GAME

Every Wednesday morning I either play Mario cart or Skylanders. The 6 year old boy who I nanny is absolutely obsessed with playing these games on his Wii. He even makes me continue to battle and race him after the TV has been turned off and we are walking up to school. Besides this I don’t play a lot of games other than iPhone ones at the tram stop like Subway Surfer and Plants vs Zombies. 

Games are a very specific type of media with many characteristics that are specific to games only. There are, of course, some similarities to radio, film and television. One of these is that the user is a prosumer and participates in the making of this media type. A critical difference between them and games is that the user has the ability or possibility to “simulate virtual worlds" (Rassens, 2005) which the gamer can contribute to and explore. The user has the opportunity to influence the events that occur and also possibly be a character in the plot of the game. 
The way that games can connect people and at the same time let people run different lives and sometimes live in different worlds is something that is pretty unique to this kind of medium. It forms a “specific type of participatory media” (Rassens, 2005). The user is able to make “strategic choices about alternative paths and, in the case of adventure games, alternative actions’’ (Rassens, 2005). When I play Mario Cart I am able to choose the character I want to be, the car I drive, the world that I drive in, what kind of race I want to participate in and then which way I want to drive. Exploring this world is called “reconfiguration” (Rassens, 2005) and is a specific characteristic of these games.

Obviously each game has its own unique way that the user interacts and maybe even contributes. In some games, including Mario Cart, you can play multiplayer allowing two people to help “shape the stories” (Rassens, 2005). 

Games are a very unique kind of media. While they do have some aspects in common with other forms of media they are characterised by the possibility of being a part of the virtual world created for you.

References:
Raessens, J. 2005, 'Computer games as participatory media culture', Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass