Socializing Gamers - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 20

1 SocializingGamers
Finding myself alone in a nearly destroyed train car, I notice the blood
oozing out of my gut. The train shakes and I am left desperately hanging
onto a railing—the only thing keeping me from plummeting into the chasm
lurking below.
These two sentences could describe many things, but in this case they
depict some of the earliest moments of a player's experience with Uncharted
2: Among Thieves . However, players could have also fi rst encountered the
game in a number of other ways. They may have carefully tracked informa-
tion and news about the highly anticipated sequel to Uncharted through a
variety of dif erent gaming publications. They may have heard about the
game from friends, perhaps even watching someone else play the game
before they picked up a controller. Perhaps they saw the commercial Sony
ran to promote the game where a twentysomething male 'asks' Sony's “VP
of Big Action Moments” what to do when his girlfriend wants to watch
the Uncharted 2 'movie' every night. 1 These moments are elements of the
words, design, and play of video games that socialize players into a certain
mode of thinking about what Uncharted 2 is and how it should be experi-
enced. By introducing an audience to what the game 'is' these ef orts form
the context for the application of wordplay, constructing how games are
played and how they are embodied as cultural products.
Starting with the specifi c elements of games themselves and moving out-
ward into media like commercials, game reviews, and game walkthroughs,
game design and external media construct preferred means by which peo-
ple think about video games. Players are routinely educated about how
to properly play a game, sometimes with an introductory tutorial or an
instruction booklet and occasionally with relatively little instruction at all.
All of these elements interpolate people into gaming, potentially on very
specifi c terms, as in the case of the Uncharted commercial where the fairly
well-of white, male, twentysomething is the one playing, and his attrac-
tive, popcorn-making girlfriend still believes the game is a movie.
In addition to the limited introduction into particular games, these ef orts
to socialize also take on a larger meaning because what it means to play
games changes. Certain design elements are normalized over time, like the
health system in Uncharted 2 or the questing system in World of Warcraft . 3
These normalizations socialize gamers into games by leading them to have