Comments on What Happens Before Game Design?: Building Blocks: Proposal Submission

Because that paper would get shut down by profs in...

2009-09-16T04:53:00.408-07:00

Because that paper would get shut down by profs in an instant due to studying privilege and how it tries to mask itself. Fantastic stories can't always have normal characters in them. Bumbling characters are a wild card because they might be so lucky they're actually fantastic and don't know it yet (see: Schmendrick in The Last Unicorn).

Awesome, very inspiring to see other people are st...

2009-09-16T00:08:49.848-07:00

Awesome, very inspiring to see other people are still working on the academics of games.

One slight issue, though, is that I've given up on claiming games are sexist because, in my experience, neither gender gets off lightly in their portrayal. If you want something interesting to tack onto this study, you might want to briefly cover the heteronormality issue as relates to male characters in games: why are we all square-jawed bionic heroes who report DIRECTLY TO THE PRESIDENT, or snivelling, bumbling comic fools?

That's pretty rocking. I think an addendum to this...

2009-09-15T15:39:06.174-07:00

That's pretty rocking. I think an addendum to this paper that I might turn into a thesis paper is taking these 10 games and expanding them to 50-75 cross-cultural games. It would be interesting to see how cultural ideologies make it into the game and how the game deals with being in other languages / on foreign soil.

Sounds awesome dude! Anything that starts with Lau...

2009-09-15T15:20:52.843-07:00

Sounds awesome dude! Anything that starts with Laurel will end well. We finally researched methods for our content analysis, going with a convenience sample of 225 based on how expensive they are to attain, with 5 ranges of Metacritic scores, 10 genres, and 5 console-types. Also, each of us is playing 2/3 of the games so there is overlap.