Playing to Win

Description

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Playing to Win: An introduction. / Thomas P. Oates and Robert Alan Brookey
Part I: Gender Play
1. The Name of the Game is Jocktronics: Sport and Masculinity in Early Video Games / Michael Z. Newman
2. Madden Men: Masculinity, Race, and the Marketing of a Video Game Franchise / Thomas P. Oates
3. Neoliberal Masculinity: The Government of Play and Masculinity in E-Sports / Gerald Voorhees
4. The Social and Gender in Fantasy Sports Leagues / Luke Howie and Perri Campbell
5. Domesticating Sports: The Wii, the Mii and Nintendo's Postfeminist Subject / Rene Powers and Robert Alan Brookey
Part II. The Uses of Simulation
6. Avastars: The Encoding of Fame within Sport Digital Games / Steven Conway
7. Keeping it Real: Sports Video Game Advertising and the Fan-Consumer / Cory Hillman and Michael Butterworth
8. Exploiting Nationalism and Banal Cosmopolitanism: EA's FIFA World Cup 2010 / Andrew Baerg
9. Ideology, It's In The Game: Selective Simulation in EA Sports' NCAA Football / Meredith M. Bagley and Ian Summers
10. Yes Wii Can or Can Wii: Theorizing the Possibilities of Video Games as Health Disparity Intervention / David J. Leonard, Sarah Ullrich-French, and Thomas G. Power
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Sociologie du sport
• Media Studies
• Sports
• Sciences et techniques
• Large-screen television technology
• Video
• Television
• Technology
• Engineering
• Cultural Studies
• Communication

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253015051
• Langue: English

Extrait

Playing to Win
DIGITAL GAME STUDIES
Robert Alan Brookey and David J. Gunkel, editors

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01499-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01502-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01505-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Contents
Introduction Thomas P. Oates and Robert Alan Brookey
PART 1. GENDER PLAY
1. The Name of the Game Is Jocktronics: Sport and Masculinity in Early Video Games Michael Z. Newman
2. Madden Men: Masculinity, Race, and the Marketing of a Video Game Franchise Thomas P. Oates
3. Neoliberal Masculinity: The Government of Play and Masculinity in E-Sports Gerald Voorhees
4. The Social and Gender in Fantasy Sports Leagues Luke Howie and Perri Campbell
5. Domesticating Sports: The Wii, the Mii, and Nintendo s Postfeminist Subject Renee M. Powers and Robert Alan Brookey
PART 2. THE USES OF SIMULATION
6. Avastars: The Encoding of Fame within Sport Digital Games Steven Conway
7. Keeping It Real: Sports Video Game Advertising and the Fan-Consumer Cory Hillman and Michael L. Butterworth
8. Exploiting Nationalism and Banal Cosmopolitanism: EA s FIFA World Cup 2010 Andrew Baerg
9. Ideology, It s in the Game: Selective Simulation in EA Sports NCAA Football Meredith M. Bagley and Ian Summers
10. Yes Wii Can or Can Wii? Theorizing the Possibilities of Video Games as Health Disparity Intervention David J. Leonard, Sarah Ullrich-French, and Thomas G. Power
Contributors
Index
Playing to Win
Introduction
Thomas P. Oates and Robert Alan Brookey
PERHAPS ONE OF THE MOST PERSISTENT LEGENDS OF THE early video game industry involves the installation of a prototype of the Pong game in a Sunnyvale, California, bar named Andy Capp s in September 1972. 1 Two weeks after the game was installed, Atari engineer Al Alcorn got a call from the bar manager, complaining that the game was broken and requesting that it be hauled off the premises. When Alcorn went to investigate the problem, he discovered the machine was jammed and overflowing with quarters. This story certainly has all the trappings of a corporate myth, but it offers an event marking the beginning of the rise of Atari as a leader in the video game industry. Given the significantly diminished status of Atari and its recent bankruptcy, it is important to remember Atari s former prominence. In other words, this story about Andy Capp s also marks an important moment for the video game industry in general.
Yet there is another important point about this event that is often overlooked: if Pong was one of the first successful commercial video games, then one of the first successful video games was a sports simulation game. We can anticipate the snickering this observation might inspire. After all, Pong was incredibly primitive, and table tennis (or Ping-Pong) enjoys a dubious place in the pantheon of sports - it s right up there with badminton and croquet. We could counter that Ping-Pong was used to open a diplomatic relationship between the United States and China in 1971, just over a year prior to the installation of the Pong machine at Andy Capp s. Our point, however, is not about the legitimacy of Ping-Pong as a sport, but rather the importance of sports to the emergence of the video game industry. At about the time Pong was released as an arcade game, Magnavox unveiled its Odyssey home gaming system. From its earliest incarnations, mass-market video gaming has simulated popular sports. Atari s 1972 breakthrough success, Pong , was a table-tennis simulation, while competitors sought to replicate games such as tennis, hockey, baseball, and football. Like Pong , the Odyssey had very abstract graphics that were augmented with plastic overlays that could be placed on the screen of the television set. These overlays were designed to simulate various games, including tennis, hockey, football, and table tennis. 2 In fact, Magnavox and Atari became embroiled in a lawsuit over the rights to simulate Ping-Pong as a video game; the suit was finally settled out of court, much to Atari s favor. 3 A few years later, Mattel would launch the first handheld LED gaming systems that included versions of football, baseball, and basketball. 4 Central to the initial success of video gaming, sports simulation games have held an important place in the history of every sector of the video game market since, including the arcade, console, and handheld markets.
We are far removed from the seventies, and in the intervening years the technological sophistication of video games has evolved far beyond the offerings of Pong and its brethren. The video game industry has not only developed a great number of sports simulation games over the years, but also built a strong relationship with the brands and franchises in the sports industry. To put this in perspective, it might be helpful to consider some numbers. In the Entertainment Software Association 2011 report, U.S. households in 2010 reportedly spent $15.9 billion on video game software, and sports games were the second most popular genre, with 16.3 percent of the market. In that year, almost $2.6 billion was spent on sports games in the United States alone. 5 In addition, of the top-ten video games in 2010, Madden NFL 11 was ranked second, and NBA 2K11 was ranked tenth. Therefore, the overlap between the video game and sports industries is significant, not only in terms of the actual game sales, but also in the sport brands they represent.
In many respects, the terrain of contemporary sport is suffused by video gaming, and the boundaries separating the two spheres have blurred significantly. The top-selling sports-themed video games are packaged with the images of players prominently displayed on the covers, and release parties and other promotional events routinely include the presence of star athletes from the present and recent past. The sporting press constantly reports the wild popularity of video game sports simulations among professional athletes, while sports highlight and analysis programs frequently employ video game simulations as pregame analysis and to help predict outcomes. In such games, sporting celebrities are reproduced in digital form, ascribed particular abilities, and placed in competition with others. The terms of athletic competition also suffuse the emerging genre of e-sports, professional leagues in which gamers compete with one another for fame and fortune akin (if not in scale) to that enjoyed by sporting celebrities. Meanwhile, video gaming has become an unlikely site for physical fitness initiatives. The Nintendo Wii system brought exergaming to the video game market, creating marketing opportunities and prompting interest among policy wonks.
This overlap between video games and sports provides some interesting opportunities for critical engagement, and this book is devoted to studying the points of convergence for these two industries. But before we turn our attention to the importance of sports games and their relationship to sports culture, we ought to briefly review how the study of video games and the study of sports have evolved over the past few years.
Although video games have been around for more than four decades, they have seldom been the concern of media scholars. Perhaps this is because for much of their existence, video games were not considered to be an artistically legitimate media form. Those media scholars who did show concern for video games focused on the effects of video games, specifically the negative effects they might have on children. 6 Although media effects scholars have continued this work, another type of video game scholar began to emerge about a decade ago. These were scholars trained in critical methods and cultural theory, and they were interested in integrating how video games operated as legitimate forms of social, political, and cultural expression. In particular, scholars interested in critical and cultural studies began to write and publish on video games, and they approached video games from a variety of perspectives. These studies have looked at how video games reflect other narrative forms, reflect cinema, and represent gender. 7
Video games began to attract these cultural scholars in part because video games became more complex. From the early technologically primitive and graphically abstract sports simulations, advancements in video game technology gradually developed better graphics and more complex narratives. It is important to note that video games, by and large, are computer programs and that video game consoles are basically computers. These consoles take digital information and use it to render images and movement on the video screen. Just as computers advanced to process more data and became more capable of handling audio and video, so too did video game consoles. Video games thus became more visually realistic and dynamic and more narratively complex. Consequently, these technological advances allow for games tha