I’ll be honest, I sort of didn’t really see the topic of ‘audiences’ to be the most important, or even interesting topic that we studied this semester. But I guess this reading from Henry Jenkins helped me understand how influential it actually is. Yeah, I thought that the audience was an important factor in this industry, but it wasn’t focusing on it nearly as much as I probably need to.

So, as I was reading it, I noticed that it pretty much directly links to what my group for Project Brief 4 have been discussing, and we’re not even doing the assignment on Audiences. Basically, we were talking about the way that video games have influenced society as a growing media, and how it has had a massive effect on its audience. We noticed that the gaming industry has been very heavily influenced by its consumers, much more so than other industries. There is a lot of fan-made and independent content that have made their way to fame due to the fact that the consumers are much more like a community. For example, modding (or, modifying), is a method of adjusting the game’s coding to suit the individual players to their own interests. Fans who have experience with modding are able to add in extra mechanics into the gameplay, or even enhance it. Rather than outlawing it, many developers have used this as an opportunity to connect more with the consumers to the point where they even create mods for their own games. Sometimes, they even leave a secret in the coding for modders to discover, and allow access to for everyone else.