B4GD

IconWhat Happens Before Game Design? What is it that happens before the design of a video game? What sorts of cultural designs are showing through the games that we play? Exploration of these ideas is the intended target of our discussion.

Building Blocks: Abstract Submission

So I went off and submitted this abstract to a sociological association. Hopefully i'll present it there, edit it up, and send it off for publication. I'd like to eventually complete this study, mirroring this half of the gaming world with that of Japan. Cultural comparisons seems natural from the perspective I've decided to take. It's nice to see this paper coming into its own.

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.

 
 

Blast From the Past: A Goofy Past of Pen and Paper

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.


I feel like it's worth throwing up here in this game design blog. I talk so rarely of actual game design and my own game design philosophy. Would you be shocked if I said that almost every game I ever thought of consisted of holding secrets, searching for our own secrets, and other players holding those secrets?

I figured I would post a few up here from back when I was 17...14 years ago! For the most part, and I still do it to this day though it starts in my head and is filtered out before it hits paper, I think of games as stories. I've always felt that any game will display itself when the story of that game is known. Ideas of chance, failure, success all lend themselves to really getting at what the designer is looking to create. After all, what would our understanding of chance be if we didn't have a history of betting on the idea of a soul?

I should note that this is from an old pen and paper game idea I had. I think I was working off of an old fever dream I had. Growing up in an industrial town I had a lot of fever dreams.

I think I called this one, The Doctor:

A cloaked figure stands on a hill far in the distance, beside him is a smaller figure, the silhouette of a riding animal beneath him, as they stand a gust of wind blows through followed by a break in the silence as the man begins to speak.

“Someone once told me as they were passing on that he could feel himself leaving his body, “ the man pauses, letting his statement sink in, “I didn’t believe him until I too, felt that spirit, my life energy, leaving my body as I lie dying.”

The second, taller man turns to the sky and says, “Why did he choose you?”

The smaller figure’s face lit up in a smile. Happiness seemed to poor from his face like blood from an open wound. “I have never found out. My life in the past was nothing special really. I was a teamster for a trade company. We delivered medical supplies to dozens of temples around the area. Nothing special really but it was a living.”

“And now you get a second chance?”

It seemed an impossibility but the small mans smile grew. “Yes. But why he chose for me to live the life of one of those Centaur creatures I’ll never know. I mean, usually he only deforms someone why had great prejudices in their past life, as far as I can remember I had none.” The man pulls back his cloak to reveal a hideous mass of wires, veins and blood tubes all tied to a mechanical mass that somehow vaguely resembled a horse. The horse’s head was not there and was replaced by the upper torso of a small man. This man, who was grinning enormously, had no idea why the great Doctor had decided to grant him a second life. He had no idea that in his past life he was a man who had a terrible past as a murdering truck driver. A man whose life had revolved around delivering medical supplies and hunting the half-horse half-human centaur he had deemed unfit for life.

The doctor had decided to give him life as a centaur to give this man a chance to redeem his soul by correcting his past mistakes. All of his racial memories had been erased; his past life now seemed somewhat inconsequential. It was up to him to live a good life. If he didn’t it was eternal life in a purgatory; a place of eternal torment and suffering. A fate worse than the death that still lingered in this mans thoughts.

There are kind sprites as well, those beings whose good hearts desired an extended life. The Doctor granted these lives with almost no cost as long as they continued their kind work. When their work was finished the doctor would place their souls in the place of eternal bliss. This place is like that feeling in your stomach when you kiss the girl you have loved your entire life for the first time, like waking up on Christmas morning to find a fresh coat of snow and puppies waiting for you under the tree. It is a good place to go, but the added life sometimes brings about change in the person. The soul can no longer stand the warm goodness of the light and desires, if only for a second, the burning pits of evil and chaos.

It is these souls, who are granted an extended life yet fail to use it to achieve anything, who are placed in the boundless confines of Limbo to think on what they have done for eternity. Limbo is a place where no one can hear you scream, no one can see you and your eyes cannot see anyone either. It is a void, a dead-zone of nothingness, empty.

Which shall you choose?

Welcome to The Doctors Lament, a roleplaying game about discovering your past or sticking to your goals. Unlike most roleplaying games this one allows what is usually referred to as the game master to come up with histories and characters to be played out in an anime world. However, all of these stories are set in the past life of their character and for some reason, The Doctor has granted them a second chance. This chance however, does not come without a price.

The price is this: the body is ready to die when you are presented to the doctor. While you lay before him he unfolds your past life and tries to determine whether or not you are special enough to be given a second chance at pure greatness. But, in order to attain this immortality through history you must make the ultimate sacrifice and enter an artificial body made of magic and metal. This body keeps the original going long enough to finish what is necessary and will shut itself down when the goals of the characters life were achieved. It sounds easy but what are you going to do when the skeletons of your past come to haunt you? What are you going to do when a former lover refuses to see you because of your transformation? Or what will you do if you try to do good only to find that you were once a terrorist hell-bent on chaos and anarchy? What will you do when the lynch mob knocks on your door?

If you can keep focused on your goals, you just might succeed

Welcome Players, Welcome to The Doctors Lament, an RPG by Suicidal Games.

For you players, all you need to play this game you is: preferably a copy of Big Eyes Small Mouth-I used a modified version of the system here but everyone should pick it up, it’s a good game, a clear conscience and the yearning to discover who you were and why you were given a second chance. Only with these things can you discover and accomplish the tasks that could award you a place in the Eternal Bliss or Dead Zone of the after life. Remember this when The Doctor hands you your character sheet.


For the Doctor:
The doctor has a lot of responsibility in this game. Aside from running the game and creating the adventures and plot twists the characters will face, it is also up to you to create characters that the players will understand and enjoy.

A HISTORY OF MY DOCTOR:
The doctor, or so the story goes, was a great man on this planet once, creating cures for disease and solving world problems. While all of this was going on he fell in love with an innocent lab assistant by the name of Mia. Mia, as the doctor would later discover, was unfortunately a plant by the evil organization hell-bent on creating chaos in the world.

Mia and the doctor soon grew together as a family and Mia became with child. The doctor’s life was happy, it was the first time in his life he had felt complete. While Mia had been pleasing the doctor she had also been warping the doctor to give up his fight on the world’s problems, “they are not worthy of your intervention,” she said. “They do not deserve to be saved. They will only repeat the same mistakes and beg for your help again.”

“But they need my help.” The doctor said with a confused mind. “They have never asked me for my help. I have just given it to them.”

Needless to say that soon the doctor’s good heart fell to his own uncertainty and turned his back on the world. About three years passed and the doctor awoke to find that his children were dead and Mia was gone. In his rage the doctor found the one thing that had eluded him his entire life, The Human Soul. Only in rage did he see it and the sight of his own mangled soul made him realize that Mia had been wrong the whole time. Humanity could prove itself given enough time. With this thought in mind the Doctor opened his lab for the first time in three years.

Now 300 years later we are beginning to see the benefits of the Doctors revelation. The Doctor found a way to prolong the lives of all humans indefinitely by implanting their body into a Mythical Centaur’s cybernetic body.. By doing this at the time of the subject’s death the Doctor can erase all past mistakes from the memory and give the person a second chance. A second chance is a new life indeed, but unfortunately The Doctor cannot erase the dark stains that past evil has on the placed within the soul and it is this stains which leave the subject open to once again fall victim to their fears and hatreds.

WHO IS THE DOCTOR:
The story above is the story I created for a game I will run. Each doctor is different. In fact, I would go so far to say that there are hundreds if not thousands of these doctors around the world. I used the body of a bull to symbolize the jealous rage that controls the doctor. Also for this doctor I will choose to deform my paitents by putting them into bodies that do not co-exsist with the environment around them. My reasoning there was that by keeping them in a deformed body I could further separate them from the humanity and privide the kindling I would need for a future confrontation.

Although I have tried to keep this game somewhat setting free there are a few questions you should ask yourself when getting ready to write a campaign.

1. Who am I?
By creating the story of your own doctor you make this game in a way your own. It is tailored to your needs and wants as well as your own dark desires and insecurities. The Doctor should reflect you in some ways, and also be fun to play. The doctor oversees the game but does not take part in it. In essence you are playing almost entirely by your rules.

2. What will your doctor do to control his test subjects?
When a character goes beserk, as some will to be sure, the doctor in my world sends his force of failed vessels to subdue this new perpatrator. Some type of control is nessecary as my subjects have powers exceeding regular humans. Will you have this problem? And, what will you do to stop the rouges from destroying everything.

3. Why does your doctor do what he does?
My doctor gives people a second chance in thanks of the world giving him a chance after he turned his back on it. Why does your doctor do what he does?

4. Characters
My characters will be generally good people who did something evil in the past to get what they wanted. Now that they have died the memories of the evil event that occurred is gone, but the stain is not. When tempted this person may do something evil as they have forgotten the lesson they learned in their first life. What kind of characters will you make? This is also something you should discuss with your players as they will be ultimately be playing the characters.

A lot of who a character is also depends on how they will react in certain situations. When you, the doctor, creates a new subject there are several guidelines you should follow. First of all this new subject, as a first temptation, is implanted into a cybernetic suit complete with weapons powerful enough to level a city block. You should keep this in mind when making each character, how will the soul react to all of these weapons? The past should include all types of mannerisms and psychological profiles. The characters history matters less than the characters psychology.

 
 

Building Blocks: Toward a More Substantial Introduction

So here we have a rough draft of a literature review starting. I thought I would post this up here. I think that I will post a couple more revisions...or at least will continue posting them until the first rough draft is complete. Once that is done, I will begin focusing more on the analysis of the game through the blog. The grammar here is very rough, so please forgive me. Also, there may be a few logic leaps I need to add some grounding too.

This is a paper that wants to look at video games. A video game is a game played in digital space via a dedicated console (SOURCE). By digital space I mean to say that it is a space created by computer programmers that is manufactured by a video game console. This console, typically a specialized grouping of hardware meant to connect to a graphic display (typically a television), processes and displays the digital space that the player then explores. What this paper wants to do specifically is look at what is happening inside the game and look at where those things are coming from in culture. Why does it matter where the things within a game come from? Well, as Johan Huizinga once told us, “In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary” (46).

Play
(Coming Soon)

Cultural Proximity (Will add more on translation and tech answers to culture problems)
Video Games are recent cultural phenomena. By recent, I mean to say video games did not exist until technology that could display digital data was ‘hacked’ in 1961 to emulate missile launches in space (SOURCE). While some people would say that video games began with a game created by Steve Russell called Spacewar created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 (SOURCE), for the sakes of this paper, video games are run via a “dedicated console” whereas Computer Games are just that, games on a computer. This distinction is rarely made in the present as it is no longer useful, but it is useful to make here for two reasons. One, there is a marked distinction between American console games and Japanese console games. Two, American computer games have begun to be American console games (SOURCE). This distinction will become clearer in a second.

The history of the computer is inexorably tied to the speed of processors and the graphic displays that show the result of that processing (VIDEO GAME DEFINITION). Faster processors means more code processed more quickly. This code allows more commands to be sent to a display, thus allowing for what began as little dots to become beings that move, act, and talk like us; video games emulate culture. The atmosphere that video games take place in are quickly becoming familiar streets and cities. Some new games boast that their gameplay is so advanced that they can even emulate sexual relations between same sex or different sex partners. Video games are quickly becoming a place where we can explore questions we can’t explore in the real world (SOURCE – CASTRONOVA?). Because video games are meant to emulate culture, the culture those video games tends to take on a special meaning. Puzzles that might seem easy for the culture they are created in might not be as easy outside of that culture; characters meant to be comedic might be repulsive to other cultures. I have made a logical jump here; video games are a worldwide phenomenon (SOURCE). Video games began in America. As stated, the game often associated with the term “first video game” is called Spacewar! and was created in 1962. This game lead to a series of events that American popular culture inevitably caused video games to be considered a fad.

After Spacewar! was released, similar video games began to appear around the world. Pong was the first video game to appear in consumer’s homes. Because of the lack of processing power, Pong was a single machine meant to be used on a single television. From Pong arose a myriad of consoles that were very different from Pong. These game machines were created to run proprietary cartridges, meaning, they would only run games made for that particular hardware configuation. The number of these machines and the number of cartridges eventually reached dizzying heights. At its peak in the early 1980s, there were five machines available: The Atari 2600, The Magnavox Odyssey 2, The Intellevision, the Colecovision, and the Atari 5200. Each of these systems had hundreds of games available for them. The market that had appeared after the success of Pong had flooded itself and eventually collapsed around 1984. The major company in video gaming at the time, Atari, was sold off in pieces. Pop culture then labeled video games as a passing fad.

While America was not ready for anymore video games, they were not prepared for what came next. Seeing that the video game market had collapsed under its own weight, Nintendo of Japan had a plan. In 1986, after three years of trials in Japan, Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System. By labeling it as an entertainment system and by offering peripherals that would attach to the machine, Nintendo wanted to convince consumers that this wasn’t just another Atari. Also, Nintendo did something that other companies in America had not, Nintendo declared complete control over the production of software. This meant that any game created for their Entertainment System was sent to Nintendo and Nintendo decided how many copies of games would be produced, when the game would be released, if at all (SOURCE). This was the creation of the video game industry. It was regulated and dominated by Japanese interests for almost twenty years. It was also at the creation of the video game market that American software makers went to the then blossoming personal computer game market to continue making games in the way they wanted to (SOURCE). The introduction of this system signaled a tremendous shift in video games that began to end when the Sony Playstation was released but was solidified when the American created Xbox appeared (SOURCE).

This paper will examine the themes present in video games now that they have achieved a modicum of cultural proximity. Previous literature on video games has revolved around the advertising of and basic premise or motivation for characters. These studies almost all originate in a time when Japan was still the primary location of hardware and software manufacturing. This paper attempts to close a gap and take a step forward in the study of cultural relevancy with regard to video games. This paper will be split into four parts. First, I will examine the literature about video games and feminist literature about the power of messages in media. Second, I will describe my method of study. Third, I will describe the themes present in video games that came out during my time with them. These themes were not present in the data but emerged ancillary to it. And lastly, I will examine the data I collected by playing these games.

 
 

Building Blocks: Logic and Literature

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



 
 

Building Blocks: Cultural Proximity

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

Aoyama, Yoko and Hiro Izushi. 2003. "Hardware Gimmick or Cultural Innovation? Technological, Cultural, and Social Foundations of the Japanese Video Game Industry." Research Policy 32: 423-333.
This article acknowledges the fact that without companies like Sony Computer Entertainment, Nintendo, or Sega, the video game industry as a whole would not be as viable an operation as it is today. It traces the penetration of the Japanese video game industry into the global market by tracing the Japanese video game's association with Manga, Anime, and a rich creative environment that lead to a collaborative environment with hardware manufacturers that systematically leveled the playing field of video gaming and stabilized it. Unlike the American market lead by Atari, Japanese companies were slower to catch on but much more active in the overall dissemination of their product into the market.

Because of the cultural proximity of hardware manufacturers to software manufacturers, Japan lead all video game industry discussions. Aoyama says,
"Evidence shows a presence of cultural proximity between platform developers and third-party software publishers, as it has been observed in other industries. Japan's software publishers have been in a unique position to access, almost exclusively, dominant platform developers particularly at the early stages of the industry's development. There are multiple ways in which cultural proximity matters, yet in all cases it functions to reduce barriers of communications and facilitates the flow of information." (Aoyama 2003: 434)
So, basically, these authors are saying that the cultural proximity of the group of engineers of a piece of hardware will allow them to create software that probably works better for it. I think that this is a fair sentiment. A thing to note here is that this article was written in 2003 and already the effect of the Xbox was being seen. The authors note: "The entry of Microsoft with Xbox may undermine the exclusive advantages of cultural proximity..." Looking with the eyes of 2009, this is definitely the case. Aside from the Wii, which enjoys the celebration of its cultural proximity while also tackling the idea of the "Gamer" generic type, Japanese gaming has been on the decline.

This is where the justification for studying the video game comes in. For the first time in decades, games from American Developers are being created for American gamers on a system created for a system from America. This shift of cultural proximity allows for influence of video games from a culture that plays and creates them to be studied.

Evidence of Japan's Decline:


 
 

Building Blocks: The Sociological Stance on Video Games Part 1

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:

Video games are played via a dedicated console connected to a television (e.g., Sony's Play Station) and computer games are played on a personal computer, or PC. These two forms of digital play comprise a lucrative sector of the global entertainment complex, an immersive, simulation-based interactive medium, a high-profile domain of youth-oriented popular culture, and a preferred leisure activity for millions of media consumers. Emerging early in the new millennium, game studies is the field of multidisciplinary scholarship devoted to the analysis of video and computer games.The origins of digital play lie in the US military–university complex. Cold War-era technologies that were intended to combat the “socialist threat” and to boost industrial productivity were turned upside down – from work to play – when, in 1962, student hackers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar?, one of the first computer games. This breakthrough was harnessed in the 1970s by Atari, the US corporation that led the transformation of digital play into a cultural industry. A harbinger of the “information society,” the spread of video arcades and the launch of the first home-based consoles in the 1980s saw interactive entertainment suffuse cultural space, commodify “free time,” and prepare many young people for the digital age.
There are some assumptions here that I have been thinking about. First, that video games prepared youth in the 80s for the digital age that was about to come. I'd say that video games were a product of the digital age and computers themselves did this. Video games were just another mode of showing the current digital display technology. But then I started thinking of other things.

Now, video games do have some impact on our lives. No, i'm not talking about leading to murdering terrorists or killing your sister, i'm talking about creating or changing the a priori knowledge, the metaphysics for your action. While I typically try and espouse the academic sources, i'll use some blogs. Take for instance: TCBAGS from Brainy Gamer. Would this have happened to someone who didn't play games? Has the video game had an impact on real world people? Everyone in that thread would say yes.

The other side of that coin is what we bring with us into the game. Mia Consalvo in There is No Magic Circle says that the real world knowledge, our real world circumstances. She says:
"Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules..." (Consalvo 2009: 9)
The magic circle is what we enter when we play a game, it is the boundary of game space. It comes from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. What Consalvo says is that there is real life that exists within the magic circle, we bring it in with us. Can we really call game space a pure place?

So, here we have two associations. The first is the link between the magic circle and real life and the other is between real life and the magic circle. While gameplay does stop when the game is finished, we often think about and act upon victory or defeat. Those feelings are real. I (and this is anecdotal evidence at best) still remember that tragic moment of complete and utter defeat when my linkshell in Final Fantasy 11 fought a dragon for 15 hours and eventually gave up. I was shocked, dismayed, destroyed. I didn't play anything for a day or two, I didn't do anything. That is an extreme example. Later, that same linkshell would defeat that same dragon in 20 minutes. But it serves as a reminder at just how serious some video games can be.

If you look up news on video games on google news, it won't take long to see a news media outlet linking video games to violence, video games to ADHD, or any manner of derogatory statements. If you look further, there is another movement (and i'll call this the James Paul Gee area) that looks at how video games are a benefit to learning and making sense of the world. What both of these stances agree on is that video games are doing something to us.

So, all of this arguing over what exactly is happening probably isn't as important to me as the simple thought that playing a video game does something to us. Now, from there, I suppose I need to pick a side but that is for another time.

 
 

Building Blocks: Proposal Submission

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?
Method
As I will be examining themes and messages portrayed by video games, the method of choice has traditionally been content analysis. There have been a number of studies that employed content analysis to examine these messages. However, the latest study I could find is Tracey Dietz’s study of 1998 study of the portrayal of stereotype in video games on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment system (Dietz 1998). Studies that have gone on since then have shied away from actual video games and have chosen instead to examine the messages portrayed by video game magazines of video games (Dill and Thill 2007). All of these studies point out that, through the body of work that Symbolic Interactionism includes, video games and the act of playing them allows younger players to learn of what the shared meanings their respective societies have created – especially gender roles (Dietz 1998 426). Because of this established body of work, I want to look at video games that are enormously popular for the Nielsen Group created 12-17 age category 11 years after Dietz’s study (McMillan 2008:3). The interesting part of this category is that it is the audience that plays the Xbox 360 the most yet almost all of the selected games are for Mature Audiences only (Age 18+). The method of selection for this sample of video games is simple.

First, I did not want to play more than one game in a specific genre or of a particular series. I felt that getting a broad overview of the various genre of video game that exists would give me a more complete picture of video games in general. Second, I did not want to choose sports games. There is a lot of literature on professional sports and aside from the personal skill involved in playing a virtual representation of a professional sport there is little difference between the groups that play the games in their living rooms and the groups that watch the games in real life. I also wanted a selection of video games that has a widespread influence. While independent games often take the general ideas of the video game industry and turn them on their heads, I am more interested in the general representation of women in popular games. As such, I settled on video games that were created in or specifically for American audiences and filtered the best selling video games on the Xbox 360 on the website vgchartz.com. Further, the target audience of these video games is white males between the ages of 12 and 17. The games that I selected were:
  1. Halo 3 – First Person Shooter, Science Fiction

  2. Call of Duty 4 – First Person Shooter, Modern War

  3. GTA 4 – Sandbox Game, Russian Immigrants

  4. Gears of War 2 – Third Person Shooter, Science Fiction

  5. Assassins Creed – Third Person Action, Science Fiction and Religion

  6. Fable II – Sandbox Game, Cartoony Fantasy

  7. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion – Sandbox Pen and Paper Emulator

  8. Fallout 3 – Sandbox Game, Apocalyptic

  9. Left 4 Dead – Zombie First Person Shooter

  10. Bioshock – World of Tomorrow Survival Horror First Person Shooter

Terms:
First Person Shooter: The player takes on the role of a person and sees the world through that character’s eyes.

Sandbox Game: Literally, the game is a sandbox with a loose story as the confines of the box.

Third Person Shooter: In these games, the player often takes on the role of one character in a story. The camera is almost always over the shoulder of that character.

Pen and Paper Emulator: In these games, the main character is essentially a math worksheet with player action creating a moral response from the game. These types of games are often based on old pen and paper war games like Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun.

World of Tomorrow: A setting in which steam power and zeppelins are still present. Computers take on ominous size and power. Examples of this are Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Rocketeer, or the Batman Animated Series. It is often used to explore the consequences of technological progress through a lens of the past.

Works Cited
Dietz, Tracy L. 1998. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38:5/6: 425-442.

Dill, Karen E; Kathryn P. Thill. 2007. “Video Game Characters and the Socialization of Gender
Roles: Young People’s Perceptions Mirror Sexist Media Depictions.” Sex Roles 57:851- 864.

John, Tracey. July 13, 2009. “Ridiculous Life Lessons from New Girl Games.” Wired Magazine Online July 13, Retrieved September 9, 2009.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/07/games-for-tweens/

Kent, Steven L. 2001. The Ultimate History of Video Games. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

Kiesler, Sara, Lee Sproull and Jacquelynne S. Eccles. “Pool Halls, Chips, and War Games: Women in the Culture of Computing.” ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 34:2:159-164.

Laurel, Brenda. 2001. Utopian Entrepaneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McMillan, Gavin. 2008. “The State of the Video Gamer.” The Nielson Company.
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040909_fnl.pdf

 
 

Overarcing Trends and Histories

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.”
It’s a strange conversation and it’s stuck with me for a year or so now. Video games are a strange and wonderful thing. The original video games were a reaction to the constant pressure of technological progress during the cold war. It was a return to the spirit of play during a time when such a spirit was very much needed. The first “video game” was created in 1961 and called Spacewar! While there had been other games made before this time, Spacewar! was the first game that wasn’t a recreation of other board games and had its own moving graphics. The first video game was based on the idea of war and for good reason; war was on everyone’s’ mind. Life in 1961 was very difficult for America. Schlock rock reigned supreme, the Beatles wouldn’t make it to America for another 2 years, and Kennedy was in the midst of Russian mobilization in Cuba. It was a time that desperately needed something to keep the play-spirit alive. While they didn’t catch on for a while, the time and the place were set for what would eventually create a sub-culture.

I am oversimplifying this by quite a bit but I wanted to make a simple point, video games began in a climate that was extremely depressing and very political. The culture of the time inspired others to be innovative and through that innovation, they kindled a spirit of play. Culture has a way of finding its way into just about anything. When the first people made their video games, they had no previous culture of the video gamer to pull from. They simply created something that was interesting at the time with what they had available. Culture, pure play-spirit, made its way into something that eventually became the video game industry.

The crux of my argument can best be summarized in 4 sentences:
  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.
The conclusion of this premise can best be surmised as:
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.

 
 

We Don't Earn the Right to Play Games Anymore, We Just Wait

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.

 
 

For the Love of Anomie

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.