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Taste Hierarchies, Video Games, and Soap Operas

2012-01-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

The fine folks at Gameranx have recently published another feature of mine titled "One Life to Live: Denigrated Media Cultures."

Here's an excerpt:

For many reasons, the subjects of video games and soap operas rarely overlap. If anything, games and soaps might be thought of as forms having little in common. Soap operas are a television genre largely associated with long-term character development spanning decades, domestic drama, and the housewife audience. In contrast, video games are a medium onto themselves, rarely attempt character development, often stay away from domestic issues in narrative, and are associated with a young male audience. However, the two media forms have one central thing in common. Both are denigrated in popular culture, one thought of as the pastime of idle, stay-at-home mothers, the other the pastime of equally idle, immature man-boys.   And you thought you had nothing in common. 

You can read the rest of the feature by clicking here.

Odd Partners Post at Gameranx

2012-01-17T21:25:00.000-08:00

It has become apparent that this blog is now just an archive of links to articles and reviews I write for other sites. And I'm fine with that.

I recently posted a feature on Gameranx about video games and environmental themes.

 Modern game consoles like the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are huge energy hogs, as are the HDTVs and sound systems used in conjunction with today’s console and computer games. In a world where old game consoles, computers, and other electronics inevitably find their way into landfills, to leak toxic chemicals into the ground, or travel thousands of miles on their way to the capital of electronic waste, Guiyu, China, to be sorted and salvaged by people slowly being poisoned, gamers need an environmental wake up call more than ever.  

It's called Odd Partners: Videogames and environmentalism. The rest of the article can be found here.

Saving Yello Review

2012-01-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

As part of my ongoing series of iOS game reviews over at Game Critics, my critique of Saving Yello is now available.

Some people might argue that the difference between a real chef and somebody who just follows directions is the ability to take the ordinary and invent the extraordinary; the ability to come up with a concoction nobody has tasted before. With a cursory glance at Saving Yello, the impulse might be to claim Dreamfab and Tactile Entertainment were just following the directions in a video game cookbook. Add two spoonfuls of Angry Birds. A dash of Pixar andFinding Nemo. One cup of Nintendo's Kirby. Mix well. Hope for the best.

To check out the rest of the review, head here.

Sea Stars Review

2012-01-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

Looking for a review of the iOS game Sea Stars? Look no further. I have one up on Game Critics.

Here's an excerpt:

Under an azure sky, amidst the stacked, rolling waves of a nameless ocean, a stork loosens the handkerchief holding a baby dolphin and drops it into the sea below. The dolphin dives like a torpedo and leaps from the curled waters like a spinning top, engulfing clouds of coins while swimming ever onward toward the invisible horizon, toward the promise of whatever comes next... at least until a pair of jellyfish entangle the poor creature in their deadly tentacles, ending its life.

Let's try this again.

Read the rest of the concept review here.

The Poetry of Video Games (2011 Year in Review)

2011-12-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote a series of prose poems as a sort of Year in Review for video games. I liked doing it. As somebody who doesn't make his own games or engage in mod communities, I like to give back to the culture in some form. So I did it again this year. Except this time I was lucky enough to get it published on a website other than this blog.

You can find last year's Year in Review here.

For this year's series, head over to Gameranx or just click here.

Happy Hills Review

2011-12-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

I have a review of the iOS game Happy Hills over at Game Critics.

There's something about iOS games and demolition that go together, like peas and explosive carrots. The formula is familiar... but not yet fatigued.

Happy Hills is a physics-based puzzler about bombing obnoxious blocks off the top of not-so-happy hills languishing under their weight. This is accomplished by easily tapping the screen where players want to detonate an explosion. In order to get a more nuanced shot, players can hold a finger to the screen and determine the best spot to detonate based on trajectory and velocity indicators that appear. Once liberated of blocks, the hills rise skyward and recapture their eerie sense of joy. The changing heights of adjacent hills become part of the puzzle-solving as the game progresses.

To read the rest of the review, click here.

Bag it! Review

2011-12-02T22:12:00.001-08:00

The kind folks at Game Critics allowed me to review the iOS game Bag it! recently.

Here's an excerpt:

"No one ever says they want to be a bagger when they grow up, but after the recession, you have to take any job you can get. In a mania, you check out the corner cake shop, but Jill already works there. You then dash to the local diner only to discover the position filled by a woman named Flo. So where do you turn? After the recession, you can't be too choosy. You become a grocery bagger. You take your dreams and you bag them. You take your dignity and you Bag It!"

Check out the rest of the review here.

A Rickety Roller Coaster: Uncharted 3 and Disappointment

2011-11-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

A rickety roller coaster, rusted yet still riveting. That's how I'd describe Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. And yes, I think the alliteration is a stretch too.

Uncharted 3 explores the relationship between Drake and Sully while once again telescoping toward an ancient, hidden city and the treasure and/or horror entombed there. At this point, Naughty Dog wears the formula for this franchise on their shirt sleeves. This time around, that formula is rattled only marginally by the inclusion of a female villain who - let's face it - has to be inspired by Helen Mirren, a sudden sense of doubt in the characters regarding Drake and his irrational, previously unquestioned death drive, and an emphasis on sand and water physics over snow and ice dynamics. Otherwise, the same formula that structured the first two cinematic action-adventure games holds steady.

And until I played Uncharted 3, I thought I loved this formula.

An incredible sense of narrative and inertia forces you to scramble from one amazing location and set piece to the next, where at any given moment you might be running for your life, hugging a pillar, waiting for the opportunity to return fire, climbing impossible cliff-faces, or solving rote but still somewhat engaging puzzles. Even today, I reminisce fondly about the opening moments of Uncharted 2, waking up on a wrecked train car dangling from the side of a snowcapped mountain, and then having to navigate my way vertically up the swaying steel snake, awed by the scope of it all. But while the first two games largely concealed the reality of the narrow choices offered to the player, the sense of claustrophobia and the spectre of the game designer's guiding hand in Uncharted 3 announce its true ambitions audibly: it wants to be a movie, and it only begrudgingly allows you to actually play it.

Normally, this kind of approach doesn't necessarily bother me. While initially praised but ultimately criticized, Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire share a similar relationship to film and end up being less games and more interactive dramas. I'm fine with this. I enjoy these two games unapologetically.

So why does Uncharted 3 bother me so much?

The game has beautiful vistas, interesting, likable characters, and again, a sense of inertia that few games achieve. Unfortunately, it also features do-or-die scenarios, bullet-sponge enemies, odd bugs and glitches, sneaking scenarios that seem to want you to fight instead, and extreme spikes in difficulty, all of which rip you out of the inertia-driven experience and remind you you're ~~playing a game~~ riding a state of the art roller coaster that occasionally stops in the middle of the ride, particularly when you're suspended upside-down in a loop, leaving you blinking in wonder, blood rushing to your head.

Combat in the game happens either down the barrel of a gun or with a clenched fist. Gunplay feels off, despite Naughty Dog's claim to have improved it since Uncharted 2. Evidently, I was not the only one to make this observation as Naughty Dog now claims to be patching the game to improve the aiming system again, successfully this time. By the time you read this, this patch may have already been implemented.

In addition to gunplay, the developers have also bolstered Drake's hand-to-hand combat for this latest iteration, emphasizing counters, grapples, and environmental interaction. When the right gears are clicking into place, the combat in Uncharted 3 sizzles. You can smash a vase over an enemy's head, dash behind (yet another) crumbled wall, lob a few grenades at a shield-bearing mercenary inching toward your location, fire off a few rounds at a sniper in the distance, dropping him, and then bound over the wall into an oncoming attacker, punch him in the face, disarm him, and then finish him with his own weapon. This is just one example of the typical combat scenario.

But as I continued to play, small things started to tarnish the veneer on Uncharted 3's otherwise hectic and fun combat experience.

There are two sneaking scenarios in the game that I can recall, one in Syria and one in the airport level, that did not allow me to sneak through them. My A.I. companion would just sit at the start of the section without moving, so that even while I successfully reached the objective without being caught, the game would not let me progress. In the airport section, the game would just kill me automatically, a not-so-subtle way of telling me I was doing it wrong. In both scenarios, I ended up just blasting my way to the goal. Only when choosing to fight in these "optional" sneaking scenarios did my A.I. companion do anything but crouch at the start of the level, immobile.

In addition to being forced to fight when I'd rather sneak, some combat scenarios become lessons in player punishment. Uncharted 2 certainly had its difficult moments late in the game (nobody enjoyed fighting the yetis), but Uncharted 3 seems to produce almost impossible conflicts randomly. Snipers keep you pinned down while kamikaze-esque drones run up to your chosen embankment, forcing you out of hiding. This wouldn't be that problematic, but they are usually accompanied by armored guards equipped with shotguns capable of dropping you in just a few shots. Oh, and there's probably a few grenades at your feet at any given time. Later in the game, you have to face Uncharted's requisite mystical enemies, just as annoying at the yetis from Uncharted 2 and capable of transporting across the map, behind you, effectively destroying the combat system that Naughty Dog has devised for the game. I want to be clear here: Any enemy that negates the main combat design of your game should raise a red flag. These scenarios, combined with enemies that can only be killed with specific weapons, weapons you often have to wait to appear based on the script of the battle - I'm thinking of one particular fight aboard the cruise ship - make the combat feel like an exercise in memorization, as you try to figure out what the designers want you to do rather than what you'd like to do.

Besides combat, the main gameplay devices in Uncharted 3 are exploration, what I'll call chase sequences, and puzzle segments. Movement in Uncharted 3 is both better than ever and more revealing of the game's failures. The number of animations for the characters has gone up, creating life-like movements, especially for Drake, who now has an affinity for wall-touching, but at the same time, there's less climbing than previous games and the actual navigation of the gameworld, while always directed in this franchise, feels like you're just pushing forward on the control stick and letting the game do the rest. Again, this is fine until it reaches its limits, like when you die on a routine jump across a crevice because your character gets caught on a piece of geometry or the normal tendency of the game to autocorrect all your movements suddenly decides to do the opposite to your detriment. This was particularly irksome in the gorgeous and impressive ending sequence when a routine set of jumps meant to heighten the tension of the dramatic moment end up disrupting the moment entirely. Once again, when your game relies on the player's complete immersion in the kinetic experience and forward momentum of the action, make sure the game isn't continually ripping the player out of this action.

In a similar vein, chase sequences play like quick-time events sans the split-second button prompts. Instead, the player is supposed to push the stick in specific directions, occasionally hitting the jump button to avoid plunging to an inertia-ending death. These chases usually involve Drake running toward or away from the camera, sometimes the pursuer, sometimes the one being pursued by armed henchmen, bone-crushing waves, or poisonous arachnids. In all cases, the spectacle of the sequences is meant to conceal the fact they are only vaguely interactive, a fact which starts to jar the player when forced to restart the same sequence after dying due to pressing left when you should have pushed right.

One particular segment that bothered me involved Drake running to catch a disembarking cargo plane before as it rolls down a runway. While the narrative moment implies haste and a sense of urgency, Naughty Dog includes a brief bit where you're basically forced to stop your frantic dash toward the plane and engage in stop-and-pop gameplay in order to dispatch three guards who stand in your way and who kill you if you try to run past them. The chase scenarios sense of pace is thrown off; the plane seems to wait for you to finish with your small skirmish before picking up speed again just as you reach the tarmac. In what was supposed to be an incredible feat by Drake to catch an uncatchable plane becomes just another heavy-scripted sequence that contradicts itself.

Puzzles. Puzzles are fine in this game. I have nothing to say about the puzzles except that I'd like a more diverse array of challenges. I've pulled enough levers and rotated enough statues based on the preexisting sketches in my too convenient notebook. Thank you.

Finally, I want to spend a moment discussing the glitches in Uncharted 3. Outside of the odd inability to actually sneak in sneaking sequences, I only encountered one major bug in Uncharted 3. During one particular easy "puzzle" involving cogs, I was able to drop one of the vital large cogs onto the floor where it became lodged in the geometry of the floor. After this, the game wouldn't let me pick it back up. This was solved by reloading the section. Upon reloading, though, the avatars for Drake, Sully, and Elana froze, their limbs contorted as if posable mannequins, the simulacrum of the game temporarily lifted. An odd glitch that auto-corrected itself after several seconds. Normally, I shrug off such occurrences, but Uncharted 2 had even worse bugs, and the legacy Naughty Dog seems to be developing for glitches in their games is akin to Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda. Only while Bethesda has the excuse of developing a freeform open-world game with tens of thousands of permutations and possibilities, Naughty Dog is creating very linear, controlled, set piece scenarios. The point is bugs and glitches shouldn't be hard to find in this type of game, and allowing them to pass quality control is another way of ripping players out of the gameworld and opening your game up to the kind of scrutiny your see here. It's supposed to be seamless. The guiding hand of the director is supposed to be invisible. Until this iteration in the franchise, it almost was.

When I think of the first Uncharted I think of riding a jet ski up a raging river, the foam of the rapids washing over Drake's legs, my aim resting squarely on the mercenary perched atop a balcony in the distance. I think of exploring the depths of a German submarine, the camera pulling in tight on Drake as I maneuvered through the cramped, puddled corridors. I think of Nazi vampire-zombies. When I think of Uncharted 2 I think of the dangling train cars, the thick and sloshy snow, the realtime demolishing of a building in Rio, and running for my life from a tank through a Tibetan village. I think of petting an ox in a quaint mountain village. These are memories I cherish.

When I think of Uncharted 3 I should think of the capsizing cruise ship, the procedural rocking of the massive boat. I should think of running through the streets of Yemen, high on an unknown hallucinogen. I should think of singlehandedly taking out a cargo plane over the abyss of the desert, then grabbing a supply shipment at the last second and safely using its parachute to safely descend to the dunes below. I should think of the desperation in wondering those dunes (although I would have used longer takes and less fade ins and outs). I should think of the moments that Uncharted has always done better than other games.

But I don't think of those things. Instead, I think of unfair combat scenarios, broken sneaking segments, session-ending bugs and glitches, and an underlying structure to the entire series that's more movie than game, more spectacle than substance. More roller coaster than videogame. The worst part is, when I think of Uncharted 3, I can't help but think about Uncharted 1 and 2 and start to see the same problems in them retroactively. The worst part is, Uncharted 3 ruins the first two games for me too.

The game is still good. Great even, in some parts. But Uncharted 3 is my biggest disappoint in 2011.

It's a nice ride, sure, but it's a ride that reminds you of the money you paid to get on, not one that makes you forget you're in an amusement park to begin with.

Dark Souls and Collective Intelligence

2011-10-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Those that know of Dark Souls understand it as a very difficult game. Within the first minute of gameplay the designers throw a boss the size of a building at you - a corpulent, scaled behemoth - and expect you to deal with the situation armed with little more than a broken sword and a profound confusion. This area is only the tutorial.

The experience of most players after the tutorial, after being scooped up by a massive raven and deposited in the game's central hub area of Firelite Shrine, is a brutal, depressing one. Some will wander down the cliff side to the graveyard only to be overwhelmed by near-invincible, unforgiving skeletons. Some might descend to the lower regions via a nearby elevator, almost ironically comfortable in the thick gloom until they face an ethereal wraith-like creature invulnerable to their corporeal blows. The experience of most players at this early point is utter bewilderment, despair, and, perhaps rightfully, rage.

I want to suggest there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening in Dark Souls, and part of this misunderstanding is grounded in the traditional ways gamers approach games of this sort: as lone quests, as a linear progression through sign-post laden hallways, and as something fundamentally individualistic.

Dark Souls is not a game you play alone, although you'll spend the majority of your time doing so, most likely. Instead, Dark Souls is a game that you play with a community, a game experience that benefits from the organic encyclopedias, or wikis, that sprout up all over the Internet. Dark Souls is a game that when faced alone becomes a daunting task, a herculean challenge. Possible? Surely. But just as surely this approach will be lonely and masochistic. However, when faced with the full weight of the collective intelligence of the Dark Souls community behind you, the difficulty of the game seems to relax, the insurmountable odds seem to reorganize in your favor. The brick wall you've been banging your head on becomes a permeable bush, though a bush still laced with briery thorns.

Borrowing the term from Pierre Lévy, Henry Jenkins uses "collective intelligence" to describe online fan groups that come together and do collectively what each individual on her or his own could never do apart. Wikipedia is a perfect example of collective intelligence in action. The wealth of knowledge (and mis-knowledge) available is far greater than any person could produce individually. Moreover, for Jenkins, collective intelligence describes a new relationship between producers and consumers, one that blurs the lines between the creation and the consumption of media. While this conception applies more to creatively-inclined games, such as Second Life and, more recently, MineCraft, whose users actively build new objects in these virtual worlds, I still want to suggest that Dark Souls can also be theorized as a game that depends on collective intelligence.

More pointedly, I want to suggest that Dark Souls is a game that not only should be understood in terms of collective intelligence but must be understood in these terms.

A player could certainly attempt to go through the entire game alone without the aid of the online community and without the aid of fellow players - even friends - but the road would be a bitter and defeating one. Instead, using various wikis to learn various strategies and approaches to areas, encounters, and insidious bosses, a player can start to appreciate the game for more than the difficulty it's known for. A player can start to appreciate the brilliant, interconnected architecture of the world, the admirable amount of enemy types complete with their own A.I. behaviors, fighting styles, and deadly attacks. A player will realize she/he has entered a world that does not hold her/his hand, that does not bow to market trends and audience surveys. With the confidence of the community behind the player, she or he can appreciate Dark Souls for the unique and inspired game that lies, corpse-like, just underneath the veneer of intimidating difficulty.

Using the online community, a player can discover short cuts, recommended paths, early opportunities to grab vital weapons, and precious knowledge that will make her or his Odyssey through the first dozen hours of Dark Souls a little less stressful. But the collective intelligence aspect of Dark Souls does not stop with the online communities and the wikis they create; the game design itself facilitates this kind of group brainstorming and support. This is accomplished through messages players can leave in the environment to warn players in other worlds of impending doom, enemy ambushes, or to point the way toward treasure. Each player inhabits her or his own world except for specific instances when she/he can enter other players' worlds - but these messages allow players to create a constantly shifting matrix of knowledge that overlays the architecture of the world and guides (or deceives if the message is purposefully false) other Dark Souls players as they inch cautiously from the safety of one campfire to another. Essentially, the player can create glowing signposts to help or hinder other players in other worlds. It's an ingenious system, one pioneered by Dark Souls' spiritual predecessor, Demon's Souls, a game I would argue must also be understood in terms of collective intelligence.

Some games are meant to be played individually and discovered gradually. Dark Souls could be described as a game like this. However, countless anecdotes from players who have gone into this game without any preconceived notions and found themselves despising the results should say something about the design of the game. No, these personal stories do not point to a flaw in the design of the game, but in a flaw in the understanding of Dark Souls as a game you tackle by yourself, in a vacuum. Dark Souls is not a game you play in a vacuum, it's a game you play in the gameworld itself and beyond, a game you play by utilizing the collective intelligence of fellow players, a game you play by discussing a particular challenge with a friend (or hell, stranger), and a game you play, whether actively or not, with hundreds of thousands of other players through ghostly messages, through the traces of those who have treaded down these dark paths before. Dark Souls is a game that the community plays together.

Either that or it's a game where a player dies alone, again and again, hopelessly, wordlessly, thoughtlessly alone.

The Echoes Project: Mapping Human Experience

2011-10-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

I have just started a Media Geographies graduate course, a course nested in and concerned with the "spatial turn" in the humanities and, more importantly, in Media and Cultural Studies. In fact, next to the incorporation of media other than film and the influence of continental philosophy (think Marx, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault), the spatial turn may be one of the most important shifts (or turns) in the field of Media Studies. Abby Smith Rumsey describes this spatial turn as "as exploration of space and place in time, supported by technologies that represent spatial and temporal dimensions and permit scholars to discover, analyze, represent, and argue various interpretations of spatial date." In other words, the spatial turn in media studies opens up a whole new landscape - so to speak - for media scholars to explore film, television, music, video games, and so on. Additionally, this awakened spatialism allows for a rediscovery of scholarship never before recognized for its spatial analysis. Theories and models from other disciplines, namely geographers, suddenly become important and again allow us to reexamine mediums in new and valuable ways.

For example, David J. Bodenhamer attempts to delineate the use of Global Information Systems (GIS) and mapping for the humanities; while many humanities scholars have eschewed this technology because of its emphasis on concrete, linear, static, and empirical data rather than on more ambiguous, dynamic, and uncertain material (things us humanities scholars adore), we have to realize the value of incorporating space into our research. When we're trying to get from one place to another or understand the gradation of a given terrain, GIS maps are extremely useful. But when we're trying to understand the experience of moving to an unknown city for a potential job or the meaning of a specific spot on a wooded mountain, a map, regardless of how detailed, has less to offer. Yet there are still ways of incorporating space and the mapping of space into humanities research.

In fact, Bodenhamer continues, "A deep map of heritage and culture, centered on memory and place, ideally would work in a similar fashion. Each artifact - a letter, memoir, photograph, painting, oral account, video, and so forth - would constitute a separate record anchored in time and space, thus allowing us to keep them in relationship, and each layer would contain the unique view over time - the dynamic memory - of an individual or a social unit. The layers could incorporate active and passive culture artifacts, such as memories generated by intentional recall as well as memories left to us in some fixed or material form." Even in this slightly abstract example, Bodenhamer begins to theorize what a "map" fashioned to the tastes of humanities scholars might look like.While reading this, I too started to think of what this kind of mapping would look like. How would one begin to map, to capture and archive, human experience, memories, personal moments - the intangible minutiae of lived experience, emotion, tied to geography and place? Being a scholar invested in digital geographies, in the virtual (and also corporeal) space of video games, I immediately imagined a digital space constructed to resemble its offline, real-world counterparts, inhabited by - for lack of a better term - digital ghosts, digital memories, digital echoes, so to speak. In short, I wondered if a project might be able to act as a sort of virtual archive or library for human experience.

The way it would work on a small scale: Pick a high-traffic, public place, a park for example. Advertise that you're looking to collect personal stories, anecdotes, and memories (ideally emotionally charged ones) people may have associated with the park. Then, design the environment and allow users (players?) to inhabit this environment. Depending on the time and the date, the user would be witness to a corresponding memory. For instance, if the memory is from May 14 at 2:30pm and if the user is using the Echoes Project on an anniversary of this temporal-spatial memory, she or he will be able to relive this memory digitally through a combination of NPC (non-player characters) acting out the memory, audio of the subject actually telling their story (this would be done via video-captured confessionals), and manipulation of the lighting and topography of the environment to highlight atmosphere and establish appropriate mood. Here's a rudimentary example of what I have in mind.

Ideally, instead of a small video-chat window, I'd like to incorporate the individual's confessional image into the scenery, as in mapping it onto the sky. This is best exemplified in the recent synesthesia game Child of Eden. In the below clip you can see the way the game's central character, Lumi, is mapped onto the flower petals (skip to 1:55):

A cohort of mine mentioned geocaching - treasure-hunting communities that operate via GPS - as another possible way of potentially theorizing a map of human experience. I like this suggestion because of the way it involves real-world locations and actually traveling to these spaces; unfortunately, it does not solve the problem of actually "mapping" the pregnant moment and the fussy memory - fussy because of its inability to recapture the moment - that archives the moment for the human brain.

While the "spatial turn" in the humanities does not have this conundrum as its sole question - there is also the problem of speculating spatial approaches to the studying of media (see Couldry and McCarthy's MediaSpace and the 5 levels of MediaSpace - I believe it is an interesting problem to mull over.

Shout Out: GSU's In Media Res

2011-09-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

Recently I did a post on the Spike Video Game Awards for In Media Res, Georgia State University's Moving Image Studies blog.

Here's the introduction to that post:

Since 2003, the Spike TV Video Game Awards (VGAs) have aired every December to the collected groans of most gamers, despite their emphasis on the hardcore gaming market of males aged 18-49. While there are many prestigious video game awards ceremonies, including the GDC Awards and the AIAS Awards, only Spike’s VGAs are televised and have a presence in popular culture. Many game critics complain that the VGAs exist simply as an excuse to sell advertising space to corporate sponsors and game marketers looking to get their next big hit recognized by their core demographic; while I do not disagree with these critics, I suggest the VGAs perform a larger disservice to the games industry.

To read the rest, please head over to the full post here.

Talking to the Player: Bulletstorm and No More Heroes

2011-01-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

Bulletstorm is the next big thing from Epic Games before Gears of War 3 releases in the Fall of 2011, and its long-awaited demo just went live yesterday for the Xbox 360.

As near as I can tell from pre-release coverage and from the demo's half-hearted attempt at a trailer, the game involves a space marine and his gang of post-apocalyptic cyberpunk cowboys (and girls) becoming stranded on a hostile planet and fighting through hordes of mutated, sadistic canon-fodder in order to escape. The hook here is not the narrative or the comical, stereotypic characters, at least I hope not. Instead, like the oft forgotten Sega game The Club (or for that matter MadWorld), Bulletstorm creates environmental playgrounds for its players to run rampant through, disposing of the enemy NPCs in as gruesome and convoluted a manner possible, all in an effort to score the highest amount of points.

It sounds like something every "core" gamer should appreciate and, in fact, revel in, right? So why does it rub me the wrong way?

The demo for the game begins in a similar fashion to the opening of cult classic No More Heroes, a game I have written about to some extent on this site. Bulletstorm's protagonist Grayson Hunt breaks the fourth wall of the game by hailing the player directly, explaining how awesome the game is with "colorful" language, usually consisting of the terms "motha fucka" and "cock". At the end of the developer diary below, you can hear a soundbite of Grayson growling, "Hey, dick-tits, this game ain't going to pre-order itself." This "speaking to" the player strikes me as something worth discussing in the future, especially considering the way both games, No More Heroes and Bulletstorm, seem steeped in a very specific version of masculinity in video game culture. Instructions and inside jokes notwithstanding, I'm curious to look into what other games "speak" to the player in this kind of "bro-meets-drill-instructor" way.

The video below features the game's writer Rick Remender and the game's producer Tanya Jessen discussing the story and characters of Bulletstorm. Interestingly, Bulletstorm has a female producer; so many people tend to argue that the problem with masculinity in video games stems from the lack of women in the industry, especially in positions of power where they might have decisions over design and game content. This same general perspective is cited as one the problems with race and sexuality in games. Scholars often point out the fact that white, straight, men make up the majority of game developers. Unfortunately, if Bulletstorm points to anything illuminating, it's that regardless of the sex/race/sexuality of those creating the games we play, if the target culture/market remains the same then the games will continue to feature the same masculinized characters, representations, and addresses.

So what separates No More Heroes' Travis Touchdown from Bulletstorm's Grayson Hunt? Ultimately, not much. While Travis may be part of Otaku culture, a culture often feminized by traditional masculinity for failing to live up to masculine standards, he responds by idealizing professional wrestlers, obsessing over sex and violence, and behaving in the exact same manner as the more traditionally masculine Grayson Hunt who belongs to the culture of the armed forces. Both games ridicule and encourage the player through verbal abuse to take part in the onscreen violence and show the game and its hero what the player is made of, to in essence prove his or her manhood - because even if the player is a female, the game offers the same masculinized address.

And from the music, editing, and sound effects used in its production, the developer diary arguably features this same exact masculine address (think Spike TV), again regardless of the sex of its producer.

Perhaps the reason I prefer NMH is because regardless of how hard Travis tries to be the ideal man, he constantly fails. Travis does not seduce Sylvia, he begs her for sex on his knees. Travis does not outsmart his enemies, he falls victim to their obvious tricks, such as Destroy Man's electric handshake. Travis does not always conquer his foes triumphantly; in fact, in one of the first game's memorable moments the boss Travis is supposed to defeat is killed by an NPC before the fight even begins. Travis simultaneously embodies the masculinity of video game culture and reveals its weaknesses, its faults, the cracks in the surface it would rather have us ignore.

So far, from what I've seen of Bulletstorm, Grayson Hunt lacks the vulnerability of Travis Touchdown. He's not coming from a place in society like that has been traditionally disparaged, such as Otaku culture. Grayson is already traditionally manly. Unlike Travis, he has nothing to prove.

The troubling aspect of games like Bulletstorm isn't that they feature these unreal masculine stereotypes or indulge in the mindless fun of cursing, flexing muscles, and brandishing firearms, but that these games collectively help to define gaming culture and to deny and eliminate addresses and players that do not fit into the white, straight, masculine paradigm. These games create players akin to Travis Touchdown, players who recognize their own masculine failings and then try to emulate these flawed ideals to their own detriment.

The Heart in Minerva's Den

2011-01-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

The first BioShock was the reason I went out and purchased an Xbox 360 in August of 2007. With its Ayn Randian literary influences, its Art Deco aesthetics, and its wonderfully imaginative world of rapture, the game just spoke to me. Luckily, the game not only lived up to my expectations, it surpassed them. To this day, BioShock remains one of the finest examples of the medium, in my opinion.

But when BioShock 2 was announced, I was not excited. In fact, I was rather offended. On the now infamous argument over whether or not games are art, I fall confidently in the “yes” category. To me, BioShock is art. And what kind of artistic work gets a sequel? Is there a sequel to the Mona Lisa? Is there a follow-up to Guernica? No, of course not, so why was BioShock getting a sequel, other than the obvious cash in?

I waited until its release in February of last year to give BioShock 2 my attention. As I progressed through the halls of Rapture for my second time, I kept waiting for the hook. Sure, you now played as a Big Daddy, those monstrous submariners clad in late 19th century diving suits from the first game, but you were given that privilege in the final portions of the original BioShock. Many people praise BioShock 2 for its closing hours, especially in comparison to the unpopular falling action of the original. And the praise is not undeserved. Yet part of the impact of the first game was the twist right before confronting Andrew Ryan, symbolized by the phrase, “Would you Kindly?” True, BioShock 2 offers the unique experience of playing as a Little Sister in the final levels, but ultimately the game’s storyline was just too – is this a valid criticism? – straight forward. Direct. Literal. Succinct. And that’s fine. It just didn’t affect me the way the first (superior) game did.

Enter Minerva’s Den, the long awaited single-player, stand-alone downloadable content for BioShock 2. When initially released to positive impressions, I was already too soured by BioShock 2 to care. I replayed the first BioShock instead this past summer, and I had a great time doing it. I told myself I didn’t need another disappointment.

I am prepared to admit this was a mistake.

With a much more compact and personal, if not less ideological, story than BioShock 2, Minerva’s Den tells the forgotten tale of Rapture’s computing core where a supercomputer named The Thinker resides. As an anonymous Alpha series Big Daddy named Sigma, the player enters Minerva’s Den with a bang, literally, and then sets off to discover the intricate relationship between The Thinker, its designer Charles Milton Porter, and the nefarious Reed Wahl. It’s a much smaller cast of characters the BioShock 1 or 2, but ultimately Minerva’s Den is better for it.

The 3-5 hour game boils down the whole of BioShock 2’s mechanics to three levels, offering the player all the plasmids, weapons, and upgrades in a expedited fashion, along with a few new additions like the Ion Laser and Gravity Well plasmid, so that within a few hours you feel as powerful as you did during the final frantic hours of BioShock 2. However, this increased pacing does not disrupt the flow of the gameplay. In fact, it feels rewarding to upgrade so quickly. In Minerva’s Den’s case, less truly is more.

The joy of Minerva’s Den is the story, just like the original BioShock. Of course, the gameplay, the mechanics, and the controls work great. They are what allow the player to get lost in the damp, rank, rusting halls of Rapture for what might be the third time. The combat is as solid as it was in BioShock 2, and even the sequences when the player must protect the Little Sisters from waves of Splicers aren’t particularly annoying.

But that’s not why Minerva’s Den was one of the best, often overlooked, gaming experiences of 2010. No. The reason everybody who finishes Minerva’s Den walks away with a smile on their face knowing they have just finished something beautiful, is because the moving narrative is delivered in an artful, careful manner. Delicately. And even if you figure out what is going on before the game tells you, even if you have completed the plot’s puzzle before the game hands you the last piece, the final walk you take through the solemn halls of Rapture toward the game’s dénouement offer something so few video games can do sincerely. Heart.

While perhaps not the best comparison, first because of its pretentions, and second because of its reliance on the established medium of literature for cultural relevance, I am comfortable writing that, like Portal in 2007, Minerva’s Den is the perfect example of the “short story” form in the medium of video games.

Upon the Realization...

2010-12-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

My friend Matt has been in Antarctica for the last 12 months. Like, the actual south pole. Recently he returned to civilization with a clean slate. When one contemplates existence in the white wastelands of the far, far south, one comes to certain epiphanies, certain realizations about the nature of things, about the future, about purpose and motivation. Having nothing else to do with himself, Matt decided to apply to grad schools. I hear it's all the rage right now.

The Poetry of Video Games (2010 Year in Review)

2010-12-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

Rather than provide another “Best of 2010” list like every other publication or website out there, I am putting together a series of prose poems that summarizes the year in video games that was. And what a great year, huh? Many of these pieces communicate my love for the respective games, although there is at least one – guess? – which I include because of its economic importance and not because I think it does anything for the medium.

Facing the Void (Mass Effect 2)

Beyond the black of the last thick curtain of space the ancient ones wait, clicking their archaic mandibles, undulating mechanically in a dreamless slumber, a vast, dead ocean of monstrous forms, adrift as jellyfish on the lifeless surface of an empty sea. They scheme. Shimmer like moribund fireflies. They plot across eons, across clouds of gamma and dust, across deserts of inert matter and vacuum.

This swarm of twisted carapace fear only one thing, although their fear is anathema, burning hatred, the slow boil of an acrid, sulfuric quagmire. They fear a captain. This captain stands as any individual stands in the great void of existence, in the face of his or her fellows, both alien and familiar. This captain stands alone. A ship. A crew. A mission. A galaxy of choices, of hive-like cities as dense and electric as a circuit, of insectoid slavers, flotsams of scrap metal lingering on the edge of a singularity.

Six Inches (Heavy Rain)

If it was only the balloon and not the boy that wandered into the crowd, lost, drifting, as balloons once loosened are known to do in the climax of a celebration or parade, where the loss of grip means only the loss of a dollar or two. But it was the boy beneath the balloon, the crossing, the car and the velocity and the father who jumped too late. It was the loss of the balloon and the boy. It was the loss and the rains that followed.

If it were only the blackouts, the suffering, the cold TV dinners, the cobwebs and the daily schedule chalked onto the kitchen board to remind him: life still happens. If it was only the divorce and the distance between him and his surviving son, the silence as loud as the television that filled the quiet between them the way helium might fill a balloon, indifferently.

If it was only the pain a father feels over a silent son. But it was also the impossibility of what followed: the human theft, the macabre newspaper clippings, the origami figures found on the young clammy bodies, their mud-smeared faces. It was the feeling that the father did this to himself, that he did not know (himself any better than he knew) his surviving son, caged beneath a sewer grate, small fists wrapped around rusted bars, water waist high and rising, rising, rising, the name of his dad on his white, trembling lips.

The Fringe (Red Dead Redemption)

At dusk the Rio is a long, unfurled flag rippling in the soft breeze; the bullets piercing her velvet surface are heard as a series of chirps and then forgotten to silence once again. A man is crossing the roiling current on a raft, headed south toward distant cacti, the ravages of civil strife, tequila hovels, lecherous generals, and the wet ash of poverty.

The unsure cliffs over the river divide the two lands, America and Mexico, the way a lightning bolt divides a tree, forever sending the surviving halves outward in opposite directions, native enemies. But the same indifferent, dry wind haunts each wasteland, the same sicknesses plague each small outpost or town on the fringe where the two landscapes, and the two mindsets culled from the landscapes, meld together. Thick with grease and lousy, the man sneaks onto and up a makeshift dock, flinching with each creak under his waterlogged boots. Before the slouching watchmen knows it, before he can shake the haze of cerveza and tobacco from his head, he watches dumbly as the man rides off with his horse. Cooling with the onset of darkest night, the dead wind whistles a folkish lullaby.

Girl, Your Tongue (Super Mario Galaxy 2)

Girl, there is no tongue for me but your tongue, and your tongue is a firecracker in the face, the last surviving string of an antique guitar, its one open note a symphony to these tired ears. Honey, your tongue is the long, long trail of the taffy from fist to clenched teeth, the rope I use to ascend out of every hole I dig myself into. Babe, you’re jalapeno hot, cloud soft, iridescent as a parking lot streetlamp. I could watch you eat for days, could watch you jump and wiggle your way to the top of my heart. Sugar, pardon the frank expression, but I could ride you across galaxies, from one planetoid to another, could polish your saddle for light years. Girl, there is no tongue for me but your tongue, and your tongue is honey suckle sticky love.

Among the Mists (Limbo)

It is funny, the fake mechanical legs that hang from steel thread as thick as a boy’s forearm, the way they raise in awful menace, pinpoint sharp and deadly, only to fall to the ashen ground again, harmless.

The young ones giggle at the mimicry but they have never met the monstrous thing the steel legs mimic. It is fangs and shadow and silence.

Incandescent moths linger on empty branches. Bottomless puddles whisper Siren songs. The faint glow of worms dot the canopy like dying stars behind the last great fog.

They say a small boy wanders alone out among the mists and cragged paths. They say he is lost. Like all of us here.

Awe (MineCraft)

I have seen the works of the gods, and I have wept in their presence.

No Songs (Halo Reach)

Tuffs of grass grow around it, the way grass grows around a stone, giving the respect an ageless object deserves. Its metal is corroded, its glass visor rived into a fissured spider web, the cold sun reflected in an empty sky on its split surface. Dried blood still clings like caulk to the inside, splattered in the pattern of dripped paint. An insect crawls along the slits that acted as vents, allowing for breath when there was still someone alive to draw one. An eroded, yellowed beak pokes around the helmets periphery, the broad plumage of the tall bird fanning in the wind, a few stray feathers flying off. Finally, the mammoth bird sniffs out the insect, snatching the small creature up with a flick of its beak. There is nobody around to witness this act, no choirs to sing the insect’s dirge; no songs at all even for the forsaken, fractured helmet and all the desperate history it hints at.

Lobbing Meat (Super Meat Boy)

If there is rhythm to the tossing of flat stones against the uneven tension of a lake’s surface or the careful navigating of rush hour traffic, bladder full, or the defeat of daily existence in modern capitalism; if there is a challenge to picking the right flower for the right girl on the right day or to avoiding the wrong words on the wrong trip in the wrong car, or to not giving up when the first few pancakes turn out blackened and deformed, then there is rhythm and a challenge in the act of lobbing a piece of raw meat at a wall repeatedly, for hours, until it lands exactly where and when you want it to.

Pogonip (Call of Duty: Black Ops)

There was a battlefield and there were bodies and the bodies were of men and women and children and voices rose up from the bodies, and the voices spoke over and through each other until a new language was born, and the survivors of the world fell in love with the new language, suspended in the air like ash after a fire or pogonip on the tips of leafless, skeletal trees, and the world did not see horror in the awful fields of the dead, their corpses rotting, their brothers and sisters marching over their wounds indifferent.

So the war did not end, and when the next war was introduced by the crooked, malevolent grinners in suits, the whole affair continued, the bodies falling, bloating, bursting, and the voices of the dead deafening the thoughts of the living, creating a world at war with itself and with language and with everything decent in mankind.

Smoke like Hanging Lace (Rock Band 3)

I can’t remember every detail of the story – my friend Eddy and I were at a bar, the lights were dim, cigarette smoke (this was before the bans) hung in the air like lace you could inhale – but I remember the look on Eddy’s face when the barkeep asked if he wanted more peanuts in the bowl his fingers had been molesting for the last half an hour. He looked almost disdainful, his eyes questioning, untrusting. “I’ve got plenty peanuts right here,” Eddy slurred. “There’s nothing exciting about more peanuts, is there?” Sure, he was drunk, but that didn’t excuse his behavior. I was getting tight myself, but I could still feel it when I turned red, embarrassment by association, because I was somehow now connected with this man, this troglodyte, in the eyes of the barkeep with her ratted hair, her big eyes, and her purple tank top. She would think poorly of me, would be slower to serve me another round, would be less generous with the pour, would maybe even sneak in a spot of saliva at the rounded bottom of my next pint. “But Eddy,” I said to him in front of her so she could hear, “If you like the peanuts you’re eating, then getting more of them should be a good thing.” He considered this, placing his fat pointer finger to his purple lips, almost suckling the tip before agreeing with me. The barkeep smiled and refilled the bowl. She probably winked at me, but I turned away too quickly to notice, perfectly satisfied with myself. After his next couple bites, his teeth filthy with the irregular shapes of peanut brittle, Eddy even remarked, “These are even better than the old ones.” Hell, I thought to myself, fantasies of the barkeep blurring my thought process, Eddy gulping down his drink so that the remnants slithered down the inside of his glass like foam snakes, even if the nuts were from the same bag as before, maybe Eddy was right. Maybe he had a point.

Simple Tugs (Kirby’s Epic Yarn)

It’s the feeling of finding your childhood toys by accident in the attic in the box at the bottom of the pile after the funeral of your last surviving parent, after the relatives leave, after you’ve braced the last embrace, swallowed the last hard gulp, and finally put the kids in front of the television to just, you know, unwind. It’s the slow peeling open of the box to reveal all those small plastic shapes that used to inhabit whole worlds you’d build up from nothing and no one, from dust under the bed or from the glare of refracted, windowed sunlight.

In your worlds zippers opened doors and everything could be strung together or pinched apart by the simple tug on a piece of yarn. The walls were fabrics you would paint on, stretch, and fold. And you could enter them and hide among the wall people, your form visible to the outside world through a tiny mound that shifted along the wall the way a dog might scuttle under a thrown carpet, and you laughed because you imagined Mom poking the bubbled up wall, mystified at the magic of it all. In this world people lived forever, and Mom would never die, and cupcakes were swimming pools, and you were as powerful as a locomotive or an embattled tank not yet abandoned to rust.

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 16

2010-09-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 15

2010-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

This is one part of a much larger argument. I will ultimately be posting the entirety of my Master's thesis and will hopefully have all the parts interlinked by the end of it. You can see the full list of parts below:

Part 1: Abstract
Part 2: Project Description
Part 3: Review of Literature
Part 4: Methods
Part 5: Chapter Breakdown
Part 6: Feminizing the Casual: The Mom Test
Part 7: Feminized Design: Gender and Technology
Part 8: "Sometimes I Play for Me": Advertising Casual Game Devices
Part 9: That Means You, Soccer Mom: Casual Gaming in the Popular Press
Part 10: Because they aren't Us: Fear of the Feminine in Gaming Culture
Part 11: From Chainsaws to Guitars: Gendered Address and Video Games
Part 12: Masculinities in Hardcore Games
Part 13: Femininities in Casual Games
Part 14: Rockers and Mafioso: Extratexts
Part 15: Representation and Game Design in Rock Band and Mafia Wars
Part 16: Conclusion

Although the Mafia Wars ad might be seen as an ironic postfeminist address to female players because of the way it smoothes the rigid edges of the mobster’s masculinity, the overall masculinized player interpellation found in the marketing for Rock Band and Mafia Wars reflects the masculinized address of the narratives and representation in the two games. For instance, the narratives of both games focus on getting to the proverbial top in your respective field, either as an international rock superstar or as a powerful Mafia boss in command of hundreds of thugs and black markets. Indeed, an often cited criticism of the masculinity of rock music is its emphasis on the mastery of instruments and its insistence on being bigger and louder than the competition. The story in Rock Band has your band starting by performing at lowly basement shows and working your way through the bar scene, local venues, and finally national and international sold-out stadium shows. This reflects the emphasis in traditional rock music on increasing complexity of sound, larger fan pools, and more explosive spectacle, all of which have helped foster the discursive masculinity of rock music.

Likewise, to the extent that it even has a narrative to speak of, Mafia Wars might be seen as representing a gradual rise from the life of a nameless henchman to a position as head of an ever-growing crime family spanning territories and continents. George S. Larke-Walsh (2010) argues that “articulations of masculinity in postclassical gangster films arise from conflicts between key elements within conceptions of masculinity as a subject position (notions of competitiveness, aggression and individual supremacy) and the structures of Mafia communities as collective hierarchies” (p. 160). Like the myriad of films Mafia Wars draws from, the game creates a masculinized subject position characterized as competitive and hierarchical. Indeed, we can already see the masculine address of Mafia Wars, exemplified through its emphasis on violence and power, running up against the feminized design of the game that forces the player to rely on and work with others in order to proceed. The same conflicts Larke-Walsh identifies as up for negotiation in postclassical gangster films can be seen in Mafia Wars. Competition, specifically the aggressive sort, has traditionally been thought of as a masculinized trait, while cooperation, on the other hand, has been culturally feminized. While neither Rock Band nor Mafia Wars features a full-fledged diegetic world, the scant narratives they do offer revolve around notions of competition, mastery, and rising to power.

The task before the characters in Rock Band and Mafia Wars is actually similar to the narrative arc for a player in Cake Mania or Diner Dash, yet the type of industry in which the player has to progress is what ultimately genders the titles. All the games follow a Horatio Alger narrative of rags to riches, of anonymity to fame, but the feminized Cake Mania and Diner Dash do so in the cake decorating and service industries, businesses which have been culturally linked to the feminine. The way Jill and Flo continually upgrade their shops and restaurants to allow for larger crowds and more exposure mirrors the way Rock Band gradually opens up larger venues and Mafia Wars offers more “job” options and ways to increase your money and power. Essentially the narratives share similar ends but it is important to note that Jill’s quest to become the best cake decorator is predicated on the goal of eventually re-opening her grandparents’ cake shop and Flo’s attempt at running her own business is in part the story of female self-discovery after years of toiling as a stockbroker. Emotions, close family ties, and self-fulfillment are woven into the narratives of the feminized games but are largely absent from the masculinized Rock Band and Mafia Wars, at least in narrative terms.

In addition to the invisible narratives at work, Rock Band and Mafia Wars evoke and utilize aesthetics, styles, and art that reproduce their respective masculinized cultures. When actually playing Rock Band, the player stares at a moving track dotted with nodes that represent musical notes. However, behind this track, a polygonal band representing the player(s) can be seen playing the song in one of over a dozen venues. Again, these venues range from dingy basement shows that conjure a DIY, punk cultural ethos to giant stadiums with advanced pyrotechnics and lighting displays that play into heavy metal’s history of spectacle. The band members featured are either presets included with the game, randomized characters, or player-created characters. Regardless, all end up as either stereotypes of particular rock genres or amalgamations created through the mixing of styles. The preset characters represent different styles of rock, including the paint and spikes of heavy metal, the shaved heads and tattoos of punk, the long hair and sweaters of grunge, and the black S/M leather and pale skin of goth rock. In other words, the aesthetics of the game borrow exclusively from tropes across rock genres, tropes which are nested in the (re)production of rock masculinities.

Moreover, the representation of rock in Rock Band avoids any traditionally feminine qualities. As Norma Coates (1997) writes, “Rock masculinity, at least the stereotype which, I assert, is still very much in play discursively and psychically, is one in which any trace of the ‘feminine’ is expunged, incorporated or appropriated” (p. 52). While the sex of avatars can be chosen by the player and there are plenty of female preset characters, this does not equate to a gender-neutral relationship between rock and sexed bodies in the game. Instead, I suggest that regardless of the sex of the rock avatars, the player address is still a masculinized one because of the game’s investment in rock culture, a culture that, according to Coates, annihilates any feminine presence or appropriates and disarms it. Indeed, although Rock Band includes men and women avatars, there is the potential to read in its representation a hidden misogyny. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press (1995) spend the first half of their book The Sex Revolts illustrating the traditional misogyny of rock music. Even if rock thinks of itself as anti-establishment and against hegemonic notions of gender, Reynolds and Press argue that “rock is not a revolutionary art, that its insubordination and ego tantrums are complicit with or bound within the terms of capitalism and patriarchy” (p. 3). Without even pointing out that Rock Band is a product in a capitalistic market, just owing to the fact that Rock Band adheres so closely to its source material of rock culture, regardless of the specific genre, much of the ideological and gendered history of that culture gets transferred to the game. As in actual rock culture, patriarchy becomes the invisible ideological structure at work within the game and is only expressed surreptitiously through avatar performances and outfits.

In a similar fashion, Mafia Wars carries the gendered baggage of its source materials with it into the gaming space. According to Larke-Walsh, the mobster “displays a ‘manliness’ that is reminiscent of the frontier men idolized in cultural mythologies and pulp fiction since the nineteenth century, a ‘manliness’ that almost, if it were not for his criminal and immigrant status, approximates the ideal form of masculinity, both physically and mentally” (p. 162). You begin Mafia Wars as a fledgling mobster that must, much like frontier men, build up a fortune from nothing. Hence, while the only representation of your character in the game is the picture you choose to upload, the game still represents your position as a masculinized one common to all aspiring mobsters. Moreover, when you encounter men of authority, often the boss characters in the game, they wear suits and fedoras, traditionally respectable and masculine attire, and are illustrated with stern, serious faces. Even if the player is a female, the gameworld speaks to her through a masculine address, and since there is little history of women as either hired guns or kingpins in organized crime, the player is addressed as a masculine subject, if not as an actual male subject. Moreover, the conflict between an ideal masculinity and immigrant status is completely erased from the text of Mafia Wars; the importance that race and ethnicity play in traditional Mafioso culture erased completely, replaced by a faceless veneer of unseen, white masculinity.

So far I have suggested that the traditional masculine address of hardcore games is present in the casual games Rock Band and Mafia Wars, games in a category that has been discursively feminized. In this analysis, I want to engage with Rock Band and Mafia Wars on the semiotic level as well as the structural level of design, play mechanics and rules. While the marketing and representation of Rock Band and Mafia Wars hail a masculine subject and thus one associated with the masculinized hardcore gamer, the gameplay and structure of these games hail a casual player, one that has been discursively feminized. Hence, these two games highlight a gendered tension in the casual game space, one that suggests the same masculine anxieties that permeate the hardcore gaming space are also present in the casual gaming space. These tensions also highlight the problems with the discursive communities that continually reproduce the differences between hardcore and casual by evoking and thus recreating them again and again.

As already mentioned, one way these differences are evoked in discourse is through the control method present in the game. Rock Band features mimetic controls that have led to its popularity and some of its classification as a casual game. Mimetic controls are meant to mimic the actions of real-world activities, such as playing a musical instrument. The player holds the plastic guitar controller like an actual guitar, sits at the drum set and bangs away as if seated at a real drum set, and sings into the microphone the way people so often do in Karaoke bars. Juul describes these mimetic controls as being easier to pick up than standard joystick and button controls because they reproduce actions most people are familiar with and allow for learning through observation as well as experimentation. Without the masculinized, complex controls of traditional games bogged down with dozens of buttons and multiple analog sticks to alienate new players, Rock Band offers a broader appeal. As I alluded to earlier while discussing Peggle, Cake Mania and Diner Dash, this lack of complexity in the controls might be read as a feminized attribute, especially by traditional hardcore gamers who often devalue and feminize casual games based on their more welcoming and simpler controls.

Indeed, if reproducing the movements of actual musicians can be called “simple,” then the central play mechanic of Mafia Wars initially appears to be even simpler. As little more than a collection of static screens littered with buttons, Mafia Wars is primarily played through a series of mouse clicks. Part of the reason Microsoft’s Solitaire and Minesweeper are two of the most popular games in the world is their expectations of the user (as well as their obvious association with the ubiquitous Windows operating system). Most people in developed nations understand how to move a computer mouse and click a button, and any game that utilizes this basic computer function has a much larger potential audience than a game that asks the player to memorize a complex set of commands on a game controller or a keyboard. In Mafia Wars players click to do a job, click to buy and steal property, click to buy weapons and upgrades, and click to recruit their Facebook friends for their mafia. Yet many core gamers view this method of interaction as a relatively passive mode of control, especially compared to the mastery needed to manipulate modern gamepads and mouse/keyboard combinations. This passivity and simple control scheme is a large reason cultural discourses have feminized the casual gaming space.

Looking at the design of the games, Rock Band remains simple structurally, but allows for complex gameplay that caters to both casual and hardcore players. The primary play mechanic in Rock Band is matching your button presses, strumming, or drum beats to the notes scrolling on screen when they intersect with nodes at the bottom of the screen. This sounds complicated, but on easy mode the player has plenty of time between notes (the song continues unplayed) and can acclimate her or himself to the controls; on the highest difficulty however the player has to have lightning fast reflexes and perfect timing in order to finish a song. This provides a hybrid nature to the gameplay, one that allows for players of all levels to interact with the game. Mafia Wars operates exclusively through the clicking of menus, which any computer user will have no trouble navigating, but the game offers an insufficient tutorial and leaves the player to figure out for her or himself the best strategies for play. In this sense, Mafia Wars resembles the classic text-based, role-playing games of early computer gaming and as such, caters to an experienced gamer’s understanding of traditional game mechanics, such as leveling up characters, monitoring stats, and exploring game options intuitively. This arguably complicated (read: hardcore) learning-curve contradicts the intuitive mouse-based interactions, the social structure of Mafia Wars, and its emphasis on cooperative gameplay. As a result, Mafia Wars might be understood as both hardcore and casual in its gameplay. Thus, Mafia Wars’ masculinized player address and steep learning curve seem to be at odds with some of its discursively feminized design elements, again dissolving the neat binary between game and gender categories.

Another feminized area of Rock Band’s and Mafia War’s design is their emphasis on social features. Rock Band encourages the player to start a band with others, either in her or his living room or across the Internet. Significantly, part of Rock Band’s appeal is the ability to play and experience music with friends and family. While the game certainly features competitive modes of play, its cooperative modes are at the core of its experience and also the mode its marketing highlights. Additionally, to further encourage new players, presumably parents and tentative friends, the game features four difficulty levels, including Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert. Moreover, the game includes a “No Fail Mode” that allows for an infinite number of mistakes without ending the song. This particular function, which replaces punishment for reward, is often looked at with disdain by the masculinized hardcore gaming community. As a culture that respects skill and dedication to master challenges, core gaming culture often deprecates games that give players too much help, such as casual games. For example, although the Japanese developer Platinum Games creates arguably some of the most hardcore titles, including Bayonetta and Vanquish, they also include very easy modes titled “very easy automatic” and “casual automatic” respectively, modes that reduce the player input to one button. When this mode was announced for the release of Vanquish, several gamers on Kotaku voiced their irritation, with one writing, “I dont understand the point of making games easy to the point you dont have to learn how to play or try [sic]” (aang002, 2010). Yet focusing on rewarding players is central in most casual games, like Rock Band, and with titles like Bayonetta and Vanquish, the hardcore space is beginning to dynamically alter its traditional mechanics in order to accommodate these less experienced game players. Even in these hardcore titles there is a blurring of traditional gaming categories. For Rock Band, the “no fail” mode is meant to allow friends and families of all skill levels to play the game.

As a primarily social, casual game, Mafia Wars puts an even stronger emphasis on getting friends involved in gameplay. In order to advance past the first few levels, players must recruit their Facebook friends for their mafia. The game will simply not allow you to progress past a certain point without engaging in its social aspects. Similarly, players who embrace the social aspects of Mafia Wars are rewarded with bonuses, free items, power boosts, and continual gifts from the gameworld and from their friends. Indeed, half of the pleasure in Mafia Wars, and a large part of the pleasure in Rock Band, is derived from sharing the experience with others. While social play is present in most contemporary hardcore shooters, such as Gears of War discussed earlier, the social play in Rock Band and Mafia Wars is not predicated on aggressive competition with others but on cooperation and sharing, two traditionally feminized traits.

Another structure in Rock Band and Mafia Wars that might produce a gendered tension is their focus on drop-in, drop-out gameplay. Juul describes hardcore games as those that require a great deal of time to complete, both in terms of total duration but also in terms of individual sessions. In Rock Band a player can easily play one song with her or his family and then stop. Indeed, this option allows for large groups of people to play the game together at parties or family gatherings, trading off instruments between songs. This mode of interaction reveals the inherent interruptibilty of the game. Certainly, I want to avoid essentializing the feminine and its pleasures, but it is worth noting that Tania Modleski (1984) cites distraction and interruptibility as feminine traits in soap operas. Modleski suggests interruption in the form of commercials and postponement of gratification in soaps work ideologically to habituate women to their domestic positions within patriarchy. Although Modleski offers this as a critique, for traditional soap fans watching their programs at home during the day, interruption offers them a chance to finish daily chores and return to the show without being punished for missing parts of the narrative. Fiske (1987) believes Modleski is arguing for a feminine aesthetic here. He suggests these feminine aesthetics “constitute not an oppositional feminist culture, but a feminine culture that asserts the value of feminine characteristics and pleasures within and against patriarchy” (p. 197). Whether subordinate to or oppositional to hegemonic patriarchy, Fiske does not want to deny the pleasures women get from watching soap operas. Granted, soap operas and video games are vastly different texts, but the feminization of Rock Band and Mafia Wars might be linked to their interruptible game structures, allowing for a few minutes of gameplay at a time. Equally, if casual games are overwhelmingly more popular than hardcore games among female players, we might consider the structure of those games, including interruptibility and the quick distraction they offer, as mirroring the same feminine aesthetics found in soap operas.

Similarly, Mafia Wars forces the player to spend short amounts of time playing the game, allowing for continual breaks. In order to accomplish most action in the game, energy must be used; as each player has a finite amount of energy, their actions are limited at any given time. In order to recover energy, the player must either get help from a friend or wait for their energy supplies to gradually refill. Indeed, time is an important factor in casual games. Juul indicates it is a stereotype of casual gamers that they invest little time into their games (p. 30), but then he turns around and indicates, “casual game design can reach new players by allowing them to play in short bursts, to interrupt a game and put it on hold, but without preventing players from engaging in longer sessions” (p. 36). While casual games should allow for longer sessions, many people do not have the time to play anything longer than “in short bursts.” This speaks to what Jenkins (2006) calls a “participation gap” in convergent media cultures. Although Jenkins argues, “race, class, [and] language differences amplify these inequalities in opportunities for participation,” (and they certainly do), he neglects to mention time as a key factor as well – although you can make the argument that time is dependent upon socio-economic class. Gender too, and specifically domestic and professional gender roles, also influence the amount of leisure time an individual has to spend on video games. With a career and household duties, many women might be more receptive to the “short burst” gameplay found in casual titles like Rock Band and Mafia Wars. These games are interruptible and also foster an extended relationship with the player characterized by brief minutes of interaction each day – a feminized game design meant to cater to a player seeking quick distractions from housework, office work, or other computer-based duties such as online shopping, online banking, and the coordinating of social schedules through email.

With their focus on time management and interruptible structures, casual games mirror the expectations of office work for men and women in a post-industrial economy. Rose and Friedman (1997) address this feminized workspace when they suggest, “In the service sector, management, and sales-oriented occupations, men and women alike are expected to concentrate on several tasks at once, to be constantly interruptible, and to focus on the needs of others” (p. 5). I have already argued that this focusing on the needs of others is present in the feminized Cake Mania and Diner Dash. However, Mafia Wars too asks players to “focus on the needs of others,” although not in the same emotional way players have to as Jill and Flo. Instead, players have to offer their friends help to complete missions and give gifts in the way of money, energy, and weapons. This form of caregiving is focused around crime and violence but it nonetheless asks players to be mindful of the needs of their friends also playing the game. This mindfulness of others does not necessarily mirror the kind of emotional caregiving typically feminized in culture, but it does match the feminized work habits that Rose and Friedman suggest are typical of a post-industrial economy and the work both men and women do in that economy. Therefore, like the contemporary office workspace, the social mindfulness in Mafia Wars can be seen as feminized.

Finally, both casual games might be understood as denying the player a proper conclusion in their underlying game structures. One characteristic of soap operas Fiske identifies as pleasurable to their audience is “deferment” of narrative conclusion. Fiske suggests, “the emphasis on the process rather than the product, on pleasure as ongoing and cyclical rather than climactic and final, is constitutive of a feminine subjectivity in so far as it opposes masculine pleasures and rewards” (p. 183). Indeed, if a masculinized pleasure might be called conclusion or finality, a femininized pleasure might be identified in the deferred, the eventual, the process itself. The relative lack of narrative in Rock Band and Mafia Wars, their emphasis on continued social play, and their distractive, interruptible forms continuously defer any final climax, instead focusing on smaller, serialized accomplishments. While it might be argued that Rock Band does have a conclusion, because it features an ending credits sequence reached when the player completes all the central gigs, the game also allows for endless play with the player-created band, earning ever more fans and money. Indeed, rather than the gameworld shutting down after the player completes the main goals, it remains open and available, and with new songs arriving weekly for players to purchase, the music experience of Rock Band never needs to end. Moreover, Mafia Wars becomes almost endless thanks to the way it manages player energy and because there is always another problem around the corner, another mission. Also, like Rock Band, Mafia Wars is updated by Zynga on a regular basis to add new content and extend the life of the game even further. In other words, Mafia Wars can almost become a part of the player’s daily life, another endless task that must be managed but that allows for a connection to others, and a game in which the pleasure of the process can be found.

I have argued that there exists a gendered tension in the casual video games Rock Band and Mafia Wars, games that exist in the tertiary space between the binaries of hardcore and casual gendered address. If the popular argument, supported by some academics (see chapter 1), is that hardcore video games are masculinized and the cultural argument is that casual games are feminized, I have complicated this notion by highlighting two different examples of casual games which defy this static gendered binary and offer a tension in their gendered address between masculine and feminine, between representation and gameplay, between hardcore and casual. A brief analysis of Gears of War and No More Heroes offers an example of the masculinized hail characteristic of hardcore video games and also how that hail might point to an anxiety in video game culture over the legitimacy of its claim to masculinity. This masculinized address is reproduced in the marketing and representational content of both Rock Band and Mafia Wars. However, an analysis of the gameplay and design of these two casual games indicates they offer a culturally defined, feminized player address as well. The dual gendered address in representation and gameplay create a site of gendered tension that suggests the persistence of core gaming culture in perpetuating a masculinized view of video games, even in the discursively feminized casual games space. My goals here are to trouble what is a problematic and constructed gender binary that has been mapped onto an equally problematic and culturally constructed genre binary in video games. These games suggest popular and core gaming cultures need to rethink their gendered understandings of the video game binary between hardcore and casual games. More to the point, these games almost demand these cultures reexamine the troubling consequences of continuing to limit our understanding of any given game or text in terms of gender. Finally, the ability for the hegemonic masculinity of gaming culture to co-opt the feminized space of casual games points to the degree to which that culture will go to defend its legitimacy in the face of the perceived feminine threat of casual games.

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 14

2010-09-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Mafia Wars Hits IPhone- View in HD! - Funny bloopers are a click away

An equally masculinized address can be found in an ad for Mafia Wars. While much of the marketing for Mafia Wars is done through word of mouth and the social networking functions of sites like Facebook, Zynga did produce one commercial for the iPhone version of the game. The short commercial consists of close up shots of gun barrels, triggers, and bullets and a panning shot of a table littered with firearms, ammunitions, bombs, and grenades. Only near the end of the piece do we see a person playing the game. A grim, older gentleman in a suit, presumed to be a mobster himself, worries over the diminutive iPhone with the gentle tap of his thick finger tips. Here we see the serious masculinity of Mafioso culture at odds with the feminized play of the game, play that involves the click of onscreen buttons to perform actions you then watch play out. This form of interaction echoes those in Peggle, Cake Mania, and Diner Dash. This ironic scene of a serious and grim businessman delicately clicking the small screen of his iPhone is followed by a voiceover announcing the tagline, “Everyone wants to join the mafia,” read in a raspy voice and followed by a gunshot. While brief, this commercial communicates its gendered address in a raw form: guns, suits, power. Except for the dainty iPhone, nothing in this ad connotes a feminized address. The commercials for Mafia Wars and Rock Band reflect the persistence of masculinity in gaming culture and its attempts to masculinize even the purportedly feminized casual games space.

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 13

2010-09-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 12

2010-09-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 11

2010-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 10

2010-09-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

This is one part of a much larger argument. I will ultimately be posting the entirety of my Master's thesis and will hopefully have all the parts interlinked by the end of it. You can see the full list of parts below:

Part 1: Abstract
Part 2: Project Description
Part 3: Review of Literature
Part 4: Methods
Part 5: Chapter Breakdown
Part 6: Feminizing the Casual: The Mom Test
Part 7: Feminized Design: Gender and Technology
Part 8: "Sometimes I Play for Me": Advertising Casual Game Devices
Part 9: That Means You, Soccer Mom: Casual Gaming in the Popular Press
Part 10: Because they aren't Us: Fear of the Feminine in Gaming Culture
Part 11: From Chainsaws to Guitars: Gendered Address and Video Games
Part 12: Masculinities in Hardcore Games
Part 13: Femininities in Casual Games
Part 14: Rockers and Mafioso: Extratexts
Part 15: Representation and Game Design in Rock Band and Mafia Wars
Part 16: Conclusion

Through software design, marketing, press coverage, hardware aesthetics, and industry discussions, the genre of casual games has been culturally feminized. At the same time, hardcore video game culture has also engaged in this feminization. Whereas the industry subtly devalues casual game players for their preferences and casual games for their lack of hardcore qualities, hardcore gaming culture makes no effort to hide its gendered disdain for casual games and casual game players. In fact, the marketing, industry, and mainstream discourses may enable the more overtly sexist treatment of casual games by the hardcore community. As can be seen in the conversations happening on the most popular Internet video game blogs - Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid - hardcore video game culture privileges a specific type of hegemonic masculinity, one that adheres to and interpellates a heterosexual, male identity. As a result, these core gamers utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to degrade casual video games, use post-feminist sarcasm within the discourse of casual games to help veil their misogyny, and evoke a protest rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on destroying and replacing traditional, masculine games. It is through this disdainful and sexist treatment of the casual genre that core gamers constitute an anti-fandom of casual games, a group Gray (2005) discusses as forming around a mutual hatred for a specific cultural text.

Part of the gendered distain for casual games in core gaming culture has a direct connection to the industry and commercial logics of always connecting the wife or mother-figure to the casual category. This basic antagonistic binary between masculine and feminine and hardcore and casual can be seen when casual games are discussed on popular gaming blogs. Whether users proudly proclaim, “My Wife loves ‘em” (Strider_mt2k, 2007), whether they negatively chirp, “i dont like my mom playing tetris all day on my game boy” (Rojo, 2007), or whether they blatantly state, “Girls can have their types of games and guys can have their own” (Joeshie, 2008), the marrying of females and femininity with the casual game space continually reproduces itself and cements itself as common sense. Casual games are understood by the hardcore gaming culture as games wives love, as games the proverbial mom plays, and as games specifically for girls or women. As a result, this discourse promotes notions of difference and distinction that ultimately recreate gender and power hierarchies in games culture and beyond.

In addition to marrying the feminine with the casual space, part of this positioning of the other happens through the labeling of casual games as other in sexual orientation. To these core gamers, hardcore games not only represent the masculine, they represent the heteronormative ideal. A discourse exists in this community that links casual games with homosexuality. This is exemplified in comments such as “Casual games? GAAAAAAAY!” (samfish, 2007) and “Casual Games are for gay people or men that are very very very in touch with their feminine side; so in touch it’s scary” (Cyro, 2007). Both comments explicitly conflate casual games with homosexuality and femininity. However, the second goes farther by evoking a masculine heteronormative anxiety at the thought of a male in touch with his emotions. Indeed, if this discourse links casual games with emotions, it would make sense that “men don't talk about casual games because they aren’t worth talking about. Playing, perhaps, talking no” (Batzarro, 2007). In this way, like emotions or homosexuality, “real men” are not supposed to discuss casual games, even if they do secretly play them. This reflects the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that limit men from discussing their feelings. Additionally, this comment echoes regulations in America’s armed forces that are founded on the credo, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy that supports the invisibility and indeed the annihilation of queer lifestyles. In this logic, playing casual games, like homosexuality, is something to be ashamed of and kept secret. In core gaming communities, even if males play casual games behind closed doors – and according to this reasoning they should only be played behind closed doors – the discourse suggests that male players are culturally encouraged not to bring it up.

Not all comments are so easily read, however. Angela McRobbie (2007) argues that contemporary culture produces a post-feminist mindset that announces the victory of feminism while marginalizing its current efforts and surreptitiously undoing all the advances it helped achieve regarding gender and sexual equality. In a post-feminist culture, sexism and misogyny appear not as proof that feminism failed but as proof that it succeeded. That is, because women supposedly no longer suffer inequalities in society, sexist jokes are taken to be self-aware and ironic; any overt devaluation of women or the feminine is meant to be seen as sarcasm. As enlightened cultural and consuming beings, we are meant to be in on the joke. These types of post-feminist comments appear on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid, and serve to poke fun at the assumed connection between femininity and casual games and the antiquated concept of ideal gender roles. However, while most are meant as tongue-in-cheek remarks, this kind of language still reproduces and reinforces the marrying of casual games and gamers with the feminine and duplicates traditional gender and power hierarchies.

These post-feminist comments appear on popular gaming blogs when male-coded gamers link females with casual games in degrading and pre-feminist ways. In one post on Kotaku titled, “Who Knew: Men Like Casual Games, Too,” a commenter named Onizuka-GTO (2007) writes, “female presence = casual. It’s a fact. Honest. :P.” This comment is reinforced by two others. A user named THE-HATER (2007) comments, “All you guys who bought Puzzle Quest are proof of the horror of casual games. Casual games are evil, they are the worst thing ever. They keep women at the computer instead of in the kitchen.” Additionally, ParadoxControl (2007) quips, “listen, I don't play games unless they come with a full rack of ribs, a 2lb sirloin, Mashed Potatoes, Budweiser, a shotgun, camo pants, and a stack of playboys, because I'm a real man!” The first of these comments explicitly joins casual games with the female, stating it as a fact beyond reproach and effectively gendering those types of game experiences. At the same time, Onizuka-GTO uses an emoticon that resembles a face sticking its tongue out, a sign that he is aware of his own absurdity and is joking around. On the other hand, THE-HATER’s words are less playful, conflating the already established feminine space of casual games with evilness and then finishing his comment by evoking pre-feminist gender roles, metaphorically plucking the woman from the office computer and plopping her back in front of the stove. However, his sarcasm is revealed by the comment’s exaggerated nature, just like ParadoxControl’s tirade about what makes a man, and more importantly here, what makes a manly game. ParadoxControl and THE-HATER play with gender stereotypes to reveal the performative nature of masculinity and femininity and to reveal the artifice of gendering casual games as feminine; although their intentions might be to deconstruct these notions, they ultimately reinforce, reproduce, and strengthen the ideologies that link masculinity to “serious” games and femininity to casual games in the first place.

In her ethnography of male gamers in Northern Ireland and southern England, Helen Thornham (2008) suggests games “are claimed by adult [male] gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes” (p. 142). Part of taking games seriously and rationally for the users on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid is staying informed and making smart purchasing decisions, traits typically assigned to masculine consuming habits. In contrast, these commenters position casual gamers as “simple people…[and] you can sell them stupid games” (TrenchyC, 2007). Moreover, what “worries [them] most about casual gamers is that they’ll stupidly throw so much money at tech that they know nothing about, and have not researched at all” (human-cannonball, 2006). Here, hardcore gamers position casual gamers as passive, naïve, and mindless consumers of popular culture. To the hardcore discourse community, casual gamers become feminized shoppers lacking agency and intelligence. Rather than doing proper (masculine) research such as reading games news, reviews, and previews, “Casual gamers DON'T care about reviews” (Jeff, 2007), don’t seem to understand “that generally [a] video game movie=suckage” (BigC72, 2007), and “have the attention span of a three month old dog mixed with a squirrel” (mix, 2008). Here, feminized casual gamers are depicted as less intelligent, less informed, and less important than their masculine hardcore counterparts. Most strikingly and troubling of all, they are positioned as sub-human and animal in their worth and intellect.

In contrast to the so-called ignorant purchases of the casual masses, the hardcore gaming discourse seems to suggest that even if hardcore gamers do play casual games, they are smart enough not to spend money on them. Indeed, hardcore gamers “won't actually buy ‘casual’ games, since most are shameless clones of earlier casual games” (ShaggE, 2007). As one user commented, “I download all my casual gaming for free. Who's crazy enough to pay for it...oh yeah, wii users. All their games are casual” (nxp3, 2008). These comments suggest that hardcore gamers do not spend money on casual games because they are not serious and real games. They lack the blockbuster budgets, visual fidelity, and narratives associated with traditionally masculine game titles. Here too the Wii is evoked as one of the worst offenders in the casual game space, a system that has opened up gaming to girls, women, and the elderly. This is reinforced when the gamer badasscat (2007) argues that casual games are “not some sort of stepping stone to ‘real’ gaming.” [B]adasscat suggests that casual games are not real games. They lack the qualities of masculine games and are thus denied the right to call themselves video games at all. As feminized entertainment, casual games are annihilated from the landscape of serious games and serious games culture, quite like the feminine in general.

This annihilation can be seen as part of a greater taste struggle by hardcore gamers against casual games and the femininity attached to them. In this struggle, hardcore gamers position themselves as the victims and position the growing number of casual players and games as an invading, threatening force. Ann Johnson (2007) has analyzed a similar phenomenon in her article, “The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism.” She argues that The Man Show, a masculine comedy program that gains laughs through largely sexist humor, utilizes protest rhetoric and “depicts women as the dominant group in society and addresses viewers as potential agitators in a struggle against women’s dominance” (p. 167). Johnson contends that even while patriarchy continues to operate relatively unopposed, The Man Show creates a reality where men are relegated to subordinate positions in both the public and private spheres, always at the mercy of dominant women in their lives. This same logic is used in the hardcore gaming community when discussing casual games. To core gamers, casual games represent a very real threat that is gradually blighting their cherished pastime with products that do not resemble the games they are used to.

Part of this protest rhetoric in the hardcore community is fueled by fears that casual games will gradually take away limited retail space and developer resources from “real” games, eventually replacing them altogether. In this logic, traditional, narrative-driven games will eventually die out as casual games flood the market. No longer will there be Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty; instead, there will just be clones of Peggle, Wii Sports, and Solitaire. Indeed, this fear persists even though core games are still cash cows for the industry. For example, the recently released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, arguably a traditionally masculine video game, earned an estimated $550 million in its first five days on sale (McElroy, 2009). Just the same, Destructoid user Necrozen (2009) positions core gamers as a dying breed when he writes, “We are a minority now. We = Less Money than Them. So you know that it's a losing battle.” Furthermore, as an imagined minority, core gamers believe their interests are no longer being taken into account by game developers and publishers. More than anything, they “hate the fact that more immersive games are gonna disappear because everyone is into the casual games now of days [sic]” (Ambitious009, 2007). Ultimately, their protest can be summed up in the words, “It's the attack of the killer casuals, and we need to make sure we're not lost in the noise” (Ketsuban, 2007). Although casual gamers do not make much noise in gaming culture because they exist outside of it, the attention the mainstream press pays to them and the interest developers have taken in them are seen as signs of a very significant threat by core gamers.

Another part of this protest rhetoric is the threat of violence if the casual “encroachment” and “oppression” continues. Alexradl (2008) writes, “For now, I'm ‘ok’ with what Nintendo is doing because they are keeping it concentrated on one system. The day their system's shitty games and shitty gimmicks leak over to the PS360 is the day I'll begin to show my true feelings.” Here Alexradl’s true feelings can be assumed to be aggressive and potentially violent. As long as casual games stay confined to what Alexradl positions as the ghetto of the Wii market, he will restrain his violent tendencies. However, if these casual games migrate from the controlled space of the Wii to the more “serious” PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, Alexradl promises retaliation. Even if this violence is metaphorical or discursive, the threat of it reveals the use of intimidation as catharsis for these hardcore gamers and continues a long history of the masculine degrading the feminine through physical abuse.

Ultimately, this protest rhetoric resembles the rhetoric of war, reinforcing the notion of a taste war in gaming. This language mirrors the war-like rhetoric central to most hardcore games popularly found recently in the Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War franchises, among others. For example, upon learning that a Casual Games Association was forming, one commenter gleefully writes, “this is great news…this means eventually they will all be in one place at the same time…with a surgical strike we can take them all out with minor collateral damage. Personally i suggest poison apples but then the suspense would kill me...” (SectionZ, 2007). This commenter’s use of military language in “surgical strike” and “collateral damage” suggest hegemonic masculinity and the rhetoric of war, not just that of protest. This language goes beyond vague threats of violence to specific militaristic methods to annihilate the threat of casual games. Using the same language as the “serious” games he reveres, the hardcore gamer declares war on the casual gaming space. There is a certain joy when the commenter suggests the use of poison apples to kill the members of the Casual Games Association, presumably so he can take pleasure in the slow and agonizing deaths of those he feels support the feminization of video games. In the hardcore gaming discourse surrounding casual games, core gamers on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to denigrate casual video games, exploit post-feminist sarcasm within the discourse of casual games, and evoke a protest and war-like rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on destroying and replacing traditional, masculine games.

I do not mean to imply here that all hardcore gamers share these discursive sentiments and actively support the kind of gendered hierarchy I propose exists in this culture. Some core gamers are not necessarily anti-fans of casual games, even if they are complicit in the gendering of those games. Some core gamers fall closer to the developers discussed earlier; though they accept, even love, casual games, they still perpetuate their feminization. For example, Kotaku user indiemike freely admits to playing casual games but also connects these games to the preferences of his girlfriend and her female friends: “I find that my girlfriend, and all of her friends that I've played games with prefer the casual games I have on hand, and don't want to get wrapped up in a story within the game” (indiemike, 2007). In fact, many commenters on the blogs I analyzed openly support casual games and admit to playing and enjoying them, but just as many also reproduce the feminine gendering of the category. Even when core gamers make an effort to embrace casual games, as Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett (2010) did in the article, “Instead of Laughing at ‘Casual’ Gamers, Try Helping Them,” they still inadvertently reproduce the effect of otherness by maintaining the stereotypes and assumptions of the casual audience and the casual game experience as feminized.

Why does this core gamer feel so threatened by this new genre of casual gaming, even if it has been culturally feminized? Other media, such as literature and film, allow for a duel existence of masculinized and femininized genres without one or the other being accused of spelling the downfall of the medium. Granted, there still exist cultural perceptions that treat masculine summer blockbuster films with more legitimacy than the “chick-flick” romantic comedy genre, for instance, but film enthusiasts do not see romantic comedies as a sign of the end of films as they know them. This intense reaction to casual video games and casual game players by the core gaming community suggests a vulnerability in the specific masculinity of core gaming culture.

This vulnerability may stem from the low cultural position of the video game medium. Like the medium of the graphic novel or comic book, video games historically have been infantilized and seen as immature. Since video games stem from early computer culture which even today often gets conflated with geek culture, video games share that culture’s emasculated stereotypes. Regardless of the fact that a whole generation of men have grown into adulthood while still playing video games, video games continue to be understood culturally as a childish distraction, at best, or a complete waste of time, at worst. Michael Kimmel (2008) claims in the book Guyland that many men in their 20s and early 30s use video games as a form of escapism to put off growing up and taking on the responsibilities of male adulthood, including starting a family. A myriad of online opinion pieces focus on whether games will ever grow up as a medium (Alexander, 2009). Most notable within this larger discussion is the ongoing argument, fueled by the comments of famous film critic Roger Ebert (2010), of whether video games can ever be art. Though this demeaning cultural position may be changing with the acceptance of casual games into the family entertainment sphere, this popular acceptance has only further irritated the masculine anxieties of core gamers.

Gamers have traditionally been characterized by a marginalized masculinity, one that mimics but does not match real-world soldiers and athletes. Being good at video games does not grant the same social and cultural benefits as being good at a sport or a traditionally masculine trade. The masculinity associated with gaming is a fragile, defensive one that has relied repeatedly in its short history on extreme violence, the sexualization of women, and strong, male homosocial bonds for its sense of power and personal legitimacy. The introduction of a feminized, popular category of video game to gaming culture might be seen as undermining the fragile masculinity that has had to continuously defend its cultural position for several decades.

In this chapter I have argued that casual video games, epitomized by Nintendo’s Wii and DS consoles, have been discursively feminized in popular culture. From the marketing to the press coverage to the design of the consoles themselves, the Wii and DS have come to represent a feminized form of the medium. By discussing casual games in terms of a feminine audience, popular and industry discourses have also contributed to this gendering. Although the reaction to this feminization may be approval for its profit-generating impact, it remains nonetheless troubling, especially given that this cultural labeling enables the core gamer to engage in sexist and misogynistic attacks on casual games and game players. While some of this behavior can be found within the gaming industry, it is within core gaming culture where we can most see casual games treated as a threat to hardcore games. Casual games have become linked with mainstream, popular culture. Discursively feminized, they are positioned as a softer form of video game technology. The core gaming community, invested as it is in hegemonic masculinity, rejects popular culture and its ties to femininity and therefore rejects casual games as a potential infection, rather than an extension, of the medium. However, how does the discursive, gendered difference between hardcore and casual games manifest in the software itself? Are there casual video games that reflect the values of the masculine core gamer? And how might these examples trouble the culturally created distinction between the two categories of video games?

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 9

2010-09-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 8

2010-09-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 7

2010-09-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 6

2010-09-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 5

2010-08-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 4

2010-08-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 3

2010-08-24T10:00:00.001-07:00

This is one part of a much larger argument. I will ultimately be posting the entirety of my Master's thesis and will hopefully have all the parts interlinked by the end of it. You can see the full list of parts below:

Part 1: Abstract
Part 2: Project Description
Part 3: Review of Literature
Part 4: Methods
Part 5: Chapter Breakdown
Part 6: Feminizing the Casual: The Mom Test
Part 7: Feminized Design: Gender and Technology
Part 8: "Sometimes I Play for Me": Advertising Casual Game Devices
Part 9: That Means You, Soccer Mom: Casual Gaming in the Popular Press
Part 10: Because they aren't Us: Fear of the Feminine in Gaming Culture
Part 11: From Chainsaws to Guitars: Gendered Address and Video Games
Part 12: Masculinities in Hardcore Games
Part 13: Femininities in Casual Games
Part 14: Rockers and Mafioso: Extratexts
Part 15: Representation and Game Design in Rock Band and Mafia Wars
Part 16: Conclusion

In order to understand where video games are going and how this casual shift is affecting the masculine culture of core gamers, it is important to look at where games have been and how categories of gender, race, and sexuality have been discussed in regard to digital games. Indeed, because of the “maleness” of video games, many scholars have been interested in what attracts women players, a base which has been growing steadily. Few scholars, however, have analyzed casual games beyond design choices and audience. Certainly, a litany of scholars have argued that core gaming culture is defined by a hegemonic masculinity that privileges white, straight, aggressive males, but few have sought to interrogate how casual games are affecting this specific masculine culture.

Many scholars have discussed the “whiteness” of video games. The first video game to feature a black avatar was Atari Basketball in 1979 (Edwards, 2009). Since then, black characters occupied mostly stereotypical, token roles in video games, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by academics. David Leonard (2003) argues that video games offer players a chance to consume the other, in this case meaning non-white characters, by visiting the virtual worlds they inhabit and literally embodying and controlling them as avatars. Additionally, Leonard (2005) contends that extreme sports games have acted to annihilate people of color, commoditize in-game urban spaces, and sexualize female game characters. In other words, Leonard believes that, just as other media, video games support the dominant ideologies responsible for systemic and institutional racism. However, Leonard is solely interested in representation in video games. My research looks more at a combination of representation, direct address, and the ways players interact with the game to analyze how video games, even some casual games such as Rock Band, hail the player as a masculine subject.

Other researchers have shared Leonard’s interest in the ways video games disproportionally represent gender and race. When textually analyzing representations in the survival horror game series, Silent Hill, Ewan Kirkland (2005) argues that the games privilege whiteness and the masculine over non-white and feminine identities. Unfortunately, Kirkland focuses only on representation in the Silent Hill games and fails to see how the underlying technological systems influence the representation of the game; he sees the fog in Silent Hill wrongly as a way of perpetuating white domination, but fails to realize the fog is actually a result of the technical limitations of the first PlayStation console. Additionally, James D. Ivory (2006) utilizes content analysis of video game reviews to determine that men are disproportionately represented in video games compared to women. Again, though, these types of studies are more invested in the representation of race and gender than in how these games hail the player as a specifically masculine subject.

Beyond representation, Gonzalo Frasca (2003) outlines several other ways games/simulations can convey ideology, all of which surround the presence, manipulation or change in game rules and structures. Frasca wants us to understand video games as simulation, and he also graciously, unlike Aarseth (2004), admits that video games can exist both as narratives and as simulations, not either/or. In other words, Frasca allows for a bridging of both the representational and structural study of video games. Therefore, I suggest both a representational and a structural analysis should be undertaken to better understand the complicated gendered address in the casual games in this project. For instance, Mia Consalvo (2003) does this somewhat successfully in her paper, “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances,” where she looks at sexuality in both representation and gameplay in Final Fantasy IX and The Sims. Moreover, there are some studies that begin to bridge the gap between analyses of representation and the gendered and racial address of video games and gaming-related texts.

Anna Everett (2005) interrogates the problematic representation of race in video games but extends her argument to suggest that the issues with identity politics, racist ideologies, and hegemonies in video games can be equally leveled against the culture that produces and consumes them. Everett’s most noteworthy contribution is her argument that suggests her “informal surveys of video game cover art and game descriptions, print and online game reviews, manufacturer strategy guides, and popular media coverage of expert gamers uncover not only an essential and privileged male gaming subject, but one who is ‘universalized’ under the sign of whiteness” (p. 312). Everett shows that across multiple core video game texts, the same white, masculine subject is addressed. My project is also interested in the address of video games. However, I expand on this research by looking at if and how this address has changed in response to the popularity of the feminized casual game.

The above scholars are part of a tradition of discussing video games in terms of gender, a tradition that burgeoned with Cassell and Jenkins’ (1999) monumental work, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. This book raises a number of important issues that deal with the place of gender in video games. It explores gender stereotyping in games, the dearth of games made with girls in mind, the gameplay girls prefer, and the disproportionate number of men versus women in the games industry. Nine years later, Kafai et al. (2008) released Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming in an attempt to continue where Cassell and Jenkins left off and speak to the changes in video game production and consumption. They begin their collection of essays by arguing that while more girls than ever play games, the industry and culture remain fixated on a masculine audience. While many scholars no longer believe gender is an important issue to explore in games, mostly because 40% of gamers are now women, Kafai et al. contend that the same issues that plagued video games ten years ago continue today, regardless of the increased female playerbase. In addition to revisiting issues surrounding women and games, this book’s essays emphasize not the “boyness” of video games, as From Barbie to Mortal Kombat does, but also the masculinity that permeates the industry and culture surrounding video games. Both of these books have an interest in the group that might be called girl gamers.

Indeed, a lot of research has been and continues to be interested in why more girls do not play games despite recent survey data that suggests women make up 40% of the gaming population (ESA). As many of the above scholars have argued, this is probably due in large part to the positioning of video games as masculine by popular and gaming cultures alike, as well as within the gaming industry. Though dated and concerned with just adolescent girls rather than females of all ages, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield’s (1998) article in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat argues that girls enjoy games with more storytelling and problem solving whereas boys enjoy more action-oriented experiences. Other studies have also focused on the experience of gameplay for females and how it might differ from the male experience (Schott & Horrel, 2000; Hayes, 2005). All of this scholarship concerns itself with why girls or women do not play more games, usually emphasizing the design of games as a major issue. I do not necessarily agree with the design argument these authors present, but my aim is not to present a counterargument; I mention these scholars to show that academics have been interested in female gamers.

While this body of work does express an interest in the broadening of the video game market, it focuses only on women and not non-gamer males, the elderly, or non-traditional gamers, and it does not explore what this broadening of the market might mean for the industry and the masculine core gaming culture that has formed around the hobby of digital games. For example, mimetic games offered by the Wii and simple downloadable games on the computer are different experiences than the traditional core video games consisting of three dimensional worlds, complicated controls, and shooting and/or fighting mechanics - the shift away from these core gamer expectations in the industry toward more family-friendly or casual experiences has caused more than a few ruffled feathers in the core gaming community. This thesis contains nods to “girl gamer” scholars, but it is concerned more with how casual games, aligned with the imaginary girl gamer, are feminized by the masculine core gamer, the games industry, and the culture at large.

In addition to representation in games and girl gamers, scholars have also explored the relationship between gender and the video games industry. In the book Understanding Digital Games, Bryce et al. (2006) note that the gaming industry and surrounding culture privilege the masculine, but the authors are hopeful that due to an expanding and shifting player base this condition is slowly changing. However, they mention this change without considering the masculine core gaming culture this gendered shift might threaten. This is especially salient because many game studies scholars, like Bryce et al., find masculinity continually championed in video game texts, including advertising and marketing (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006). Additionally, official game websites have been found to feature males more than females, to sexualize females they do feature, and to under represent minority groups, such as Hispanics (Robinson et al., 2008). This scholarship suggests that typical video game advertisements in gaming magazines and official game websites position the female and the feminine as other through sexualization and marginalization or ignore the presence of both entirely. Other studies of video game advertisements, using content analysis rather than textual analysis, have agreed (Scharrer, 2004). Unfortunately, much of this research has been focused on the marketing side of the industry and not on discourses of gender circulating within the industry itself. Using the rise in casual game development as a historical period of interest, I examine some of the discussions surrounding gender and casual games within the games industry to analyze how game creators view this change in focus from core to casual. In addition, I link the feminization of casual games in popular and industry discourses to the misogynistic positioning of casual games within hardcore gaming culture.

Approaching the games industry from a broader perspective, Fron et al. (2007) explore the ways technological, cultural, and commercial forces have influenced the evolution of the games industry, and how these forces have marginalized women and non-white players and catered to the masculinity of gaming culture. Furthermore, Fron et al. argue that video games exclude certain demographics and if game creators want to expand the market, they need to change from an exclusionary masculine focus to an inclusionary gender-neutral focus. Like Bryce et al., however, Fron et al. call for a change in development standards without considering the core gamer backlash such a shift will engender. Indeed, over the last ten years, the period Jesper Juul calls the “casual revolution,” developers have been releasing more and more simple, “gender-neutral” games, which are often culturally feminized, but no scholarship has looked at how this trend is viewed by the core gaming culture used to “traditional games,” let alone how this trend can be seen as gendered in and of itself. As these studies indicate, scholars have explored gender in the gaming industry, but they have largely focused on arguing, time and again, how masculinized that industry has become. Taking the masculinity of gaming culture as a starting point, this thesis is interested in the impact on this gendered culture by the increased development and play of feminized casual video games, games with different aesthetics, different designs, different mechanics, and different goals.

Along with studies on games as text and the gaming industry, a number of scholars have looked at the experience of gaming and how gender augments that experience. In an ethnographic study of adult game players, Helen Thornham (2008) argues that video games are socially and culturally gendered male and that there is a hegemonic system of inclusion (men) and exclusion (women) in place. According to Thornham’s observations, playing video games is considered to be part of the masculine gender role. Consequently, women are often reluctant to divulge an interest or competency in certain games even when they possess them. Moreover, in another study using the same ethnographic data, Thornham (2009) explores the ways male gamers rationalize and normalize gaming habits that have long been associated with children. Thornham contends games “are claimed by adult [male] gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes” (p. 142). This is probably because of the stigma that video games are for children, although this bias should be obsolete, considering the average age of a game player is supposedly 35 now (ESA). While Thornham’s study suggests an anxiety surrounding men’s consumption of video games, it also points to the ways games have become part of the masculine experience and have worked their way into the realm of “serious” masculinity, where cars, firearms, and sports more typically reside. I am interested in how this “serious masculinity” views the rise in more feminized, casual games, and how these views reveal an unease or uncertainty in the masculine position of gaming culture.

Other studies argue that rather than being fully integrated into male adulthood, video games offer a childish escape for men from the anxieties of maturity. Derek A. Burrill’s (2008) Die Tryin': Video games, Masculinity, Culture deals with how masculinity is (re)produced in, and produces, the digital imaginary, a concept that involves the perceptions of, and connections between, gender, technology, culture, and power. Most importantly, Burrill conceives of masculinity in the digital imaginary as a perpetual boyhood, a place free of traditional adult male anxieties of powerlessness in the professional and domestic spheres. Burrill is part of a large number of writers who have pigeonholed video games into the easily accessible category of pure escapism, even if he does complicate the reasons behind that escape. Thus, I suggest Burrill falls victim to the popular, but increasingly dated, belief that digital games are intimately connected to childhood. This is not an argument I support, but I do share Burrill’s interest in the intersection between gender, technology, and culture, and my project in many ways situates itself within these three discourses.

Outside of the escape games may or may not offer, other scholars focus on the aggressive experience of playing some of the more violent, competitive video games. Avery Alix (2006) carefully dissects and analyzes the discursive communication between players in the competitive online first-person shooter Counter-Strike as they attempt to assert masculinity in a virtual space. Alix contends that player conversations, largely infused with misogynistic, homophobic, and racist language, are constructed to support heteronormative, (white) masculine standards. In this respect, his findings mimic those of the majority of scholars interested in gender and video games. Moreover, what Alix and the other studies have in common is a focus on players rather than the design or content of the games. However, none of these studies dealing with players seem particularly interested in the culture of the core gamer and what this culture has to say outside of specific games. Granted, Thornham does ask her participants about the games they prefer, but none of them identify with the core gaming culture. Indeed, these studies seem much more interested in the individual experience. This thesis contributes to the scholarship on player experiences by focusing on the core gaming culture, a culture composed of passionate fans with opinions about what makes a “good” game, what makes a “bad” game, what a game should be, and how casual games are potentially changing the industry and the activity they love.

Henry Jenkins’ (1992a) work in Textual Poachers legitimized fan communities and challenged the notion that fans are passive consumers of media without social ties or interpretive skills. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers Jenkins (2006) continues this trend and expands his idea of participatory cultures to include bloggers and more significantly, gamers, who had been left out of discussions of fan communities for years. Around this time, other scholars began to examine gamers as legitimate fan cultures, as well (Taylor, 2008). Jenkins (1992b) suggests, “media fans are consumers who also produce, readers who also write, spectators who also participate” (p. 208). Core gamers are actively involved in the production of a number of popular discourses around gaming. They write FAQs. They share gossip, inside news, complaints, and strategies. They build websites honoring their favorite games. They create mods or entirely new games in their spare time. They mobilize and congregate online in a number of locations and build discourse communities. Of course, it is important to realize that “hardcore gamer” or “core gamer” are loaded terms and cannot easily encapsulate the diversity of opinions, preferences, and attitudes of people who might identify as hardcore or core gamers.

Therefore, it might be useful to identify the term hardcore gamer identity as existing along more of a continuum than in a fixed position. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst (1998) create a useful continuum for understanding the various levels of engagement between people and mediated activities in their book Audiences. This continuum ranges from consumer to enthusiast to petty producer, a fan that creates original texts. An example of a petty producer in core gaming culture would be someone who regularly creates mods or small, independent games as part of their fandom. Using this model, I would locate the hardcore gamer as hovering between the enthusiast and the petty producer. However, the actual percentage of core gamers who create mods or design their own games is most likely very small. Likewise, Janet Wasko (2001) offers another consumption continuum in her analysis of Disney’s audience. For her, the continuum looks like this: fanatics - fans - consumers - cynics - uninterested resisters - straight up antagonists. What is noteworthy about Wasko’s scale is her inclusion of antifans or antagonists, those people who are invested in the active hatred of the brand or product, a group Jonathon Gray (2005) has spent some time discussing. This thesis treats the core gamer as a position of fluidity that includes game enthusiasts, creators of video game paratexts, passionate fans, game creators, and those who like some genres while actively disparaging others. Therefore, I suggest that a core gamer can be both a fan and an antifan depending on the game franchise or genre in question. Owing to this, I examine the discourse of core gamers surrounding casual games and how it acts not only to perpetuate the feminization of casual games but to position core gamers as misogynistic antifans of casual games.

This adoption of antifandom by the masculine core gaming culture can be seen as a response to the expansion of the games market in recent years to include the domestic family. Some research on the adoption of video game technology by the family has already been done. In “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” Bernadette Flynn (2003) traces the migration of the video game from the public space of the arcade to the private space of the domestic living room hearth. Flynn makes a case that video games, like radio and television before them, are beginning to be the focus of the shared family living space, but she also recognizes that this same technology also acts to displace or attack what has made this domestic space feminine for so long. Despite finding their way into living rooms across the country, video game consoles have never tried to fit a traditional domestic, feminine aesthetic. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox consoles, Flynn notes, stand out in living rooms as masculine technologies, especially with their large sizes and black, angular cases. Of course, Flynn writes before the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii in 2006, a sleek, simple, white rectangular console about the size of three DVDs stacked on top of each other. Unlike the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 (updates to the consoles Flynn writes about), the Wii fits a feminine aesthetic in that it is small, white, and can almost disappear in the living room setting. My work builds on Flynn’s research by arguing that the Wii, unlike its competitors, has actively assimilated itself into the domestic space because of its feminized aesthetics and, moreover, because of the feminized casual games that make up the majority of its library. Consequently, my thesis also explores how core gamers view the Wii and its mimetic games as one of the most dangerous threats to the contemporary, traditional video game.

Jesper Juul continues to look at the domestication and popularization of video games in A Casual Revolution. Unlike Flynn, Juul invests a lot of time in his book discussing how the Wii has changed the way people play video games. In addition, Juul delineates what differentiates a casual game from a hardcore game, using a number of design choices as the basis for his criteria. Juul’s work is intriguing because it shows that scholars are aware of the rise and the importance of casual games. Unfortunately, Juul misses an opportunity to analyze the gendered nature of casual and hardcore games and gamers. Also, while Juul mentions that some hardcore gamers feel like they will be left behind if the industry shifts completely toward the creation of casual games, he devotes less than a paragraph to this thought and does not explore the various ways these core gamers are positioning, feminizing, and disparaging the casual games movement. My project will build on Juul’s research on casual games by adding this gendered element and by exploring the way casual games are affecting the masculine culture of games rather than the way they are affecting the design of the games themselves.

Being a medium which grew rapidly in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, video games have existed within what some call a post-feminist culture for the latter half of their lifespan. In “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Angela McRobbie (2007) argues that contemporary culture produces a post-feminist mindset that announces the victory of feminism while marginalizing its current efforts and surreptitiously undoing all the advances in gender and sexual equality it helped achieve. As a cultural phenomenon, post-feminism seeks to silence current feminist critiques, shunning them as the antiquated rumblings of a misandristic cult group. It is a cultural voice that empowers women with choice: the choice to work or stay at home; the choice to change their identity through fashion, makeovers, and plastic surgery; the choice to take control of their sexuality. In all of these choices, though, capitalism and consumerism are driving forces, as are fetishisms with youth, whiteness, affluence, and attractiveness. In other words, post-feminism celebrates the freedoms women gained through the feminist movement while re-sexualizing women under the guise of choice and lifestyle and perpetuating an ideal femininity consisting of white, middle-class, sexually available women. I adopt McRobbie’s understanding of a post-feminist culture and use it to critique some of the ways casual games are feminized.

Concurrent with a post-feminist culture is the phenomenon of feminist backlash by an imagined disenfranchised masculine populace. Part of my project will look at the core gamer backlash to the rise of casual games in popular culture. I view this backlash as analogous to other masculine backlashes that have appeared in popular culture in the last 30 years because of the successes of feminism. In “The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism,” Ann Johnson (2007) argues that The Man Show, a masculine comedy program that gains laughs through largely sexist humor, utilizes protest rhetoric and “depicts women as the dominant group in society and addresses viewers as potential agitators in a struggle against women’s dominance” (p. 167). Johnson argues that even while patriarchy continues to operate relatively unopposed in society, The Man Show creates a reality where men are relegated to subordinate positions in both the public and private spheres, always at the mercy of dominant women in their lives. A similar angle is taken by Susan J. Douglas (2002) in, “Letting the Boys be Boys: Talk Radio, Male Hysteria, and Political Discourse in the 1980s,” where she argues that white, male shock jocks employ minority protest arguments, often in strong, emotional ways, when defending what they feel are attacks from all sides on the societal position of the white, straight, male. Johnson and Douglas are both concerned with the ways the dominant social group – in this case, masculine, white, straight men – rhetorically place themselves in a subordinated position in order to gain sympathy for their perceived lost status in society. This thesis continues these arguments; the masculine culture of core gamers employs similar tactics when talking about feminized, casual games. They see casual games as subverting the “traditional” games they are used to and replacing their complex, narrative, and graphically robust games with “silly” mini game collections, Wii “waggle fests,” or simple, computer puzzle games. Core gamers view themselves as the subjugated minority voice despite the fact that “traditional,” masculinized games are still being developed and marketed to the same degree as they have ever been.

Up to this point, gaming scholarship has engaged with games on a representational, structural, demographic, or production level. Few scholars exploring gender and video games have gone beyond calling video games a masculine medium or engaging in questions of why females do or do not play games. More recently, scholars have taken an interest in the production of games and specifically in the lack of females in the video game industry. Ultimately, I contend it does not matter what the sex is of the player or the producer. What matters is the gendering that occurs at the level of discourse. Little scholarship appears to investigate the specific masculinity of video game culture or how the popularization of the feminized casual games genre has impacted this masculine culture. Moreover, little scholarship has used discourse analysis to explore the myriad ways these technologies and games are gendered in commercial and gaming culture or how the cultural and gendered hierarchy of masculine and feminine has been recreated in the medium of videogames along largely arbitrary lines. Ultimately, these are the contributions of this thesis.

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 2

2010-08-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

Casual Threats: Gender and Video Game Culture: Part 1

2010-08-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Everybody Should Buy Decay Part 1 & 2

2010-08-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace has been around for a while now and I haven't seen much come out of it that holds any interest to me. Just a lot of basic activities that use the Avatar and incredibly cheap attempts at getting 80 msp ($1) from you. Of course, there have been a few notable exceptions. The dual-stick shooter I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 has sold incredibly well. I picked it up myself. No, it doesn't offer complexity or even provide evidence that it took long to dream up and develop, but it has character, an excellent theme song, and also provides a tongue-in-cheek critique of gaming culture's obsession with zombies. Another game I haven't played but gets a lot of praise is Breath of Death vii, an old-school RPG parody.

But there is one game that I discovered on my own that needs to get more attention from the gaming community. That game (or games, as it were)is the Decay series from Shining Gate Software, an indie developer out of Sweden.

In Decay the player wakes up hanging from a noose in a bathroom, miraculously cognizant after an apparent suicide attempt. Using classic static-screen, point-and-click mechanics, you navigate the lonely apartment, eventually working your way out into an equally morbid and isolating apartment complex. The atmosphere conjures memories of the Silent Hill franchise while the gameplay smacks of Myst and SCUMM adventure games.

Picking up a photograph, the player can choose to manipulate it in 3D and discover a hidden message scrawled on the back. This might reveal a vital clue or a number essential in solving a nearby puzzle. While the locations available to the player are few, they are all haunted by an eerie presence, a dread that keeps you on the edge of your seat while playing. This anxiety or fear is a strange feeling considering the lack of animations and general low fidelity of the visuals, but it proves the developers at Shining Gate have a knack for horror in games and begs the question of what they could accomplish if properly funded by a publisher.

Right now the first two parts of Decay are available on the XBL Indie Games marketplace. Decay Part 1 and Part 2 are 340 msp ($3) each. This shouldn't be a case of how long the games are or whether they are collectively worth the $6 for the experience so far; instead, this is about supporting an indie dev who has created something compelling, artistic, and atmospheric with little to no budget. This is about supporting the art of indie gaming.

With so much shovelware appearing on the indie marketplace, the gaming community should support efforts like the Decay games and reward devs like Shining Gate Software for using the venue appropriately, not just to make a quick buck.

Follow them on twitter here.

Sadomasochism and Gaming (Demon's Souls)

2010-08-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

Demon's Souls. That's right, I've finally went down that jagged, booby-trapped road.

If I had to sum up my experience it would be this: Demon's Souls is the definition of "hardcore" for this console generation.

The game is punishing, unwieldy, and seems to hate the player with glee, but because of these qualities, it is the most rewarding game I've played in a while. It's not survival horror, but I feel fear while playing it. The most rudimentary enemy can kill you. Even after leveling up, thanks to hard work, determination, and a few "soul farming strategies" gleaned from the Internet, I still die on a regular basis.

If you ever find yourself in possession of a PS3 one day and if you want an experience that harkens back to the frustrating difficulty (yet blissful rewards) of a classic NES game, then pick up Demon's Souls and play it. You won't be disappointed.

Crushed maybe, but not disappointed.

*This is basically the what I wrote to a friend in an email in a rush. It sounded like a good enough summary of my experience with Demon's Souls so far, so I decided to post it.

Here is a montage video to give you an idea of how the game plays, and no, the player doesn't die, but normal people do, all the time:

Video Game Poetry Volume 4

2010-07-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

Among the Mists

It is funny, the fake mechanical legs
that hang from steel thread as thick as a boy’s forearm
the way they raise in awful menace
pinpoint sharp and deadly
only to fall to the ashen ground again, harmless.

The young ones giggle at the mimicry
but they have never met
the monstrous thing the steel legs mimic.
It is fangs and shadow and silence.

Incandescent moths linger on empty branches.
Bottomless puddles whisper Siren songs.
The faint glow of worms dot the canopy
like dying stars behind the last great fog.

They say a small boy wanders alone
out among the mists and cragged paths.
They say he is lost. Like all of us here.

Ata(Wii) Would Like to Play

2010-07-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the helpful memory of a certain thesis adviser, I looked into old Atari ads and discovered an eerie connection between the past and the present. Few have really discussed how modern Wii marketing echoes so closely these early attempts at selling video games to the whole family. Enjoy.

Atari Commercial

Nintendo "Wii Would Like to Play" Commercial.

Best Game at E3 2010: Portal 2

2010-06-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

I should have multiple posts up concerning my impressions of the games and technology at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. I should, but I don't. Now I dislike excuses, especially those that begin with, "Well, I've been really busy so...."

Yes, I've been busy: camping, finishing thesis, teaching a few summer courses, but not so busy that I can't sit for an hour or two and organize my thoughts on the most important video game convention in North America.

There was a lot to like at this year's E3. Harmonix's Dance Central was the one good thing I took away from Microsoft's upcoming Kinect (formerly Project Natal). Sony's Move controller (the Wii HD, more or less) did little to excite me. It's like the Wii but without Nintendo's history and universe of characters to draw from. Both Kinect and Move will likely sell well, or at least well enough. It still remains to be seen whether the Wii audience will make the (not so pricey anymore) jump to high definition consoles or whether they are even interested in adopting "upgrades" to their already paid for motion-controlled gaming experience.

Speaking of Nintendo, they pretty much tapped directly into the nostalgic core of my being, pumping it with some kind of pure light native to the heavens of gaming. A new Zelda, a new Donkey Kong Country, a new Kirby, and on top of all of that fan-service, they announced what we all knew was coming: the Nintendo 3DS, the next iteration of their handheld that features the now famous 3D screen that works - and here's the kicker - sans ridiculous glasses. With already announced titles including a new Kid Icarus and a remake of Ocarina of Time and Starfox 64, I can't imagine a tech product more targeted at me.

But if there was one game that put all others to shame at E3 2010, it was Valve's Portal 2.

Just take a look at the gameplay footage below. There's no analysis needed. You can see the story elements coming together, the game mechanics, even in their early state, already stacking to epic proportions, and the excellent Valve-ness of the game, which takes place in the Half-Life universe.

If Sony would have had the heart to show Last Guardian (wait for TGS) or Ubisoft the good grace to give us a glimpse of Beyond Good and Evil 2, I might have come to a different conclusion. As the situation stands, Portal 2 was the best game software at E3 this year.

My friend's NES Collection

2010-04-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

I have a friend named Matt.

He has an awesome collection of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games. Here's a picture.

Right now, Matt's in Antarctica. So all those games, yeah, they're just sitting there. Being pretty.

Matt has two great sites. Check them out here and here.

It's strange how old "junk" can make you jealous, isn't it? I mean, would I actually want this pile of gray plastic, ancient chip sets, and pixelated time sinks?

(yes)

Of course not. It's still cool, though.

Here's a zoomed in shot of the collection.

Is a book shelf still a book shelf if it holds dvds or games?

Odd Heroes

2010-04-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Today it was confirmed by Lorne Lanning that the oddworld series has once again been shelved. Of course, that's not what I heard.

Joking aside, it's sad news.

Back in 2005 I was really into the Oddworld universe. Not much has changed. But like every browncoat knows, there's not enough new material to keep me satisfied. In fact, unlike the Serenity verse, which at least has been getting updates via the comic medium, oddworld has been shut down since the Janurary 2005 release of Stranger's Wrath.

Anyway, five years ago I made this. This thing. It's going to waste on my computer's HDD, so I offer it up to the Internets.

What is the Oddworld equivalent of a browncoat anyway?

An oddcoat?