The Gamer Lifestyle
I want to argue that the ability of the franchises to extend the experience of engagement with their worlds across space and time is a key feature for their potential ideological influence.
To highlight this, consider the extreme case of someone (and there are in fact many people today who approach this extreme) who wants to lead a “gamer lifestyle” and is committed to playing games and thinking, talking, hearing, and writing about them pretty much “24/7”. This does not mean that the person must sit in front of a fixed computer in a chair all day and most of the night.
Laptop computers are now sold that are specifically designed to allow people to take their games with them to work or on the road. But much more common, and cheaper, are the lower-end systems such as the GameBoy Advance, which is a small, lightweight, small-screen gaming console, for which all the major franchises produce simplified versions of their games and worlds. A new trend, which will grow rapidly, is toward “mobile gaming” in which cellphone or wireless technology converges with gaming technology to permit online multi-player games with greatly reduced graphic complexity. Some genres of mobile gaming do not simply reproduce the console or computer-screen game experience, but allow players to interact in real social space “in character” in the terms of the game world. In places such as Scandinavia, where digital cellphone technology is quite advanced and ubiquitous, many people participate in real-life games with the aid of cellphone technology.
Nor is game-playing the only way to remain in the gameworld ethos. You can watch G4 TV (“TV for Gamers”) at any time of the day on television. You can log on to a website to join in discussions of the game or its associated movies or books with an online fan community. You can write and discuss fan fiction online. You can go to CHAT rooms and do IM (instant messaging) with friends or online acquaintances, where the discussion either centers on the franchise world, or deals with other topics in a community where the franchise world forms the common shared experience and referents or topoi of discussion. You can go to a movie theatre, play a DVD, or read a comic book or a novel. You can wear clothing, collect and interact with “collectibles”, eat candy, trade cards with friends, play the game on a local network with your friends in their home or yours, or just talk to friends who share your interests, face-to-face, online, or by cellphone. In highly developed world-franchises such as LOTR, there are also LOTR branded or themed: jewelry, watches, calendars, poster art, sculpture, T-shirts, and baseball caps. In fact, you need never be without the option of a link to the gameworld ethos, available within seconds, anywhere and anytime. (For a sample of this pervasive material culture, see: http://www.lotrfanshop.com/ and http://www.lotrplaza.com/directory/ .)
This potentially represents a degree of ubiquity comparable to that of the Christian mythos in the High Middle Ages. It is perhaps not totally paranoid of some fundamentalist Christians to regard aspects of the gameworld ethos as competing with Christian culture for the attention and engagement of many people, particularly the young. And, not surprisingly, if a little late to the game, Christian groups are trying to generate a franchise world in all these media that is faithful to their beliefs and mythos (e.g. http://www.christiangaming.com/ ).
Consider also the timescales of engagement, even for the less-than-fanatical gamer. Once you are committed to playing an immersive game, you may well play for several hours a day, for a period of weeks to months. If you participate in a persistent-world game (e.g. Everquest, StarWars Galaxies), where there is no “ending” to the game, you can continue this pattern indefinitely. By the time boredom would finally release you, the commercial producers are sure to be ready with a highly seductive sequel, extension, or other renewal of the novelty and attraction of the gameworld. This represents sustained engagement in a worldview on a timescale far beyond what film offers, comparable to immersion in a substantial novel, but lasting far longer than it takes to read most print fictions. The overall duration may be comparable to one or more seasons of episodic television programming, but the continuous periods engagement are far longer (two to four hours at a stretch, even up to nine or more hours in a day). The nature of the engagement is also far more active, often from a first-person viewpoint, as well as in many cases also socially interactive. It holds not just the attraction of a good story, but has the added attraction of being able to act out a fantasy role within the context of a good story.
It is important at this point to distinguish among the various genres of computer games in relation to gameworld franchises. To some extent these genres are blurring today as hybrids attempt to maximize appeal to players, but there are certain principles at work in the genre divisions that are relevant to this analysis.
The principal genre that fits into the franchise model is known as the role-playing game or RPG. In this genre the player creates or selects a character or avatar, his/her own representative self, realistic or fantasizing, and then animates this character through a series of adventures, usually heroic. The RPG player may interact mainly with the computer program itself (single-player gaming), which is capable of simulating adversaries and other characters (NPCs, non-player characters, or artificial-intelligence animated characters) or else with a small number of other human players as well as NPCs (multi-player gaming). In the online persistent world genres, which are extensions of the RPG model, there may be hundreds and potentially thousands of player-characters visible as well as NPCs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, MMORPGs).
Initially, this RPG genre created fantasy worlds of a Tolkienesque or medieval character, but to this core were added science fiction worlds (Star Wars, Star Trek) and more recently military combat worlds. The separate genre of First-person Shooters contributed many of its features to these worlds, especially the combat worlds. FPSs are often multiplayer, and lend themselves to competitions among small groups or teams, but are rarely massively multiplayer, and are not usually linked to the major franchises. So did the tradition of early adventure and action games. Another key genre is the strategy game, descended from board-based wargames or re-enactments of historical battles and campaigns, which evolved into games that allow the player to re-play history over decades and centuries, competing with other players or with the artificial intelligence of the program, animating leaders of other factions. These games have a strong economic-management basis, as well as military and political strategy foundations, and they also have contributed features to the RPG and MMORPG franchise worlds.
Somewhat separate, but very popular, are sports-playing games, from individual and new-generation sports (snowboarding, skateboarding, auto racing) to traditional team sports (basketball, football, baseball, soccer). The team sports games are tied to the existing major sports franchises (nationally recognized teams and leagues) and so to televised games and sports commentary (which also has its own cable-TV channel). Several of the more popular competitive strategy and shooter games have actually become quasi-sports, with high-stakes tournaments, commercial endorsements, and in some countries (not the U.S. so far) fully organized leagues and teams. These games also participate in franchises, frequently based on the pre-existing franchises of professional sports leagues, which have long ago spread themselves across many other media for a wide age-range of consumers. So far this genre has mainly aimed at producing realistic technical simulations of the original sports, with little exploration of the novel aspects of virtual worlds. Its ideologies are also those of the original sports cultures. I will not deal further with this type of franchise development.
It seems likely that, given the identity issues involved, choice of game genre is becoming an important social marker, and so is likely to be related (cf. Bourdieu’s Distinction) to social class fractions and trajectories, as well as ethnic and other identity subcultures. It is often noted that young males define the markets for many of these game genres, while girls and women participate in smaller numbers and tend to gravitate to games in which there is more focus on social interaction and relationships (e.g. online card games with parallel chat channels, or The Sims franchise, particularly its MMO variant in which the player arranges the lives of semi-autonomous NPCs and can interact with other player characters). There are RPG variant genres known as “God games” in which the player controls complex social systems, similar to a large range of simulation games (other than sports), in which the player creates and manages amusement parks, railroad systems, etc.