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