Task 4: Additional Web Research - Video Game Audiences

In this post, I have researched information from the Media Edu site which talks specifically about the video game audiences, and the fact that video games have changed, with the audience able to play with freidns and family, as oppposed to being solitary gamers. In addition, this articel refers to the fact that there has been contestable evidence which suggests that video games are violent.

VIDEOGAME AUDIENCES


The audience for videogames has been stereotypically represented as solitary players, usually male, usually in their teens and probably suffering from increased aggression.

As we have seen, these stereotypical assumptions are not correct. The average age of players is 28, almost as many women play videogames as men, and there does not seem to be any incontestable evidence that proves that violent videogames increase violence in society.

The final characteristic of the stereotype, that videogaming is a solitary activity, has also been challenged and largely disproved by many studies.

During the 1980s it was noted that the game arcades were social places in which players and non-players alike would gather around machines to watch their friends play.


Today with the rise in popularity of online gaming and networked play the idea of the solitary gamer seems more the exception than the norm.

The success of the Nintendo Wii console has been attributed to it being marketed towards families and not just children. But more generally it is very rare for a modern videogame to be available without a ‘network play’ option as it has been shown to greatly increase sales (Hamilton 2007).

Another modern trend is that children’s play spaces have moved off the streets and into their bedrooms. While this is not universally seen as a good thing, many parents feel reassured that their children are ‘safe indoors’ with videogames providing the occasion for children to meet up and play with their friends in each other’s houses.

Videogame players are generally characterised as being more active than the so called passive consumers of other media. Although media researchers stress that all media consumption (the ways in which media is watched, listened to or generally experienced) are active since media audences have to think about what they have experienced in order to make sense of it.

In addition to this meaning making activity, videogame players have to decide how to play the game, since no two games are ever exactly the same.