Vaginophobia - via The Escapist

Over on the The Escapist, there's an article by game journalist Michael Thomsen called "Vaginophobia," which tackles the oft-commented portrayal of women (and more importantly femininity) in video games.  This topic lies close to my heart because I wrote an undergraduate thesis of the portrayal of women in science fiction movies from the perspective of gender.  Needless to say, I'm pretty excited to write about this.

Thomsen starts off with a story from his childhood about his male bluster to his friends and how it actually was his desperate attempt to hide the fear of rejection.  Then he goes into the tried-and-true observation that games tend to be marketed towards males, specially teenage males.  But he takes it a step further too, and extends the critique beyond that typical demographic, arguing that games reinforce the male hegemony of strength, independence, and general bluster and alleged bad-assery.

His basic argument is that the portrayal of women in gaming is less about minimizing or marginalizing women as a whole and more about reinforcing the male anxiety about the emasculating presence of women, and the iron-bound boundaries we put between the genders.

Again, as per my custom, I won't repeat verbatim what you can read via a click.  It's a great article, my only qualm is, as with most blog articles I've been finding, the arguments are somewhat undeveloped and the piece ends a bit abruptly.  Thomsen make's some great points and gives a slightly different perspective on what's becoming a common critique of video games and women.

GLS June 9 - 11

The annual GLS Conference (Games, Learning, and Society conference) started this week (sorry, I'm a little slow on the uptake here).  This is the 6th year of the conference, and it's held in Madison, Wisconsin.

You can check out the Conference page here: http://www.glsconference.org/2010/  There's a comprehensive breakdown of each days sessions and events here.

The GLS site is here: http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/.  The features academia (hey, we like that, right?), some activism - overall it's a great organization.

GameCareerGuide: A Common Framework for Storytelling in Game

Over on GameCareerGuide.com, there's a rather lengthy (and somewhat dense, truth be told) article about Storytelling  games.  The author, Gian Mancuso, makes some interesting points about how storytelling occurs within games.  While slightly more cerebral that what you find online most of the time, it's a pretty interesting read.  

Mancuso starts out by establishing his media theory of choice, in this case Narratology.  Not being horribly familiar with the theory itself and a somewhat lacking definition within the article left me a little unclear, other than it's a concept pioneered by Russians, and we got the concept of a "Plot Device" from it.  (Note: a quick jaunt to Wikipedia cleared out some of the fogginess from the authors description).  

One of the most compelling pieces is the author's differentiation between story and plot.  According to the author, even with multiple play-throughs of a game, Story remains the same (a series of linear events) while the Plot can never be experienced the same way twice (how the story is expresssed).  My favorite line from this article can be found on page 2, "Games dynamically produce plot as an emergent experience."  This is where the meat of the article is, at least in my opinion. 

While simply stated, this is a rather profound statement -- no other medium can claim to do anything dynamically.  All other media, be it books, movies, comic books are by their very nature static.  The claim to dynamically produce plot (plot as in the author's definition) highlights one of the major breaking points of games from traditional media. The idea that the plot changes based on playthroughs is something that while intristic in nature, is difficult to grasp.  Ultimately, most people equate "Plot" with "Story" which is no doubt why the author spent the first part of the article defining and justifying his separation of the two concepts.  

Even reflecting back on something as simple as Super Mario Brothers on the NES, we have Story and Plot as two discrete concepts.  The Story is "Save the Princess," and the Plot is "In saving the princess, I died four times trying to get to the princess."  Another piece of the 'Story' is defined by game play rules -- you get touched by a baddie, you die.  While the story as defined by the game play remains the same, how the game play is expressed, that is to say the plot of that given instance of the story, changes with each individual experience of the story and various interacting parts.  

Muscano goes on to describe the role of the player (or perceived role of the player) and agency within his dynamic, and finishes up with a section about the importance of cohesion between the story and plot, and how poor execution of either negatively effects the other.  

Muscano does a good job of splitting up Story and Plot, and explains and supports his arguments well for the small space he has.  While he takes a more holistic approach, he makes some very profound points that would be great to expound upon in the future.  

Via: A Common Framework for Storytelling in Games