More fans in the mainstream…(joy!)
March 1st, 2008 by Loretta
ughh… so i don’t have much (read: any) profound insight to shed on this link and its content but when i saw the headline “Gaming Gets Creepy: we all love it, but do you love it TOO much?” i knew there was potential for yet another problematic representation of fans… and i was right! so i figured the best thing to do was to share it with y’all!
this time it’s all about attacking those bizarre gamers!
i stumbled upon this link from the (annoying yet enjoyably distracting) AIM Today site. it links to a slide show that has nine slides that each provide snide comments about different aspects and stereotypes of the gaming community.
Also, I found it interesting that this page is located in the Game Daily section of the AOL website world. This made me question who the intended audience is. Is it for people who don’t identify as a gamer, or for people who play video games and may very well partake in some of the activities that are shown in the slide? My first answer is that it’s obviously for those on the outside who can point and laugh at a community they don’t understand, but placing it on a gamer’s website is slightly contradictory. This also made me think about how gamers would respond… which led me to realize that there is probably some continuum where “extreme” gamers who identify strongly with the identity presented here would probably be offended while more “casual” gamers may be able to remove themselves from the identity and still find amusement in laughing at the “others.” but who knows…
overall, i’ve decided that this example of fan representation just provides more ammunition against the close-minded (and mean) mainstream meadia and more support for why fan communities remain exclusive and are hesitant to stand up to be “loud and proud.”
p.s. i kind of scared myself when i realized that before taking this class i would have seen this link and thought nothing of it except maybe “those people are odd and immature. aren’t i much more grounded and normal? good job loretta!” which i guess is the desired effect. but now i just view it like any other problematic, prejudice piece of poo polluting the public… and that worries me even more.
(final note: i just noticed that there is no link to this slide show on the main Game Daily page… nor is it easy to find without starting at aim today!)
Posted in Fan representation | 5 Comments »
Hmmmmm… It looks like there’s two parts to this article/slide show thing. The second part is fairly sensationalist. “Look these people are racists and pedophiles and they play video games thus all people who play video games must be like that!” While there are intensely troubling sides of fandom, I do think that they went through and picked some of the worst behaviors and presented them as typical of the gaming subculture.
The other part however, is typical of the mainstream criticism that fans are “sitting to close” and care about their texts too much. Jenkins in Textual Poachers quotes Pierre Bourdieu on the “bourgeois aesthetics” which consistently values “‘detachment, disinterestedness, indifference’ over the affective immediacy and proximity of the popular aesthetic” (Jenkins, 60). In the article they not only mock fans for caring to much the authors also say (about fanfic) you’ll never make money since companies own copyrights to these characters, an attitude that I find very bourgeois. Obviously since the mainstream rejects your way of interacting with the text and you can’t make money off your hobby/passion, it’s not worth doing.
I too am really confused as to who their audience is. Presumably if your looking at the site you already like video games, and no one really enjoys being mocked. Perhaps it’s to make the casual videogammer feel better about themselves? “Maybe I’m a bit weird, but these people are real freaks”? It definitively favors one form of consumption (which is no better or worse than others), playing the game and only playing the game, over other more transformative forms.
So, in the context of everything we’ve learned in this class thus far, I too am troubled by this represenation of gaming fans. The slide that struck me the most, however, was the second one, which talks specifically about male involvement in fan fiction.
On this slide, the author talks about how it is alright for a child to write made up stories about characters, but that once a boy becomes a teenager and moves into adulthood, this practice of creativity and make believe is unacceptable. So, I want to ask why we feel we should draw this distinction, especially since there are authors out there creating new texts every day that essentially involve playing make believe. If it is acceptable for a grown man to make up a story about imaginary characters and worlds, why isn’t it ok for that same man to make up stories with characters that preexist in other texts?
I also found this slide particularly troubling because of what I thought was an example of promoting stereotypical ideas of what role men should fill in society. The author of this article says that writing fanfic is a pointless task for men because “A.) you’ll never make money since companies own copyrights to these characters, and B.) you’ll never get laid. Ever.” Although I am still not sure what the ultimate purpose of this article was, and like Nicole and Loretta, I’ve had a difficult time figuring out who the target audience was, this seems to make a general assumption that a man’s primary concerns should involve making money and having sex. It also makes me believe that the author of this article would not believe that fanfic was as unacceptable for women as it is for men, which I think creates a huge double standard that we need to address more in our class discussions of fandom.
With regards to the question of intended audience, I think Danielle’s quote from the site says it all. By the author stating, “you’ll never make money since companies own copyrights to these characters,” they clearly exhibit a preoccupation with the pursuit of capital, which seems obvious, but has somewhat deeper implications that answer the question that no one has answered: who is this distorted illustration of fandom intended for?
I like to think of the model illustrated by AIM Today (or AOL.com, or MSN.com) as the tabloid model: easily consumed, easily accessible stories. Easily consumed in that the stories are formatted in bite-size portions, often as laundry lists, countdowns, and yes, picture slides. They are easily accessed because they are on the homepages of the big email sites. So now, to make sense of the contradiction introduced by Loretta, who is it all for?
To me, I think the answer is both nobody and everybody. No one usually has the time- or will take the time- to browse through these brief and oftentimes deceptively trivial stories. So readership is not built on the typical demographic demarcations of age range, occupation, sex, etc, so there is no specific demographic to appeal to. The important thing isn’t to discover who is actively reading these things (which, I think, is the real question we’re getting at in order to identify different modes of fandom), but rather to recognize the system that is enacted by these websites. As stated above, money is the fuel to this system in a very straightforward way. The equation is this: more readers= more site hits= more ad money. So the key to all of this, essentially, is to take on the task of building a reader base with people that are more interested in checking their email. The answer to this dilemma is simple, and is the third reason I call this model the tabloid model: the titles must shock, awe, or wow the reader.
mission accomplished with this one, huh?
But to relate this more to fandom, I was arriving at the realization that information- its distribution and consumption- is becoming like the tabloids. For example there are podcasts that relay annotated versions of entire editions of newspapers, reducing them to 7 minute sound bites. I wonder if the standardization of this act of compression threatens fandoms in any way, as it promotes a certain level of distance and superficiality that is counter to what is typical of a fan….
To me, gaming fandom is in many ways unique. It’s a type of subculture that hasn’t really come up in class, but like watching sports or TV shows, playing video games is something that millions of Americans engage in. And as with media fandom, society makes a distinction between people (usually children) who play video games recreationally and people who take it “over the line”, as this web-page demonstrates.
We all know the familiar charge that fans are too close to the texts, are unable to separate fantasy from reality, live vicariously through the texts, etc. But the nature of video-gaming lends itself very easily to this criticism. Video games are all about active participation, about actively inserting yourself within the text. This close interaction between fan and text and the tendency of video games to blur the distinction between reality and “fantasy” in this sense, invite critics to make these kinds of charges. Although video games allow the type of participation and control over the texts that other types of fans could only dream of, gaming fandom is really a two edged sword (no pun intended) due to the stigma that is placed upon it.
I agree that there is a popular stigma surrounding playing videogames after a certain age, and I think that, while it is not addressed often in class, it is similar to the attitudes facing other fans. I wonder, though, if some of this is changing with the advent of the still-growing nerd-chic trend. For example several years ago the big media news was that for the first time a videogame release had outperformed a massively successful Hollywood film in its opening weekend. I am referring to Halo 2’s opening weekend gross beating out the take of The Incredibles. (I realize, as did most commentators, that videogames are much more expensive than movie tickets)Nevertheless, this was considered a major development in terms of the mainstreaming of videogame culture. I am interested in the idea of interactivity and the ways in which the adoption of online personas or even avatars on a personal console can change the user’s self-perception and others’ perception of the gamer and how those issues might intersect with fandom.