Lately, I’ve become interested in mobile games as a genre, especially those revamping popular games originally designed for much different platforms. While not hastily defined elsewhere as a genre, I like to think of Nostalgic Franchise Mobile Games as a very niche and Millennial digital genre, where games that are now thought of fondly as indicative of simpler times, games that current young adults played as children, are getting a technological upgrade. While my research has indicated there are clearly many examples of these to be found, the two I keep coming back to are Pokémon GO and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Perhaps because both were games I played extensively as a young person and thus adult me is enamored with and invested in their updates to fit technological trends in order to be viable in today’s market of mass media and hyper-saturated consumers.
Though it didn’t end up being wholly relevant to my examination of this genre, my most interesting finding was an article examining why Animal Crossing: New Leaf can be classified as a horror game, which frankly sounded absurd to me at first, but made a lot of sense once I read the argument for it (I’ve uploaded a PDF here if anyone would like to take a look). ——> AC Horror
My biggest challenge for this assignment is finding credible sources to refer to and to use to fact-check myself. My biggest triumph has been the wealth of knowledge I didn’t know I had and also an ability I didn’t know I had to talk about video games very intellectually. I enjoy assignments that have me examine familiar things in unconventional ways or unconventional things in familiar ways. In my History of the Book course, we are examining the evolution of manuscripts by creating a class wiki of a New SU Religion, which is a way of looking at something familiar in an unconventional way, while here with this project we are looking at unconventional things in very familiar ways (via technology and academic writing about it).
I’d like to relate my genre to the concept of “stuff economy” versus “fluff economy” presented in the reading. These mobile games are a good example of the move from using currency for tangible items to media or digital items, as many of these games have systems that allow real currency to be converted to virtual currency and then exchanged for virtual items, which is an old concept originally held within traditional console video games.
Word Count: 413
Works Cited
Lunsford, Andrea A. and Ede, Lisa. “Among the Audience”: On Audience in an Age of New Literacies