Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Rise of Sports Video Games, Part 1
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Sports and Society
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À partir de la leçon
The Megabusiness of Sports
Rencontrer les enseignants
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Hey there Sports and Society people.
Welcome to my humble home here in Durham, North Carolina.
And today we're going to look at a new aspect of the business of sports.
Namely, the explosive growth of sports video games.
Now there's only one problem here.
I don't really know anything about sports video games myself.
I grew up in the age of Pinball Wizard and the arcades and pinball machines.
There is an expert in the sociology of sports video games in this very household,
and that's why we're here.
And that's my oldest son Ray, so let's go upstairs and
see what insight Ray can offer us into the world of sports video games, come on.
Lucian's older brother and he's a fan of sports video games,
he spends a lot of time playing them.
What are you playing right now, Ray?
>> NBA 2K13.
>> And do you have specific teams that are playing each other right now?
>> Yeah, it is the Chicago Bulls and the Miami Heat.
So, I think a lot of older people, people like me in their 50s
wanna know why are sports video games so fun to play?
>> Just because you can't really, normal people can't really get the experience
of being in the NBA,or other major sports, so video games kind of help.
>> So you play NBA games, what other games do you play?
>> NFL football, and soccer.
FIFA soccer.
>> Cool, great.
Okay, thanks Ray.
So one way to start beginning thinking about sports video games is to think about
a French theorist named Jean Baudrillard, who died a few years ago and
was quite an influential thinker.
And Baudrillard introduced the idea of hyperreality.
And what he claimed was that in our increasingly technological world,
the borderline between what's real and what's fake, what's real and
what's a sham copy, has become increasingly blurred.
And it can be increasingly difficult to distinguish the fake from the copy,
the real from the authentic, and an example of this, a classic example,
would be the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas.
It's a copy, if you've been there, of the real Venice, in Italy, in northern Italy.
And in Las Vegas, in the Venetian you have canals,
you have gondoliers singing cheesy songs, you have replicas of St.
Mark's Cathedral and Piazza San Marco, a replica of the Doge's Palace.
And if you close your eyes and listen to the gondolier singing or
maybe just open them and look at the replica of the famous Venetian campanile,
you can almost imagine that you are in Venice.
So here in this hyperreality, in this hyperreal state,
as predicted by Baudrillard and imagined by Baudrillard, you
have a confusion of the boundary between the real Venice and the fake Venice.
I think most of us still know that the fake Venice is the one in Las Vegas.
But the borderline between the real and the fake has become more blurred.
Now this is what's been happening with video games.
Because as video game technology has increased the replica,
the fidelity of the video games has become increasingly sophisticated,
increasingly to mimic the real.
So for example, if you're playing Call of Duty, the graphics look almost like real
life reporting, or a film, a documentary film about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Again, I think one can still tell where Iraq and Afghanistan are and
what experience is like there as something different from playing the video game.
But the video games had become a form of hyperreality in the sense that
they become harder to distinguish from the real thing.
Now this is happening in sports video games as well.
Take a look now at a little bit of NBA 2K.
[MUSIC]
So what you can see here is that it's not all that easy to distinguish
this fake video game from a real televised game and the quality of the graphics.
So, with sports video games and
video games in general are an example of Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreal.
And when we go back a little bit and
start to think about what we should make of video games and sports video games,
in terms of whether they are good or bad or a problem or not.
We tend to have two very polarized positions.
The idea of video game love, and what I'm calling the idea of video game hate.
Now video game hate is what's typical, especially of parents like me,
who are not crazy about video games and sports video games.
Ray probably plays a couple hours of sports video games a week,
maybe not quite that much.
Excuse me, a day.
And that seems to me, as video games seem to a lot of parents, like an awful lot of
time to be sitting in your room playing these games with your little finger thing.
And so you have video game haters who will say,
video games isolate people from other people.
Video games promote obesity because people are sitting on their butt
playing these games.
And that video games can promote violence because so
many of the games are very violent and involve destroying other people,
shooting guns, doing awful karate chops and mixed martial arts and so forth.
So video game hate sees video games as a new social scourge in society.
But we also have the opposite phenomenon of video game love.
And these are people, sometimes people who play the games, like Ray,
who thinks the games are great, and all power to him.
But also scholars and game studies critics,
who say video games are actually a really good thing.
And one of the most prominent figures here is a man named Henry Jenkins.
Henry Jenkins is a leading figure in critical game studies, and
he argues that video games are an example of what he calls the lively arts.
He argues that American culture in particular, over the last 150 years,
has produced these new unconventional popular art forms.
Jazz, comic books, and he argues that video games
are a part of this tradition, of creation, of creativity.
And in fact when you look at video games, the graphics, the story lines,
the platforms are often, not always, but
often incredibly beautiful and complex and aesthetically interesting.
So it's possible to agree in part with Jenkins that video games,
including sports video games, are a form of artistic creation.
Jenkins and others would also emphasize games often involve social networking.
They are not simply about isolated teenagers sitting at home, and
they're cut off from their friends playing these games.
But that many games involve multiplayer
forms of participation that link people up to another.
Game scholars will also say that well, kids will play violent video games but
that doesn't mean that they're necessarily gonna go out and shoot a bunch of people.
That they're somehow neatly internalizing
the kinds of things that they see on the video game screen.
So this is a bit of background about video games and
how we ought to think about them.
My own feeling as an anthropologist is,
it's not really very useful to either say, video games are a stupid, dumb thing, or
to say, video games are so wonderful, I'm gonna let my kid play 12 hours a day.
Well our task as critical thinkers about sports,
in this case sports video games, is to try to not make these sweeping judgments.
And instead try to understand sports video games as this cultural, social,
political, economic phenomenon that we need to try to understand.
And in fact I should say as a parentheses, that there's really very little
good research as yet by anthropologists or anybody else about sports video games.
And if any of you out there is thinking about going to graduate school and
maybe writing a dissertation in cultural studies or anthropology or sociology.
I think the examination of sports video games would be a great topic for you.
So what about sports video games in particular?
What we see is an arc of tremendous growth,
as we've seen in video games in general.
The first sports video game, and I'm old enough to remember this,
I'm sorry to say, was Pong, Pong, invented by Atari back in 1972.
And Pong was a game that you could only play in a video game arcade.
You couldn't bring it home, at least at first.
There weren't any special consoles, and it was very crude and primitive, but
back in 1972 it looked really space age and
high tech and we really enjoyed playing it.
So from 1972, you go up to the present, where sports video games had
become a giant multibillion dollar industry.
Just think of all the money and
labor and commercialization that goes into sports video games now.
It costs about $500 to buy a new PlayStation or a new XBox.
The games are $50 each.
You have these gigantic companies like Sony
that are making all of this money selling consoles.
Gigantic programming companies that are selling the software like EA Sports
and 2K.
So sports video games have become a gigantic business and industry.
And this is all, you have to remember,
an industry that didn't exist at all in relationship to sports 40 years ago.
Just going back down memory lane a little bit,
when I was a 13 year old, in Italy, they didn't have sports video games.
And if you wanted to do something besides watch a game or
play the game, one of the only options was to buy soccer cards.
In Italy you would buy these little soccer cards, and then they were adhesive and
you'd put them into the team.
I did pretty well, I finished up a lot of the teams.
Well here are I'm missing some cards, but this was it
if you wanted think about sports or beyond going to the stadium or playing.
Cards, maybe you could buy a jersey but that was hard to do.
And it was the same for American sports like baseball.
If you're into some baseball you could buy baseball cards.
Baseball video games?
Forget it.
Now we're in the new age, the dictatorship of the console.
We moved into this age where sports video games are a really important
part of the sports landscape in the 21st century.
[MUSIC]
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