Video Games

Video Game

• Is a media product with an interactive or ludic element
• Ludic: Latin for 'i play'
• They are more interactive than other media industries
• It is the broadest industry and has a lot of genres
• There is an assumption that videogames do not have anchorage and a deeper ideology
• There is more competition in videogames than other media products such as tournaments
• Substantially higher RRP (Recommended Retail Price), cost a lot more than other media products.
• Games are developed for specific hardware
• Videogames target a specific audience, a dedicated, niche, enthusiastic, core audience.
• Videogames are an extremely specialised industry
• Dichotomy: 2 things that contradict each other, binary/diametric opposition
• The videogame industry is nerdy and niche, however the industry is large and profitable

Fans

• Fandom is not the same as audience
• Fanfiction
• Merch
• lunch boxes
• hoodies
• t-shirt
• Gives us social interaction and makes life more interesting

• Pony's Creed Sisterhoof
• is a great example
• 'the death of the author'
• Clay Shirky
• 'End of audience' theory
• Audiences are no longer passive: they interact with media products in an increasingly complex variety of ways
• Suggests that the audience is the producer
• However this theory is very untrue, it is not entirely convincing, 
• Criticise this theory
• 
  

Steve Neale

• Cover art for Assassin's Creed is repeated over and over again because it sells, all the same genre

Assassins Creed III: Liberation

• Published by Ubisoft in 2012 for the PlayStation Vita
• With a subsequent HD re-release for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
• Trans-national creation as it was developed in Bulgaria, Canada and Italy
• Videogames are extremely expensive to make so they need to sell thousands
• Assassin Creed III: Liberation was too big to fail
• Has a clear and communicatcble story that has an understandable narrative
• The number of sales didn't live up to expectations
• A Sequel and a spin-off
• Wasn't a typical PSVita game
• A hand-held system means you feel more imersive in the system, however
• It was re-released on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 
• Consumers in the west tend to prefer home consoles instead of consoles on the go and that why the PSvita was more popular in Japan
• Assassins Creed's III sold 3 million copies, however Liberation sold 600,000
• Avatar is the technical term for a character you play as in the videogame
• The life bar, map and weapons selector is known as the HUD (heads up display)
• Ludo-narrative dissonance, the gameplay elements get in the way of the story elements
• Trailer:
• High-production value suggests it was made by a major company
• Main protagonist is a mixed race black woman
• Potentially this game is trying to aim towards a mixed race women (A unique selling point)
• Targeted a mass audience as if it was a movie
• Uses black fade
• Slow-motion
• There is no gameplay, parts of a videogame that is interactive
• Only cutscene footage
• The trailer is a link to Sony's distribution Service
• The trailer has a clear and easy identifiable narrative
• A story of a former slave who fights back, such as Django Unchained (Intertextuality)
• Over the top action and violence, makes it looks like the production value is high
• Set in Louisiana
• Offers the audience the pleasure/gratification of escapism
• Touches upon Slavery, can create a controversial topic
• Excellent example of digital convergence. videogame advertised on youtube that acts like a movie trailer 
• Didn't include the sci-fi elements of the game so that the producer could target a larger audience
• David Hesmondhalgh: The Media Industries
• Horizontal and Vertical integration
• Monopolisation
• Curran and Seaton: Profit and Power
• The media is controlled by a small number of companies primarily driven by the profit and power
• Media concentration limits variety, creativity and quality
• More socially diverse patterns of ownership can create more varied and adventurous media productions

Death Stranding (2019)

• Death Stranding x Rick & Morty
• Unconventional 
• Subversive
• Mysterious
• Hermeneutic
• Leaves a lot of question
• 
  

• Livingstone and Hunt: Regulation


• BBFC
• Due to the digital technologies, the regulation of all media industries are widely ineffective
• The increasing power of global media corporations, together with the rise of convergent media technologies and transformations in the production, distribution and marketing of digital media, have placed traditional approaches to media regulation and risk.
• PEGI is the company that regulates videogames

• PEGI
• PEGI replaced ELSPA
• In 1982, a game called Custor's Revenege was uploaded to Atari. It involves raping a tied up native American woman.
• In 1992, a game called Night Trap was the first game that got BBFC certificate  
• The regulation of video games inefficient, age ratings would not work, so PEGI was used instead

Target audience is 14-21 males

Lots of dark colours

Capture the Zeitgeist

Could suggest why having a female lead in Liberation may have not gone too well

The Proairetic code of the hood promotes violence

Mise-en-scene of weapons 

Read Dead Redemption 2

• The higher the age rating, the younger the audience
• Completely illogical 

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Ubisoft:

• 90's 
• Indiana Jones The Last Crusade: The Action Game
• 00's
• Battle of Prince of Persia
• 10's
• Farcry 4

Super Mario Land

• Came out 1989 on the Gameboy

Plato system

• Started in 1960s
• touch-screen activated

How significant are economic factors in the magazine industry? Woman and Adbusters

How significant are economic factors in the videogame Industry? Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

• First commercialised in Japan
• Space Invaders was so popular that it lead to a shortage of 200 yen coins
• Entire blocks in building were rented out and filled with space invader arcade games
• America followed with Atari
• One such example being Centipede
• At this time, Nintendo existed
• UK
• ZX-Spectrum
• Famous for extremely low-budget games (bedroom coders)
• Early experimentations and generic fluidity

• 1980s videogame crash
• The game that supposedly ruined the game industry was ET
• Games started getting more dull and boring
• Nintendo
• Released a Famicom/NES, which was Nintendo's first console
• They gathered all the American videogames into one console
• Started issuing RPG, role-playing games, such as DragonQuest
• Super Mario Bros came out 1985
• The NES revived videogames
• This created a huge division between American games and Japanese Games
• Japan had more rpg games whilst the US had more of a open world game
• Sega vs Nintendo

• Super Street Fighter changed videogames because it was one of the first multiplayer games

Reverse Pyschology was used to get people to buy the first Playstation in UK

• In London they set up clubs for young adults to take part for Playstations

Digitally distributed: The process of having an online shop sell you games, like Steam

Les Revenants & Genre

Highly atypical show: Les Revenants

Genre

• Thriller/Horror
• Romance
• Action
• Supernatural
• Drama-
• Avant-Garde
• Zombie
• French?
• Unconventional/atypical/subversive

Example of cult TV

• Fans who are devoted to a particular TV show

• Intertextuality
• Setting in the low French-Alps
• Architecture is French-esque
• Explicit amounts of blood
• Produced by a French channel (Canal)
• Treatment of genders is more relaxed than in the UK
• Stereotypically looks of French people

If a TV show is aimed to multiple audiences, it's known as a double mode of address

For example: younger and older generations for Les Revenants

Facts

• Released 26th November 2012 on Canal+
• Released in the United Kingdom on the 9th June 2013, on Channel 4
• 2 series, 8 episodes each
• Based on the French film 'They Came Back' in 2004
• Les Revenants (the movie) was directed by Robin Campillo
• Created by Fabric Gobert
• The show has a significant majority of white people suggesting it presents the ethnic diversity of France, this shows the target audience
• George Gerbner argued that if a certain group of people was left out of a media product is called symbolic annihilation 
• Mogwai- Band
• Unconventional rock band
• Extremely normal looking, not wearing anything special (Atypical)
• No vocalist
• Genre is post-rock and has a niche/cult audience
• Can ensure the show that has a pre-sold audience
• The soundtrack is Atypical/ they composed the entire soundtrack for Les revenants
• 
  

"In the 21st century, it is essential for TV shows to offer their audiences multiple meanings" - evaluate this claim with reference to Les revenants/The Returned

1. Representation can be used by the producer to manipulate the audiences ideology
2. This allows the producer to construct a perfect reality that may be reflected in the real world
3. This makes Les revenants highly polysemic as people's choices may not want to follow the producer's ideology

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Promotional images for advertising

• Camille is stereotypically attractive
• Ginger suggests rebel
• Dress older then she is, suggesting she's a mature teenager
• She does display being grumpy
• makeup suggests she's tired and ill
• Is a highly subversive atypical representation of a teenage girl
• This suggests that the audience has high expectations

• Claire has nice hair, well dressed
• She has a very understated glamour
• Atypical representation of a middle-aged woman
• Stereotypically middle class

Promotional image

• 
• Set in a valley in the French Alps, targets a French audience because it's something they would be familiar with
• Black Rose is symbolic of Mourning which is a binary opposition between the wedding and the funeral
• Binary opposition between life and death
• Canal + co-produced I, Daniel Blake
• Caption "The past has decided to resurface" suggests its edgy
• Wedding dress has connotations for it being a romance genre
• Specific stereotypical French people were chosen to show that this is a French show
• Stuart Hall suggests that Les Revenants is a show that is supposed to have negotiated reading
• The text is split in half which could be referring to binary opposition that Simone and Adele are divided and broken
• The show is marketed differently in different nations because different nationalities stereotypically have different tastes
• This is because of Cultivation theory by George Gerbner, that French people experience more edgy, sexual TV shows than other nationalities
• 
  

• The characters in Les Revenants are stereotypically attractive to a French Audience

Trailer

• The trailer uses a rapid fire montage and cross-cutting, this is very conventional for a trailer
• Trailer is exciting, has a range of characters, same footage but done by a different director instead of Robin Campillo
• the distributors had taken a different role with the footage
• Has english subtitles and english texts, meaning its aimed towards an english audience
• Is exciting and fast-paced
• close-up of pictures covered in blood suggests horror
• Bus crash also suggests horror or action (very dramatic)
• Atypical horror cult show, just like Mogwai
• Also demonstrates a romance, horror, thriller, action hybrid genre
• a philosophical cult drama
• This is done to get a wider audience
• the distributors are clearly targeting a mainstream audience
• Hard-sell show

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Camille and Lena

• Lack of non-diegetic sound anchors the audience into a tense and deliberately uncomfortable scene, appealing to a niche audience or fans of horror and mystery
• Knocking on wall in hermeneutic codes, indicating a dramatic and mysterious event
• Deliberately confusing and challenging

Simone, Adele and Lena Scene

• Adele's response is not logical and is not typical of the genre
• Mid-shot of Adele collapsed against the door is symbolic of her misery and her lost of sanity, along with the high angle view makes her seem isolated, exposed, alone and weak
• Preferred reading of this scene was to make her seem happy again, but Les Revenants puts us in a confused position by making her not happy to see her.
• Terror intertextuality, the diajetic knocking sound, coupled with the shot of the handle moving is highly conventional of the horror genre.
• The scene demonstrates hybrid fluidity between the genres of horror and romance
• Brighter lights on Adele's side contrasts the low-key lighting on Simone's side of the door
• Non-diajetic music creates a stereotypical horror track, instruments such as a piano can be played very creepily. An arpeggiated song, symbolises loss 
• Big theme about this show is death, this means that this is final, and there is no return from death but Les revenants flips this, and for example Adele is upset because she believed she is being haunted by Simone
• We have a shot of Simone yelling "open the fucking door" with a counter shot of Adele screaming "go away'. This creates a barrier between the two and a diametric opposition.
• Extremely uncommercial scene
• Mise-en-scene of the mirror symbolises that Simone is a ghost and that he doesn't belong here
• Adele wears a white dress symbolises the fact that she is married
• Simone is wearing a suit which creates a binary opposition between Adele and Simone,  Simone is giving order and being stereotypically masculine, Adele is being stereotypically feminine and being scared and isolated, this links to Lisbet Van Zoonen's theory that genders are portrayed in a certain way across all media
• Low-key lighting in Adele's house is a proairetic code suggesting something bad is going to happen to her
• This could be an intertextual reference to the gothic genre
• lighting is artificial suggesting Adele carries herself now and doesn't want Simone in her life
• Long shot of Lena suggests how lonely she is and how vulnerable she is
• Middle-class characters for a middle-class audience
• Every character in the show is white, suggesting a white middle-class target audience
• Slow paced editing but increases as the music gets more intense

Monsieur/Madame Costa

• Mise-en-scene or the ropes that bond her make her seem vulnerable, the fact that the audience is place in another room to her on the other side of the fire on the other side of the door frame
• Completely atypical response
• Soundtrack doesn't fit the scene, it is a contrapuntal sound
• There is a mundane/boring response to the fire, Mr Costa thinks he's gone mad, Mrs Costa is confused by the fire
• Classy old fashioned house suggests middle-class elder persons house

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Steve Neale wrote about Genre such as conventions to give movies and TV shows certain generic classification 

Genre can sometimes be ineffective in categorising media if it involves completely different media products that follows the same genre partially

Genre limits creativity 

1. Twin Peaks
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. The Wire
4. Doctor Who

The Walking Dead

Genre

  

Genre: a type of media product, governed by implicit rules

Hybrid genre: a combination of different genres

Sub-genre: is a genre within a genre

Generic Paradigms: aka Genre convention The building blocks of a genre, mise-en-scene, sound etc

Iconography: Stuff that makes up a genre

Verisimilitude: Every text has it's own set of rules and situations. However there are many that can break this, depending on the genre.

Verisimilitude = Reality/Realism

Intertextuality: The shaping of a media product's meaning through referencing another product another product.

So when we watch a horror movie, we know the consequences of going into that dark room

Genres from this poster(1963) --------->

• Horror
• Tragedy
• Romance
• Serif font
• Thriller
• Design is that of arty and is painted suggesting it's a classical
• Font is rooked and wonky and sharp
• Is a hybrid genre
• Generic paradigms include: bats, castle, the moon, the dead woman and of course the vampire
• Low-key natural lighting is sp00ky, connotes to a feeling of suspense, a hermeneutic code
• Mise en scene of red and black connotes to death
• Font looks like wood and the V looks like a stake- iconography
• The eerie and bleak and stereotypical setting
• A typical romance narrative with a gothic twist
• Stereotypical setting of a vampire film, gothic castle
• Contains a wide range of paradigms

Giallo- Subgenre of gothic horror combined with detective

Danmaku shooter- subgenre of 2D games with a lot of bullets

Visual novel- game completely based on text and decisions

vaporwave- taking samples of 80s 90s music and slowing it down

Grindcore- subgenre of rock, fast hardcore punk with heavy metal

1. Paradigms
2. Repertoire of elements
3. Iconography
4. Generic conventions
5. Conventional elements
6. Conventions
7. Paradigmatic features

Star Trek: The next generation

The setting is in space

The android Data

Mise en scene of futuristic technology, space-ships

Binary opposition- Humans & Aliens

Futuristic costumes

Steve Neale- Genre Theory

Repetition & difference
Believes that genre is essentially instances of 'repetition of differences'
He suggested that texts need to conform to some generic Paradigms to be identified

The Simpsons

The intertextuality of The Simpsons is to make the targeted audience to laugh
Double mode of address was used. Adults will get the reference, whilst children will just find it funny.