Game Culture 01: Introduction

What is culture?
Culture can be found in whatever constitutes a group. A country, an organization, a society. What distinguishes the different groups from one another, are the building blocks that they are made of, such as behaviors, habits, practices, objects, institutions, standards, taboos, valuesand norms that are shared by all the members of the group. As culture more or less is everywhere one might look, the area has been studied since forever ago. One large "problem" however with studying culture is, that the person studying culture, be it contemporary or retroactively, will always be a part of a culture himself, be it the same or a different culture. This cultural background influences how people put meaning into objects or symbols (incoding) but also how they understand and processes information from objects and symbols (decoding). Anyone studying culture will thus always be influenced by hos own culture's building blocks.

Two attempts of analyzing and creating social theories on contemporary culture will be highlighted in the following; The Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School.

The Frankfurt School
"Go home, watch an episode of Lost, forget your sorrows and slave-life and meet at work at 7 the next day" - mass-culture keeps you occupiedThe Frankfurt School has its roots in marxism, and is especially engaged in the use of mass culture in western culture as a formulaic, standardized and industrialized tool that dulls people and moves focus from their boring, repetitive lives to the wonderful world of e.g. Jersey Shore and Idols. Mass culture thereby "keeps the machinery going" and makes people, who would want to go up against the system, occupied with mass-produced crap.
Critique: Critique of the school's theories states that the theory is too general. Especially, it does not concern itself with the many counter-demonstrative sub-cultures that might appear within a culture.

When writing this, the wonderful and fantastic world of Bollywood immediately popped into my mind. I remember being told, while travelling in India, that some of the highly dramatic movies of Bollywood cinema served as a mean for the poor to escape from their earthly sorrows.

The Birmingham School
"You must have an education, you have to work during the day from 9-17, the teacher knows better than the student..." - Power structuresInstead of speaking of one, large mass of fairly identical people, the Birmingham School concentrates on the values of the dominant culture and its power structures. These structures are ideas of family, religion, education etc. The power structures associated with these ideas, are holding us down. But from this suppression, resistance will always rise in the form of sub-cultures that re-invent and re-appropriate ideas, symbols, theories and everyday things.
Critique: Critics of the Birmingham school states that the power of sub-cultures' resistance is overstated, and points out that resistance can be absorbed by culture as well. As an example you can get t-shirts with anarchy symbols almost everywhere, and several chains exists that tries to mass-produce punk, vintage and other sub-cultures.