Monstrous Women in Dragon Age: Desire Demons and Broodmothers | Gaming As Women As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’m a great fan of the Dragon Age series. I enjoy the soap opera-esque drama, the wisecracks, and waving around a giant sword while covered in the blood of my enemies. The game even has some aspects that are laudable from a feminist perspective. The game also has some less feminist features. In this essay, I’d like to talk about a very specific feature of Dragon Age: Origins: the female monsters. The demons in Dragon Age: Origins have asexual bodies and speak in distorted, vaguely male-sounding voices if they even speak at all. The first shows a desire demon who disguised itself as a cat in an attempt to feed upon a lonely young girl’s desire for friendship. The final scene involves a confrontation with a desire demon who has possessed Arl Eamon’s son, Connor, who appears to be a young teenager. So why is the desire demon depicted as it is if its modus operandi seemingly doesn’t involve sex at all? It’s time to do things differently.
List of ethical concerns in video games (partial) | Leigh Alexander A list of real ethical concerns in video games: Video games are used to covertly advance the political agendas of arms manufacturers. The aggressive marketing of capitalist war games is an inspiration to the U.S. military, which could take a page out of games marketing’s book in order to push unpopular ideas on the public. Games like Littleloud’s Sweatshop or Molleindustria’s Phone Story are forbidden from Apple’s mobile storefronts, because they question (arguably deservedly) the ethics of manufacturing operations in impoverished areas. This site and this one are just a couple of the sites game developers can pay for reviews that make unproven promises to improve games’ positioning on mobile storefronts. Developers who invest in design and publishing on mobile storefronts can expect to have free, unsanctioned clones of their games steal their revenue and come ahead of the original on charts with no action taken from the companies that own those storefronts.
The First Female Gamers The miniature wargame play celebrated in the War Game Digest could reach only a limited audience because it required painstaking efforts from dedicated and artisanal adults. Avalon Hill’s board wargames, on the other hand, could reasonably aspire to reach the mass market. They built on the recognized tradition of juvenile board games, but with a complexity that attracted a more mature consumer — all without the expense and craftsmanship that miniatures entailed. Avalon Hill branded many of its wargames as famous American battles, with titles like Gettysburg or D-Day, which minimized the need for advertising or explanation. It was Avalon Hill’s magazine The General that introduced the gaming community to itself. The character of the early gaming community surrounding The General is most readily demonstrated in the “Opponents Wanted” advertisements, classifieds that Avalon Hill ran free of charge for subscribers to help them participate in local or play-by-mail wargames.
Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons & Dragons | Analog Game Studies There is a clear problem of representation in games and — more broadly — in the cultures produced by games. This problem in representation has most recently yielded controversies such as #gamergate1, but it is also more or less responsible for debacles such as the PAX dickwolves saga, and the recent death threats to Anita Sarkeesian spurred by her “Tropes vs. Women in Games” series. Outside the spotlight of digital games, some members of other game communities, such as Ajit George2 and Shoshana Kessock3, have been outspoken about problems of representation at Gen Con4, North America’s largest tabletop game convention. Image CC BY-NC-ND, by Angela Marie Henriette. The first article reviewed in this essay is “Notes on Women & Magic – Bringing the Distaff Gamer into D&D,”6 which offers a schematic for the ways in which the female body should be understood and regulated within Dungeons & Dragons. Needless to say, women were not the intended audience of The Dragon. Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3
O Jogo do Bicho: Pushing the Boundaries of Larp in Brazil | Analog Game Studies Traditional O Jogo do Bicho betting card, illustrated by Mariana Waechter and designed by Luiz Falcão. O Jogo do Bicho (The Animal Game), created by Luiz Falcão and Luiz Prado, is a two-hour chamber larp for eight people about (bad) luck, uncanny experiences, and what people do together when there is nothing to do. Influenced by Jeepform, Nordic Larp, and and other blackbox traditions, the game makes heavy use of metatechniques and is one of the first Brazilian larps (that we know of) in this style. O Jogo do Bicho was first run in Belo Horizonte in April, 2014 at a festival called Laboratório de Jogos (Game Lab), aimed at a community of indie analog game developers, especially indie RPGs. In O Jogo do Bicho, players represent freelance criminals (some of them in their first involvement with organized crime), hired by the bookie known as Tarzan. After the first playtest, which was more in the style of Tarantino, we decided to dial back the use of referentiality to American cinema.
The Bad Apples Of #GamerGate Twitter user @EvilBobDALMYT proclaims himself “#GamerGate Firebrand” in his bio and has been active in the tag since the beginning. He is also present in the IRC chat logs, including having operator status on the channel. He at many points hunts for and provides personal information about the individuals speculated to have had sexual relations with Zoe Quinn. Aug 31 20.25.26 <EvilBob> These are the types of tranny bitches we’re dealing with. @EvilBobDALMYT participated in the harassment campaign against Zoe Quinn since the beginning. So when Anita Sarkeesian tweeted that “gamergate is the new name for a group that has been harassing me for 2 years,” she was factually correct. These people have spent the last two years harassing and demeaning women in and out of the games industry. There may be ethical, honest people involved in #GamerGate.
A tsunami of testimonies: assaults in the Swedish larp community Warning: this post details sexual violence. This is a guest post by Kristin Nilsdotter Isaksson. It originally appeared in Swedish and in English on Spelkult. The English translation is by Charlie Charlotta Haldén. Editor’s note: “larp” is live-action role play. We’re talking about sexual harassment in the world of larp. On June 17, 2014, a new Facebook group was created for Swedish-speaking larpers who identify wholly or partially as women. It’s so important that we talk about our experiences. A lot of times, I am personally skeptical of gender separated forums and arenas. Lately, a darker subject has crept into the discussion threads, and during the past few weeks, a tsunami of voices has swept over us. There are a lot of perpetrators, and a lot of victims. I was almost completely out of it, and I couldn’t do much of anything to stop it, because I hardly understood what was happening. I was always supposed to play a submissive role at the larps, a servant to the group, to his friends.
A Little Gamey: Why "Cinematic" Should Be a Dirty Word in Video Games A Little Gamey: Why “Cinematic” Should Be a Dirty Word in Video Games Media Flux AAA (triple A) video games and the people who play them need to get over their embarrassing and childish insecurity. If I spent as much time getting in shape as gaming culture spends defending their chosen art form from mostly imagined assaults, I would have the abs of Ryan Reynolds. “We’re art too!” There are many reasons for these misguided attempts at credibility, but one of the largest lies in a certain ignorance of form. Games used to use cut-scenes because game engines were limited in their abilities, and it was simpler and more effective to make a cut-scene to express certain things. As an example of this absence of thought in much videogame development, it’s useful to look at Bioshock Infinite. Perhaps the single most artistically successful game in recent memory is Fez, Phil Fish’s still stunning platformer which uses its gameplay to express everything it needs to say. Back