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.