Extra! Extra! Farm All About It! Popular Press Coverage of Farming Simulator

Abstract

While the number of individuals employed in the agriculture industry in Canada continues to decline, video games about farming have increased in popularity. One game in particular, Farming Simulator, allows people to play at farming through digital versions of tractors and combines, while also taking care of livestock, just as one would find on a real farm. The media has become an integral way to understand the labour of farmers, through popular television, movies and digital games. Therefore, I argue that popular press publications on farming games can influence the general public’s understanding of Farming Simulator and agriculture broadly. Articles were collected using the Dow Jones Factiva database and the keyword “farming simulator”, for an initial 1,053 publications as the dataset. Currently using qualitative content analysis and inductive thematic coding in the NVivo software, broad themes can be identified with an emerging codebook currently being developed. Due to the multiple contexts of the keyword “farming simulator”, I focus my analysis on articles pertaining to the Farming Simulator game series. What is inferred presently is the press coverage of this game series primes the audience to view the game and farming negatively. Therefore, the way journalists report on simulation video games, Farming Simulator in particular, can impact the perception of these video games and the broader industry they draw their content from.