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Thursday, November 10

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

DGR02

Current Topics in Games Research

PP 107

Between Resistance and Resignation: Children’s Experiences of Advertising in Mobile Games

C. Martinez

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1

Lund university, Communication and media, Lund, Sweden

Mobile games have become popular among a broad demographic, including women, men, adults and children (Hjorth & Richardson, 2014: 2). Many

of these games are so called‘free-to-play’and use revenue models based on advertising and in-app purchases.These revenue models in different ways affect

the content, structure and processes of mobile games, and, consequently, also the player's game experiences. In light of this, to gain a better understanding

of digital game experiences, game research need to pay attention to how players experience digital games as advertising spaces, what consequences in-

game advertising have for gaming activities, and how players relate to strategies used to make them purchase in digital games. This paper addresses some

of these questions by focusing on how nine- and twelve-year-old children experience and engage with advertising in mobile games. Existing studies on

children’s experiences of in-game advertising - here defined as “explicit advertisements, such as banners, pop-ups, and streaming video-clip advertise‑

ments”(Tran & Strutton, 2013: 455) - deal with computer-based digital games (e.g. Marti-Pellón & Saunders-Uchoa-Craveiro, 2015). However, how children

experience advertising in mobile games on touchscreen devices has not received attention in previous research. This study draws on group interviews (in

total 46 participants) with Swedish children conducted in 2015. The children’s descriptions of their experiences and engagement with advertising in mobile

games were detailed, and similar experiences emerged in all group interviews. The theoretical framework draws on research into game experiences and

motivations for playing digital games. To analyze children’s engagement with in-game advertising the paper also draws on de Certeau’s (1984) theory on

practices of everyday life. The results show how advertising in mobile games mainly constitutes negative experiences for the children, as advertisements

interrupt and alter moments of enjoyment, achievement and immersion during game play. The results also show how children engage in a haptic struggle

with advertisements on the touchscreen, and how this struggle involves a sense of ‘deception-in-the-hand.’ Children feel lured when they accidentally

press adverts that appear suddenly and direct them away from the game to App Store, and when they struggle with adverts that have tiny close buttons.

The children describe how they in different ways try to resist advertising in mobile games by performing avoidance tactics, but also how they sometimes

resign and watch adverts without wanting to. Based on these results the paper discusses whether mobile games, using advertising as revenue model, can

be said to serve the interests of children. References de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hjorth, L. &

Richardson, I. (2014). Gaming in social, locative, and mobile media. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Marti-Pellón, D. & Saunders-Uchoa-Craveiro, P. (2015).

“Children’s exposure to advertising on games sites in Brazil and Spain.” Comunicar 23(45):169–177. Tran, G.A & Strutton, D. (2013). “What factors affect

consumer acceptance of in-game advertisements?”Journal of Advertising Research 53(4):455–469.

PP 108

Teens and Digital Games: What Kind of Relationship and Practices?

S. Pereira

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1

University of Minho, Communicaton Sciences, Braga, Portugal

One of the major aims objectives of the European Project entitled “TRANSMEDIA LITERACY. Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to

improve formal education” (H2020-ICT-2014/H2020-ICT-2014–1) is to understand the cultural and social competencies that young people is developing

in the current media landscape. Digital games and digital literacy are a specific area to be explored with and by adolescents within this project. Using

a qualitative methodology, thirty students from 12 to 18 years old attending Basic and Secondary Public Schools in Braga, a city in the North of Portugal,

were invited to participate in two Workshops centered on digital games. What kind of digital games they prefer and play; how they discuss their interests

and practices; how they expand narratives of games; what are their perceptions on the importance of digital gaming for peer cultures; to what extent

digital games are a significant cultural object for and about them, are some topics that this paper intends to present and to discuss. TheWorkshops succeed

the administration of a questionnaire to a wider sample of students and precedes a set of semi-structured interviews. The results coming fromWorkshops

are the material specifically chosen to be explored at ECREA Conference however the analysis will gather contributions from questionnaires and interviews

whenever it is necessary. Based on a vast and rich set of qualitative data and multimedia information collected by the Portuguese team and analyzed using

the qualitative data analysis software NVivo, this paper uses young people’s own voices and words to explain different practices of play emerging from their

media consumption habits and to understand how digital games are an expression and simultaneously an agent of peer cultures. As a paper presented in

the scope of a Transliteracy research project, it is theoretically framed by media and digital literacy field.

PP 109

Reframing the Theoretical Approach to Game Studies: Contributions from Symbolic Interactionism and Communication Studies to

the Research on Social Interaction and Videogames

L. Lima

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1

King's College London, Culture- Media and Creative Industries, London, United Kingdom

Influential to current thoughts on videogames research are the theorists of play and game from the past. Remarkably, the works of Huizinga, Sutton-Smith

and Callois are often cited as basis for contemporary definitions of game and play from Jesper Juul, Markku Eskelinen, Gonzalo Frasca among others. In this

paper, I intend to delve further in the past in order to assess the utility of the symbolic interactionism framework to the field of videogame studies. There is

scarce reference to some key authors that falls within the symbolic interactionism spectrum, especially Gregory Bateson, George Mead and Erving Goffman

(Consalvo 2009, Juul 2005;2013, Frasca 2007, Giddings 2014, Friess 2012). However, the contributions given by these authors prove valuable to understand

videogames as a medium and a culture, as having not only action but also interaction as its key modes of communication. Drawing on seminal texts from

Mead, Goffman, Bateson and Blumer I intend to demonstrate how this perspective allows for a more complex understanding of videogames as a relation‑