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Let’s Talk About Video Game Statistics and How They Impact Us

This conversation is an old one, what is a girl gamer? But you can’t get to this idea without digging through a huge variety of propaganda and ideology that is created by the old gatekeepers of an industry created by and meant for “men.” In that regard, Let’s Talk About Video Game Statistics.

There will be some appropriate generalizations in that we’re talking about very general trends here but I do not believe that they will be distracting.

During college, at least I hope during college, you learn to question things. Statistics, data, and a variety of official sources can be manipulated to serve the needs of funders. Further, a lazy reliance on these numbers offer a means through which ideas are perpetuated and disseminated through a populace that are then referred to as ignorant and stupid. Let’s talk about the statistics used to explain the development of a diverse game industry.

Let’s go through an over-repeated example and one that is completely ignored.

During E3, you heard a lot of data being thrown around about the changing nature of the gamer. More people playing video games is a great thing, right? For example, each keynote mentions this number in some way, shape, or form:

40% of all video game players are women.
ESSENTIAL FACTSABOUT THE COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY

kaine

Images of Women 12: The Final Bout

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

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

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):

  1. Within culture at large we communicate ideas that represent things
  2. Those ideas become embodied in figures
  3. What ideas are communicated are controlled by purchasing power
  4. This is a symptom of American culture that the Japanese have called Moe
  5. As purchasing power occurs, the idea of what that idea is is solidified
  6. When that idea begins to stale, new ways to repackage that idea are tried
  7. The success of the idea depends more on consumer culture than it does on quality
  8. The majority culture in consumer society represents the shape and flow of that idea
  9. 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”
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

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.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 6

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.

Images of Women: Blog Entry 5

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 unfortunately, 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.

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).

Images of Women: Blog Entry 4

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

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

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

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