This week we discussed user-generated content and the wonderful world of Minecraft. The fascinating thing with user-generated content (UGC) games, like Minecraft, is the ability for a game to sustain itself strictly depending on the creativity of their players. Minecraft leaves the gaming world with endless possibilities from re-creating real life attractions, building your own fantasy world, and even creating puzzles that challenges and connects players in the community. UGC games have the ability to create a huge community connecting players all around the world via a singular game.

In the “Minecraft: User-Generated Content” Chapter of HTPVG, Newman discusses “Minecraft’s mutability as a game” (277, HTPVG:Kindle) and refers to players as content generators. The mutability of Minecraft as a game allows for its players to choose the kind of experience that they want out of it. Players can choose to play in Survival mode and fend off the various mobs that they encounter, or take a more free-flowing approach and play in Creative mode to create their own virtual worlds. The wide range of gameplay that Minecraft provides allows it to be a game for all ages, genders, professions, etc. Mods that are available allow players to switch it up giving them endless different gameplay possibilities. The mutability of the game will allow for it to adapt well to the changing world of gaming. Minecraft is a game that grows with the player. As players go from Middle School or High School or High School to College, the virtual world they build in Minecraft will grow as they do.

Another great aspect of UGC games is the community they build around them. UGC Games like Minecraft and Super Mario Maker have HUGE communities of players. Newman states in the HTPVG chapter, “Minecraft’s UGC is not limited to creations made within its pixelated game world. Countless online video channels offer advanced building tutorials, tours, and explanations of expert creations” (278, HTPVG:Kindle). Newman brings up the idea of how Minecraft continues to grow outside of just playing the game. Similar to the video we watched in class, people stream their plays, give tours of the elaborate worlds that they’ve built and even give tutorials on how to build those worlds yourselves. The open-endedness of Minecraft gives player endless opportunities to try new creations by learning from their fellow Minecraft creators. Similar to Super Mario Maker, players have the ability to create their own creative Mario platform game. Players are provided with the tools they need to build their platform games and the rest is up to them. The online community of Super Mario Maker is endless. Players can post their own game creations online and others are challenged with the task to complete them. There’s numerous videos on YouTube of gamers playing 0.00% games which is basically where gamers play levels that have a 0% completion percentage in the community. This gives players endless amounts of gameplay. There will always be the challenge of creating a difficult game and also completing other 0.00% games. This competitive aspect of a UGC game is what keeps this game a staple piece in anyone’s collection of Nintendo games.

I can see UGC games becoming a more popular type of game for developers to produce. The ability to attract a diverse group of gamers as well as the endless possibilities of gameplay make UGC games an overall popular pick for any type of gamer.

Authors such as Toupin and Hablerstam break down communities within the gamming world. As members of said world, it is hard to come believe that there is issues of sexism, racism, alienation, etc, but unfortunately that is the truth the world needs to accept. As member of such community it is our duty that everyone of all backgrounds and identities are accepted. With the support of feminism, would support the acceptance of individuals of all backgrounds in be properly included.  Writers such as Toupin and Halberstam explore this conversation more to help society include the gaming industry to become more welcoming to all backgrounds and identities.

            Writer such as Toupin help articulate that gaming companies needs to include a more diverse set of content, to help include more diversity within gaming communities. With the support of feminism, different identities and backgrounds can be understood and recognize within a safe space. However with that being said, the idea behind feminism within the text, need to be understood and not limited too, class, religion/culture, gender etc. Toupin states that, “Intersectional feminists argue that feminism cannot be studied, understood, or practiced from a single, immediate, standpoint… understanding requires engagement with culture, class, sexuality, ethnicity, gender and other power structures which engender inequality” (Toupin 2). Analyzing this piece of text, supports the idea that not only feminism is and can be a powerful force to have a true sense of diversity within the gaming community but shows how its cover and is understood in various forms. Such as culture, class, sexuality, gender and much more. In doing so, anyone who isn’t straight, white, male can be (and should be) represented in a safe space where they can openly talk about issues within the gaming community. As well as, express their thoughts in which can ultimately improve the quality of games. With that being said, Toupin also makes the point that members are being harassed of different extreme levels due to the fact that they are identify in a different manner than the mainstream audience (i.e, white, straight, male).  The author states, “Individuals shared experiences, documenting instances of sexism, sexual harassment and discrimination which arose in the course of their relationships with geek culture” (Toupin 3).  What this shows is that, with the presence of Geek culture, individuals are targeted due to the arise of different ideas and perspective within the gaming community. Therefore, making it more difficult to not only change the space for other gamers but society as a whole. Overall, Toupin raises these points to help articulate how gaming companies needs to include a more diverse set of content, to help include more diversity within gaming communities.

            Hablerstam purposes the stance in which games have more representation. In the text, it is stated how games need to be revised to help be more a diverse audience. It is stated that, “I believe the question of what contribution gaming might offer to queer theory requires rethinking the concept of the game, the purpose of the game, the differentials within the game between winning and losing, and the modes of identification and desire that any given game requires” (Hablerstam 189). What this shows is that, in order for games to essentially evolve, developers need to incorporate the purpose and other factors of their games with the inspiration of queer theory.

                                                            WORK CITED PAGE

Toupin, Sophie. “Feminist Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and Hacker Cultures.” https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/5e00ea752296c/6402654?response-content-disposition=inline; filename*=UTF-8”Toupin%20-%20Feminist%20Hackerspaces%20The%20Synthesis%20of%20Feminist%20a.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200420T010406Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PLTYPZRQMY/20200420/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=de219d4e7bcfc5b0d8d2a60077ffb869835a80221e90894327b4d87924dd4047.

Halberstam, Jack. “Queer GamingGaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo.” https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/5e00ea752296c/6402658?response-content-disposition=inline; filename*=UTF-8”Halberstam%20Queer%20Gaming.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200420T011610Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PLTYPZRQMY/20200420/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=ff6c667626393e9f1ae42be1deacb11c77d32289c3de71765b26508007b0c036.

The idea of user-generated content has always been something that fasincated me in gaming. Whether it be mods like Counter-Strike and Dota, or open-ended games like Minecraft or Terraria. The ability for a game to sustain itself beyond what is made by the developer is very interesting. Sometimes it may even lead to an entire new genre being developed, such as with MOBA’s with Dota and autobattlers with Auto Chess.

One of the ideas that James Newman harps on about in his HTPVG chapter “Minecraft: User Generated Content” is how difficult it is to identify exactly what Minecraft is because of how many different forms it takes. Between the game itself having dramatically different games in Creative and Survival, there is also all the fan-made game modes that are included. When someone says, “I play Minecraft,” there are so many different styles and different things that it means that it’s very hard to define it. I, for example, almost entirely play the game (back when I played it consistently) in creative, except for the few times I had played in a private survival server with friends.

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of multiplayer gaming in general. While the communities can be harsh, unwelcoming, and perhaps even gatekeeping, there is something beautiful about it as well. The fact that fans themselves are able to come up with new things to give old games multiple new leases on life over the years is incredible. I’ve always believed that the best games are the ones that are able to sustain themselves over a long period of time purely due to the fanbases love of the game.  All of this is amplified further by the addition of things such as opening the source code for modding (credit to John Carmack for being the main pioneer of this idea), and this leads to games often becoming sustainable for far longer than we have seen in the past. Some modern multiplayer games, such as Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch, even opened up a mode where you could modify server settings and mess with physics and the like just for people to try and create their own game modes within the existing engine.

Newman also invokes the concept of watching “Let’s Players” playing game modes that they either create themselves, or are sent in by fans. This is a brilliant way to increase “shelf life (a metaphorical term in this digital age)”. It increases the longevity of the game even further, since if a certain content creator gets popular enough, then that can lead to fans of them wanting to play the mods that the creator is playing, and it theoretically creates a self-sustaining circle (which will, of course, inevitably end at some point).

I love the topic of modding in games, especially since the games most important to me were originally mods themselves.

 

 

Newman, James. “Minecraft: User-Generated Content.” How to Play Video Games, by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York University Press, 2019, pp. 277–284.

When it comes to the term ‘griefing,’ I was unfamiliar with what it entailed, what it meant, and its effects on the gamer when it comes to irritation, harassment, and targeting, specifically at the hands of females, women of color and sexual minorities. As someone who is unfamiliar with gaming culture/community, this course has taught me the ins and outs of those who share a passion for gaming in regards to connection and shared interest. The gaming community can serve as a beneficial environment for adults of all ages, as well as youth, who utilize the community as a way to bridge the gap between distance and difference. The community has the ability to allow individuals to connect on a deeply personal level or a deeper, more emotional level based on the players’ interest and intention. But as positive as the community can be, it can also serve as a dangerous and detrimental environment for fellow gamers as ‘griefers’ threaten and target individuals of their choosing based on stereotype, prejudice, and judgment. In Chapter 2 of the book, “Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat,” the chapter, “Gaming’s Many Social Justice Warriors and the Quest for Accessible Games,” by Lisa Nakamura, states the definition of griefing: “Griefing, the purposeful use of digital affordances to destroy another user’s pleasure or freedom of movement, is a perennial practice, and women, people of color, and sexual minorities are targeted more than others” (p.35).

Nakamura states that as GamerGate emerged, the harassment experienced on social media towards female users served as the platform for mainstream exposure in regards to targeted and intentional griefing, specifically at the hands of female gamers. Only when news of this behavior became popularized did society no longer turn a blind eye to this griefing behavior. As a young woman myself, this type of deliberate harassment and pleasure stemming from annoyance and nuisance in the form of multiplayer video gameplay, is both frightening and considerably threatening to my safety and willingness to participate in video gameplay. Although I have never personally experienced griefing, I would not know how to handle the behavior nor how to avoid it. When playing with others, running the risk of harassment and judgment comes as both an expectation and a realistic fear. Why is this our reality? Why do women, minorities, and those who differ from the ‘societal norm’ face harsh treatment? How can this be changed or avoided?

In an additional article, “Toxicity and Abuse When Gaming Online: Flaming and Game Rage,” from the website The Cybersmile Foundation: Gaming, griefing is listed as the disruption of other players on purpose with an intent to annoy other players. The article states that certain players who engage in gameplay amongst griefers actually enjoy playing with these individuals due to the challenge presented in an attempt to overrule one another through who can cause the utmost damage or annoyance in the game. Although this behavior can be interpreted in that manner, the article blatantly also states that griefing is usually recognized as a toxic behavior that can reasonably be reported to game moderators or administration teams.

In conclusion, the behavior and intention of ‘griefing’ lies in the desire to troll, to disrupt, to annoy, to throw off, and to essentially, hurt another player’s ability to succeed within gameplay. But these intentions can also translate as a way to channel behavior that is labeled as cruel, damaging, and morally unjust. It is best when analyzing any type of potentially dangerous and servile behavior to determine the intentions. Are they purely due to game strategy or are they a cause of an underlying target towards a specific individual?

Works Cited:

Kafai, Y. B., Richard, G. T., Tynes, B. M., & Nakamura, L. (2017). Chapter 2. “Putting Our Hearts Into It”: Gaming’s Many Social Justice Warriors and the Quest for Accessible Games. In Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming (pp. 35–47). Lulu.com.

Solutions, M. W. (2020, April 5). Types Of In-Game Abuse – Cybersmile. Retrieved from https://www.cybersmile.org/advice-help/gaming/types-of-abuse.

In Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo, Jack Halberstam talks about how glitches can be considered synonymous with failure. Glitching means that something is broken, it’s not right, and something that is broken or failing must be fixed. People don’t like failure. It is implied that failure is unacceptable. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all. There’s something deeply saddening about that statement. First of all, it implies that doing something differently, to the extent that it shouldn’t exist. It also means that there is always a right way to do something, with no deviations. If something is wrong, then the right must be the standard.

In my final paper for this course, I talk about Monster Factory, an online video series from Polygon where Justin and Griffin Mcelroy use the character creation engines of different games to create ‘monsters’. Although using the term monster suggests that these creations are wrong and bad, that’s not really the case. Sure, the monsters are outside the norms of what is considered attractive, and therefore ‘normal’, but they don’t exist as failures or mistakes, and they aren’t treated that way. Throughout these videos, it becomes apparent that the monsters are deviations from real life societal norms of appearance, and from the in game narrative. They aren’t extensions of Justin and Griffin, they aren’t a game piece or tool to navigate the game with, they’re their own character, with personality and a story completely separated from the rigid narrative of the game in which they are contained. When they make Final Pam in Fallout 4, her narrative isn’t that of a 1950’s housewife exploring a nuclear wasteland, she is Final Pam, a scourge upon the world, a powerful entity whose main goal is to find a multitude of sons and husbands and to escape the confines of the game. When they play Mass Effect 2 and realize that the character creator is too restrictive to make a true monster, they are upset and end up forgoing the formula of making the monster and finding their narrative to mess around with the game’s code to mess with Shepard’s polygons and find different ways to mess up his face that aren’t included in the game. It gets to the point where the appearance of the monsters is completely separate from the world of the game. They effectively exist outside of their set narrative. In the context of Monster Factory, using the character creator as a tool to create beings that are separate from the narrative created by the game, with an outlandish appearance and their own personality, shows how much gray area there is between right and wrong, success and failure.

Even though the term ‘glitch’ is mostly used in terms of technology, it still gets brought up in discussions over humanity. It’s strange, because why would there be a clear and defined wrongness in a human being? We’re all different, even if it is only in very minute ways, so claiming that there are ‘wrong’ traits to have as a human is pointless. The most obvious answer is that when there is no way to claim a person is wrong by using the language of feelings and emotions, because bigotry is too unreasonable and apparent when stated upfront with no logic behind it, the next step is to hide behind the guise of science. Science is seen as solid proof, a reasonable backing for bigotry. This leads to statements such as “There are only two genders, male and female”. To not exist in the clear definitions standardized by extremists, you are a ‘glitch’. “We’re not talking about feelings, the sex that you were born as is the one you will always be, regardless of your identity.” Being outside the standard is to be other, to be a glitch, to be a failure. If you don’t complete the narrative that everyone is expected to conform to, you are what’s wrong with society. When Justin and Griffin Mcelroy make a monster, they find a narrative not intended by the developers of that game. Being a glitch isn’t failure, nor is differing from the norm a failure. It’s just using the tools that you have been provided for a purpose that the standard didn’t intend for.

Halberstam, Jack. “Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo.” Queer Game Studies, by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 187–199.

A lot of this week had to do with communities and community building. Minecraft is a prime example of different communities. It allows servers, which provides a platform for people to come together and cooperate in a space they enjoy. It is capable of more than survival, but also creative modes that focus specifically on making whatever you want. Servers can supply both toxic and safe spaces. So it is important to recognize that not every area is beneficial. In the same way, not every group is going to be welcoming. In a group full of the majority, the minority may never find a space comfortable.

Today, I’d like to relate welcoming spaces for minorities to my own experiences. Tabletop Simulator is a game that allows a community driven workshop of multiple board games to be played online. As a female, I have a group of exclusively males friends and we play a deduction game known as Secret Hitler. Although my friends are quite inclusive, being a minority within a group ultimately singles you out. In a game built on trust, if you are the minority, you stand out and people will pin you or deduce you as the enemy. However, if one chooses to not speak, nobody suspects who you are, but at the same time, you can’t provide any valuable information to any other members on who the enemy is. It brings up the question that even if a community is inclusive and tries to create a safe space for females or a minority, does it truly deliver a comfortable or fair environment?

I’d like to relate this to hackerspaces. Hackerspace is a word and thing that I’ve never heard of before. They “are volunteer-run spaces where one can tinker with hardware, software or any other types of technology and socialize.” Many spaces have opened up with the goal of creating a safe space for women. In the process, it provides women with a new outlet to explore STEM and level the heavily male dominated playing field for computer science. The feminist hacker space is not exclusive to only women, but it is welcoming to women. More STEM focused groups should be produced in order to give females the capability to explore more hobbies and occupations. If a space is feminist friendly, it doesn’t guarantee that the space has the majority as females. Let’s say it is though. Although we solved the problem by making the majority into the minority, who is to say that the environment doesn’t create a new minority? For example, one minority could be the least knowledgeable versus the highly experienced individual. It is intimidating to be the odd one out in any situation.

In general, when will there be a place that the majority can’t intimidate or pick out the minority unconsciously? Even if the location is inclusive, it will never take away the fact everyone lives with unconscious bias. A group will single out someone who isn’t like them although they can try to be self conscious, they will cause a new bias in the wake of their old bias.

Works Cited

Payne, Matthew Thomas, and Nina Huntemann. How to Play Video Games. New York University Press, 2019.

Toupin, Sophie. “Feminist Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and Hacker Cultures (2014).” Journal of Peer Production, http://www.academia.edu/24232869/Feminist_Hackerspaces_The_Synthesis_of_Feminist_and_Hacker_Cultures_2014_.

There are a few different ways to categorize different types of gamers. Several different aspects go into what we classify as a casual gamer. These factors are typically based on the individual’s duration of gameplay and the genre of the game. Also, I strongly believe that games are constantly evolving and developers dictate their audience completely.  According to Lina Eklund “The first commercial digital games were adult activities, as arcade games appeared in pubs (Williams 2006). As consoles became available for private use they were then marketed as family entertainment – available to play in the family home. However, after the video game market collapsed in 1983 the industry needed a new approach. When Japanese Nintendo released their Famicom console – the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the West – they aimed their product at children, foremost boys, in order to find a more secure audience. As Krotoski (2005) has shown, before this, the gaming industry aimed games at everyone – men and women, old and young alike. This shift towards young men changed ideas about who the consumers of digital games were, and this strategy in production and marketing still prevails. During the 1980s and early 1990s, digital games were seen as boys’ toys and game developers were/are almost solely men (Haddon 1988) leading to a marginalization of female users. Since then three major waves of social and technological changes can be identified that have impacted on the game audience”. With that being said, Eklund’s excerpt clearly identifies the turning points in gaming history. Production would constantly swap their emphasis from women gamers to men gamers, and occasionally both sometimes. I find that quite flabbergasting, because prior to reading this article I always assumed that it was always about men due to stereotypes.

Furthermore, with the shift to gamers being perceived as males the defining of a gamer changed as well. As games elevated, so did the level of hardcore content as well. With more explicit games gaining popularity, so did the amount of production. As the gaming industry progressed, games such Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto flourished. Personally, I grew from a casual gamer to a hardcore gamer because of the attraction that came with violent games. Eklund states that “The term ‘casual gaming’ came about as digital games as well as users became more diverse and different designations came into use to contrast early digital gaming (hardcore) to what were perceived as new (casual) game types, genres and gamers. Dividing gamers into hardcore and casual is now one of the bases for understanding different types of games/ers both in academia and industry classification (Juul 2010). Casual games tend to have more positive fictions featuring no or cartoonish violence, require little previous knowledge of games, allow players to play in short bursts and practice excessive positive reinforcement of success (ibid.). Casual games are lighter, easier to play and flexible (Kultima 2009). In contrast, hardcore games are seen as heavier, featuring violence and dark themes and taking time to learn”. With that being said, Eklund conveys a certain stigma about hardcore gamers who tend to play these form of games. I’m slightly concerned with the perspective that playing dark themed games correlate with being a hardcore gamer. Casual gamers also indulge in these same genre of games as hardcore gamers which can depend on the popularity during the time of release. I’ve witnessed many casual gamers indulge in the most violent games, due to its availability. So is it really fair to categorize dark gameplay with a certain type of gamer?

Work Cited

Eklund, Lina. “Who are the casual gamers? Gender tropes and tokenism in game culture.” Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The changing gaming landscape. Ed. Tama Leaver and Michele Willson. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 15–30. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 24 Feb. 2020. .

No wayy! I am at blog post number ten! This semester has been great. I really have enjoyed this course. Personally, I enjoy playing video games, but, I never knew that games could be dissected to the points that we got to during this semester. When I first signed up for this course, I hoped that we would not just be playing video games, but also look for meaning and develop a broader scope of the gaming world. This is exactly what I got out of this course. Before I get into my last blog post, which will be about Minecraft, I want to thank Dr. Cody and all of my classmates for making my experiences in this course memorable. We engaged in some really enticing discussions throughout the semester.

Getting to the point, one interesting topic that we covered during week eleven of the course dealt with Minecraft. I have to admit, I played a lot of Minecraft back in high school. However, after having more on my plate to deal with during my college days, I have shifted away from the game. Something interesting that we covered in one of the readings and during class discussion on Thursday surfaces around the notion that Minecraft is always updating. In James Newman’s piece, “Minecraft: User-Generated Content”, he states, “Given the number of ports and updates available since its initial release, we might argue that Minecraft is best approached not as a single game but as a web of interrelated titles that unfold over time” (Kindle pg 278). Most of my classmates indicated that they have played Minecraft before during our class discussion. For those of you familiar with the game, new mods and updates are always happening in the Minecraft world. What I took away from this is the fact that the creators and software workers have a good sense of just how far Minecraft could actually go. Games like Minecraft, which allow for players to basically make what they want, demonstrate a tremendous amount of autonomy. Games with autonomy will always thrive in our gaming world. The reason for this being that people do not like to play within limits, but rather, they prefer to make things that are appealing to them in their own ways. Another reason why Minecraft will continue to be successful is because of its flexibility. What I mean by flexibility is in terms of the audience for the game and the actual game play itself. For example, I mentioned that I started playing Minecraft back in high school. Today, I have a seven-year-old cousin who plays Minecraft and also has a pretty good-looking world as well! Overall, Minecraft is a great game, but what makes it stand out from others is the amount of freedom that it offers for its creators.

To sum it all up, another point that Newman gets to in his work is the idea that Minecraft is a hard game to give an exact description of. Taking what I have learned throughout this semester into consideration, this is actually a good thing for the game. To quote Newman, he states, “In some cases, updates fundamentally alter what Minecraft is—or perhaps more accurately—expand the horizons of what Minecraft can be” (Kindle pg 278). Based off of this quote, Minecraft is ever-changing, which means that giving this game an exact definition of its functions is sort of impossible. In other words, this is the ideal game for all groups of people. Why play a game that is limited to certain functions? Why play a game that has a structure that you really cannot change? Why play a game that will always be the same? By playing Minecraft, people can actually feel as if they were considered when the developers got to work. Minecraft offers something many other games lack, which is the ability to feel that what you create is certainly possible and acceptable.

-Andy Kissoon

Growing up as a consistent gamer I always correlated fun with graphics and enhanced narratives. As a huge fan of the WWE Smackdown vs Raw game series I always had the most fun experiences battling my way to WrestleMania. However, it wasn’t until I read about Amanda Philips’ perspective I began to understand the importance of losing as well. I began to realize how the pressure of losing in main event matches made me keep playing the game, because it wasn’t easy. According to Philips “This is particularly important in studying videogames because of the way they historically have been linked to fun and fandom. We think of games as things we do for fun, even when we are making or studying them. Much of the popular discourse around gaming connects them to the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from achievement or overcoming obstacles, even when the point is not fun itself, but more mundane achievements like training. The popularity of gamification attests to the allure of “fun” for educators, advertisers, and gamers alike. But fun is not everything. Bonnie Ruberg (2015) argues that the hegemony of fun in game design and culture flattens the emotional complexity of the gamic experience, and that “no-fun” can be an affective position with radical potential. She points to scholars such as Jesper Juul (2013), who writes about how failure and frustration are also important characteristics of gameplay. In fact, failing is one of the most important parts of a game, since we do it over and over and over again”. Ironically losing in games play as much of a vital role in the creation of video games like fun does. Personally, I enjoy playing Nba 2k20 when I’m working hard to win games. For example, starting off mycareer mode with a point guard that is a 60 overall makes it very difficult to facilitate wins for your team. All of this losing constantly makes winning a much more fulfilling experience.

Even without threat, certain communities aren’t given an equal amount of social justice in the world of game development. Philips continues to convey great detail about how transwomen don’t generate much income from producing, but yet they are still vulnerable to mass harassment. She states that “Anna Anthropy, the radical trans lesbian game designer, encourages everyone to learn how to make games. She advocates for simple tools such as Twine that open up game design to those without the programming skills often thought necessary to make games (Anthropy 2012). She and other transwomen designers, including Merritt Kopas and Mattie Brice, create min – imalistic, short games that subvert AAA expectations, often telling stories or using mechanics that are not marketable in the mainstream. Their games are highly personal, occasionally unpolished, but always evocative and meaningful to play. They do not make much money, often relying on crowdfunding models to support their production. In a tragedy for justice, these transwomen have endured intense harassment for offering alternatives to the AAA industry without being able to support themselves financially”. It’s also important to acknowledge that social justice in video games is not always given to everyone. Although Twine is a tool for freedom and creativity in gaming, members of the LGBT community still aren’t fairly encouraged. Philips excerpt conveys the lack of justice in gaming amongst people who receive a lot of harassment from the gaming community. I find the harassment to be unjust, because it holds certain communities back from enjoying video games with liberation. All gamers should enjoy access to this, because the gaming experience should always be safe no matter what community you are a part of.

Work Cited

Phillips, Amanda. “Game Studies for Great Justice.” The Routledge Companion to Media
Studies and Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, Routledge, 2018, pp. 117-127.

Throughout our time in class we discussed the different aspects of the first person gameplay of Gone Home. Gone Home is an award winning exploration game that was created by Steve Gaynor. The game went on to be very influential because it included a different form of sexuality while also welcoming players of the LGBT community. Gaynor does this by representing lesbians in a narrative that is exploratory, relatable and mysterious. Merritt Kopas describes the game as “This is a video game. About girls in love. That shouldn’t be exceptional in and of itself, but it is. And because it’s a video game about a big empty house and because it’s a story about girls in love, anyone who has any familiarity with either of those genres is going in expecting the worst to happen. Because seriously, setting a lesbian love story in a creepy old mansion is the perfect confluence of terrible… So you’re moving through the house, and you’re finding these audio journals from your little sister, Sam, telling you all about this girl she’s met named Lonnie and how cool she is. And you’re kind of on edge because the lights are flickering and every once in a while
the house creaks in the storm and you don’t know what’s going to
come first, the beginnings of a lesbian tragedy suicide sequence or
something jumping out at you from a dark corner. And then there’s this scene in a bathroom on the second floor. I’d entered the room from the hallway coming out of Sam’s bedroom, having just read a few ominous-sounding notes from her. In the bathroom you turn on the light and immediately notice that there’s blood in the bathtub, and your heart races because this is a video game and you’re exploring an empty house on a dark and stormy night and nobody is around for some reason and you’re just waiting for it to turn out that, surprise(!), everyone is dead”. Furthermore, conveying the mental environment of an individual who has to be discrete about their sexuality due to family and friends. Although the narrative may come off as cliche, it still possesses relatable factors that many gamers have been through in real life.

Additionally, gamers like Kopas enjoy the possibilities that come with developers creating more games that are in the same genre as Gone Home. Obviously it’s difficult to fulfill the needs of single gamer, but with more LGBT representation in gaming brings hope for more. Narratives will need to be more diverse and relatable to others that seek this type of gaming. For example, Kopas mentions that “But ultimately Gone Home left me hopeful rather than grieving. Hopeful about storytelling and games, and hopeful about my own experiences. Because obviously we can’t go back home, into
our pasts, and change things—like Katie, all we can do is observe, witness, turn things over in our heads until they make a kind of sense that we can work with. But we can write new stories, ones where girls in love don’t die tragic deaths and where big empty houses are scary but ultimately safe and where you can have a teenage girl romance at twenty-five, or thirty-five, or whenever you want to”. Overall, it’s essential to acknowledge the effects of gender-based narrative that can affect the overall gameplay experience for users of the LGBT community.

Works Cited

Kopas, M. (n.d.). On Gone Home.