Game Design as Cultural Practice Fall 2009

Gender, Race & Representation: Katamari Androgyny?

            In a game industry permeated by katanas, explosions, and big-freaking-guns, Katamari Damacy stands apart as a unique creation. The uniqueness, however, is somewhat difficult to comprehend. Bluntly, it is a very strange game, filled with color and personality. The primary mission is to roll up clutter, litter, people, rainbows—pretty much everything—into giant, amalgamate balls (katamaris) that are supposed to replace the constellations that the King of All Cosmos accidentally knocked out of the sky while under a drunken stupor. While the game certainly captures the aesthetic of “odd,” what kind of appeal does it provide? Is it a masculine game, a feminine game, or an androgynous game?

Fron et al. in the essay “The Hegemony of Play” and Fullerton et al. in the essay “A Game of One’s Own” both criticize the game industry for its male-oriented mechanics in video games, such as violence, warfare, and aggressive competition. Jenkins, in his essay “Complete Freedom of Movement,” reiterates these characteristics as typical of “boy culture.” Though Jenkins does not portray these characteristics as negative (indeed, they are all typical and natural), all three essays agree that they presume an unnecessary dominance of the industry that precludes feminine or cross-gender games. Katamari Damacy manages to avoid many, but not all of these male-centric pitfalls. It is not an action-puzzle game, not a wargame, there are no guns, no explosions, no death (at least not explicitly), and there is no fervent spirit of rivalry and competition (it is mostly single-player, and though 2 players can compete to create the largest katamari, this is not the main feature of the game). In these respects, Damacy manages to escape many of the masculine “ideals” that permeate other games and instead become something new and different.

The game does contain violence (as the katamari grows, it can eventually roll up living beings, including people), but this is more a comic side-effect of the massive, rolling sticky ball. Furthermore, there is no blood and the people themselves are abstract and polygonal. The game itself is rated E for “mild fantasy violence,” reflecting the light-hearted mood of the action involved. While the game veers close to other male-oriented pitfalls outlined by Fullerton et al., such as conquest, danger, and destruction, it manages to avert most of them by its goofy and humorous attitude. The humor, combined with wonky music and cheery color palette (which subverts one of Fullerton et al.’s other complaints about the dreary, monotone appearance of male games), softens the violence and makes Damacy silly and fun—both universal ideals. Also, while at a glance the game may seem destructive, this attribute is also subverted by the game’s narrative, which explains that the giant balls the player makes are being used to recreate the moon and stars. In this way, the game becomes creative instead of destructive, an attribute that is further enhanced by the game, which tracks the types of objects that compose the player’s katamari. The player has control over what they choose to roll up, and the game recognizes this by naming the end product based on its composition.

So Damacy seems to depart drastically from typical male games, but in what direction has it departed? Is it feminine or androgynous? While the game is colorful, it certainly isn’t “pink” (Fullerton et al.’s term for exclusively female games). In some ways, there is the challenge of skill, the achievement driven aspect (i.e. make a katamari that is x big), and the “spatial rotation” puzzles mentioned by Fullerton et al. (in this case, a dual analog stick control system) that all appeal to males. Contrarily, there is appeal to females in many of the ways outlined by Jenkins, such as a sense of exploration as the player wanders through spaces that vary in size from tabletops to continents, or the sense of investigation and discovery of new fun objects that are scattered about, just waiting to be added to the katamari. However, Damacy misses out on other female-preferable characteristics mentioned by Jenkins, such as an emphasis on emotions or interior worlds. Brenda Laurel, in her book Utopian Entrepreneur, adds even more characteristics that Damacy fails to embrace. Using her experimental game project Purple Moon as a case study, Laurel emphasizes the importance of narrative, backstory, relationships, storytelling, and the presence of values. All of these ideals are practically absent from Damacy. One might imagine that there is the value of “don’t pollute” (because of the rampant litter the players gathers up in the Damacy world) or the relationship between the Prince (the player) and his father the King of All Cosmos, but both of these are a stretch and neither is very substantial.

While the attributes mentioned by Laurel and Jenkins are good, they are not for all games. Not every game needs depth of character or narrative (think of Elektroplankton, for instance, or Spore). Damacy thrives on its quirkiness and its humor, and it does so with great success. The game seeks to create a very “silly” aesthetic, and it embraces that silliness in all of its design decisions, from concept to character design to music. Because of this, it ultimately achieves an androgynous type of fun. The main character is a “prince,” but he is represented in such a simple, abstract, and silly manner that his gender is practically meaningless (furthermore, the poor fellow is only 10 cm tall, so you don’t see much of him anyway—which is in itself a subversion of the testosterone-pumped masculine stereotype). Therefore, while it does not perfectly meet the gaming urges of both sides, Katamari Damacy manages to fall somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum, becoming a game that provides something fun to anyone who experiences it.

 

--Daniel

Works Cited:

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.

Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom of Movement" (1998) in Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (2005). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001

Gender, Race & Representation: A diffrent way of viewing things

The game I chose for this post is Portal (2007). Released in the Orange Box package. Portal is a short FPS puzzle game with a female main character, this character also happens to be the only human character to be seen in the game.

            I think the game is interesting for working with in the “Hegemony of Play”(Fron et al, 1) and creating a new game that is out side of the industry standard at the same time. While it is a FPS the player is only allowed to shoot portals, really just a tool for getting around a level. The game also seems to have a more level playing field for gender then most other FPSs. Portals demand on “spatial rotation skills” which  are “difficult for women and girls to master”(Fron et al, 4) are kept to a minimum. Most of the puzzles through out the game don’t require many quick reactions, most solutions can be planned out well enough that the user can either rehearse the actions needed or come up with an easier alternative method. Though the game does have a few puzzles that do require quick movements or I was just unable to see them in a way where the movements weren’t necessary.

            The female character in this game breaks the convention mentioned by Fullerton et al “Historically, in the non-digital playground, girls have been spatially constrained in their play activities.” (Fullerton et al, 3) In Portal the female character main objective is to move through her environment: the character moves outside of the boundaries of current physics as well as the boundaries decided for her by the homicidal computer, the game actually ends with the main character breaking free in to the outside world. Portal also tries to appeal to both genders with the way it treats its characters. “Early research into games and gender found that women and girls resonate with games that have storylines and character development.”(Fullerton et al, 6). At the beginning of the game the voice of GLaDOS sounds just like a computer recording as the game progresses the voice becomes a memorable character as it often comments on your progress and responds to what you do. Most of the objects in that game are given a personality. One of the more memorable characters is the companion cube. It is literally a cube it never speaks but the game tries to make the player have some feelings toward the object due to the interactions that are forced upon the player.

            Portal also has another feature which makes it friendly to both genders. As Jenkins wrote about the games that were a space for girls “play spaces for girls adopt a slower pace, are less filled with dangers, invite gradual investigation and discovery.”(Jenkins, 356) This is not to say that there are not many dangers in the game or that the game is not challenging but the game is good about its difficulty curve. The first puzzle in the game, how to escape from your room, is solved by the game for the player to introduce them to the concept of how to use portals. I don’t think the game will let the player fail a level until the third level. The game also has a very small penalty for failure: often just being set back to what you were doing moments before you failed and given another chance. Also as the game progresses the player will be given little treats that they can explore which can give some insight on the current situation of the character.

            The game also helps to level the playing field in terms of difficulty by giving many environmental clues as to what should be done. “[Girls] tend to prefer more body-centric navigational methods then boys, relying more on landmarks for cues.” (Laurel, 40)  The levels are covered in lines leading from one object to another to show relations as well numbered symbols to show the orders things should be done in. While some times its difficult to figure out how to do something its not very often that the player won’t know what needs to be done.

           

           

 

Works Cited

 

Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. The Game Design Reader, 670-686.

 

Laurel, B. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

 

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). The Hegemony of Play. In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan. 1-10.

 

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

Gender Role Reversal in Japanese RPGs

    Representation of gender in video games is undoubtedly a topic of particular interest in the sphere of Western video game studies. Whether one looks back at classic examples of outrage like Custer's Revenge or modern day cases with Dead or Alive: Extreme Volleyball, the idealization of the male and female genders in video games is especially pronounced and a perhaps problematic trend. However, through my experience in playing video games that originate from outside of the Western civilization, I have found that Japanese video games offer an odd, enigmatic take on gender representation. In particular, I will focus on the wildly-popular Final Fantasy series, from VII on up through the latest installation as to describe and analyze a more recent trend.

    Japanese role-playing games as a whole tend to be very dramatic, structured and linear in their narratives, aside from having set a trend for multiple endings to a story. These stories are mostly character-driven as well and often bring a multitude of characters into the mix whether they are playable characters, secondary characters or villains. What I've found in a multitude of Japanese games I've played, female characters are represented in a variety of ways that have similarities to Western representations. Yuna, a summoner and magic-user from Final Fantasy X for instance, goes from a quiet, reserved character wearing a long, conservative dress to wearing a far skimpier mini-skirt and top in the sequel FF-X2, while also packing two guns. Falling into a similar trap with Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, the idea of 'Barbie kicking butt' (Fullerton, pg.3) would backfire and be more likely to attract male players than female players. Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII, although an accomplished martial artist and strong as a bull, fights with little more than a white, well-filled tank-top and mini skirt on.

    Japanese mass media, such as in manga and anime alike, has a tendency to objectify its female characters as much as it empowers them. Female characters taking the lead role is common in many stories, if not moreso than their male counterparts, yet there is another odd tendency to be found in the Japanese culture that finds its way into games. As Japan is undergoing a sort of gender revolution within the country, with women increasingly holding off on marriage and child birth until a later age and female audiences becoming more pronounced, male characters now often find themselves in a reversed role of sexual object and ideal.

    Ever since the Final Fantasy series took on a more 'realistic' look starting from VII, almost all the lead characters have been male. On top of that, they are often represented as young, leanly-muscled men with long or exotic hairstyles and a decidedly 'pretty' look. While this is perhaps coincidence, one only has to attend a cosplaying event or browse the internet to realize that female gamers (and even girls who don't play games) have an overwhelming tendency to dote over these more feminine, idealized male characters as male games would drool over a scantly-clad Night Elf cosplayer.

    In stark contrast to the Western ideal of a male lead, who is often heavily-muscled, ugly and coarse in many ways while taking part in a heavily action-oriented game, Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy also have action elements involved, though they tend to revolve more around intricate stories and settings along with unique battle mechanics. Character development is key in these games, and I have certainly found a share of older women gamers that not only are aware of the idealized male characters in the Final Fantasy series, but fawn over them in a similar manner to their younger compatriots (Pearce, pg.12). The idolization of male characters has been a part of fandom in many genres and forms, such as the advent of slash fiction and the incredible popularity of yaoi in the vein of Japanese culture, both of which depict often male characters in homoerotic situations and most of which are written by heterosexual females.

    Whereas girls were disadvantaged to boys in previous generations for a number of reasons, such as girls being culturally restricted to more feminine activities and being excluded from 'boy' activities such as games, territory and paternal rebellion, that is not so much the case these days (Jenkins, 344). Female gamers in themselves are bucking many cultural expectations by way of their mere existence, and that is expounded upon by the act of fantasizing about ideal male characters in an overt manner rather than simply gazing quietly from afar. While it may seem unusual in many ways today, I am hardly stating this case as a bad thing.

    Overt attempts to market to a female gaming market such as Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon attempted to do will continue to be made, but as she states in Utopian Entrepreneur, 'short changing research always turns out to have been the wrong idea.' (Laurel, pg.38) Simply creating pretty male characters in video games is a successful in drawing in female gamers, but may not be a sustainable model in the long run. It may not even be the best way to appeal to female gamers since it's simply what male gamers like in female characters. It is nevertheless an interesting switch on cultural expectations for the genders when it comes to video games, and Japanese role-playing games are a prime example of this odd conundrum.

Blogpost #4 Nancy Drew and the Haunting of Castle Malloy Empowering Girls through Jetpacks since 2008

For this blogpost I want to discuss Nancy Drew and the Haunting of Castle Malloy, the 19^th game in the Nancy Drew series of computer games released by Her Interactive. I chose this game because it’s favorable acceptance by game critics, the popularity of the long running Nancy Drew series of computer games, and its availability to me via Steam. At first I was extremely skeptical of it, expecting a sort of adolescent-girl mentality to its gameplay (a fair assumption considering it is targeted to adolescent girls), but I found myself enjoying the game even with its marriage seating arrangement puzzles, flower picking, and jetpack flying. Therefore, I would like to review why this game worked in light of the readings that addressed “girl games”, and what made it so enjoyable.

 

As a Girl Game

“Girl Games” are best defined by Henry Jenkins in his study of girl and boy game spaces and by Brenda Laurel’s example of her experience running and designing the Purple Moon Series. Henry Jenkins first describes female spaces in girl’s literature, pointing to the example of The Secret Garden: “in such stories, the exploration of space leads to the uncovering of secrets, clues, and symptoms that shed light on character’s motivations. Hidden rooms often contained repressed memories and sometimes entombed relatives” (Jenkins 349). He also stresses the importance of emotional connections and relationship based gaming, where in his two examples of Theresa Duncan’s games and Secret Paths from Purple Moon “embrace remarkably similar ideals—play spaces for girls adopt a slower pace, are less filled with dangers, invite gradual investigation and discovery, foster an awareness of social relations and a search for secrets, center around emotional relations between characters. Both allow the exploration of physical environments, but are really about the interior worlds of feelings and fears” (Jenkins 357). Brenda Laurel also pointed out that relationship gameplay did not only have to happen between game character and player, but could also extend to other players. While Jenkins described the “friendship adventure” where puzzle solving is paralleled to relationship building in the game Secret Paths, Laurel also talks about how those games extended to the Purple Moon website to help children form an online community: “We were surprised and delighted to discover that girls were using the postcard system on the site to arrange swap meets for Purple Moon treasures. They formed clubs within the site based on treasures, zodiac signs, sport interests, animals, geographic location, and favorite characters. They also spun off independent fan sites” (Laurel 51). Laurel also pointed out the difference in expectations girls had to games than boys: “girls did not so much mind violence as much as they disliked the lack of good story and characters” (Laurel 40). Girls also had values when it came to measuring social status: “a girl’s social status among her peer is likely to be influenced more by her network of affiliations than by any explicit measure. Covert tools such as exclusion and secrets are prominent means of social competition” (Laurel 41). The aspects of these girl-centric games was not simply finding non-violent alternatives, but presenting spaces that encouraged relationships with in-game characters and online communities, were investigative and exploratory, and centered on social aspects and discovery.

Nancy Drew and the Haunting of Castle Malloy shares much in common with the examples cited by Jenkins and Laurel’s work in Purple Moon. The game’s premise is that Nancy Drew is invited to the castle of Malloy by her friend to be the maid of honor for her friend’s wedding. When she gets there though, she drives her car into a ditch after a mysterious apparition causes her to swerve, and when she arrives at the castle she discovers her friend’s fiancé has mysteriously disappeared. It uses the long-established point-and-click adventuring system and Myst-style gameplay to put the player into Nancy Drew’s 1^st person perspective, although movement is done statically and not through continuous movement, like a shooting game would. This kind of landmark and static navigation fits in with Laurel’s discovery that women prefer “more body-centric navigation than boys, relying on landmarks for cues” (Laurel 40). The narrative framework of the game is an important consideration in light of its audience, for the game revolves around trying to save a wedding for a female friend, and several puzzles revolve around female-gendered tasks, such as a (particularly challenging) wedding seating arrangement puzzle. Other puzzles exist in the space of the castle and surrounding areas, discovered through exploration and sometimes impossible to figure out until certain other puzzles have been discovered and explored. But most interestingly, an incredible amount of detail has been put into bringing the three main characters (Kyler, Kit, and Donal) to life through the expert voice acting and detailed animation in contrast to the relatively low-tech approach of the rest of the game. Discovering the secrets behind each character brings out much of the enjoyment in the game and advances the narrative, although such actions don’t solve any puzzles directly; for example, the discovery of photograph can lead to a confession that Kit has lingering feelings for Kyler, and that combined with the discovery of Matt choosing someone else over Kit to be best man relates directly to Jenkins’s earlier quote that “the exploration of space leads to the uncovering of secrets, clues, and symptoms that shed light on character’s motivations”. There is also a parallel between how both Nancy Drew games and the Purple Moon series take advantage of convergent culture and fan communities. Brenda Laurel in her website efforts made the Purple Moon not just a series of games, but also a cross-media experience. Likewise, the Nancy Drew game is drawing from an incredibly long franchise of Nancy Drew books, toys, and other media. Brenda Laurel points out how “Purple-Moon.com really tried to meld brand identity with personal identity…for the success of a brand or a set of characters, an active fan culture may not be sufficient, but it sure is necessary” (Laurel 50). Nancy Drew likewise both a brand and a character that girls can relate to and see themselves in. Wikipedia states “Feminist literary critics have analyzed the character's enduring appeal, arguing variously that Nancy Drew is a mythic hero, an expression of wish fulfillment,^[12] or an embodiment of contradictory ideas about femininity.” (Wikipedia). Point by point, Nancy Drew and the Haunting of Castle Malloy hits upon the various criteria Laurel and Jenkins note about girl games: it presents a strong set of characters and narrative, emphasizes exploration and mystery, has secrets that reveal hidden character motivations and leads to character discovery, and provides an alternative that is non-violent and non-masculine.

 

As an Androgynous Game

Another light to view the Nancy Drew game though is not to see how it is different from “male games”, but rather what it draws and builds off of from an already established tradition of gaming. As stated earlier, the game borrows from the Myst type of static image navigation where the player moves in the first person through a series of still images to create an exploratory space. The point and click mechanics have existed through gaming history since The 7^th Guest, the Monkey Island series, and during the big 90’s boom of adventure games from LucasArts and Sierra. Therefore, all the qualities of exploration, mystery uncovering, narrative, and character relationships could be applied to these past games as well. Indeed, strong narrative and character, exploration within a domestic or limited space to uncover mysteries, and the qualities that make Nancy Drew a “girl game” extend to all the games within the genre it works within. While Laurel describes making a specifically girl-centric game with its paper-moon series, Ludica (or Fullerton et al) point out the need to not just make “exclusively female (or ‘pink’) games” but also consider the genderless-game: “As Woolf points out in her essay, the solution is not simply to create a distinctly feminine voice (although this is one potential angle of approach), but rather to promote the cultivation of an ‘androgynous mind’” (A Game of One’s own). The haunted castle of Malloy provides the kind of  “secret places” that Ludica outlines in the essay, which they mark as feminine: Ludica argues that the presence of incomplete and unfinished spaces “cry out for player agency, for players not only be transformed by, but also to transform the space as part of the play experience” (A Game of One’s Own). The Castle of Malloy in Nancy Drew is ramshackle, run down, with not only hidden passages but also ruined stairways and doors that lead to blasted-out nowheres. It is through puzzle solving (specifically activating a Jet Pack) that Nancy can reach the tower which the ruined stairs can not reach, in some way both resulting in the discovery of a “secret space” and the completion of the castle’s incompleteness. Yet, there is a certain aspect in which the castle is like a boy’s space too; Ludica mentions how the “knowing how and where to access [a game’s hidden] secrets is the province of ‘real gamers’” which is tied to male-centric processes of conquest and exclusion (A Game of One’s Own) but with the shift of pushed entirely to discovering hidden areas and discovering new aspects of the limited familiar space, there is also a male appeal to ‘unlocking a new room’ or discovering a gear for the gearbox puzzle from the very beginning of the game, allowing the player to go back and solve it. Nancy Drew’s own ‘Hidden Easter Egg’ is not difficult to find, but it in facts calls for an extra level of exploration and attention to detail, and it is the “feminine” action of exploration and mystery solving that unlocks it instead of having “exclusive knowledge” or enacting “conquest”. But more surprisingly, these same elements have existed in adventure games, some which were markedly male-oriented (Full Throttle) and some more androgynous (Myst). One of the most notable in the genre, Dreamfall, does not explicitly mark itself as a “girl game” yet lends itself to be extremely girl friendly: the main character is a strong female who explores both her world and a fantasy world to uncover a mystery where plot, narrative, dialogue with other characters, and emotional relationships take priority over action, fighting, or conquest. The game was never marketed as “girl”, and has been the darling of many critics and “hardcore gamers” everywhere.

Why aren’t these types of games still being made? One can point to the “Hegemony of Play” that Ludica blames for creating a “third gender” where this kind of androgynous play need not apply: “the game industry has constructed an entirely new fictional variation of Simone De Beauvoir’s subjective male, one which may have as little to do with the majority of men as it does with women” (Hegemony of Play). The essay summarizes this attitude in this anecdote: “In response to the recommendation from his marketing director that [a gaming executive] speak to [Pearce] about creating games for girls, he quipped: ‘Our job is to take lunch money away from 14-year-old boys’” (Hegemony of Play). With the industry assuming the audience consists of 14-year-old boys, values that defined the adventure game genre such as exploration, character dialogue, and narrative fall to the wayside as the industry assumes that “gamers” want conquest, violence, coolness, and don’t care about the other stuff. Yet these were the games that made up a good part of the history of games for many hardcore gamers, and to veterans of computer games such as myself, I don’t find it surprising that on most blogs I read and news I hear comes from the “jaded gamer audience”.

The bottom line ends up being this: what made Nancy Drew an enjoyable experience for me was not that it had qualities of being a “girl game”, but being an “adventure game”, the kind of game that was made en masse right around the time Doom came out and when the computer game industry was extremely small. The qualities marked out of exploration and narrative as being female may or may not stand as true, but what a past history of Monkey Island and Myst point out that such qualities make for great games. Nancy Drew reminded me of the golden age of adventure games, and for that I’m happy that I’ve played it. Besides getting to fly around on an experimental WWII era Jetpack.

 

-Jason Lee

Bibliography

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.

Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" The Game Design Reader, ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman.MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2006. 330-363.

Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Pokemon and Gendered Games

When I was a child, girls just did not play video games.  Sure, we could play the educational computer games like Math Blaster, but we were considered "weird" if we played "real" video games.  None of my girl friends owned a gaming console; the only reason why I had access to a SNES was because I had an older brother who got it for Christmas one year while I was given more Barbies.  I liked to watch my brother play, but like everyone else, I thought that girls would never like video games or be good at them.  For me, that all changed in 1998 with the US release of Pokemon Red and Blue.  Suddenly, it was okay for girls to be good at video games and it was okay for us to beat boys at it!   Pokemon was a phenomenon that revolutionized the attitudes many people had about girls and gaming as well as introduced several generations of girls to video games.  Why was it so popular with both genders though?  This question can be answered through examining the essays of Laurel, Jenkins, Fron et al and Fullerton et al.

One of the most important aspects of Pokemon in the early games was that it was fairly gender neutral.  While the main character's avatar is supposed to be male, it is abstract enough to look like any gender the player wants it to be.  Also, the game asks for your name at the starting screen without giving any indication that they expect the player to be a boy.  The first default name, for all versions of Pokemon, is simply a color.  While blue and pink/red do have a gender connotation in American society, the player is free to choose to play either version without being penalized for choosing one over the other.  Throughout the game, players are given several choices on how they want to play.  For example, you could rush into a gym and defeat everyone present or you could solve the gym's puzzle and only fight the gym leader.  Later editions of the game introduced growing plants, secret bases, fashion/talent contests, and customizing the designs on pokeballs with stickers as important gameplay mechanics.  This illustrates the concept of  the "'androgynous space' that engages all aspects of all persons: a space into which women and girls are invited and welcomed, but in which men and boys can also enjoy more diverse and nuanced forms of play than are typically available to them," (Fullerton et al pg 1).  While the main method of advancing the game is still defeating opponents, there are now a large number of other, more girl oriented ways to play the game.  Even the ultimate goal of the game and the catchphrase of the TV show, "Gotta Catch Them All!," is a collection oriented goal that appeals to girls.  Fron et al asks "Would early games revolve around themes such as botany, fashion, fortunes, life lessons, sociability or sewing?" (Fron et al pg 7).  With Pokemon, we can see that a game can incorporate these themes and still be extremely commercially successful with both genders.

There are some instances where Pokemon has failed to be gender neutral.  One such example is of Pokemon Yellow, which was an attempt to incorporate the television show into the game series.  The main character of the show is a boy named Ash who has a pikachu follow him around.  Not only was the attempt to have a pikachu follow the player around in the game a failure, most girls did not want to play as Ash.  Even though the game was identical to Red and Blue (except for the pikachu), most players assumed that you were playing as Ash and this alienated many female players.  Players could no longer choose what pokemon they wanted for their starter, which also took away from the feeling that you were the one making your own, unique way through this world.  Laurel notes that "...the transmedia process has thus far consisted of repurposing content from one medium to another-film to TV, comics to film, dolls and toys to video games, movies to dolls and toys, or movies to the web," (Laurel 82).  She  goes on to explain that this repurposing does not work.  Pokemon Yellow is a great example of how the cycle from game to television to game ends up destroying some of the most important aspects of the game.  However, in the long run, all of the games encouraged players of both genders to explore the world of the game and discover all of its aspects and secrets.  It actively encouraged players to revisit areas in order to access new areas that were previously restricted.  They encouraged and promoted the ability of children to explore the environment, which plays an important role in "...their growing sense of mastery, freedom, and self-confidence..." (Jenkins pg 337).  In the end, the Pokemon games have done a lot to encourage both girls and boys to play games together in play styles that suite their interests.

Works Cited
Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.

Jenkins, H. (2008). Complete Freedom of Movement. The Game Design Reader, 337.

Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Gender and Culture of Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is a game by Ubisoft published in 2008. It is a game that, while enjoyable and offers beautiful environments to explore and simple, forgiving gameplay mechanics to coax in more casual players, finds itself rooted in many of the gender and cultural stereotypes that plague the digital game industry today.

Gender stereotypes of the game are seen in full force, creating a perfect example of the “hegemony of play” (Fron, et al). For example, the way the main female character, Elika, is dressed. She wears an extremely revealing blouse, added on with the fact that her clothing is torn, shows more skin than previously thought possible. Moreover, despite the fact that Elika has magical powers and the ability to fly, she is forced to act as a sidekick to the physically grounded Prince. She follows him around constantly, offers assistance as he is about to fall to his demise, and gracefully sweeps back down next to him. This passive and submissive behavior is seen as clearly intentional by the fact that when the Prince begins to scale vines on a wall, she finds it necessary to take his hand and take a piggyback ride until they reach the top, despite the fact that she is shown as fully capable to deal with all other acrobatic feats (jumping from pole to pole, running walls, shimmying, etc) that the Prince does. And despite the fact that she can just fly. It is difficult to see how Elika's character design was not aimed at a certain male demographic, and that strong gender role stereotypes came into play in her design. It is also difficult to see how her design could come around with a fully diverse design team.

The male and female gender gap is further played out in the game by the types of characters the Prince and Elika represented. As mentioned by Jenkins, boy culture has roots in being physically violent and that boys are typically characterized as more capable of leaving and exploring new places. Girls, on the other hand, are often restricted by parents and generally prepared more for a domestic lifestyle. This is especially brought out by the Prince, who comes from a faraway land, and the princess, Elika, who has never left her palace home. The Prince often offers more violent solutions to problems (“Can't I just hit something?”) while Elika rarely expresses anger and offers a more peaceful and maternal attitude (after defeating a bad guy, “he only wanted to defend his people”). If the solution to the issue of increasing separation of gender in media is to create a gender-neutral game environment (Jenkins), Prince of Persia is certainly not an example.

Personally, I enjoyed exploring the environment and discovering the story of the game space, but the forced and blatant gender stereotypes played out in the game were, to be honest, quite uncomfortable and unnecessary. There are certain aspects of the gameplay and game space that could be seen as appealing to a female audience, such as the exploration of spaces, a goal of healing environments, and preventing destruction. The female character is also characterized as having the ability to open portals to new, enchanted worlds as mentioned by Fullerton. These aspects, however, are drowned by the male lead character, who takes the main stage and serves no function other than to battle and hinder a girl who could otherwise be flying. Moreover, personally, I do not agree with either the female or the male stereotypes in the game. With the Prince and Elika as the only relate-able characters in the game, it is difficult not to view them as stereotypes for an entire gender. In this way, it is difficult not to offend people if they, like the barbies mentioned by Laurel, are the only indication of what a gender is supposed to mature to be like. Ultimately, Ubisoft presents a strikingly beautiful environment and friendly, casual gameplay, but sinks the game by forcing blatant gender roles on its two main characters.

Bibliography

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). The Hegemony of Play. In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan. 1-10.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. The Game Design Reader, 670-686.

Laurel, B. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

FPS in a Feminine Space

The First-Person-Shooter is the prototypical male-dominated video game genre.  FPS titles offer violence, killing, wartime narratives, and lots and lots of guns.  The heroes are scowling badasses, the villains are ruthless aliens, and the story is almost always the same.  Lost amidst these male fantasies are genuine female characters.  Be they scantily clad damsels in distress or scantily clad amazonian warrior queens, it is very rare that women are represented without being blown out of proportions.  Even rarer are shooters that center on a female character.  It just so happens that Valve's Portal (2007) features a female lead character.  Furthermore, she is not presented as a crude vision of the male fantasy, but simply as a woman.  

Portal accomplishes very much in advancing the way gender is applied to video games.  There are many ways to represent space, and video games have always had a unique way of doing so.  But in recent years, primarily the era of 3D games, have created a standard for spatial design.  Space has largely become defined by western, cartesian and male ideals [Fullerton 2].  The space of a video game must promote gameplay and shooters promote violent spaces.  That is, in Halo a hill is not a hill - it's a sniper ridge.  Portal is not based in a violent world.  The world of Portal is about manipulating and exploring space the most effective way possible using the otherworldly possibilities presented by the portal gun.  The space seems unremarkable at first glance.  The floor, the walls, the ceiling  and a sparse array of platforms make up the environment.  The portal gun changes the elements of the environment.  Just as Halo's hill transformed, the walls, floors and ceilings begin to take on new meanings for the player.  The player truly does begin to "think with portals".  The game bears an interesting parallel with Alice in Wonderland.  In defining the feminine concepts of space Fron et. Al list a "cast of female heroines who open portals to and explore magical, alternative, and sometimes highly treacherous mythical and imaginary worlds…These women are brave, curious, adventuresome, and smart, solving complex problems to arrive at their destinations…"  The character in Portal wakes up in a testing facility, spurred on by the encouraging words of a computer system.  Like Alice, she interacts with a warped world (warped via the portal gun), and is confronted by violence from that world.  It seems that Portal portal is a feminine space being explored with typically male game mechanics.

The game mechanics of Portal are simple but robust.  There are numerous ways to solve each puzzle, a testament to the game's design.  In portal, it is not a person, but the environment that provides resistance to the player.  The gameplay mechanics are strongly tied to the narrative.  At first, the payer is edged on by "the experiment"- completing puzzles for the sake of science.  Later, violence becomes a motivator.  The player is trapped and must use the portal gun to escape.  The mechanics of  the shooter are still present in the game.  Shooting accuracy and reaction time are are of paramount importance.  But Portal is unique in that the gun creates, rather than destroys.  Later in the game the player is confronted with gun turrets.  The portal gun is used to defensively to avoid violence rather than a tools to distribute destruction.  

There are no human characters in the game, and the only interactions the player has are with the GLaDOS, the turrets, and the weighted companion cube.  Laurel encourages relationship building in stories, and Portal does so in a few unique ways [Laurel 59].  First is GLaDOS, who offers guidance and advice while simultaneously antagonizing you.  You perceive her in a variety of ways throughout the game - but I would characterize her role as that of a mother.  She wants you to succeed, though she is not afraid to apply tough love (read: killing you).  An interesting interaction takes place early on in the game, when you first meet the weighted companion cube.  Though it is simply a metal cube, GLaDOS insists that you not become too attached (or talk/listen) to it.  Later, when instructed to kill the cube by dropping it in a furnace, the player feels guilty, like they betrayed a friend.  It's a feeling that is caused by GLaDOS' herself in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  By warning you against getting attached to the cube, the player begins to humanize it.

Finally, the catalyst of gender representation in the game is the perspective itself.  The player finds out relatively early on that the character is a woman.  There is no "Metroid-esque" moment of surprise that the character was actually a woman.  But the first-person perspective internalizes all of the characters actions for the player.  There is a fundamental difference in how first and third person perspectives are read by the user.  Lara Croft is an object, a puppet for the player to use.  In this way, male players are controlling a woman, not taking on her role.  When males play Halo, they don't control Master Chief, they become him.  The character's and the player's actions are one and the same.  The same applies to the character in Portal.  Male players are able to become a woman when they take the control in hand.  And in doing so, they are able to explore a feminine space.  

Flash Source Codes

Hi all,

Click here to download a .zip that contains all the source code and shit (now with super helpful comments!) from our first Flash lesson.

And this has the .zip of the source code for the XML lesson (the one with the bouncy ball).

Thanks, Matt!

 

KOTOR: A Step in the Right Direction

For this blogpost, I decided to revisit one of my favorite games of the past decade – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR). KotOR was always interesting to me not only because of its turn-based combat system, but also because of its focus on dialog and personal narrative. This time, though, I also focused on the game's treatment of gender, of spaces, and of cultures, hoping to find some redeeming qualities in this game I love that will prevent it from being dismissed as your standard violent action game targeted at pasty white boys with a violence fetish. While I won't claim the KotOR is the paragon of gender-neutrality and progress in the gaming industry, the game is certainly moving in the right direction.

KotOR is interesting in that it both conforms to and somehow also avoids being characterized entirely by the "Hegemony of Play" (Fron et al, 2007), particularly in its treatment of combat. Indeed, the marketing and merchandising strategies of the Star Wars franchise are the epitome of the "[taking] lunch money away from 14-year-old boys" attitude described by Fron et al (2007), and that any game springing forth from that culture would solely target the "hardcore gamers" and their love of RTS and FPS gameplay (p.7). However, KotORs combat system (which comprises only about 50-60% of the actual gameplay) is turn-based with the illusion of real-time action, and allows the player to pause the game during a fight, look at the situation, and issue orders, then resume the action. Also, the game is available for both consoles and PCs. These two factors (combat system and PC availability) directly break down two of the barriers to female gamers – non-female-friendly controller design and the necessity of strong spatial rotation skills (Fron et al, p.4) – and makes even the traditionally male-oriented combat aspect of gameplay more gender neutral. It isn't simple, cutesy, or "girly", but it isn't "hardcore" either.

Another interesting fact arises from KotOR's roots in the Star Wars universe. The existence of the larger Star Wars story world presents a space to create, as Jenkins (2004) put it, "an immersive environment [the player] can wander through and interact with" (p.678). KotOr makes use of this space wonderfully, and tries to maintain a healthy balance between the "dark and monochromatic" dungeons Fullerton et al (2007) describes (p.3) with vast, populated cityscapes with open skies and scenic views. Even in the dungeon-like areas, the palettes are brighter and more inviting than one would expect, creating environments that will appeal to females as well as males (Fullerton et al,p.3). KotOR also makes good use of its narrative space, creating many, many instances of Jenkins' (2004) concept of "micronarratives" (p.679) in the form of small dialog interactions between the player and the non-player characters in the world. Much of the game's content comes from the exploration of the various stories of the characters through these dialog events. Fullerton et al (2007) mentions the importance of "navigable narratives" in appealing to female gamers (p.6). Each of the narratives for the characters in the game creates a new narrative space for players to "discover, uncover, and reveal the plot elements," (Fullerton et al,2007,p.6) and many of these narratives can be resolved without violence (and sometimes the player is rewarded for avoiding violent confrontations).

Oddly enough, the vast merchandising nature of the Star Wars universe contributes to the narrative in another way as well – transmedia. The transmedial culture described by Laurel (2001) is very, very present for the Star Wars franchise. There is a core "foundational narrative" which many people (not just the 14-year-old boys) are familiar with that has been around for over 30 years, and the "story world" is spread across movies, television shows, comic books, novels, video games, and more (Laurel,2001,p.85). I am not going to claim that the literature of the Star Wars universe is of the highest caliber, but it definitely creates a wide range of possible media (not just video games) for users to interact with. In addition, Laurel (2001) also describes the importance of relationships in storytelling, and how it is distinctly different from just a story (p.59). The micronarrative, character-driven subplots of KotOR epitomize this idea. At any point during the main story, the player is free to choose to stay on board their ship and talk with each and every member of their crew, exploring and building (or destroying) their relationship with each character in the game.

Finally, KotOR is actually one of the few games I've played that avoids the use of "kombat" lingerie (Fullerton et al,2007,p.3). The female versions of all the armor or clothing in the game are only modified in such as way as to make it possible for someone with female anatomy to actually wear them. While I won't say the beauty or femininity of the female models is totally realistic, the female form is not objectified for the purposes of being a male fantasy. Rather, the differences present seem only to allow the player to distinguish between the two genders. The male models are not overly strong or huge either – almost every character in the game seems just barely above-average in their body image. I won't claim the game has the best representation of the sexes in the gaming world, but for a mainstream game based on a massive marketing franchise, the generic nature of the character models when compared to most other games is surprising.

All in all, KotOR is a game that simply manages to avoid many of the design pitfalls that plague many "hardcore" games without specifically trying to fix them, but it's a good first step in the right direction. After all, the more developers that haven't yet fallen into the pit, the more there are to help fill it in.

Works Cited

Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. The Game Design Reader, 670-686.

Laurel, B. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). The Hegemony of Play. In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan. 1-10.

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.

SAmer Ead LCC4725 - Blog Post 2

“The goal of a game, we may say, is winning the game“[3]. ­While playing Ninja Turtles on the NES, I dare say, even though I was looking forward to win or beat the game (over and again!), my main purpose was to enjoy my time playing with friends, in one of the few and extravagant multiplayer games of its time. Thus my main motivation to play was always to spend time with friends and to measure how we coped together, in one way or another, which ultimately affected our relationship for the rest of the day if not the entire week, “The player is stimulated to emulate himself, permitting him to take pride in his accomplishment, as against those who share his taste” [2]. In this blog I intend to critique the various elements and features of Ninja Turtles’ effects on my family, my friends, and even myself in real life, versus the definitions of games provided by Huizinga, Caillois and Suits in The Game Design Reader.

One of the most puzzling things with respect to the NES in general, and Ninja Turtles explicitly, was watching family and friends from various generations, including my parents, play the game and actually express enjoyment and excitement, as if “the ‘fun’ of playing resists all analysis, all logical interpretation”[1]. Yet play seemed to be something irrational. For example, as my mother taught me that violence could never be the solution to a problem, I found it hard to believe her when I watched her kill the enemies in the game, and actually enjoy it! Such dilemmas provided me with a different perspective of the world around me, and the effect of games on it. One thing was apparent though everyone playing was trying to waste time, taking their minds off of work, life, and their individual problems to be able to reach a state of much needed leisure, and entertainment. Such results led me to believe that there is much more to games than I could possibly understand, the state of play itself is an “occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money” [2] yet a much needed sate “for relaxation” [1]. Ninja turtles particularly touched on an aspect pretty much only found in board games prior to its existence and that is the need of a positive social atmosphere in order for players to be able to cooperate, which in many ways simulates a work-like ambiance but for the fun of it and thus “Games therefore might be expected to be what work, in some salient respect, is not” [3].

Thus Play must be defined as “a free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement” [2], something that ninja turtles accomplished and provided to individuals from all ages, groups and backgrounds. From my perspective, I felt that the three authors did a great job at defining what a game is, but I feel that they lacked the subliminal portion of the message, it has been proven that games indirectly affect the minds of the players and could help shape them.
By thus, I conclude that as humans, we do not always take on at playing games knowing all the exact limits, especially which appear to reach out beyond time and place.

[1] -- Huizinga, Johan. "Nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon." The Game Design Reader. Ed. Salen and Zimmerman. Boston: MIT, 2006.

[2] -- Caillois, Roger. "The definition of play and the classification of games." The Game Design Reader. Ed. Salen and Zimmerman.

[3] -- Suits, Bernard. "Construction of a Definition." The Game Design Reader. Ed. Salen and Zimmerman.