SAGE Journal Articles
This article considers the amazing commercial success of the HGTV cable TV network, its tremendous influence on shows produced for the Discovery network’s The Learning Channel (TLC), the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) network, Bravo and BBC America, and their collective contributions to reality TV’s new global programming gold rush. Of particular interest in this analysis are the innovative ways that the HGTV network and its progenyremake key elements of traditional women’s media genres, reconfigure audience participation, and recodefamiliar televisual structures and narratives featuring identity politics vis-à-vis race, class, gender and sexuality.
This article examines the notion of genre in video games. The main argument is that the market-based categories of genre that have been developed in the context of video games obscure the new medium's crucial defining feature, by dividing them into categories loosely organized by their similarities to prior forms of mediation. The article explores the inherent tension between the conception of video games as a unified new media form, and the current fragmented genre-based approach that explicitly or implicitly concatenates video games with prior media forms. This tension reflects the current debate, within the fledgling discipline of Game Studies, between those who advocate narrative as the primary tool for understanding video games, “narratologists,” and those that oppose this notion, “ludologists.” In reference to this tension, the article argues that video game genres be examined in order to assess what kind of assumptions stem from the uncritical acceptance of genre as a descriptive category. Through a critical examination of the key game genres, this article demonstrates how the clearly defined genre boundaries collapse to reveal structural similarities between the genres that exist within the current genre system, defined within the context of visual aesthetic or narrative structure.