HA10 Task 3 - Responses

For this task I will be using the reception theory model to help me analyse my own response to my chosen game which is League of Legends.

Researchers came up with this theory model as a way to further their findings on an active audience and so in the 1980's and 1990's there was a lot of work done on the way that individuals received and interpreted text and how their circumstances like gender, class, age etc. affected their way of reading.
The way this works is the creator must first encode a type of message for the consumer and then the consumer decodes it or interprets it, this means that not everyone will interpret the text they are given the same way. So this theory points out that in fact the meaning of any media text is actually created by the consumer instead of the actual creators. Like I said before the meaning is first encoded into the media text by the creator but after that it depends on the consumer how they interpret or decode the signs within the media text given to them. The audience can arrive to the three following readings:

Preferred Reading - This type of reading is when the audience understand and accepts the ideology that is being offered to them.

Negotiated Reading - This is when the audience understands the ideology but only accepts some of it's aspects but rejects the other aspects.

Opositional Reading - This is when the audience interprets the offered ideology the opposite way than it was intended.

In my opinion I think that League of Legends is quite a complex game, its one of those game where if you've had no experience with other similar games then you won't really do well and because of this I think that even though their PEGI rating is 12+ they mainly cater for players over the age of 16.
Sometimes the developers of the game drops hints in-game about upcoming changes to a specific character or a new upcoming character. The way they drop these hints is by putting unusual symbols all over the map in-game and it is up to the player to guess whether its going to be a new character or a minor or major change to a character.
For me I would say that my way of reading the game is both through preferred reading and negotiated reading because I understand the ways of the game and how it works but there are some aspects of the game that I can't accept like how some characters look and how they are played but the developers of the game do make changes surrounding these subjects. It's not opositional reading for me because I actually understand the game and so it prevents me from interpreting something the opposite way it was intended to be.