Two of my favorite YouTube videos from the past year depict the destruction (by sledgehammer) of two newly-purchased popular video gaming consoles: the Playstation 3 (PS3) and the Nintendo Wii. Though the statement on the sledgehammer-wielding provocateurs' website states that the acts of destruction were intended as nothing more than entertainment for those who hate said consoles, they raise questions familiar to any fan studies scholar. Why do these objects mean so much to so many? Is console fandom something like other forms of media fandom? Is it akin to brand fandom, or something more like people's love/hate relationship with televisions?

One rather obvious antecedent to console zealotry is the Apple cult. In part, this is a cult of personality. If you believe Steve Jobs is particularly innovative, then you're more inclined to become an Apple adherent. I doubt that anyone bought a PS3 based on their adoration of Howard Stringer, and I doubt even more that most Wii owners have heard the name Satoru Iwata before. Its possible that Apple fans are loyal only to innovation itself, in which case they would abandon a well-established company in favor of a down-on-their-luck underdog like Nintendo. These consumers sense that underperforming companies have less to lose by doing something completely new, and the Nintendo Wii's new movement-based interface reinforces this belief.

All varieties of brand fandom are based on the images of the brand and the community around the brand [i]. The popular press certainly played a role in establishing the images of a goliath Sony and a back-from-the-dead Nintendo, reveling in the unexpectedly high sales of the Wii over the holiday season. We also might consider the differences between the two news stories linking both the PS3 and the Wii to fan deaths: a PS3 fan was [i]. The popular press certainly played a role in establishing the images of a goliath Sony and a back-from-the-dead Nintendo, reveling in the unexpectedly high sales of the Wii over the holiday season. We also might consider the differences between the two news stories linking both the PS3 and the Wii to fan deaths: a PS3 fan was shot outside of a store and robbed of his console (sadism), while a Wii fan hydrated herself to death in an attempt to win a console on a radio talk show (masochism).

We must also take into account the images promulgated by expensive ad campaigns launched by manufacturers. The more “value neutral” a consumer good is, the more it seems to cry out for advertising that explicitly associates the object with a certain set of values, one that does all the semiotic heavy lifting for us (for an example of this, check out this recent Chevy truck ad). The Chris-Cunningham-esque PS3 spots depict the de rigeur blank white space inhabited by a creepy baby doll and a sentient machine – no clips of the games necessary. The Wii's first ads show a couple of Asian men driving across the countryside in a tiny car playing Johnny Appleseed, bestowing superior Japanese technology upon American families that look strikingly similar to those featured in Atari's first ads 25 years ago. The problem is that the physicality of the Wii interface renders this kind of advertising inadequate. To know how great (or lousy) the Wii is, you need to use it, which may account for the proselytistic claims of Wii fans: “you NEED to play this!”

This brings me to a point of differentiation between console fandom and traditional media fandom: functionality. In addition to critiquing the iconography and narratives of video games, popular gaming criticism has long taken into account the various types and levels of interaction allowed by each game, typically referring to these attributes as “gameplay” or “playability”[ii]. With the advent (or perhaps the [ii]. With the advent (or perhaps the perfection) of a movement-detecting interface, the differences in gameplay now extend beyond the games to the consoles themselves. Might then a gamer be a fan (or anti-fan) of a particular mode of interaction: say, swinging a controller as if it were a sword? Granted, there's the “won't I look like a dork” factor that is sure to turn off many image-conscious teens, but I think that the fan culture surrounding the Wii may be an indication of a more fundamental link between functionality and fandom.

Until recently, the prohibitively high cost of game development has prevented developers from trying out new modes of gameplay on consumers. The same barrier to innovation is more evident at the console level, as these machines take years and billions of dollars to develop. As the cost of development continues to fall, game designers are beginning to explore the infinite array of modes of user-avatar interaction that the medium allows for. Each mode of interaction is no more inherently superior to another than each genre of film or each television series are to their counterparts.

Our minds work in different ways: some people are particularly good at puzzles, others are better at time-sensitive precision activities like car racing. These differences in cognitive traits and their influence on gaming abilities have been explored in studies of gender and gaming. Such studies are only relevant as long as we conceive of “gaming” as a monolithic activity, when in truth it is becoming more varied each year. The proliferation of new modes of interaction will allow everyone to find their favorite type of game. In order to ensure a heterogeneous gaming universe, we cannot dismiss certain modes as obsolete (as is the custom in all matters technological). Each console, like each game or each TV show, will have its fans.

Notes
[i]Citation: MacLarne, Carrie, “I'm with the Brand: the Consumer as Fan.” [i]Citation: MacLarne, Carrie, “I'm with the Brand: the Consumer as Fan.” Stay Free Magazine. Issue 15.

[ii]Indeed, the role of popular gaming criticism in establishing fanbases is worth considering. Does the New York Times' damning review of the PS3 do anything to the console's [ii]Indeed, the role of popular gaming criticism in establishing fanbases is worth considering. Does the New York Times' damning review of the PS3 do anything to the console's sales figures?

Image Credits:
1. PS3 vs. Wii
2. Mario Statue
3. Spielberg plays Wii
4. Wii Cosplay

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Ever since the Wachowski Brothers bowdlerized Baudrillard, the idea that we are living in a world made up entirely of simulations has become somewhat of a platitude. Rather than accept this extreme line of reasoning, I find it more fruitful (or at least more reassuring) to see some moments in our media-saturated lives as more real than others. In this world, we can still tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, though this hardly guarantees that we’ll prefer the real to the fake every time. That would explain the not-altogether-unpleasant sensation I get when another bit of so-called real life experience is replaced with a simulation which everyone happily and knowingly embraces as if it were real.

Such a moment occurred a month ago at The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a beloved local movie theater that hosts sing-along screenings of musicals and music videos. That evening’s entertainment consisted of a collection of music videos and filmed live performances from the late ’80s and early ’90s. As we took our seats, clips from the documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot played. So we began by laughing at individuals who, some seriously, some semi-seriously, proclaimed their undying love for metal and, more specifically, Judas Priest. I’m sure some of us shared this love. Our laughter was directed more at their outdated haircuts and the conspicuous lack of sleeved shirts than their sentiments.

Then came the videos. I never really gave much thought to what exactly I was performing while singing along to a song on the car stereo, but when surrounded by hundreds of other people singing the same words, it was hard not to think about audience reaction as performance. Was it a sort of mass karaoke, in which we all, on some level, imagined ourselves to be the performer? Were we performing the actions of an audience we once were, twenty years ago? Imagining that you are Axl Rose is (for most of us) so much of a stretch that it is difficult not to remain somewhat removed from this role. Imagining that we were part of another audience in another time, however, was quite easy, as it was a role not too far removed from what we were. One had to wonder: Did we forget that we weren’t watching a live performance? Did it matter to us?

At first, we seemed to move effortlessly between genuine appreciation and mocking (but perhaps affectionate) laughter at the painfully earnest performances from a time before irony invaded every aspect of art and life. In this respect, the Journey videos were especially remarkable. It is difficult to imagine how they might’ve been viewed sincerely. But something changed when the video for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” came on. We weren’t just having a laugh at videos we all remembered, which was fun in and of itself. I’ll be the first to admit that there were many factors that contributed to this transformation. By that time, people had had time to get sufficiently intoxicated. More important than that was the presence of hundreds of ostensibly like-minded people. The enjoyment came from the presence and performance of other spectators as much as, if not more than, the presence of the text/performer.

I thought back to the times I went to see shows at massive outdoor venues, too far away from the stage to see the performers, forced to watch their images on a giant screen. Was my experience at the Alamo really any different? If the actual performers were there, then we might have felt a little odd about combining our singing with laughter. In their absence, we could easily step back into our ironic stances and have a good laugh at what we were seeing and doing, or simply get on with our own lives and not worry about an actual performer or their feelings. This may or may not happen with cover bands. In those cases, it is hard to ignore the fact that these are real performers who probably have put their own creative material on the back burner to exploit the material of others.

I realized not only that so much of the joy that comes from a live performance is generated by the audience, but also that the concept of “live performance” may pertain as much to the audience as to the people on the stage. Film theorists are quick to point out that seeing a summer blockbuster in a crowded theater is just as communal as a rock concert. But when the audience is strongly discouraged from reacting aloud, from becoming part of the show, then their presence can easily be forgotten.

Several weeks after this at Austin’s annual South-by-Southwest music festival, I fought the tides of critics, A&R folks, and assorted hipsters to try to catch a glimpse of some of the 1,500 bands that were playing. Generally, I met with little success, but just seeing the utter desperation with which audiences pursued some bands, and other bands pursued audiences, got me thinking again about what makes a communal entertainment experience worthwhile. I’d never deny the power of a live performer to electrify a seen-it-all crowd of insiders, and there’s a certain spontaneity in such performances that recordings obviously cannot recreate. However, when audience reaction becomes part of an event, whether the performance is live or recorded, one gets the feeling (the illusion, perhaps) that anything can happen.

Link:
Sharon Strover on Mobile Privitization

Images
1. REM’s Michael Stipe
2. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

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Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas drove home a point that has been made repeatedly in the pages of Flow — the way we engage media is undergoing radical changes. The prospect of online distribution of programs created for TV has come to pass, with more portable video players and video downloading programs emerging to compete with the Video IPod and ITunes. These developments are likely to make the Nielsens, an already woefully inaccurate audience measurement system as detailed by Jason Mittell in the previous issue of Flow, even less accurate. It may no longer make sense to track an audience without looking across media — from television broadcasts, to video-on-demand, to downloads. But changing the method of audience measurement for TV programs won’t be easy. In fact, depending on whom you ask, it might not be possible at all.

What’s clear is that there is a lot at stake. As John Gertner noted in a New York Times article last April, changing the method of audience measurement could change the entire culture industry, an industry that, for reasons both economic and ideological, doesn’t like to be changed. Indeed, these statistics hold so much sway over those shaping the American collective consciousness that it’s easy to suspect their custodians of having something other than the accurate depiction of audience desire as their MO. However, if we adopt such a distrustful view of audience measurement, if any centralized system for the measurement of audience preference is inherently susceptible to corruption, then what would be the incentive to develop a more accurate system?

There is a certain amount of faith one must have to engage in the campaign for more accurate audience data. One has to acknowledge that what is being measured — the audience for certain programs — has social and political implications that go beyond dollars and cents. While every consumer decision made by citizens impacts these spheres, its easy to see how ratings for a progressive-minded talk show might be more indicative of its consumers’ values than, say, their decision to buy Crest toothpaste instead of Colgate. Creators, distributors, advertisers and audience researchers all have socio-political agendas of one sort or another. Nevertheless, they (particularly the distributors) are motivated foremost by profit, and if people are willing to pay for a certain program, or tolerate ten minutes of advertising to watch a show, then they would like to know about it. If it really is “all about the money,” then the networks would want to know exactly what the audience wants so that they don’t miss the boat on a series that ends up being a hit on DVD or, god forbid, another network.

We have to believe that while a totally accurate picture of audience desire may never be achievable, it is an ideal that can and should be aspired to, as much for the sake of the scholar seeking a greater knowledge of how individuals engage media as for the sake of the fan crusading to keep a soon-to-be-cancelled show from going under.

Assuming that the system is broken, and that it is worth fixing, is there anything outsiders like us can do to affect change? Individual arguments for a show’s potential, no matter how well founded or articulate, can only do so much. A financial catalyst is needed, and we might just have that in the form of a la carte availability of TV episodes courtesy of ITunes. If a show with horrible ratings gets downloaded enough times, the creators, distributors and advertisers will get the message — something is seriously wrong with the way audience desire is measured. The “tipping point” referred to by Derek Kompare in his response to Jason Mittell’s article may take this form.

Just how resistant is the current audience tracking system to change? Is this stubbornness due to an inability to keep up with new distribution technology? Is it part of a concerted attempt to marginalize certain values put forth in certain programs, or is it simply a case of a large system with many players that cannot change quickly? Perhaps we’ll never have totally accurate answers to any of these questions, but that doesn’t make the search for these answers any less worthwhile.

Image Credits:

1. Arbitron’s Portable People Meter

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This week, FLOW celebrates its one-year anniversary (or, if you prefer to avoid marital metaphors, our first birthday). The speed with which debates have evolved over this past year is quite encouraging. As we hoped, the mutability of the website allows us an opportunity to make the walls around and within media studies a bit more porous. There has been plenty of intelligent commentary from undergraduates, graduates and faculty alike, a trend we would like to see continue in our sophomore year.

This issue provides the wide range of tones, subjects and approaches that readers have come to expect of FLOW. Brian Ott examines the humor inherent in the (un)natural coupling of contemporary TV icons and millennia-old philosophers available in the recent “Popular Culture and Philosophy” series of books. Douglas Kellner returns to the pages of FLOW with another piece on spectacle and television news, taking an overview of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. As Kellner notes, it was remarkable to hear members of the mainstream finally begin to talk about race and class; perhaps equally remarkable to hear sustained criticism of the administration.

Class plays a role in the quick-fix tear-jerking reality drama of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as well. In his article, John McMurria highlights the differences between the single-family narrative of the show and the chronic, systemic problems that guarantee an unending stream of families in need of such help. Along with The Apprentice, EM:HE may be the first look at television after the shift from traditional 30-second spots to embedded advertising. Dan Leopard’s article suggests that an increased awareness of media might not mean looking closer at the television or computer screen currently in front of you as much as it means realizing just how many screens we look at each day without realizing it.

Walter Metz takes full advantage of what FLOW has to offer, in terms of readership and speed of publishing, by continuing the project of applying theory to a program that just aired this past week. But why stop at “current television?” Jonathan Gray examines the phenomenon of judging a show that hasn’t even aired yet, something that we’ve all engaged in but haven’t read much about. His provocative piece draws attention to a possible drifting apart of analyst and viewer/industry while introducing the concept of pre-decoding. This reconsideration of Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model reminds us that in order for canonical theories to remain vital, they must be challenged by new thinkers and applied to new circumstances. Your challenges, modifications and suggestions are most welcome.

Image Credits:

1. Happy Birthday!

Last week, I attended a screening of Dial M for Murder being shown at a 3-D film festival at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA. Any encounter with stereoscopic technology gets me thinking about the future of visual media — the present future as well as past futures. I imagine what it must’ve been like when motion pictures were new, or when people first saw a film with sound or color. I can quite easily remember the early days of video games — my feelings of nostalgia for that Atari 2600 my brother got for Christmas are embarrassingly strong. Then, most recently, there was the ascendance of the Internet, a medium that has had such an immediate, profound impact that it is difficult to imagine life without it. As the record shows, any predictions as to what the future of media might be are doomed to be ridiculously inaccurate (3-D hasn’t exactly conquered visual media.) However, in studying media, it seems impossible not to, on some level, make conjectures as to what the future of it will be and, ideally, have some say in this future.

After the movie, I debated the merits of 3-D with a friend of mine. We agreed that the technology is still imperfect. But, for the sake of argument, what if there was a version of 3-D cinema that managed to feel totally immersive without giving you a headache? Would we want that? The debate reminded me of some of the larger questions I have about the role of media in our lives — Is each step on the verisimilitude scale a step in the right direction? Do we value emotional realism over visual realism? If we could have a totally immersive media experience, would we want control, or would we want to just sit back and watch?

Of course, Dial M for Murder, or even the state-of-the-art The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D, are light years away from the Holodeck, but those issues of preference for control and predictability are already cropping up in online gaming environments. With the impending rise of HD television, we must ask if and why people are willing to spend thousands of dollars to get a crisper image on their TV screens. Does this little bit of verisimilitude matter that much?

While I’m of the mind that there is no aspect of media too trivial to warrant study, it’s nice to take a break from the myopia of the daily media events, and the short-term projects that we’re all working on, and take a step back to look at the larger picture, to ask the big questions about media and media education. In this issue of Flow, Sharon Ross offers some practical suggestions of ways to bridge the gap between cultural studies and political economic approaches, reminding us that it’s as important to be confronted with something you don’t think you will like at a conference as it is on the television. Brian Ott compares Fox News with The Daily Show, while Frederick Wasser looks at the connection between the narcotizing effects of television and Republican political dominance. Getting out of one’s home country can widen one’s conception of what television is. Jim McGuigan visits Australia and New Zealand and comments on regional and international television broadcasts appearing on television there. Guest Columnist Jane Feuer examines season finales in terms of narrative closure, contrasting the tidy endings of film with the sprawling arcs of television shows. Taking perhaps the furthest step back of all is John Hartley, who sees the fissure in media studies as a product of deeper differences between European and American cultures. We encourage you to take a step back from your everyday work and help us examine these “big pictures.”

Image Credits:
1. This Issue on Flow

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