DIGITAL GAME AS A PHENOMENON OF MASS AND POPULAR CULTURE

The issue of digital games can currently be considered a highly relevant topic. Media theoreticians subject the phenomenon to a constant research, paying their attention not only to its negative or positive impact on users, but also analysing the occurrence of heterogeneous cultural expressions (e.g. presence of violence, sexism, narcissism, or stereotypes in digital games etc.) in the discussed type of media production. Others, mainly representatives of cultural anthropology, within the stated context, accentuate a significant fact that the game taking place in an every-day life reality could be regarded as a determinant of the culture itself. However, a new phenomenon - digital game, has established itself alongside the development of media, or media reality. According to the previous theory, videogames, together with other media, have influenced an emergence of a different kind of culture - media culture, which can be elementarily categorized as mass and popular. The main objective of the paper is, therefore, to clarify the cultural basis of selected digital games, with regard to their classification as products of either mass, or popular culture. For these purposes, we use mainly logical-conceptual methods of text analysis, while the issue of the presence of mass and popular culture characteristics in the dimension of digital games has become a subject of discourse analysis. The ambition of the study is also to define the basic terminological apparatus, or the terms "digital game", "media culture", "mass culture", and "popular culture". Special attention is given to a case study aimed at mapping the presence of mass and popular culture characteristics within the selected digital games.