The work designers make is inspired by taste, and taste is often derived from what we’re exposed to during our upbringing. But design values and history is taught through a canon; that accepted pantheon of work by predominantly European and American male designers that sets the basis for what is deemed “good” or “bad.” The authority of the canon has undermined the work produced by non-Western cultures and those from poorer backgrounds so that Ghanaian textiles, for example, get cast as craft rather than design. Classifying traditional craft as different from modern design deems the histories and practices of design from many cultures inferior. We should aim to eliminate the false distinctions between craft and design, in order to recognize all culturally important forms of making. Design thinking rhetoric is similarly exclusive: To frame design thinking as a progressive narrative of global salvation ignores alternative ways of knowing.
Video games and social media require human users to enter into a procedural loop known as flow
While there are no universals in media culture today, there are many qualities worth exploring, because they are shared by many communities or because they are compelling remediations of the age of modernism. One of these is procedurality. Popular modernist writers today claim that this is the essence of the computer: its procedures (algorithms, programs) allow it to interact with other machines and human users in increasingly complex and creative ways. Video games and social media are procedural: they require human users to enter into a procedural loop that both constrains and empowers them. Procedurality is itself the latest version of mechanization, which has been a key condition of society and the economy since the Industrial Revolution. While modernism was vitally concerned with the cultural meaning of mechanical and power technologies in the 20th century, today’s media culture is exploring how far procedurality and simulation can penetrate into and redefine creative expression as well as our politics and everyday lives.
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.”
While some teams fashion themselves after traditional sports franchises, other are thinking much bigger than wins and losses, focusing on content creation and even apparel as valuations continue to spiral higher.
While people are still grappling with the technical ramifications of Google’s Stadia platform, gamers have begun asking deeper, more troubling questions. What do mods look like in a world of game streaming? What happens to game preservation? What happens if Google dwarfs gaming the same way it has with search, browsers and advertising? And most worryingly of all, what happens if Google decides to walk away from the industry later on?
Esports probably won’t replace baseball as America’s national pastime, but it’s now just as popular as the NBA. Last year, 63 million US viewers watched competitive video games, according to Activate Inc., putting esports on par with the NBA’s viewership.
If you’ve read anything about growth marketing, you’ve probably run across the popular examples. Airbnb drove traffic to its site by building a way for its hosts to cross-post their listings on Craigslist. Dropbox grew its user base by giving existing users free storage for referrals. Hotmail expanded its reach with a footer link advertising the service in every outgoing email.
In internet land and our digital life, few stories over the past few months have been so epic and persuasive as Fortnite’s growing popularity. Netflix famously said in January, 2019 that Fortnite was a bigger competitor for attention than Hulu or HBO.
On Saturday I watched my 12 year old son scoff down his meal so that he could rush upstairs to get logged on with his friends in time for a Marshmello live streamed event on Fortnite. As you can see from the video this was Marshmello appearing as a Fortnite character, on stage with his music playing. Meanwhile Fortnite players moved around the ‘concert venue’ showing off their dance moves – all of which of course had been purchased in app with Fortnite VBucks. In-game live experiences like this are nothing new, but it may just be that we are beginning to get to a tipping point in shared gaming experiences for Gen Z that will shape their entertainment expectations for years to come. Tweens and teens are already spending more time socializing via social media than real world contact, connected gaming is adding to that mix.
While social games foster collaboration and competition, they have also been home to hostile communities, where harassment and uncivil behavior can run rampant and make headlines. Some online multiplayer games have become so ridden with profanity that many players disable chat functions.
Yet games are an enduring medium; more than 90 percent of teens play video games, according to a 2018 Pew survey. And some educators and researchers are optimistic that, with the right guidance and oversight, kids can pick up healthy habits even as they engross themselves in yet another Fortnite battle royale.
The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports. Women who compete professionally in e-sports face heckling from teammates and fans, and are sometimes accused of serving as fronts for male players. At the same time, team owners with an eye toward reaching a potentially gigantic untapped market of young female viewers remain eager to diversify their rosters to provide an entry point for girls who might never have thought of video
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