Marshall McLuhan, Video Games and the Secret Life of Walter Mitty

My co-author has recently presented our paper on video games at the conference Northeastern Association of Business, Economics and Technology (18-19 Oct). The paper is an exploration on games as services and build on our 2004 paper at the Other Player conference.

“This paper offers a conceptualization on the nature of games as a customer offering through classical media considerations. That is, in his seminal treatise on the media, Marshall McLuhan asserted that “The medium is the message.” We have at hand new technology and a new medium – video games. To get some feeling of how gamers extend themselves, we turn to two classics, James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash for some insight. There is an indication that life may indeed be imitating art. In other words, video games provide a significant advancement from a pre-existing situation in a manner analogous to the way Gutenberg’s printing press changed lives through books. Literature has long presented possibilities in which one can be immersed. Through video games, and virtual worlds, this potential has been taken to new heights. According to McLuhan’s treatise they may be providing even greater advances in the way we adapt in the future.”

As usual it’s avalible on academia.edu

Swedish Game Conference

Next week, Oct. 5-6, the Game Incubator in Skövde are hosting Swedish Game Conference. The event has loads of activities and speakers that could make this a very interesting two days. For example listening to Nolan Bushnell will be very interesting! I will also step up to the challenge and add bits and pices of smart things to say to this crowd.

Playing the Game: Leveraging artistic freedom, technical demand and financial pressure in video game development

Next week I was supposed to have presented a paper at the Nordic Academy of Management conference. Unfortunately I will not have the possibility to attend and present the paper, or interact with my fellow colleagues at this conference. But, the article is avalible at academia (as most of my other texts) for those of you interested in reading it.

The article is an exploration of the research project that Ulf Sandqvist and I have embarked upon ,studying leadership in the video game industry. This industry seem to be wedged between technical possibilities, artistic dreams and financial demands. Not that very far from other cultural industries today.

Carry on! Understanding Creativity Through Popular Culture

This week I am participating at the conference SCOS in Istanbul. This is actually the first time I am attending this conference, and the first time I visit Istanbul – the good things were lined up one might say. But, most importantly Alexander Styhre and I have an article that is appropriate to present in that forum.

Carry on! Understanding Creativity Through Popular Culture – this is an article I’ve been wanting to write since I saw the reality show Project Runway. This is a show about making garments, under very special conditions one might say. One very dominant aspect of that show is the concept of creativity. This article takes on the task of discussing how creativity is understood and communicated throughout the show. Here we make use of Bourdieu and argue that creativity is an outcome of relating to the field and its borders, with the criteria: art, craft and commerce.

Zackariasson, Peter and Styhre, Alexander (2011). Carry on! Understanding Creativity Through Popular Culture. SCOS, Istanbul 14-17 July.

Culture Jamming in the Digital Space

Next week I am presenting at a European Science Foundation workshop in Leuven, Begium. The workshop is called Consuming the Illegal: Situating Digital Piracy in Everyday Experience. “There has been a tendency in academic work on piracy to view piracy as a product of existing contexts (e.g. legislative, criminal, behavioural, business and so forth) rather than focusing on piracy as a practice and adopting a bottom up approach. Little work has yet approached piracy from an ethically neutral perspective and explored it through established literatures on routine consumption, everyday practice, and consumer engagement with cultural media. Instead it has adopted a priori assumptions that consumers of pirated goods are „deviant‟, „unethical‟ or demonstrate consumer „misbehaviour‟.”

The aim of my presentation is to describe how culture jamming is a method for challenging symbolic representation in public spaces. The impact of digital spaces, and participation in these, makes culture jamming a valuable counter force in the dominance of corporate interests.

Marketing video games in the cultural economy

In the end of this week I am presenting a conference paper on video games and marketing at the Internation Market Trends Conference in Paris. Paris is always nice and I’m proud to still pass as a young scholar

Abstract
Following in the wake of Internet technologies the video game industry is today transforming games to service outlets and promotional tools. Games are no longer products that are sold on a point of sale setup; instead developers offer the service to subscribe to games. In the midst of this transformation developers are also making use of the interactivity enabled by Internet technologies and crafts games as a sphere for promotion, a place for other organizations to display their products or services.

Edited book on the video game industry to be published in 2012

In 2012 we will published an edited book on the video game industry (eds. Peter Zackariasson and Timothy L. Wilson). The book will be published in the Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organizations, and Technology series.

This book is an edited collection of academic contributions on the video game industry. Generally speaking, there will be 17 or 18 chapters in the text. Each of these chapters will be written by an individual or individuals who have done serious research in this relatively young, but growing area. The chapters will be grouped in four parts that capture the essence of the industry. Individual chapters will integrate aspects of history, human behavior, technology, business and economics. Part I will describe the nature of the industry as it exists today and aspects of interrelationships in it. Part II will relate to the industry as it has arisen in different parts of the world. Part III reflects the medium itself, which provides a unique platform for entertainment and potential for future development. Part IV extends observations into the future. Basically, the book is positioned to describe and define video games as their own special medium. They are not pinball from which they grew, nor movies which they sometimes resemble. They are a unique form of entertainment based on meaningful interactions between individuals and machine across a growing sector of the population. The need that this book meets is that it will provide a reference foundation for individuals seriously interested in the industry at the academic level. Presently we know of few other books that meet this need. Consequently, we expect papers in it to be widely quoted in subsequent research and also the book itself will serve as a reference in curricula associated with video game development.

The aim of this book is to provide a platform for the research on the videogame industry to draw a coherent and informative picture of this industry. Previously this has been done sparsely through conference papers, research articles and popular science books. Although the study of this industry is still stigmatized as frivolous and ‘only’ game oriented, those of us who grew up with video games are changing things, especially research agendas, the acceptance of studies and their interpretation.

Research Project on Leadership in the Cultural Industry

Ulf Sandqvist and I have just recieved funding for a three year project on leadership in the cultural industry, from FAS. In this project we will study the video game industry, an industry defined by technical competence, artistic creation and profit. Se below for a Swedish summary.

The Dematerialisation and Democratisation of Currencies

This week Ulf Sandqvist and I will be presenting a paper on the IR11.0 conference in Gothenburg. It’s the first time either of us will be presenting at that conference. But, plenty of interesting papers and people. Should be fun!

Ulf Sandqvist and Peter Zackariasson (2010). The Dematerialisation and Democratisation of Currencies: a historical description of currencies and how the physical has been replaced with the virtual. Internet Research 11.0, 21-23 October, Gothenburg Sweden.

Abstract:

Most of us who are participating in virtual worlds are familiar with the economics of these worlds. Selling and buying what we need in order to sustain out virtual presence is a part of the daily life. As participants, and sometimes as trolls or elves, money and barter has been ascribed a significant part of this. The result has been that we interact with virtual marketplaces, just as we interact with every other aspect of our virtual lives. As most of the actions in the real world are economised, the tendency to evaluate relationships and objects from an economic perspective, the threshold to adapt to a virtual market is quite low. Just like many other structures we find in the real world, economy seems to make sense to us and are many times taken for granted.

Conference paper on the development of games and ANT

Next week I will present a conference paper at the EASST conference in Trento, Italy. The paper is an exploration of the material from my thesis, about building understanding of game development using an ANT vocabulary.

Zackariasson, Peter (2010). It’s Anarchy! Translating Beliefs and Desires into Prescriptions for Participation in an online game. EASST 010, September 2-4, Trento.

Abstract