That's Not a Real Game: Videogames, Gender, and the Popular Imagination

My all-purpose argument for this debate is ‘Because they aren't us.’ – The-Excel[1]

The majority of people are fucking stupid and they have no taste.' True words, sadly. I pity the people who buy the wii just for the fucking sports games, and then say after finishing the games. 'OOOOH, look at me, I'm a gamer now!!!!!' I promptly bring out my ps3 and beat there sorry asses at VF5, with a 30-0 win streak at Tekken, then finish them off with shooting the shit out of them on Resistance, then say to them that they are but mere SHADOWS of gamers. - Mushman[2]

Introduction
New media have traditionally been positioned as masculine in history, whether considering early radio hobbyists, gramophone hipsters, or personal computer techno-geeks. Videogames are no exception to this trend. The gaming industry and the popular imagination positioned videogames, like any other new medium, as a masculine technology inhabiting a masculine cultural sphere. Nested as they were in early computer technology, videogames were birthed, so to speak, from within an already existing masculine techno-realm, and it was within this realm where they gestated and grew. However, recently videogames have seen a shift away from a purely masculine position both within the gaming industry and more broadly within the cultural imagination. With videogames easily accessed via the Internet, such as Popcap’s Bejeweled and Peggle, and with the popularization of Nintendo’s Wii console and DS handheld, videogames have begun to not just ashamedly inhabit the domestic sphere as a male’s toy, but to become part of that sphere’s essential fabric, to become, instead, the family’s toy.


As part of this shift, and also as a reflection of it, the mainstream press has altered, albeit subtly, the ways it categorizes and covers videogames, broadening the technological sphere to include more than the stereotypical young, male enthusiast. For instance, in a recent review of the Nintendo DSi handheld system, New York Times’ Seth Schiesel speaks to the reader not as one gamer to another, but as one average consumer to another, concentrating on the fun-factor of the device rather than its technical prowess, a significant shift in the manner mainstream press outlets cover, and connect the reader to, the gaming industry.[3] In this way, videogames are becoming a part of family and domestic life in a way before unimaginable in popular culture.

Alongside this shift, and perhaps in response to it, the self-proclaimed hardcore gaming culture, or core gamers as they might call themselves, have responded passionately and defensively to what they feel is an encroachment on a very personal (read: masculine) hobby and culture. Part of the rhetoric produced in this insular culture’s response to the popularization of videogames is the advent, and more importantly the feminization and devaluation, of the term ‘casual’ when applied to the type of gamer Schiesel hails in his review of the DSi. This term acts as both an oppositional classifier to the more ‘serious’, more ‘real’ hardcore, masculine videogames, and as a repudiating, denigrating label for the types of people who engage with and find enjoyment in certain kinds of game experiences catered toward a more popular audience. In other words, ‘casual’ in hardcore gaming culture is almost always positioned as bad, or less than, and almost always positioned as feminine.

Within this context, questions remain. How and to what extent is the mainstream press, such as outlets like the New York Times, shifting or expanding their coverage of games to reflect and redefine the popular imagination of the medium and what is the landscape of this new position? In what ways does the hardcore gaming community speak of ‘casual’ games and in what ways does it, whether directly or indirectly, marry this term with hegemonic femininity? In other words, what effect do terms like ‘casual’ or ‘mainstream’ have over the popular imagination and how and why are these terms largely situated within a feminine sphere by the hardcore gaming culture? Through a discourse analysis of mainstream press coverage of videogames in outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and other publications in the United States, and through an analysis of the conversations happening within hardcore gaming circles on three of the most popular Internet videogame blogs - Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid - I will answer some of these troubling questions and speak to issues concerning gender, power, and hierarchy in relation to videogame technology and culture. Ultimately, I suggest that while videogames are becoming more popular and accepted as activities for the family, women, the elderly and non-traditional gamers, the hardcore, masculine gaming community, feeling threatened, is simultaneously marginalizing, feminizing, and trivializing this new crop of casual game players and the games and systems they play.

That Means You, Soccer Mom
In the past few years, mainstream press outlets have begun to cover the gaming industry more than ever, and a good portion of this increased coverage is on the phenomenon of casual games and casual gamers. In a New York Times article published December 5, 2007, “In a New Merger, Evidence of How Much the Gaming World Has Changed,” Seth Schiesel points out that “until recently, it seemed that the only way the game industry knew how to grow was to keep drilling deeper into its core demographic of tech-savvy young men who had few interests beyond cleavage, explosions and touchdowns.”[4] Here Schiesel reveals the default identity of the typical gamer, a masculine one, and simultaneously, he delineates the expectations this archetype gamer has of the games he plays. In other words, Schiesel reinforces the gendered nature of the medium. However, Schiesel goes on to suggest a shift in this logic when he comments that “over three successive autumns, true visionaries demonstrated a new way to conceive of video games -- not merely as a niche pastime for geeks but as the next mainstream entertainment medium, one that could appeal to women, families, older people and all the other demographic groups the industry had forgotten about.”[5] Schiesel’s suggestions in this article are not a minority voice; in the past several years mainstream press coverage of videogames has evolved to reflect their shifting position in the popular imagination by focusing on the broadening of the gaming demographic and the rise of casual gaming, hailing non-gaming girls and mothers and describing their increasing gaming habits, and linking the Nintendo Wii and DS with the elderly population and healthcare.


In “Remaking the Domestic Television Apparatus in the 1990s,” William Boddy argues that “much of the 1990s discussion addressing the entire spectrum of electronic high tech was inflected with the rhetorical project of remasculinizing the television apparatus through fantasies of power and control, a fantasy of technological terror and mastery for a masculinity under siege.”[6] In an inverse of the discussion Boddy refers to, the discourse of the popular press surrounding videogame technology today focuses on the softening and simplifying of videogames. Rather than individual power and complex control meant to assuage a masculine crisis, the mainstream press is highlighting aspects of community and universalizing, gestural interaction with videogames. Unlike the rhetoric of remasculinzing television, videogames, along with the popular press coverage of them, are in the process of demasculinization. Even while the industry depends on their loyalty and purchasing power, traditional masculine games and gamers are positioned as obsolete and detrimental to the growth of the medium in popular news coverage. In “As Gaming Turns Social, Industry Shifts Strategies,” Schiesel notes that “companies that are making games more accessible are growing like gangbusters, while traditional powerhouses with a traditionally limited strategy of building around the same old (if you will) young male audience have stagnated, both creatively and on the bottom line.”[7] Far from speaking to the traditional constituency of videogames, the industry and the press seem to suggest a shift in what games can be, what they can mean, and who can, and should, enjoy them.

Of course, it is important to remember, as Lisa Gitelman suggests, that “technological change is not a laboratory event or a corporate strategy but a fully social practice.”[8] The industry alone cannot change the cultural conception of videogames but instead must rely on outside discursive processes, such as press coverage, to do so. In her article, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph,” Gitelman posits that the definitions and meanings behind popular media are not created and cemented by their producers but instead are altered, constantly in flux, and negotiated by their consumers, those that adopt the technology and attempt to make sense of it in relation to existing home and social dynamics.[9] By examining the history of the phonograph, including its introduction into the home, the ways it was marketed by retail outlets, and the ways the public made sense of the new technology, Gitelman concludes that the adoption of the “phonograph formed part of a profound transformation in the public sphere, signaling new subjectivities and continued developments in the categorization of gender, class, as well as other relevant parameters of identity and community.”[10] Ultimately, she concludes that “modern forms of mediation are in part defined by normative constructions of difference, whether gender, racial, or other versions of difference.”[11] Videogames were only understood until recently as a boy’s toy or an adult male’s guilty pleasure. At least in Western cultures, that is how the public made sense of them. They have been gendered since their inception as masculine, or at the very least, as a technology that provides pleasures for males only; recently, though, thanks to journalists like Schiesel, videogames have been reaching a broader audience. Their cultural meaning is changing.

Undoubtedly, essential to this broader audience is the demographic of non-gaming girls and women. In “Wii wins big among casual gamers,” Byron Acohido mentions the Wii game Wii Sports, a game that features motion controls to mimic simple sports actions such swinging at a baseball, boxing, or tossing a bowling ball down a waxed, virtual lane.[12] Whereas typical masculine videogames the hardcore gamer enjoys, such as First-Person Shooters and Action-Adventure games, require a gaming literacy and advanced skills in analog stick and button manipulation to control, Acohido illuminates that, “suddenly, Aunt Sally, with no previous gaming skills, could hold her own against little Billy, the family's gaming guru. All she had to do was swing the Wii controller; no furious button pressing or amazing hand-eye coordination needed.”[13] With simple and universal controls, casual games, and specifically games for the Wii, are empowering those previously cut-off from videogames due to their lack of gaming literacy, and as such, previously adverse toward them. With the rise of Internet casual games and the Wii console in the living room, mainstream news coverage reflects that videogames have started to not only find their place in the domestic sphere but to shed their masculine connotations and dominance and be accepted by mothers, daughters, and sisters, too.


A major piece of evidence regarding this shift in coverage comes in the hailing of the reader as a (feminized) non-gamer. When discussing the growth of the games industry in the article, “Anticipating the Obsolescence of Fast Thumbs,” Schiesel discusses how Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello wants to seek out new and untapped gamers.[14] Schiesel makes it abundantly clear that Riccitello does not want the “desensitized, caffeine-mainlining, virtual-gun-toting twitch artist” or the “high school Madden fiend or video basketball jock.”[15] Instead, Schiesel calls out what has been until recently the “other” in the videogame world. Pointing a metaphorical index finger out to the reader, Schiesel commands, “That means you, soccer mom. That means you, cubicle-dwelling Dilbert clone. That means you, seventh-grade girl.”[16] Here Schiesel sketches out the archetypes that the games industry wants to court and by doing so, he is expanding the acceptable audience for videogames. Along with others in the popular press, Schiesel hails the non-gamer as gamer, invites them to explore and lay stake in the medium, and rearticulates the cultural position of games.

Bernadette Flynn outlines the migration of videogames from the video arcade to the home living room in her article, “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” but recognizes at the time that there was “little attempt by video console manufacturers and distributors to present the video-game console as a domesticated object.”[17] While I suggest this remains true for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles, both of which remain, at least primarily, dedicated to the core, masculine gamer, Nintendo has aggressively pursued the domestic sphere and the non-traditional gamers that inhabit it; press coverage of Nintendo’s Wii and DS reflect this pursuit. In Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times article titled “Moving Beyond Joysticks, and Off the Couch,” she speaks of her previous anxieties involving videogames and her refusal to purchase a game console because of fears she had that it would make her daughter a couch potato.[18] However, she goes on to write, “I recently remembered this vow while waiting in line for two hours outside the Nintendo store in Manhattan. Like hundreds of other parents, I was trying to get my hands on the Nintendo Wii, a popular video game system and one of the season's hottest toys.”[19] Although Parker-Pope previously conceived of videogames as non-productive and unsuitable for her daughter - perhaps because she was unconsciously influenced by their masculine mapping - her views changed regarding Nintendo’s Wii. Additionally, by conveying this personal shift in opinion, Parker-Pope implicitly invites others who may have been hesitant toward videogames to give them a chance; with her narrative of conversion, she neutralizes the gender dimensions of games while repositioning and reflecting their place in the popular imagination.

Indeed, part of this repositioning process involves the evolution of videogame technology and its gendered dimensions. Flynn proposes that “the design of the console has changed from a toy, to an entertainment unit, to a futuristic appliance.”[20] Again, while Microsoft and Sony’s consoles concur with her assessment, I suggest the Nintendo Wii has reintroduced the console-as-toy concept, but rather than positioning it as just a masculine toy, Nintendo has successfully created a family toy, a feat heretofore unseen in the console world. However, as Gitelman suggests, without the public discourse of the mainstream press, Nintendo would not have been as successful as they have been. Not only has the press highlighted, discussed, and invited more mothers and daughters into gaming, they have connected a generation previously alienated by videogames with the still burgeoning medium.


Popular press outlets have highlighted the fact that elderly men and women are exploring what has previously been an entertainment medium for their children and grandchildren. In a Boston Globe article published June 16, 2007, Robbie Brown reports how Nintendo has been donating free Wii consoles to retirement homes across America.[21] In a similar article also in the Boston Globe, “Rehab patients: Wii would like to get better,” Jennifer Fenn Lefferts reiterates the phenomenon of the elderly playing with and enjoying the Wii when talking about 62-year-old mother Deborah Thompson.[22] Thompson hated video games until “she stood recently, cheering herself on and pumping her fist each time she scored a point against her computer opponent - the Wii.”[23] Like the Parker-Pope narrative, Lefferts’ story reveals a general acceptance of videogames among non-gamers, even those that never grew up with games as cultural entertainment. Similarly, Drug Week and USA Today feature similar articles that replicate the newfound connection between the elderly, health, and videogames.[24][25] While some of these individuals still shy away from computers, the Internet, and MP3 players, the mainstream press and Nintendo have courted them and convinced them they too can be part of videogame culture.

Clearly, by focusing on the broadening of the gaming demographic and the rise of casual gaming, by hailing non-gaming mothers and daughters, and by linking the Nintendo Wii and other casual games with the elderly population and healthcare issues, the popular press coverage of videogames has reified and reflected the shifting position of games in the popular imagination. However, although the popular imagination of videogames has shifted from a purely masculine activity to a more gender neutral position, there still exists a core to gaming culture that represents the increasingly insular and defensive masculinity of traditional games technology, a culture that views the popularization of videogames from a suspicious and threatened perspective.

Because They Aren’t Us
In a conference presentation suggesting high-definition televisions are a new site for gender and class hierarchies, Elana Levine cites Boddy when she describes the negotiations and distinctions occurring in television ownership and control in the early 1990s when men, threatened by television’s growing association with popular and consumer culture, flocked to retail stores to purchase bigger, more masculine TV sets to again reclaim the technology they felt slipping into a feminized status.[26] This minor-crisis is similar to the state of core gamers in light of the emasculating Wii console. As the Wii seeps into more and more houses and as that kind of technology becomes synonymous with video game technology, core gamers have begun to perceive the medium as a whole becoming infected with a feminized stigma. In response to the popularization and shifting place of games in the cultural imagination, gamers on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid, three of the Internet’s most popular gaming blogs, threatened by the changes to their medium, have feminized and marginalized this new crop of casual game players and the games and systems they play. In addition, they utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to degrade casual videogames, use post-feminist sarcasm within the discourse of casual games, and evoke a protest rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on destroying and replacing traditional, masculine games.

There has been a long history now of linking mainstream or popular culture with the feminine.[27] As videogames grow and expand their audience, they become a greater part of popular culture. Specifically, though, casual games, with their pick-up-and-play nature and easy-to-learn controls, lend themselves well to mainstream or popular audiences. However, once linked with popular culture, I suggest casual games become representations of passive consumption for hardcore gamers and, as a result, become linked with the feminine. In her article, “SIMple & Personal: Domestic Space & the Sims,” Mary Flanagan argues that The Sims game feminizes the player by encouraging them to engage in consumerism for and within the domestic sphere.[28] In this way, Flanagan suggests the game hails the player as a female subject, creating a sense of unease amongst the male players who are conscious of their suddenly fluid gender roles. If we can assume the popularity of the Sims franchise, its content, and its large female playerbase makes the game a casual experience, then might other casual games have the same feminizing effect on core masculine gamers who are used to their games rearticulating and reinforcing their masculinities? While The Sims also engages the player in consumerism within the game, the product itself, because it might be argued to be a casual game, represents consumerism and passivity as well. I suggest that traditional masculine gamers are engaged in an on-going taste war with the rising culture of casual games and that this taste war manifests itself through the gendering of the casual game space. Pierre Bourdieu argues in Distinctions that taste cultures define themselves primarily by what they are not.[29] Gender, too, is defined largely by evoking its opposite. In other words, in the hegemonic gender binary, the masculine is everything that is not the feminine, and vice versa, the feminine lacks everything that the masculine possesses.


This basic binary between masculine and feminine and hardcore and casual can be seen any time casual games are discussed on popular gaming blogs. Whether users proudly state, “My Wife loves ‘em,” whether they negatively chirp, “i dont like my mom playing tetris all day on my game boy,” or whether they blatantly state, “Girls can have their types of games and guys can have their own,” the marrying of females and femininity with the casual game space continually reproduces itself and cements itself as common sense.[30][31][32] Additionally, it promotes notions of difference and distinction which ultimately recreate gender and power hierarchies.

Of course, this discourse is not limited to Internet blog comments but pervades the entire gaming industry, including games marketing. In her research, Flynn noted “that for the middle-class female readership of lifestyle magazines, the video console is still an alien machine in relation to narratives of identity associated with domesticity and family togetherness.”[33] I have suggested that this notion is changing thanks to casual games, Nintendo’s Wii, and the shifting discourse of the popular press. However, writing just six years later, and exploring recent game advertisements, some of which were aimed at women exclusively, Shira Chess’s research reveals “a marginalizing attitude towards women in typical video game advertisements, and an essentializing one in recent advertisements specifically aimed at feminine audiences.”[34] Chess suggests that typical videogame advertisements in gaming magazines position the female and the feminine as other or annihilate the presence of both entirely. Essentially, Chess proposes that “one does not have to look far to see a division and gendered hierarchy between traditional (masculine) gamers and newer (feminine) gamers.”[35] In the same way that these ads position the female and feminine gamer as other, the discourse created through popular blog comments positions casual games and gamers as other and alien to the core culture of gaming.

In addition to marrying the feminine with the casual space, part of this positioning of other is through labeling of casual games as other in sexual orientation. To these core gamers, hardcore games not only represent the masculine, they represent the heteronormative ideal. A discourse exists in this community that links casual games with homosexuality. This is exemplified in comments such as “Casual games? GAAAAAAAY!” and “I hate stupid cats! They are all Evil! I dont freaking steal. Casual Games are for gay people or men that are very very very in touch with their feminine side; so in touch it’s scary.”[36][37] Both comments explicitly conflate casual games with homosexuality and femininity. However, the second goes farther by linking cats, a stereotypically feminine-coded pet, with casual games, and by evoking heterosexual anxiety at the thought of a male in touch with his emotions. Indeed, if in this discourse casual games are linked with emotions, it would make sense that “men don't talk about casual games because they aren’t worth talking about. Playing, perhaps, talking no.”[38] In this way, like emotions or homosexuality, “real men” are not supposed to discuss casual games, even if they do secretly play them. This reflects the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that delimit men from discussing their feelings and regulations in America’s armed forces that are founded on the credo, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” In core gaming communities, even if males play casual games behind closed doors – and they should be played behind closed doors – the discourse suggests that they are culturally encouraged not to bring it up.

Not all comments are so easily read, however. Angela McRobbie, in “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” argues that contemporary culture produces a post-feminist mindset that announces the victory of feminism while marginalizing its current efforts and surreptitiously undoing all the advances it helped achieve regarding gender and sexual equality in society.[39] In a post-feminist culture, sexism and misogyny appear not as proof that feminism failed but as proof that it succeeded. Within this context, because women supposedly have equal rights now and men are reformed, any overt devaluation of women or the feminine is meant to be seen as sarcasm. As enlightened cultural and consuming beings, we are meant to be in on the joke. These types of post-feminist comments appear on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid, and I suggest they are meant to poke fun at the assumed connection between females and casual games and the antiquated concept of ideal gender roles. However, I argue that while meant as tongue-in-cheek remarks, this kind of language still reproduces and reinforces the marrying of casual games and gamers with the feminine and reproduces traditional gender and power hierarchies.


These post-feminist comments appear on popular gaming blogs when male-coded gamers link females with casual games in degrading and pre-feminist ways. In a November 3, 2007 post on Kotaku titled, “Who Knew: Men Like Casual Games, Too,” a commenter named Onizuka-GTO writes, “female presence = casual. It’s a fact. Honest. :P.”[40] Moreover, this comment is reinforced by two others. A user named THE-HATER comments, “All you guys who bought Puzzle Quest are proof of the horror of casual games. Casual games are evil, they are the worst thing ever. They keep women at the computer instead of in the kitchen.”[41] Additionally, ParadoxControl quips, “listen, I don't play games unless they come with a full rack of ribs, a 2lb sirloin, Mashed Potatoes, Budweiser, a shotgun, camo pants, and a stack of playboys, because I'm a real man!”[42] Onizuka-GTO’s comment explicitly joins casual games with the female, stating it as a fact beyond reproach and effectively gendering those types of game experiences. At the same time, he uses an emoticon that resembles a face sticking its tongue out, a sign that he is aware of his own absurdity. On the other hand, THE-HATER’s words are less playful, conflating the already established feminine space of casual games with evilness and then finishing his comment by evoking pre-feminist gender roles, and metaphorically plucking the woman from the office computer and plopping her back in front of the stove. However, his sarcasm is revealed by the comment’s exaggerated nature, just like ParadoxControl’s tirade about what makes a man, and more importantly here, what makes a manly game. ParadoxControl and THE-HATER play with gender stereotypes to reveal the performative nature of masculinity and femininity and to reveal the artifice of gendering casual games as feminine; however, although their intentions might be to deconstruct these notions, they in truth reinforce, reproduce, and strengthen the ideologies that link masculinity to “serious” games and femininity to “casual” games in the first place.

In her exploration of the ways male gamers in Northern Ireland and southern England rationalize and normalize their gaming habits, Helen Thornham suggests games “are claimed by adult [male] gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes.”[43] Part of taking games seriously and rationally for the users on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid is staying informed and making smart purchasing decisions, traits typically assigned to masculine consuming habits. In contrast, they position casual gamers as “simple people…[and] you can sell them stupid games.”[44] Moreover, what “worries [them] most about casual gamers is that they’ll stupidly throw so much money at tech that they know nothing about, and have not researched at all.”[45] Here, hardcore gamers position casual gamers as passive, naïve, and mindless consumers of popular culture. Casual gamers become, to the hardcore discourse community, feminized shoppers lacking agency and intelligence. Rather than doing proper (masculine) research such as reading games news, reviews, and previews, “Casual gamers DON'T care about reviews,” don’t seem to understand “that generally video game movie=suckage,” and “have the attention span of a three month old dog mixed with a squirrel.”[46][47][48] Clearly, feminized casual gamers are depicted as less intelligent, less informed, and less important than their masculine hardcore counterparts. Most strikingly and troubling of all, though, they are positioned as sub-human and animal in their worth and intellect.

In contrast to the so-called ignorant purchases of the casual masses, the hardcore gaming discourse seems to suggest that even if hardcore gamers do play casual games, they are smart enough to not spend money on them. Indeed, hardcore gamers “won't actually buy ‘casual’ games, since most are shameless clones of earlier casual games,” and as one user commented, “I download all my casual gaming for free. Who's crazy enough to pay for it...oh yeah, wii users. All their games are casual.”[49][50] These comments suggest that hardcore gamers do not spend money on casual games because they are not serious and real games. They lack the blockbuster budgets and narratives associated with traditionally masculine game titles. Here too the Wii is evoked as one of the worst offenders in the casual game space, a system that has opened the flood games, so to speak, for girls, women, and the elderly. This is reinforced when badasscat argues that casual games are “not some sort of stepping stone to ‘real’ gaming.”[51] Casual games are, badasscat seems to suggest, not real games. They lack the qualities of masculine games and are thus denied the right to call themselves games at all. As feminized entertainment, they are annihilated from the discourse of serious games and serious games culture, quite like the feminine in general.

This annihilation can be seen as part of a greater taste struggle against casual games and the femininity attached to them. In this struggle, hardcore gamers position themselves as the victims and position the growing number of casual players and games as an invading, oppressive force. This same tactic can be seen in Ann Johnson’s article, “The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism,” where she argues that The Man Show, a masculine comedy program that gains laughs through largely sexist humor, utilizes protest rhetoric and “depicts women as the dominant group in society and addresses viewers as potential agitators in a struggle against women’s dominance.”[52] In the program, Johnson argues that even while patriarchy continues to operate relatively unopposed in society, The Man Show creates a reality where men are relegated to subordinate positions in both the public and private spheres, always at the mercy of dominant women in their lives. This same logic is used in the hardcore gaming community when discussing casual games. To core gamers, casual games represent a very real threat that is gradually blighting their cherished pastime with products that do not resemble the games they are used to.

Part of this protest rhetoric in the hardcore community is fueled by fears that casual games will gradually take away limited retail space and developer resources from “real” games, eventually replacing them altogether. In this logic, casual games will eventually draw away all development funds from traditional, narrative-driven games and flood the market. No longer will there be Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty; instead, there will just be clones of Peggle, Wii Sports, and Solitaire. Indeed, this fear persists even though core gamers are still cash cows for the industry. When Necrozen writes, “We are a minority now. We = Less Money than Them. So you know that it's a losing battle,” he positions core gamers as a dying breed, a group that is itself being marginalized by the threat of casual games.[53] Furthermore, as a minority, core gamers believe their interests are no longer being taken into account by game developers and publishers. More than anything, they “hate the fact that more immersive games are gonna disappear because everyone is into the casual games now of days.”[54] Ultimately, their protest comes out as “It's the attack of the killer casuals, and we need to make sure we're not lost in the noise.”[55] Although casual gamers by their very nature do not make much noise in gaming culture, the attention the mainstream press pays to them and the interest developers have taken in them are seen as signs of a very significant threat by core gamers.

Also part of this protest rhetoric is the threat of violence if the casual “encroachment” and “oppression” continues. Alexradl writes, “For now, I'm "ok" with what Nintendo is doing because they are keeping it concentrated on one system. The day their system's shitty games and shitty gimmicks leak over to the PS360 is the day I'll begin to show my true feelings.”[56] Here Alexradl’s true feelings can be assumed to be aggressive and potentially violent ones. Ultimately, this protest rhetoric also resembles the rhetoric of war, a fact which reiterates my argument regarding a taste war in gaming. When learning that a Casual Games Association was forming, Sectionz gleefully writes, “this is great news…this means eventually they will all be in one place at the same time…with a surgical strike we can take them all out with minor collateral damage. Personally i suggest poison apples but then the suspense would kill me....”[57] Sectionz’s use of military language in “surgical strike” and “collateral damage” suggest hegemonic masculinity and the rhetoric of not just protest but war. Clearly, core gamers on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to denigrate casual videogames, exploit post-feminist sarcasm within the discourse of casual games, and evoke a protest and war-like rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on destroying and replacing traditional, masculine games.


Conclusion
Throughout this article, I have argued that while videogames are becoming more popular and accepted as activities for non-traditional gamers, the hardcore, masculine gaming community views this acceptance as a threat to their culture and as a result, marginalizes and feminizes this new crop of casual game players in addition to the games and systems they play, such as Nintendo’s Wii. In the discourse of the popular press, videogames are becoming linked more and more with popular culture and are being softened as a technology, shedding their masculine connotations and adopting, instead, a more gender neutral position. The core gaming community, however, invested as they are in hegemonic masculinity, rejects popular culture and its ties to femininity and therefore, rejects casual games as a potential infection, not an extension, of their cherished medium. Borrowing from Levine’s argument that HDTV sophistication and cultural status are linked expressly with their masculine gendering, I suggest that when casual games are denigrated as trivial and traditional videogames are celebrated for their seriousness and authenticity, both of which are nested in masculinity, “that celebration [and denigration are] rooted in a gendered cultural hierarchy that supports the maintenance of an inequitably gendered society.”[58] Owing to its significance in relation to gender and power structures in society, the casual game space and the hardcore gamer’s relationship to it should be revisited in the future to determine if some of these phenomena continue to persist or whether they have themselves shifted to reflect either an even greater conflict between hardcore and casual gamers or, instead, a growing acceptance, and de-gendering, of videogames as a whole.

Endnotes

[1] The-Excel, “Rockstar Doesn’t Get the Hardcore/Casual Fad,” Destructoid,

http://www.destructoid.com/rockstar-doesn-t-get-the-hardcore-casual-fad-99878.phtml

[2] Mushman, “Hating on the Casual or Why It’s Alright to be a Bitter Old Man,” Destructoid,

http://www.destructoid.com/hating-on-the-casual-or-why-it-s-alright-to-be-a-bitter-old-man-94013.phtml.

[3] Seth Schiesel, “With More than Games, DSi Widens the Playing Field,” New York Times, April 4, 2009, sec. C

[4] Seth Schiesel, “In a New Merger, Evidence of How Much the Gaming World has Changed,” New York Times,

December 5, 2007, sec. E.

[5] ibid.

[6] William, Boddy, “’Mission Number One is to Kill TV’: Remaking the Domestic Television Apparatus in the 1990s,” In New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States, edited by William Boddy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 72.

[7] Seth Schiesel, “As Gaming Turns Social, Industry Shifts Strategies,” New York Times, February 28, 2008, sec. E.

[8] Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph,” In Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003, p. 62.

[9] Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph,” In Rethinking Media

Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003.

[10] Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph,” In Rethinking Media

Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003, p. 74.

[11] Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph,” In Rethinking Media

Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003, p. 75.

[12] Byron Acohido, “Wii Wins Big Among Casual Games; Group Could be Huge, Untapped Mass Market,” USA Today, May 25, 2007, sec. Money, p. 2B.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Seth Schiesel, “Anticipating the Obsolescence of Fast Thumbs,” New York Times, July 8, 2007, sec. AR

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Bernadette Flynn, “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 4 (2003): 557.

[18] Tara Parker-Pope, “Moving Beyond Joysticks, and Off the Couch,” New York Times, November 27, 2007, sec. F.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Bernadette Flynn, “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 4 (2003): 551-576.

[21] Robbie Brown, “Games Seek to Bring Seniors to Their Feet – Nintendo Marketing the Wii in Ritirement

Communities,” Boston Globe, June 16, 2007, sec. Metro, p. A1.

[22] Jennifer Fenn Lefferts, “Rehab Patients: Wii Would like to Get Better,” Boston Globe, October 9, 2008, sec.

Northwest, p. Reg6.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Drug Week, “Wellness; Casual Games Play a Critical Role in Health and Wellness,” May 9, 2008, sec. Expanded Reporting.

[25] Edward C. Baig, “Older Folks like Tech Toys, too; And Companies are Providing Them,” USA Today, January 8, 2009, sec. Money, p. 1B.

[26] Elana Levine, “Selling the HD Set: The Cultural Meanings of TV Technology,” Unthinking Television Conference, George Mason University, March 26, 2009.

[27] Andreas Huyseen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986: 188-196.

[28] Mary Flanagan, “SIMple & Personal: Domestic Space & the Sims,” Melbourne International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009.

[29] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge, 1984.

[30] Strider_mt2k, “Casual Gaming on the Rise,” Kotaku, http://kotaku.com/279716/casual-gaming-on-the-rise.

[31] Rojo, “Casual Gaming on the Rise,” Kotaku, http://kotaku.com/279716/casual-gaming-on-the-rise.

[32] Joeshie, “SXSW08: The Female Takedown of Casual Gaming,” Joystiq,

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/03/09/sxsw08-the-female-takedown-of-casual-gaming/

[33] Bernadette Flynn, “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 4 (2003):

p. 565.

[34] Shira Chess, “A 36-24-36 Cerebrum: Gendering Video Game Play through Advertising,” Currently in review at the journal Games & Culture. Retrieved on 4/9/09 from http://www.shiraland.com/Work/advertising_sample.pdf, p. 24.

[35] Shira Chess, “A 36-24-36 Cerebrum: Gendering Video Game Play through Advertising,” Currently in review at

the journal Games & Culture. Retrieved on 4/9/09 from http://www.shiraland.com/Work/advertising_sample.pdf, p. 2.

[36] samfish (MSDF- Nurse Outfit!), “Men More Likely to Steal, Lie About Casual Games,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/30/men-more-likely-to-steal-lie-about-casual-games/.

[37] Cyro, “Men More Likely to Steal, Lie About Casual Games,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/30/men-more-likely-to-steal-lie-about-casual-games/.

[38] Batzarro, “Men More Likely to Steal, Lie About Casual Games,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/10/30/men-more-likely-to-steal-lie-about-casual-games/.

[39] Angela, McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies, 4, no. 3 (2004): 255-264.

[40] Onizuka-GTO, “Who Knew: Men like Casual Games, Too,”

http://kotaku.com/318580/who-knew-men-like-casual-games-too.

[41] THE-HATER, “Who Knew: Men like Casual Games, Too,”

http://kotaku.com/318580/who-knew-men-like-casual-games-too.

[42] ParadoxControl, “Who Knew: Men like Casual Games, Too,”

http://kotaku.com/318580/who-knew-men-like-casual-games-too.

[43] Helen Thornham, “Claiming a Stake in the Videogame: What Grown-Ups Say to Rationalize and Normalize Gaming,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15, no. 2 (2008), p. 142.

[44] TrenchyC, “Casual Games Get Bad Reviews, No One Cares,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/06/casual-games-get-bad-reviews-no-one-cares/.

[45] human-cannonball, “Casual Games are Serious Business,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/26/casual-games-are-serious-business/

[46] Jeff, “Casual Games Get Bad Reviews, No One Cares,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/06/casual-games-get-bad-reviews-no-one-cares/.

[47] BlgC72, “Casual Games Get Bad Reviews, No One Cares,”

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/06/casual-games-get-bad-reviews-no-one-cares/.

[48] mix, “Bleszinkski Wants Casual Gamers in GoW 2, Wii Disappearing Ray Yet to be Invented,”

http://www.destructoid.com/bleszinski-wants-casual-gamers-in-gow-2-wii-disappearing-ray-yet-to-be-invented-108895.phtml.

[49] ShaggE got that Mango Sentinel. SCOOPS!, “Who Knew: Men like Casual Games, Too,”

http://kotaku.com/318580/who-knew-men-like-casual-games-too.

[50] nxp3, “Casual Gamers Worth Billions,” http://kotaku.com/368009/casual-gamers-worth-billions.

[51] badasscat, “Casual Gaming on the Rise,” Kotaku, http://kotaku.com/279716/casual-gaming-on-the-rise.

[52] Ann Johnson, “The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007), 167.

[53] Necrozen, “Square Enix Chats Bollucks About ‘Casual’ Games,”

http://www.destructoid.com/square-enix-chats-bollocks-about-casual-games-123657.phtml.

[54] Ambitious009, “Who Knew: Men like Casual Games, Too,”

http://kotaku.com/318580/who-knew-men-like-casual-games-too.

[55] Ketsuban, “Casual Gaming on the Rise,” Kotaku, http://kotaku.com/279716/casual-gaming-on-the-rise.

[56] Alexradl, “Hating on the Casual or Why It’s Alright to be a Bitter Old Man,” Destructoid,

http://www.destructoid.com/hating-on-the-casual-or-why-it-s-alright-to-be-a-bitter-old-man-94013.phtml.

[57] Sectionz, “Casual Gaming on the Rise,” Kotaku, http://kotaku.com/279716/casual-gaming-on-the-rise.

[58] Elana Levine, “Selling the HD Set: The Cultural Meanings of TV Technology,” Unthinking Television

Conference, George Mason University, March 26, 2009.

Happy Birthday, Blockhead

Today Alexey Pajitnov's vision and everybody's favorite block puzzle game turns 25.

Happy Birthday, Tetris.

Twenty-five years ago Pajitnov created the simple block-fitting program on an old IBM system, according to a Chicago Tribune article announcing the celebration. In 1989 Nintendo picked the game up and ported it to their Gameboy handheld system, instantly popularizing the little gem and cementing its position not only in videogames but in popular culture in general.

I've been playing Tetris as long as I've been playing videogames. My first cell phone was my favorite because it came packed with the game. If asked, I will probably admit Tetris is my favorite game ever, not because of its stellar graphics (just look at it) and not because of its amazing story or presentation. Instead, Tetris is my favorite game because it's an experience that never gets old, that can be played at anytime, and that retains the same charm whether it's your first time aligning a perfect row of blocks or your thousandth.

In fact, the game is so popular that one of the four shapes players work with, the L-Block, won Gamefaqs' 2007 Character Battle contest. Even though I find Gamefaqs to be populated by Final Fantasy Fanboys and Nintendo loyalists, it was still enduring and hilarious that an inanimate object beat out, well, actual characters.

If you haven't played it (for shame) go buy a version. You have no shortage of skews. The easiest is probably the cell phone version. If you have played it and don't own it in some form (for shame again), go buy it as well.

So toss back some beers, throw back some whiskey, puff some cigars, and revel in the falling confetti. Today there's something worth celebrating.

Trico Named: The Last Guardian

Hot off of Sony's E3 press conference comes this official video from the newly named third game in the Ico franchise. It's called The Last Guardian, and it's the reason I'm going to break down and buy a PS3.

It looks to be an updated trailer of the one that leaked early last year and that I recently posted. The graphics have improved a lot, and the model for the boy protagonist has changed slightly. There is also some additional footage at the end of the trailer.

This is why I play videogames.

Because no other medium can offer what Team Ico's games give the player: interaction AND emotional connection.

Enjoy.

New Team Ico Game Revealed (for real)

If you look at my April 1 post, you might notice I was kidding a bit. I guess the joke is on me. This footage proves that my imagination was actually more accurate than I could have, well, imagined. Basically, I lied about the whole thing. Little did I know I was almost right.

I'm laughing to myself.

And after watching this footage, I hope you are, too.

'Nuff said.

No More Feminism: Postfeminism and No More Heroes

An electric guitar riff twangs in the background as a hulking motorcycle bursts through a gate surrounding a beachside mansion. Shrapnel clouds the air as the cycle skids into a fountain and ejects the driver, Travis Touchdown, from his seat. Travis descends to the courtyard floor promptly decapitating two atypical guards in suits and sunglasses. After the chaos settles, blood stains the garden floor and Travis shouts, “Fuck head,” as the two headless forms behind him crumble to the ground. Another guard stands between Travis and the entrance to the mansion, already shaking and stuttering as he attempts to answer Travis’s demands. Travis wants to know where Holy Sword is, the #10 top ranked assassin in the fictional city of Santa Destroy, California. When the guard can’t answer, Travis cuts him in half and plows through the front door. He says, “Hey, you out there holding the wii-mote.” He asks, are you ready? Thus begins the violent Wii beat-em-up No More Heroes, a game developed by Grasshopper Manufacturer and released in January 2008. However, this opening scene is merely a blip in the game’s exaggerated gendered imagery, representation, and construction. No More Heroes positions itself as a postfeminist videogame that hails the player as a masculine male and plays on gender and sexual stereotypes of heteronormativity with a tongue planted firmly in cheek and a knowing wink directed at the gamer from behind the yellow pair of hipster shades its protagonist wears, an effect which ridicules the straight, white heterosexual male and his fantasies as much as it celebrates them.


To begin, the game places you in the shoes of Travis Touchdown, an adolescent-minded gamer obsessed with wrestling, anime, and porn. Vestiges of these traditional male interests are littered throughout his apartment, which acts as a hub for you to save your game, review purchased video tapes, and change your clothes. Wrestling masks hang on the walls alongside anime posters featuring young girls in school girl outfits. Garbage and clothes cover the floors. Travis’s apartment epitomizes the traditional bachelor pad. Additionally, the last name of Touchdown is telling of his gendered position. As a hyper-aggressive sport, football has long been aligned with masculinity. With his name conjuring the name of a score in football, Travis Touchdown becomes even more masculine; moreover, the game suggests the innuendo of scoring, conflating the meaning of victory and the sexual act. However, like the close-contact sport of football itself, Travis straddles the line between immature heterosexual fantasy and homoeroticism. Throughout the game, Travis is delineated as a sex-starved, horny geek who spends his days watching either half-naked men wrestling or overdue pornography (the video store continually leaves messages asking for him to return the tapes). One might argue the relative similarity between the wrestling and the porn and the odd way they are paired as equal interests with little contradiction. For instance, although both entertainment forms highlight the body in the name of masculine pleasure, wrestling has a distinct lack of a female presence in much of its airtime and even hints at a eroticizing of the male body, its muscles, and the physicality that occurs between men.

In addition, although the player is allowed to collect an array of clothing for Travis, including countless indie t-shirts, jeans, and jackets, this kind of involved accessorizing does not seem to hinder his manhood – after all, he has to look cool while he slashes through hordes of enemies with his light-saber-inspired laser sword. Finally, in another example of the complex relationship between his hyper-masculinity and a more sensitive new man persona, Travis owns a kitten that the player can stroke and play with, which while limited in its interactivity, remains nonetheless a bizarre inclusion. However, though Travis displays certain characteristics of many male groups that are devalued by society – metrosexuals, gamers, geeks – his aggressive attitude and emphasized heterosexual desires, his large specialized motorcycle named Schpeltiger, and his position as violent killer attempt to create an immobile male monolith for him to claim. The game wants to create a man native to a postfeminist era (a man aware of female liberation and capable of taking care of himself) but also one that can just as easily throw the term “bitch” around when referring to females in the game. He becomes the embodied fantasy of every shut-in gamer – itself a stereotype at this point.


The game’s plot evokes the stereotypical desire for violent competition in men by placing the player in the role of an assassin charged with killing the top ten ranked killers in town in order to hold the coveted number one place. This again mirrors Travis’ naming convention to invoke and naturalize rivalry and violence as desirable goals. After a night out drinking, Travis meets Sylvia, a “smoking hot chick,” according to Travis, and also a blond Frenchwoman who works for the United Assassins Association (UAA). In an attempt to impress her, a motive frequently referenced in regards to Travis’s actions in the game, Travis faces off and kills a random assassin. The rest of the game involves the player leading Travis from one killer to the next, spilling blood in more outlandish and strange ways each time. Before and after each battle, Sylvia gives Travis either a pep talk or a congratulatory speech.

Sylvia acts as both sex object and agent of power in the game, mimicking the post feminist woman’s position as someone who owns their sexuality and invests themselves in looking good while still maintaining a sense of autonomy, independence, and power. With a French accent, Sylvia conjures images of the exotic beauty so often portrayed and utilized in the media – the foreign unattainable other. In addition, her outfits continually highlight her shapely body, often revealing cleavage. With little doubt, her form is objectified and over sexualized. She teases Travis, who fauns over her, knowing she has power and influence over him not just because as a representative of the UAA she is his boss, but because her attractiveness and sexuality can be used as manipulative tools to control the helpless male dupe Travis is positioned as. In one particular pep talk, Sylvia both encourages the player, but also challenges him, to prove his manhood when she says, “Are you up to the task? You are the man! Take it to the red zone. Show no mercy. I believe in you and your force.” Here she equates Travis’s ability to overcome his foe with scoring (again echoing his namesake), showing no mercy (equal to showing no emotion), and using his force, which can be interpreted as his raw manhood, his masculine strength, or the phallic-invoking laser sword he runs around with. Nonetheless, even while Sylvia is continually portrayed as a sexual being, she holds a commanding position in the relationship between Travis and her. Aside from leading him on with flirtatious utterances and revealing clothing, Sylvia also physically commands Travis by kicking him around and controlling his body. In one particular scene early in the game, Sylvia kicks Travis out of a moving limousine after teasing him about going with her to get her facial. He falls to the concrete and rolls, his screams marking not just physical pain but also sexual frustration, the two ways Sylvia, though sexualized, remains independent and powerful in the male-dominated world she finds herself in.


In the introduction to the game, Travis speaks to the player frankly, explaining how he met Sylvia, how he killed the initial assassin, and how he came to be in his position. At the end of his explanation, he inquires, “What do you say, bro? Are you ready?” Although gamers are socially thought of as primarily male, the facts point that the ratios of male to female gamers are almost equal. Just the same, I suggest certain games still a mostly masculine address. These tend to be what are called the more hardcore games, meaning those games that are traditionally violent, feature masculine protagonists, and are found on the leading home consoles. This label is one created and used by male gamers largely to differentiate themselves from more casual gamers, gamers who tend to be made up of more women than men. In this way, it is a method of adding cultural value to their group while devaluing the other. Therefore, as a hardcore game, No More Heroes thinks it can safely, although perhaps mistakenly, hail the players as male. Still, the game interpolates the gamer as a male spectator/player and thus instantly expects the player to see the world the way Travis views it and to encounter and view the other characters, especially Sylvia, the way Travis views them. From this male spectator position, the player is asked to perform the hyper-violent attacks in the game, attacks made more visceral due to the gestural controls of the Wii console.

No More Heroes adds an extra layer of spectatorship because it forces the player to physically make the same aggressive movements as Travis does to the enemies he encounters. What other games have you do with buttons, the Wii demands you do with quick gestures and movements. When prompted by the onscreen icons, the player slashes the wii-mote horizontally and sees Travis conduct the same action, halving an enemy in two in a spray of blood. At other times, the player is asked to pull their left and right arms apart to perform a devastating wrestling move on a dazzled foe. The game implicates the player, presumed male, in the violence and further attempts to naturalize the correlation between male and aggressor. However, in another example of the confluence between violence and sexuality in the game, when the energy in Travis’s sword depletes, the player is asked to shake the wii-mote, as if the hilt of the sword, to rattle its internal batteries. When both Travis and the player attempt this action, though, it conjures a masturbatory gesture, a phallic symbol gripped firmly in hand. Travis shakes the sword hilt and the player shakes the wii-mote, both in an attempt to get the long laser blade erect again. This kind of detail once again indicates the game is having fun at the player’s expense. While one minute it allows the player to perform the literal actions of a hyper-masculine young male with sexual prowess in the form of a beam saber, the next it has the same player metaphorically jerking off and submitting to the embarrassment of a stilted weapon.


Finally, many of the game’s ranked assassins contribute to the complex gender constructions present in No More Heroes. The first two assassins you face, Holy Sword and Dr. Peace, are both ridiculed by Travis as an “old man,” a name perhaps meant to indicate the loss of their virility, a quality valued in ideal masculinity and something Travis proves he has through his sword and motorcycle. Destroy Man is a would-be superhero with a cod piece that fires a laser, a weapon that, like Travis’s, evokes the phallus as deadly instrument and unit of power. Interestingly, although Travis spares the life of the first female killer he comes across – because she is a woman, we’re led to believe – he does not hesitate to kill the other two female assassins he encounters. This may be because the first, a school teacher, has more feminine qualities than the latter two, a bomb-toting woman with a rocket launcher leg and an alcoholic doll-dress-wearing “bad girl” armed with a baseball bat. In any case, Travis does not hesitate to toss around curse words freely and refer to all the women in the game as “bitches” as least once or twice.

In a postfeminist era where women are expected to occupy both roles as sex objects and roles as autonomous professionals – where they are to both embrace and deny feminism - and where men are supposed to be progressive but also maintain traditional masculine characteristics, No More Heroes delivers an over-the-top, skewed reality that attempts to incorporate all of these contradictions and paradoxes. As Travis Touchdown, the player is both geek and saber-wielding superman. Also, since the game hails the player as masculine, they are invited to view the game world with the same sarcastic, juvenile, and over-masculine perspective, in addition to physically performing the same violent gestures that Travis performs in the game. They become Travis, more or less, in both mind and body. Furthermore, the women in the game, specifically Sylvia, are both sexual objects – all of their wardrobes are revealing and scant – and also powerful, independent agents capable of fighting their own fights and, in at least two cases, dying in an equal battle field with Travis, who submits to and respects them even as he disparages and dehumanizes them. While this is only a tertiary glance at the complexities and problematic imagery, representations, and gender construction in No More Heroes, it would be interesting and perhaps helpful to compare the gender aspects of this game with other games that have come out in the last few years and to look into whether these characteristics are native only to Japanese-developed games or if they appear in Western-developed games as well.

New Team Ico Game Revealed

Rumors on NEOGAF, which appear to be legitimate, indicate the new Team Ico game will feature a complex relationship between a boy and a dragon.

"It will be a twist on the old 'a boy and his dragon' fairy tale and have the player controlling the dragon," the NEOGAF post said, in a distinct shift from previous games where the player controlled the male hero character (either Ico or Wanda). The boy, a little older than a toddler, will walk alongside the dragon and ride on its back. In other words, he will be the frail companion character.

Much like Panzer Dragoon, though, the dragon will start off as a hatchling and, throughout the course of the game, will become a full fledged wyvern.

The end is supposedly going to be an epic battle which should make Shadow of the Colossus look like an 8-Bit era Nintendo game.

I'm certainly excited! How about you?

Rumble in the Jungle: Violence Perceptions in Videogames Based on Avatar Gender: Or Why Lara Kills Softer than Drake Does

Continuing with my examination of the gendered dimensions of videogames, I approached the experiment wondering whether or not perceptions of videogame violence changed with the gender of the player-controlled avatar or game protagonist. Specifically, I wanted to know whether perceptions of violence would soften in participants when viewing a shooting scene with a female avatar when compared to a similar scene featuring a male avatar. To conduct this experiment, I used two groups of JMC 201 students in two separate lab sections. Each were shown a video clip lasting just over 1 minute that featured a similar scenario of the player-character shooting random enemies in a jungle environment laced with ruins.


As the standard for shooting games is to feature a male avatar, I chose a clip from the PS3 game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune to use as a control for my first group, which featured 11 students. In order to check whether violence perceptions would soften with a female avatar, I chose a similar scene from Tomb Raider: Legends, a game featuring the female heroine Lara Croft, to show my test group, featuring 9 students. After each group viewed their respective clips, I administered a posttest with three questions. The three questions focused on 1) Violence 2) Graphicness and 3) Aggressiveness. Each question asked the students to use a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being a lack of Violence/Graphicness/Aggressiveness and 5 being an abundance of them. For instance, 5 in the first question would indicate Very Violent. My hypothesis was that the test group being shown the Tomb Raider clip would rate the clip less violent, graphic, and aggressive on average. Even though I carefully selected the clips based on their overall similarities (I actually think the Tomb Raider clip is MORE violent), I still guessed the test group of students would rate the video less violent than the control group being shown the Uncharted video. This would reveal a gender bias if not toward video game avatars, than at least toward the relationship between violence perceptions and gender.


My hypothesis turned out to be correct. The results from my control group were higher in every category: Violence (Avg. 4.27), Graphicness (Avg. 3.2), and Aggressiveness (Avg. 4.2). By contrast, the results from my Tomb Raider test group displayed a distinct softening of violence perceptions: Violence (Avg. 3.5), Graphicness (Avg. 2.6), and Aggressiveness (Avg. 3.5). This revealed a difference of .77, .6, and .7 in their respective categories. It is obvious that participants do not perceive videogame violence in the same way when a female avatar is the one engaged in the violent acts. Unfortunately, it is difficult to generalize these findings or infer what they might imply to videogame studies as a whole. All the participants were university students and all were interested, at least, in writing for media. Each of these characteristics potentially helps skew the results. In addition, because these are two separate groups, it is hard to argue that each person individually would display a softening of violence perceptions if I were to show them the videos back-to-back, and it would be difficult to determine whether showing one video before the other would result in untrustworthy data.

In a larger study, I would like to find a larger sample composed of random participants from all walks of life and find a way to reliably show them both video clips at separate times without revealing my experiment goals or influencing the results. Also, although the clips were fairly similar, because they take place in two different games, it would be better to find one game that offers the choice between female and male avatars. This would ensure that each clip could be as similar in every other fashion as possible.