Video games

One place you may like to go for a holiday is the video game capital, Japan. Japan is the place in which Nintendo was created and has created a series of game that people love.  Nintendo has had the ability to use media culture to promote domains of participation. Personally I am not a gamer and I do not understand a lot about games, the only games I really play is Tetris and Candy Crush. Perhaps when going on a holiday I should have been playing games to make the time go faster.  As such this area is not very clear to me. 

However Raessen distinguishes between three different game reading strategies the ‘‘decoder-receiver’’ can use to interpret texts; the ‘‘dominant-hegemonic or preferred reading,’’ the ‘‘negotiated reading,’’ and the ‘‘oppositional reading.’’ Respectively, these strategies point out the possibility to read a text according to the dominant ideology, the possibility to negotiate this dominant ideology and to varying degrees mix adaptive elements with oppositional elements, and the possibility to go against the dominant ideology and come up with a purely oppositional reading. Through: interpretation, reconfiguration, and construction (Raessens, J. 2005 p. 373-374)    

People have the ability to interpret things differently. As such, through media culture we can encode and decode information differently. For example, when playing video games I have the ability to see the game in my own point of view. As such when playing a game like ‘Crash Bandicoot’ I have the ability to determine and control the direction of the game. (Raessens, J. 2005 p. 374-376)   

Reconfiguration allows for people to explore the unknown and give gamers different possibilities. People have the ability to make choices in what happens within the game and guide through the processes the game is going. This is especially evident in the game ‘The Sims.’ Gamers have the ability to choose what the sim does for a job, how their house is set up, who they are friends with and how they live their lives. (Raessens, J. 2005 p. 378-379)   

Construction allows for game designers to have the ability to add new elements or modify existing elements of the game. For example, there are heaps of different Mario Brother’s games. Each of them with similar concepts or the same characters but doing something different likes car racing or playing Olympic games.  (Raessens, J. 2005 p. 378-379)   

Raessens, J. 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388