How do players understand video game hardware: Tactility or tech-speak?

Abstract

This article explores how video game players talk about the technological hardware they use to play games. The games industry is known for deploying often confusing and unclear ‘tech-speak’ terminology to convey the supposed value of new gaming hardware, drawing on tropes of numerical objectivity, ‘upgrade culture’ and the implicit obsolescence of previous technological iterations. However, we show a divide between supposedly objective tech-speak penned by the industry and the subjective experiences of users. Gamers rarely understand their gaming hardware through these marketing and advertising discourses despite their high visibility, instead framing the technology they engage with in intimately tactile, and more broadly contextual, terms. This highlights a significant disjuncture between the industrial and their perception of their audience, with implications for our understanding of ‘tech-speak’, its limitations, the video games sector and the consumers who purchase its products.

Keywords

Consumption marketing subjectivity technology video games

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adorno

Horkheimer

([1944] 1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso Books.

Apperley

Jayemane

(2012) Game studies’ material turn. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9(1): 5–25.

Apperley

Parikka

(2018) Platform studies’ epistemic threshold. Games and Culture 13(4): 349–369.

Arsenault

(2017) Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Ashcraft

(2010) Why are consoles banned in China? Kotaku, 15 July. Available at: https://kotaku.com/why-are-consoles-banned-in-china-5587577 (accessed 15 July 2019).

Ashton

(2011) Upgrading the self: technology and the self in the digital games perpetual innovation economy. Convergence 17(3): 307–321.

Behrenshausen

(2007) Toward a (kin)aesthetic of video gaming: the case of Dance Revolution. Games and Culture 2(4): 335–354.

Bogost

Montfort

(2007) New media as material constraint: an introduction to platform studies. In: Proceedings of the first international HASTAC conference. Electronic techtonics: thinking at the interface, pp. 176–193. Available at: http://bogost.com/downloads/bogost%20montfort%20hastac.pdf (accessed 18 September 2019).

Busse

(2013) Geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan. Participations 10(1): 73–91.

10.

Campbell

(2015) The Curse of the New: how the accelerating pursuit of the new is driving hyper-consumption. In: Ekström

(ed.) Waste Management and Sustainable Consumption: Reflections on Consumer Waste. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 28–50.

11.

Carey

(2008) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Revised ed. London: Routledge.

12.

Consalvo

(2006) Console video games and global corporations: creating a hybrid culture. New Media & Society 8: 117–137.

13.

Cornwall

(2007) Buzzwords and fuzzwords: deconstructing development discourse. Development in Practice 17(4–5): 471–484.

14.

Dean

(2008) Communicative capitalism: circulation and the foreclosure of politics. In: Bolder

(ed.) Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 101–122.

15.

Depoorter

(2014) What happened to video game piracy? Communications of the ACM 57(5): 33–34.

16.

Deringer

(2018) Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

17.

Dyer-Witheford

de Peuter

(2009) Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

18.

Gazzard

(2016) Now the Chips Are Down: The BBC Micro. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

19.

Giddings

(2009) Events and collusions: a glossary for the microethnography of video game play. Games and Culture 4(2): 144–157.

20.

Gitelman

(2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

21.

Goode

Kartas

(2012) Exploring software piracy as a factor of video game console adoption. Behaviour & Information Technology 31(6): 547–563.

22.

Gray

(2016) Reviving audience studies. Critical Studies in Media Communication 34(1): 79–83.

23.

Guiltinan

(2009) Creative destruction and destructive creations: environmental ethics and planned obsolescence. Journal of Business Ethics 89(1): 19–28.

24.

Harwood

(2011) The Interface: IBM And the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

25.

Hayes

(2008) Girls, gaming, and trajectories of IT expertise. In: Kafai

Heeter

Denner

, et al (eds) Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 217–230.

26.

Hayles

(2008) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

27.

Hjorth

Arnold

(2013) Playing at being social: a cross-generational case study of social gaming in Shanghai, China. In: Huntmann

Aslinger

(eds) Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 101–118.

28.

Hjorth

Richardson

(2014) Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media. London: Springer.

29.

Hoggins

(2019) Gaming worth more than video and music combined in record UK entertainment revenues. The Daily Telegraph, 3 January. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/01/03/video-games-make-half-record-uk-entertainment-revenues/ (accessed 15 July 2019).

30.

Hollett

Ehret

(2015) Bean’s world’: (mine) crafting affective atmospheres of gameplay, learning, and care in a children’s hospital. New Media & Society 17(11): 1849–1866.

31.

Hornborg

(2014) Technology as fetish: Marx, Latour, and the cultural foundations of capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society 31(4): 119–140.

32.

Jarvenpaa

Makinen

(2008) An empirical study of the existence of the Hype Cycle: a case of DVD technology. In: Proceedings of the international engineering management conference, Estoril, 28–30 June 2008, pp. 1–5. New York: IEEE.

33.

Johnson

Luo

(2019) Gaming-value and culture-value: understanding how players account for video game purchases. Convergence 25: 868–883.

34.

Jou

(2012) Boy, is China’s illegal gray market blatant. Kotaku, 13 February. Available at: https://kotaku.com/boy-is-chinas-illegal-gray-market-blatant-5883693 (accessed 15 July 2019).

35.

Jurgelionis

Fechteler

Eisert

, et al. (2009) Platform for distributed 3D gaming. International Journal of Computer Games Technology 2009: 231863.

36.

Juul

(2005) Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. London: MIT Press.

37.

Kendrick

(2015) Misogyny and gaming: the maintenance of a male-gendered gamer culture. Available at: http://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/RULA%3A4255/datastream/OBJ/download/Misogyny_and_gaming___the_maintenance_of_a_male-gendered_gamer_culture.pdf (accessed 13 November 2018).

38.

Kiley

(2016) Indie inclusion? Analyzing diversity in the independent video game industry. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20539 (accessed 13 November 2018).

39.

Kirkpatrick

(2004) Critical Technology: A Social Theory of Personal Computing. Aldershot: Ashgate.

40.

Kittler

(1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

41.

Lewis

(2013) Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.

42.

Liao

SXT

(2016) Japanese console games popularization in China: governance, copycats, and gamers. Games and Culture 11(3): 275–297.

43.

McArthur

(2009) Digital subculture: a geek meaning of style. Journal of Communication Inquiry 33(1): 58–70.

44.

Marx

(1999) Capital: An Abridged Edition. Online ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

45.

Montfort

Bogost

(2009) Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

46.

Murphy

(2009) ‘This is intelligent television’: early video games and television in the emergence of the personal computer. In: Perron

Wolf

(eds) The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York: Routledge, pp. 197–213.

47.

Naughty Dog (2013) The Last Of Us. [Playstation 3] Naughty Dog.

48.

Naughty Dog (2015 [2009]) Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. [Playstation 3, 4] Naughty Dog.

49.

Pargman

Jakobsson

(2008) Do you believe in magic? Computer games in everyday life. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11(2): 225–243.

50.

Parisi

(2018) Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing With Haptics From Electricity to Computing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

51.

Pearce

(2008) The truth about baby boomer gamers: a study of over-forty computer game players. Games and Culture 3(2): 142–174.

52.

Schott

Horrell

(2000) Girl gamers and their relationship with the gaming culture. Convergence 6(4): 36–53.

53.

Schreier

(2018) Some reasons why the games industry is so secretive (and why maybe it shouldn’t be). Kotaku, 13 May. Available at: https://kotaku.com/some-reasons-why-the-games-industry-is-so-secretive-an-1825929139 (accessed 13 November 2018).

54.

Semeraro

(2017) PlayStation leads again, but Xbox rises in October’s $102.3 million gaming TV ad spend. VentureBeat, 12 November. Available at: https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/12/playstation-leads-again-but-xbox-rises-in-octobers-102-3-million-gaming-tv-ad-spend/ (accessed 14 July 2019).

55.

Shaw

(2013) On not becoming gamers: moving beyond the constructed audience. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. DOI: 10.7264/N33N21B3.

56.

Silverstone

(1999) Why Study the Media? London: SAGE.

57.

Simon

(2007) Geek chic: machine aesthetics, digital gaming, and the cultural politics of the case mod. Games and Culture 2(3): 175–193.

58.

Smith

(2018) How corporations are destroying video games. Salon, 28 January. Available at: https://www.salon.com/2018/01/28/how-corporations-are-destroying-video-games (accessed 18 November 2018).

59.

Sotamaa

(2007) Perceptions of player in game design literature. In: Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 conference. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.190.1299&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed 18 September 2019).

60.

Stahl

(1995) Venerating the black box: magic in media discourse on technology. Science, Technology, & Human Values 20(2): 234–258.

61.

Standing

(2007) Social protection. Development in Practice 17(4–5): 511–522.

62.

Stark

(2019) Desanctifying the charisma of numbers. Journal of Cultural Economy 12: 83–89.

63.

Stivers

(2001) Technology as Magic. New York: The Continuum.

64.

Svartsjö

(2017) A plan on creating a video game store in Kokkola. Available at: https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/135746 (accessed 13 November 2018).

65.

Taylor

(2009) Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

66.

Thornham

(2011) Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis. Farnham: Ashgate.

67.

Villapaz

(2013) ‘GTA 5’ costs $265 million to develop and market, making it the most expensive video game ever produced: report. International Business Times, 8 September. Available at: https://www.ibtimes.com/gta-5-costs-265-million-develop-market-making-it-most-expensive-video-game-ever-produced-report (accessed 14 July 2019).

68.

Witkin

(1998) Adorno on Music. London: Routledge.