Elektroniska spel i tidningsfältet : En studie av recensenters förhållningssätt till dator- och TV-spel

Sammanfattning: This paper considers the roles of critics, newspapers and magazines, in the process ofdescribing computer games and video games as either technical objects or products intendedfor entertainment.The making and “using” of computer games and videogames originates in small groups ofpeople possessing a lot of knowledge in computers, during a time when these kinds of deviceswere very expensive. But now, the gaming culture has grown and almost anyone in oursociety can own and play a video game. For that reason, one could ask the questions “are thegames and the people who plays them still parts of a ‘technical culture’?” and “do we needsome kind of prior knowledge to fully understand the videogame critics?”The critics represent “the official idea” of what a videogame is, how it works and if it is worthplaying. One should be able to trust them since they represent papers and magazines with anassignment to spread information of a serious character. Bourdieus “distinction of taste” and“capital theory” and Vedungs “idea analysis” aided us when we read and analyzed 18computer game and video game reviews in six Swedish news papers and gaming magazines.The conclusion we came up with was that the critics frequently focus their texts to cover the“story”, “graphics”, “feeling” and the “style/genre” of the reviewed games. These dimensionsare easy to understand even if one doesn’t have a lot of experience with video games. Theywere far more common than others that, for example, explained if the game was hard to play,if it contained any bugs (flaws) and discussions like “who would be likely to play thisgame?”, but sometimes they occurred. Dimensions like that require some prior knowledge.Some technical knowledge could help the reader understand more of the reviews, but arerarely essential. According to what we have read in the newspapers and magazines, gamesand gaming could consequently be considered less of a technical question and more of amatter of entertainment.