Xmas Task 1

TASK 1

In the beginning it starts off with a white blank background with text being scribbled out in black. There’s a person talking over whilst the text is being scribbled out whilst using provocative and abusive language. You hear him say “If you think your government sponsored brutality intimidates me, you clearly don’t know anything about Dragovich “. It fades in and we are revealed to a person on his knees and in a composition where he is the focal point. The person is bleeding heavily and there are bruises all over his face to connote this. A Close up shot is used on his face to reveal the brutality of his bruises and we soon realise that he is the person be interrogated. There is a person behind him who is an interrogator and due to the shot it connotes that you are playing in the point of view of another interrogator. He takes a breather and then says “I have nothing to gain by talking to you”. The interrogator that you are playing breaks a window, and then picks up a piece of glass. He then says “think about what you have to lose”. He then places the glass into his mouth whilst the person behind him chokes him ensuring the glass is in his mouth and doesn’t try to s pit it out. Two punches are thrown at him and the interrogator reiterates, “We can do this all day – we got plenty of windows”. The person being interrogated suddenly begins to choke and starts spitting and spewing out blood onto the floor. He says “I’m already a dead man” but then begins to spill showing how the Americans used violence to successfully interrogate him.
They are all Americans and quite easy to notice due to their accents and the way they look. The person interrogated is represented as a victim and therefore the audience empathize with him. The interrogators are represented negatively due to the violence and brutality used when interrogating him, however the interrogators are in fact not villains and however using this amount of violence and force for a good reason, although the representations argue the opposite. The representations are not fair portrayals of Americans as they are solely not known to be violent and brutal and does not reflect society. It does challenge society and however in some ways does re-enforce the extents some Americans may breach in order to gain important information.
The primary audience is for 13 to 25 year olds whereas the secondary audience is 25+. In some advertisements it is shown to be a diverse game as everyone is playing the game, both young and old with a variety of different jobs. The narrative is quite violent and brutal which creates suspense and drama towards the audience viewing the following scene. It creates a moral panic as it effects young audiences and encourages them that this behaviour is acceptable with society. Some scenes in other countries have been censored in order to protect children from being affected. The hypodermic needle passively injects the media with the portrayals within the game hence making the audience believe it is good to carry out these following actions. It injects the audience with the idea that war and violence is an enjoyable experience and misrepresentations of race, gender and ethnicity are the correct portrayals within the game.
The fact that the Institutions are based in the USA creates the idea of how Americans represent and stereotype society in a particular way. It also creates the idea that violent games come to the UK and affect audiences more than expected then what it does in the USA. The increase in violent games post 9/11 along with the many inclusions of Arab ethnicities gives the impression of how the actions of 9/11 have changed the way society in America view other races and ethnicities.

Watch 0.50 to 2.20

Violence Theories

Video Games + Violence

"One would have to conclude that video games have always contained a high degree of violence, but just now are the realism and gore levels catching up to the level of violence in games."

"The violent video games are also the more popular games on the market" (Schutte et al. 1988; Funk and Buchman 1996; Quittner 1999)

Social Learning Theory

Catharsis theory

The Psychological Effects of Violent Media on Children

"Children who view media violence are more likely to have increased feelings of hostility, decreased emotional response to the portrayal of violence and injury that lead to violent behavior through imitation."

Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses and Consequences

Theories of Violence in the Media

Computer Games, Violence and the Effects theory

Audience Theories

Hypodermic Needle Theory

- Passively intake or inject the mass media's portrayal and tend to believe it.

- Draws attention to power the media producers have.

- Injected Audience > Passive + Powerless

Audience are injected with the idea that war + violence is an enjoyable experience and the misrepresentations of race, gender and ethnicity are the correct portrayals within the video game.

The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences.
The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.
The Hypodermic Needle Theory is therefore an effects theory that contends viewers are passive, and directly affected by what they view; people accept the message they see without considering its merits. In that way media content is shot at the audience like a magic bullet, directly penetrating the viewer' mind.

“it is the process of creating shared meaning.”(J.Baran, Introduction to mass communication).

“It views audience as the passive receptors of virulent viruses produce by the media” (Starker, Evil influences: crusades against the mass media).

Cultivation Theory

- Different groups/audiences respond differently to the media put before them.

- Audiences gradually develop certain views about the world, some of which are 'false'.

"The mass media are controlled by people who are in power in society, and therefore tend to provide representations which uphold the status quo."

- Audiences gain knowledge about world from media, recognises important role media has in our lives.

- Encourages news > crime watch feeds perceptions that Britain's Crime rate is growing.

They emphasize the effects of television viewing on the attitudes rather than the behaviour of viewers. Heavy watching of television is seen as ‘cultivating’ attitudes which are more consistent with the world of television programmes than with the everyday world.

Watching television may tend to induce a general mindset about violence in the world, quite apart from any effects it might have in inducing violent behaviour.

Gerbner argues that the mass media cultivate attitudes and values which are already present in a culture: the media maintain and propagate these values amongst members of a culture, thus binding it together.

Gross considered that 'television is a cultural arm of the established industrial order and as such serves primarily to maintain, stabilize and reinforce rather than to alter, threaten or weaken conventional beliefs and behaviours' (1977, in Boyd- Barrett & Braham 1987, p. 100).

Hawkins and Pingree (1983)

References

Key publications

Boyd-Barrett, Oliver & Peter Braham (Eds.) (1987). Media, Knowledge & Power. London: Croom Helm.

Condry, John (1989). The Psychology of Television. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Dominick, Joseph R. (1990). The Dynamics of Mass Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Evra, Judith van (1990). Television and Child Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976a). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26, 172-199.

Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976b). The scary world of TV’s heavy viewer. Psychology Today, 10(4), 41-89.

Hawkins R.P & Pingree, S. (1983). Televisions influence on social reality. In: Wartella, E.,

Whitney, D. & Windahl, S. (Eds.) Mass Communication Review Yearbook, Vol 5. Beverley Hills CA: Sage.

Livingstone, S. (1990). Making Sense of Television. London: Pergamon.

McQuail, D. & Windahl, S. (1993). Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communication. London: Longman.

Stappers, J.G. (1984) De eigen aard van televisie; tien stellingen over cultivatie en culturele indicatoren.Massacommunicatie 12(5-6), 249-258.

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Media Magazine

1) Diploma – freedom to play: is online gaming hazardous to health?

"They have, according to critics, sucked the social life out of many of today’s teenagers."

"A large portion of today’s teenage generation spends much of its free time sitting in front of a computer screen shooting aliens, zombies or other teenagers sitting at another computer screen"

David Pinchen is studying the new Creative and Media Diploma at Long Road Sixth Form, Cambridge.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 28, April 2009.

2) Censorship – Debating the Issue

"Both films assume a degree of sophistication and intelligence on the part of the audience when interpreting the messages and values encoded in such graphic depictions. On the other hand, no director ever has complete control over how the representation of violence will be received by the audience."

Stephen Hill is Head of Media at The Burgate School and Sixth Form Centre in Fordingbridge, and also teaches at Bournemouth Media School. He is studying for a PhD on the Music Press.

First published in MediaMagazine 24, April 2008.

3) Studying videogames

"Some people believe that the violence portrayed in videogames is a primary cause for violent acts committed by children. They believe that games make violence socially acceptable. They argue that children replicate the behaviour they view."

4) Why should we study digital games?

"There are also those who are more concerned by the notion that games negatively affect their users. Games have been vilified in the popular press for their supposed violence. Much of the apparent evidence for the link is founded on poorly conceived or simplistic research methods, generally combined with a very narrow understanding of what constitutes play, or a game, or violence. Digital games are accountable for their content, just as any other form of media must be. But, as yet, there is no compelling reason to single games out as having a greater ‘influence’ than television, for example."

Andrew Burn, Diane Carr and Gareth Schott

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 5, September 2003

5) Categories of violence

"There is a mechanism, usually called ‘identification’, which makes viewers of ‘violence’ vulnerable to it – such that it thereby becomes a ‘message’ by which they are invaded and persuaded."

"Violence is a unit of meaning that can be abstracted from occasions and modes of occurrence, and measured – with the correspondent assumption that the more violence there is, the greater its potential for influence."

Martin Barker

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 1, September 2002

6) Diploma – the c-word: censoring the media?

"Many people use the games as a way to tune out of the real world and if they want to steal a car, they steal a car in-game instead of in the real world. In could be argued, therefore, that the game stops people breaking the law, although ironically many adults believe that such games encourage kids to steal cars and argue that the games should be banned. The amazingly realistic graphics that some of the newer games have seem to fuel such worries about their impact on young people."

Tim Hodson is studying the new Creative and Media Diploma at Long Road Sixth Form, Cambridge.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 28, April 2009.

7) Games in the classroom – whatever next?

"Games have narratives, and as the player moves through the levels or stages, s/he experiences the game as a character. In this sense this is a unique kind of text because, as you take on the character you are playing, you ‘become’ a representation. We could get into all kinds of intellectualising here about existential postmodern identities."

Julian McDougall

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 6, December 2003

8) Spread the word / Viral and sub-viral

9) Capture the objective: postmodernism, creativity and Call of Duty

From MediaMagazine 33, September 2010. Available now as a PDF download and in the archive Creativity, Videogames, Postmodernism, Theory, A2, Popular culture ???

10) What are you playing at? – Representations of gender, race and nationality in videogames

"The main task for any student is to challenge this. You must develop a critical faculty that questions and probes how and why this ‘misrepresentation’ occurs. As you do this, the benchmark for most media study will always hold true – what is the ‘message’ behind the medium?"

Patrick Toland

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 7, February 2004

Scholar Articles

Invading your hearts and minds" Call of Duty and the (Re) writing of Militarism in U.S. digital games and popular culture
"Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to show how these games contain images and narratives that resonate with and reinforce a tabloid imaginary of post 9/11 geopolitics, glorify military power and elicit consent for the idea that state violence and wars are inevitable"

The Appeal of Violent Video Games to Lower Educated Aggressive Adolescent Boys from Two Countries
“In general, boys were most attracted to violent video games. Boys that scored higher in trait aggressiveness and lower in empathy were especially attracted to violent games and spent more time playing video games than did boys lower in trait aggressiveness.”

Academic study says violent games reduce stress

The Motivating Role of Violence in Video Games
Studies also showed that players high in trait aggression were more likely to prefer or value games with violent contents, even though violent contents did not reliably enhance their game enjoyment or immersion.

The Hitman Study
Results do not support a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior, but do suggest that violent games reduce depression and hostile feelings in players through mood management.

Playing with Race: The Ethics of Racialized Representations in E-Games
“Reinforcing the racism that justifies domination and mass killing becomes a key part of the authenticity of historically accurate war gaming.”

Worlds of affect: virtual geographies of video games
“First, there are the representational issues concerning the worlds depicted in video games, such as those portraying hyper sexualized women or Orientalist depictions of Arab enemies. We suggest, however, that these cultural, sexual, and political representations are not the only forces doing work on the player within the virtual world of a video game.”