If it's in the game, it's in the game : an analysis of the football digital game and its players

The focus of this thesis is the representation of football, as sport and culture, within the medium of the digital game. Analysing its three sub-genres - the televisual, the extreme and the management genre. This dissertation outlines how each configures, incorporates, rejects or ignores certain conventions, values and practices connected to the socio-cultural system of the sport, and the wider sport-media complex in its representational and ludic system. Though the marketing literature surrounding these games often makes claims to their simulational quality, these products will be shown to present very particular, dissimilar and above all ideologically loaded versions of the sport they claim to impartially represent. In an evolution of Baudrillard's (1983) concept of the simulacrum, these digital games will be revealed as euphemisms for sport, as inoffensive representations of something that may in reality be considered to offensive, or too harsh for inclusion into a marketable product. Also central to this thesis is the increasingly trans-medial nature of sport consumption, as the post-modern consumer does not simply distinguish between the various media he or she consumes and the 'reality' of the mediated object; indeed it is the mediation of the sport that now constitutes the dominant interpretation of its conventions and values. To quote John Fiske, the media no longer supply 'secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality they mediate' (1994, p.xv).