Catherine Beavis

Faculty of Education

Deakin University

221 Burwood Highway,

Burwood 3125

paper presented at

Research in Education: Does it Count

Australian Association for Research in Education annual conference

Adelaide, 29 November - 3 December 1998

For the purposes of this paper, I have taken Nintendo and computer games as my central example of the texts of the new technologies. I focus on research on young people's engagement with these games, and some of the assumptions, tensions and contradictions that characterise work in this field, with particular reference to constructions of reading and of the young person or child. Implicit in these debates are views of childhood and youth; of community; of reading and textuality; of subjectivity and of the desirability, presence or absence of resistance and critique. Perspectives drawn from fields as diverse as Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Gender, Literacy, History and Literature differently explore relationships between constructions of childhood and the new technologies, between computer texts and the formation of personal and cultural identities, relationships which are constructed differently again by research coming out of welfare, social and psychological fields such as the current Parliamentary Inquiry into the Effects of Television and Multimedia on Children and Families in Victoria.

Central to most discussions are four questions, differently asked and answered:

• what is the nature of digital culture

• what is the nature of young people's engagement with digital culture texts?

• what are the consequences of their engagement with these texts? - the 'effects' debate- and

• what, if anything, should we do?

Two further questions I want to ask in turn of these discussions concern their view of reading - the nature of the interaction between readers and texts - and of the young people about whom they write - how young people are constructed in their writing and research.

Research into relationships between young people and the new technology is always grounded in assumptions about the nature of youth and childhood, whether or not these are explicitly addressed. As Sefton-Green notes, 'concerns about the changing nature of childhood - or indeed about its apparent 'disappearance' - have become inextricably bound up with wider anxieties about the impact of technological change'. 'Evidence' for childhood's demise include the relocation of play from outdoors into the 'safer' space of the home, and the supposed displacement of more traditional forms of play. As Sanger notes however, quoting the Opies nearly thirty years ago, '"The belief that traditional games are dying out is in itself traditional" Opie and Opie 1969)' (1998:9). The shift from the streets to more supervised and protected spaces has implications also for youth culture (James 1993, Buchner 1990, cited in McNamee 1998: 195), both male and female. (McNamee 1998:196) Other arguments suggesting connections between the end of childhood and the new technologies posit a loss of innocence consequent upon the sexualisation and commodification of childhood, through the mass media and the creation of the youth market.

For all Sanger's reminder, apocalyptic and millenialist views linking technology with the end of childhood are common. The most valuable research into this area seeks to configure the causal connections somewhat differently. Walkerdine, for example, locates fears and moral panics concerning boys and computer games within in larger anxieties about children and the status of childhood at the end of the Twentieth century (Walkerdine 1998: 1) and explores collocations within the present times which result in this anxiety. Underlining the diversity and specificity of different groups' experience, she explores ways in which historically established discourses are at work in the construction and regulation of attitudes towards middle and working class boys' engagement with computer games. Sefton-Green discusses connections between digital culture and a 'new world order' in terms of relationships between modernism and postmodernism, drawing on Giddens (1990) to argue that 'the current state of affairs resembles a continuation of the immediate past more than a new beginning. (Sefton-Green 1998: 5). Like others, Sefton-Green stresses the need not to lose sight of continuities between digital culture and older popular and media forms.

A related set of anxieties concerns the effects of the new technologies, in particular of texts such as Nintendo and computer games, together with interactive screen engagement, on young people's subjectivity - the fear that the new technologies have so profoundly changed young people that we are faced with 'aliens in the classroom' (Green and Bigum 1993). An important set of questions at issue here concerns the interrelationships of reading, texts, subjectivity and construction. Arising from this is the question which is perhaps the most pervasive, complex and troubling dimension of young people's engagement with the texts of the new technologies for writers and researchers from diverse fields - the issue of the 'effects' of computer games content, in particular with respect to violence and aggression, and to representations of masculinity. I return to this central matter in the concluding section of the paper.

What seems to be essential, as alluded to in the work of Walkerdine above, is the need to distinguish between specific groups of young people and children. While many studies make the point that popular fears and assumptions about the 'effects' of the new technology reflect more far reaching views about the nature of childhood, the concept of youth or childhood itself for the most part remains somewhat undifferentiated. This imposes serious constraints on understanding the nature of young people's interactions with the texts of the new technologies in different instances, the implications of their engagement with such texts for the construction of personal and cultural identities, the ways in which they are positioned within discourses mobilised by their readings, and the social contexts and consequences of their involvement with computer games. As Alloway and Gilbert note, research which treats young people as a homogenous group, 'bypass[es] the interplay of gender, class and ethnicity in the ways in which children take up positions in relation to cultural pursuits; representing children as equally and commonly positioned in cultural meaning making.' (Alloway and Gilbert 1998: 96) In such analyses, they continue,

It is clearly the case that the new technologies have created not just the possibility but the reality of very different types of text to those with which we have been familiar with in print, oral, aural and visual form. The non-linear nature of 'hyperfictions' epitomises the ways in which such texts challenge print-based 'commonsense' notions of reading, simultaneously overturning many aspects of traditional literary theory, while being seen literally to embody the new. (Douglas J.Y. 1989, 1992, Snyder 1996, 1997). Ways in which the structures of the new forms, whether hyperfiction or the more widely popular computer games maintain or reconfigure what we understand by both narrative and reading has been a source of fascination for many, myself included (Beavis 1997, Snyder 1997, Green, Reid and Bigum 1998 et al.). In seeking to understand and evaluate the nature of young people's interaction with such texts, a revisiting of what we understand by 'reading' in this context, including its role in the construction of subjectivity, seems both necessary and appropriate.

Some studies approach this dimension through a consideration of the structures and characteristics of computer games. Games work within highly diverse but specific generic conventions, drawing on literary, filmic and other references across a range of cultures, utilising familiar structures of variation and repetition. Computer games almost physically enact metaphoric dimensions of literary theory. The text literally only comes into existence when engaged by the reader/player. The reader is an active participant in the joint construction of meaning, with the meaning, or at least the action, created only through the player's physical participation. While each level has a prespecified configuration, and the traps, fights and puzzles are written into the program, it is also true that one never plays quite the same game each time, one never reads the same text twice. Reading/playing moves forward through an interaction between expectations, extra and intratextual knowledge and prediction, and so on, with intertextual and intergeneric knowledge at a premium in making sense of both narrative and symbol. Readers/players are literally invited to take up the subject positioned offered by the texts, at the keyboard, with the invitation often offered in the form of direct address whereby players are required to merge first, second and third person to move the game forward, simultaneously operating both an omniscient and an entirely partial overview.

Yet while there are clearly similarities in many respects between playing games and reading fiction (Beavis 1997), there are also obvious disjunctions. Interactive software, as Friedman notes

This intermeshing and confusion makes it doubly hard to untangle the nature of young people's engagement with digital texts, in particular in relation to their enmeshment in/distance from the ideologies and pleasures of the games, and the implications of this both for the formation of subjectivity, in different contexts and for different groups, and for young people's agency in the world. Pursuing specific features of the structures and demands of computer games has led to useful explorations both of the nature of players' engagement at other levels, and of the literacy learnings - the 'new' literacies - they entail. Some of the most interesting work focuses on elements of design (Kress 1997) and space (Johnson-Eilola, 1997, Fuller and Jenkins 1995).

For Kress, digital and multimodal texts are part of a changed landscape of semiosis which calls for a new theory of representation, one which takes account of changes in forms of text, uses of language and modes of communication (Kress 1997:75). Kress wants to locate users/readers/players as active within the changed context of 'electronic, multimodal, multimedia textual production' (Kress 1997:77), to see individuals as 'the remakers, transformers of sets of representational resources-rather than users of stable systems, in a situation where multiple representational modes are brought into textual compositions.'(Kress 1997:77). Kress' argument, that young people need to be conversant with and agential in design and visual forms of representation is consistent with arguments for a changed view of literacy which includes the capacity to read and negotiate images and textual representations of all kinds. For Kress, young people are constructed potentially at least as complex meaning makers in a variety of forms, with sophisticated literacy capacities fostered by their engagement with the new technologies.

Johnson-Eilola and Fuller and Jenkins differently explore the spatial structures of computer games to hypothesise about the kinds of reading practices and sensibilities both taught and required. Computer games are often described as archetypal postmodern texts, concerned with surfaces and pastiche, and free of modernist parameters of simple rules, sequence and linear time. Johnson-Eilola is amongst those who believe there is indeed a changed consciousness and way of being in the world for young people, as a consequence of their immersion in digital culture and the new technologies - ways of being that we, 'the occupants of history' could do well to learn from. He argues that in playing computer games young people learn 'to deal tactically with contingency, multiplicity and uncertainty' (Johnson-Eilola 1997:195). Successful game playing requires a postmodernist sensibility, whereby players 'are capable of working such chaotic environments from within, moment by moment.' In a highly romantic and somewhat wistful evocation he describes his version of the 'aliens' young people seem to have become, as evidenced in their playing of these games: 'their domain is space rather than time. They exist within time, dancing across it, rather than being subordinated to it.' (Johnson-Eilola 1997 195-6).

Fuller and Jenkins draw somewhat different conclusions about the implications of the spatial organisation of games. They compare computer games not with literary narratives but with sixteenth and seventeenth New World voyage documents such as Walter Raleigh's Discoverie of the large, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana (1596) or John Smith's True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia (1608). They argue that computer games represent a shift from narrativity to geography, with parallels concerning the navigation, mapping and mastery of physical and cyberspace. The pleasures of playing, they argue, lie not so much in narrative action, which tends to be inconclusive and/or deferred, as in the continual opening up of new spaces and screens. Characters, in their view, are 'little more than a cursor that mediates the player's relationship to the story world.' (Fuller and Jenkins 1995: 61).

This question of players' relationship to character is of considerable importance in assumptions made about ideology, and the ways in which games work on players' subjectivity - of considerable pertinence in discussing the effects, masculinities and violence debates. What is of interest in this context is that Fuller and Jenkins suggest that game playing is ideological almost by virtue of its structure, regardless of 'content', as it is traditionally conceived. Playing computer games, in an overfamiliar, overcrowded and overly regulated America, they argue, allows the recreation of the Renaissance encounter with America without guilt. 'Virtual reality opens up new spaces for exploration, colonisation and exploration, returning to a mythic time when there were worlds without limits and resources beyond imaging.' (Fuller and Jenkins 1995: 58).

What is one to make of this? Where computer games' chief pleasures are seen to lie in the exploration and conquering of space, the lure for players entails both the deeply rooted appeal of the urge to create new worlds, and an outlook whereby exploration and expansion are coterminous with achieving 'mastery' - a mastery which amounts to colonisation and conquest in the non-virtual world at least. How the young player is then construed as explorer/coloniser/conqueror becomes a matter of considerable ambivalence and uncertainty. The coupling of admiration for such 'virtues' as heroism and intrepid venturing with the uneasy entertainment or suppression of the dimensions of conquest (or more likely its celebration), is in many ways emblematic of the contradictory and coexistent discourses of games. Detailed and specific studies are needed to explore the ways in which such texts work polysemically, the ways they engage and position readers, and the ways in which young players in turn are both constructed by and resistant to 'the pleasures of the text'.

What these accounts of the possibilities of reading/playing games all share is a view of players as informed, as autonomous, and as 'super-rational'(male) beings (Walkerdine 1998). When games are considered in relation to market forces, as big business and part of multimillion dollar multinational enterprises, more compromising and troubling issues arise. Computer games are part of a much wider cultural/industrial, military/entertainment complex (Sheff 1993, Shuker 1996, Wark 1996 et al) - as Helen Nixon puts it in a recent paper 'fun and games are serious business' (Nixon 1998). What are the implications for culture and identity of participation in the marketing and playing of games, when as Nixon notes, 'consumption is ... a cultural phenomenon, entering the cycle of symbolic exchange that is contemporary consumer culture (Baudrillard, 1981) and 'to do with meaning, value and communications as much as it is to do with exchange, price and economic relations (Lury 1996:10).' (Nixon 1998: 25)? Within this context, young people as a market are heavily researched and targeted, so that the purchase and playing of games is already implicated in much wider discourses and practices to do with identity, privilege and opportunity, what is seen to be current and 'cool', and so on.

What does the playing/consumption of computer games mean and do for youth culture in the context of economies, the heavy emphasis on consumption, the 'relentlessly material' nature of society and new patterns of social division - the world Hall describes as 'New Times' (Hall 1996). How autonomous or agential are players/consumers in this context? The 'threats' to local culture from globalisation, or at the very least the likelihood of relocation, are well documented (Wark 1994, McNamee 1998). And what of issues of access, gender and class? Many argue persuasively that in the nexus between the local and the global, multimedia technologies and digital cultures operate to maintain unequal relations of power, carrying their own 'cultural pedagogies' or pedagogies of everyday life (Kellner 1995, Luke 1996). It is these pedagogies, and the ways in which computer games, like other texts, circulate and are embedded within existing discourses to do with gender, ethnicity, class and power, that are at the heart of the anxieties and analyses connecting games with violence in the community - the 'effects' debate.

The question of the relationship between popular culture and levels of violence in society is one of urgent interest to many sectors of the community. Inquiries into such connections are conducted repeatedly, a current example being the Parliamentary 'Inquiry into the effects of Television and Multimedia on Children and Families in Victoria'. Terms of reference for this inquiry, amongst other things, include the brief to 'assess the likely impact on children and families of new and emerging forms of multimedia technology and [to] consider ways that this technology may enhance the well being of families' and to 'examine the relationship between violence on television and violent behaviours within families'. Such connections are explored repeatedly (eg Durkin 1995), yet such inquiries consistently fail to establish unequivocally the causal links between image and effect they seek to find (Alloway and Gilbert 1998).

What interests me here are the overlaps, intersections and collisions in relation to the 'effects' debate on the one hand and poststructuralist positions on the discursive construction of subjectivity on the other. On the face of it, both fields and findings seem quite contradictory. As Sefton-Green notes, 'research from the effects tradition either sets out to create anxiety (see Newsom, 1996) or to explain and allay such concern in the context of moral panics (see Buckingham, 1996)' Sefton-Green 1998: 14). Effects research encompasses both the insistent search for the pernicious image that might turn society (or the individual) bad, categorising and quantifying violent images and games with an implied link between these and violent behaviour within families, and audience research, that shows readers/viewers to be well aware of distinctions between fact and fantasy and so quite capable of critique. Feminist poststructuralist work on the role of discourse and story in the formation of subjectivity complicate this picture, stressing the role of images and story in popular culture in constructions of masculinity and violence in particular. Such research comes often with a pressing moral imperative, arguing strongly for intervention and the teaching of critical literacy, to enable games and stories to be read differently, and different stories to be read.

Central but invisible in research of this kind is the figure of the reader, and beliefs and understandings about what reading entails. The knot I'm working at is that which intertwines a scepticism about young people as passive and uncritical consumers who are easily led, on the one hand, with poststructuralist insights on the other into the discursive construction of subjectivity, and the potent role of stories and representations in shaping power relations and gendered subjectivities, for young people particularly. Part of the answer, in sorting through such apparently contradictory positions, must lie in greater specificity and differentiation within studies, in relation to constructions of young people, of research agendas, and of the texts themselves.

Walkerdine makes useful distinctions in relation to current panics and contradictions about more long standing discourses concerning the susceptibility of 'the masses', with implication for how young people's engagement with computer games is understood, regulated and policed. She points to the class basis of different readings made of young people's engagement with computer games, whereby working class boys are seen as 'proto-violent and addicted' and the middle class boy as a 'super-rational' explorer (Walkerdine 1998: 6). She concludes with a number of questions pertinent to untangling the effects/subjectivity knot I have described:

• what kinds of subjects and subjectivities are created through game playing and through other popular media?

• what are the ways in which such discourses and practices prepare children for the world beyond the screen?

• How might we begin to explore the situated production of all subjectivities of the world's children as they face the huge differences confronting the new millennium (Walkerdine 1998:26)

Poststructuralist perspectives have a great deal to offer in teasing out the ways in which computer games, like other popular culture texts, are deeply implicated in the formation of youth culture and constructions of masculinity, particularly in relation to overtly violent and misogynist texts, such as many computer games. Alloway and Gilbert (1998) and Gilbert and Gilbert (1998) explore the role of computer games in contributing to constructions of masculinity for young people that are both limiting and 'dangerous' (Alloway and Gilbert 1997). Computer games are seen as tapping into, endorsing and recirculating discourses of masculinity that are largely hegemonic and non-reflective, that legitimate and promote violence, exclusion and domination. Their research takes them back not just to the young person, the player/reader, but also to the text. They distinguish both between different groups of readers (young people), and also between different types of games - those which promote versions of masculinity 'based on unquestioned and unproblematic expressions of violence' and those which' attempt to connect the visceral with the reflective (Giroux 1995:303).' (Alloway and Gilbert 1998: 99).

Alloway and Gilbert foreground the text in the process of reading, while exploring also the reading process, and the construction of subjectivity. . Young people need to be helped to critique and resist the subject positions and ideologies of computer games. The games themselves may become the focus of critical literacy work undertaken with young people, but such work must go beyond textual analysis. As Gilbert and Gilbert put it:

Like Luke (1996) and others, Alloway and Gilbert see computer games with other popular culture texts as 'cultural and community pedagogies [which] offer sites for meaning making and pleasure; they market representational politics; and at the same time, they pass as apolitical entertainment.' (Alloway and Gilbert 1998:100). The question of how to mobilise the 'desire to do [one's] gender otherwise' foregrounds the complexity of working with popular culture and intervening to change the direction and nature of engagement, to allow contestation and debate. It's a question that is always problematic, and always central to discussions linking pedagogy, subjectivity and youth culture, where the concern is to make available to young people opportunities for resistance and critique. A recognition of the role of pleasure and desire entailed in engaging with popular culture texts such as computer games, and of young people's willing complicity in many features of their style (Hall 1996: 470 ), if not their ideologies, must be a key feature of any exploration of young people and computer games .

Computer games as new texts, digital texts, and texts of youth culture, themselves provoke multiple readings in relation both to their own, reflexive, textual nature, and in relation to their implications for young players. As the positions canvassed in this paper show, constructions of youth, of youth culture and of reading in relation to computer games vary considerably across a range of fields. For some theorists, players/young people are heroic and flexible adventurers with tolerances and literacy abilities far beyond those of the generations researching them. For others, players, particularly boys and young men, are complex and nonreflective subjects likely to be much influenced by the discourses and ideologies of computer games in ways that run counter to the production of contestation and diversity, and a recognition of the role of such texts in the production of subjectivity.

Understandings of the nature of reading, and of the role of digital texts in youth culture and in the construction of subjectivity, have real world implications in many spheres. Computer games must be seen in the context of the cultural/industrial, 'military-entertainment' complex which produces them, and the multinational socio-economic context within which they are marketed and sold. Complex understandings of the links between representation and identity, between pleasure and aesthetics, between dominant discourses and hegemonic practices and a recognition of texts' appeal are all important factors in exploring the nature of young peoples' engagement and fascination with computer games, and in helping young people become informed and critical. So too are the exploration of the textual nature of games, of the changing nature of both literacy and narrative, and a recognition of the defining role of youth culture, popular culture in many young people's lives.

An earlier version of this paper was given at the Deakin Centre for Education and Change invitiational miniconference: Representing Youth, Geelong, September 18-19, 1998

Hall, S. (1996). What is this 'black' in black popular culture? In D. Morley & K.-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 465-475). London and New York: Routledge.