Building Blocks: Methodology, Sociological Background, Sample Methods

There is something to be said about trends. Being in a college atmosphere, you see it a lot. The same kids discovering the same knowledge taking the same roles, looking down on the same people and listening to the same (culturally the same) music. It's trending, it's predictable. However, it is these trends that allow us to study the social in a way that is both defining and meaningful. How else would we know that hipsters like stuff like deerhoof or bjork or that the Axe marketing campaign would actually work on its intended audience? How would we know who to target for Volkswagon or Hummer advertising? How would Glen Beck be able to find his intended audience and get it riled up by crying all the time? How would Obama have been able to accomplish all he has without trends, without predictiblity?

Ok, it's a double edged sword. But it is useful.

This entry is more about building blocks. The last entry I made had to do with the basics of feminist theory. In short, gender and sex, the former learned the later ascribed, is also the product of imitation. We grow as people and, as we grow, we imitate the things we see around us. This imitation keeps gender rules alive and that imitation is the major source of male power. It's time to move on from there. This study is to look into video games and the representation of gender. I need to define some terms here.

Video Game: I need to have a definition for video game that comes from the way my discipline understands them. This definition comes 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.

This seems reasonable. It goes a little against the definition and history that the ULTIMATE VIDEO GAME ENCYCLOPEDIA gives, but this is to be expected. More extrapolation, more rigor.

Social Communication: This is simple enough, communication meant to serve a general purpose. This could be, for this definition, magazine ads, television ads, spam email, banner ads, television shows, movies, photographs, video games and more. Basically, things that deliniate a specific type (type being a standard in society (teacher, wife, husband, nerd, hipster).

Manifest Function / Latent Function:

Manifest Function: intended consequence of an action. An example of this is the posting of speed limits.

Latent Function: An unintended, often unrecognized, consequence of an action. An example of this is the sudden braking of cars at speed traps causing more money to be spent on brake work over time.

Manifest functions are all around us. For example, society has a need for punishment of deviant behavior. So, it creates these punishments through a system of law. The creation and enforcement of these laws are manifest functions of this social action. An unintended consequence, a latent function of this new system of laws is the creation of deviance through marking behavior that was previously unmentioned as deviant. The sudden appearance of deviant individuals where there was none before is an unplanned consequence.

These two concepts are part of the central function of sociology. Whereas we would get called finger pointers and rable rousers, Sociology is supposed to point out the unintended consequences of social actions by studying that action. It is here that uneven power structures, class structure building and differences appear.

Content Analysis:

"In content analysis, researchers examine artifacts of social communication. Typically, these are written documents or transcriptions of recorded verbal communications. Broadly defined, however, content analysis is 'any technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying special characteristics of messages.' From this perspective, photographs, video tape, or any items that can be made into text are amenable to content analysis...objective analysis of messages conveyed in the data being analyzed is accomplished by means of explicit rules called criteria of selection, which must be formally established before the actual analysis of data.

The criteria of selection used in any given content analysis must be sufficiently exhaustive to account for each variation of message content and must be rigidly and consistently applied so that other researchers or readers, looking at the same messages would obtain the same or comparable results.

Qualitative Research Methods For the Social Sciences (pages 267-8)

In other words, you set up a survey that you basically take all of your social communications through, code it all, look at the data, and interpret it. It is a lot more sophisticated than that! but this is the gist of content analysis.

Over the next few weeks, i'll be developing this further. I probably shouldn't post every part of every tool that I develop but I probably will. It is more useful to me to post stuff and make sense of it for a given audience of people who probably don't know how social science works than it is not to.

My subject matter again is video games and the representation of the female. As I go through and think about categories and selection criteria for the games themselves, I need to find a sample to pull from. I only have 16 weeks to complete this analysis so I am going to take a smaller group than I would have liked. I believe I am going to take the top 10 selling games on the xbox 360.

I will select that top 10 with these criteria:

No Sports Games

Only 1 of a particular genre

No music based games (rockband or guitar hero are out)

This leaves me with a list that sort of looks like this:

1. Halo 3
2. Call of Duty 4
3. GTA 4
4. Gears of War 1
5. Assassins Creed
6. Fable II
7. Oblivion
8. Fallout 3
9. Left 4 Dead
10. Bioshock

I chose the 360 simply because I want to target the age category that the nielson data says are playing the 360 12-17 year olds. Further, Xbox 360 users are the fastest growing group of video game users behind the Playstation 2. They also replace most time behind a television with game playing rather than television watching. It also avoids PC Card games in which the female population is often given as the primary focus of this category. I think that this will allow for a more solid beginning for further projects in this light.

I need to go buy those games. Ugh, Oblivion and Fallout 3 are going to be the most time needy. I believe I am going to put around 20 hours into each of these games. 20 * 10 = 200 hours spread out of 14 weeks with 2 weeks to finish everything up.

Seems fun.