Video Games and Representation

Representation is the most important Key Concept in Media Studies; Media texts of all kinds play an important role in representing people, events and ideas; The audience of a media text plays an active role in decoding these representations through their own cultural  and life situation; Toland (2004) suggests that games position and situate us to accept, in many cases old fashioned and simplistic representations of gender and ethnicity;  

Brey et al (1998) developed a semiotic approach to game representation by looking at the oppositions and relationships between elements and characters that add up to a coherent system of meaning in the game; Brey asks the following questions: • Who has the most agency (ability to influence

events) in the game?  • Who is absent from the game e.g women or the

disabled?• Who is active and passive in certain situations?• Which characters have a voice and which are silent?• What roles are allocated to which characters?

  

By asking these questions we can build a deeper understanding of the ways some games reinforce a range of repesentational codes; The narrative and characters within video games reinforce many of Vladimir Propp's character types; Propp (1968) stated that most stories in Western culture share a limited range of character types; Propp analysed the narrative structures of Russian folk tales and discovered a high degree of conformity to a limited number of narrative patterns. These included the following character types: The hero; a false hero; a villian; donor; princess; a father figure; a helper; a dispatcher.

Propp's approach suits the formulaic nature of video games narratives; Video games often draw on ancient narrative forms such as: • Quest narratives;• Sagas;• Romances;• Epics

 Propp's character types fit the episodic structure of games - the rewards, challenges, obstacles all form part of the game structure. More information of Propp can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp  

Propp's character types are a useful way to investigate some games:

But not others:

As long as we limit ourselves to more literary games with fictional characters and a linear goal-orientated narrative then Propp's character types can be useful; Applying Propp's character types will allow us to investigate the ways characters function within the game; this will also illustrate our intermedial understanding of video games; in other words how the audience understand and comprehend the game based on previous media experience. Intermedial = video games often refer to other media texts. When one text refers to another this is called 'intertextual'; intermedial describes a media form which relies on our understanding of and experience of other media (for example film and music) to make meaning.

Issues of representation can be discussed and applied to a range of games from the obvious (GTA4) to the less obvious (Fifa '09); MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) change the linear nature of gaming; free-roaming and sand-box gaming has changed how gamers play; in Second Life gamers construct idealised representations of themselves; Online networks - from online cheats, to forums, to the distribution of 'patches' ties in with much of fan-dom and fan culture that grew around TV shows like Star Trek and The X-Files; this has changed the way that gamers interact with each other and the industry.      

Key term: 

Verisimilitude   the way that a text combines a range of elements so that the viewer or reader is able to believe in its reality. Even a text with no relationship to the real world will establish verisimilitude if it has logic, plausibility and makes sense on its own terms. For realist texts verisimilitude will rely heavily on authenticity.  GTA 4 relies heavily on verisimilitude as the streets/chararcters/cars etc look authentic.