B4GD

Despite their popularity, there is a dearth of sociological research about gendered depictions in video games. In 1984, several companies from Japan consciously took control of the failing video game industry. For the first time since video games had been created, both hardware and software were manufactured in Japan, for Japanese, and then translated for American markets. In America, computer gaming became a small subculture associated with a derogatory, socially isolated, “nerd” culture. With the success of the Xbox 360, the American computer gaming and console gaming markets have converged. The cultural proximity of these video games has lead to a new age of relevant American cultural references. This research, recognizing this new cultural proximity, analyzes the content of 9 of the best selling, non-sport, non-related video games. Specifically, this research tries to answer what messages about gender, particularly women and femininity are being communicated by these games. In video games, different characters are programmed to act in different ways according to the genre and context of their environment. Overall, I found that female characters are programmed to reflect stereotypical roles in American culture and often as characters who need to be rescued. However, this research also finds that there are several unique female roles for female characters in video games. As an example, in the First-Person Shooter type of game, a female is often the voice of command or information. In these games, an Anglo male is the default, or only, character a player may choose to be.

Looking back at old game design ideas is something of a hurtful and painful thing to do...but i've been doing it a lot lately.

It's all coming together, this literature review. I have 3 games left to go through: Bioshock, Call of Duty 4: World at War (or Modern Warefare), and Fallout 3. I've been working on an introduction and transition to feminist theory and I think I have it. The sources i've been looking at are:

Huizinga, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press.

Caillois, Roger. 2001. Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Laurel, Brenda. 2001. Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or The Love of Technology. Paris: Editions La Découverte.

The logical leaps don't seem to be too bad but what do I know. For now, i'll throw this up here so I can look at it later.

A. Games are important because they communicate ideas about fair play, the magic circle, and use of free time.

a. Huizinga 46: “Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character that it precedes in the shape and mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary.”

i. Over time, the play-character crystallizes begins to be hidden by cultural phenomena (like video games) (46-47), other parts of it become sacred (religion, government, etc).

ii. In this way, video games, we can say, are an essential part of the cultural transmission, that certain elements of play are given form by them.

1. Naturally enough, the connection between culture and play is particularly evident in the higher forms of social play where the latter consists in the orderly activity of a group or two opposed groups. (47 Huizinga)

b. Caillois 40: “They (Games) reflect forms which, while doubtless remaining in the domain of play, evolve a bureaucracy, a complex apparatus, and a specialized hierarchical personality. In a word, they sustain permanent and refined structures, institutions of an official, private, marginal, and sometimes clandestine character, whose status seems nonetheless remarkably assured and durable.”

B. Technology as an answer to a cultural problem

a. Translation - Video games began in America, failed, picked up by Japan and sent in a new direction, American Gaming centered on the 'nerd' culture of America and went into the fringe computer hacker realm for years. Eventually it came back beginning with the success of the xbox. Now it has come full circle. Key event: Nintendo released the Wii in America before it released it in Japan.

i. Source to refer to: (Aramis: 33): “People always wonder how a laboratory, or a science, can have any impact at all on society, or how an innovation arises in the mind of its inventors. The answer is always to be found in the chains of translation that transform a global problem into a local problem through a series of intermediaries that are not “logical” in the formal sense of the term, but that oblige those…who are interested in the global problem to become interested through almost imperceptible shifts, in the local solution.”

ii. Page 32: Any engineer is posing questions and critiquing society through answering those questions: Video Games are an answer to the question of fun in the cold war at first, when that fails, interactive manga and anime in Japan that is eventually exported. When those wane, the video game is retranslated by American engineers as that of a multiplayer experience based on the popularity of multiplayer PC games by Microsoft. It is a way to bring a whole slew of disconnected people together.

iii. In doing this, American engineers take the global market of the video game and bring it within a close cultural proximity of American gamers. For the first time since the 90s, video game hardware and software were being created here, designed by companies here, and played by players here.

C. Cultural Proximity - Beginning with the re-translation of the video game we have begun to see a growing cultural proximity of the American video game with the American video game console.

a. The American video gaming fringe that was eventually re-translated to the XBOX was the white male dominated PC Gaming market.

i. Quote: Laurel 23: “Computer games as we know them were created by young men around the time of the invention of graphic displays. The whole industry consolidated very quickly around a young male demographic – all the way from the game-play design to the arcade environment to the retail world – and it made no sense for a company to swim against the tide in all three of these areas at once.”

b. American norms, moirés, and ideas about how a game is played are making it now into a much wider scope of people than previously thought possible.

c. Despite video games coming back to an American cultural proximity, the new video games are continuing through the PC market. The PC Market continued after the video game bust in the 80s. That market, created by young white males for young white males, has been copied into the new American based console market.

D. Feminist Theory or, why it matters that a video game is transmitting the translated nature of a new cultural proximity.

TERMS TO DEFINE:

Fair Play

Magic Circle

Translation

Cultural Proximity

Mediator

Intermediary

Collaboration versus competition

Anime

Manga

Cold War Innovation

Play-spirit

Video Game PC Market

Another step in the direction of a sociological justification for game studies is cultural distance. The main article for this is:

It comes to my attention, in writing about video games and thinking about sociology, that video games are something of a mystery to sociology. Take, for instance, the definition of video games from the blackwell dictionary of sociology:

So, I submitted a proposal to do the study. It's interesting to note that writing about video games for people who don't know about video games is exceedingly difficult to do. I try to maintain an ease of reading in this but i'm never sure if it works entirely. I suppose that is what writing in grad school is all about - figuring out how to approach different audiences by changing tones and grammar. The audience here is my Qualitative Methods professor.

One thing about Content Analysis that is interesting is that it is either Qualitative or Qunatitative. I want to submit this paper to something to see if I can get published again so I might do a Qualitative version and a Quantitative version and send them off to seperate journals. I will hopefully be sending this off to a pop culture studies gathering here in a while. We'll see how that turns out.

For those who do game studies, I wonder if you might have better luck making the terms of video games more layman.

Introduction
The video game became a cultural phenomenon at the end of the 1960s. The first video game Spacewar began as an exhibit in science expos (Kent 2001 18-19). As the graphical interfaces these early games used became cheaper, video games joined up with pinball machine shops and started the arcade phenomena. Eventually, video games moved into the home through the Pong and Atari home systems. Video games have grown in complexity in conjunction with the computer processor and display devices like televisions or computer monitors. In a historical context, video games have employed gender stereotypes since their creation. Video games have always been a man’s market (Laurel 2001: 23). They were invented by men as a “hack” of technology created in competition with the Russians during the height of the cold war. At first, they were labeled as a technological exercise – a product of science (Kent 2001: 15-19). Since science was or is still the socialized realm of males, females were not targeted by early video game manufacturers and are still not targeted by today’s manufacturers unless they are specifically made to cater to stereotypical female images (Laurel 2001: 22-24). For example, the Bratz line of video games along with like The Clique: Diss and Make up, My Fashion Show, and My Perfect Prom all exemplify stereotype by showing its target audience, 12-14 year old girls, that dressing up and acting like their peers will make them popular in school and with boys (John 2008).

In the nearly fifty years since Spacewar was created, little has changed in the realm of marketing video games. Despite the society altering Civil Rights Act of 1964, women are still not a viable market to target for video games. While most video game critics, academic or otherwise, would say that women make up a large part of the video gaming market, females are still primarily playing video based card games (e.g. solitaire), not the games that the rest of the male population would call a video game (McMillan 2008: 2-3). However, given the recent advances in graphical displays, graphical processing, and advancement in the power of computer processors, women have begun to take more of a role as video game characters.

Despite their more regular appearance, there are some complaints from feminists about the role of women in video games (Kiesler, Sproull, and Eccles 2001). In the video game Fallout 3, the first female the player meets is the main character’s mother. She dies directly after giving birth. The second female the player meets in Fallout 3 is a childhood friend, the daughter of the leader of the initial scene. Despite any feeling of friendship, the main character is forced to kill her father and escape into an apocalyptic, radiated Washington D.C. In another extremely popular video game, Fable 2, the first female the main character meets is the main character’s sister. After opening a magic box that allows the main character to make a wish, the siblings enter a majestic castle whereupon the villain is introduced, shooting the main character’s sister and throwing her out of a window. The second female character that is met is an immortal wizard named Theresa. This character will tell you what to do for most of the game. Halo 3, one of the bestselling video games of all time, follows the main character, Master Chief, as he goes after the artificial intelligence that has guided him through his perilous tasks of the first two games – a virtual woman named Cortana. The topic I propose to study is the representation of and general themes relating to gender in primarily American created, popular video games on the American created video game system, the Microsoft Xbox 360. The method of this study will be content analysis.

Research Questions

1. How are females represented in video games, in general?
   
   
2. Are there trends in the representation of female characters?
   
   
3. Do these trends follow typical male created stereotypes about women?
   
   
4. Is there a difference in interactions toward a playable character if the playable character can be female? If there are, what are the differences?
   
   
5. If the main playable character can become female, does the narrative change to suit the already present atmosphere of the game?
   
   
6. Given that females and males are often non-playable characters, how do these non-playable characters interact with each other without player interference? Basically, how does the narrative contribute to the representation of gender?

This post is about common sense and writing down common sense. It's such an interesting thing, at times, writing down the obvious. Here is one such attempt. One day I was having a conversation with a friend at a party. We were talking about video games, he being a software researcher he kept talking about one particular thing that bothered him.

“There’s something to be said about video games in the 70s, they were video- games. Everything past that is something else, I wonder what it is.”

1. Video games were created through play-spirit as a way to capture the play-spirit, unconsciously, through purposeful and illogical abuse of very serious technologies.
   
   
2. The first Video Game was the first game that did not simply try to take a real world game and make it electronic.
   
   
3. The industry that sprang up after that time mimicked the board game market and eventually created a distaste for video games by making too many games for the market to handle.
   
   
4. Since those initial games, made without a previous body of culture to pull from, the sub-culture of the gamer has been made into an inclusive, ever shrinking mass of reference to those initial times.

Video games have, by and large, done their best to maintain their unique market, not through trying to sell more to people who “might” play video games but to the people that “do” play video games. When games were simple, when input was simplistic, this market was vast enough to sustain an industry. However, as time has gone on, games have become more complex, and as the first group of gamers leave the market the cost of the industry has surpassed the possible buying potential of the audience game makers want to attract. The time is ripe for a new market plan to be installed and Nintendo is trying it. However, Nintendo does this without catering to the previously installed consumer base. By not catering to this group, they have alienated them, causing a larger rift and furthering the now unlikely scenario of game manufacturers looking for a bigger market.

This post, like most posts I make, is about society. Howerver, this post is came about while thinking about raising children.

I try and talk a lot about social aspects of games, not so much the games themselves. Really, what I try and talk about are the reasons why certain things are in games today. I am obsessed with the perception of reality through enlightenment thinking and i'm even more obsessed with the path of thinking that video games are going down.

I was thinking about a few things today. First, I was thinking about my first computer. the Timex Sinclair 1000. I loved this damn thing. It made me both love and hate programming. It also gave me the first taste I had of what a computer was. I mean, look at that thing, it's got tapes. What the hell, given what I know now, was that all about?

We don't really know anymore save those that want to know. Even at the time, we knew it was code sent to a disc through a tape recorder but we didn't know how or why. I remember having a Frogger game that said 16k of power. What does that mean? I have an idea, but at the time, I remember just sitting there in awe as I listened to the stead bweeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr... of the code running its way through the machine. Eventually, I had Frogger.

Growing up, I had a nice Pong machine, followed closely by an Intellvision. I loved both of them. I really enjoyed playing Astrosmash with my Dad. I just sat there and pretended to be the little nose guy shooting boogers at bigger boogers. It was raining Boogers and only I could stop them.

It was around the time my parents bought us an NES that video games began to be too much for people. Atari had flooded their own market and the idea of a video game was going down hill, it was a fad for people, for kids in the end, and the era of the arcade in America began to dwindle.

Sitting now at the end of a long road, I can still remember the sense of awe and amazement I had at playing Contra. I remember playing it at my uncle Chuck's house. I wanted to know what happened, were the two guys going to kill all the aliens?



Video games have moved on, and up in a lot of ways, down in a lot of ways too. As with most things in capitalism, the growing complexity of coding a video game has mirrored the growing complexity of interpersonal communication and how the world works in general. Whereas before I was a nose flinging boogers at other boogers, i am now an angry man with a large sword hell bent on smashing an asteroid into another planet. I have more than just a nose, now I am a relatively realistic looking person with realistic aims, goals, patterns of behavior, and life points (you have life points, don't you?).

Kids enter into this world and are beset on all sides by things that are new, even to us who has the child. I asked once if we owe it to our children to play through games for them so they can play all of a game instead of the levels of a game that it comes with out of the box.

My thought on this is going back to the Timex Sinclair 1000 and thinking about just how hard I had to work to get the games to work. I would spend an hour and a half to play a game for 30 minutes. The part of it that was fun was seeing if the magic code I had written was ok. I also enjoyed looking through the game code for things that I could change. Could I make the B for bullet actually be an F?

As time went on, the console was fun but was not as interesting as the absolute terror that it was to load and play a game on a computer. Oregon Trail, when i was in Elementary School, I was allowed to play on occasion only because I had figured out how to make it work. I did this by lying about having the game at home and playing with it for a few weeks. 4th grade was a strange and wonderful time.

Here is my thought in a nutshell. When raising a child or even when wanting to get into thinking about video games, would a child be better off having not known the way games were made over the course of technological development. I realize that this could apply to anything, film, television, food technology, etc etc. I think certain things are fine to just accept as they are now. I, for one, never want to think about an old copy machine even though I know the same principles I am talking about exist in that old time copy machine.

The thing about it is that when the Timex Sinclair was around, when the Commodore 64 was around, when the Apple II was just coming about it took forever to get to play a game. Playing a game was a treat, it was a privilege. You earned it. That privilege has become waiting. We have to wait to play the game, not because it isn't installed yet, but because it has to bring the complexity of the last few years of driver changes and glitches. We don't earn anything on the new games, we just wait.

I have a pretty robust collection of old game systems. I have to wonder if I should try and teach my child how games developed as they develop through their important years. I wonder if I should try and shelter them from more complex electronics before I shove them out the door with a DSi or a PSP. Still, it just might happen that the child will become the soccer star I didn't.

Recently, I was asked to do a podcast with the Brainy Gamer himself, Michael Abbot. I started to say something but couldn't think of the right words to finish the thought. It has to do with innovation and trending in times of need. It's linked to the sociological concept of anomie (Merton's not Durkheim's).

In a nutshell, Anomie is: The gap between the culturally favored goals and an individual's access to the means to achieve those goals. In other words, the culturally favored goal here in America is money, success, to be on top. There are several things that happen here in the breakdown. Merton called these the five modes of adaptation.

While there is a lot of exposition to be done on these concepts, the crux of this is innovation. New and maybe 'not so legal' ways of making the money. Drug dealing, for example, is an innovative coping mechanism for achieving culturally favored goals while ignoring legitimate means.

I started talking about lower classes having to be innovative to achieve the culturally favored goals but I couldn't think of a way to describe the application of this idea to the game industry.

This is what I wanted to say:

"During difficult times, large companies are going to do exactly what they have been doing; more of the same with less personnel. In gaming industry terms, they will produce sequels and games similar to those that have been successful before. Gamers will enjoy these games because they have little else to find, little else to do BUT play those games given difficulty now with job layoffs and the depression that is going on now. However, during this time, those who have A). Time because they might not be working in a corporate environment as much and B). a want to create a 'new and innovative' game will try and do so. This is why, as we have seen recently, small game studios or even just individuals with enough time and expertise, produce such amazing indie titles lately.

A depression equals unbridled room for innovators to explore due to normal business being stagnant. Typically, these innovations, once conditions improve, will become the norm. Those innovations might even provide a means through which the depression ends."

There, I feel better.