Popular Culture

I attended an invited panel session at CRPP today entitled: Popular Culture and Education is Asia. Panel included Peter Demerath (University of Minnesota), Zawawi Ibrahim (University Malaya) and Yoshitaka Mori (Tokyo University of the Arts).

What I take away for my research are these questions:

From Demerath

1. MMOG is a playground that attracts players from all nooks and corners of the world. Various culture and practices emerge when people of all background meet and interact. Players become "cultural innovators" whose identities emerge from the negotiation and "orchestration" of competing discourses and social structures.

Beyond MMOG, what are the multiple networks that have "educational effects" on players' identity development?

How is the mass culture associated with globalising era, consumerism and individual freedom mediate players' identity development?

What kind of cultural resources players draw on to make powerful moral judgment about appropriate selves?

How players' identities impact how they "read" and what they take away from playing?

How to establish players' critical media and digital literacy? How do they learn these? And how they impact how players "read" and what they take away from playing?

From Zawawi

2. Cosplay is one of the emerging popular culture associated with media and videogames that transcend beyond game environment into the real world. Granado Espada too is a big hit with players for its baroque period costumes. I wonder what motivate players to engage in cosplay and how immersing in this culture (whether they are participants or just observers) impact how they "read" and what they take away from playing.

From Mori

3. When popular icon in television or videogame crosses into the realm of players' everyday life (Mori used the example of Doremon who makes an appearance in textbooks and other print materials), how would players read this development?

Do they see it to mean that the television programme or videogame associated with the popular icon is accepted by society as safe and good?

How would this perception impact how they "read" and what they take away from playing?

Granado Espada is the first and so far the only MMOG recommended to be used in Singapore Schools. While it has yet to make an appearance in the curriculum hours, only find solace in after-school activities, still what does it mean to players when they can play GE in school.

Another day to go for the conference tomorrow. I hope to take away as many probing questions for my research as possible.

Media and societal violence: Identifying the two camps on the debate

The second discussion highlighted by Terra Nova in respond to a never-ending fascination by some quarters to link media with violence in society was also started by Edward Castronova. Castronova provides a scathing attack on the authors of a paper "The Effect of Videogame Violence on Physiological desensitization to Real-World Violence" (see left).

Now I have not read the paper yet but Castronova's review brought to my attention the individuals from the two polarized camps on this issue. I am familiar with works of people in Castronova's camp but not that of Carnagey, Anderson and Bushman. I need to be familiar with their works, how their works are cited and who cited them , and also critics of their works. I need to explore more of such works as they will be useful for my literature review and help extend the discussion of my research topic from psychological perspective.

How teens' experimentation with identities affects how they read game?

Henry Jenkins shares an autobiography of one of his students reflecting on her journey and engagement with popular media during her teens. The post reminds me that I too did collect pictures on my bedroom wall and in my scrapbook. Those pictures are pictures of soccer teams and players. I remember those collections meant a lot to me then and I had to save before I could afford to buy soccer magazines from sundry shops where they had pull out centre piece that featured a famous players or soccer teams competing in the English Division One, equivalent to today's EPL. I drew pictures of soccer players and paste them onto the cover of my school text books. Back then, I aspired to be like them, most importantly to be like my all time favourite player, Ian Rush. While I play nowhere near Ian Rush, I remember fondly calling myself as him when I got together for a game of soccer or even when I hanged out with friends. I agree that I was experimenting with identities back then and media facilitated that.

Jenkins' post alerts me to the influence of age factor on how players "read" games. Teenage is a period of time where teens explore their subjectivity and experiment with many identities while navigating their way in searching of meaning to their existence and their relation to the social environment around them. Hence, MMOGs can be seen as laboratories to experiment with identities and how this experimentation mediates how they "read" and take away from playing MMOGs.