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Tuesday 21st August 2007 11:00 am
Matteo Bittanti meets the “Angry Gamer.” Smack-talk ensues.
Or “How I stopped worrying and learned to love Xbox live.” Matteo Bittanti discusses the “Angry Gamer” as staged masculine performance.
He is sitting in front of a television screen. He is wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Headset on, hands tightly clutched on a game controller. But there is something terribly wrong here. He looks enraged. He swears profusely. At one point, he gets up, starts jumping up and down. He is gesticulating in an unorthodox manner. Look at him: he just threw a gamepad on the floor. He screams savagely. He kicks his chair. He punches the television. He is the “angry gamer.” Yes, and he publicly celebrates his cantankerous behavior on videos that he subsequently uploads on YouTube. Ouch.
The most pressing question: is the “Angry Gamer” real or Memorex? Is he a menace to society or does he simply exists in the interstices of a cluttered mediated space? In other words, should the parents be worried? The answer is yes and no. Yes, the Angry Gamer is very real. I occasionally meet him online. He is rude, racist, and obnoxious. At the same time, the answer is “no,” what we see on YouTube is a caricature, a parody. The typical “Angry Gamer” video is a stagedperformance that, as juvenile as it looks, it is not more harmful than any other form of mediated violence. These clips - that mostly feature white male kids and teenagers - are dramatic performances of masculinity characterized by a strong element of theatricality.
“Trash-talk,” kicking, and screaming are linguistic and paralinguistic devices that heighten, amplify, and accentuate the gaming experience. It is as if the players - whose onscreen performance is entirely symbolic, intangible - were relinquishing their sedentary condition by performing a hyperactive, frenzied spectacle, a physical emulation of the ethereal actions of their virtual counterparts. Swearing, shouting, and destroying “real” objects enhance and extend the experience of the game so that players can carry the drama of the game a little over the boundary of the magic circle, right into their physical space, when they have to close the gap between heightened excitement of the simulation and the boring shallowness of their bedrooms, the exotic places they visit during their digital escapes and the generic spaces they inhabit. After all, playing videogame is about negotiating the nihilistic impulses of the alter-ego and the demands of the super-ego.
For more, read my extended analysis at: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/83
Image: Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, “Shooter” - Video and photo documentation of “LAN-Events”
Category: Ecology-of-Games
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