Shaviro's detailed review on Gamer

Steven Shaviro's blog - in depth review of Gamer

March - Notes on Collective Identity

These are the questions and content which will be answered in the essay about the investigation into social identity;


- Research across 2 Media  (TV documentary, film)

- How group represents itself, using new media to communicate:
  using forums / social networking, gaming sites, tournements

- Are there limits to how they can express themselves? 
  Unregulated? Rules?
  Who are they imposed by? ......themselves?
  Are there legal limits?
  Boundaries of self expressions in new media

- How do they dominate the media space?

History:  awareness of 2 different periods of time
                   finding an earlier period that the social identity was part of. 
  Has it changed in gender, class ...etc?  How has it changed?
  Real social history

Collective identity and Mediation

- Theorists   (ie, Michael Wesch  - optimistic vs isolation)

Anonamy: connected but isolated
Features of what people experience in social identity

Collective identity has been theorisedThe relationship between the media & the group

Mediated: identity does not exist without media
                personalised media
                stereotyping
                cannot have an identity without the media

Reflecting & distorting:  the media finds and creates images of representation of the group, then reflects / distorts it. (Like a mirror, of somewhat distortion)

Media constructs and shapes identity,  re-invents identity
Soical groups do not exist without media.

Girl Gamers Theorist

Aleksandra (Aleks) K Krotoski (born 1974) is an American broadcaster and journalist, currently based in the UK, who writes about technology and interactivity.
She presents The Guardian podcast 'Tech Weekly' and contributes to guardian.co.uk.
She formerly wrote a print column for The Guardian's now defunct Technology section.

Since co-presenting the computer games programmes Bits for Channel 4 from 1999 to 2002, she has written academic and industry research papers. In 2006, she contributed to the United Kingdom's Department for Education and Skills and the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) collaboration, "Unlimited Learning: The role of computer and video games in curriculum-based education". In 2004, she authored ELSPA's "Chicks and Joysticks: An exploration of women and gaming".

In September 2006 she was named one of the games industry's 100 most influential women by NextGen.biz and in November 2006 she was named one of the "Top Ten Girl Geeks" by CNET.

In 2009 she completed a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Surrey which examined "how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web."

In February 2010, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC Two. This TV documentary series was described by the BBC as charting "two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web, weighing up the huge benefits and the unforeseen downsides."
She also presented an accompanying four-part podcast series on the BBC World Service.
As of November 2010, she is Researcher in Residence at the British Library and is curator of the Growing Knowledge digital exhibition at the library.

- from Wikipedia




Top 10 Girl Geeks - CNET

Chicks and Joysticks - An exploration of women and gaming

Games Industry's 100 Most Influential Women

Unlimited Learning: The role of computer and video games in curriculum-based education.

Aleks's Profile on guardian.co.uk

The Guardian's Game Blog

Theorists

A general theorist of collective identity is Michael Wesch

Media Theorists

Máire Messenger-Davies is Professor of Media Studies, and Director of the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. A former journalist, with a PhD in psychology, who has taught in universities on both sides of the Atlantic, she is the co-ordinator of the recently-formed Meccsa Policy Network .


Her research interests focus on media, young people and children; broadcasting in the USA and the UK; and teaching research methodology. Her most recent research, in collaboration with colleagues at Cardiff, Bournemouth and Nottingham Universities, is on young people, citizenship and news – especially in relation to the transition from broadcast to online journalism; this is a BBC/AHRC Knowledge Exchange funded project.


She has written a number of books, including Dear BBC: Children, television storytelling and the public sphere (2001); Fake, fact and fantasy: children’s understanding of television reality (1997) and Making People Count: Practical Research Methods for Media & Cultural Studies (2006). 

Films

"We've all seen movies based on video games, but movies ABOUT video games are a whole different animal"

• Gamer is a 2009 science fiction thriller film written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
  The film stars Gerard Butler as a participant in an online game in which participants can control human beings as players, and Logan Lerman as the player who controls him.

Trailer:

• eXistenZ is a 1999 body horror/science fiction film by Canadian director David Cronenberg. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law. Like many of Cronenberg's other films, eXistenZ has strong elements of surrealism.

- - - Full film bio

Trailer:

BBC's Panorama on Video Games

This is the BBC's  documentary series, Panorama, on their investigation into addiction to video games and the bad effects of gaming to young children.


Part 1:




Part 2:

Personal Experience Research

To gain information and feedback from those who are included in the social group and call themselves gamers, i will create a survey of questions and post it to gaming community sites / forums.
By doing this, i can get gamers personal opinions and experiences for my research.

As i myself am part of some gaming communities, i will be able to get alot of information from gamers of different nationalities and ages.

Internet Research

I searched the internet for articles written about the effects of gaming, the stereotypical argument is that getting involved with video games that are intense or violent is bad for children.

These articles are mainly focused on young children, some also include the positive & negative effects they have found:


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0816/is_6_21/ai_n9772319/

http://www.ehow.com/list_5815166_pros-exposing-children-electronic-games.html

http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/occ72-compgames.pdf

http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_2/1.pdf

http://www.ehow.com/about_5370127_positive-effects-video-gaming.html

http://www.raisesmartkid.com/3-to-6-years-old/4-articles/34-the-good-and-bad-effects-of-video-games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_behavioral_effects


<quotes>


In the BBC documentary series program ‘Panorama’ an episode featured the negative effects of gaming / intense gaming, and didn’t state many positive for the opposing argument.

I will study both the negative and positive media representation of gamers and gaming, across various types of media.

My Collective Identity Research

I have chosen to study the collective social identity of Gamers; people who spend alot of their time playing video games.



Dictionary definition:


"one devoted to playing video or computer games"

gam·er

–noun

a person who plays games

Past Exam Questions on Collective Identity

• How do the contempory media represent nations, regions, and ethnic / social / collective groups in different ways?
• What does contempory representation compare to previous time periods?
  (eg:  folk, devils & moral panics)
• What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?
• To what extent is human identity increasing mediated?
       - across two types of media

"Only a fool wouldn't judge by appearances" - Oscar Wilde