Futures of Learning

One of the foci of our literature reviews involves gaming and gaming practices in international contexts. While attention to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of gaming is emerging in the United States, Europe and Asia (see Larissa Hjorth’s recent edited issue in Games and Culture), it is often difficult to find documented accounts and analyses of gaming practices in other regional and national contexts. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case. In the first instance, gaming (at least mediated forms of gaming) requires basic infrastructure, such as gaming systems, availability of games, sources of power and, in the case of networked gaming, connectivity. Although infrastructure and availability partially account for the lack of information on gaming in contexts (particularly in the “developing” world), academic interests also play a role in the relative dearth of research on everyday gaming around the world. For many of us who conduct ethnographic research, the emphasis on text and narratives (rather than context) that dominated early studies of video games may have contributed to the lack of attention to gaming. For many anthropologists, I also suspect that the relatively lowly status of video games and mediated gaming as a legitimate object of academic inquiry may also contribute to the inattention to gaming (although see Boellsdorf 2008).

Yet, despite the empirical gaps in the research on gaming, I am not convinced that mediated gaming is not an everyday part of life, even in the most economically disenfranchised countries and regions. Indeed, in my own research on ICTs and development in Jamaica, gaming was present, but it always rested in our footnotes, fieldnotes and contributions to the “gray” policy literature. For example, when I was in Jamaica in 2004 carrying out fieldwork I often had to go to one of the local internet cafes to send attachments or lengthier fieldnotes to Danny (Miller) who was in London during portions of our fieldwork. Looking back on one of my notebooks, I recently noted that I managed to scribble on the back of the page a sketch of the inside of an internet café in one of the malls in Portmore, Jamaica. At the time what stood out was the large numbers (over 20) of television screens and monitors that were solely dedicated to gaming; the few computers dedicated to email and the internet were located at the back of the café. Depending upon the time of day, it was almost a fight to make your way through the groups of boys in their khaki uniforms gathering around the gaming computers. The popularity of the games which, in turn, spurred the congregation of boisterous boys was part of the reason that a UNICEF-sponsored internet café in Portmore restricted playing games (as well as downloading pornography and music), and the community internet café, Zinc Link), located in one of the most dangerous areas of Kingston, restricted game playing to “educational games” (see Miller and Horst 2005).

Games were also present outside of the internet cafes, in the homes, schemes and districts of rural and urban Jamaica. Even in 2004, one of the local video stores that sold original and bootlegged copies of videocassettes and DVDs also kept a small collection of desktop games behind the counter. A number of the more middle class families (ones who managed to purchase computers) had copies of games such as “Need for Speed”.  In one of the poorest areas in Portmore where I carried out research, a family received a second-hand Nintendo console in a barrel (literally a barrel drum typically filled with basic staples like rice, food, clothing and other items shipped to Jamaica) from one of their cousins living in New York. Like the footballs, food and other resources in the neighborhood, many of the members of the local “crew” gathered together in the afternoons and evenings to play games. In this particular community video games superseded dominoes, the game that is prevalent throughout the Caribbean among men. Playing games, and gaining access to new games, also was an incentive to trade and borrow other people’s cell phones. Teenagers in rural and urban Jamaica often possessed a wealth of knowledge about the particular games offered on different phone models and tried to borrow their parents’, siblings’, other family members’, neighbors’ and friends’ cell phones while they were bored, or “killing time” (see Ito and Bittanti, Forthcoming) at home. With almost one-third of Jamaica’s population being under the age of 15, and 26% unemployment rate among youth of working age, 15-24, in 2004, games on mobile phones and (in most cases) second-hand devices like gameboys or consoles were a welcome addition to their everyday ecology.

Even a quick review of my notes from our research on mobile phones in Jamaica suggests that gaming is not only present in a place like Jamaica, but that it may be being integrated into Jamaican culture in a number of fascinating ways. For example, and like many contexts in the United States, gender dynamics emerged around gaming. In the relative privacy of their home, many girls talked about how they enjoyed playing the basic games that came on their mobile phones when they were “bored”, but girls were relatively absent when the members of the local “crews” played games on the neighborhood console in more public settings. In addition, the only girls at the internet café were the girlfriends who lingered near their boyfriend while he played a game, and the (quite popular) girl who took payments at the shop. At the time I remember thinking these practices were interesting but, for a variety of reasons (time constraints, funding sources, and other research agendas), I never felt followed it up with further research. Given that so many of us carrying out ethnographic work in contexts outside of the United States may find ourselves making similar choices, I wonder what lies in the margins and footnotes of other researcher’s fieldnotes which we can and should start paying attention to in order to develop a deeper understanding of new media in everyday. Perhaps more importantly, how we can begin to bring these footnotes and partial accounts into the foreground to enable us to map the gaming landscape in a range of countries and regions throughout the world?

References:
Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg.

Ito, Mizuko and Matteo Bittanti. Forthcoming. Gaming. In Ito, et. al’s Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press

Miller, Daniel and Heather A. Horst. 2005. The Jamaican Internet: Supply, Demand and Education. Information Society Research Group
Working Paper Series No. 5 (June 2005).