At times, this semester has been depressing and seemed like it would never end. I suppose this is the way that projects work but as this is a project that required a lot more than a week's worth of effort, it has been something of a miracle that i've managed to keep it together.
I'm putting the finishing touches on this presentation. I just finished the handout for the presentation and i'm going to test it on the class before re-doing it for a larger, more focused audience. It's quite exciting. One day soon, i'll probably upload my worksheet from this project so that other people can see what my items were. Overall, the most learned thing about this is that my research questions were extremely vague so it gave me a wide variety of things to notice but I think that next time I do something like this i'd like to focus it more...a lot more.
Until such a time as the actual project is done, i'll just leave up the abstract and first two paragraphs:
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.
This is a paper about video games and the culturally flavored messages that are being communicated through them. There is a distinction that I will use that most people involved with video game studies would not agree with: computer games and video games. A video game is a played through a console connected to a television. A computer game is played through a computer connected to a computer monitor (Blackwell). This distinction has been important to us, in the United States, for quite some time. It was useful because video games came from Japan – companies like Nintendo, Sega, Square Enix, and Capcom, based in Japan, were the primary creators of video game hardware and software as it was distributed in the United States. Computer games, while also created in Japan, were not traditionally translated, localized, and released in America. The American computer game culture was as such that it was associated with the derogatory, socially isolated, nerd culture (SOURCE?). It was not until video games embraced the CD-ROM that American created video games began to reappear and sell well enough to be called popular (SOURCE). This paper believes that the release of the Microsoft XBOX 360 has signaled a new era in which the rift created in the 80s between video games and computer games created in America is mended.
There are five parts to this paper. The first is an overview of the history of the video game and how it relates to culture. It is important to understand the creation of hardware and software in order to understand why these technologies have been associated with derogatory culture for so long. After this, I will approach methodology. Even though video games and computer games have been around for nearly 40 years, there is not a lot of work on video games. Despite the amazing cost to produce a video game – almost as much as a blockbuster movie’s budget – video games have rarely entered academia. Third, I will move from method and get into detail on the types of games I have selected for this study and why they were selected. It is important to distinguish between games due to differences in game-play, narrative, and ambiance. Fourth, analysis of the data I have collected. Exactly how are women portrayed in popular video games? And last, I will examine potential future research and offer some critique of video games themselves.
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