The audience of a game is always going to be the first thing a game designer has in mind because without the audience there is no one to buy the product. For video games, the male target audience is in the forefront, but as we can see, there is an existing female audience. It is not only an activity for men. Even with some acknowledgement of the audience, women are still placed into a stereotype. Chess explains that the market fails to realize them as an audience and decides to determine them as just a genre of games.This genre is pretty much what is known as female games, which was given a set of components that determined what made a game feminine. The list of characteristics, that Chess included from Sheri Graner Ray’s book, is as follows: less risk, cooperative play, avatar customization, forgiving game designs, indirect competition and less moving objects. So, this is why many mobile games are deemed convenient for women as they are less time consuming, less violent and more convenient. For example, Farmville incorporated a lot of these aspects. There was avatar customization through your farmer. You couldn’t die and the only real risk was your plants withering. Also, there weren’t any moving objects like a first person shooter. These types of games are widely popular and this is why the mobile game market is the size it is today.

With the realization of this new found game style, more games became appealing for women. However, mobile games were the female genre and the female audience couldn’t see the light of day. As women are stuck as a genre, they are never broken down into the many communities that actually exist. They are forever stuck as stereotypes like fashion, shopping and mobile games. On the other hand, we do see games try to appeal towards the female audience instead of just focusing on the game as a genre. One game, Life is Strange, is very ambiguous as there are plenty of female characters. The protagonist, Max, is not just your average feminine girl. She appeals to the tomboys, hipsters, and outsiders. She plays ice hockey and is very passionate about photography. Also, the game has very simple mechanics and time management, which would fit into the list of female game characteristics like non threatening and risk free. This game isn’t just for women though and seems to be playable by other audiences, due to the appeal of an intriguing narrative. Not to mention, it’s not a mobile game, which definitely helps it rise above being just a female game and helps justify itself within the male dominated communities.

As we look towards the future of games, we can only hope that the female audience is expanded upon and dropped as only a female game genre. It is clear that females are very avid gamers, regardless of the political connotation and fear of labeling themselves as one. They do exist even if nobody wants to admit it. Personally, i’d hope to see the female audience have more debuts within the hardcore communties because games are getting quite stale.

Work Cited

Chess, Shira. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

The playing of video games has often been seen as a male-dominated hobby. Women are often an overlooked demographic, and even when companies look to market towards that demographic, they do so with a specific stereotype of the demographic in mind. Along with this stereotype, comes with the idea of games that exhibit gameplay that are not typically seen in the gaming mainstream. These are games marketed towards the “Player Two,” as Chess describes it. Chess’s usage of the term Player Two describes female players as the second thought for many game developers. The games that often can be coined to be designed for the Player Two often exhibit lower stakes, lower time requirements, and places heavier focus on the player actions themselves rather than having the player actions be a means towards a win condition. 

Chess brings up one of the earliest examples of a game designed and marketed towards the Player Two, the Nintendo Knitting Machine. At the time, the Nintendo Knitting Machine was considered something different and maybe even revolutionary. A gaming product that was advertised to female players and lacked many features a mainstream game would have while also introducing new features not seen in games before. However, the fact that a product that intends for players to do knitting while marketed towards girls shows a pretty obvious act of stereotyping to their marketed demographic. There’s a message in there that tells the gaming world that girls are not interested in violent or competitive games, and that they would much better be suited with games that focus on housework, such as knitting. This in turn influences the thoughts of children who see these kinds of marketing and play these games.

In addition, I think this type of marketing is not only detrimental to girls, but also to boys as well. A game that introduces new and unique concepts and mechanics should not only be the interest of one demographic. Almost everyone I know loves the introduction of novel concepts in any medium of entertainment. As an extension, I feel that if it were not the fact that knitting is stereotyped as a girl’s activity, there would be a lot more boys that are more willing to do knitting and by extension be a marketable audience for the Nintendo Knitting Machine. 

I feel that it is important for marketing in games to broaden the demographics they appeal to. I feel that marketing towards specific social groups such as gender or sexuality is a handicap for gaming industries, especially games that are more marketed towards a younger demographic, where many are still trying to discover what they like and don’t like. If a child sees that a game is not marketed towards them, they will think that they are not supposed to like those types of games and may never try them out, not knowing if they may have enjoyed them if they did. Alternatively, they may try them out, but will fear being stigmatized for not “liking what they’re supposed to like” and may keep their enjoyment a secret.

Sources:

Chess, Shira. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

This week for our readings in the book Ready Player Two by Shira Chess, I decided to read the fifth chapter, Bodies, as it pertained to the topic in my final research paper, where I am going to look into the power of choice in avatars and character creation, and how those choices may or may not reflect our real world selves. Ready Player Two is all about identifying the ‘player two’ in the social aspect of video games, which is usually a woman, but can be any sidelined identity that does not correspond with the idealized white male we often see in video game culture. One of the most notable aspects of player two is that a lot of rhetoric surrounding the ‘female identity’ in media focuses on the assigned female at birth reproductive system. As such, the fifth chapter opens up with a description of a product called Skea, an alternative to regular Kegel exercises, which are supposed to strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor, with the draw being that it was supposed to be a gaming experience akin to the series Temple Run. The major problem with this product is the advertisement made to fund the Skea, in which the inventor, Tom Chen, demonstrates the elasticity of the pelvic floor of a woman after childbirth by shoving fruit into a net in front of a poster of a scantily clad model. This demonstration assumes that all women loose elasticity after childbirth, and chooses to represent this process not with an anatomical model of the afab reproductive system, but with a poster of a lingerie model, a representation of a woman most can’t identify with. So even though this product was made specifically with women in mind, the assumptions the product makes isn’t applicable to everyone, and its delivery comes off as insulting to those who are supposed to buy it.

And that leads to a different problem. If we assume that the player two in our community is a cis, able bodied female, we neglect so many other identities that can be harmed by this assumption. Even then, in most media, a woman is equal to someone who is cis and is not only able to, but wants to experience motherhood. This allows groups, such as transphobic feminists, known as terfs or gender critical, to exclude trans women from female oriented spaces, implying that because they do not have a afab body, they cannot have these experiences, that they “appropriate women’s bodies while still embodying patriarchal dominance” (Chess, pg 160). This view of femininity overlooks that there are women who either cannot or do not want to experience childbirth, and adversely reduces us to a mere bodily function. It’s a view that is contrary to feminism, as the thought that child bearing being the only thing women are good at, being the one thing that makes us women, is our bodies.

How does this concern player two? For one, childbirth has always been a way to confine women to the predetermined role as ‘mother’. For example, Outlast 2 embodies this throughout its narrative. Many entries in the horror genre use the trope of the ‘painful pregnancy’, an inherently sexist trope that often forces the women in the story to become pregnant, and then experience it as painful and horrific in a traumatic way. In Outlast 2, you play as a white male reporter who is trapped in a murderous hillbilly cult, who must find his wife and survive the night. The ending shows you finding your wife inexplicably pregnant, giving birth and then dying. This is her only involvement in the story besides in flashbacks and dream sequences. The reality of player two is much too often of a cis female, someone that can easily be sidelined as a damsel in distress or as a woman in the refrigerator. It excludes women to a singular bodily function, makes us exist only as the foil and the motivation to the titular male character. It ignores that women aren’t just our bodies, and it also denies trans women who may not be afab the right to exist as women.

Works Cited

Outlast 2, Red Barrels, 2017.

“Playing with Bodies.” Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity, by Shira Chess, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

On the recommendation of a friend, I played Missed Messages this break, (among other games, but they are not relevant). This is actually a very short game, one play through will take about ten to fifteen minutes depending on reading speed/ how much the player messes with the game. (If you really want to get through it though, you could probably do it in five minutes). There are only four achievements in the game and in order to get all four would only take about thirty to forty minutes. What is interesting in this game is that in this short amount of time, Missed Messages is able to get across its point as well as give you a good sense of the character you are playing as. Before I get into looking a little into the game itself and how it does this, I would like to note that I think its a good game to look at for this class, not only due to some of the relevant topics it brings up, but also it is not too far off from a game that would be easily doable for the project.

Missed Messages touches on themes of suicide and depression. The game begins with the player character in her dorm room attempting to do homework, but is unable to focus. This is a relatable moment for many college-aged students. The game play does this by not only having the main character mention how she cannot focus, but also by given the player choices in what to do every few moments to show the character’s lack of focus. In order to get more into the character, the player can also bring up Spotify (okay, if it was given it name it would probably be named something like Spotsify, to avoid copyright, but that is irrelephant) and select different songs, which will actually change the background music of the game. This gives the play an idea of what the character would listen to, as well as gives the player some agency. For example, I found the original song annoying so I chose, the more soothing one. The player will begin to messages from a mysterious “Goth GF” which they are able to either accept or decline and respond to. Eventually, if the player messages Goth GF enough, they will be able to go and meet her. At this point the player is able to talk to their roommate for a bit. If it is the first play through, the player has no choice but to either go meet Goth GF or go back to work after this interaction, where the roommate, May, seems very distant and says her good byes to the player before going back into her room. When the player leaves May behind, they will spend the rest of the night with Goth GF and then come back to find out they missed messages from May and note on the door to call the police. From this, the player learns that May killed herself that night and the game ends. On future play throughs the player is able to instead spend the night with May where she will open up about her feelings of loneliness and depression.

The game essentially has two endings, one where May dies and one where May lives. In the ending where May dies the player sees the guilt the main character feels and sees the impact suicide has on those who live on after without that person. In the ending where May lives, the player is able to learn about May’s feelings and how they affect her life. As well as see the struggle May goes through to deal with them on her own. I believe the point of this game is bring awareness to mental illness and how much it can impact our lives if not treated properly.

For those interested, the Steam Link:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/812810/missed_messages/

(TW: self harm, depression, suicide)

During my spring break I ended up playing a lot of video games. With the my newly founded free time I spent it relaxing and chatting with friends. While playing these games the one thing I always remember is how much time I have during break and how much time I don’t have after break. As Chess states in Ready Player Two “Video games, one would think, fall under this purview—while one might schedule free time for playing video games, the game itself is rarely full of the everyday obligations implied by the monotony of time management. Thus there is a push-and-pull when video games are specifically designed with women in mind. They are often designed with an understanding of the complex relationships between women and time, but also with an understanding that time is what is necessary to draw in more players and create a depth of play.” (Ready Player Two 61)  During the semester me and my friends will always have to coordinate around when is the best day, usually the weekend, to play video games/board games together. I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, it’s become more difficult to find time to play video games, as I am stuck with either work or school work.

Some of the games I got into were Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. Both are similar in that you have villagers but your end goal is different for each of them. For Stardew you can choose to remove Jojamart from the town or just focus on your farm. As for Animal Crossing, other than paying off you house debt there is no other main goal. The player can set their own goal for themselves and set out to do it. For me currently in my New Leaf file, I’m working on collecting all bugs and fish to get the golden fishing rod and bug net. I’ve already expanded my house to the max and paid off the debt so I’ve set that as my goal for the game. Within both games the player can choose to express themselves through the clothing they wear. As Chess states in the first chapter “Unsurprisingly, many of the gameplay assumptions made by game designers reflect suggestions based on Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design. Some of the game-play elements discussed by game designers include: • increased use of social elements; • fewer constraints on time; • less in-game risk; • simple mechanics; and • emphasis on creative expression.” (Ready Player Two 44-45) Both of these games include some portions of these attributes within their games. Animal Crossing is more elaborate in allowing the player to customize their character. Stardew on the other hand allows for more social options as it allows you to romance a selection of the villagers in the game.

Within both, time is an aspect that controls the game. For Stardew the time is an in-game clock, and Animal Crossing uses a real world clock. Due to having the concept of time, but seasons certain animals are only available which adds to the gameplay. As the season passes that animal will be gone, incentivizing the player to continuously play each day in order to find that animal or plant.

With our recent discussion on marketing games and consoles towards specific genders, such as the Nintendo Knitting machine, the question is brought forward of whether any good is brought from marketing to gender specifics. By marketing to one gender you then seclude the other, for example since the knitting machine is viewed as a female gaming machine, a male would be seen as different for wanting to play with it. This works both ways and can even be seen today in gaming culture in general. Most first person shooters are viewed to have predominantly male player bases. When a female is seen on one of these games the initial reaction is that they are somewhere they don’t belong and they are often secluded or bullied for playing what they enjoy. Also sometimes in these games there is a role that the community forces on to the other gender, which can be seen in overwatch where the community has created this identity for female gamers as support players rather than playing the damage or tank role. Overall by creating these stereotypes and marketing for them the issues are only amplified which is a step back from the direction our society should be heading in reference to gender politics and equality. When companies market for gender the create a divide that doesn’t need to exist.

Growing up around the Mario craze, I have distinct memories of playing Balloon Battle on Mario Kart with my Pink Nintendo DS or Yoshi’s Island on my Game Boy advance. 20 Years later, Mario games are still taking over the console world, with Mario Party and Mario Kart being popular go-to games for group gatherings. The Mario Franchise has been around for about 40 years and their new releases never disappoint. With every game they release they provide us with both the excitement of a new game, but also the Nostalgia that older games provide. The nostalgia that comes from Mario games will never die. Why is that?

What makes Mario Games so Nostalgic? For one thing, games like Mario Kart and Super Mario Bros hasn’t changed significantly since they were first launched. Sure, the games now have definitely improved with clearer imaging on the Super Mario games and more elaborate tracks on the most recent release of Mario Kart. However, the overall concept of these games have not changed since they were first released. You play Mario Kart 8 the same way you’d play the original Mario Kart game. You might not be playing it on the same console, but the overall game play is the same. The same linear map is provided with every super Mario game. You’re provided with a pre-determined path that you need to follow in order to complete the level. Newer releases may give you more levels to complete or better graphics but the overall goal of the game never changes. That is what Nintendo does so well. Nintendo has done an excellent job in ensuring that with every new release of an Original Mario game, they don’t change the overall game play of it. This helps to build the Reflective Nostalgia mentioned in the Shovel Night chapter in How to Play Video Games. Regarding the reflective Nostalgia that the Shovel Night game provides, Vanderhoef states “Upon its release, critics praised the game for its ‘Classic,’ ‘old school,’ ‘retro’ appeal” (Shovel Night 319). This is similar to what Nintendo is doing with their games. By keeping their game design similar to how they were on the original release, they provide players with that reflective Nostalgia that they’re looking for.

What reflective Nostalgia does best is it gives us a sense of escape. Playing Mario games brings me back to my childhood. It reminds me of a more simpler time, playing video games with my sister and having no real “Responsibilities.” For this reason exactly, I find myself playing Mario games to get away from the real world and reflect on a part of my life where “adulting” wasn’t a thing. I feel that Reflective Nostalgia is especially significant for adults. It provides us with a memory of the past. Maybe that memory is with someone we used to know, or someone that is no longer with us. Whatever that memory may be, find a game from your childhood that provides you with that nostalgia.

As I mentioned in class I strongly believe that narrative is the catalyst of video games and leaves the largest impression on users. There’s been constant debate regarding narrative being a beneficial necessity for games or it being detrimental. Based on my own personal experience as a gamer I’ve always looked forward to the unique storylines games possessed. Throughout my gaming experience with, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, I was able witness a campaign that revolved around emotional war scenarios with the beloved Captain Price. Captain John Price is known as a protagonist who is the main character in all of the Call of Duty games since the release of Call of Duty 4 in 2007. At the time of his initial debut I was only ten years old, so I truly felt as if I grew up with Captain Price in my life up until I graduated from high school. I outgrew Call of Duty by the time I was in 11^th grade, because of my increased interest in playing more basketball. Throughout many of the campaigns I’ve played I experienced various emotional moments where I had to save Captain Price’s life or him having to save mine under the mist of war. Every single year during the fall I would constantly anticipate the releases of trailers and YouTube gameplay, because I truly couldn’t get enough of the narrative. These detailed war story lines created so many memories for me as a gamer due to the adrenaline and excitement the missions were garnering for me. Pursing checkpoint after checkpoint was always risky with opposing armies that were meant to stop us from our war goal which was winning. Constant trial and error as a war soldier built a passion for being good at Call of Duty. With that being said, without this narrative it would be extremely difficult for me to feel nostalgia from the game and I wouldn’t have had the same emotional experience otherwise. According to Mejeur’s article, Too Narrative Too Queer, “If we’re going to attempt to excise stories from games, we might as well stop making games. Waypoint’s Patrick Klepek started down this road, saying, “The problem is that it doesn’t matter: games have no choice but to tell stories,” but abruptly veered away from the most obvious follow-up to that statement: games have no choice but to tell stories because they are made by humans, and humans think in stories. Precisely how that happens is debatable, and has been debated around theories like the narrative paradigm, but we order things and seek structure. We played Pong, assuming a wider world of players on a court or at a table, rather than just playing Move Ball With Physics (and even that can be argued as a narrative structure, i.e. the ball begins here and then goes there. Also, it was never literally a ball at all; that is its own story).” Overall, Klepek’s articles conveys how essential it is for video games to possess narratives, because as humans we can’t help it, but to enjoy storytelling. Alike films and books, video games should be allowed to generate good narratives with ease as long the storytelling intensions are good.

Work Cited

Batti , B., & Karabinus, A. (2017). A Dream of Embodied Experience: On Ian Bogost, Epistemological Gatekeeping, and the Holodeck.

This past week we talked about how nostalgia affects how we remember older games and how some newer games are made. Nostalgia affects the way we perceive games that we used to play, especially the ones during our childhood. We tend to remember things based on our experiences, causing us to experience restorative or reflective nostalgia. Vanderhoef’s “Shovel Night: Nostalgia” discussed in great detail how the game brought out both restorative and reflective nostalgia when playing the game. We discussed in class that restorative nostalgia is the act of returning to a previous time in its purest form. It would be like going back and playing 007: Golden Eye for the Nintendo 64 and enjoying it on the original console with all its positives and negatives. Even though the controller isn’t very comfortable for a shooter and the game would occasionally freeze if the cartridge slot was dusty, you wouldn’t want to have it any other way. Reflective nostalgia is when we reminisce on past games and enjoy the good times but also recognize the negatives. For example, I used to love playing Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64 with my brother. I don’t think I was even in elementary school yet but I remember having a ton of fun. I’d love to go back and play it but at the same time I kinda don’t want to either. I really hated the N64 controllers and much preferred the Dreamcast’s controllers which had a similar layout to modern controllers. Something I also realized is that compared to newer Smash games, many of the characters in Smash 64 had incredibly broken move sets. Some characters had obviously overpowered moves while others had near useless attacks or were even missing moves in their move set. It was definitely an incredible game for its time and I’d love to go back a play a few matches but I think I’d much rather play the newer games on a regular basis.

Regarding nostalgia, many times we tend to forget the worst aspects of the game. Buinicki’s “Nostalgia and the Dystopia of History in 2K’s Bioshock Infinite” shows an excellent example in which people may look back on terrible events and twist them into a positive event or time. In Bioshock Infinite, the Battle of Wounded Knee is remembered as a glorious and heroic victory over the attacking Native tribes when in reality, it was a severe overreaction that led to the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Natives. It serves as an exaggeration in which some people may look back at the event with nostalgia and see the event in a much more positive light than it actually was. I feel that this tends to be common when experiencing stressful and difficult events. I seem to notice this quite frequently in military veterans. Their service in a combat zone is marked as one of the most stressful times in their lives. Many service members who fight in a combat zone can’t wait to leave and get back to their normal lives. Yet many veterans become nostalgic of their time overseas. I remember one veteran described it as the only thing he had to worry about was getting shot in the face. Meanwhile as a civilian, he has to worry about taxes, rent, work, wife, kids, mental health issues, politics, etc. Meanwhile, he reminisced on his time overseas as being comparatively carefree when in reality it probably was not the case. And I know at the time my brother wanted to rejoin the Army as well but I did my best to make him remember that through all the nostalgia it wasn’t worth going back. The film “They Shall Not Grow Old” also seems to touch on the topic as well except this time for soldiers during World War One. Towards the end of the war, neither side really cared who would win at that point. A common sentiment felt by the soldiers on the frontlines was “screw the war, we just want to go home.” Yet once the armistice was signed and the news was spread that the war was over, there was no cheering to be had in the trenches. Soldiers began to wonder “what do we do now?” after this long and brutal war has ended. Many veterans began to feel nostalgic and miss the armed forces, so much so that many veterans would volunteer as World War II erupted twenty years later.

Mohammad Farraj

DMS 448

Blog Post 7

            As time progresses, ideas are created, technology advances and goals are accomplished. In the creative space such as media, game studies and technology, when scholars surpass an idea or invent a piece of technology, those ideas and inventions become a piece of the past. But as these achievements are accomplished, we look back to these ideas  and recognize that they aren’t in the past and forgotten. They are not only seen as lessons but seen as way we as a society (and its individuals) could grow. In relation to this idea, the word “Nostalgia” becomes the turning point of said conversation. In the article, “Nostalgia and the Dystopia of History in 2K’s Bioshock Infinite” by Martin Buinicki, shows how the gaming community (including it’s developers) grow from the past and learn from it. Overall, nostalgia helps the community grow and learn in order to improve.

In the article, “Nostalgia and the Dystopia of History in 2K’s Bioshock Infinite” by Martin Buinicki shows how the idea of Nostalgia helps guide the gamming community to improve themselves and it’s products. In the text, Buinicki states how in one game called “BioShock Infinite”, looks back into it’s product (the game itself) and analyzes how it has displayed people of color in such a racist manner and whitewashed history to display such gameplay. In the text, it states, “In a similar way, as Bioshock Infinite unfolds, players learn Columbia’s Rockwell-inspired exterior hides multiple racist depictions of African Americans, Native Americans, the Irish, and the Chinese…The horror of the raffle forces players to recognize what has been absent in the hazy, peaceful set pieces of Columbia, and, subsequently, in their own idealized views of the past… The degree to which nostalgia serves to obscure oppression is one facet of the considerable debate regarding the uses and abuses of nostalgia (Buinicki 727). What this shows is that, within the game Bioshock, game developers have depicted people of color are portrayed in a racist manner that gamers are exposed too. In doing so, players are witnessing the whitewashed methods that developers have placed for players to play through. However, as time progresses, developers have looked back at their work and made progress in understanding the lessons from gamers reactions, blogs and gameplays through said game. What this shows is that, by looking back at nostalgic events within their work, game developers are able to improve themselves and their product. Reflecting back from DMS 448 class discussions, nostalgia is originally used as a term to look back into previous times and recognizes this idea of vintage, classical time(s). However, in some cases such as this, that may not be the case. Game developers look towards nostalgic moments in their companies and work,  and use it to progress and build themselves. In doing so, that is how they grow as a company and franchise. Therefore, this article and the concepts with it, help both companies and gaming communities improve for society to witness.

                                                                        Work Cited Page

Buinicki, Martin T. Nostalgia and the Dystopia of History in2K’SBioshock Infinite. learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/5e00ea752296c/6391964?response-content-disposition=inline; filename*=UTF-8”Buinicki%20-%202016%20-%20Nostalgia%20and%20the%20Dystopia%20of%20History%20in%202K%27s%20Bios.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200315T193719Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PLTYPZRQMY/20200315/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b6fae982c8f16f8011995e3889f5f94d0de23a70994286178134a7e307c58ca7.