For nearly twenty years, I’ve been told of a place just outside of Toronto described to me as a gamer’s paradise. “Playdium” has been a part of my life, that up until now, I haven’t had a chance to actually experience. It is a year-around entertainment center with a variety of arcade style games and attractions. After two decades of repeated rumblings about the arcade from friends, game store clerks, and forum users, I finally decided to visit this so called paradise. After my experience I can only describe it in the same way. It is the ultimate gaming utopia, and the perfect example of a center for my particular subculture. But is the true nature of culture equally applicable to this new media subculture we call gaming? In addition to providing a reflection on my experience at Playdium, my paper will also critically reflect upon the ways we understand, document, and define “culture”, while arguing that gaming does indeed fit this definition.
2. CULTURE
“One of the …show more content…
The author gives us three ways to understand the materiality of culture: actor-network theory, cultural studies, and material culture studies (Storey, 2015). After carefully reviewing all three approaches, I see that material cultural studies are the most productive path for critical thinking about my site and its contents. Interacting with the games at Playdium would not be possible without the careful aesthetic design choices behind each one. These include dimensions of graphics, music, animation, and more. For each second I spent playing, these images, what the course text calls material culture, influence and imprint my mind. Material culture involves various sensory features including sound, movement, and storytelling, all of which are stimulated when playing video games (Hasio, 2015). With entertainment centers like Playdium and other arcades, we can see that material culture has earned a fundamental place within video
2. CULTURE
“One of the …show more content…
The author gives us three ways to understand the materiality of culture: actor-network theory, cultural studies, and material culture studies (Storey, 2015). After carefully reviewing all three approaches, I see that material cultural studies are the most productive path for critical thinking about my site and its contents. Interacting with the games at Playdium would not be possible without the careful aesthetic design choices behind each one. These include dimensions of graphics, music, animation, and more. For each second I spent playing, these images, what the course text calls material culture, influence and imprint my mind. Material culture involves various sensory features including sound, movement, and storytelling, all of which are stimulated when playing video games (Hasio, 2015). With entertainment centers like Playdium and other arcades, we can see that material culture has earned a fundamental place within video