Kerr, Aphra --- "Beyond Billiard Balls: Transnational Flows, Cultural Diversity and Digital Games" [2010] ELECD 137; in Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira (eds), "Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity

Editor(s): Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446830

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Beyond Billiard Balls: Transnational Flows, Cultural Diversity and Digital Games

Author(s): Kerr, Aphra

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

2. Beyond billiard balls: transnational
flows, cultural diversity and digital
games
Aphra Kerr

INTRODUCTION
Current mass media policy and regulation in Western Europe is primarily
state-based and increasingly functioning under the presumption that a compet-
itive market will maximise individual choice and diversity. Policy interven-
tions are primarily justified in terms of specific market failures including
concentration of producers in the marketplace, the need to reward content
developers financially for their work and issues related to distribution bottle-
necks.1 Nevertheless, it is clear that at the national and European levels, public
interest and cultural arguments also inform policy development and regula-
tion. New media, including online and offline digital games, represent a new
area for policymakers at the national and international levels. This chapter
aims to contribute to our understanding of how digital games operate as
markets and as social and cultural activities in order to inform discussions
about the need for policy interventions.
Two significant challenges face us as we attempt to assess the usefulness
and applicability of a `cultural diversity' discourse in the contemporary media
context. First globalisation, with its associated flows of people, goods,
services, technology and ideas, has challenged how academics and regulators
think about culture and the media, and has shifted attention away from the
national to the transnational, the translocal and the regional.2 Thinking about
culture and cultural diversity has had to shift from the national frame to a

1 Nicholas Garnham, Emancipation, the Media and Modernity: Arguments
about the Media ...