Consuming Sport Crawford, Garry
2004, 20040603, 2004-07-30
eBook
Consuming Sport offers a detailed consideration of how sport is experienced and engaged with in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of its followers. It examines the processes ...of becoming a sport fan, and the social and moral career that supporters follow as their involvement develops over a life-course.
The book argues that while for many people sport matters, for many more, it does not. Though for some sport is significant in shaping their social and cultural identity, it is often consumed and experienced by others in quite mundane and everyday ways, through the media images that surround us, conversations overheard and in the clothing of people we pass by.
As well as developing a new theory of sport fandom the book links this discussion to wider debates on audiences, fan cultures and consumer practices. The text argues that for far too long consideration of sport fans has focused on exceptional forms of support ignoring the myriad of ways in which sport can be experienced and consumed in everyday life.
The concept of “fun” is widely used within the game design and game studies literature, and is frequently highlighted as a key component of good game design, as well as a key factor in why people ...play games. However, it is a term rarely unpacked, and fun in video games remains relatively underresearched, certainly in comparison to other associated terms such as “play.” This article therefore provides a much-needed sociological exploration of a term at the center of games design and studies, and moreover, argues, that doing so allows us to explore a range of important and related topics, such as the changing relationship between work and leisure and the blurring of fun and no-fun boundaries, as well as enabling us to delineate between often interchangeably used terms, such as happiness, enjoyment, and pleasure.
In recent years, the idea of player control, or agency, has become central and explicit in certain video games and genres, affecting many debates concerning the study or definitions of video games. ...In spite of this, the notion of agency in video games has been rarely explicitly explored or defined in relation to its sociological and political dimensions. Hence, drawing on actor–network theory, (neo-)Foucauldian governmentality studies, and empirical data gathered over a 3-year period, this article expands to our understanding of video game player agency and, moreover, argues that video games provide an important example and perspective to consider the contemporary nature and political basis of agency.
From the very first days of digital gaming, sport-themed videogames have been a constant and ever-popular presence. However, compared with many other genres of games, sports-themed videogames have ...remained relatively underresearched. Using the case of “sports videogames,” this article advocates a critical and located approach to understanding videogames and gameplay. Unlike many existing theorizations of gameplay, such as the “magic circle,” which theorize play as a break from ordinary life, this article argues for a consideration of play as a continuation of “the control of the established order.” It argues that many videogames, and in particular sports videogames, can be understood as “themed” spaces which share similarities to other themed locations, such as fast-food restaurants and theme parks. These are “nonplaces” themed to provide a sense of individuality, control, and escape in a society that increasingly offers none.
Video Gamers Crawford, Garry
2012, 20110804, 2011, 2011-08-04
eBook
Video gaming is economically, educationally, culturally, socially and theoretically important, and has, in a relatively short period of time, firmly cemented its place within contemporary life. It is ...fair to say, however, that the majority of research to date has focused most specifically on either the video games themselves, or the direct engagement of gamers with a specific piece of game technology.
In contrast, Video Gamers is the first book to explicitly and comprehensively address how digital games are engaged with and experienced in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of those who play them. In doing so, the book provides a key introduction to the study of gamers and the games they play, whilst also reflecting on the current debates and literatures surrounding gaming practices.
As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication have presented new challenges and opportunities for the field of football studies. In turn, researchers ...active across the social sciences and beyond have responded and are beginning to carve out a new field of study - digital football studies. In the absence of any concentrated review of this field, the purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to critically revisit previous 'waves' of football studies scholarship; (2) to identify themes in current digital football studies scholarship and identify areas for future study; and (3) to begin to map out some theoretical and conceptual traditions that might better equip scholarly enterprises for the study of football, and by association leisure and sport, in the (hyper)digital moment. We also postulate the establishment of digital football studies as a collective enterprise will be especially important for a post-Covid-19 globe given the rapid acceleration towards digital during the pandemic. To this end, we argue that leisure and football studies must develop empirically, methodologically, and theoretically to better capture the nature of (hyper)digitalised societies and the ways audiences are playing with, and shifting, the boundaries and possibilities for football and leisure.
The first full length dictionary of leisure studies, offering a critical survey of this increasingly popular and interdisciplinary field and incisive overviews of the key figures whose work exercises ...the most powerful influence on leisure studies today.
Online Gaming in Context Crawford, Garry; Gosling, Victoria K; Light, Ben
2011, 20130301, 2011-03-31, 2013-03-01, Letnik:
56
eBook
There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and ...pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet.
This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.
Video gaming is often understood and narrated as an ‘experience’, and we would suggest that this is particularly notable with sports-themed video games. However, we would argue that how the game ...experience is curated and consumed, and how this relates to wider social process and forces, is rarely given any detailed consideration within the existing game research literature. Hence, this article explores how game experiences can be understood and articulated around four key themes. First, we begin with the argument that video games connect with, but also lead, a wider social trend: understanding social reality as a set of designed experiences. The real is progressively becoming a repository of technologically mediated experiences, and the logic of video games is anticipating this process. Second, we suggest video games are translations of phenomenological worlds: When successful, key aspects of the meaning of things remain similar even as one moves between spaces, domains, mediums and platforms. Developers often seek to bring others’ experiences into a game environment, such as translating the geography and mechanisms of sporting locations and competitions into a game environment. Third, following this translation of meaning across domains, gamers often narrate their encounters with video games as they would with any other experience, such as winning the Champions League in Football Manager becomes recounted by gamers like any other achievement. Fourth, video games are interactive and explicit bodily experiences because they must be enacted in order to exist.
This paper explores the contemporary nature of association football consumption. In particular, we argue that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic reveals the contemporary and particular nature of the ...relationship between football and its supporters, which is increasingly focused on the consumption of themed digital participatory experiences. During this pandemic, what fans missed was not only live football, but also the sporting ‘experience’ and the opportunities for participation that this provides. Hence, here we saw fans, clubs and media providers employing new digital technologies to create themed experiences that facilitated (and mediated) participation and interaction. Following Žižek (2014), we suggest that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic can be understood as a global mega event that creates a seismic, reality alerting schism, whose aftermath requires new ontologies and theories. Our response is to utilise a number of key and illustrative examples and to offer a new synthesis of theories and literatures, most notably, on the experience society, theming, participatory culture, neoliberalism and digital culture. This new context and (re)combination of theories then provides a new, and essential, perspective that reveals a great deal about the contemporary nature of the sport, what fans buy into, and also, how this may change post pandemic.
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