stuart hall theory of gaming

Preferred reading is when audiences respond to the media product in the way the media producers want/expect them to. when the meaning is negotiated the audience will accept that a film is based on the film like e.t for example. sometimes an audience will not accept the producers representation, Hall described this as that the media audiences have three ways of reading/responding to the media text.

The producers of early computer games were only able to produce simple graphics,  so the visual representation was not very accurate for example pong.

The graphics in this game at the time was probably advanced but when we play this games years later when we look at the games the graphics are very poor because other games have more advanced qualities, beside this game does not  look like a ping pong match


Even so, these games markers wanted to include some sort of narrative with their games because some gamers need a sense of purpose, They used titles and box art to suggest narrative and themes and settings. like mario for example.

In this game super mario bros the design on the game cartridge shows the narrative of the game which is Mario going through a castle .




This approach to game play is a very good example of how producers and consumers negotiate their reading of narrative in media texts.