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.
I wanted to write a series on a random thought I had not so long ago with regard to the anthropological term called, "going native."
The term for this is "going native" - where the researcher ceases to balance the roles of participant and observer and, instead, simply participates like any other group member. A researcher who "goes native" effectively stops being a researcher...
In essence, a researcher who has gone native no longer has the ability to see what it was they were effectively studying and they begin to participate in the group they were studying. They make movies about this sort of thing. Lawrence of Arabia was a good one, any movie where a cop becomes a drug addict and forgets they were a cop; The Salton Sea is a decent example of it as well.
In any case, after the events of Modern Warfare 2 (F.A.G.S. and "No Russian"), I realized that the idea of going native is quite actively at work in the gaming industry. Starting here, I wanted to do a few posts on it. This first one is one such attempt to get at this idea without just saying it.
Last week I went bowling.
Why does this matter? Well, I realized something that I think a lot of us forget when we’re writing or talking about video games. Sure, we hear and talk a lot about casual vs hardcore and narrative vs mechanics (I can’t use ludology – it’s just not a useful term to me as it isn’t 'really' the study of play…it is the study of video games. But hey, if it’ll sell books and school programs, let them use it).
Let me tell you a story.
So, Kristen and I were in Tiffin, Ohio, my hometown. The local bowling alley, heritage lanes (formerly gay lanes) has long been the hangout for the locals. My hometown is something of a northwest industrial town insomuch that most of it closed down when deindustrialization began to claim cities like mine. I can remember one day everything was great, it was the 80s and everything was totally awesome. The next morning, everyone was down, everyone was angry, and no one had a job. Being a boy of 30 now, back then all I really remember is from a kids point of view.
Anyway, deindustrialization, bowling, gay lanes.
It was a free-for-all. My brother, his girlfriend, myself, my girlfriend, my mom, and my dad. We didn’t give a damn about bowling. It was something we all used to do, it was a novelty. But, like all novelties, it gets to be pretty well remembered with time. Novelty, you see, is something like a fine wine. Bury it, stick a bottle in the cellar, forget about it and one day you pull it out and find not only is it worth the price you originally paid, it’s actually worth more than that, and it’s better than we remember…for a time. Like all bottles of wine, it gets empty, we drink too much, and suddenly, we wake up the next day and remember why we didn’t ever really like drinking in the first place.
Next to us was a group of local folk, probably people that still worked for the local factory. For these guys, that novelty never really got placed in the cellar. That novelty never really was a novelty at all, it was a lifeblood, a reason for living. Like all things we find that not everyone can appreciate something in the past, it must be celebrated in the present. Appreciation comes in the weeklong buildup to the weekend of wine drinking, or in this case…bowling.
It is here that I must leave this metaphor and reveal its purpose.
For us, for gamers, we are those people who look forward to bowling every weekend. We build it up each week for a weekend of serious, ‘hardcore’ gaming. We’re the same as those locals, mullets, tattoos, beer, and all. The world has moved on without us. There never really was a ‘casual revolution’ only a point in time whereupon the rest of the world reminded us that most people don’t play the same thing we are. No, what we’ve been doing is perfecting our bowling techniques.
We can almost all bowl 300s these days. I mean, have you seen how many polygons we can make our machines display at once? It’s almost as if we’re at the precipice of the uncanny valley. We’ve conquered this mountain.
Why is this important?
It’s important to realize that most people do not play video games. While we can say that they do, what we mean is that they play things like solitare, Farmville, or browser games like elf bowling. What we call ‘the casual revolution’ was an attempt to get other people to join us at the bowling alley. The interesting thing is that these days we see a lot of grumbling coming from the ‘locals’. The bowling alley is crowded now with a bunch of people throwing balls down alleys that were populated by the same type of person until very recently.
When I was at the bowling alley, the same locals took to being more boisterous than I’m sure they ever were when left alone. Slowly, we lost our places at the tables near the alley. Slowly, we lost our ability to have fun. Slowly, their behavior became too obnoxious for us to really put up wit. Eventually, they were left to bowl by themselves until the game shut down. While I’m sure that they were happy, I can tell you that we probably won’t be bowling again for another few years. We need to let the novelty age to perfection.
Plain English
In the fewest words possible, I will attempt to explain what I mean. The gaming industry has been inclusive since the end of the SNES era . The casual revolution is an attempt to bring the games we’ve all been playing casually for years and the games that the industry has produced for years for the inclusive crowd, together in an attempt to create a much larger, ‘game industry.’ We are seeing signs of success for the massive resistance the inclusive group began the day the casual revolution started. However, the thing that seems to be unspoken, is that casual games have been more of a success in terms of ‘players’ than the ‘hardcore’ gamer scene could imagine. In the end, non-gamers do not want to think about the video games as the inclusive group has called them. They want to play tetris.
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.
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.
