Abstract
Based on the critical discourse analysis, this paper will conceptualize games as interdiscourse. The entanglement of games with expert knowledge by means of special discourse is essential to constitute their dimension of meaning. In this view, the analysis of knowledge within the game is a breakdown of its manner of presentation, its course of action, and its implementation in the media. The chapter presents how in current construction and management simulation games like Zoo Tycoon knowledge are negotiated within the game. The knowledge presented and circulated in this type of game is strongly multilayered and is not always playful at first sight.
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Notes
- 1.
The mention of the term “mass communication” should not be misunderstood as an argument to conceptualize video games as objects that can be described by (simplistic) terms of taxonomical, typological, or distinct forms of order. On the contrary, my conceptualization of video games tends to an understanding of games as unspecific forms of a materialization of meaning, knowledge, and power, which are part of a highly dynamic, complex, and (in its hierarchical structure) unsorted circulation of articulations, actions, and underlying forms of social knowledge. To sharpen this argument, there is no consistent definition for “the video game”: Every single medial articulation has to be described in its own specific form. There are not many criteria shared between Space Invaders played on an Atari 1040 and an online session of World of Warcraft.
- 2.
Such a conceptualization of media refers back to a metaphysical understanding of mediality, as it is, for example, presented by Krämer (2008) as well as in poststructuralist or cultural studies-based theories.
- 3.
Toward the problem of an extended economy of games, see Nohr (2008, 217–230).
- 4.
- 5.
See www.strategiespielen.de (accessed November 22, 2010).
- 6.
A concentration on the topic of “knowledge” seems to be currently reasonable because the idea of knowledge as a form of “transportable” and “structured” meaning is not only a central idea of philosophy, pedagogy, or linguistics – it is also one key argument in the public discussion about how video games affect us. The question of the agency of a video game is most often a question about what this game “teaches” its player.
- 7.
By “enunciation,” I mean the production of a position of speaking that cannot be put on the level of an ideal subject but rather on the level of an abstract instance that tends to be invisible. Quite simply put that means that one cannot reasonably talk about the position of an author in the process of the production of video games based on division of labor.
- 8.
The theory of discursive coupling emanates from the “classic” definition of discourse (referring back to the work of Michel Foucault): Thus, a discourse is “a specifically-historic and special, regulated formation of propositions […] that are allocated to a specific and special thematic field” (Link 1998, 50–51; author’s translation). Discourses can be understood as articulating practices that “do not represent social circumstances passively but constitute and organize them as a flow of social knowledge through time” (Jäger 2004, 23; author’s translation). A discourse is therefore to be understood as a “somehow” regulated link or formation of utterances. The term “utterances” does not mean description, grammatical sentences, or speech acts, but the entirely individualized, contingent, anonymous, pure, and tight materiality of something “really” said at a certain time and in a certain place.
- 9.
A differentiation between denotation and connotation is an idealized and reductive form of description. I use these terms in a very open sense: Denotation should point to the use and interpretation of a symbolic form beyond a specific situation – the fundamental, “lexical” meaning of a word. Connotation means the contextual (intra- and intersubjective) meaning, association, or paratextuality, for example – the negotiated meaning of a word. But such a division is unsustainable in a narrower sense of symbolic logic (see Winkler 1989). Also such a clear division is more or less senseless in linkage to a concept of discourse, which marginalizes the idea of the possibility of a pure subjective production of any kind of denotative meaning or knowledge: All meaning is produced through and with intersubjective discourses and dispositives. The use of this term is not driven by the search for a dichotomic conception but as a fuzzy description. Denotation is an innuendo of the institutions of power, connotation a promise by the discourses itself.
- 10.
James Gee (2000) argues analogically (even though with a totally different theoretical-analytical motive) when he declines the essential effects of video games in a way that makes the player always to “active problem solvers.”
- 11.
Concerning the key-medial functions of games and tendencies of naturalization (see Neitzel et al. 2009).
- 12.
And if you want to get really analytical about CDA – your analysis will never stop, and it will never be objective. Because of the highly dynamic structure of discourses, the results of a media discourse analysis will be outdated the moment you write them down. And they cannot be objective in any sense, because you as a researcher are part of the discursive system, you are analyzing.
- 13.
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Nohr, R.F. (2012). Free Market Economy and Dino Crisis: The Production and Circulation of Knowledge in Strategy Games. In: Fromme, J., Unger, A. (eds) Computer Games and New Media Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2777-9_8
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