EVE Online’s war correspondents: player journalism as history

This chapter examines three news sites – EveNews24, TheMittani.com and Crossing Zebras – attendant upon the 12-year old Massively Multiplayer Online Game, EVE Online. It explores the role that EVE’s journalists and the historicising process of journalism play in constructing the game’s history, and considers the relationship between this journalism, fan practice and the game community. It concludes that EVE’s journalism does produce history, but that this is a history of and for an elite group of EVE players, arising from fandom of a particular approach to EVE play

Archives of role-playing’s personal pasts

Tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) are complex sites of play, and implicated in the production of meaning and affective relationships, characterised by emotional-physical responses. Role-players are encouraged, through the structure and affordances of these games, to build such relationships with (their) game characters, supporting the development of serial narratives and experiences across multiple game sessions. In this short paper, I explore how these affective connections are built and maintained through, and in relation to, character (record) sheets, used in a range of games to specify, represent and ultimately capture and preserve game characters

Personal Listening Pleasures

Personal listening technologies have been credited with the privatization of listening, yet this idea seems difficult to sustain. In exploring the history of personal listening, this chapter highlights the need to distinguish between notions of private and personal, along with their commonly used synonym, individual. This analysis compels the reader to consider personal listening within its broader cultural context, as something also public, collective and communal. Furthermore, in light of the long history of personal listening practices, it interrogates the complex relationship between technological and cultural imperatives, encouraging the reader to question their assumptions about the causes of cultural change

Changing Cultural Coordinates: The Transistor Radio and Space / Time / Identity

In the decade after 1955, the ways in which it was possible to experience listening to radio were transformed in the United States of America: radio, and music listening, would never be the same again. For consumers these shifts were to be found in both when and where people were able to listen, but also in the very sense of how they understood themselves as listeners. In this chapter we explore the ways in which temporal, spatial and identity “reconfigurations” of listeners’ experiences of radio relate to the profound changes in the devices that reproduced the programs for those listeners, in the programs themselves, and in who provided them

Gaming Global

The Gaming Global report explores the games environment in: five EU countries, • Finland • France • Germany • Poland • UK three non-EU countries, • Brazil • Russia • Republic of Korea and one non-European region. • East Asia It takes a culturally-focused approach, offers examples of innovative work, and makes the case for British Council’s engagement with the games sector, both as an entertainment and leisure sector, and as a culturally-productive contributor to the arts

The Britishness of 'British Video Games'

British government policy has much to say about video games, through production support, regulation, and recognition (or lack of it) of their cultural nature, with games defined and promoted as part of the creative industries in a manner which owes much to film policy. Yet the drive to promote both the games industry and games culture, and the inconsistent usage of terms like culture and creativity, produces tensions between different elements of ‘Britishness’, expressed and experienced not only through policy, but also through the creation and consumption of games. In considering the specificity of games’ contribution to British identity, therefore, we must understand how different elements of cultural policy interact with the interests of audiences and creators to define ‘British games’ – games which have the quality of being, or being seen to be, British. Such games might be expected not only to represent British culture within a global marketplace, and to project soft power, but also to address the British nation in some manner. This diversity, of global and local, of present-mindedness and nostalgia, suggests that British games articulate a complex and plural sense of national (cultural) identity

Why walk when you can teleport? Themes of travel in online roleplaying games

Travel constitutes a significant activity in the majority of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs), whether players are pursuing quests, trading, adventuring or simply exploring. Yet not all journeys are equal, and the roles of, and responses to, various journeys demonstrate a number of interesting interpretations of travel. From one perspective, journeys in games are simply consumers of time: notably, World of Warcraft obtained the nickname “World of Walking” due to player perceptions that there was too much travel involved. Yet it is intriguing that some players voluntarily undertake extensive journeys, which are often difficult (in gameplay terms) and time-consuming, when more convenient routes are available. This article seeks to consider the many roles of travel in MMORPGs, and to reflect on ideas of the journey as, among other things, labour (travail), a rite of passage, and a means of saying goodbye