Games and Globalization
There is a sense in which global capital is now re-making nation-states as the units of economic competition, in the form of national and regional markets as well as capital sources. In the games industry the major players are the U.S. and Japan as producers, with the U.K. and some other parts of the EU trying to gain a larger share of the global market. There is a great deal of investment at present in research on games in the EU nations that are eager to succeed in the industry (the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia). This carries over to academic status for games research, which is quite low in the U.S., but rising rapidly in the latecomer states.
In historical terms, Japan has had surprising success in the US market, particularly with younger children, who may be less acculturated to US norms than adults. The manga-anime franchises are very strong among US pre-teen youth and young children, from Pokemon and Digimon to Yu-Gi-Oh and Dragonball Z, or at older ages the Final Fantasy franchise. Moreover, the industrial leadership of Japanese companies, and their US subsidiaries, such as SEGA, Nintendo, and SONY have given them control of franchises, originating in their cultural ethos, that are now almost cultural icons in the U.S. (e.g. Mario Brothers). It seems so far to be only with the adolescent and extended adolescent markets that there is a return to Western cultural preferences (Tolkienesque and Science Fiction RPGs, traditional sports games). The exceptions seem to be (a) adult interest in strategy and warfare games that include the option to identify with a non-Western culture, and (b) RPGs that base many fantasy elements on Japanese cultural themes (e.g. the Final Fantasy franchise). It is of course the case that many adults also enjoy playing the cross-over games intended for a younger market (e.g. in the Mario Brothers franchise, or the Zelda franchise).
I recently became aware of a largely non-U.S. Japanese franchise, Phantasy Star, which was listed as one of the top 10 games of the last ten years in the U.K. It was the only one in the list that was not already very familiar, so its appearance was quite a surprise. It has been going since 1988, is still quite active, highly regarded by players and game critics, has had an active MMORPG variant since 2000, and has apparently been released in that form for personal computers (as opposed to dedicated game console machines) only in Japan and Taiwan and not in the U.S. Moreover, the online version was released to directly support play in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English, German, Spanish, and French. It would be interesting to know how many U.S. produced game titles, especially online-world games, support any languages other than English. An MMORPG, Lineage, originated in Korea and has vast numbers of online players there as well as in Japan and China, and many also in the West of both Asian and European cultural backgrounds. It is not uncommon to find the player dialogue in a scene being conducted in alphabetic Chinese, even on servers catering to players in the US heartland (Steinkuehler, 2004).
I am making these loose connections to the globalization of capitalist-commercial culture because of the familiar argument that the increasing scale of commercial production and the drive to maximize profits in global markets favors the creation of more culturally uniform markets. To sell LOTR or Final Fantasy in global-scale markets, you need the power to create demand for what are essentially cultural products (in the sense that desire for these products arises mainly from the need to define and express culturally-significant identities). As Bourdieu argues in Distinction, the value of products in a market is largely a function of their appeal to a culture-specific habitus, a disposition or taste that is cultivated in relation to one’s social position. It has long been recognized that commercial advertising to mass markets is not just selling products, but selling lifestyles or tastes, and indeed selling a value system and in many respects a culture. Looking across advertisements, what is being sold is an internally differentiated, stratified, and unified “heteroglossic” culture (Bakhtin, 1981a; Lemke, 1995). Different brands, even from the same producer, target low-end and high-end markets; children, teenagers, extended adolescents, or older adults each are defined as constituting separate subcultural markets. We are all becoming accumstomed to accepting the principles of this market differentiation, which is only visible intertextually, and which remains largely covert and implicit from the viewpoint of any particular consumer.
The virtual-world franchises are also engaged in this project of re-creating stratified global market-cultures. Just what is the ideological content of this New Cultural Order? That is, just what principles of differentiation and hierarchy are at work to produce what system of values and social relations for the benefit of global marketing and global profits? The global economic order aims to succeed in creating a global culture to which it can market products on a global scale. It is somewhat caught in a contradiction as it does so: on the one hand, it maximizes profits to the extent that there is a homogeneous cultural order (so that one product line, minimizing production and marketing costs, appeals to all), but on the other hand, the conditions of reproduction of capital concentration (the basis of power and privilege for those making the marketing decisions) demand a differentiated and hierarchical culture (with associated brand differentiation and multiple product lines that bring higher production and marketing costs and lower net profits).
Caught in the pressures of this contradiction, global cultural marketing is both working against national and ethnic cultural diversity and working for class-, age-, and gender- based market differentiation. At least, I would identify these as the large-scale, time-averaged trends. There are also various competing interests and strategies within capital. Those who see their power and privilege as having a national or ethnic basis will continue to try to manipulate mass culture towards hierarchical differentiation on this basis. National producers will be in conflict with cross-national producers. Ethnic and religion-based centers of power will also be in conflict with global marketers. Class-differentiated markets seem to be a necessary concomitant of economically-based power and privilege and the ideologies that support them. Age- and gender- differentiations in the global-culture market may or may not persist. Clearly they have been and still are to a large degree foundational for the power of global-marketers. Middle-aged decision- makers benefit by pandering to the young, minimizing competition for their positions by encouraging extended adolescence, culturally portraying the young as irresponsible, right up to the age of 40. They must also attempt to perpetuate cultural naturalizations of gender-based differentiations of values, both to maintain their own cultural sense of the superiority of masculinity and to marginalize competition from highly educated, intelligent, and resilient females. In the present state of rapid technological flux and economic re-organization, both 30-something males and many females have distinct competitive advantages over traditionally dominant 50-something males. These pressures maintain the current age- and gender- obsessions of global mass-marketing culture, even though in principle these differentiations of the market do not maximize capital’s profits.
While gender ideologies are being maintained, in new guises, age ideologies are clearly shifting. Pursuing a strategy that is to their caste advantage, the currently dominant senior managers are homogenizing the age-cohort market by both infantilizing their most potentially dangerous junior competitors (30-somethings) and pushing “adolescent” taste and values down below teenagers as far as they can make it work. You can see even 7 or 8 year old girls wanting the fashions marketed (officially) to 20-year old “Britney Spears” look-alikes (and more obviously intended for 14-18 year olds). These clothes, and many franchise video-games and films, have an appeal now that ranges from age ten to age fifty. But clothing, and many other products, including most videogames, continue to be strongly gender differentiated.
I have not so far mentioned another strong traditional cultural differentiation, that based on sexual-orientation. The dominant caste by and large does not appear to see any significant objective threat from gay and lesbian competitors. So the New Global Cultural Order is quite happy to homogenize markets across gay and straight, marketing the same products in much the same ways to both groups, and including gay and lesbian minority characters and themes up to a point in films, television, and, one hopes, eventually games. The difficulty with this strategy is of course the strong class-bias in homophobia in Euro-American cultures, so that working-class males are culturally shaped towards an extreme masculinity that makes them more ready to take on dirty and dangerous tasks from building construction to infantry soldiering. That masculinity is based in a complex system of value-contrasts which has to accommodate both anti-femininity and male-bonding, as well as a strong sense that upper-class occupations are insufficiently masculine to aspire to. Homophobia is both a by-product of the internal contradictions of working-class subaltern male identities and a tool for their cultural production. This class-linkage makes the risks of gay-friendly marketing to working-class males outweigh the advantages of homogenizing their market with respect to sexual-orientation. Only in distinctively middle- and upper-middle class markets is this safely profitable.
I hope these observations are sufficient to make the prima facie case that there is a new global cultural order in the making, that it is caught in ideological contradictions that should make its analysis both amenable to critical discourse analysis methods and significant for the critical-emancipatory aims of such research. I believe that the most interesting new phenomena in terms of how ideological effects are carried by semiotic media arise in the new inter-media world-franchises, and this is where I am focusing my own efforts to develop research techniques and theoretical conceptualizations to more effectively analyze inter-discursivity across products, media, and markets.