Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual by Kiri Miller

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By Kiri Miller

Why do not Guitar Hero gamers simply choose up genuine guitars? What occurs while hundreds of thousands of individuals play the function of a tender black gang member in Grand robbery car: San Andreas? How are YouTube-based song classes altering the character of novice musicianship? This publication is ready play, functionality, and participatory tradition within the electronic age. Miller indicates how games and social media are bridging digital and visceral event, developing dispersed groups who forge significant connections by way of "playing alongside" with pop culture. Playing Along finds how electronic media are delivered to endure within the transmission of embodied wisdom: how a Grand robbery Auto participant makes use of a digital radio to listen to together with her avatar's ears; how a Guitar Hero participant channels the adventure of a reside rock performer; and the way a starting guitar scholar interprets a two-dimensional, pre-recorded on-line tune lesson into third-dimensional actual perform and an intimate dating with a far off instructor. via a chain of attractive ethnographic case reviews, Miller demonstrates that our daily reviews with interactive electronic media are steadily remodeling our realizing of musicality, creativity, play, and participation.

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Theorists of virtuality too often assume that our actual bodies are irrelevant to contemporary techno-mediated life. As Steve Dixon notes, many digital-performance scholars push theories of “the metamorphosis and fragmentation of the body in virtual realms” so far that they end up believing in disembodiment (2007:215)—whereas “what is practiced by digital/posthuman performers is commonly the search for the opposite: for cohesion, for meaning, for unity, for intimate cybernetic connections between the organic and the technological” (155).

As the much-anticipated final element of the trilogy that began with GTA III and Vice City, San Andreas was a tremendous commercial success. It sold over 12 million copies in its first four months on the market. K. bought this game within nine days of its release (Surette 2004, Adams 2005). These figures are not unusual when it comes to popular music or movies, but games like San Andreas are less casual purchases. They cost three or four times as much as new CD releases, a price point justified by the buyer’s expectation of spending something like a hundred hours in the gameworld.

Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. (1997:3–4) Aarseth’s work on “ergodic literature”—texts which require this sort of improvisatory investment—helped shape Gonzalo Frasca’s equally influential distinction between literary-theory-oriented “narratology” and game-theory-oriented “ludology” as the two major scholarly approaches to digital games (Frasca 1999; cf. Juul 2005:15). Ludologists concern themselves with the unique properties of games as distinct from narrative texts, including their variable outcomes and the effort they require from players.

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