, the paper found that these interviewees were largely ‘invisible’ to the wider gaming community and producers, an issue raised by Bryce and Rutter (2002:244) in an earlier paper, which has important implications for the development of the games industry

The Business of Making Games

The aim of this chapter is to give the reader an insight into the growing economic significance of the global games industry, to explore the process by which games get produced and to examine the dynamics operating in each sub-sector of the industry. Thus the ‘business’ of making games is defined rather broadly

Digital Games as Cultural Industry

This is the third chapter of my book 'The business and culture of digital games. Gamework/Gameplay'. The chapter begins by situating digital games both conceptually and statistically within the wider economic and media environment. It considers how digital games might fit into what is commonly known within media studies as the cultural industries and analyses the growing economic significance of the global games industry as compared with other cultural industries in major markets. It then moves on to examine the structure of the digital games industry and its key sub-sectors. Finally, the chapter examines two important trends in the industry, namely vertical integration and licensing. While some of the statistics are now out of date I think it provides some useful analysis on the structure of the industry

Representing Users in the Design of Digital Games

While economic and sociological studies have generally recognised the important explicit role that users play in shaping a technological artifact - through feedback channels after launch and market trials and studies before launch - there has been less exploration into the more implicit strategies by which designers attempt to pre-figure users prior to launch. Given that design involves making choices, and framing the choices made by users, this paper suggests that Madeline Akricha's approach (1992, 1995) may provide a constructive tool for exploring more implicit and indirect strategies of representing users in the early stages of the design process. It may also prove useful in exploring how users can be excluded or alienated through design. While acknowledging that users may actively negotiate designers' representations this paper will explore the usefulness of the Akrich approach in relation to understanding the design of digital games. A study in 2001 of production in digital games companies in Ireland found that various macro, meso and micro level factors play a role in limiting the games developed and the user groups developed for. This paper will present findings from ongoing research conducted in 2002 into the reasons which account for how one start-up company decided to design a multiplayer online game for males aged 25-40

Beyond billiard balls: transnational flows, cultural diversity and digital games

Current mass media policy and regulation in Western Europe is primarily state‐based and increasingly based on the presumption that a competitive market will maximise individual choice and diversity. Policy interventions are primarily justified in terms of specific market failures including concentration of producers in the marketplace, the need to financially reward content developers financially for their work and issues related to distribution bottlenecks.1 Nevertheless, it is clear that at the national and European levels, public interest and cultural arguments also inform policy development and regulation. New media, including online and offline digital games, represent a new area for policy makers at the national and international levels. This chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of how digital games operate as markets and as social and cultural activities in order to inform discussions about the need for policy interventions