Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Abstract
Digital games are increasingly an integral part of daily life for people of all ages and
genders. Based on a Foucauldian notion of power and discourse, the central question
discussed here is how people above the age of 60 and their engagement with digital
games are constituted within existing research. The available literature can be
separated into two distinct themes focusing on shaping and maintaining the player
and the players relation to games. A highly functionalistic approach to the use of
digital games runs through much of the research due to its preoccupation with
social, mental, and bodily health or with the needs of the game industry. This tendency is linked to notions of economical productivity, a theme that is analyzed on the
basis of theory formations from cultural gerontology as well as in relation to power
and discipline.
Keywords
digital games, ageing, cultural gerontology, discourse, discipline, power
Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark
Corresponding Author:
Sara Mosberg Iversen, Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej
55, Odense M, DK-5230, Denmark.
Email: siv@sdu.dk
Digital games may once have belonged to the adolescent male but are now increasingly becoming an integral part of daily life for people of all ages and genders. For
instance, recent national surveys on the use of media in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark indicate thatvarying between the countries512% of the population above
60 years of age play digital games at least once a day. These numbers should be compared to the average for the whole population, which lies between 18% and 29%.
(Bak, Madsen, Henrichsen, & Troldborg, 2012, p. 131; Nordicom-Sverige, 2012,
p. 2; Vaage, 2012, p. 70). While remaining underexplored, research on digital games
has begun to pay more attention to ageing adults. As they are being studied and
articulated in research, these (sometimes potential) players are, likewise, turned
into particular kinds of subjects through the employed discourses (Foucault,
1982, p. 777).
The question of how ageing adults are constituted through discourse is of course
not limited to the topic of digital games. However, as digital games within Game
Studies, Design Studies and Media Psychology are typically understood as sources
of pleasure, entertainment, creativity, cultural expression, and freedom in line with
aesthetic and culturally oriented theories of play (Caillois, 2001; Gadamer, 2004;
Huizinga, 1992; Suits, 2005), it is interesting to examine how these themes are
treated when digital games are linked to ageing adults. Central here is the question
of how people above the age of 60 are constituted in relation to digital games within
the existing research on the topic (George & Whitehouse, 2011). This is an important
issue to investigate because subject positions are produced through discursive practices that enable and limit the ways in which individuals can both see and express
themselves, as well as be seen and expressed, meaningfully (Foucault, 1982; Wetherell, 1998). The aim is to investigate the truths about the topic as they are established through the offered representations and technologies as well as how these
enable certain possibilities while limiting others (Graham, 2011, pp. 665666).
The category of the old, elderly, or ageing is at any time formed within
particular historical and societal conditions. Featherstone and Hepworth (1995)
assert that chronological age in itself only became a prominent marker with the
growth of the state, industrialization and the panopticon society (p. 372).
In other words, while the ageing body does have its role to play (Blaikie, 2004,
p. 80; Gilleard & Higgs, 2009; Gunnarsson, 2011), being elderly is not so much
a product of ageing itself as indicative of values within a given society. Thus, cultural gerontologist Andrew Blaikie argues that notions of elderliness within modernity increasingly have come to have economic productivityor rather the lack of
itas its core:
Paid work in modern societies has been widely regarded as a central feature underlying
social identities, conferring independence and adult status. By contrast, those not
engaged in paid work, primarily children and the retired, have been relegated to a condition of dependency that is structured both by labour market considerations and the
machinations of the state. Not only are they marginalised through non-membership
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of the workforce, but also their exclusion is legally enforced through education policy, at
the one end, and statutory retirement ages and pensions at the other. (Blaikie, 2004, p. 81)
Although economic nonproductivity and the structures tied to it have been central
in delineating elderliness throughout most of the last century, a new paradigm has
arisen both within public discourse and policies, that of active ageing (Biggs,
2004; Marhankova, 2011). Increasingly, people above 60 years are being implored
to stay in the workforce, pensioners are encouraged to serve society through voluntary work, and the plight of every citizen to be self-dependent for as long as possible
is continuously reinforced. At any time, then, the changing policies, practices, and
discourses shape elder life in certain ways, offering the embodied being ways to act,
think, and make meaning. Here the individual with his or her stories may accept or
negotiate, in ever so slight ways, their designated roles (Foucault, 1982, p. 794; Katz,
1996, pp. 2425).
It is within this often paradoxical landscape of institutional structures, discourse,
and lived practice that I will address the constitution of ageing adults in relation to
digital games in the existing research. Drawing on work within Cultural Gerontology,1 the discourses of ageing adults and digital games are discussed in relation
to general constructions of ageing in the West. Then, with a basis in the work of Foucault, I examine the disciplining forces at play in these constructions.2 Finally, I discuss the prospects for research to challenge existing power relations through critical
inquiry and by making alternative subject positions available.
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Central for the use of technologies of domination is visibility. Discussing both the
modern prison and the education of soldiers and children, Foucault (1991) demonstrates how the subject is turned into an object of surveillance through a myriad of
techniques: The placement in and arrangement of space, the individualization of each
subject through documentation, the creation of strict procedures for actions, continual evaluation according to a given standard, and so on. The goal is always to
increase efficiency and normalize, rendering the individual productive and obedient.
Or, if the first is not possible, the abnormal are contained within fitting institutions.
While technologies of power are wielded in order to affect the actions of others, the
technologies of the self offer techniques for the individuals own self-formation:
[they] permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways
of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness,
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 1988, p. 18)
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11
Criteria for inclusion are that the articles contain peer-reviewed research specifically
considering ageing adults (60) in relation to digital games. In order to limit
the scope, all review articles (Bleakley et al., 2013; Hall, Chavarria, Maneeratana,
Chaney, & Bernhardt, 2012; IJsselsteijn, Nap, de Kort, & Poels, 2007; Larsen,
Schou, Lund, & Langberg, 2013; Marston, Greenlay, & van Hoof, 2013; Marston
& Smith, 2012; Miller et al., 2014; Whitecomb, 1990) have been left out.
With regard to method, it is important to stress that the existing research is examined with the objective to identify discursive constructions rather than with a focus
on the soundness of the individual studies, their findings, or any overall trends in the
presented results. As has been made clear previously, it is not individual intentions
that are targeted here, but rather the socially established ways of knowing, speaking,
and doing that proliferate in relation to people above 60 and their (at times potential)
engagement with digital games. Thus, individual researchers may well be compelled
to draw on dominant discourses that they do not necessarily agree with, simply
because existing discourses have already marked the requirements for making sense.
In order to approach the analysis of discourse systematically, every article has
been coded with regard to:
The stated aims, in order to examine the kinds of sense the researcher can
make of the topic within different disciplinary formations, such as Psychology, Gerontology, Media Studies, Design Studies, and Game Studies,
The reasons given for the relevance of the research, in order to examine the existing discourses that the various studies draw upon and are inscribed into, and
The representation of ageing and ageing adults, in order to examine the subject positions made available through the given portrayals.
Reviewing the available literature on this basis, the studies focusing on digital games
in relation to those above 60 years of age can be separated into two distinct, yet
related, themes focusing on:
maintaining and shaping the player and
the players relation to digital games.
A few research articles touch on both themes, but generally there are not a lot of
overlapping cases.
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In this case, the ageing adult is invoked as an agentic being with a desire for independence. Others studies do not reflect explicitly about the underlying purpose of
health interventions, probably because the desirability of health and skill improvement is assumed to be given. Yet, while it may certainly increase the ageing adults
quality of life, these activities are simultaneously a way to maintain effective subjects who do not incur expensive health and care costs.
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13
With regard to the representation of ageing adults, many of the studies invoke the
growing population of elderly in the West as a societal challenge. Where ageing
adults are thematized more elaborately, the conceptualizations largely focus on the
decline associated with ageing and the problems that may arise on this basis. For
instance, the increasingly ailing body, decaying cognitive abilities, social isolation
due to immobility or societal structures, too much empty time with no meaningful
activities to fill it, and lack of motivation to exercise and maintain ones health:
In general, seniors (60 years of age) are faced with mobility issues due to cognitive,
perceptual and motor impairments. In addition, a Meta-Analysis of 40 studies conducted in Europe and North America showed that 20-35% of people aged 65 to 79 years
and 40-50% of those aged >80 report moderate to serious loneliness. (Gajadhar et al.,
2010)
Older adults face significant health care challenges ranging from age-related
changes resulting in reduced cognitive performance and resilience, as well as reduced
physical abilities, acute disease, and age-related illnesses, such as dementia, stroke, or
injury [ . . . ]. (Smeddinck et al., 2013)
While a few studies explicitly target either frail or healthy ageing adults, most of
the research offers some general descriptions of the bodily, mental, and social consequences of ageing, representing ageing adults as a rather homogeneous group facing similar problems. At other times, the ageing adults are grouped with children as a
particular market for training games (Nacke et al., 2009, p. 493). The ageing adults
in these studies are to a great degree presented as hesitant and immobile, requiring
the intervention of outside forces in order to better or maintain their current state of
life. It is, thus, quite symptomatic that those suffering from dementia are not mentioned when Simon MacCallum and Costas Boletis list the stakeholdersdoctors,
caretakers and the public (2013, p. 16)who might be interested in digital games
used to prevent this condition.
14
games and gaming technology in everyday life (De Schutter et al., 2014a), reasons
for accepting or rejecting digital entertainment technologies (Dogruel et al., 2012)
and the experience of flow (Marston, 2013b). Notably, the rest of the articles either
refer to the possibility of bettering health or social relations or to the needs of the
game industry when arguing for the relevance of the research. It is important to
emphasize that the majority of these studies are not market oriented as such nor concerned with measuring health effects. However, despite the interest taken in the
players articulated experiences and motivations, for one reason or other the
researchers have chosen to emphasize the commercial or health-oriented utility of
the studies.
Conceptualizing the ageing adults as users of digital games or as an attractive and
underinvestigated consumer segment with particular needs and tastes, these studies
typically present ageing adults as a heterogeneous group with different experiences
and preferences. Likewise, while some studies mention or focus on the possible
health benefits of playing particular types of digital games, the ageing adults in most
of these studies are presented as healthy, active, and in charge of their own lives. I
believe this focus on diversity to a great degree is due to the qualitative or caseoriented focus of much of this research. However, it also aligns well with marketorientation, as consumer society to a great degree operates by offering individuality
to the consumers by commodifying difference and celebrating branded diversity
(Klein, 2010).
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Taking their starting point in the influential book by Peter Laslett A fresh map of
life: The emergence of the third age (1989), Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (2013)
16
suggest that notions of older age have changed in the West after the Second World
War with new practices, understandings, and possibilities. However, as an active
youngold category has emerged, they go on to argue, this notion contains within
it an image of that which it seeks to repel, that is, the old-old. This latter condition
they term the fourth age. While it may seem obvious that the fourth age chronologically follows the third, Gilleard and Higgs (2013) emphasize that these conceptualization should rather be seen as two different paradigms of ageing. It is relevant
to delve deeper into these available visions of oldness because it may aid in further
investigating the constitution of ageing adults within research on digital games.
With regard to the third age, Gilleard and Higgs (2009, pp. 121122) consider this
a cultural field. That is, a set of attitudes, rhetorics, possibilities, and expectations
(in short practices) that have emerged mainly as a result of the ageing generations
experiences with and participation in consumer society. Although the phase where
third life practices are expected is largely situated within postwork life, it is defined
not so much by particular age spans as by being a stage in which agedness is
actively warded off through consumption (Coupland, 2009; Gilleard & Higgs,
2009). Retaining maturity by acting and dressing age appropriate while on the
other hand maintaining youthfulness through diet, care products, clothing, and exercise, the ageing adults of today tend to identify more with their children than their
parents (Biggs, Phillipson, Leach, & Money, 2007). It can, moreover, be argued that
productivity, the lack of which has defined old age in modernity (Blaikie, 2004), is
retained by the retired consumer who, buying leisure activities, services, and goods,
still makes societys wheels turn. Consumption, then, can even be regarded as a strategy for maintaining societal relevance past the years in the workforce. Gilleard and
Higgs regard consumerism as a shared habitus that informs ageing even for those
who can or will not participate in the feast of the markets (2009, p. 122123).
Contrastingly, the fourth age in Gilleard and Higgs perspective is defined as the
combination of a public failure of self-management and the securing of this failure
by institutional forms of care (2009, p. 122). This is a vision of old age where body
and mind no longer cooperate, and the old person increasingly becomes subject to
the care of others. With the gradual loss of bodily control, agency is expected to
diminish (Jolanki, 2009, p. 217). The fourth age is the place for confused, leaking,
sometimes revolting bodies (Brijnath & Manderson, 2008). It is the end of productivity, then. The old person no longer has much to offer a neoliberal society. Ultimately, and for a Western mind-set perhaps most terrifying, the fourth age is a
realm from where no one returns. It is the onset of death. Articulating the fourth age
as a social imaginary (2013), Gilleard and Higgs stress, that this notion is important first and foremost as a bleak vision of what may come. It is the dark side of the
third ages luminous moon. In other words, while the elements related to this image
may well play out for some ageing adults as concrete reality, the concept is even
more important as a frightening apparition.
Turning again to the research on digital games and ageing adults, it can be argued
that most of the studies approach their subject largely on the basis of one of these two
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17
logics. One approach stresses the attractive market made up of ageing adults who
attain individuality and agency through consumption. Playing digital games may
here be a way to hold unto ones current life while old age slowly creeps closer.
Entertainment technologies are, likewise, offered as a means for prolonging the third
age by training the brain or for motivating a less sedentary lifestyle for those who do
not eagerly accept active ageing. In this light, digital games become one of the available means both for society and for the individual to escape the unpleasant perspectives of the fourth age. The fourth age, likewise, appears throughout the discussed
studies. Sometimes it is a looming threat to be fended off. However, it also materializes as a stage whose ailments digital games may help to contain, supplementing or
replacing expensive human care.
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The notion of discipline may even offer an answer to a question discussed earlier,
namely, why ageing adults and children tend to be singled out as groups who in particular require a functionalistic approach to the use of digital games. As already
touched upon, one technique of domination according to Foucault is the individualization of the population through surveillance, documentation, and evaluation. As
every citizen is singled out according to their characteristics, some are more so than
others:
In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient
more than the healthy man, the madman, and the delinquent more than the normal and
non-delinquent. In each case, it is toward the first of these pairs that all the individualizing mechanisms are turned in our civilization; and when one wishes to individualize
the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the
child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he
has dreamt of committing. (Foucault, 1991, p. 193)
A Thousand Things
As has already been made clear earlier, I am fully aware that the intention behind the
discussed studies is not to turn ageing adults into problematic subjects. Yet, the
employed discourses in many cases do so. I will here suggest at least two closely
related reasons why these discourses are maintained despite the denormalization
of ageing adults that they contribute to. First, the research on ageing adults and digital games examined here draws on already existing discourses, negotiating the webs
of power and discipline of which science is an influential component. The images of
ageing proliferating in society, thus, inform initial assumptions. Moreover, even if
one may be questioning dominant understandings of ageing, a focus on the problematic elements of ageing and a functionalistic outlook may well be required in order
to secure funding (Foucault, 2010, p. 64). In this way, discourse techniques of power
and discipline intersect in setting up certain boundaries for how the world must be
seen, investigated, and understood.
Bearing in mind that power is productive and, hence, at play in all human activity,
is there anything to be done at all or are we as scholars impotently caught in our own
webs of domination? Turning again to Foucault, famous for his insistence on not prescribing solutions, he nevertheless remains hopeful with regard to the potential for
change:
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And if I dont say what needs to be done, it isnt because I believe there is nothing to be
done. On the contrary, I think there are a thousand things that can be done, invented,
contrived by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are involved,
have decided to resist them or escape them. From that viewpoint, all my research rests
on a postulate of absolute optimism. I dont construct my analyses in order to say,
This is the way things are, you are trapped. I say these things only insofar as I believe
it enables us to transform them. (Foucault, 1994, pp. 294295)
Here Foucault points to recognition as the first step toward resistance and change.
It means accepting that one is already part of the power relations that define how
reality is supposed to make sense, taking on the responsibility for the shaping powers
one holds. On this basis, it is possible to examine the working of the webs of dominance in terms of, for instance, acceptable reasons for knowledge production, the
constitution of facts, institutional backing, technological formation, procedures, and
so on. Here also arises a potential for resistance, in that one may choose to provide
alternative interpretations and new subject positions, in this case for the ageing
adults who play digital games.
The provision of alternative subject positions, will, I believe, at times require that
the relation between ageing adults and games is examined from an emic perspective.
That is, from the lived insider perspective of the informants in order to gain insight
into the ways in which the ageing users of digital games think about, understand, and
carry out their practices. As it is, there are remarkably few qualitative studies of ageing adults in relation to digital games. However, as some of the discussed studies
also illustrate, an emic perspective alone is not enough to provide alternative subject
positions because dominant existing positions are used as meaning-providing
resources not just by researchers but by the ageing adults themselves. Sometimes
it is possible for a skilful and aware interviewer or observer to move beyond these
publicly reinforced and acceptable ways of being an ageing adult. However, often
these notions are the very foundation for making sense of ones existence and, hence,
not something that can easilyand perhaps even should notbe deconstructed
within the encounter between researcher and informants. This is where one has to
turn to, for instance, discourse analysis, Actor Network Theory or practice theory
(among others) in order to examine how existing formations become true, silencing alternative subject positions and ways of making meaning of the world.
The provision of alternative subject positions, however, is not enough either.
It has been a big step forward that the White heterosexual male is no longer the
game player per seeven if gamer culture is still dominated by this particular
ideal (Nakamura, 2012; Shaw, 2012). However, it is even important to consider
on which pretexts different subjects are allowed to become players. While there
are no White-hetero-male games, there are plenty of girl games, casual games,
learning games, and brain-training games aimed at particular, typically nongamer audiences. It should be continually discussed and questioned why some
players are allowed to play for the sheer pleasure of it while others can only
20
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21
Scholars of digital games have a responsibility for acknowledging and continuously questioning the networks of power in which our research is inscribed as well
as the subject positions it makes available. More emicly oriented research may provide a better understanding of the ageing adults own perspectives. However, as daily
conversation uses available discourses as a sense-making resource, it is even necessary to critically investigate what can and cannot be said, meant, and practiced
within the dominant discourse formations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Notes
1. Cultural gerontology, according to the European Network in Ageing Studies, reveals and
dissects culturally-determined perceptions, attitudes and effects of human ageing (ENAS,
2013, not paginated).
2. I base my understanding of power on the whole of Foucaults authorship, which shifts from
a focus mainly on domination to one that takes individual agency more into account (Gordon, 1991). While some may see a discrepancy between his early and later theorizing on
power, Foucault himself maintains the clear relation between the two (Allen, 2011; Foucault, 1982).
3. Two studies that have been omitted here count as older players those above the age of
3540 (Pearce, 2008; Quandt, Grueninger, & Wimmer, 2009).
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Author Biography
Sara Mosberg Iversen is an assistant professor at the Department for the Study of Culture,
University of Southern Denmark. She studies digital games as procedural texts as well as
their uses and place in everyday living. Players who fall outside the norms inherent in gamer
culture are a particular research interest.