The Hindu Business Line : <I>Blurring of boundaries between work and play </I>

To Aphra Kerr, digital games are merely commodities - "created as cheaply as possible and sold in those markets that are rich enough to afford them". She sees digital games as epitomising "an ideal type of global post-industrial neo-liberal cultural product."

Kerr is a lecturer of sociology in the National University of Ireland, and her new book is The Business and Culture of Digital Games, from Sage (www.sagepublications.com) . `All work and all about play,' you can say about the work, because the author loads it with theoretical underpinnings that you might never have thought to exist in the realm of games. Such as that digital games emerged "in an era when discourses of the post-industrial and the post-modern dominated and when existing public regulation of the media and communications institutions was being dismantled."

Kerr isn't too happy that many of the hopes and fears about digital games are based on "speculation and conjecture rather than academic analysis and contextually situated empirical research." She asks: "How can we talk with authority about the effects of digital games when we are only beginning to understand the game/user relationship and the degree to which it gives more creative freedom and agency to users?"

First check if you know what digital games are. They are "socially constructed artefacts that emerge from a complex process of negotiation between various human and non-human actors within the context of a particular historical formation," says Kerr. Quite a challenging definition, that is, but `a wider social challenge', according to the author, is "the blurring of boundaries between work and play in post-industrial, post-modern societies." For instance, "lunch time and coffee breaks are spent playing games and browsing work-related Web sites on the very computers used to make games."

Don't underestimate games, because there is a lot of work involved in these, be it in creating or playing one. "Amateur game players put a lot of `work' into playing and `modding', or modifying, digital games; into levelling up, learning the codes and conventions, finding cheats, practising, participating in online communities, beta testing games, developing new characters or maps," explains Kerr.

Much work has gone into studying digital games too. For instance, "Bolter and Grusin argue that digital games `remediate' both television's hypermediated form and film's more immediate form." And Kerr cites Stuart Moulthrop, who sees the `shift from narrative to ludic engagement with texts and from interpretation to configuration' as symptomatic of wider shifts in society and in our relation to information systems.

A discussion on the economics of the digital game industry gives interesting statistics, sourced from various estimates. In 2000, the global `leisure software' industry was worth about £13 billion, according to a report by the UK Government; of this number, almost £10 was said to be games software. The US accounted for 35 per cent of the market, followed by Europe (31.5 per cent), and Japan (18.5 per cent). In 2001, Datamonitor estimated games software sale to be $17.7 billion, the largest market being the Asia-Pacific. A different report (Forfas) forecasts the sales to touch $30 billion by 2010.

"The Entertainment Software Association in the US and the National Purchase Diary Group, a consultancy based in New York, estimate that total sales of video and computer game software in 2004 generated $7.3 billion." If you add up hardware and accessories, the total is just under $10 billion. "By comparison, the domestic box office in 2004 in the US generated $9.5 billion." The winner in a bar chart, however, is DVD, notching up $15.5 billion, apart from $5.7 billion on DVD rentals and the money spent on DVD players. A 2002 survey on leisure activities in Japan found that expenditure on videogame software ranked third, after mobile phone fees, and Internet connection fees.

Games can have problems when crossing cultural boundaries. Kerr says that Asians may find game environments from the US or UK `too dark', with `ugly' characters, even as `Japanese game genres like romance games' may seem foreign to outsiders. As a result, perhaps, "Only a small number of digital games sell outside their home markets," opines the author. Worryingly, attempts to design games specifically for women "tend to veer towards stereotypes and essentialist qualities and may alienate as many women as they attract."

Serious read.

Accessible help on Access

When a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, with more than a dozen years of consulting experience, talks...

Do you use Excel for data analysis? If yes, pay heed to Michael Alexander's caution: that things can go wrong! How? "Scalability is one of Excel's immediate drawbacks," he writes. "What happens when you reach the 65,536 limit (of Office 2003)? Do you start a new tab? How do you analyse two datasets on two different tabs as one entity? Are your formulas still good? Will you have to write new macros?"

Another problem is the absence of transparency of analytical processes. "It is extremely difficult to determine what is actually going on in a spreadsheet," points out Alexander. "Anyone who has had to work with a spreadsheet created by someone else knows all too well the frustration that comes with deciphering the various gyrations of calculations and links being used to perform some analysis."

Even the `formula-auditing' tool may not help much, frets the author. The third problem with Excel is about separation of data and presentation. "Data should not be tied to a particular presentation, no matter how apparently logical or useful it may be. However, in Excel, it happens all the time." To overcome these worries, you may read Alexander's book titled Microsoft Access Data Analysis, from Wiley India (www.wileyindia.com) .

The author is an MCAD, that is Microsoft Certified Application Developer, with more than a dozen years of consulting experience. He runs www.datapigtechnologies.com, a free tutorial site. The book begins with Access basics, where you identify the seven database objects on the `Database window' - viz. tables, queries, forms, reports, pages, macros, and modules.

Part two of the book is on basic analysis techniques, discussed in chapters devoted to transformation of data, calculations and dates, and conditional analysis. The section on advanced analysis takes you on a tour of SQL, introduces `descriptive statistics', and moves on to `pivot tables' and `pivot charts'. The last part of the book is about automating data analysis.

Ever heard of `Jet query optimiser'? You can notice this in action when Access shuffles your criteria and expressions around. "The query optimiser is charged with the task of establishing a query execution strategy," explains Alexander. The `strategy' is nothing but a set of instructions given to the database engine to tell it how to run the query `in the quickest, most cost-effective way possible'.

Towards the end of the book is a topic to shock you: database corruption. This happens owing to many reasons: "The database may have encountered errors while writing data; table definitions may have degraded over time; some VBA code or macro may have caused a fatal error... "

An Access book that you should keep handy.

Tailpiece

"I use old CDs as cup lids."

"Oh, I've been buying new CDs for the purpose!"

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