A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History. By Laine Nooney Abstract The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the games industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” To “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history.
What was rippling on the surface of videogame historiography in Huhtamo's 2005 essay boils over as we cascade into 2014. Medium Difficulty. By Kaitlin Tremblay As much as we all love Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball — wait, do we? — we have to admit it brings to light some pretty unsettling ideas about women and video games: namely, that representation of women has fought a long, hard (no pun intended, of course) fight to be more than characters with spectacular tits. This isn’t to say that video games are evil and vehicles of patriarchy, because quite honestly, I think that video games, more than any other medium, are capable of achieving a thoughtful and progressive gender politic.
It just needs to be conscious of gender criticism in order to do so, and to avoid the mentality of: “She has tits and she knows how to use a gun, what else do you want?” There has been resistance to approaches that criticize gender in games (albeit largely in comments threads), but I think that a lot of that resistance stems from a misunderstanding of what gender criticism is about. How to Be: A Brief Introduction to Gender and Performance. Why We Don’t Have Female Characters - Front Page - Magical Wasteland. I noticed your game has a character editor, but doesn’t include the option to make a female character. Why is that? Well, it’s hard to make female characters.
First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that. I’m thinking about it now and I have no idea how you’d even start making those kind of changes in our low-level architecture. Then there’s the art aspect. Female bone structure, on the other hand, is extremely complicated. So when you look at it– you look at the cost of creating all those assets, the modeling, animation, the voice over, and so on– you take that cost and multiply it by a billion.
Speaking Up: Why Female Game Writers Shouldn’t Be Ignored. The Melbourne Freeplay 2011 games festival did what it does every year: encouraged gamers, developers and writers to think deeper about the medium they love and the issues that surround it. So when a panel titled “The Words We Use”–originally intended to be a forum to discuss games criticism and writing–was derailed to the subject of gender in games writing, it drew attention to an important and contentious issue. Here, two female game journalists weigh in on some of the ideas raised in an email correspondence about the role of female writers and critics in the games industry. Laura Parker is the Associate Editor of GameSpot Australia, a finalist in the Walkley Foundation’s Young Australian Journalist of the Year Awards in 2009 and the winner of the IT Journo Game Journalist of the year in 2010. Tracey Lien is the Acting Editor of Kotaku AU, a winner of the Walkley Foundation’s Super Media Student Award and a finalist in IT Journo’s Best New Journalist category in 2010.
GDC 2012: Dealing With Gender Issues In Games—And Game Development. “I just assumed that once you had a team that’s diverse, the magic would happen, and you’d have this perfectly-balanced outflow, and gender issues and race issues would just disappear. Wow—was I wrong.” Those words came from Mia Consalvo, a Games Researcher from Concordia University who talked about the work her and her development team did on Eksa: Isle of the Wisekind during her GDC 2012 panel titled “Gendering a Game: Strategies for Team and Content Management in Student-based Game Design.”
The goal for Eksa was to create a game which could explore how social interaction can be made to be more meaningful for players of social network games—no matter their age, race, or gender. Consalvo explained that—as the product owner—she worked hard with Game Director Sara Verrilli to put together a diverse staff of student programmers and artists. Problems even showed through in the targeting of the game.
Why is all of this important? The Problem With E3, Booth Babes, and Gaming’s Gender Bias. Is that it’s not the problem. It’s the symptom. In the past two weeks, no less than four gender bias issues have rocked gaming news. Things got kicked off with Hitman: Absolution’s trailer. Then E3 got rolling, and fortunately, we as an industry finally took umbrage with the Booth Babes on display. Closely following that was the “protect Lara Croft” and her “almost raped” trailer moment, and we’ll close out two weeks of scandal with the Tropes vs.
Women in Video Games Kickstarter project, which (ironically?) Proved its need to exist when a mouth-breathing campaign of ur-trolls decided they were going to use the “bitch get in the kitchen” primitive form of trolling to try and convince its creator (or themselves I guess?) It’s easy to see with a couple of weeks like this, that gaming has a problem. Treating women badly, unfairly, or as a sex object isn’t just an issue with gaming: Comic books are having a helluva time lately figuring out how to portray and treat their female characters. Opinion: Video games and Male Gaze - are we men or boys? [Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield makes the claim that the game industry at large still treats women primarily as a vehicle for the display of boobs and butts, not only in games, but within the culture at large, saying this is a natural extension of who we put in charge.]
I won't pretend to be above biology: I like boobs and butts as much as the next hot-blooded heterosexual male. They're just about the most aesthetically pleasing configurations of fat and muscle you can find on a person, and I am far from being immune to their charms. But women are a lot more than boobs and butts. That may seem obvious, but the game industry and its fans are demonstrating their ignorance of that fact time and time again. Recently I did an interview, an excerpt of which you can find here, with Hitman Absolution director Tore Blystad. Blystad isn't sure why this trailer in particular upset people, when he feels this is the way the series has always presented itself. The "but she's powerful! So What If I'm A Woman? Let Me Play The Damn Game.
Kaitlin Tremblay's Blog - Intro to Gender Criticism for Gamers: From Princess Peach, to Claire Redfield, to FemSheps. Intro to Gender Criticism for Gamers: From Princess Peach, to Claire Redfield, to FemSheps. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
By Kaitlin Tremblay As much as we all love Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball — wait, do we? — we have to admit it brings to light some pretty unsettling ideas about women and video games: namely, that representation of women has fought a long, hard (no pun intended, of course) fight to be more than characters with spectacular tits. This isn’t to say that video games are evil and vehicles of patriarchy, because quite honestly, I think that video games, more than any other medium, are capable of achieving a thoughtful and progressive gender politic.
How to Be: A Brief Introduction to Gender and Performance See the problem? How to Play: Gender Possibilities in Games. Sexual harassment in the world of video gaming. 3 June 2012Last updated at 19:12 ET By James Fletcher BBC World Service The world of video gaming has a problem with sexual harassment. The number of women gamers is growing fast - in the US they now make up 42% of the total - but it remains a macho environment, where women are often exposed to abusive language. (The language in this report reflects that reality.) "Get back in the kitchen and take your goddamn hands off a video game controller. " The male voices are aggressive, even angry. "Stupid bitch," says one. "I hope your boyfriend beats you. The tirade of abuse ends and Jenny Haniver laughs. "Get back in the kitchen? " Online gamer Jenny Haniver We're sitting in her living room in Wisconsin, listening to audio recordings she makes when she goes online to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
The recordings end up on Haniver's website, Not in the Kitchen Any More. Continue reading the main story American gamers Source: Entertainment Software Association (US statistics) European gamers. The Problem with the “Lowest Difficulty Setting” Beware of the Sorrell: Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man. To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends I‘m going to talk about something I am evidently unqualified to talk about.
Women. I have met some and they seemed very nice people on the whole. I read, seemingly more and more often with every passing day, about the way that women are treated online, particularly in the game community and their lack of representation in the game industry. It makes me angry. So here, I will write about that. I will not be accused of being a shrill moaning harpy. It strikes me as incredibly bizarre to think that men talking about the mega-sexism in the game industry, pointing at it and screaming and banging their ham-sized fists on the metaphorical game-table and bellowing that “this will not stand!” I am bellowing Then read the comments and it’s just a roll-call of complete fucking bullshit. The even worse part are all the articles I can’t link to because they were never written. But but but but but but but but but ur a fag This is my straw.
Thinking Brickly: The LEGO Gender Gap: A Historical Perspective. “Why does all the girls have to buy pink stuff?” Even a child can see something is wrong in our toy stores. The gender gap* that frustrates Riley in the above video does more than tell her which toys it socially appropriate for her to play with, it separates her from a whole realm of experience - masculinity. As Riley grows older and decides what sort of person she wants to be, she will encounter this gap again and again. While crossing the gender gap is not impossible, it is difficult and doing so risks stigma and ostracism, just ask the boy who dressed up as Daphne or the girl with the Star Wars water bottle.
The gender gap is evident in nearly every aspect of our society, but one of the first and most striking examples is toy choice. The LEGO Gender Gap: A Historical Perspective Last month’s splashy introduction of the new LEGO** friends line has stirred up a lot of controversy. 1932-1977: The Brick Era The 70s also saw TLG experimenting with different types of human-like figures.