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Video Games in the Digital Age

Video game audiences, fandom and media effects

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 Unit 3

Overview

Casual player, participatory culture and textual poaching.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

How does the industry group and target players?

Key term

Why did the industry come to target audiences beyond young men?

Key term

How does streaming change the relationship between a game and its audience?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How does the industry group and target players?

    Model answer

    Players are grouped by age, gender and platform, and increasingly by playing style and available time, so a publisher can distinguish a committed player who wants a hundred-hour world from somebody who plays in short bursts.

  2. 2

    What is a casual player?

    Model answer

    A casual player plays in short sessions, values simple controls and forgiving difficulty, and does not identify with gaming as a hobby, which is why accessible titles reach far beyond the traditional market.

  3. 3

    Why did the industry come to target audiences beyond young men?

    Model answer

    The traditional market was close to saturated, while women, families and older adults represented enormous untapped demand, so widening the audience was the cheapest available route to growth.

  4. 4

    What is participatory culture?

    Model answer

    Participatory culture is a culture in which audiences do not simply consume but create, share and circulate content of their own, and gaming is one of its clearest examples.

  5. 5

    Summarise Henry Jenkins's argument about fans.

    Model answer

    Jenkins argues that fans are active participants in the construction and circulation of meaning, that they appropriate texts in ways producers never authorised, and that they build social and cultural identities through a participatory culture.

  6. 6

    What is textual poaching, and how do players do it?

    Model answer

    Textual poaching is taking a producer's material and using it for the audience's own purposes, which players do by modding, making machinima, writing fan fiction and playing games in ways the designer never intended.

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An audience receives what is offered.
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