Blog 4

In my experience in seeing games and gamers represented, it tends to revolve around white males. The demographic that the advertisers are trying to appeal to is white males. When you see a gamer or someone like that in media, they are more than likely white males, but they are not always represented in a positive way. Sometimes they are portrayed as fat slobs who live in their parent’s basement and sit in front of the computer playing their game eating pizza and drinking mountain dew. Another not so savory stereotype portrayed in the media is the skinny white guy who is a shut in and a “dork”. I would agree that as the world is progressing more, the advertisers are including more diversity and targeting a more diverse crowd, as said by Shira Chess, Nathaniel J. Evans, and Joyya JaDawn Baines in their study ‘What Does a Gamer Look Like? Video Games, Advertising, and Diversity’ :

“there is still a cultural perception of the gamer as white male. There are exceptions to this, which can be seen in many commercials that challenge our expectations of what a gamer might look like and how he or she might behave, and certainly we have found that there is an

increased inclusivity in terms of who might actually appear in these commercials.

Some commercials have begun to play with and tease out these representations..”

I recently saw a commercial for the new Call of Duty game and they had a lot of diversity represented. They had multiple races and genders all coming together to form their old team. There was a mothers and fathers and a lot of different demographics covered. They recognized that more than just white males play the game and they used it to advertise to their wider audience and make them feel closer to the game.

I personally have never paid any extra money to have the skins or extra guns or map packs in a game, nor have I paid for any extra virtual currency to make my player better or anything like that, I also haven’t bet online so I can’t fully relate to some of the article by Joshua Brustein and Eben Novy-Williams, but I have gambled on playing video games with my friends before. We would put some amount of money on games of whatever it was that we were playing whether it be NBA 2K or FIFA or whatever. We bet on these just like we bet on pro and college sports games, like Brustein and Novy-Williams said in their article ‘Virtual Weapons are Turning Teen Gamers Into Serious Gamblers’, “Reasonable people can debate whether competitive video gaming is a sport, but it has at least one thing in common with football, basketball, and soccer: People like to bet on the outcome.”. I’m sure that when people begin to make money gambling on these online platforms, they are going to want to find more ways to do it and more ways to make that money and have that feeling of winning that’s associated with gambling. Esports gives people a new platform to bet and gamble on and exposes gambling to a new demographic of people that may not have been exposed to it if that weren’t the case. It adds something that is getting to be if it isn’t already as big as any other major sport in the world. It reaches a worldwide audience.

Brustein, J., & Novy-Williams, E. (2016, April 19). Virtual Weapons Are Turning Teen Gamers Into Serious Gamblers. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-virtual-guns-counterstrike-gambling/

Chess, Baines, & Evans. (n.d.). Chess_What does a gamer look like.pdf. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ImnoswzjW0NjM3emZMS09kaEU/view