Language-GAME-Players: Articulating the pleasures of ‘violent’ game texts

Young peoples’ voices have been considered irrelevant or unreliable when it comes to discussing the influence and impact of their engagement with screen-mediated depictions of violence. Historically, such viewpoints have been derived from the controlled experimentation of modernist psychology, which constitutes the most sustained and prominent enquiries into the consequences of individual participation in, and viewing of, simulated violence. In espousing an impersonal approach, psychological research has opted not to demonstrate any understanding of the properties of the particular games or the medium its findings have been used to denigrate. Neither does its research possess broader awareness of the social dimensions of play or the productivity inherent in the practices of its surrounding cultures. This paper introduces findings taken from a two-year project that attempted to draw together what have essentially remained separate lines of inquiry – the critical and analytical scrutiny of Game Studies applied to understanding the pleasures of engagement with game violence. The aim of this research was to achieve a more contextual understanding of texts that utilise violence from the perspective of young people that opt to experience them as an entertainment form. In doing so, a range of qualitative methods were employed to encourage game players to present their viewpoints and offer a voice that is all too often absent from the ‘one-way debate’ attached to the representation of violence within games

The impact of Nintendo’s "for men" advertising campaign on a potential female market

In order to emphasize the maturation of their hand-held console and increase its appeal to an adult market, Nintendo's UK advertising campaign for the Game Boy Advance SP drew explicitly upon 'lad' culture and a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of cologne advertising. In this campaign, the lead and most prominent promotional advert for the device used an image of the Game Boy with the tagline "For Men". This paper outlines why Nintendo's decision to present the Game Boy as a male accessory prompted exploration into its potential impact on the female market. Much of the emerging research field examining female participation in game cultures had at that point tended to focus its attention on exploring the experiences of different female groups with a variety of software titles and its associated communities. In contrast, this paper addresses participants' perceptions of the gaming industry and its relevance to them as a (potential) consumer by taking a hardware device as its focus. This was achieved by conducting a series of focus groups, with a range of both experienced and inexperienced female game players, during which participants were asked to engage with the hand-held device and experience both its single and networked game-play capabilities with the game Legend of Zelda. The findings address participants' awareness and views on the extent to which gaming is coded male and its ramifications for their participation in game cultures

Exploring the cause of game (derived) arousal: What biometric accounts of player experience revealed

The function of this paper is to present research findings that ordinarily would never see the light of day, not because they have no value or significance, but they might seem marginal and less significant given the main focus of the research conducted. When studying player experience, there is value in widening the focus of research to avoid attributing too much value to one kind of experience over others. The findings presented here come from a much larger three-year research study into player experiences with games containing violence. The broad intent of the study was to query the strong association between effects research and responsive regulation measures (game classification). The research was guided by the idea that exploring “the extent to which the public’s perception of causal links between game playing and various social ills’ might be ‘moderated or even undermined by [knowledge of] how players actually respond to and negotiate their way through the content and characteristics of the medium” (OFLC, 2009, p. 24). To do this, the research employed a mixed methodology to examine player experience (as introduced in Schott et al., 2013a). The study produced a number of data points in order to characterize the multi-dimensional nature of players’ experiences. This paper focuses specifically on the outcome of utilizing a biometric measure (GSR) as a guide for determining which aspects, from game experiences that required hours of game play, should be assessed for their significance. The value of employing GSR as a textually neutral method for detecting which aspects of a game had an impact on players is assessed