What Happens Before Game Design?

A Year in Review 3: Journal Articles

2011-01-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

In addition to the many books I had to read, I think I should include academic journal articles and other bits from the academic world. Apologies for no pictures in this post. Academia is a boring, pictureless world of grey graphs and grey lines in multiple shades...of grey.

It is sort of amazing how much knowledge I have consumed in the past year. It's little wonder I felt overwhelmed, tired, depressed, and withdrawn at the end of it.

Reading these sorts of things is extremely necessary (or so I have been socialized to think) to cut through the personal biases, generalizations, and other noise that comes with culture. You cannot completely cut through these things, but it sometimes helps to try. Each article represents a unique moment in time, or catalogs an event over a period of years.

The power of academia isn't in what it is learning but in what it catalogs, what it explains. As with all knowledge, acceptance of things like this should come with reservations. Everything academia publishes is only correct for so long and even then "correct" is suspect.

Useful is probably closer to what journal articles end up being. Caveats aside, here are a group of articles that have stuck with me since I read them.

Aoyama, Yuko, Hiro Izushi. 2002. “Hardware Gimmick or Cultural Innovation? Technological, Cultural, and Social Foundations of the Japanese Video Game Industry.” Research Policy

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines the role of creative resources in the emergence of the Japanese video game industry. We argue that creative resources nurtured by popular cartoons and animation sector, combined with technological knowledge accumulated in the consumer electronics industry, facilitated the emergence of successful video game industry in Japan. First we trace the development of the industry from its origin to the rise of platform developers and software publishers. Then, knowledge and creative foundations that influenced the developmental trajectory of this industry are analyzed, with links to consumer electronics and in regards to cartoons and animation industry.

Video games are unique in that they are cultural objects infused with technological symbolism. At times, we laud video games for their ability to make us feel. Other times, we are amazed by the sheer amount of power a video game contains. Throughout their history, many different cultures have contributed to what eventually became video game culture. This particular article is useful insomuch that it traces the problems and benefits of how culturally close a hardware manufacturer is to a software producer. Given the recent Xbox 360, I wonder and hope for an update to this article.

Becker, Howard. 1967. Whose Side Are We On?. Social Problems

INTRODUCTION:
To have values or not to have values: the question is always with us. When sociologists undertake to study problems that have relevance to the world we live in, they find themselves caught in a crossfire. Some urge them to not take sides, to be neutral and do research that is technically correct and value free. Others tell them their work is shallow and useless if it does not express a deep commitment to a value position.

This dilemma, which seems so painful to so many, actually does not exist, for one of its horns is imaginary. For it to exist, one would have to assume, as some apparently do, that it is indeed possible to do research that is uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies. I propose to argue that it is not possible and, therefore, that the question is not whether we should take sides, since we inevitably will, but rather whose side are we on.

This particular article comes up every year and is central to my current thoughts on minority vs majority groups. Take, for example, video games. Most game studies folks take great care to design studies that incorporate independent games. They do this because, it seems, it is easier to gain access and, for whatever reason, minority groups "need" to be studied. What this ends u p doing, as Becker points out, is simply adding to the general malaise against the larger group. Without the larger group, the minority group gains access to more things but at a certain point that group will be abandoned for the next minority group. In order to combat this, more research needs to be done on the majority groups. In video game terms, this means that more work should be done with larger companies. The data these companies would provide would offer quite an amazing amount of useful data.

Consalvo, Mia. 2006. “Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture.” New Media Society

ABSTRACT:
This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. As an exemplar of this process, the Japanese game publisher Square Enix is the focus of this case study, as it has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture.

I have been excited by any work that makes an effort to separate games that come from different cultures into different types. This particular piece is a foundational one for my thesis. In many ways, I want to present video games as something that is created by culture. I want to add to this sentiment that video games.

Connell, R.W. and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept." Gender and Society.

ABSTRACT: The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations (the idea of multiple masculinities, the concept of hegemony, and the emphasis on change) and what needs to be discarded (onedimensional treatment of hierarchy and trait conceptions of gender). The authors suggest reformulation of the concept in four areas: a more complex model of gender hierarchy, emphasizing the agency of women; explicit recognition of the geography of masculinities, emphasizing the interplay among local, regional, and global levels; a more specific treatment of embodiment in contexts of privilege and power; and a stronger emphasis on the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity, recognizing internal contradictions and the possibilities of movement toward gender democracy.

This article created a lot of really useful knowledge for me. Anyone tired of discussions about hegemony, feminism, and various other tedious (because of social barriers to discussion, not because of the topic) material should read this article.

Connel and Messerschmidt remove a ton of barriers in the discussion of gender by re-establishing gender studies as both male and female, not just inequality between the two because males, like females, do not actually meet the expectation of the hegemony. In the end, the most basic thing to take from this article is that we are not being complicated enough when it comes to studying gender.

Jones, John E. 2005. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Case No. 04cv2688

INTRODUCTION:
On October 18, 2004, the Defendant Dover Area School Board of Directors passed by a 6-3 vote the following resolution:

Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught. On November 19, 2004, the Defendant Dover Area School District announced by press release that, commencing in January 2005, teachers would be required to read the following statement to students in the ninth grade biology class at Dover High School:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

This judgement has been frequently handed to me over the years but 2010 is the first time I have actually read it. Because I live in Texas, school books, school subjects, and other various things around school have been extremely important. The loss of things like Benjamin Franklin, various Mexican War issues, the trail of tears and other tragic moments for white americans will lead to a generation of kids striving to be more white than they are already covertly pushed into.

This particular judgement is striking because of the extremely careful wording the judge used. In almost all ways, this judge shut this argument down. It is a solid piece of writing and the careful writing is indicative of the growing problems that have been created through the intensifying frequency of "innovation". I really recommend this as a "must read."

Latour, Bruno. 2010. An attempt at writing a “Compositionist Manifesto” New Literary History

A prologue in form of avatar:

If I had an agent, I am sure he would advise me to sue James Cameron over his latest blockbuster since AVATAR should really be called PANDORA’S HOPE! Yes, Pandora is the name of the mythical humanoid whose box holds all the ills ohumanity, but it is also the name of the heavenly body that humans from planet Earth (all members of the typically American military-industrial complex) are exploiting to death without any worry for the fate of its local inhabitants, the Navis, and of their ecosystem, a superorganism and a goddess called Eywa. I am under the impression that this film is the first popular description of what happens when modernist humans meet Gaia. And it’s not pretty.

The REVENGE OF GAIA, to use one of James Lovelock’s titles, results in a terrifying replay of Dunkirk 1940 or Saigon 1973: a retreat and a defeat. This time, the Cowboys lose to the Indians: they have to flee from their Frontier and withdraw back home abandoning all their riches behind them. In trying to pry open the mysterious planet Pandora in search of a mineral —known as unobtanium, no less!—, the Earthlings, just like in the classical myth, let loose all the ills of humanity: not only do they ravage the planet, destroy the great tree of life, kill the quasi Amazonian Indians who had lived in edenic harmony with her, they also become infected by their own macho ideology. Outward destruction breeds inward destruction. And again, like in the classical myth, hope is left at the bottom of Pandora’s box —I mean planet—because it lies deep in the forest, thoroughly hidden in the complex web of connections that the Navis nurture with their own Gaia, a biological and cultural network which only a small team of naturalists and anthropologists begin to explore. It is left to Jack, an outcast, a marine with neither legs nor academic credentials to finally “get it”, yet at a price: the betrayal of his fellow mercenaries, a rather conventional love affair with a native and a magnificent transmigration of his original crippled body into his avatar thereby inverting the relationship between the original and the copy and giving a whole new dimension to what it means to “go native”…).

I take this film is to be the first script that doesn't take ultimate catastrophe and destruction for granted —as so many have before— but opts for a much more interesting outcome: a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined. The lesson of the film, in my reading of it, is that modernized and modernizing humans are not physically, psychologically, scientifically and emotionally equipped to survive on their Planet. Like in Michel Tournier’s inverted story of Robinson Crusoe, they have to relearn from beginning to end what it is to live on their island —and just like in Tournier’s fable, Crusoe ultimately decides to stay in the now civilized and civilizing jungle instead of going back home to what for him has become just another wilderness. But what fifty years ago in Tournier’s romance was a fully individual experience, has become today in Cameron’s film a collective adventure: there is no sustainable life for Earth bound species on their planet island.

So, while studying modernization and the theories that go along with it, I ended up reading a ton of Bruno Latour. At this point, the fans of Latour seem more like rabid Star Wars fans than they do philisophs or professionals so it's hard to cut through that sort of stuff to get at what he is talking about.

This article, if you can stomach reading Latour, is interesting because of what it signifies. At some point, as masculinity came under fire, and with it, modernization theory, feminism gained power. Along with it, things like living in harmony, being at peace, and other "female" designated behaviors began to permeate popular culture. This movie, Avatar, symbolizes a general switch away from trying to conquer nature to giving up the frontier and heading back home. That living within nature is probably more of a benefit for the planet...and us...than it would be living through science as nature.

Messner. 2005. The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
INTRODUCTION:

The historical development of modern men’s sport has been closely intertwined with the consumption of alcohol and with the ﬁnancial promotion and sponsorship provided by beer and liquor producers and distributors, as well as pubs and bars (Collins and Vamplew 2002). The beer and liquor industry plays a key economic role in commercialized college and professional sports (Zimbalist 1999; Sperber 2000). Liquor industry advertisements heavily inﬂuence the images of masculinity promoted in sports broadcasts and magazines (Wenner 1991). Alcohol consumption is also often a key aspect of the more dangerous and violent dynamics at the heart of male sport cultures (Curry 2000; Sabo, Gray, and Moore 2000). By itself, alcohol does not “cause” men’s violence against women or against other men; however, it is commonly one of a cluster of factors that facilitate violence (Koss and Gaines 1993; Leichliter et al. 1998). In short, beer and liquor are central players in “a high holy trinity of alcohol, sports, and hegemonic masculinity” (Wenner 1998).

This article examines beer and liquor advertisements in two “mega sports media events” consumed by large numbers of boys and men—the 2002 and 2003 Super Bowls and the 2002 and 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. Our goal is to illuminate tropes of masculinity that prevail in those ads. We see these ads as establishing a pedagogy of youthful masculinity that does not passively teach male consumers about the qualities of their products so much as it encourages consumers to think of their products as essential to creating a stylish and desirable lifestyle. These ads do more than just dupe consumers into product loyalty; they also work with consumers to construct a consumption-basedmasculine identity relevant to contemporary social conditions. Drawing on insights from feminist cultural studies (Walters 1999), we argue that these gendered tropes watched by tens of millions of boys and men offer a window through which we can broaden our understanding of contemporary continuities, shifts, and strains in the social construction of masculinities.

This article came up a few different times this year and I think the spirit it captures might actually be more accurately portrayed through the movie Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This article traces the impact of feminism on males through beer advertising for major sporting events, particularly, the Super Bowl.

Feminism has had a huge impact on men, maybe moreso than it has had on women. It is rare to see articles like this and while this particular article has a lot of methodological issues, it is useful. Between this and the Connell/Messerschmidt article, a person could make some interesting arguments.

Wajcman, Judy. 2007. “From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience.” Information, Communication and Society

ABSTRACT:
This paper situates current discussions of women's position in ICTs in the wider context of feminist debates on gender and technology. While a common trend among early feminist theorists was a profound pessimism about the inherent masculinity of technology, this was replaced during the 1990s by an unwarranted optimism about the liberating potential of technoscience for women. This article gives an account of both technophobia and technophilia, arguing that recent approaches drawing on the social studies of technology provide a more subtle analysis. Avoiding both technological determinism and gender essentialism, technofeminist approaches emphasize that the gender-technology relationship is fluid and flexible, and that feminist politics and not technology per se is the key to gender equality.

I think that this abstract speaks for itself. This article and the next are a comprehensive examination of feminist thought about technology.

Wajcman, Judy. 2010. “Feminist Theories of Technology.” Cambridge Journal of Economics

ABSTRACT:
Feminist theories of technology have come a long way over the last quarter of a century. The expanding engagement at the intersection of feminist scholarship and science and technology studies (STS) has enriched both fields immeasurably, and I will largely focus my reflections on the literature associated with these sites. I begin by highlighting the continuities as well as the differences between contemporary and earlier feminist debates on technology. Current approaches focus on the mutual shaping of gender and technology, in which technology is conceptualised as both a source and consequence of gender relations. In avoiding both technological determinism and gender essentialism, such theories emphasise that the gender-technology relationship is fluid and situated. These deliberations highlight how processes of technical change can influence gender power relations. A feminist politics of technology is thus key to achieving gender equality.

I got into technology studies because I was writing a paper on Science Literacy and STEM education tactics. The article linked above is a great overview of two things. 1). A history of feminist thought with regard to technology and 2). Why that history went the way it did. If you have ever wanted to link feminist thought to technology, this piece is really great.

Williams, Dimitri, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory. “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games.” New Media Society

ABSTRACT:
A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in proportion to the games that were actually played by the public, and thus allowed the first statements able to be generalized about the content of popular video games. The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly. Overall, the results are similar to those found in television research. The implications for identity, cognitive models, cultivation and game research are discussed.

This article does a good job at pointing out the, systematically, the over-representation of white males in video games. The authors take their findings and place it within the literature on television research. This step makes this piece extremely useful for any research projects that involve digital groups in a wide-range of disciplines. The section "Why game representations matter" is very exhaustive.

The end

I think that this is a pretty nice review for the things I found interesting last year. My selection process is mostly 3 from each type of semester (Spring, Summer, Fall) and a floater. I have to wonder what will happen once i'm out of school.

Resolutions?

I spent a lot of 2010 in the midst of a great deal of stress that was unavoidable. Most everything in my life suffered. 2011 will be a year of re-establishing that which I lost in 2010 and putting forth a lot of effort to get into a PhD program. I've been writing a research philosophy lately. I might actually be on my way to creating a 5 year research plan. 2011 will be a year to remember!

A Year in Review 2: Books

2011-01-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

I read a lot this year. In fact, I think I read more this year than I have in most years previous. In the light of the new year, despite being 4 days in, I thought i'd put up a quick retrospective on the books I read for 2010. As I tried to do in the last post about the new year, I am including books that weren't first published in 2010 though some of the stuff I read was just released.

Because this is about 2010, i'll put up 10 books that impacted me. I will put these in alphabetical order by author.

Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals.

Throughout college, publically and personally, I struggle with acknowledging I am a fan of Japanese things and violently denying that fact. I am of two worlds. The shame of the Japanophile haunts me. The tag of Otaku continually follows me. As I have gone through my Masters, I began to realize that this label, this aversion to belonging to a community of people who are mostly denied a place in common society, is probably worth studying. Throughout the years, discussing various aspects of the Japanese culture with my old language and culture professor, I began a journey to understand what it was that I was all at once attracted and repulsed by.

At random, I came upon this book by Azuma. It is one of the first real attempts, I think, to bring the philosophs from Japan into an American scene. Who knew that the Japanese loved Hegel and, through Hegel, the Frankfurt folks? I certainly did not.

This book traces the development of the Otaku in Japanese popular culture and it does so with a sense of wonder that can only be called Japanese. By the end of this book I was so hopeful yet so depressed that I didn't know if I could really bring myself to look through it again for references. The reaction I got from this book tells me that anyone who has ever wondered about Otaku, Anime, or just Japanese pop culture, really needs to read this book.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space.

Early in the year, at the end of the Fall semester 2009, I began to really enjoy the use of Twitter. While I have made some mistakes in how I communicate through it, the amount of knowledge it has opened for me is somewhat staggering. Chris Lepine, a doctoral student in Edmunton, Alberta in Canada, recommended this book by Bachelard as a book that people interested in design might enjoy.

My initial thought was that I typically avoid psychological texts insomuch that blending them too much might be a problem later in my professional life. However, on a whim and during a particularly long bus ride to Austin from school, I made it through most of this book.

The most basic thing I took from this book is that we are all raised somewhere. The place where we are raised reflects a general sense of how we perceive the world later. As such, in application of these ideas, a designer will take from their childhood and development portions of this and place it in what they are making.

I am obsessed, continually, with this very idea. After all, design cannot happen without reference. To design is to critique. To anyone with time and to anyone who can stomach the stuffy, complicated, prose of an academic philosoph, I really recommend this book.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games.

I learned a lot about the world through video games. As a child, health problems kept me out of social circles and made it difficult for me to form relationships as a normal child would. As such, I was given a heroic amount of video games and would often spend time going through them, noticing how different the ones made in this crazy Japan place were from the ones that came from America. With this thought in mind, I read Persuasive Games at the behest of a slew of people, most notably Simon Ferrari, and I was extremely happy with what Bogost had to say.

The thing I took out of this book was that the narrative of a game in addition to the things we call rules form an argument about something. Namely, the narrative and the mechanics are inexorably linked and that link coincides with societal norms and values. In what may be my favorite example of how games reflect culture, Bogost discusses the rules for food that govern Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

In this section, he outlines the negative connotations of fast food. Fast food is traditionally associated with the lower classes. As such, the lower classes have weight problems. Weight problems are associated with laziness and the lower classes are therefor associated with being lazy and fat. Now, Rockstar, whether meaning to or not, created a world for CJ that includes only fast food.

The interesting thing here is that this is a social critique. Basic sociological theory posits that we are all trapped by the conditions we were born into. Education levels, healthiness, work ethic, socioeconomic status. To make a long argument short, the lower classes (working classes) eat fast food because there is no other choice because that choice isn't known. Fast food restaurants are traditionally associated with urban centers and the general socioeconomic conditions of urban areas are traditionally very low.

This is an oversimplification but the gravity of this appearing in a game like Grand Theft Auto does two things, 1). It reifies the idea that the poor only want fast food and 2). It calls to attention the fact that the poor only have access to fast food.

Bogost's book, for that reason (even if i'm getting it wrong), was amazing.

Daniels, Jessie. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights.

One of my favorite faculty members I help is one Dr. Barbara Trepagnier. Her book, Silent Racism, introduced me to a lot of concepts and ideas that would form the greater part of what I was interested in as a Graduate Student. One day, I went looking for more books about similar concepts. I was all at once interested in how race was portrayed online and how race came online.

On Amazon, I found the book mentioned above and posted it to Twitter. A little while later, I recieved a mention on Twitter from the author and so I started following her. A few replies, a brief presentation in the department, and a bunch of direct messages and emails later, I find myself writing a book chapter on race and video games with Dr. Daniels. This particular story is probably one that is found a lot on Twitter.

The book though, is a historical treatment of white supremacy and how it found its way online. It also discusses the idea of cloaked websites or, those websites out there that seem to be one thing while actually being a way to hurt an idea. For example, anti-abortion websites meant to feel like abortion communities or websites of people who love wal-mart that is actually run by wal-mart.

The ideas, treatment, theories, and data in this book really make it worth far more than an academic text about an idea. I try and push this book on most people I meet and hope to see it keep appearing in the various circles of people online I talk to.

Dematteis, J.M. and Mike Zeck. The Amazing Spider-Man: Kraven's Last Hunt.

I grew up with people who loved comic books. I love video games and digital media. Last year, thanks to the "Black Spider-Man" incident, I somehow ended up writing about and reading about comic books.

I was interested in how Spider-Man developed over time, through various writers all coming from mostly the same background, and how the sense of place that is Brooklyn changed given the amount of time that has gone by since the comic first appeared. This particular comic, a story about a hunter incapable of understanding or dealing with defeat, really hits a lot of points that resonate with the "whiteness" of comic books.

If you haven't ever read this particular comic, I really recommend it. Defense of my statement will come as we get closer to my presentation on the subject in April.

Jin, Dal Yong. Korea's Online Gaming Empire.

So, Korea is one of the most interesting game designing places that isn't Japan or America. At least, this is what I have heard. It is almost impossible to find good data or historical development texts anywhere. This book does an amazing job at what it says it will:

"This book examines the multiple causes of growth of the online game industry in Korea. First, this book explains why and how the Korean government adopted new economic and cultural policies to develop the online game sector as a cutting-edge business and cultural icon. Second, it examines the role of Korean and foreign-based transnational corporations in the online game industry...The relationship between international transnational coroporations and Korean-based transnational and national corporations will also be examined. In this light, the book discusses the impact of neoliberal globalization on the game industries and on government policy." (page 9).

I really hope that more video game studies take the form that this book did. The impact of a video game, especially large games, is much more than most people realize.

Latour, Bruno. War of the Worlds: How about peace?

This particular book has had an impact on a lot of the things that I do. It is perhaps the most clear and distinct example of what the work of Bruno Latour has to offer to the body politic as well as the language that surrounds many of the issues central to modernization, globalization and neoliberalism.

"Whatever follows modernism at least has the advantage of being clearer. There is no doubt that the war of the worlds is taking place; unity and multiplicity cannot be achieved unless they are progressively pieced together by delicate negotiations. Nobody can constitute the unity of the world for anybody else...by generously offering to let the others in, on condition that they leave at the door all that is dear to them..." (p.30).

This particular lesson is really difficult to swallow. However, it is a lesson that all of us need to swallow.

Video games reflect the nature of the systems we live in. No matter the game, the inequity present through who plays and how they play reflects a system that has had an impact throughout the world. I can only hope that the "punk" game makers in the indie scene will pick up on the old punk movement and produce work that actually escapes this system instead of adding to it. This book was heavily on my mind this year as I watched the indie game scene take its current shape.

Lingis, Alphonso. The Community for Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

Going along with the Latour book comes this book about death. It is a collection of essays from this philosopher and it actually blew my mind. It sets everything up through this passage:

"From the beginning, philosophical thought, unlike the wisdom of the sages of pre-Socratic Greece, India, Persia, and China, was linked to the cause of building community. The rational form of knowledge produces a common discourse that is intergrally one and a new kind of community, in principle, unlimited.

Rational science is not distinguishable from the empirical knowledge of the great sedentary civilizations of India, China, the Mayas, the Incas, or from that of the nomads who have surived for centuries in their often harsh environments by its content of observations...

...What the West calls science is not accumulations of observations but explanatory systems." (p.1-2).

This particular introduction has been on my mind since I read it. I have tried to strive to understand what it means for society, what it means to two unlike groups meeting at a negotiating table. At its essence, I have tried to think about what it would be like to not be surrounded by a culture that exists through and because of science.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics.

I began to get into comic books so that I could present a paper on Spider-Man. I wanted to get into comic books because, like video games, they are the new place for mythology as well as a cultural object that bridges cultures together.

It has taken me a long time to be able to really start down a path to understanding comics. In addition to being cultural objects, fan studies also has a healthy amount of data to use here. This particular book serves both of these purposes by providing a blue-print for how fans judge a comic as well as how authors write them.

In the copy I have (ISBN 9780060976255), page 74 is probably the most useful thing to me. It discusses 6 aspects of comic books.

Moment to Moment
Action to Action
Subject to Subject
Scene to Scene
Aspect to Aspect
Non-Sequitur

The author then goes through a variety of comic books and displays how each of them uses these 6 aspects. Cultural differences are especially noticeable here. The implications for things outside of comic books are stupendous. As such, this book should be read by all manner of people.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race.

For this book, for all of Nakamura's work, I can't really put into words how useful it is. Instead, i'll simply post the back of the book:

In the ninties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the Internet's rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. Today's online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reeal but showcase people's racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Lisa Nakamura refers to case studies of popular yet rarely evaluated uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Websites, intant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures.

What this book ends up doing is providing a context through which the emergence of particular racial stereotypes evolved online. Her later work focuses more on the nationality and stereotypes of gold farmers in Massively Multiplayer Games.

In the end

In the end, I realized while writing this, that I am currently obsessed with the impact of neoliberal policies and ideas on the perception of just about anything. 2010 has been sort of a depressing year academically, but I can also say that I feel great about what i've read.

A Year in Review

2011-01-01T12:15:00.001-08:00

So, it's 2011 now and everyone I know or occasionally read is making posts about their favorite games that came out in 2010. I used to write (when the subject was new to me) about modernization theory; that theory of progress, how we are always moving forward and how, while we aren't there yet, science will save us.

In the spirit of protest (in the loosest sense of the term), I decided to write about some games that I found this year, or found interesting, and not about the latest and greatest. Each game represents a unique point in time for me. Since it is 2010, I will mention 10 games.

Trauma from Krystian Majewski

So, as I have slowly made my way through mapping out the indie scene in video games, I came upon Trauma. Later, I somehow ended up doing a Podcast with Krystian about Monster Hunter but that is a story for later.

Honestly, I was sort of amazed at what the game was trying to accomplish and I was shocked that I felt like I did the first time I played Myst when looking at preview videos for it. Who was this woman, why was she there, what is up with all these dreams, are they dreams? All these puzzles. Unlike Myst, this game really reminds me of the thing I do like about new games based on older models, they have a chance to make them better. Sadly, not many do, but this game has really impressed me. I am generally uneasy while playing it. This is a really great feeling!

Monster Hunter Tri

Along with Krystian, who is making the above game, and SocialDissonance who makes videos for this game, Monster Hunter Tri has made a really stupendous impact on how I view video games and what they mean to me. I initially started playing this game as a way to distract myself from a very personal situation my fiance and I were going through at the time. Her father was dying. At the time, a friend and I had started playing this game. We later found SocialDissonance and a couple other players through Internet-Relay Chat and formed a really solid group that didn't fall apart until the situation I was avoiding actually occurred.

It changed my perception about games in a few subtle ways. I view games as a construction of culture. Mechanics and Narrative construction occur using the same building blocks. In this game, the 3rd (5th) Monster Hunter game, Capcom actually removed a lot of content, a lot of complex mechanics, and tried to reboot the series for world consumption instead of Japanese / Korean consumption. While it didn't necessarily accomplish its task, it did manage to make a few things clear for me about the imbalance of success of games internationally.

In general, Japanese and American gamers have very different tastes that are very complicated and intertwined. These tastes are based on lifestyle, age appropriateness, commute traditions, and historical developments.
While those tastes coincide, the culture of origin present in a game's mechanics (bundles of rules) does not matter as much as the culture of origin of the game's presentation (which is a type of mechanic).
American gamers will take some games that come from Japan and place them on a pedestal insomuch that it actually restricts a game's proliferation inside American culture.
Attempts to by-pass this typically end in frustration on all sides.

Monster Hunter Tri is, by and large, a great game. However, it is only a great game if you have friends to play it with. Monster Hunter, like other Capcom Games, reflect a general sense of "the climb," but do so brutally. While Monster Hunter Tri is a reboot and much easier than the others, it is still impossibly hard for someone who hasn't played these games before. The success of these games in Asian markets combined with the elitism of the type of gamer who traditionally likes Japanese Games because they aren't popular in America, present an impossible intersection of gaming and culture.

I should probably develop this further in a different post.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (not my video but it's the best I could find)

I suppose this would be considered cheating but I ended up getting myself a PSP Go for Christmas. This was one of the first games I purchased for it (the others being Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker and Tetris). I have probably played about 100 hours of this game (it boasts over 500). Unlike Monster Hunter Tri, this game is brutally hard. On the first mission, I died. On the second mission, I died. I kept dying until I managed to hobble together a suit of armor and a really defensive weapon in order to deal with the harsh world I was just in. The sense of empowerment a person feels when they finally down a really difficult wyvern in this game is powerful. I really feel like the world is just a little easier than it was each time the end music plays and the phrase, "Objective Complete!" appears on screen. The uphill climb is a general reset to 0 over the course of 3 different phases of the game (low rank, high rank, and g-rank).

The first mission of each rank reminds you that the world your character lives in is much more brutal than you thought. This is a game more about your will versus a computer's will (in the form of wyverns). I feel compelled to keep trying until I can outsmart the computer or simply outlast it.

Wii Punch Out

I played through this game in a weekend and had tons of fun doing so. I then bought the original Mike Tyson's Punchout (without Mike Tyson) and was reminded why my childhood frustration with the game existed. I still can't beat Mike Tyson.

Nostalgia in this game is like some sort of crazy thrill ride. Each of these characters has grown up in a way that Nintendo kids can identify with and that most people who play the game will be able to understand. I really wish that more game reboots and remakes would manage to capture the feel of this game.

Irisu Syndrome (The Alice Syndrome)

At one point, I was reading somewhere on the Internet about a bunch of games that physically did things to a person's computer or game system. The most obvious are games like Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube or Metal Gear Solid 2. Nier also ends up being like this. So, this game creates a series of txt files in a folder on your computer. It doesn't tell you it is doing this. I recommend this game for a lot of what happens in those text files. It is pretty unique.

Metroid

I think most people probably know what Metroid is at this point. NES Games like Metroid are, by now, legendary. When I was researching something on the history of women in video games, I came across the instruction book to this game: here. That Samus wasn't revealed as a woman until the end of the game is something of a wonder to me. Reprints of the game, and those instruction manuals, took a gender neutral tone. The implications for this, and all arguments for and against the reasoning for it, are vast.

Policenauts

This game is one of the first fan-translations I had come across while it was in its infancy. How it managed to get finished is sort of a blend of SomethingAwful's Let's Play community and the people who had started doing it. The amount of crowd-sourcing and effort that went into this is nothing short of amazing. The game itself is most definitely worth a play. Hideo Kojima can, even if you don't like his games, make games that are unique.

Half-Minute Hero

This game is really intense. You have 30 seconds to stop a person from casting a spell to destroy the world. There is also the Princess 30. A princess with a 30-second curfew that has to do various tasks to save her Dad. I think the game really shines as an example of something that has bothered me about games.

Games do not have to be based on reality. A man could, if programmers wanted, subscribe to female stereotypes. Or, this princess could have a 30-second curfew set by her parents but still manages to go out and beat down a whole slew of enemies with her army, accomplish a task, and run back to the castle. The ramp-up of this mode really has me enjoying this game.

Saints Row II

Earlier this year, I started work on a co-authored book chapter about overt and 'color-blind' racism in games. I met a lot of interesting folks doing interesting projects along the way. So, for this project, I had to play through a significant portion of Saints Row II, a game I wouldn't normally play because, by and large, I am not a fan of open-world games. However, this game had some pretty unique things to it:

I could create a male or female character with a male or female voice. Transgender characters were possible.
While making a character, increasing chest size ultimately results in the model being censored while a shirt or bra is rendered.
The messages in this game were extremely poignant in terms of race relations.

This game really left me wondering about how the gender and ethnicity issues of gaming today will be addressed: Will same sex relations, fairness, and equality ultimately be overcome because it is cheaper to do so programmatically? I expect i'll write about this more this year.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I think most of the issues with gender equality are present in this scene. The game makers spend a lot of time establishing the generally good quality of character of Sgt. Paul Jackson. He then decides to go against an evacuation order "rescue" the only female character seen in this game. The only reward for this action is that all involved die. This scene is sadly squashed by the events in Modern Warfare 2 and all notice of it is probably out of the public eye.

The end of the year new year resolutions

I spent a lot of December trying to get into hardcore gaming and I am trying to resolve this in the new year as an end goal. I have learned more this December than I had the previous 11 months. Until now, I have only managed to get through a few games in this manner (100% complete, mastery, etc). My problem has long been that I tend to go all over the place with games. As I finish the research on my thesis, I have managed to hit a stride in games unlike anything that i've really been able to do. This excites me and I think that my comprehension of games now is more clearly formed. I will probably not post very much about my thesis until it gets closer to being finished.

Images of Women 12: The Final Bout

2010-11-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

I am nearing the end of this semester. In the beginning, I said this:

Part of this course is keeping a journal of reactions to the articles we are supposed to read. The resulting entries related to this course will be slightly more personal than I typically write about but will most likely still relate to videogames in some way shape or form.

In looking at my entries from the past, they look something like this:

1. Covering - The act of hiding one's sexuality when that sexuality doesn't agree with the norm
2. Cult of True Womanhood - Entry for women in games as a historical analysis
3. The Virgin Mary and faulting pop culture for "missing" some things while getting others (Avatar: The Last Airbender)
4. Powerful women, Eve, Lilith, and purity in games
5. STS, STEM, Females and Technology
6. More on the cult of true womanhood
7. Diversity in technology creation, games
8. Annotated discourse on race in technology
9. A blog entry detailing my presentation on the interaction of Moe and War (american and japanese games)
10. A statement on comic books loosely tying in gender as an example
11. More detail about comic books and race, Aunt May as a stereotype

The thing that bothers me about the previous two entries is that gender took a bit of a back seat and I ended up talking about Intersectionality. I think I tend to write about this as I am obsessed with networks through Bruno Latour. However, I don't know that i've ever defined it. Intersectionality is:

a sociological theory suggesting that—and seeking to examine how—various socially and culturally constructed categories of discrimination interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical models of oppression within society, such as those based on race/ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, or disability do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.

I think this concept can bridge the gap between traditional social science and the social science Latour discusses in most of his work. The primary and most basic difference is that instead of attaching value or assigning the cause for behaviors (in the Howard Becker sense of the word), we sociologists let our research subjects act of their own accord. In a sense, Sociology is less about identifying problems and more about displaying how people think.

In this sense, we Sociologists need to learn how to write. We're really bad at it.

So Intersectionality is a unique and bridging topic. While Sociologists assign actions and beliefs based on precedents in research, Sociology is very good at identifying how people are different.

Where we come from, our gender, our social class, our ethnicity, our religious beliefs, our governmental beliefs, our sexuality, our peer groups, our subcultures, and so many other things create a person who then uses those things to make sense of the world around them. This is not to say that society exists outside of us, but that each moment, each minute, everyday, we have an interaction with something, somewhere in which we are influenced or are doing the influencing.

Insomuch that Sociology tends to get ahead of itself in declaring minority/majority power relationships and Actor-Network Theory almost totally ignores that power, Intersectionality is a mode of thought that takes into account difference before making judgements about it.

As an example, let's deconstruct a video game character. I have been playing the game Nier lately. In this game is probably the most interesting character I have seen in a video game: Kaine. Kaine is possessed by a male spirit and has been since she was a little girl. In many ways, Kaine is both intersexed and transgendered. Intersexed in that she has the soul of a male in her body but transgendered in that her behavior is that of a male and her appearance is sexualized female. This is such a controversial topic in the United States that the character (who has received quite a bit of press coverage as the game was released) was not featured on the US Website

I think the easiest way to display how different these two traits (masculine and feminine) are. Here is the intro (watch the first 15 seconds or so) which displays some "stereotypically" masculine behavior:

And here is what she looks like:

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the game happens at the very, very end:

Nier, Kainé and Weiss defeat the Shadowlord and his Grimoire Noir, and discover that the Shadowlord is actually the original "Nier" that was seen in the game's prologue. Driven by an identical desire to protect his daughter, he sacrificed himself and became a Gestalt in order that he could fend off the monsters attacking them, and became the first ever sentient Gestalt in the process. Now, having taken Yonah from Nier, he has given the original human Yonah - who originally became a Gestalt accidentally at the end of the prologue, and soon after relapsed - her Replicant body, but this Yonah realises that she cannot keep it, as she hears the Replicant Yonah calling for her father. She vacates the body, and Nier and Yonah are reunited.

Subsequent playthroughs reveal additional information from the perspective of the Shades, while a book accompanying the game, "Grimoire Nier", released in Japan, adds further information to events after the game's conclusion. The book indicates that the Shadowlord, as the first sentient Gestalt, was connected to all other Shades, and that Nier's slaying of the Shadowlord will cause the decline of all Gestalt forms (Shades) in the near future. As Replicants are unable to reproduce and must draw their energy from their Gestalt forms, it is also suggested that the Replicant population will begin its decline as well, and thus Nier has inadvertently set into motion the end of humanity. However, it should be noted that in the final ending, Nier sacrifices his very existence (game-wise, the player's save file is literally deleted) to save Kaine. The contractor for this revival, Tyrann, claims that the sacrifice will transform her into a regular human being. Since Kaine is a dual-gendered human, it is possible that she could attain the ability to reproduce and become the mother of humanity.

First and most obviously, this game comes from Japan. There is a lot of info on why their fiction has developed like it has but very little of it makes it into english. In any case, this story is about the trouble with cloning and the problems that come within the intersection of science and faith. In the context of Nier, one could say (from the aspect above) that Kaine is Eve but more than that, represents a combination of masculine and feminine traits. This intersection represents a needed realization that can only come through playing the game 3 or 4 times.

This realization is needed and necessary for everyone to live after the consequences of a choice.

In a lot of ways, this realization only comes after we move past the idea of love. Nier is a sad and lonely game.

So, Intersectionality.

Japanese video games often present unique outfits to depict a variety of ideas and present an even more diverse possibility for collectors of action figures and to allow fans to experience the idea of Moe. Moe (萌え) is as such that the embodiment of an idea through a character is the norm. The story, the narrative is deemphasized and traits are often emphasized. Other outfits (clothing) allow for a designer to represent how a group is (see Simmel: Fashion). I think that maybe this quote from this article might be worth mentioning:

The moe character is a product of the breakdown of the grand narrative and rise of simulacra, and its form is one of unbounded virtual possibility. Concretely, a moe character is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a 'body without organs,' or the 'virtual dimension of the body that is a collection of potential traits, connections and affets. These potentials are accessed overcoming binary oppositions that order and control the body. It is not without significance that moe characters regularly exhibit ambiguity and contradictions (NOTE: installation of Hegelian dialectics is an obsession with the theorists this author mentions) - child-adult, male-female, animal-human - and that these bodies that are (both literally and figuratively) denied organs have increased virtual potential.

So, the character of Kaine in this story is the embodiment of the past (anger and fury / male) in the house of innocence and birth (life, eve, etc). That she eventually represents a combination of male-female is of particular interest because it is resolving the potential that comes through combination of these things, a trait that is of special interest in the development of Otaku culture (to whom this game is targeted). This author goes on to say:

Critics point out that characters described as moe have always tended to be physically immature 'little girls,' but Deleuze and Guattari suggest that these moe characters endlessly sprout new forms and fantasies. The pursuit of moe is thus exposing and reacting to the body without organs, to virtual potentiality...That the moe form...is outside personal and social frames is precisely why it triggers this affect.

In looking at this character through western eyes, a note of intersectionality (I hope), there is an interesting aspect of this world. The world of Nier is a world that is having problems because a machine that was created has grown to a point of sentience. Essentially, this is a story of the ghost in the shell, a theme that grows in importance each and every year due to the overwhelming increase in technological ubiquity. In the world that has moved on, class (an important distinction in the real world) is all but removed as the need for money has been replaced with the need to survive. Creation of new beings is also not present simply because (as with most ghost in the shell related ideas) robots cannot recreate.

In this world, we have moved on past the idea of the body as a vessel. In this story, books can talk and form opinions. Science is omni-present but like other science fiction apocalyptic tales, science has taken on a unique magic like tone. Everything in this game is desperate and it is this desperation that is probably a reason why the game has not done well for, if as research suggests, the normal player of a video game lives above the middle class line, that player cannot understand the desperation that comes with wanting to survive.

I had hoped to write a lot more but this is getting to be a mammoth piece. Perhaps this is why we talk about the intersection of social nodes so rarely.

And so, Images of Women comes to a close. This semester has been one of growth. I created too much work for myself and had to learn to deal with that. Perhaps the most valuable lesson from this particular class was the discussion of Hair (that I haven't written about here but really want to), Eve (who has made it into a large amount of my posts here), La Llorona or La Malinche (really this is a larger discussion of Aztec culture being forcefed Europe), and transgender ideas like the Bois. I have always wanted to begin the study of transgender groups but I find that because of Becker's article "Who's Side Are We On?" that my want to study majority group trends, to study normative behavior (which isn't ever normal to begin with) has overridden this want. I am thankful to read about it and hope to make it into a project soon.

Next semester I get to read the literature of Margaret Atwood all semester. I am beyond excited about this as I really enjoyed The Blind Assassin and haven't read real fiction in almost the entirety of my Graduate Studies.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 11: Comics is Comics

2010-11-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

So I suppose I have paid for my lazy and meandering post from yesterday in a really nice series of posts on Google Buzz from Jonathan Mills. I admit, or I have tried to make known, that I know a lot about various comic characters because of an old friend but very little about the rules the comic books have as a communication media.

So, it's time for another long and meandering post. Again, these posts are the first time i've tried to branch out into this realm. It will take me a good while to get up to speed (or I think it will). I attach these to the Images of Women Posts that I need to be making because of how much it has made me think outside of sociology. These posts are me trying to take what we've talked about and relate it back to what I have been trained to know.

In reference to Donald Glover as Peter Parker. It was never an argument as to whether or not Peter Parker could be black because, an actor portraying a character is not as important as the character itself is in these cases. The argument is about what the rest of Peter Parker's circle would look like, not so much about the character himself. Case in point: Obama. Throughout his campaign he deftly avoided being labeled African American. Instead, he discussed his father, an immigrant from Africa.

For sources, I need a few different things to make the argument I want to make.

To sum up, I believe, in thinking about Jonathan's argument, this is my argument:

Comic book figures who make the transition from a comic book to a new media like movies or television are imbued with two things: public image as comic icons and through that iconography, symbolic meaning of whatever characteristic they represent. Those two things interact with the forced blinding of American racial interaction and create hyper-localized discussions that point out differences between racial groups while also showing how heated the discussion of race has become. The makeup of these discussions, while they take continuity as a main point of argument, are pulling from the color-blind rhetoric established in the era that began after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Spider-man, because of when he appeared (Developed in 1962, own comic 1964), presents a unique point of conversation in that he represents white culture directly before this historic event. In this way, changing Peter Parker's race would represent a powerful move in American Equality.

It needs to be a bit refined, I should say. To make this argument, I need to do the following things

1. Answer the question, what are Comics?

2. What are pop culture icons?

3. Data-Flow with reference to comic continuity vs public understanding of comics

4. Race and Ethnicity Discussions with reference to 1 and 2

The most basic definition of comics I have seen in the past couple months has been:

Comics are Juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

This is from what most people say is required reading for anyone: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I think the most poignant thing I take from this book is:

When we abstract an image through cartooning, we're not so much elminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning," an artist can amplify that meaning in icona way that realistic art can't...Cartooning isn't just a way of drawing, it's a way of seeing. The ability of our cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally.

In thinking about this book, I realize I should put what is one of the most difficult ideas i've come across that shouldn't be difficult.

I rarely talk about art. I wanted to get into comics because I mostly don't get art. In preparing for this paper on Spider-man, I have learned that almost all of sociology is done because we don't get something. I find this to be true. I am interested in video games because I don't get them. I am interested in Race, Class, and Gender because I was raised as a Middle Class WASP-type male. I have tried to separate myself from my upbringing because I think it would be useful and because above all things I wonder why.

Comics, if you take this definition to be true, communicate information much more quickly than words because of how much it takes to learn to read.

But I wonder what it means to be able to recognize cultural symbols present within a picture. Do you not need to know or be socialized to a culture to understand a picture?

Then I realized it isn't so much socialization into a particular culture as it is socialization into any culture. The act of localizing any object ultimately takes that object's origin and changes it. Thus, intent still matters but only insomuch that the person viewing it knows.

Getting back into comics. The Spider-man example from last time is important because people understand that Spider-man is a certain way and the way Spider-man is is the way we expect them to be. As McCloud says, the mind fills in the space between panels. So, anyone who has read a comic has had to think, whether they like it or not, about who spider-man or peter parker is and that reference comes from other media. Comics are interesting in a similar way to literature (a point McCloud makes) in that the connection with the reader is intimate. We read and translate to our own subjectivities without anyone else around to talk to us or judge us for it.

2. What is a pop culture icon

I'll use the pop culture icon description from Wikipedia because it mirrors other things i've read about it:

"A pop icon is a celebrity, character, or object whose fame in pop culture constitutes a defining characteristic of a given society or era. Although there is no single definitive test for establishing "pop icon" status, such status is usually associated with elements such as longevity, ubiquity, and distinction. Moreover, "pop icon" status is distinguishable from other kinds of notoriety outside of popular culture, such as with historic figures."

Spider-man has been mascot for Marvel for quite a long time. He's also been in the public eye since 1964. The public has seen Spider-man on cereal boxes, coffee mugs, television shows, movies, comics in newspapers, bed sheets, shower curtains, and more. Peter Parker is associated with Spider-man. Moreover, he is associated with coming of age and with learning, "with great power, comes great responsibility" and this is Spider-man's defining characteristic. It is referenced again and again and again.

But it's more than that. Aunt May has been in each and every comic, Mary Jane has ben Spider-man's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy and Eddie Brock, J. Jonah Jameson, and more are all part and parcel of the package. The only african-american (getting back to Donald Glover) is the editor of the Daily Bugle Robbie Roberts - who interestingly enough is credited with being the first non-comic relief african american but was changed to comic relief in the movie(s).

So what would the change of Spider-man really entail?

To me, my initial reaction is that the white perception of African American culture (not African American culture itself) would be installed over top of the stereotypical white one. This is where the problems start (I am not mentioning comic continuity here).

Consider this:

The median income for a household in the borough was $27,611, and the median income for a family was $30,682. Males had a median income of $31,178 versus $29,429 for females. The per capita income for the borough was $13,959. About 28.0% of families and 30.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 41.5% of those under age 18 and 21.3% of those age 65 or over. In 2005 the Bronx was named the poorest urban county with a population over 1 million. This does not factor in the Bronx's high cost of living.

When Spider-man was first created, the Bronx was a difficult place with Italian and Irish gangs vying for supremacy of the area. These days, the population statistics look like this:

Whites of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic origin represent over one-fifth (22.9%) of The Bronx's population. However, non-Hispanic whites form under one-eighth (12.1%) of the population. Out of all five boroughs, The Bronx has the lowest number and percentage of white residents.

This idea changed as the Harlem African Americans who could afford it, moved out of Harlem and into the Bronx.

So, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country with one of the higher crime rates in the country gives birth to a crime fighter who believes and is taught the responsibility that comes with power. All of this within a partial hood where the need to live outweighs the need to learn and be responsible.

I imagine at this point it seems as though I am being unfair. And, I probably am. But this is a reason that Spider-man was chosen to live where he lives at the time he was developed. It was a difficult place for a white boy to be but it was a symbolic place for him to live. The chronicles of white teens dealing with dangers and high school gangs is as such that it has been so over-stylized in popular culture (Grease, the Outsiders, Lost Boys, etc), that it just isn't believable.

On the other hand, drug dealing black high school students are believable. The Wire, True Blood, any time crime is mentioned on the evening news, and just about every movie about black youth features a play on the ghetto. The themes involved with this, with white culture's obsession with the ghetto, hip hop, or black music in general is a feature of the development of popular culture studies in America.

I mentioned women in the last post because women are part and parcel of the greater movements within popular culture. Take Aunt May up top. She has changed very little. The worried old lady is something of a fixture in popular culture. But this is a white old lady. A black old lady would be something else entirely, could Aunt May become the stereotypical black woman or would Peter Parker be "black" as the argument about this idea suggests.

In the end, I am just scratching the surface. The information Jonathan gave me about the comic Truth: Red, White, and Black which is based on the Tuskegee experiments in the early 1940s that have been in the news again recently really points at the beginnings of a whole new range for comic books that I hope people will either capitalize on or at least explore.

I think this is a good place to stop as I know i've embarrassed myself. Stream of consciousness was never my forté. As i've heard too often recently,

"Nick, the way you think is weird."

It's so true.

Images of Women 10 - Spider-man and Spider-girl are both White

2010-11-08T17:37:00.000-08:00

I need some help remembering some ideas so I am going to try and reason my way through something and head back to names.

So I recently decided to expand a little in what I usually write about. A while back I was a bit amazed at the hashtag #donald4spiderman. The hashtag was created by one Donald Glover who declared that he would like to be considered for the part of Spider-man in the upcoming Disney Reboot. The initial post is here:

http://www.iamdonald.com/post/647884473/donald4spiderman

The reaction sort of startled me. It has an effect on other people too. I think my favorite reaction was from a mentor who just sort of looked off in the distance and said, “imagine if James Bond was cast as a black man.”

I will be presenting this at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association in San Antonio next April. The abstract I submitted is below:

I’m Not Racist But Peter Parker Was White, People. Spiderman, Race, and Donald Glover

Initially created for teens in 1962, Peter Parker, aka Spider-man, was one of many ways white middle-class ideas were communicated and promoted after World War II. Peter Parker has traditionally been portrayed as a white teen male. He symbolizes the up and coming teen everyman as they learn to cope with the “great responsibility” that comes with “great power.” Since the mid-1960s because of the culture surrounding the Equal Rights Movement, the concept of the everyman has been transitioning to more than white males. This transition comes in spurts through challenges to the stereotype – typically through popular culture. This presentation is an analysis of one such challenge. On May 5th, 2010, an African American actor named Donald Glover declared that he was, “putting [himself] in the running for the Spiderman reboot.” Through the twitter hashtag #donald4spiderman as well as numerous blogs and message boards around the Internet, the public reaction was one of two opposites. On one side, people said, “It is a downright sin to cast a black man as Spider-man.” while others said, “This is about giving a talented guy a chance…” Spiderman creator Stan Lee responded to Glover’s announcement saying that a change in Peter Parker could risk confusing audiences but that he deserved a chance like anyone else. I examine reactions to this announcement and place it in the literature about color-blind racism as well as research that examines the shift from cowboy to superhero. In this way, I will show how comics challenge society as superheroes transition to new media and new audiences.

I wanted to relate this to my images of women class. In particular, I want to try and make a Marxian dataflow.

The logic I think I want to use here goes a little like this (I am embarrassed by how juvenile this will be):

Within culture at large we communicate ideas that represent things
Those ideas become embodied in figures
What ideas are communicated are controlled by purchasing power
This is a symptom of American culture that the Japanese have called Moe
As purchasing power occurs, the idea of what that idea is is solidified
When that idea begins to stale, new ways to repackage that idea are tried
The success of the idea depends more on consumer culture than it does on quality
The majority culture in consumer society represents the shape and flow of that idea
Challenges from non-majority consumer groups will be met with extreme prejudice

So, if I were to put it in words, I would say that the popularity of an idea, represented by an object or figure made into an object results in the gradual loss of that ideal through over-marketing thus forcing a re-establishment of that idea. If that idea goes too far into the realm of minority culture, the reaction from majority typically results in a re-establishment of that idea without minority input.

Juvenile though it may be, I think finding a methodology for the project above is important. I keep going through the Frankfurt school stuff I have and thinking that maybe it is what I should use. No doubt, the things I would pull from there would be useful as I have stayed away from media studies thinking more about the culture surrounding media than the media themselves.

Things seem to break down quickly when you think about products meant for minority groups. But it is a difficult thing. All products, whether they like to admit it or not, need to be in alignment with the core. What I mean is that, for example, different versions of the dominant group's stuff is reproduced to be slightly more targeted toward a different group. Take the super but mostly "girls"

Spider-woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xao_sF3aAo0

Wonder Woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZCbF_eOTw4

Super-Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCCI6RP_f0k&feature=related

She-Hulk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIWD9t4xs5s

The Invisible Woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hluSn7Rzd4s&feature=related

Bat Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMzjJ5Fdn34&feature=related

This factors in to video games as well. Harvest Moon for Girls comes to mind.

I haven't named a single theorist yet but I think I remember what it was I was thinking about.

I'll sleep on this and write more tomorrow.

Otaku and the History of Gender in Video Games

2010-10-26T10:33:00.001-07:00

So, for this course Images of Women, I have to construct a presentation on a subject of my choosing. I initially chose to do a presentation on the female body in the digital form. However, I have realized that the thing that makes the topic of gender in a digital environment interesting is that the reason our digital selves have changed is so much that the games themselves have changed, but because cultures behave differently but in capitalism, compete for dominance and that dominance typically means market saturation and control. The control then means that certain aspects of culture are displayed and that the people playing video games might not be from where the games are from. This is unique. Video Games are unique.

What I mean to say is the basis of my talk:

Video Games are unique in that they come from a place, a culture, but most often represent a different place / culture. Video games are unique because where they come from shapes how that new place looks, feels, and more specifically acts and responds. Video games are unique because while they show a variety of voices in what is constructed, they are created by a very slim portion of society.

This presentation traces the origin of video games in war, through wargaming, through the emergence of Japanese console markets, and finally into the newest generation through which American interests have once again become competitive.*

* This presentation presents a generalization and condensed history that is not as Weberian as I normally like to be. I am ignoring certain parts of political development that results in the issues present in some of the LGBT debate. Apologies.

Here is the presentation - Sorry to the prezi haters out there.

It is broken down into three parts: War, the Rise of Moe, and the shallow but silent emergence of LGBT in games. That emergence is marred by age restriction but it is significant enough to mention.

WAR

In Fallout 3, the very beginning of the game says, "War, War Never Changes." This, for the most part, has shown to be true here in America. We fight wars and our wars give us jobs, reasons to live, reasons to complain, protest, and feel empathy / apathy. War does not change. However, cultural beliefs about war do change. Popular opinion changes. This is a primary function of Sociology in America, to measure public opinion.

A question I want to ask is what does it mean when a different culture's products are used as the basis of popular culture.

Video games got their start through display technologies developed after the end of World War 2. War was on everyone's mind and while some games demonstrated a general sense of family entertainment, video games quickly became a realm of boys and men.

Because this is a presentation on women, I wanted to focus on the appearance of women in video games. The first instance of a woman I could find was that of Lois Lane in Superman for the Atari 2600. This particular game was also one of the first in which a man has to rescue a woman. This is a common theme in almost every type of media: books, movies, television shows, magazines, and most especially video games.

The interesting this about women and men in video games, especially at this early stage is that it was difficult to represent people but when they were represented, it was almost always a man who did and a female who caused the man to do in some way shape or form. Earliest games I can find are:

Superman (2600)

Smurfs (Colecovision)

Oregon Trail (various)

Beat em & Eatem / Lady in Waiting (2600)

Swedish Erotica: Beat Em & Eat Em )(2600)

Ms Pac Man (Various)

Custer's Revenge (2600)

On the Commodore 64 there were various other games that had a female in them but they were associated with what would eventually become girl games: Cabbage Patch Kids, Barbie, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland. These games sold reasonably well but not as well as what would become the new console market. The next big push in females in popular games came from japan.

The Rise of Moe (萌え)

Moe means a lot of things but basically here I will use it to display two specific ideas in Japan. One of these meanings stands out for stereotypes of Japan in the United States. This is from Otaku: Database Animals:

Independently and without relation to an original narrative, consumers in the 1990s consumed only such fragmentary illustrations or settings; and this different type of consumption appeared when the individual consumer empathy toward these fragments strengthened. The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior "chara-moe" - the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. (37).

The second meaning is that of budding or brimming. In many ways, this second meaning is often misinterpreted as a Japanese obsession with young, cute things. With some sort of perverted social issue within the Japanese as a whole. What is meant by this is typically associated with the:

"sense of being strongly attracted to one's ideals has often been expressed as moe. This term, which literally means "sprouting," is derived from another Japanese word moyasu or moeru which means "burning (passion/heart)." Moe was originally used for female idols and animation characters, but it is currently also used to applaud the stylishness of hardware and has become popular among entusiastic consumers. It has recently become recognized among overseas fans who enjoy Japanese otaku culture and pop culture such as animation and games." (5)

This definition comes from a report called "The Otaku Group from a Business Perspective: Revaluation of Enthusiastic Consumers." It labels moe also as a basis in consumer culture but identifies it as a factor of otaku that has moved outside of that culture. How does this relate to gender? Well, as of 5 years ago, however, unmarried males aged 30 or higher make up a majority of moe related sales. Video games are a significant portion of this market, games being a secondary way in which movie, manga, or television characters are sold to fans.

The interesting thing here is that video games, particularly those of Japan in the late 80s and early 90s, began to exhibit this in the way they were presented. Mario was created as a figurehead of the Nintendo franchise. Additionally, we saw the creation of a variety of stereotypes that would become established in video games as a whole.

The Info Girl

One of the earliest examples of the info girl I can find is from a manga named Macross. This particular television show has been around for well over 20 years. In this show, there is a clearly demarcated line of responsibility. Women run the instruments that analyze a war, males make decisions and do the fighting. The interesting comparison to American interests which had men as well as other men controlling every aspect of war. It wasn't until the 1990s with the birth of the info girl in multimillion dollar franchises that made their way into American pop culture.

The Warrior Woman

In 1986, a woman entered into video games as a playable character. Her name was Samus Aran but no one actually knew that she was a woman. The instruction book for the game had this text:

The space hunter chosen for this mission is Samus Aran. He is the greatest of all the space hunters and has successfully completed numerous missions that everybody thought were absolutely impossible. He is a cyborg: his entire body has been surgically strengthened with robotics, giving him superpowers. Even the space pirates fear his space suit, which can absorb any enemy's power. But his true form is shrouded in mystery.

The reveal of Samus Aran as a woman is one of the greatest surprises in video game history but that reveal has mostly been forgotten in the status of her being lauded as the proudest moment of womanhood's entry as actors in video games instead of observers and analysts. Later versions of the game still did not mention Samus' sex (not gender, there isn't enough interaction to portray cultural norms of gender) insomuch that they used gender neutral language symbolizing a general shift that players identify as the bounty hunter, not the character she was.

With the establishment of the NES as a dominant player in the video game market shortly after the fall of American video gaming the previous year, Japanese interests gained a foothold in the market. This foothold, symbolized by the growing Otaku obsession with Moe, soon allowed for an overwhelming stranglehold on the type of games would appear on their systems. Concurrently, video games made by Americans fell into disarray with a majority of them going on to the Personal Computer (PC) market.

While in the background, American video games began to tote violence as a feature of their gameplay. Early violent games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Phantasmagoria, 7th Guest, Castle Wolfenstein, Quake, and many others. The shock of violence in games created a flurry of attention and the introduction of CDs in console games gave the American game makers easier access to much larger audiences. American game makers began to reappear in popular culture. As "more adult" gaming came in to popularity, so too did characters who were "adult."

Lara Croft, the Lesbians in Fear Effect 2, and other characters made a unique appearance.

LGBT Characters and the Changing of Gender Patterns

I found this entry on wikipedia. It is by far the most interesting thing I have ever seen there. As I noted earlier, the sex of Samus Aran was removed from Metroid for American audiences until the end. I wanted to focus on a couple different things.

First, LGBT characters are not unique in games not made in America. While earlier games fell under the Nintendo code (and were thus mostly removed), video games because of the nature of "becoming adult" began to explore sexuality more often. However, this exploration of sexuality is still under the purview of "not for kids."

I wanted to focus on two examples that display the difference in gender representation between America and Japan.

Flea: Chrono Trigger

The picture at the beginning of this article is from the video game Chrono Trigger. The character flea appeared in 1995 during the tail end of Nintendo's dominance and Nintendo's "Code of Ethics" they had used throughout their growth as a leader in the industry.

This character shows up as a henchman for what is thought to be the main antagonist for about half of the game. He is a henchman who wants to look beautiful. Gender portrayals in Japan are a lot different than those of America.

Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix

Gender in American games entered through a variety of ways. This game, featuring two lipstick lesbians. As was common at the time, these women looked and acted like stereotypical hetero-women but were sexually attracted to one another. The developer stated that these women were not homosexual, just attracted to each other at the time. This was not the game's central theme but it was featured on advertisements for the game, the game's cover, and critical reception. Homosexuality serves, in American developed games, male fantasy as well as a tool through which audiences may be disgusted (evil as homosexual, antagonists as homosexual and therefore off center).

I Think There is a Mercedes Divide, I'd Like to Have One

2010-10-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

Following up on the entry I wrote in response to Brandon Boyer's talk at Indiecade, I thought I would put a very broad and general post on why diversity is important, how it is being hindered even by the well-meaning white person (myself included), and the impact diversification of games could have on society.

Getting Started

The quote that names of this entry comes from Lisa Nakamura's book Digitizing Race. It is from Colin Powell's son Michael Powell when he was appointed head of the FCC. The quote signifies a general malaise toward government help with various social problems because those social problems are seen as the problem of individual effort (laziness) rather than one of institutional trends. Here is where I will begin.

Discomfort and Defensiveness

Race and racism is uncomfortable to discuss. This discomfort is based on historical development of trying to get past race through white groups forcibly forgetting about it; gender falls in to this as well. Put simply and generally, it begins during the aftermath of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and culminates in the Barack Obama election.

We are all currently on a precipice of race discussion that needs to be pushed into the public light.

First, a generalization. We, white society in America, have lost the ability to seriously discuss race without being defensive and it is this lack of discussion that perpetuates race based problems.

The most basic way to describe this effect is that the Civil Rights Act was a collective effort of many groups that culminated in a major majority shift to wait for minority groups to reflect majority norms and values. In essence, the white reaction to the incredible '60s Civil Rights Movement was one of passive waiting for normalization. Normal, in this case, is whiteness.

An example:

Imagine discussing a political belief with someone who is violently opposite to you but is your boss. Your boss is passive aggressive. While he or she is your boss, they are, in reality, just another person, they just feel differently than you. Somehow, this person has been designated as above you and culturally, this means more successful than you and success is a culturally favored goal.

Perhaps your job skills are actually better than your boss. It doesn't matter.

How often would you bring this subject up? What would happen if each time it was brought up, he or she would simply brush it off. If pressed, they would ask why you had to play this political card. In the end, if you were just more hard working, you could be the boss.

Only, your boss would still be above you. Would the stress of that get to you?

Could you keep up a fight against your boss if you knew that that they could simply end your job at any time? That your organization would simply believe your boss because of how much trouble your political beliefs caused.

Being Passive

This discomfort is normal life for a large amount of people; this discomfort should be fought against; this discomfort should be relieved. I do not mean by running down to your local minority based nonprofit group or anyone nearby who looks different from you, I mean by actively discussing it with friends, family, and everyone you know. By not letting someone tell a racist joke, by recognizing certain aspects of humor as racist, by recognizing that all of us are in some way racially motivated and hold racially localized beliefs. In essence, be active about race and gender.

Passivity within discussions about race, gender, and diversity is the very thing that causes that discomfort. It does this through removing it from public discourse.

I am going to pull from as many sources as possible. This is not because I want to say things with other peoples words or take shortcuts through vast disciplinary structures within academia, it is because so many of these sources say the same thing about a huge variety of subjects.

It may be a bit of an overload but if I have a goal in making this post, it is to give readers the ability to recognize the problems within American society about the subjects this blog is interested in: Video Games and Internet Technology.

The term and concept that sits at the crux of this post is multi-faceted but singular in its function. Color-blind, or institutional racism, is typically defined in two different ways, a violent dialectic that is impossible to debate.

The dialectic forms through two different interpretations of the term color-blind. Through explaining one end of the pole, the other end will make itself known.

I Don't Even See Color

We live in a society that tells itself it is post-race. Race neutral (gender neutral as well) terminology is everywhere. Phrases like, "I don't even see what color they are." or other similar sentiments are kin to this definition of color-blind.

From Lisa Nakamura, a quote from another scholar, Vijay Prashad:

"Color-blindness is a symptom of racism." Vijay Prashad identifies this gentler form of racism as the greatest problem of the twenty-first century - the "color-blind" replaces the color line as the prevailing practice that permits resources to be unevenly allocated based on racial identities. - 3 Nakamura

Blindness to color doesn't work because there are cultural differences between races/ethnicities in society. From motherhood or parenting to pay gaps, even type of industry (source) or media representation, the difference can be seen rather blatantly if we actually looked at the data. and this definition serves as a means through which this difference can be ignored by the dominant group (White People). Further, because the dominant group can ignore these differences, those whom are affected by them can only serve to rock the boat. The origin of "The Race Card" or "The Gender Card" resides in this blindness.

The opposite end of this dialect then, recognizes the impact of this passivity. Please note that liberals as well as conservatives fall into this discussion. It is not a political topic but a universal ignoring of race that perpetuates these issues.

This series of ideas is from a book by Barbara Trepagnier called Silent Racism: How Well Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide:

Race awareness in well-meaning white people—including racial progressives—is both sorely lacking and a crucial piece of the racism puzzle.
Well-meaning white people who are passive around others’ racism encourage it, whether or not they intend to.
Slavery and segregation have been transformed into a less obvious structure: institutional racism.
Race awareness entails understanding three facets of racism: the history of racism in the U.S., how institutional racism operates, and insight into one’s own silent racism and passivity.
Both silent racism and passivity in well-meaning white people are instrumental in producing institutional racism.
Throughout U.S. history a small group of white Americans has stood against the racist institutions of their day.

Each one of these items represents an extremely defensive conversation. Time and time again, college students in multi-cultural classes around the country read this book or others like it: Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Lies by Jessie Daniels, White Like Me by Tim Wise, and dozens more. During class, students often listen to endless lectures about racial problems. However, once outside of class, a common phrase or sentence outside that classroom might be, 'I'm not racist, I have black friends, but I wonder why....."

These statements are acknowledgements of a racialized belief but are masked by passive defense against understanding that belief. The term social distance here designates a distance between the speakers understanding of a group. In this case, the understanding is very little but the speaker is positioning themselves as extremely close to that group. That no one would question it is how these racialized beliefs continue, uncountered and unchanging. This is based on the idea of privilege. Whites can do all of these things because they are the dominant group.

If the training students receive in these classes doesn't create active participants in discussions of race, how can we begin to discuss these things.

Video Games

From this quote, I will enter into video games and video gaming. Video games are often used in education debates as a means through which arithmitic and computer use is taught.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a random sample of 12-17 year old children in the U.S. found that 73.9% of all white children play video games while only 26.1% of all non-white children play.

The skills learned through computer use at school and home are used later in life and is represented through different data collection efforts. Recently (2009 report using 2007 data), a report of unskilled workers was released. This study looked at what job skills unskilled laborers used during their time at work. From that study comes this quote:

Only 39 percent of Hispanic workers hold jobs that require daily use of computers, compared with 67 percent of white workers. The daily job tasks required on noncollege jobs held by black workers are more similar to those held by white workers, with two notable exceptions—arithmetic and computer use. Only 41 percent of black workers use computers daily, compared with 67 percent of white workers. And nearly half of whites in noncollege jobs use arithmetic daily, compared with one-quarter of blacks.

The interesting thing about this study is that it looks at 3 particular groups: whites, blacks, hispanics. Asian cultures are often left out of studies like this because of a particular function Asian groups serve in diversity discussions. In color-blind discussions Asian groups are often used as tokens of success, distracting from larger problems, especially in technology sectors. From Lisa Nakamura:

The discourse of color-blindness is relatively new in American racial politics and Robert Lee identifies it as a key feature of Colr War liberal ideology...[An example] Asian Americans were posed as models of this type of "ethnic" poliical subject because their low usage of welfare and political docility, along with their successes in the education sysem, made them prime examples of racialized subjects who had overcome the barrier of color, or race-as-biology, to become model consumers of commodities as well as creators of economic value: as Lisa Lowe would put it, they were positioned as both labor and capital. They were also seen as ideal liberal subjects in that they were figured as not needed intervention of the state, particularly in reference to education and technology." 4

Race and Gender Safe - White Privilege

Video games are almost all white and all male. Within the industry, there are what I would call "safe" individuals. Non-white individuals who act white enough to allow for a false inclusivity and false diversity. This is not meant to belittle or make less of accomplishments so much as it is to point out that there are significant gaps between white males who make video games, and nonwhite males and females who make games. The need to be mindful of this difference should not be confused by a visible but tiny minority of minorities.

As I posted last time, less than 7% of most "tech" industries are nonwhite. Tokenism is an old practice and in the video game industry, it can be difficult to see. The issue becomes more visible when we examine how the term video games is operationalized.

There are typically 3 different ways games are operationalized:

Do you play console games? (Male Dominated, Females around 1/4 of all gamers)
Do you play games on a computer? (Female Dominated, Females age 54 dominate)
Do you play games on a computer or console? (Males dominate, Females 40% of gamers)

The differences in these numbers are vast. Without Computer games, females constitute almost 30% of all gamers. When including computer games, females comprise as much as 43% of all gamers.

Getting a little further in to some data, Nielson reports that, 12-17 year old males living in homes making $75k or more make up the most active group of gamers. This statistics refers to console gaming, a type of gaming that dominates most sales categories and is commonly referred to as "the game industry."

If we go into the "Essential Facts about the Gaming Industry" from NPD group, the average age of video gamers is 34 years of age and male but Adult women represent a more significant portion of the game playing population (33%) than boys 17 or younger (20%).” However, this study combines the console an PC markets and includes games like Hearts. Solitaire, and games like it and is funded by the game industry itself.

Finishing Up - Problems with Diversity and Criticism

I have tried to say that discussions of race are uncomfortable. What is more troublesome is how we have come to passively allow (covertly) more aggressive styles of racism (overt) to continue. My main point here is that allowing it to "work itself out" is more damaging than being out and out overt about race.

When race discussions happen, the normal response is typically that of defensive "I'm not racist" posturing as well as more blatant and hyper-energized discussions of how something "isn't white" (See Donald4Spiderman for an example or discussions of female Shepard in Mass Effect).

Video games matter because of what they mean to life for people later, they are an introduction to computer use, to interaction with a digital environment. As we have seen, this has translated to more computer use for white groups even in the unskilled labor force.

The need to diversify video game development, given these facts, represents a significant and important step in solving a wide array of problems, not just more minority groups within video gaming itself but more technological socialization for a wider portion of society that it manages currently.

Focusing on technology use by making a more intimate experience of video games while aiming to gain a greater audience will have a tremendous impact in the home life of a huge variety of individuals whose parents could never have dreamed of what their children will be able to do.

Simply using computer technology in a classroom everyday has already proven to have a significant affect on children's learning outcomes and possibility spaces later in life.

This effect can be multiplied and furthered through emphasis on diversification of games through the diversification of game developers. Equity and Equality are within reach during our lifetime but must be actively pursued. Let us not sit idly by and let another opportunity pass us by.

Diversity in Games Will Work Itself Out and other Indiecade Thoughts

2010-10-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

A long winded wind up to a blog entry on diversity:

At Indiecade this past weekend, I had a chance to meet a lot of people. As a gamer and as someone interested in games, I have been continually challenged to figure out what, if anything, I wanted to do with my education and eventual PhD direction that somehow involved videogames. A couple of weeks ago, I was approached to co-author a book chapter in a collection of video games and power. It was during this time that I began to realize that because I have been in Sociology for so long, I was no longer interested in design or the functional aspects of design, but the power present throughout an entire series of designs. I headed to Indiecade with this realization and because of that realization, entered a talk on how All Play is Personal. This talk, given by Austin's Brandon Boyer, was pretty good but left me a little frustrated by the very thing that was driving me in to more sociological training: power.

So, I begin this entry by saying that the rate at which white majority power, particularly male power is ignored in video game design continually frustrates me. It is not to say that it should be the only discourse for games, but that it should be part of discourse by default.

Overview of the Session

So as far as I could tell, this session was about how we all play up in our head and that each head is supposed to be different. The approach to this session went a little like this: He wasn't in to videogames after elementary because a girl embarrassed him enough to make him stop playing. Years pass, he gets in to the music stuff he did in Austin and gets back into video games through those musicians.

Then the talk shifts to what indie is. He brings what I felt was the best point of his talk here: indie games are awesome because of the personal touch indie game makers. A single voice isn't drowned out by the massive focused roar of "mainstream." He calls for more work on who indie makers are and what their situations are.

More work on what and who a game maker is is an excellent idea because, aside from an occasional nod here and there on the internet, the larger gaming population probably has a stereotypical image in their head about what a game maker is and what they look like. The problem begins here. Video games are not music in industry or makeup and that thread could use a whole other discussion but I am a bit more worried about a couple different, but related ideas.

None of what he says is necessarily bad for gaming, the talk itself was just unnecessarily shallow in scope given the way it handled diversity and that is what left me with a bit of a bitter taste.

Diversity

Diversity here is loosely defined as a combination of many different types of voices. Given that definition, there are two premises that came around. One came out during the Q+A while the other was sort of an omni-present idea:

1. Once society works itself out in the diversity thing, video games will too.
2. This was more of an overarching thread: Japan is not America is not Japan.

Diversity will never simply work itself out

This is perhaps the most terrible feeling I took out of Indiecade and really spoke to a gigantic problem a bunch of us were talking about before Indiecade began: caucasian dominance of video games is not in dispute, discussed seriously, or actively fought against. Sadly, this lack of action can be seen as one goes from Mainstream to Indie and is linked to a much larger problem that begins with race and gender gaps seen in early (elementary school) pushes toward human-computer interaction.

In any case, this discussion is about videogames. Here is one of the most fascinating mini-activities I can use to display the diversity issues in games. Find pictures of the big gaming events, e.g. GDC, PAX, ComicCon, Gencon, Origins, and a wider range of events like Internet technology conferences. Find someone who is nonwhite. Can you?

It is difficult; even finding nonwhite or female playable characters in digital environments is typically futile. I have been playing with an idea over the past year that generally states: videogames rely or I believe they rely, on Japanese representing minority status in games because, after all, Japanese were told that they were not white by the supreme court.

In numbers, and if videogame industry jobs are anything like the other tech industries, less than 7% of all employees at American housed companies are nonwhite. This extends to gender as well. There is a well known contrast between games made for girls and games made for boys. The impact of this general fact is so vast that we are only beginning to really understand how it is influencing society as a whole.

The Gaze - a helpful term to use to discuss the impact of a lack of diversity

In social science, we often discuss (sometimes with dismay), the male gaze. I will post this overview from wikipedia in lieu of the academic work (Donna Haraway, Laura Mulvey) it appeared in:

In feminist theory, the Male Gaze expresses an asymmetric (unequal) power relationship, between viewer and viewed, gazer and gazed, i.e. man imposes his unwanted (objectifying) gaze upon woman. Second Wave feminists argue that whether or not women welcome the gaze, they might merely be conforming to the hegemonic norms established to benefit the interests of men — thus underscoring the power of the male gaze to reduce a person (man or woman) to an object (see also exhibitionism).

From the male perspective, man possesses a gaze because he is a man, whereas, a woman has a gaze only when she assumes the male gazer role, when she objectifies others by gazing at them like a man. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports Paul's description of the "female gaze" as "a mere cross-identification with masculinity", yet evidence of women's objectification of men — the discrete existence of a Female Gaze — is in the "boy toy" adverts published in teen magazines, despite Mulvey's contention that The Gaze is property of one gender. Moreover, in power relationships, the gazer can direct his or her gaze to members of his or her gender, for asexual reasons, such as comparing the gazer's body image andclothing to those of the gazed at man or woman.

This gaze extends to race and ethnicity.

The gist of this argument is simple.

If there is a noticeable imbalance of ethnicity or gender in the construction of a cultural object, then that object contains the majority's gaze. In video games the dominant gaze is younger (50 or under), white, and overwhelming male.

Conclusion and Content

Because video games contain cultural messages through programmatic expressions of systems and are because those systems are useful in socializing youth to the actual systems, video games allow for white male dominance of technology to continue. An example here, and perhaps the most blatant is the PS3 and the Xbox360. Japanese games primarily appear on the PS3 while American games primarily appear on the Xbox. There are always exceptions to generalizations, these exceptions do not mean the generalization is incorrect.

Throughout Brandon's talk, he continually pointed to Japanese examples of indie games. In fact, aside from a couple mentions of Steph Thirion's talk that occurred just before him, he almost totally used Japanese examples. Even in his "I want you to do this type of thing" music sections he used Japanese artists to illustrate his point. Japan makes games for Japanese and those games sometimes are intended to be for wider audiences but remain primarily Japanese. This does not make them the indie scene in America or video games in general. Nor does it make the indie scene diverse.

In contrast to this is the company Nerjyzed, a privately held African American video game maker. Their flagship game, Black College Football Experience has sold 133,000 copies since its release. However, I have yet to really see Nerjyzed listed in conference presentations or as sponsors. They have been on national tv (BET). I do not know if they have been invited and declined. These game makers should be celebrated, consulted, and asked to collaborate on other projects and here is a controversial statement, a statement I wish someone like Brandon Boyer would have made:

Even if the games created by indie or mainstream studios like Nerjyzed are not up to the white majority (read: standard) of videogaming, games made by these studios should be at least discussed and consciously critiqued to the same levels as any popular independent developer does. If what Boyer wants is a more public image of game makers, then interviews and discussions of these (nonwhite) game makers needs to be one of the first attempts at at this, not a celebration of more white game makers as video game versions of rock stars.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 6

2010-10-05T19:05:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have left me somewhat obsessed with one of the articles we read from Barbara Welter: "The Cult of True Womanhood."

The cult of true womanhood sits in this sentence:

"The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues - piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity."

From my memory:

This quote came to be during the middle ages during the rise of the church. One of the most interesting articles I can remember reading but can't remember the name of says that the church needed to secure bloodlines for proper succession of royal families so it created a need for female purity and ultimate control of the male sex drive. I wish I could remember the book this article came from. I read it during a course on Shakespeare when I still wanted to major in English, when I had different goals in life, before I wanted to drop out of college.

In thinking about the major shifts in my life, I began to think about the major shifts throughout history. The last major shift began at the height of church power and was symbolized through Ferdinand and Isabella. The power of God through the growing might of the spanish created a landslide of power shifts that ended up in the current society we live in. Taking from the stuff i've been learning these past few years in the grad school, that power is about to shift back to the people we grabbed everything from who grabbed it from the romans and the greeks in the first place.

It is interesting that we look so fondly on that time. Even in videogames, we often see the cult of true womanhood presented as the reality of the time. Even in games from what we would call extremely foreign do the norms and values of those times, or what we know or think we know of those times (middle ages) show up as blasé facts.

Moving on

I wonder about change in society. As Simmel said, while technology has shifted and changed, become better, society has remained the same or regressed. Actual changes in society are marked by events, single sentence changes in the makeup of what makes us, us.

I suppose it is a bit pessimistic to say that we haven't changed. I do not see this at all. I see this as a mark that through our current frames, we need to figure out how far we can go. Recently, as is probably the case for all people who live, our time has seem remarkable change, especially for women and the Cult of True Womanhood. But really, has it? Or will this era simply become, "Well, women started producing in society doing things that resembled what they got shoved into when they received the fence labeled, domesticity."

The reality here is probably far different than I can remember but it is my memory of what I have learned that keeps me interested in what about that learning is wrong.

I think it is my upbringing as a middle class white male in an extremely rural environment that brings me the most need to focus on gender studiesl or more generally, on power in society. This particular class has shown me a different side to the literature i've been reading in that I can see or look at this stuff removed from the power producing it. It's nice!

Images of Women: Blog Entry 5

2010-10-04T18:41:00.000-07:00

So we come to another blog entry for class. I guess I need 12? 16? With Indiecade coming up, I have been looking around for some interesting feminist games and you know what? There aren't any. I am continually disappointed by the representation of gender even within the independent scene. There is a reason for this, of course, I wrote about it last year.

I wrote this:

There is a saying in STS: “Technology is Society made durable” (Latour 1991). Technology is a portion of society that has been given tangible form as a technical object. While this sentiment came to be much later than second wave feminism, early second wave feminist scholars reacted toward technology as yet another means through which patriarchy is reinforced or reified (Wajcman 2007). For example, technology of the home, products like washers, dryers, sinks, toilets, plates, and dishes are created with the female consumer in mind. The creation of these objects reifies the gendered norms of the home and because women could not enter the design world, these objects were a direct form through which men interpreted women (Wajcman 2007). Feminist scholars sought to rectify the lack of engineering and scientific influence by pushing for equity in the design process by achieving gender equality in the labor force that produced and designed (Wajcman 2010). After fighting for equity for nearly twenty years, feminist scholars, realizing scientific careers were not as open to female entry as most careers, switched gears from workplace equality to the educational process (Wajcman 2007). These scholars saw gendered norms present in socialization during adolescence as the major source of the lack of equal representation in the design process of new technology (Wajcman 2010).

If you haven't read the Wajcman papers, I really suggest them. they are amazing. "Feminist Theories of Technology" is probably my fave but also I enjoy: "From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience."

Above, I am making an (old) argument that design is a social process. That men design products for generic representations of people and that generic person, for most science, is male. The only kind of products that are designed specifically for females are those that the stereotypical role of females need. By studying what those products are, we gain a significant amount of knowledge about what society, through majority male thought, thinks of women. Further, in this argument Wacjman goes through the development and reclassification of what would eventually become STEM studies. Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics.

Ok, this is an old debate but I am wondering about something and I am thinking about yesterday's business I wrote about with Eve so i'd like to posit:

If Eve bit into the apple first then it stands to reason that one of two things are going on (there are more but binaries are easy): A). Eve was curious, more curious than Adam and B). Even was easier to tempt.

So, if we say A), then why aren't women in STEM fields and if B is true, then why are males targeted and not females?

Of course, this is a bit of a straw man (person). I am making a shaky binary and now i'm supposed to topple it. But in the end, the binary is meant to point out something I've discussed in one of the last few blogs: women score higher, generally, in elementary school, on STEM tests but end up so frequently eschewing technologically oriented jobs for jobs in Science. I am making a leap here but I end up attributing it to nature v technology.

I feel like it gets to purity and through purity, we get to eve. If technology represents mans conquest over nature, then it stands to reason that anything associated with nature will be selectively but actively controlled. Eve, the first woman, created humanity as she did, with a bite of a fruit that gave the knowledge necessary to know what god knew, to that there was good and evil. The fight against nature, nature of man, nature of the world, nature of the beast, is the very fight that Eve started, the fight to live with the fruit. Eve represents that part of humanity that needs to be quelled. She is that innate curiosity that created humanity as it is now. Eve is the embodiment of the personification of nature.

We see this metaphorical fight throughout history. At first, we sought to completely conquer it. We sought to defeat Eve. These days, as Bruno Latour says, we have sealed Eve off behind fences, vast tracts of nature that we allow to exist because we have to. And here I will end this blog entry, after making a huge logical leap into something that I find interesting, but is probably not provable or testable. I should have been in the humanities:

I will end with a quote from Bruno Latour (Compositionist Manifesto):

I take this film is to be the first script that doesn't take ultimate catastrophe and destruction for granted —as so many have before— but opts for a much more interesting outcome: a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined. The lesson of the film, in my reading of it, is that modernized and modernizing humans are not physically, psychologically, scientifically and emotionally equipped to survive on their Planet. Like in Michel Tournier’s inverted story of Robinson Crusoe, they have to relearn from beginning to end what it is to live on their island —and just like in Tournier’s fable, Crusoe ultimately decides to stay in the now civilized and civilizing jungle instead of going back home to what for him has become just another wilderness.4 But what fifty years ago in Tournier’s romance was a fully individual experience, has become today in Cameron’s film a collective adventure: there is no sustainable life for Earth bound species on
their planet island.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 4

2010-10-03T19:20:00.000-07:00

In looking to the school semester, I need to continue my responsibility of journaling responses to readings. I think I need to be a little bit more creative this week so, i'll try something a little different this week as I can't just keep responding to a week's worth of readings. Recently, we discussed Lilith and Eve and the significance of each. One of the most interesting discussions came in the form of deciding whether or not they are the same person. First, I will discuss the origin of her story.

If you don't know, Lilith is the supposed first wife of Adam. She was made of the same dirt that Adam was made of and as such, felt she was equal to him. Now, the evidence for this is somewhat shaky. While most things in the bible are borrowed or taken from other sources, even biblical reference is somewhat lacking. The only verse responding to lilith comes from the book of Isaiah 34:13:

Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. 14 And wild animals shall meet with hyenas; the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; indeed, there the night bird (liylith) settles and finds for herself a resting place. 15 There the owl nests and lays and hatches and gathers her young in her shadow; indeed, there the hawks are gathered, each one with her mate. (ESV)

A longer reference is taken out of a hebrew text called The Alphabet of Ben-Sira:

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone.' He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.

Adam stood in prayer before his Creator: 'Sovereign of the universe!' he said, 'the woman you gave me has run away.' At once, the Holy One, blessed be He, sent these three angels Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to bring her back.

Said the Holy One to Adam, 'If she agrees to come back, what is made is good. If not, she must permit one hundred of her children to die every day.' The angels left God and pursued Lilith, whom they overtook in the midst of the sea, in the mighty waters wherein the Egyptians were destined to drown. They told her God's word, but she did not wish to return. The angels said, 'We shall drown you in the sea.’

'Leave me!' she said. 'I was created only to cause sickness to infants. If the infant is male, I have dominion over him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for twenty days.’

When the angels heard Lilith's words, they insisted she go back. But she swore to them by the name of the living and eternal God: 'Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.' She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day. Accordingly, every day one hundred demons perish, and for the same reason, we write the angels' names on the amulets of young children. When Lilith sees their names, she remembers her oath, and the child recovers.

But this text is in contention. Many believe that this text could be little more than "fan fiction" for the bible. Or, if that does not sit well, a story born from the book of Genesis leads some to conclude that they are the same being.

In Genesis 1:27 it says:

²⁷So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Then later in Genesis 2:18 it says:

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

This continuity error has lead to a growing popularity for Lilith despite her occasionally being associated with the snake that tempted Eve with the fruit of knowledge as well as a being that gives birth to 100 children a day. In the long run and through the omnipresent Thomas Theorem (If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences), the gist of this myth has boiled down to one of power.

By power I mean gendered power. Lilith considered an equal to Adam, or man. this equality would have created a more equal base for power. The entirety of the bible would have been much different. I found myself in class wondering about how the story of Abraham would have played out if Sarah or Hagar had played as much of a role in what eventually happened there (assuming biblical literalism here). I suppose what I am eventually going to conclude is this:

Emphasis in the class on Eve and Lilith was placed more strongly on Eve given what seems to be a surprising lack of sufficient evidence (or interest given many of our religious backgrounds) for Lilith but I have always had some questions when it comes to the bible. Until the 14th century, sex and power within a given household had much more balanced responsibilities or so I would like to believe. It wasn't until the rise of the church that the idea of the pure virgin appeared. It was a time when greater emphasis was placed on the body, its purity, and cleanliness was a sign of not being penitent to god. This time saw a radical shift on Eve as being evil or the responsible for the first mistake of humanity.

It is an interesting idea and how it has shaped public policy, power between men and women, and all sorts of other things still continues to shape many aspects of society today. Indeed, most every movie about the middle ages has something or another to do with the deflowering of a woman who is little more than an object of war.

While I haven't written about videogames, I thought I would mention that the very first time I ever heard of Lilith was in the video game Final Fantasy 4 where she was an enemy, a lamia or snake woman, who would often charm the adventurers with a kiss. At no time in any video game I have played before or sense have I seen this. I think it is more interesting that Lilith made it into a Japanese game and I wonder about theological debates about Christianity in Japan about this subject.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 3

2010-09-28T10:39:00.001-07:00

So for this week of class, we had to read:

Rayna Green, ‘The Pocahontas perplex: the image of Indian women in
American culture’.
Gloria Anzáldua, ‘Coatlalopeuh: she who has dominion over serpents’.
And a bunch of smaller links on La Malinche, La Llorona, and the Virgin of Guadalupe

All of these topics seem so interesting. While I have been in Texas for ages, it has been unfortunate that I have never had to take a history of Mexico course. The politics for this particular topic are vast given the political makeup of Texas and the historical development of it, but it still makes me a bit sad.

Perhaps the most shocking of things this week is something I feel sort of ignorant for just learning - that the Virgin of Guadalupe is, in fact, the virgin Mary. I also had no idea that within a year of the Virgin of Guadalupe's appearance, 9million Aztecs had become Catholic. This change is still the essential foundation of Mexican Catholicism.

In videogames, game makers will often use what I would call cheap tricks to give a narrative volume or resonance. Most often, this comes in the form of a female being kidnapped, or killed, or a child being abducted but recently it has begun to use events to mark places where the player is suddenly supposed to connect with a game and want to play it more.

Further, games lately have been obsessed with gaining "godlike" power or even killing (a) god. This is typically implied to mean the ultimate power of a male god.

I finished watching the television show Avatar: The Last Airbender yesterday. As I watched this show, I was sort of amazed at how well it portrays cultural difference, working together to understand difference, and eschewing violence in favor of either being clever, being passive, or letting an angry thing burn itself out.

As the show ended, I realized that it followed almost all the standard or stereotypical gender roles and that these roles are often seen in video games.

1. The medic

2. Tom Boys "girly" awkward moment

3. redemption of Tom Boy through a crush

4. Graceful but delicate rogue

5. insane, controlling antagonist who eventually loses her marbles and because of that, is defeated (you can interchange boys and girls in this role but girls lead to strange romantic awkwardness)

There are more of these but throughout the show it relied on each of these to get its cultural messages across.

I come full circle now back to video games.

In Brenda Laurel's the Utopian Entrepreneur, she recounts the experience of creating a game that, "reflected the social realities of most girls' lives." Her major critics cited tat this isn't the goal of feminism to which Laurel responded, "Did anyone notice this wasn't Barbie?-that Rockett struggled mightily to be ethical and self-defined?" (26-28).

We read about the Virgin of Guadalupe and other myths of foreign women saving European explorers and to me it seems as though all of these stories have the same thing in common, 'we miss the point more often than we get it.'

The Last Airbender did an unthinkable thing in creating their different and multi-cultural content yet here I was judging it for missing several aspects of culture that need to be addressed. However, should the show be blasted for what it lacks (considering the difficulty of changing gender roles in a way that parents would like and kids would not be confused about) or enjoyed for the forward thinking it contains?

I think that this point is one that we should all think about.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 2

2010-09-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

This week's readings have a lot to do with the assumption that women have to follow the norms in the "cult of womanhood." As I did in my previous entry, this will be an application of the principles discussed in these articles.

Barbara Welter, ‘The cult of true womanhood: 1820-1860’.
Malvina Shanklin Harlan, excerpts from Some memories of a long life, 1854-1911.
Shirley Carlson, ‘Black ideals of womanhood in the late Victorian era’.
Arlene Stein, ‘The year of the lustful lesbian’.
‘When Jill becomes Jack’.
Rosa Maria Gil and Carmen Inoa Vazquez, ‘Do not forget a woman’s place’, excerpts from The Maria paradox.

Each of these articles is a testimonial to the various facets of womanhood. The Cult of True Womanhood. This is not to say that this is the reality of women so much as it is the reality women are forced to adapt. While it has changed since this original dates of this article (1820-1860), The Cult of Womanhood is defined as:

The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues - piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all togehter and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife-woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or welath, all was ashes. - Barbara Welter

Once again, because this is a blog about videogames, I will be applying these terms to that realm. The Cult of True Womanhood has certainly changed since the mid to late 1800s. Feminism, especially through the 1970s and 1980s had a tremendous influence on what a woman is, how we should all perceive women, and where women as a whole should be headed.

However, inside the vacuum of videogames, this is still something of a new concept. There are still people defending choices to not include women (Activision, Bioware) and when women are included, they are often not included as playable characters, but as moral compasses; information givers; plot points through murder, betrayal, and lust; or even the object of game mechanics through sex (Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas, GTAIV). In videogames, even though the 1970s brought tremendous change for the realities of women, men still resist and that resistance shows in the videogames they make.

Consider the first videogames. Perhaps the earliest version of a female in a game is a wife in the earliest iteration of The Oregon Trail in 1971. Past that, women began appearing as kidnapped or in need of help. For example, Lois Lane in the videogame Superman allowed Clark Kent to regain his powers if the kryptonite items took them away 1978. In 1981, Lady (now known as Pauline) was kidnapped by the nefarious Donkey Kong, thus creating the need for Jumpman (now known as Mario) to climb the platforms and rescue her. These games were then followed by the pornographic atari games of 1982.

A vacuum was created for women's entry into games because of several factors. A). The cult of womanhood did not allow for women to pursue technological careers (or careers at all for a while) B). Feminism at the time was concentrating on end goals of women being in technological jobs and not on training for them C). Feminism in general was more concerned with (more important) matters of government, power, and the home life than it was about science, technology, and least of all videogames. We have only recently begun to understand why videogames play an important role in socializing boys into the dominant masculinities.

When videogames were first created, they were all based on war technology because of the Cold War and the fact technology was constantly created to help those who made war technology. The first games simulated war in some way shape or form. Through the 70s and into the 80s, American dominance of videogaming allowed this to continue. In 1985, Atari was sold and this symbolized American retreat from the videogame market. This symbolic gesture also signifies the pop culture trend of apathy toward videogames. While Nintendo began to dominate videogaming shortly after, the games Nintendo created were much different from those that were created in the United States. This change in the origin culture created a new means through which women could enter videogames. However, those means are far different than could be imagined for American Audiences.

Japanese feminism is an interesting subject. The most basic difference is that Japanese Feminism, from what I can find, is that it is less focused on idividual autonomy than America. For a good overview of the basics of this movement, Wikipedia actually has a decent amount on it. To shorten things: my basic argument is this:

Japanese feminism is complex and difficult to discern given American feminism. Japanese games introduce complicated differences in the cult of womanhood that are different enough to be noticed but because videogames came from Japan, they were mostly ignored because of the racist attitudes toward the Japanese and the apathetic tendences toward videogames that were occurring during this time.

I have tried to show (and have perhaps been unsuccessful) that the cult of womanhood began and has continued unchanged by the period of time between the late 60s and today due to the apathy associated with the content of videogames by the general public. I have also tried to introduce that while some content in games seems a bit forward moving in terms of feminism, those games most likely come from Japan, a place where feminism is focused on different parts of society than we in America would be.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 1

2010-09-11T06:21:00.000-07:00

This semester, one of the last two I should be in, I am taking a course called Images of Women. The course description for this course is:

We shall examine and critically reflect upon many of the images of women prevalent in Western culture. Special attention will be placed upon the fragmentary and conflictive character of the images. Examples will be drawn from films, literature, visual arts, and popular music.

Part of this course is keeping a journal of reactions to the articles we are supposed to read. The resulting entries related to this course will be slightly more personal than I typically write about but will most likely still relate to videogames in some way shape or form.

The first series of articles is about the act of covering.

Kenji Yoshino, ‘The pressure to cover’.

Claire Chow, excerpts from Leaving deep water.

Sandra Guzman, ‘Joy of being nueva Latina’, from The Latina’s bible.

Toi Derricotte, excerpts from The black notebooks.

Jennifer Camper, Ramadan.

Paul Spickard, ‘The illogic of American racial categories’.

Bliss Broyard web site: watch the short video by Bliss Broyard

The act of covering is from Irving Goffman:

Goffman observes that ''persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.'' He calls this behavior covering. – Kenji Yoshino

From LBGTQ groups to nationality differences with majority groups to tattoos to political affiliation, the pressure to cover and conform to one’s environment is radically powerful.

Since this is a blog that is mostly devoted to videogames, I thought I would write about something that I covered last year, female gamers.

Gaming is mostly a male hobby and industry. While certain datasets show female gamers as growing or on the rise, these datasets do little to differentiate between the types of games either side of gender is actually playing. If we were to include a variable on type of game, I have a feeling any researcher could make a case that men are playing the games that they make, women are playing, mostly, card games, puzzle games, and games like The Sims. As evidence for this I offer a couple of posts I made a while back.

Now why is this important and what does it have to do with covering.
Here is my central idea in as concise a form I can make it. Women who play videogames because, “they reject what they see as a very traditional and old fashioned view of femininity from the girls games movement all the while criticizing the characters that they find in boys games as being the product of male erotic fantasies” (Cassell 10). In other words, females play games meant for males, reject femininity, yet want feminist views to make their way into videogames. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. Women who accept societal norms must cover that they play videogames in order to maintain traditional femininity or play games for girls.

There has been a significant amount of research devoted to the girls who reject femininity and play the games for males. Little has been done to discuss alternatives to current games for girls in any other way than to stop making them. One attempt, Brenda Laurel’s Rockette, a game meant to approach tween girls where they were traditionally and give them tools to cope with the stereotypes, was shut down very quickly by some negative reviews from supposedly feminist reviewers. The resulting question that was never answered was, “is it good or bad to reflect the social realities of girls lives?”

That question is still being avoided. In the mean time, girls who play videogames but accept traditional femininity are forced to cover in all walks of their lives. They cover because if they begin to reflect the training boys receive through these games: competition, the need to be on top, and how to interact with dominant masculinities, then that girl may be abandoned by femininity altogether. This may not always be the case.

The issue with studying girls playing games right now is what they are playing and how they are playing but most research seems to take on the fringes of females playing games: females who are masculine by behavior or who would be bois according to this week’s readings. The real means through which women will begin to be represented in gaming is not be focused on the margins, but by influencing the majority, “generic” women as defined by women themselves.

Until then, videogames themselves are still tragedies of hegemonic masculinity, allowing subordinated and dominant masculinities to exercise their power over what could only be called female puppets.

End

Week 2: Book Reviews

2010-08-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

I have never been a very good gamer. I love video games, but I often play through games because i'm more interested in the story than I am in the mechanical aspects. This has proven to be the biggest challenge in doing this sort of thing, I just don't really like doing it. Of course, this is a defensive maneuver on my behalf so I can distance myself from the tedium of playing certain games over and over and over. Of course, I really only dislike it when the game is particularly bad.

This week, i've tried to learn to get past this. In particular, I did this through reading about two different things, Japanese Otaku Culture and Procedural Rhetoric.

Book Review (ok, not a book review but things that are useful to me).

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals:

This book is proving to be really invaluable for more reasons than I had initially intended. I wanted this book to be a reference for otaku culture as I understood it. However, this book functions more as an overview of post modernism.

Earlier in this blog's life, I wrote a lot about modernization theory. This is to say, the period of time in which the powerful european nations attained industrialization and then proceeded to modernize. We typically signal the end of modernization around the end of the 80s. For Bruno Latour, this end was signaled as the initial meetings about environmental concerns. For him, he tells us Modernization actually began when we realized the world we were living in was able to be hurt.

Now why does this matter? In short, this quote sums it all up:

...modernity equals the west, post modernity equals Japan.

This is sort of straight forward. In the European sense, Japan's modernizing times were far removed from them. Despite the fact that most of the modern marvels (like the clock) were probably created in the Asian countries, Europeans began using them in much different ways, ways that would eventually allow them to do the things that the Europeans did.

And then the war happened.

World War 2 is a pretty terrible time for the Japanese. Not only were the Japanese utterly destroyed, their emperor defiled, and their country sacked, they were forced to succumb to modernization as the Europeans had done. Japan was forced to belong to a culture that they themselves had no part in. While the Japanese took, as they had done with many other cultural ideas (the musket, for instance), they excelled and perfected the idea of modernization. It is at this point that this book comes into play.

Hiroki Azuma writes that the Otaku are a symptom of the culture that was forced upon Japan and it is that symptom, cultural item, or meme, that is so symbolic of the plague infecting the rest of the world. The Otaku, "...is one of adaptation - of how to "domesticate" American Culture (11). The interesting thing about this is that the Otaku have roots to ancient Japan, not the Japan that existed during the war. It is a past that American perception of Japan has installed within the Otaku culture. This means of the otaku spread during the economic boom in japan during the 1980s. Azuma states:

"The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S. produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that allowed people to forget about these origins."

He then goes on to describe in detail, the culture surrounding the Otaku. For me, the usefulness of this book are the sentiments described above. Sitting at the crux of this book is the statement,

"In order for human beings to be human, they must behave in a way that negates their own environment...they must struggle against nature."

The Otaku, Azuma states, do not. The Otaku has spread, anywhere there are superfans, the same cultural impulses are guiding them, animalistic database creation or in a simpler sense, otaku and those like otaku are merely concerned with filling out databases.

In video game terms, you could point at social games as another symptom of post modernity in Azuma's interpretation.

Persuasive Games

I have been wanting to really read Simon Ferrari's thesis for another project I have been doing some preliminary work on. In preparation for the preparation I wanted to reread some aspects of Persuasive Games. In particular, I wanted to read the section on politics.

Now, politics are interesting because we often do not recognize the impact that they have on our lives. Wages, interest rates, moral compasses, are all guided by politics and those politics, especially in this country are based on what Weber called the Protestant work ethic. In particular, Weber refers here to the Calvinistic ideal of predestination but in any sense, Christianity is the backbone of the American means of doing just about everything.

And those things make it into the games we play. With this in mind, I wanted to read what Ian Bogost had to say about ideological frames and how procedural rhetorics reflected those ideologies. This book has been picked apart at length so I will only post a quotation that pretty much summarizes what it was I was looking for (75):

"Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they should operate. Videogames that engage political topics codify the logic of a political system through procedural representation. by playing these games and unpacking the claims their precedural rhetorics make about political situations, we can gain an unusually detached perspective on the ideologies that drive them."

In this quote there sits, I believe, my major criticism of Perusasive Games. Bogost makes the claim that ideologies (however base they may be once codified to a procedure) make their way into videogames but does not really, as far as I can tell, take this to the ultimate conclusion that different cultures designing games will codify procedures differently. In truth, the book itself is already complicated enough without bringing these ideas into it so I can understand that.

Another aspect of this book I find useful is Bogost's criticism of James Paul Gee. If you get a chance, buy the book and check it out.

With that, I have summed up this week. My intent to write everyday has been compounded with the fact that a new semester is about to begin. Planning and implementation of new policy have made my days extremely busy. Once it is over with (around mid-September), I hope to get into a much more regimented writing habit.

Week 1: Day 5,6,7: Operationalization

2010-08-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

There is a general criticism of blogs as being inferior to academic journals or magazine articles. They are not developed enough, they are not complete enough, they are not rigorous enough to be useful. I do not intend to do any of those things. I mean to keep a diary of tangential musings as I work through the final expression of my learning here in my master’s program. As I try and publish articles that do represent those things above, I will do my best to link them. Until then, if there are any questions, feel free to email me at nick.lalone@gmail.com or simply comment here.

I took a couple days to relax and let my mind wander about method. It is interesting to let this happen. In the shower, awake suddenly at night, or even just mid-sentence with a friend or loved one, and you suddenly understand what you’ve been processing. It’s fun to just let go. It doesn’t always work though.

Every once in a while, I rewatch this Ted Talk from Sendhil Mullainathan. In this talk, Mullainathan notes a particular issue that plagues most of humanity, “the last mile problem.” Throughout his presentation, he points out several things that just haven’t gotten to full adherence yet. Adherence in this case could mean life or death: hydration salts for diarrhea, pens for insulin. He ultimately states that when something like this gets to a point whereupon technological innovation doesn’t work, we try harder to innovate in such a way that the last remaining non-adopters will somehow find it within themselves to comply. What doesn’t typically occur to people is the fact that these people are not adopting because they either don’t understand or do not believe in what they’re seeing. A technological innovation isn’t going to work. Instead, a social behavior drive might end up pushing that last mile out. For example, a letter about energy consumption to huge energy consumers with a smiley face or a frowny face or even a car commercial for a more fuel efficient car that shows how maneuverability and avoiding accidents makes more sense than driving a land tank.

What does this have to do with methods?

What it boils down to is that Mullainathan points out that we often try to innovate ourselves into finishing off a problem rather than look at cultural problems that might present a much more rewarding understanding of the solution. This extends to sociology to a greater extent than most as this is supposed to be what we do (though we often prefer to remain neutral than take sides even if we do take sides without saying). Often in methods we tend to think about what hasn’t been done before. My first impulse when designing my study was to look at what other sociologists have done and what game studies is trying to do and make a study that does none of that. However, it is important to try and use some of what they have done in order to truly test what I am designing a study to not do.

Ultimately, I want to prove them wrong because I think they have all been wrong. While this is indicative of social science and science in general (perhaps not overtly most times), in this particular circumstance what I want to do is show how to study a video game through a sociological lens that uses both camps of technological influence. The first camp believes in the ultimate benevolence of technology. They are tools that are of no consequence to social interactions. The second camp believes that technology is constructed socially. That innovators and thinkers creating technology are judging society and creating technology that fills in gaps or weaknesses they believe need to be filled.

What I shouldn’t do is what we are trained to do, to plug holes. The problem here is with defining the topic of study. American Sociology as a whole – and to a lesser extent World Sociology – really has no real idea how to study a cultural object like video games. The proper thing to do here, I think, is to write a paper that is ultimately about operationalization with an example of how that operationalization would work.

To begin, define operationalization:

Operationalization is the process of defining a fuzzy concept so as to make the concept measurable in form of variables consisting of specific observations. In a wider sense it refers to the process of specifying the extension of a concept.

So in order to operationalize this, I need to define some of the concepts surrounding video games. Within sociology, you see a lot of reaction to the aggression causing behavior concepts coming out of psychology. Further, there are developments within sociology about the Symbolic Interactionist ideals of generic types (generic representations). Why sociologists seem concerned with perpetuating and negating the same concepts, I have yet to really discover. I would imagine it has something to do with tenure promotions, ease of publication, and period in history. My reaction to sociological texts is to turn them on their head and study them simply as a cultural object but as carefully and rigorously as possible. To do this, I believe I need to loosely define some historical concepts as present tense concerns.

Video games represent an innovation of technology meant to guide missles.
Ultimately, this particular item will most likely be struck. While I believe this is an important note to make, the literature mostly downplays this. Military simulation takes a backseat as what we now call the video game market more represents Japanese created innovations rather than the American model that had failed.

Systemic Representation: Bogost Definition: “Videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and imagined systems work. They invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. (Bogost 2006). “It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life…” Johan Huizinga
In my previous blog, I compared these two ideas and concluded they mostly represent the same logical conclusion from different periods in history. I needed to find something to set this idea against, what had changed since Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens. Later in this list, I bring the work of Hiroki Azuma into this picture. Bogost and Azuma’s definitions sit at opposite ends of the same idea. While Bogost believes that video games represent expressions of systems, Azuma believes these systems to be shallow and meant to fulfill the needs of a consumer base who does not care about what the games express past their ability to represent something in a database of items noted as important for a particular moment in history with no greater motive in mind. This dialectic (Hegelian in more ways than one), will most likely form the crux of my method: Expression of systems vs apathy of consumer. I believe the easiest way to measure this is to examine what parts of systems have progressed over time. To do this, content analysis of a particular game and each of its iterations, notating what exactly was done to them, should be done.

When videogames came under the purview of the Japanese, Japan was in a rapidly growing Otaku sub-culture. Japanese literature calls the Otaku a symptom of post-modernism (nothing is real, everything is subjective sense). Otaku are “database animals” concerned more with filling out databases through immediate animal like gratification rather than pursuing human betterment through exploration of deeper and deeper meaning. Japanese dominance of the video game market reflects this as games became more complex with more wildly varying, but shallow stories that represent specific instances within various databases representing various subjects. – Hiroki Azuma

Building on Bogost’s definition is this somewhat depressing statement. This is where a test comes into play. This is an interesting concept that is very new to me. As I work through his book, I am continually amazed at the work Japan has done in this realm. While I regret that I cannot read Japanese well enough to grope at their sociological a priori understandings, I am somewhat saddened by what is typically communicated through it. There’s an almost overwhelming sadness and underlying fury at what Japan is now. Things there seem very unique and I wish I could read more about it.

Privileged White Male Plaything: “Computer games as we know them were invented by young men around the time of the invention of graphical displays. They were enjoyed by young men, and young men soon made a very profitable business of them, dove-tailing with the exisiting pinball business. Arcade computer games were sold into male-gendered spaces, and when home computer game consoles were invented, they were sold through male-oriented consumer electronics channels to more young men. The whole industry consolidated around a young male demographic. – Brenda Laurel
Working from the previous two statements, I then want to move onto constructing a test to test this idea. It is interesting to note that most of the popular video games in America are marketed to American white males despite most of the video games, historically, not being made here. What does it mean that Japanese influence and marketing had this remarkable impact on youth from 1985-present? This idea will also be valuable. The historical development is somewhat obvious but there are these items to note:

Videogames in America were sent to the negative “fringe” of society when Atari closed its doors and associated with PC Gaming.
Videogames were then called Console Videogames and hardware was controlled by Japanese interests.
Videogames grew more complex through making the effort to more properly represent systems, human representations, and physics.
American PC gaming grew more complex than console video games that were more concentrated on tight database control rather than multiplayer innovations that had come through internet based co-op gaming (FPS, MMORPG).
5. American console makers reestablish a competitive edge through representation of PC gaming on home consoles.

Which then leads to this from Justine Cassell and feminist researchers

Male dominance of video gaming in general is called into question. Video games represent a means through which the process of human-computer interaction is taught to humans, in particular, males. This, combined with the subject matter of current video games (compete, dominate, play on a team) represent male interests and male socialized norms (hegemonic masculinity).
Video games as a whole, have begun to be considered as a tool of male dominance. In particular, video games, often blamed for keeping people indoors and making people more violent and heftier, are pointed to as a new and more focused tool that communicates the basic tenets of hegemonic masculinity. Stereotypically perfect males allow males to identify and explore (consciously or unconsciously) male models of behavior. Criticism of this typically takes the form of criticism of female games who less covertly communicate female norms and values while downplaying technological factors (multiple button presses, combinations, puzzle configurations, themes and contexts). To test this, I believe that I need to examine video games created by specific groups. I am concerned with how this sentiment differs between cultures, and how it is real, if it is real. Statistical trending I believe would help here.

In the end, I believe I have 3 different tests I would like to do.

Development of System Representation; meaning, how have the systems of video games grown over the years. What aspects of the world “real or imagined” do these systems represent? What trends are present and what does this mean?
What have these trends lead to within male culture when correlated to historical developments within feminism. How has privilege changed and how is it communicated by games?
Within that correlation, what have been the trends thoughout video gaming between cultures.

I know by tomorrow these tests will change quite a bit. With only a couple weeks to go before I really begin though, I feel like i'm ahead of the game. I seem set on cross-cultural comparison. With the next few days of writing, I hope to take that idea a bit further to truly develop some interesting hypothesis testing.

Week 1: Day 4: More Method

2010-08-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

So a phrase that is sticking with me, actually, there are two. There are two phrases that stick with me as I think about how i'm going to do this.

“Videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and imagined systems work. They invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them (Bogost 2006).

and

“It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life…” Johan Huizinga

I believe these two expressions are saying the exact same thing though in very different ways. When Huizinga posited his idea, the digital had not really been imagined yet (this is not entirely true, e.g. The Machine Stops, video adaptation). The idea of computers ruling our lives was around in some fashion or another (for example, the Golem) but the idea of a play space constructed completely out of a mathematical representation of the real world was not something that would have really been considered as there just wasn't language or technical knowhow yet.

Bogost is positing his idea years and years later insomuch that we have developed to a great extent, the digital representation of the world we live in. Only, something is a little off. Something is always off. For Bogost, through this statement, we understand that the judgements based on what is constructed by game makers or virtual world engineers. These constructs represent a collective interpretation of reality given form through tools those engineers had available to them at the time. No longer does the play express interpretation, the world the play happens in is the interpretation.

With this in mind, i need to develop a way to study it. The method i'm interested and most comfortable is content analysis. For those who do not know, the most basic definition of it is:

"Content analysis is a summarizing, quantitative analysis of messages that relies on the scientific method (including attention to objectivity, intersubjectivity, a priori design, reliability, validity, generalizability, replicability, and hypothesis testing) and is not limited as to the types of variables that may be measured or the context in which the messages are created or presented."

A translation of method like this is basically that content design is a means through which the cultural processes of an object are examined. In most cases, content analysis is used to examine interview transcripts. Here a person is using stereotypical language to explain how they are not racist. Here a person is constructing a generic type that is both gendered and ethnocentric. And so on and so forth.

For those types of designs, the content of the material is examined and coded in a way that the trends within the content come out to the researcher.

However, if one examines something like television commercials the researcher would take existing notions about something, for example, female beauty, and look at how much or how little the existing data matches what we already know, and how much it does not. This marks a point in time in which social science as a whole (if written well and published and accepted as canon) recognizes change.

I want to apply this method to video games.

But the problem is that there really isn't a means through which I can rely on. There is no canon to improve. There is no change. I have to build a canon.

With that in mind, I am embarking on a lengthy tour of the literature about content analysis. Over the next few days, these posts will be about my method.

Week 1: Day 2 and 3: Getting More Organized, More Rigor Needed

2010-08-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finally started getting in to what is expected of me from my Committee chair. My chair is used to evaluation research and quantitative methods so I am interested in what he has to say about a project that is mostly going to involve qualitative measurements.

The other members of my committee are qualitative specialists as well as someone from communication studies that ends up being one of the primary authors of the text I’ll most likely cite. I’m very excited.

So I’m stuck in trying to keep this sociological. While I wanted to try and bust the mold of papers that comes out of sociology, I realized recently that I really need to write traditionally about nontraditional things.

As it stands, I am setting this paper up to do two different things, cross-cultural comparison, and historical trends set against trends seen over the history of video games. Namely, I’m interested in how subjects like government, female representation, heroes, and other culturally originated norms and values have been translating since video games first appeared in the 70s.

I will be revising this initial statement over time.

On Methodology:
There is a surprising dearth of discussion about videogames, videogame programmers, and videogame players in sociology. There is also little to no work on differentiation within videogames when they are referred to. While other disciplines have approached the subject at various times during each technological high point in popular culture throughout the development of modern videogames, the operationalization of “videogame” seems to have been given little thought. Because of this, the complex history of the geographical focus of video game development; sales trends by state, country, continent, or world data; and the intersection of virtually constructed representations of real systems have all received very little attention.

This paragraph will define the terms needed to continue an examination of videogames. First, from author Ian Bogost, the definition of videogame: “Videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and imagined systems work. They invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them (Bogost 2006). Social Science typically defines video games in the way that Bruno Latour defines a black box or “…a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output” (Latour 1987: 2). In terms of input, social scientists understand that video games are created by males through a mostly democratic or totalitarian group process. This process aims at creating a product that will generate capital to cover its development and will also allow future development for different or similar new products. Further, they understand that people who play videogames are generally 12-35 year old white males and that this has something to do with white male dominance in computer design, programming and development (Justine Cassell). This is the input of and the output of video games, but little is understood about the process of playing them, what each “imagined system” reflects about the real systems they are meant to recreate.

In order to open this black box a little, I must define a little about the act of making a video game. In the most basic form, Johan Huizinga said of play:, “It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life…” In simpler terms, how we play is how we understand the world to be. Going back to Bogost’s definition, videogames take act this one step further through the digital recreation of the world the game maker lives in. For social science to ignore how we are playing and concentrating on the who is making the game and who is playing, sociology misses an opportunity to grasp at the missing masses or that part of society that sociology cannot account for (Latour 1992).

For this paper, Videogames are primarily created in two very different societies: Japan and America (Europe, Australia, and other Asian Countries create video games as well but for the sake of this paper, the focus will be on Japan and the United States). Each of these countries create video games using very different media as a foundation: Japanese video games rely on their comic book sector for inspiration and ideas; American video games rely on war simulation, pen and paper based games like dungeons and dragons, and more recently, movies. Each of these societies through each of these foundations understands reality in very different ways. These differences come through in a variety of ways. This paper is an attempt to explore why and understand how games change given larger historical occurrences and sociological trends. To begin, we must first understand how video games are different in order to begin to grasp how those differences are influencing society.

In societal terms, video games are, by and large, made by and for males. In this country, video games are made for white males whereas Japanese game makers target their males. Videogames are the playful embodiment of what is commonly referred to as Human-Computer Interaction. During the cold war, “hackers” (2 white males) used a system meant to guide missiles to their targets (what we now call personal computers) to make a game. This game, called Spacewar, was the first video game and from that game came an industry. This industry collapsed and quickly regained composure as an import from Japan. The resulting negativity surrounding the American video game market became the purview of white males while video games were divorced from personal computing. Computers then became the realm of white males, console video games became Japanese. While this has changed slightly with the release of the xbox 360 video game console and the Nintendo Wii to a greater extent, the video game is still considered a male realm.

When I say, “the video game is still considered a male realm” what is it that i mean? And further, what consequences does it have? Justine Cassell, a scholar specializing in Human-Computer Interaction states that as early as elementary school, men are pushed toward exploring the full potential of computing. As time goes on, the representation of virtual space resembles that of what scholar Donna Haraway calls, “The Male Gaze.” Each and every aspect of virtual space resembles what males see as the world.

Week 1: Day 1: The beginning and Otaku: Database Animals

2010-08-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Because I’m heading into the last year of my graduate studies, I am in the process of beginning my thesis. For Sociology, this thesis typically takes the form of something we find interesting in the world we have studied. For me, my thesis is taking the form of something outside of school combined with exploratory studies that have been in process for the past 2 years. This blog reflects my wanderings in such a way that if one were to begin reading this at the beginning, by the end, I would imagine that you would be as confused as I am.

Social science is at a strange crossroads. The old methods, the new communication media, the radical changes in perception of the world (modernizing to post-modernity, environmentalism, and the affect of feminism to name a few) have all lead to a sociology that is just as confused about itself as it is about its future. It is as if a gigantic paradigm shift occurred but so many of the old sociologists either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the ensuing war about whether or not the shift happened at all was mostly ignored.

Sociology today is much the same as it has always been. Most graduate students write the same papers we have always written, deviance-based writing, class or privilege studies, influence of some factor or the predictability of a scenario given a specific model within a large group of people (statistics). As a whole, Sociology still ignores the influence of non-human entities on human actions or beliefs. As a whole, Sociology faculty members seem to be against (almost entirely) changing or rectifying certain errors of judgment the founders of our discipline installed. Ontologically, especially in America, we are still obsessed with “the little guy.” “Whose Side Are We On” is an article about this obsession. So often we want to study the outliers that we often forget that whole other part, actual society.

This is where I am when I start on really getting into my thesis. I do not want to study the same issues we have been studying for years. I do not want to ignore non-human/human codependency; I do not want to ignore the rest of society.

I am naïve. People tell me this quite often. I find this naivety to be extremely helpful in these situations. I don’t want to lose it.

Over the next 20 weeks or so I’m going to try and write at least something about whatever I’m doing for my thesis. I’m hoping I can write 1000 words a day for 20 weeks straight. Perhaps I need to just to keep things in order in my head.

First up, I’ve been reading this book: Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma. This particular book is one of the first real pieces of work I have found about modernization / post-modernity issues. Further, it is the first real theory piece on social theory from a Japanese Author who was trained by other Japanese theorists. It is an important book…sadly, it was printed in 2001 and already has a sequel. It made it into English this year. Of note in this book are some points on the history or set-up for why this book had to be written. An example and the general premise of this book (emphasis mine: from the translator’s note xv-xvi):

“Through his examination of otaku as consumers (and producers) of cultural products, Azuma develops a new understanding of our historically bound sociocultural situation after the rupture and breakdown of moder ideologies. Azuma examines what is left in place of the absent grand narratives and the effects of this absence on human behavior. The book proposes a model of the “database animal” as a new type of consumer in the postmodern information era, arguing that, rather than reading the stories in a “human” mode of consumption that longs for the existence of and searches for deeper meaning, the cravings of “animalized” otaku are satiated by classifying the characters from such stories according to their traits and anonymously creating databases that catalog, store, and display the results. In turn, the database provides a space where users can search for the traits they desire and find new characters and stories that might appeal to them. Here “database” is not simply the kind of computer program or Website for storing and retrieving information that humans are finding it increasingly difficult to live without, but rather a model or a metaphor for a worldview, a “grand nonnarrative” that lacks the structures and ideologies (“grand narratives”) that used to characterize modern society.”

Of note here, he is using an interpretation of a Hegelian interpretation from one Alexandre Kojéve. This is a difficult sentiment I have been having trouble with fully comprehending. It goes something like this:

After World War II, America entered a “post-historical” period whereupon we also entered into a “classless society.” In essence, the United States entered the Marxian period of Communism with other countries being at various stages toward it. In addition, he claims, humanity returned to its animal like nature insomuch that we were always in the present and simply did as we needed to when we needed to because we could. Japan also had American values hoisted upon it but, as Kojéve states, “snobbery in its pure form created disciplines negating the ‘natural’ or ‘animal….[I]n spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values…”

However, the Japanese themselves state, “To put it simply, in today’s Japan there is nothing. And so no margin for recovery.” – Karatani. It is an active ideological power, this “nothing.” If one were to compare Japan to children’s movies, Japan is the nothing that envelops the world in The Neverending Story.

This author, Hiroki Azuma, responds to this sentiment saying that it was the American values forced on the Japanese that created the animalization of the Japanese people and that animalization took the form of Otaku. Otaku, if you do not know, are: “…those who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on (3).”

In essence, the appearance of the Otaku is a “symptom of post modern society.”

This book is unfortunately timed. The post modernity period in America is mostly done at this point. Having confused itself into who knows what exists now, you could say that the Otaku has spread through the entirety of this country. An interesting thing of note though is that while this seems to be a bit bleak, the appearance of the Otaku is also a chance at newness.

As with most things involving the Otaku, the sentiment about them is generally negative and thus little studied. Social Science often has to (as does all science) provide topics of interest in order to keep funding, public interest, academic interest, or create a new movement. For Otaku in Japan, the attachment of negative sentiments is linked to a series kidnappings and rapes during 1988-89 by one Miyazaki Tsutomu. In American Culture, the installation of Japanese products signaled the appearance of Otaku who have mostly been lumped into the old pen and paper, now PC gamer groups (an example of how and when the negativity for these groups started can be linked to Tom Hanks).

This is just from the opening of this book. I am excited to get into the meat of it. I got some names of several Japanese sociologists/important scholars I need to look up:

Otsuka Eiji (Monogatari Shohiron (Theory of Narrative Consumption))

Miyadai Shinji on kogal (high school girls deeply immersed in the urban culture)

Osawa Masachi on Aum Shinrikyo or the cultu responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack.

Also Asada Akira and Kojin Karatani (post modern theorists)

I hope to finish this book by tomorrow.