Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (review)

Actually, what drew me to this book was the subtitle, as it struck me as a tremendously important issue. When I grasped that the main title referred to a study of video games, I was a bit disappointed, having little personal interest in the things since my son outgrew them. But if I was right on the former, I was wrong regarding the latter. Digital Play is an important book, on both levels.

First, because in four decades, 'the digital game [has been] transformed from the whimsical invention of bored Pentagon researchers, computer science graduate students, and nuclear research engineers into the fastest-expanding sector of the entertainment industry.' In 1999, the interactive game industry's revenues were over $8.9 billion, compared to the US movie industry box office of $7.3 billion. Interactive games, the authors note, span a growing range of new technological platforms, from home video game consoles to virtual reality theme parks, not to mention SMSes on cell phones. And supposedly over 60 per cent of Americans, or some 145 million people, play interactive games on a regular basis.

Secondly, and despite all the hype about both new media and new economies, it is the Nintendos, Segas, and Sonys of this world that, according to even critics of so-called 'digital capitalism,' are the first companies to have created a successful and global multimedia product market. If so, then perhaps Alvin Toffler was right when he talked in the 1980s of the coming of 'the prosumer' (as opposed to the consumer). Or digerati Martyn Lee when he terms the interactive game 'the ideal commodity.'

Why this might or might not be the case is of course the burden of the present book, and I'll get to their main argument briefly. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Puiter argue in their introduction for a (well-founded) scepticism regarding the long-proferred promises that technologies - and communication technologies in particular - will free us from toil and make us better human beings. Such scepticism is all to the good, but one counter is that this is just old-fogeyism and that 'the kids' themselves have understood the real, liberatory potential of 'world creation' where reality is the accomplishment of its participants. And this is a possibility that our authors are prepared to take on. Part of the problem is that the 'toolkit' for the usual thinking about many of these issues in media studies is one of its crankiest branches, the Marxist-derived 'political economy' of communication approach. Here, to exaggerate just a bit, it's all a big capitalist conspiracy and all the dice are always already loaded: Leonard Cohen, no political economist but a pretty good poet, put it best in his song, 'Everybody Knows.'

As our authors recognize, a 'conspiratorial' approach won't really do. An improved analytical model of understanding interactivity is called for, that they term the 'three circuits,' which combines three streams in communications or media studies (political economy, media texts and audiences, and institutional decisions). Or, to hugely simplify matters, the recognition that one trait that makes human beings human is that they like to 'play' - with words, with toys, games, whatever. And it is precisely in their conception of the perfectability of 'playability' that Kline et al not only begin to get at what's preoccupying about the enormous increase in the interactive game business, and in turn its transformation of the entire business, namely, the fusion of technology, culture and marketing.

Without going into their three-circuits model at any length (but see especially their chapter 2), suffice it simply to say that it offers a dynamic model of the 'convergence of myth, machines and markets.' Thus, through an analytical model of how technology, markets, and cultures intersect, historical analysis of the rise of the interactive game industry, and case studies and interviews, they identify three major sets of contradictions...