Hybridity in the Fourth Space: Video Games and the Global Youth Imaginary
The “third place”: a social sphere roped off from the “first” and “second” places of the home and the workplace (Oldenburg 1997). Consisting collectively of spaces like cafés, bars, and clubs, the third place serves as a highly accessible and hospitable ground for people to converse and interact with their peers by allowing them to escape from the obligations of family life and labor. In this sense, the spaces that make up the third place are the “anchors in community life,” facilitating more creative social interaction that is “informal but intentional” (Sleeman 2012).
As Korean youth embraced the rapid proliferation of broadband internet access in the early 2000s, PC bangs (pronounced “bahngs” and literally translating to “PC rooms) emerged as especially potent third places due to the popularity of online gaming (Chee 2006). Because they herd gamers into a single space, PC bangs work with the internet to provide an interactive duality, with players able to virtually cooperate and communicate while in the game world and then physically engage as they congratulate and tease each other after the game ends.
In her analysis of the PC bang as a physical space, Florence Chee glosses over the concept of the games themselves as a type of “fourth place” for youth (2006: 231). This fourth place, seemingly barricaded from the physical world by a screen, is a new social frontier, a cyberspatial landscape across which national, linguistic, and cultural borders are redrawn and navigated by youth and their virtual bodies. Certainly, PC bangs and arcades remain gravitational centers of intranational socialization, and internet gaming serves as a potential avenue for international interaction, but these concepts focus primarily on social interactions between individuals independent of game content. The most striking possibilities of gaming are found when looks to the relationship between the individual and the game itself. Here, youth can adventure through unexplored “virtual geographies,” shaping powerful worlds of affect, particularly as three-dimensional games continue to offer more realistic graphics and more contemporary cultural themes (Graham & Shaw 2009).
This fourth place is a vibrant site of cultural hybridity. The virtual world incorporates a variety of cultural flavors into its imagery, a first layer of hybridity that is determined by those who produce the games. Some game developers pit samurais and ninjas against medieval knights and Jedi in games like Soul Calibur, while others design their characters to be as racially or ethnically ambiguous as possible.
As Korean youth embraced the rapid proliferation of broadband internet access in the early 2000s, PC bangs (pronounced “bahngs” and literally translating to “PC rooms) emerged as especially potent third places due to the popularity of online gaming (Chee 2006). Because they herd gamers into a single space, PC bangs work with the internet to provide an interactive duality, with players able to virtually cooperate and communicate while in the game world and then physically engage as they congratulate and tease each other after the game ends.
In her analysis of the PC bang as a physical space, Florence Chee glosses over the concept of the games themselves as a type of “fourth place” for youth (2006: 231). This fourth place, seemingly barricaded from the physical world by a screen, is a new social frontier, a cyberspatial landscape across which national, linguistic, and cultural borders are redrawn and navigated by youth and their virtual bodies. Certainly, PC bangs and arcades remain gravitational centers of intranational socialization, and internet gaming serves as a potential avenue for international interaction, but these concepts focus primarily on social interactions between individuals independent of game content. The most striking possibilities of gaming are found when looks to the relationship between the individual and the game itself. Here, youth can adventure through unexplored “virtual geographies,” shaping powerful worlds of affect, particularly as three-dimensional games continue to offer more realistic graphics and more contemporary cultural themes (Graham & Shaw 2009).
This fourth place is a vibrant site of cultural hybridity. The virtual world incorporates a variety of cultural flavors into its imagery, a first layer of hybridity that is determined by those who produce the games. Some game developers pit samurais and ninjas against medieval knights and Jedi in games like Soul Calibur, while others design their characters to be as racially or ethnically ambiguous as possible.
However, the multiplicity of playing styles within these games forms a second layer of hybridity that offers new possibilities for youth to determine the cultural bonds that they create. For example, the strategy of killing other players in the MMORPG Lineage varies by country. Taiwanese and Russian gamers view it as the most important aspect of the game, while Japanese and Chinese gamers decry it as selfish and unnecessarily violent (Yoon & Cheon 2014: 473-74). These variations are determined by cultural distinctions and individual choice in a way that cannot be manipulated at the corporate centers of production. Unlike center-periphery media, which traces cultural communication linearly from producer to consumer, interactive media opens up a multipolar network, allowing youth to take an active role in writing the script of how they establish transnational bonds with gamers who share their values. It is in this sense that youth step past their static role as passive spectators of center-periphery media and become the “producers, subjects, and mediators” of localized culture, enabling a global youth imaginary to unfold in real-time (Yoon & Cheon 2014: 479).
References
Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. The Great Good Place. Boston: De Capo Press, 1999.
Sleeman, Matt. “There’s No Home Like Place?” in Pete Myers, Going Home: Essays, Articles, and Stories in Honour of the Andersons. Raleigh: Lulu Press, 2012.
Chee, Florence. “The Games We Play Online and Offline: Making Wang-tta in Korea.” Popular Communication 4:3 (2006), pp. 225-239.
Graham, Ian and Shaw, Ronald. “Worlds of Affect: Virtual Geographies of Video Games.” Environment and Planning 41:1 (2009), pp.1332-1343.
Yoon, Tae-Jin and Cheon, Hyejung. “Game Playing as Transnational Cultural Practice: A Case Study of Chinese Gamers and Korean MMORPGs.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 17:5 (2014), pp. 469-483.
This page is a tag of:
Online Fourth Spaces: Youth Sociality in Blogs and Imageboards, Offline Third Spaces: Anime Conventions as Sites of Desire, Exploring Reasons for Differences in Gaming's Implications on Japanese and Korean Youth and Society, 2D Bodies: Depictions of Youthful Bodies, Global Youth Imaginary View all tags
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