One of the fundamental aspects of the football carnival was the consumption of alcohol. Understanding the role of alcohol consumption in the fan culture of English supporters is essential to understanding carnival fan behaviour. This chapter details the way in which the research participants responded to alcohol restrictions upon them around matches. It shows that regulations and laws prohibiting alcohol consumption were often simply ineffective, due to lax enforcement, ingenuity on the part of the fans or in many cases a combination of the two. Furthermore, in some cases, attempts by the authorities to restrict alcohol consumption by fans had the effect of increasing both alcohol consumption and potential flashpoints for disorder. Due to the fundamental value of heavy alcohol consumption at matches abroad for fans, not only did they resent alcohol bans and share a collective feeling against the authorities, but they also had no respect for these laws.
SimCity clearly pays homage to the device of wonders of the past. It is the postmodern equivalent of these archaic visual machines, and it perfectly demonstrates the fluid boundaries between simulation and art, urban planning and literature, technology and entertainment. The evolution of SimCity has been characterized by a reduction of abstraction in the graphic depiction of urban and natural elements, to the point that some commentators such as Israels argued that the game displayed a sense of aesthetic perfection that only true works of art possess. Although SimCity was originally designed for a single-player, offline experience, since its inception it has always been a moderately massively online game. SimCity is one of the first computer games to be used for pedagogical and educational purposes. In SimCity, however, this desire is never satisfied. In a sense, the game is truly Bunuellian: pleasure is constantly postponed, delayed and deferred.
This chapter considers the attitudes of carnival fans to issues of gender, race, sexuality and disability. It details the behaviour and experiences of the women in and around the Red Brigade group of United Manchester fans. Sexist terminology, metaphors and chants prevail in comment upon the game and in fan culture. Although masculine and misogynist views dominated the culture and vocabulary of the fan groups, there were a number of women who attended matches in these groups regularly, and drank, sang and entered into banter in the same way as their male counterparts. Football fans have historically suffered from a bad reputation when it comes to racial tolerance. Accusations of racism and xenophobia have frequently been levelled at English supporters. Attitudes towards homosexuality and disability that were commonplace within the fan groups were the same as those witnessed in pubs, clubs, student halls of residence and even some academic conferences.
While the carnival fans did not attend matches with the intention of causing disorder, they were affected by violent incidents. This chapter investigates the relationship between carnival fans and those responsible for maintaining order - police, private security staff and match-day stewards. Positive interaction is viewed by crowd psychologists employing the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) as a key factor in laying the foundations for successful management of a football crowd, and could be based upon such minor social signals as a smile. The appearance of complete cohesion (and sometimes collusion) between the stewards and police officers was occasionally challenged, and cracks appeared in the 'machinery' of crowd control inside stadiums. As the ESIM school of crowd psychology suggests, both domestic and foreign police forces appeared to play a significant role in influencing whether disorder involving the research participants would occur.
As an extension of the well-established Warcraft series, World of Warcraft is a subscription-based massively multiplayer role-playing game that came online in late 2004. Alongside an analysis of the game's specific stylistic and textural milieu, it is the way that this particular multiplayer game facilitates a balance between player agency and restriction and the relationship between interpellation and identity that provide the main focus of this chapter. In addition, a variety of issues around player identity arise because of the social context afforded by the game and it is a core contention of this essay that it is the complex interactions between text and player/s that breathe vitality and drama into this world. Assessing what impact playing a social and fantasy-based game like World of Warcraft has on personal identity is not easy, particularly as identity is performative and has playful aspects.
This chapter begins by explaining the title: what is the split condition of digital textuality? In literature, drama, and films, the magic formula for reaching the tourists of the Tropics has been traditional narrative structures, the magic formula for reaching those in love with the North Pole has often been the rejection, or what Alan Liu would call the creative destruction, of these structures, and the magic formula for reaching the population of the Temperate Zone has been the renewal of narrative. Most importantly, the fictional world should be adaptable, so that when the player returns to a site he has already visited, something will have changed, and different narrative possibilities will open themselves. In other words, he will not encounter the same character who says the same things every time he visits the same spot, as is too often the case in videogames.
For a large number of football fans who travel home and away with their team, fandom is analogous to carnival. One opinion of the carnival fans that was repeated at Blackpool, United Manchester and England national team was that their style of support was on the wane and that the 'craic' of going to football with their mates was not as good as it had been in the past. As this book has documented, attempts by clubs and local authorities to control the carnival are not appreciated and are sometimes rebelled against. Observations suggested that the more 'official' the carnival was, the less support it would get from the carnival fans, which again fits in with Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of carnival. The book has shown that the carnival fan groups are exceptionally resourceful and resilient, and show no sign of abandoning football however much they may resent its increasing commercialisation.
The book’s conclusions are briefly presented in the last chapter. Given that each chapter offers its own concluding reflections, this chapter returns to the question of urban comparison within African peripheries and considers the value of comparison for advancing understanding in these complex urban spaces. It briefly addresses the book’s contribution to core literatures detailed here at the start of this chapter, but primarily it returns to our conceptual framework and our five logics of African urban peripheries to consider their value and limitations. Finally, the chapter considers the policy implications, very generally, of some of the arguments and evidence presented in this text.
This chapter considers the early stages of migrants' housing pathways including the process of leaving home and their early experiences as an independent household. The discussion is positioned in relation to a number of structural determinants of migrants' housing experiences and how discourses embedded in related public policies, most notably in terms of housing options and support entitlements from government, impact on migrants' living arrangements and their future housing plans. The chapter examines a number of discourses that act as barriers to finding accommodation, including the impact of stigma on migrant identity. Finally, discourses of homelessness and their capacity to determine policy responses to the increasing and diversified incidence of migrant homelessness are discussed. This analysis centres migrants' interactions with homeless service providers and how both groups reacted to the discourses surrounding legislation that proscribes recently arrived migrants from receiving any meaningful form of social protection.
This chapter aims to provide an ethnographic account of the subculture of 'hardcore', home-and-away English football supporters that the author has labelled as carnival fans. A rigorous ethnography remains the best way available to social researchers to cast light on the intricacies and complexities of the life-worlds of subcultures such as the carnival fans. Participant observation within a football crowd provided an excellent 'strategic position' for securing relevant and accurate data. The chapter discusses the author's research with the fans of Blackpool FC, England national team, and Manchester United. Although the research participants were not 'hooligans', most were involved in low-level criminal activity on a regular basis. A final important ethical issue for a researcher carrying out fieldwork into sensitive areas is that the anonymity of the research participants should be ensured.