The Face Youth Lab is the place for researchers and marketers to keep up to date with current youth movements and trends.
By exposing Face case studies, sharing proprietary research and connecting you directly with young people our regular and varied offerings will help you understand and interact with youth
We’ve already explored how the ease of internet access to music has provided young people with a certain hackers mentality that disposes them to circumvent access rules like cheat-codes used in video games. Legal solutions like Mixcloud, Spotify and an upcoming iTunes cloud streaming service were necessary as soon as young people became ‘pirates’. Yet with an industry as production heavy and reliant on young people as film and cinema, the adaptation period to instantaneous access is not so clear-cut.
Late last year Voddler, a Swedish web-startup, drew comparisons to Spotify as it signed deals with major film studios Paramount and Disney in order to stream their films online to its users for free. Voddler vice-president, Zoran Slavic, brought up the impressive stat that, in Sweden,his application is “adding about 3,000 users a day”. This figure evidences the startup’s belief that file sharing and internet piracy have fundamentally changed youth habits to the point that many expect to be able to see movies online without paying for them. However, while a belief that youth behaviour is both being changed and changing societal behaviour is forward thinking compared to the rest of the industry. It appears from early reviews that due to its slow user interface Voddler is not yet as essential for film as Spotify is for music.
Despite this initial poorly reviewed user experience the significant shift that the Voddler example brings, is the fact that major film studios like Warner Bros. have now begun to realize they will have to compromise to youth behaviour more and vilify the new technologies that young people use less . More and moreconsumer electronics brands producing TVs are realizing that digital distribution must now begin to be incorporated into the TVs. Meanwhile the video game console war is also being waged amongst young film viewers.
Even actors are beginning to realize the shift within their own industry. Rising star Joeseph Gordon-Levittannounced his open-source film production project, hitRECord.org at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Users can upload their own clips, tweak existing clips, add soundtracks, record new voiceovers, etc. Films can be recorded on anything from a professional grade camera to a mobile phone. Gordon-Levitt or RegularJOE as he’s known on the site, hopes to produce a full project that will be released in some sort of money-making format (DVD, VOD, small theatrical run, online etc) where half the money will go back to the users who selected to work on the project while the other half will go back into funding hitRECord.
The theme of money appearing at the end product is no real surprise in with such a production heavy industry as film. At last weekend’s “Cinemarama Futurama: The Future of the Theatrical Experience” panel Jeffery Winters noted how “the conversation will probably go to money, but the answer we all want is what will the future look like?” A detailed summary of the panel can be found here but it can finally begin to be stated that that “the thought that increased ways of watching films at home is cannibalizing the theatre business is wrong”. Young people have lead the way in film streaming at home and it seems as though the industry is realizing that digital will give increased exposure to films creating more interest in them generally, allow distribution costs to drop to zero thus giving everyone entrance to the industry, possibly like hitRECord.One negative factor might be the noise of promotion in the larger budget films getting louder while the independent films struggling to be heard. Perhaps we’ll ultimately have to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to bring forth the best films.
A quick search on Google News reveals that the recent earthquake in Haiti has caused, amongst many other horrific problems, thousands of orphans. As we explored last week, young people are terrifically and passionately motivated to help their fellows when they can, with social media beginning to act as a primary means of directing people to how they can help. While it was neigh-on impossible for young people to become involved in an offline way with the controversial 2009 Iran Election, the humanitarian crisis in Haiti has within days spawned beneficial attempts to gather aid.
In the week after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, London’s young music community sprung into action, using social media to promote the donation funded events in a very short space of time. One of the bigger nights, SOMENight, which held a minimum £5 donation upon entry and a raffle once inside, had a huge lineup including some of the UK’s biggest urban acts in Wiley, Donaeo and Shy FX amongst others. It had over 1200 Facebook attendees within three days, evidencing the salient extent to which London’s youth were willing to put forward aid in an offline manner through using online tools. Event organizer Chantelle Fiddy of Ctrl.Alt.Shift, a London based charity who use popular culture to take global action, said that “Proceeds will go to the Ctrl.Alt.Shift Haiti appeal. Hundreds of thousands of people are already feared dead and many more are believed to be critically injured. Countless are homeless. The five partner groups are are targeting areas that are getting little help from other agencies. They will provide food, tents, hygiene kits, blankets, jerry cans for water, water purifiers and medical support.”The very nature of this event provides stout resistance to what is often perceived to be an apathetic generation in traditional media, as young people across the capital are this week giving their precious finances in donating the cause.
Darfur is Dying is a flash game drawing attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. The game or, “narrative based simulation”, as the designers called it, is awkward to play, not giving the user a particularly pleasant experience, perhaps as it shouldn’t. Blunt messages fly up when you fail in your attempts to reach water:
“You have been captured by the militia. You will likely become one of the hundreds of thousands of people lost to this humanitarian crisis. Girls in Darfur face abuse, rape and kidnapping by the Janjaweed. As someone at a far-off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?”
While the game or “narrative based simulation” may not be fun in the traditional sense of the word, it does engage and draw attention to the disparity of a gamer and the crisis surrounding refugees in Darfur.
Suzanne Seggerman, of the organisation Games for Change muses that the word ‘games’ has the wrong connotations for these serious simulations states that “games are systems, and they offer a good way to explore complex systems … by role playing, shifting variables and seeing how outcomes are affected. Games have to be taken on their own terms. They’re not trying to replace the reality of Darfur or Rawana. But people cannot go and experience these places, and the simulated experiences games offer are amazing. I don’t look on games as competing with the real world and human interactions. I see them as a medium and as a path towards actions in the real world”.
As Seggerman suggests, young people are beginning view social media and gaming as compliments to offline activity and in the case of philanthropic aid and charity, as a medium to diffuse the message. This is reflected generally in young people’s view of digital as explored by Tech Tribe 2009. Within a few days over 5,000 people joined a Facebook group calling for Bankers Bonuses to be given to aid Haiti. This rising sentiment that the older generation have failed in attempts to create a better planet for their offspring is reflected in this inspiring blogpost, which calls for a metaphorical divorce:
Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.
You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.
You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.
You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.
You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.
You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.
You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.
You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.
You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.
You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.
You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.
There are lots of Haiti benefit events taking place over the weekend and there are sure to be over the next few weeks also. Their successes are already being noted as Chantelle Fiddy thanked the Ctrl+Alt+Shift crowd, ”according to security they’ve not seen a crowd like that since the last rave at The End.” A review of the Ctrl+Alt+Shift party can be found here and a quick Facebook search should begin reveal further fundraising parties should you wish to take part:
The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independent.The attention grabbing headline refers to the potential threat OnLive offers to the current gaming industry by removing the iconic, chunky hardware boxes from gaming.
OnLive aims to cut the need for hardware by using the upper limit of internet bandwidth to stream any game to a display of the users choosing. This would fundamentally alter the marketing war between games consoles that has existed for years, it will essentially cut the need to upgrade hardware in order to play new, more advanced games. Instead of buying new, OnLive will merely upgrade their servers, making gaming far cheaper for gamers; and accessible only to those with fast enough internet access. The above video seems to endorse this as the graphically heavy and admired PC game Crisis is streamed to the iPhone. With constant internet access being a key factor OnLive also allows users to view exactly what games their friends are playing, opening enormous possibilities for multiplayer games. Laptop and smart-phone access for cloud gaming is apparent in their built-in access to the internet, TVs will also be able to have OnLive access as they release a ‘microconsole’ flatter and smaller than a standard console controller, connecting the large display to a modem and streaming the game information to the TV.
Yet on the day OnLive officially announced themselves in 2009, Sony happened to register the name ‘PS Cloud’.While the gaming industry does not yet appear to be quaking in its boots, technology trends of the last decade indicate that if the service is ‘good enough’ it will succeed. The console heavy gaming sector is only just waking up to what the music industry has had to deal with for the last decade in digital distribution becoming the dominant method. While technology experts have negatively stated that they fear the ‘decade of the gadget is over’ the positive upspin on this is that an integration of information will be taking place within these gadgets as differentiated services and internet access/speed becomes a more central component.
Youth behaviour will define further which of these services are fully adopted as they defined the last decade with the adoption of cheap, accessible ‘good enough technologies’ to become the dominant consumer electronics of the last decade. While vinyl is in the midst of a cult revivial amongst young people, there is no denying that MP3 players and laptops have long over taken record and CD players as the main mode of listening to music. While the sound quality of these newer technologies is inferior, the accessibility and cheapness has clearly won over many young people. This will be the same with books, as a New York Times writer recently noted in that his daughter called his Amazon Kindle ‘daddy’s book’ instead of an electronic reader .Tech Tribe 2009 clearly shows that young people have fully adopted this ‘good enough technology’ which has suddenly come to outline consumer electronics for the last decade in online films through laptops, digital photos, eReaders and Skype. If OnLive is cheap, accessible and good enough, young people will almost certainly adopt it, evidencing how youth are possibly the driving demographic sector in how consumer electronics develop.
For a more detailed overview of how OnLive will work after it’s full release later in the year, watch the detailed presentation below. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also available on Youtube.
The phrase “3D is coming to your living room” was being bandied around freely by the likes of Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Sony in booths worth their weight in gold at the International Consumer Electronics Show last week.
There has been a lot of hype about 3DTV recently. Yet despite the 3D film Avatar having become the second biggest grossing film in history, 3DTV seems more an extension of High-Definition TV and possibly a step towards returning TV to a more unidirectional focus for young people again where the internet has made it multidirectional and periphery. Young people are able to watch programs on the net via their laptops while multi-tasking other activities (homework, music, instant messaging etc). However… 3DTV does hint toward greater possibilities for the next evolutionary entertainment step.
As Tech Tribe 2009 showed usyoung people are watching TV in a less linear, unidirectional fashion. On average, young people are watching 3.5 hours of TV online a week, compared to 5 hours of average TV consumption and around 20 hours of general online activity. This increasingly multilayered media consumption has clearly had those in the TV industry worried and so it may be suggested that 3DTV is an attempt to reassert the top-down, dominating media style of TV. So what does 3DTV have in stall for us?
With a few possible niche exceptions, it seems as though most of the consumer electronics industry has chosen to implement the active shutter glasses version of 3D as opposed to the lens based passive glasses that are used in current 3D cinemas. The active shutter glasses are powered by a battery which blocks each eye alternately as the display of 3DTV has alternating frames: the left eye then right eye, left eye, right eye etc. The glasses then sync to the display via infrared receivers. Clearly this technology seems a lot more cumbersome than the Buddy Holly time ‘passive glasses’ that are currently being used in the cinema and replacing the battery could well be as annoying and fiddly changing the TV remote.
The advantage of using the active shutter glasses however is that 3DTV has such a fast refresh rate that the set can be used as normal TVs also, which is why 3DTVs will ultimately succeed even if they fail. Similarly to HD it will be hard not to find a 3DTV when you enter go to buy a new Television.
The recent bout of 3D cinema, it could be suggested, initiated an attempt to combat downloading, as the pirates would no longer be able to view the 3D processed films without getting a headache. Yet piracy represents an unmet demand in young people. 3DTV could possibly be suggested to represent an attempt to meet this demand and bring the immersive cinema experience to the living room. Avatar has, since its release in December, gone on to become the second biggest grossing film of all time, making $1,372,993,105 at the box office. Could 3DTV really represent a challenge to cinema? Possibly, if the price, on-demand ease and quality of the sets themselves are to the consumers needs. Yet the current crop of 3DTVs on display at CES seem like a stepping-stone to the fully immersive experience of the near future. One new technology, Intel’s Wireless Display (WiDi) allows your laptop to wirelessly connect to your HDTV, allowing the fully on-demand quality of internet streaming to appear on your TV. While some companies are beginning to invest in non-glasses based 3DTV, which is primarily coming about through gaming technology pushing innovations. Yet the technology that everybody wants to see, 3D holograms, has yet to materialize. Although a lot has been theorized and they are apparently in the pipelines. Yet it appears like young people will continue to use the internet and their laptops to watch films until cheap, accessible and truly immersive alternatives come into function. It feels like this won’t become fully mainstream until the consumer electronic industry recognize exactly what people want out of their products. Youth behaviour is often a good indicator of this.
Tech Tribe 2009 revealed how young people, despite their relatively meager financial situations, are still heavily attentive to philanthropic activities surrounding their environments. Last year was a big year for youth participation and making their voices heard within their communities. Young people in particular have shown an apparent increase in participation in both off and online political protest. Online tools like Facebook and Twitter, have been essential in making clear and obvious this suggested increase. Never before has there been such tools for exercising ones voice and opinion in such a democratic manner. Yet despite this increase or least seeming increase, the integrity of this participation has often been criticized in the last year.
Considering the amount of media attention it received it is no real surprise to find that the controversial 2009 Iran Election made three appearances in the top 10 news events of Twitter’s most used status updates of 2009. Perhaps much of the media attention was because there have never really been any tools quite like this to facilitate an online protest. Yet there was no real revolution in Iran. Protests were suppressed violently and the protested regime is still in control. This suggests that the media may have overestimated the effect of the social network’s ability to dictate the offline revolutionary activities.. Yet while critics would suggest that this ‘armchair Twitter revolution’ is hypocritical and even aiding of the regime, it can be suggested that it is merely not focused as it could be. The shared opinion of many was apparent, yet the ability to carry this sentiment offline was inhibited by the brutal strength and violence used by the Iranian government. In such situations perhaps an awareness that social networking cannot do everything in its current form, yet an appreciation of its ability to proliferate information is the way that it might be best regarded.
The problem with this viewpoint however is that taking part in online protests or petitions may give some the feeling that they have done something and they may do no more. This skeptical viewpoint can be challenged however with the mix of both offline and online protest that the recent UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 had. While the conference has been mostly adjudged to have failed horribly in its attempts to reach a global agreement to reduce carbon emissions, the mixture of both offline and online protest impressed some. It showed that to some extent when young people have the opportunity to match their online sentiment with their offline action then they take it in abundance. Online protests were not limited to Twitter this time. With Facebook more likely to have closer friends than Twitter, in having the world’s fifth biggest population at 350 million, and Youtube exhibiting personal video uploads. Twitter took a backseat allowing a more individual approach to be adopted by the young people involved. Facebook status updates included ‘Hopelesshagen’ and ‘Everyone arrested before lunch. Anti-climax,’ while video updates from the UK Youth Climate Coalition made the protest seemed more real:
Despite the failure of the conference itself, Copenhagen seemed in some ways like a step forward in the growth of online youth protesting, becoming a sign that a mergence of offline protest was possible, and that online could act as a catalyst for actual offline protest. The reasons for failure were not through a lack of effort from young people rather, that again the powers that be, in this case the politics of the various heads of states that refused to compromise. If the viewpoint is taken that the opportunity to take part in offline protest is available, youth protest participation takes a more positive spin. This can be reflected in the protests of young people on a national scale in the UK.
The above video is an example of a UK youth protest organized online. The overwhelming response to the website http://www.voteforchange.co.uk asking for a protest method was that of a Zombie Walk. In this instance young protestors reclaimed public space and marched outside The Houses of Parliament as ‘brain dead politicians,’ recalling the original use of the term zombie, which in literature was an allegory of brain dead consumers who did not think about their consumptions. This generation of young people is clearly politically passionate to a large extent. New technologies have clearly allowed a politically motivated generation to express their sentiment. When this online sentiment is perceived as attainable, then offline action is merged with online sentiment. This is clear within the recent Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number 1 campaign recalling a nearly 20 year metal song to beat the current crop of manufactured pop using social networking. The campaign managed to raise £70,000 for the charity Shelter from single sales, against evidencing a political and philanthropic motivation to the campaign. Online organization of political participation is still in it’s infancy for young people, yet if the sentiment is as strong as has been, it can be suggested that offline participation and social cohesion will only continue to become more organized and apparent. Reclaiming public space will continue to spread awareness of positive message rather than negative ones which young people are only too aware that the mainstream media purport. Everything is OK is an online campaign group which aims to spread positive word that mainstream media is creating separatism in people, giving the opposing message that Everything is OK.
Facebook’s recent announcement that the embedded game Farmville has more users than the whole of Twitter shows just how casually games have seeped into our lives. The proof is in the pudding as Farmville’s 69 million users earn Facebook an estimated £614, 150 per day, while Twitter’s revenue was projected to be £245,516 for third quarter of 2009. The realization that gaming has casually seeped into the everyday lives of many more people than hardcore gamers, is a significant one for the gaming industry.
The CEO of Electronic Arts, one of the worlds biggest games developer/publishers, John Riccitiello, believes that “with the advent of the new digital media landscape, we’ve seen a torrent of new consumers. Conservatively, if I add up mobile phone users who play games, social network people who play games, people who play PC games online in Asia, there’s at least a billion people gaming today. So we have five times the audience we’ve ever had, and it’s growing in leaps and bounds.” This integration of games into the more casually used devices, beyond consoles has important implications for how games are developed, as the wider populace interact with the more casual qualities of simple pick-up’n’play games. These qualities have allowed more and more people to begin producing their own games for mobile phones and web browsers. Casual games have clearly become immensely successful in the last few years with estimates suggesting that the casual gaming industry will be worth $13.5 billion by next year. It has even been suggested that the runaway success of the Wii was built on adapting these casual qualities to console gaming. The gaming industry has most certainly noticed it as Nintendo’s competitors begin to adapt their hardware to attract more casual gamers.
While the term casual gaming has become popular only over the last few years, it can be suggested that the concept has been around for 20 years. While dedicated video game consoles produced games as their ultimate end, Microsoft allowed their users to casually dip in and out of gaming with Solitaire, which is widely considered the first casual game with more than an estimated 400 million users to have played it since it’s release in 1989. This success along with handheld devices such as the Gameboy reaching 118 million units sold worldwide in 2008, may suggest, that there was always a market for those more casual about gaming as.
The advent of Adobe Flash games distributed by a web-browser begun the modern drift towards casual gaming as a new market market began to develop. The game Bejeweled has been downloaded more than 150 million times since it’s release in 2001, which is by no coincidence around the same year that broadband internet started becoming commercially available in the UK, with broadband penetration becoming akey driver in the distribution of casual gaming market. Apple realized the potential of digitial distribution and began producing iPods that could play simple casual games in 2003, the same year that Nintendo announced they were developing the Nintendo DS.High internet speeds, application simplicity and availability would eventually reach levels of dissemination where consumers who could previously not create there own games were distributing them to phones and browsers, yet it was the console market that next begun examining the profitability of casual gaming.
Upon the European launch of the Nintendo DS in 2005 the President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata commented that with their new consoles Nintendo intended to cater for “the needs of all gamers whether for more dedicated gamers who want the real challenge they expect, or the more casual gamers who want quick, pick up and play fun.” This expansion in philosophy to include casual gamers was a winning stroke in the current ‘console war’ between the handheld consoles the DS and the PSP and later the home consoles, the Wii, Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. In just 4 years since its release, the Nintendo DS became the biggest selling games console ever in the UK, passing 10 million units sold in December 2009.Celebrity friendly marketing in the UK helped in the in the breaking of this record, but it was the simplicity of the largely puzzle and crossword based games including Brain Training, Sudoku and Professor Layton that contributed to bridging the boundaries between gamers and non-gamers.
Nintendo quickly followed the casual yet phenomenal success of the DS by releasing the Wii in 2006. The Wii differed from its competitors the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, in choosing not to rev up the graphics of its predessor the Gamecube, but instead to branch out to “bring new gamers and casual gamers into this industry” largely through the use of the Wii’s innovative motion tracking control-pad, the Wii remote. The scaling down of buttons, meant that those who were not used to which button is which in gaming could easily swing their arm in the arc of a tennis stroke in a tennis game, giving a more simple, accessible and intuitive control system for casual gamers and those outside of the hardcore. The strategy worked. As of October 2009, the Wii had sold over 22 million more units worldwide than it’s closest competitor the Xbox 360. The console has sold more than 6 million units in the UK in only 3 years and analysts have stated that its current worldwide lead in unit sales, even if the worse case “scenario were to occur, the Wii would still come out the winner, with some room to breathe.” This is a signal of the ongoing trend of good enough technology surpassing its more expensive competitors. While the Wii is first perhaps mainstream example of successful casual games could get, it was still within the console realm, giving it limited success to more casually accessed devices such as computers and mobile phones.
A key factor in bringing more casual consumers into the gaming industry has proven to be to allow gaming in short bursts, either on public transport or on work breaks. Suitably simple, playable games with no need to save were necessary therefore to emerge on devices, which could be easily accessed in these scenarios. In 2007 both the iPhone and Facebook began allowing third party development for applications on their platforms. The lines between games developer and consumer have begun to blur as the last year has seen an exponential rise in gaming on both platforms as developers with basic skills have gotten to grips with the possibilities and the challenges of the mobile phone and social networking platforms. One of the major players in social network gaming Playfish, was bought by EA for around $300 million in November signaling the enormous valuation of gaming on social networks.As previously mentioned Zynga’s Facebook game Farmville has more users than the whole of Twitter and makes Facebook an estimated £614,150 per day through micro-transactions. The social gaming company has also recently raised $180 million in venture capital fundsand is doing well enough to advertise, during a recession, that they are hiring on a huge billboard going into San Francisco, without using any words.
In the space of only a year 18,554 third party developed games have sprung up for the iPhone App store. Former ATM software developer Steve Demeter, becem one of the most famous iPhone game successes by creating ‘Trisim’ in his spare time. He submitted it to Apple priced at $5, making $250,000 in profits in the first two months of it’s release. London has it’s own successes in iPhone App development, including Simon Oliver whose ‘Rolando’ sold several hundred thousand copies, with a sequel doing equally as well, this even lead to a recent article in the London Evening Standard newspaper heralding the “Triumph of the Apprepreneur”. The emergence of this trend has given opportunity to websites like iPhone App Freelancer http://www.iPhoneAppFreelancer.com/ to emerge which allows those with no technical no-how but good ideas to collaborate with developers looking for freelance work to create fresh iPhone Apps and games, celebrating the new found potential in the co-creativity of casual gaming.
Microsoft seems to understanding this at last with that controller-free system which can also be used beyond games. Only the sales will be able to tell if Playstation 3’s Motion Controller will be able to challenge it, yet the ability to dream further to appears to be Microsoft’s, purely in pre-release hype. All the console systems however, will have to some extent take the lead from their users who are becoming ever more vocal, and used to instantaneous tweaking and adjusting of their systems with the digital distribution via phones and social networks. In order to keep up with the casual phenomenal, the behemoth that the games industry will have to continue to look towards is the wider populace and how they wish to casually interact with entertainment and games.
The controversial and immensely successful release of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is particularly timely given that we are in the midst of the festive season. Modern Warfare 2, which was released in November of this year, smashed entertainment industry records to become the biggest entertainment release of all time. Within 5 days of it’s release Modern Warfare 2 generated $550 million, over $150 million more than the biggest ever 5 day gross at the box office (Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, $394 million in opening 5 days).
Banned in Russia, because of a controversial scene in which the player can choose to mow down civilians in a terrorist attack on an airport, the storyline of the game focuses on the large-scale outbreak of war in the modern world, further pushing its timely quality with the recent ramping up of the war in Afghanistan. The controversial subject matter and particularly realistic setting has set the game up one of the most talked about Christmas presents for mother’s to give their children this year. On her blog, one Mother sarcastically asked and answered: “How do we really feel about war, anyhow? After 40,000 years the evidence is in. We like it. Here’s the top toy we will give this year to our children to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Upon hearing the discussions about whether Mums would buy Modern Warfare 2 for their young children, I thought about my Mum’s impact upon my early life as a gamer. Unable to conceive of getting into video games without her financial backing as a child, and baring in mind that the world of gaming had changed significantly since I was a child in the early 1990s, I decided to ask her a few questions about her interactions with games via my obsession with them as a child.
“I think I started buying you games around 8 or 9 years old. You didn’t get them immediately. You had to ask for a long time, even though your friends had them for a while, but I guess it was a point of reference for you. To have something in common with others was I think the main reason we bought you a console.
“Particularly being an only child I didn’t want you to feel left out, I suppose all mothers have that urge though. I thought it might have a positive impact on your hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, so when I first started buying them I would more or less choose the games that you got, apart from the ones your uncle bought for you! I remember I bought you Ecco the Dolphin and Art Alive because I thought the covers looked nice and I thought there might be some education value to them!”
I don’t really have any memories of my Mum getting me those game I didn’t really want, although there are lots of stories floating around the internet about Mum’s getting the wrong game for their child, especially with Modern Warfare 2 having a similar release for the Wii that is more an updated version of an older game.
I had totally forgotten about these placid and notoriously difficult games, but it was probably more its difficulty, especially of Ecco the Dolphin, rather than the fact that my Mum had chosen it. It was interesting that she choose the game purely based on the cover though, rather than play-testing it herself, as the internet didn’t exist in our world circa 1992.
I asked her what her concerns were with me playing video games as a child in general.
“Yeah I had concerns generally. I had heard stories of addiction on the radio, alongside those more extreme stories of children getting violent through not being able to differentiate between fantasy and reality and re-enacting the games that you had, but ultimately I didn’t censor you beyond the extremely violent and gore-filled games as I had faith both in my parenting ability by correlation your own ability to distinguish fantasy and reality.
“I was vehemently against buying GTA for you, all I had heard about was the violence in it, even though I knew your friends had it and you had the money to buy it yourself when you were 12 I didn’t let you buy it.”
I remember that my friends had Grand Theft Auto, one of the most controversial games that has since become a best selling series, allowing the player total freedom in a city but encouraging them through storyline to become a career criminal. I suppose the early censorship my Mum had instilled had worked as I don’t really remember having a large desire to get GTA, and it was only when the 3D version came out when I was older at around 15, that I had a desire to buy it, and my education in games in conjunction with my Mum’s early censoring had firmly distinguished gaming from reality.
This ability to distinguish even formed part of my argument when asking my Mum to buy me a game she wasn’t prepared to.
“Well your Uncle Herman would pass you down lots of games he would have, but I asked him to censor them, which he did most of the time! I’d buy you gaming magazines quite regularly; I still think to do that sometimes! And you’d usually get the same games as your friends. When it came to me actually buying games for you, you’d try and charm me!
I remember one time when we had been at the theatre seeing Richard II and you said to me ‘Can we have a look in the games shop?’ phrasing it in such an innocent way that you just wanted to have a look at what was there, but we both knew full well that you knew exactly what game you wanted!”
I too remember never once thinking ‘ah I’ll just have a look’ and always attempting to get my Mum into the games shop so that I’d have a shot at getting the specific game I had in mind.
“Once we got inside you’d keep the charm going but on this particular occasion after the theatre, with a large bout of pestering too! On the whole though you knew which games I would get you and which I wouldn’t, and once I had told you that it wasn’t suitable for you, you’d try with another game you had in mind.”
I do remember my journeys to the game shop as mostly being successful with my Mum, but I don’t think she ever bought me a game that was way out there and unsuitable.
“I would largely look at the cover then decide whether it was suitable for you, because you’d be with me most of the time I didn’t really have the opportunity to test it at home for myself, but we did end up playing one of the more controversial ones together and I got really into it.”
This brought me to one of my clearest memories as a young gamer. My Mum sat down and actively took part in scrolling beat-em up games with me. None of my other friends Mum’s did that! So it was really fun that she actively took part in them and we able to complete or get to the final round of, the two games we played the most together; Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2.
“I think your Uncle Herman gave you Golden Axe, which I really really enjoyed but although we got to the final round we never completed it! And Streets of Rage, I was iffy about the violence on the cover but I let you convince me slightly and I wanted to experience it myself to see whether it was bad or not, and in the end I ended up really enjoying it! The girl character became a fantasy me! I really loved that we got to go on a quest together, especially with the fantasy setting of Golden Axe, I trusted your ability to differentiate between the game and reality. I liked the stories too and felt a thrill at accomplishing them!
I think I ended up playing it through wanting to experience how violent it was for myself and also you asking me to play with you when you didn’t have friends round. Unless you experience it for yourself, you don’t really know what it’s about and it also gave me validity if I needed to censor it while we were playing. I guess the lack of blood and gore, despite the violence was a key factor in letting those two particular games slide, they really weren’t as bad as some of the others, and especially Golden Axe which was set in a more fantastical realm”
At this point I begin to contrast my Mum’s attitude with 16-bit graphical violence with the graphics of the modern day behemoth of gaming, and in particular the controversial level in which the player takes the role of a soldier who goes undercover as a terrorist and is encouraged to gun-down innocent civilians in an airport. The fact that this level can be skipped is in many ways an emotional plot device to get the player to dislike the bad guys of the game. Even if the player does decide to take on the level they do not have to largely partake in the shooting of civilians.
After the brief story monologue, and the in-action graphics of the game appeared, my Mum looked at me shocked at how realistically the graphics had progressed since we were playing together more than 10 years ago.
“I’m shocked at the realness of it! I’m not sure I would’ve bought you the beat-em up games if they’d been this real!”
When the shooting of civilians started happening she looked visibly disgusted.
“I don’t like how the gun was coming from my perspective, that makes it too real. It didn’t used to be like that point of view. There’s a crossover with reality here also.”
She stopped the video ¾ of the way in though, as she was unsure if she could continue. “
I’ll finish it but it’s caused me a degree of anxiety definitely, but then again I suppose I am able to suspend my disbelief as the characters walk through the bodies in a cartoony way rather than stepping over them in a more realistic way, but the wanton destruction of this game disgusts me. It made me shudder and dragged my emotions into it despite it being a game. If you were younger, I wouldn’t be buying that for you if you!”
I ask about the upcoming proposal for the Digital Economy Bill, which will make it illegal for the first time to sell 12+ rated games to children under the age of 12 and she answers with full confidence in the passing of that law.
“Yep very sensible, the media has a part to play in this because you only hear about the games that cause controversy, or I do anyway because you were my link to that world, but I suppose if you were younger now I’d use the internet more to check up on what games you wanted and maybe look for more realistic takes on reviews or multiple ones anyway.
“Games have definitely got more realistically violent since I was buying them for you, but I suppose the world has seemingly got more violent too in the reporting of violence. There’s more a saturation of violence it seems, but having said that I’m intrigued by the Wii, which my friend has a Pilates game for so I’d consider checking that our, and I get the impression that it spans generations rather than hardcore teenage gamers. It seems to have something more appealing. I think the key factor in parental control is actually experiencing the game for myself though.”
While my Mum has been musing about whether to buy herself a Wii since interviewing her, there is definitely a thread that the violence of games past went unnoticed by parents and there are plenty of examples of kids appealing to internet gaming community members to help them persuade their Mum’s to buy them Modern Warfare 2 (examples here, here, here and here). Yet in a lot of cases (well, at least in mine), Mum’s decision was often final and perhaps it needs that firmness to give children a clear sense about how to choose what games they can deal with. There is no doubt that it’s essential to censor young children to games in some form, but my discussion with my own Mum also suggests that it is possible to find a middle road, where both parents and children can enjoy games together, where censoring can become more of a behind-the-scenes issues rather than a confrontational one.
As a related link it seems there are also others comparing the violence in the games of yesteryear, including the aforementioned Streets of Rage 2:
Having explored how the young psychedelic pop scene of Baltimore is giving the city a sense of colourful positivity and moving the city’s image away from the bleak images of The Wire, another US youth movement has also emerged to give young people a fun and attainable sense of achievement, community and hope
The Jerk movement is a new youth culture emerging this year from Los Angeles. Jerkin’ centres around talented groups of young urban dancers who often make their own beats. While the style of hip-hop is not very distinct, it is a lot more accessible than it’s main inspiration, the Bay Area’s ethereal hip-hop known as Hyphy. The name Jerk is taken from the fact that the dancing style is central to the culture. The term Jerk is itself one of the most used dances seen in the various YouTube videos, and consists of moving your knees in and out while keep your feet stationary and standing on your toes. Other moves are known as the ‘reject’ which is a backwards running-man, the ‘dip’ and ‘pindrop’ and are all accessible from the many YouTube instructional videos.
The dance style became popular firstly at parties and then really took off through YouTube. The movement has picked up so much pace that Jerkin’ duo New Boyz have been signed to a record contract by Warner. Their debut single ‘You’re a Jerk’ (above) has attracted over 21million views since May. The making of the official video had hundreds of locals turning out to be a part of the movement that was clearly beginning to get mainstream attention.
Jerk culture has been spreading around Los Angeles’ high schools and all-ages clubs for more than two years, but it’s because of “You’re a Jerk” that the music industry started paying attention. “You’re a Jerk” isn’t the first jerk song, but it was the first to get play on L.A.’s urban radio stations, the first to break through in non-local markets from Phoenix to Birmingham, Alabama, and the first beacon to other jerk music artists that fame really can extend beyond MySpace and house parties. It is not only the dance style that has been promoted via the online videos, however, as the Jerkin crews have their own style beyond the music and moves.
The Ranger$, who are the spokes crew for The National Jerk Association, have won many Jerk related competitions in California. They are all aged between 15 and 17 and their ‘Jerkin in Jerkville’ video, has garnered 3.5milion YouTube views since May. The Ranger$ are perhaps a better example of why Jerkin has taken off in such a positive way and become a cultural phenomenon. The lyrics of the songs, made by the young Jerk crew themselves, are all about wearing colourful skinny jeans, girls and their dance moves rather than any of the violent stereotypes typically associated with modern hip-hop. Beyond this still, the DIY nature of the video highlights The Ranger$ as a dance crew, a conscious element of how they formulated earlier this year. You could even say that the dance crew ingredient of Jerk culture is a return to the original 5 elements of hip-hop, which included break dancing. Graffiti, rapping and DJing are other the main elements yet street fashion and slang are often also included. The fact that Jerk culture includes most of these elements signals its importance beyond a style of dance & music, and into a movement.
- skinny jeans movment
It is no coincidence that the documentary chronicling the Jerkin Movement has emerged online rather than on MTV, which seems to have lost touch with emerging cultural movements associated with music. The internet has been key in the rise of Jerkin, not only in the spread of the DIY viral dancing videos, of which there have been some 35,000+ uploaded in the last 8 months, but in the creation of the culture in of itself. The aesthetic style mashes together various ingredients including checked shirts, skinny jeans, colourful and childish caps, t-shirts and even occasionally colourful mohawkes, with geek, skater and punk elements. This mash-up of style is symptomatic of the way culture is being democratized and disseminated because of the internet, in this case online access has allowed it’s young users access to a wide and varied view of hip-hop and culture before mixing it up and making it their own. Robert Randall, music editor of L.A Weekly notes that in scouring the history of hip-hop through internet, the positivty of Jerk culture is “like they’re dipping back and forgetting things like gangsta rap ever happened”. This view of Jerkin takes in the view of the film A Remix Manifesto, which we have already explored, that creativity is at it’s height via a large public domain from which to be influenced, which is internet is making possible.
In recent times however, many critics have suggested that this voracious merging of culture has resulted in a meaningless void that today’s young people exhibit. Examples of this meaningless culture are said to be Hipster’s wearing Keffiyehs while having no political meaning, and the styling of the metrosexual as an appropriation of gay culture with no meaning beyond itself. While the Hipster might be an example of how a young internet generation excitedly ate culture and spat out faddish content, Jerkin has more resonance with the people that are enveloped within it.
The spreading of Jerk culture on the internet was almost inevitable given it’s multi-faceted influences, yet the coming together of those fun and colourful influences also encouraged it’s spread in California before it became viral. Legacy of the New Boyz notes that before Jerkin emerged “people used to go to parties and get shot up, now they go to parties to jerk and have a good time”. This positivity competition to acquire fame via youtube views rather than drug deals is perhaps another reason that Jerk culture has taken off so quickly both online and physically. Yet it also exhibits the entrepreneurial and global perspective of its young dancers. “People were making jerkin’ music, but nobody was like doing anything with it” Legacy said. “We wanted to make it worldwide. This dance is crazy, and it got potential, so we wanted to make it worldwide. We made a jerkin’ song. We made ‘You’re a Jerk,’ which is like a double meaning. Jerkin’ is just having a good time, you just grooving. Some people ain’t capable of crumping. Their body can’t do all that. Everybody can jerk, my grandma be jerkin’. His 4-year-old brother be jerkin’. It’s just groovin’. It’s positive.” Young people now “think globally and act virally” as The New York times notes. With the other crews such as Action Figure$, LOL Kid$z, Pink Dollaz (who have already collaborated with M.I.A) and the Rej3ctz starting to gain national attention in America and get signed, it looks as though the young people of the Jerk Movement may create a lengthy and positive narrative for other young people to then digest, appropriate and then redistribute themselves online. Apparently Jerkin has already been spotted in Tottenham, North London. We await the videos on youtube.
Below are some Jerkin links to some of the dancing crews mentioned:
We’ve previously explored how Facebook is affecting relationships of young people . Our Headbox community member Rusha (23) described her relationship with her contacts on Facebook and how she didn’t know as many of them as she did in her day-to-day physical life saying that she had “never spoken to a third of them at all”. She outlined the passive nature of friends on Facebook, suggesting quite a negative impact upon social relations. She goes on to say that social networking encourages a way “to connect to people in a way that could only be described as passive”. Yet the word ‘passive’ could easily be substituted for more positively connotated words such as ‘ambient’ or ‘continuous’. There have been many news reports stressing the negative impact that social networking may have upon physical social relations (another example here). Yet there is a recent bout of news that suggests that social networking is actually impacting somewhat positively upon social relationships as people become both aware of the limits of social networking as well as how to maximize their social networks online. 2009 has provided enough of a shake up, largely through the mainstream notoriety of Twitter, to begin conceptualizing social networks differently to how they were at the beginning of the year.
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has examined the effects of social networking and cell phone use over the last 20 years. According to the study, although the participant’s social circles were self-reported to smaller than 20 years ago, this was not due to internet usage. In fact, people who regularly use digital technologies are far more social than the average American, having wider more diverse networks and are more likely to visit parks, cafes or volunteer for local organizations according to the study. This suggests, that in some ways a greater interaction with the internet and social networking sites, presents a greater interaction with community around their users, be it through a niche or a geographical interest. Many studies have hypothesized that the average person is feeling more socially isolated because of the rise of the internet. Pew confirmed previous findings that close networks had dropped by 2 or 3 friends, yet it also reported that only 6% of Americans fell into this previously attributed isolated category of citizen, with no significant change over the last 20 years. The study suggests that people are becoming more aware of exactly how to use social networks and are unperturbed by how the media might suggest that they take them too literally. The recent suggestion that young people are now ‘finally flocking’ to Twitter suggests that they are realizing the power of the social network merely for what it is, rather than an indicator for how many deep and connecting friendships one has.
Twitter has become the great example of the realistic social networking next step in that there is nothing beyond the 140 characters that can be shared. It is the bare bones of the information and possibly a link to a new site, in some ways confirming Pew’s findings that although people still prefer to connect in a face-to-face fashion, there is a growing realization that social networking is effective for exactly what it suggests rather than igniting a more close and meaningful friendship connection with others. Not necessarily knowing your contacts very well on Twitter allows a certain openness that is crucial to, perhaps, Twitter’s greatest reward, serendipitous discovery – the adjustment of this feature caused an uproar on the microblogging site earlier in the year. With more young people using intentional misspellings with leetspeak or lolspeak even as far as using exclamation marks with a few number 1s purposefully inserted when ending the group (!!!!11), indicating an excitedness that is usually conveyed with such haphazard typing mistakes, it could be suggested that there is possibly an increasing awareness of the internet’s impact upon society as digital becomes a less separate reality for young people. It is perhaps no coincidence then that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named ‘Unfriend’ as its word of 2009.
Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for the Oxford US dictionary program states that as a 2009 Word of the Year, Unfriend “has both currency and potential longevity”. The OAD word of the year even sparked a debate as to whether it was actually Unfriend or Defriend is the word that should be used.
The popularity of the concept perhaps further indicates John Fischer comments that it’s an “example of how things like social networks are changing our relationships. You used to have to deal with all the messy real-world parts of ending a friendship and now you can just click a button and delete someone.” This changing relationship has even manifested itself within mobile phones as the Samsung Jet features an incoming fake call function to alleviate annoying conversation.
This shift is further evidence that young people who are growing up with social networking and digital are beginning to see them less as separate realities from the physical and are integrating real life privacy concerns into their personal social media strategy. We’ve already shown through Tech Tribe 2009 that in the last 12 months well over half (63%) of 19-25 year olds have upped their privacy settings. Social media strategy has become such a popular concept with the quitting of Twitter by Miley Cyrus, Lilly Allen and Stephen Fry (the latter temporarily) that it has satirized with the term suicide, particularly in the case of Ed Droste, founder of the band Grizzly Bear . The satirist even ran his own cyber suicide story http://www.carlesisdead.com/ with a more satirical hipster character, Mikebro, replacing him for the 10 top albums of the decade post and on the Hipster Runoff twitter account. This hipster-based satire of social media strategy is an example of how conscious young people are becoming of it and also how the digital world is becoming less distinct from the physical.
This lack of distinction is ever more apparent in industries that directly involve laying digital information onto the physical world such as geotagging and augmented reality, the latter being a market, which may be worth $732million by 2014 and is already interacting with children’s action figures. While young people have generally begun to suss privacy settings for social networks. There are privacy warnings to be heeded as these new technologies become mainstream. Now that Twitter has enabled location information to be noted to tweets, and digital information can be added to pictures via augmented reality apps there are concerns that releasing such a combination of information such as visual cues and location could invite unwanted attention. This discourse is however part of a larger ‘transparency versus personalization’ debate that has always run since people started beginning putting up personal information on the internet, as Kevin Kelly notes that “if you want total personalization, you have to be totally transparent”.
Most people won’t take their personal social media strategy this far however, and will be utilizing different social networks for different purposes as they become more aware of how integrated they become into society. Linkedin is used for professional collaboration, Facebook for personal friends while Twitter is used both to connect with friends and collaborate serendipitously. There will always be those who opt out categorically such as 25 year gold physics graduate Tomek Kott whose wife started a mini-crusade to get him to join in creating the Facebook group “Tomek Kott Must Joint Facebook”. It seems as though these examples are becoming more anomalies worth noting however as more and more of the world become socially networked.
Yet while it is noted that a huge majority of young people have joined social networks and are beginning to perceive them for precisely what they are, the assumption that young people are becoming intuitive with technology and are therefore, what some call Digital Natives, can be challenged as was the case at a lecture last week at the London School of Economics. Professor Sonia Livingstone noted that digital intuitiveness is not a staple characteristic of young people growing up today, instead noting Ofcom’s recent study showing that there is no real consensus for 12-15 year old internet users about exactly how search engines work with 37% suggesting relevance was the key factor, while 32% believed truthfulness to be the factor that ranks results. These results suggest that there is no clear way to define young people beyond the fact that they are young people. While the large majority is becoming aware of personal social media strategy there will always be those who are unaware, yet things like this are teachable in school, unlike the older methods for consuming media like TV. Dr Rebekah Willet suggested at the digital native lecture that for children social networks were more of an instrument of sub-conscious expression rather a conscious platform of it’s own. This is supported by the fact that recent psychological research has suggested that Facebook profiles capture their users true personalities, rather than exaggerated ones. It is perhaps necessary to view a combination of the two views as social networks become as immediate realities for young people as their daily face-to-face interactions – the conversations are both unconscious and conscious of those viewing them online.
With Animals Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion being labeled as a potential album of the year in Januraryand their profile raising and following this up with gigs in high profile London venues such as the O2 Academy Brixton it is not surprising that their small home city of the Baltimore is becoming more recognized as a hotbed of musical creativity and moving beyond it’s association with so real it hurts drama The Wire. In the UK, Baltimore primarily has an association with the institutional setting of The Wire and not much else. Yet in the US, Baltimore has garnered national attention with it’s artists bringing forth a new wave of colourful psychedelic pop. Furthermore it seems like ‘blogs worth blogging about’ are already sighting Baltimore-based bands as a potential record of the year 2010 material just as Animal Collective were sighted as such early in 2009.
The fact that news of Dan Deacon’s cancelled US tour popped up on the NME website suggests an increasing awareness of the Baltimore-based artist in the UK. Deacon’s playful live shows have been getting more recognition to the point where he played a well publicized concert in London in June this year. His live shows often take place in the midst of the crowd and involve dance circles, human tunnels, over-the-top countdowns and other playful interactions with the crowd. This colourful aesthetic pervades the scene that’s emerging from Baltimore, and is in direct contradiction to the stereotypically bleak images of Baltimore that is in the consciousness of the British public.
Is the UK vision of Baltimore about to change??
These stereotypes are however being blown away by Deacon and Wham City, an art and music collective made up of Deacon’s dearest friends and most frequent collaborators. This attempt to spread joy and technicolour manifests itself quite prominently at shows as Deacon often hands out the lyrics sheet to his “national anthem” for Wham City and encourages mass singalongs:
There is a mountain of snow
Up past the big glen
We have a castle enclosed
There is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold
Into a huge hand
That hand’s a held by a bear
Who has a sick band
Of goats and cats and pigs and bats
With brooms and bats and wings and rats
And great big dogs like kings and queens
And everyone plays drums and sings
Of big sharks, sharp swords
Beast knees, bees lords
Sweet cakes, mace lakes
Oh mamamamamamama
Although Wham City represents only the tip of the iceberg in Baltimore’s tangled scenes collective creativity, they are at forefront of this smorgasboard of pop culture, 15 members of which went on tour with Deacon as a whole in the US this summer forming a playful orchestra. Wham City even has it’s own festival, Whartscape which has been putting on regularly since 2006 during Balitmore’s Artscape art festival. The anti-festival turned oddball indie magnet covers four nights, two full days, and four venues, is backed by a list of sponsors, and brings in headliners whose individual payment guarantees could probably cover a month’s rent for everyone involved in organizing the fest combined.
This powerful and expanding artistic influence in the city of Baltimore occurred organically around 2004 as the Maryland Institute Colleage of Art started giving classes again. This in combination with large and cheap warehouse spaces in Baltimore, which has created the perfect environment for young people to have the space and time to create, such as Wham City’s below interpretation of Beauty and the Beast which came from finding cassette tapes of the soundtrack.
There is an argument to suggest that a gentrification cycle occurs because of these artistic movements towards cheap spaces that eventually develop an aesthetic of cool, which then drives up the prices of the properties and brings in more wealth forcing the artists to move elsewhere for cheaper rent. Although this is yet to happen with Baltimore, it can be suggested it has already taken place in Brooklyn, New York and Shoreditch in East London. In this way it might be suggested that the creative desires of young people might bring a greater sense of safety and affluence to the community that they creating within. This places a large amount of responsibility in the hands of those young people as to how their community will be shaped.
