The first video for the week notes that “colour” is frequently used as a way of showing race, even when it is two armies — one red, one blue. As you go through the next four videos, it is expanded to show how race is used to indicate “the other” — an opponent, for example. Some examples for the week include:
Choices may often reflect external racism i.e. “black dwarves” are more evil than light dwarves, often as proxies for more complex situations;
Race serves as the basis for conflict, and conflict can serve as the basis for a narrative arc;
What is present is as important as what is absent;
Default characteristics can serve as “indicator” of what a “normal” character should be;
Character race representations look at cultures and roles within games, including options around protagonist or antagonist roles;
Fighting games often include game mechanics framed through a racial lens to control player attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.);
It was an interesting summary, and I can see in many cases the detailed internal mechanics and choices that are presented as a basis for racial conversation. However, the initial premise — red vs. blue, or even white vs. black in chess — is a bit too stretched.
Continuing down the Open Access rabbithole, I found the UNESCO-led site, the Global Open Access Portal. You can even narrow it down to just Canadian access sites. Which I did. And then went further down the rabbit hole with some of the following highlights:
I don’t know a lot about the ins and outs of academic publishing, so let’s start by making that clear. More often than not, I’m likely to trip over government or thinktank reports than scholarly articles. I don’t have a home account for EBSCO access, or a university library account to access their scholarly journals that way, so in the absence of that type of access, I love the idea of Open Access. And when the University College of London announces they’ve hit their 1M download mark of e-texts through Open Access, that sounds outright awesome. The true power of the original university net, sharing and collaborating without restricted rights for the information. Releasing their findings into the wild.
But I do know that the world is not that clean. Academics compete for prestige journals, publishers hoard space and leverage control and $$ through access to those same journals, and while open access threatens to “disrupt” that industry, it is mostly a drop in the bucket. Publishers don’t relinquish control quite that easily. Hence you end up with people having to curate various online journals to separate the wheat from the chaff, set up lists of predatory journals to help identify “real” journals from “vanity” journals that will publish anything if the fee is paid, all with a veneer of review.
After reading the article about UCL’s milestone, I started clicking on other open access links. I started with the UCL Press site itself, quickly jumped to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a bunch of others competing to be the internet ring of editors that rules them all, i.e. finding them, bringing them all together, and in the darkness e-binding them. Very precious, indeed. I wanted to test the DOAJ, so I searched for scholarly journals (not just single articles) about “public administration” to see what they would find.
One of the first that popped up in the search that looked promising was the School of Public Policy publications by the University of Calgary. I went back two years and looked at 2016, 2017 and 2018 for Research Papers, Briefing Papers, Technical Papers, and Communiques. Some of it looks REALLY interesting and I will likely download a bunch of it for lunchtime reading at work. I know, I’m an admin geek. Here are some highlights of interest to me:
Research Papers
The Theory and Evidence Concerning Public-Private Partnerships in Canada and Elsewhere (Anthony Boardman, Matti Siemiatycki, Aidan R. Vining)
A Major Setback for Retirement Savings: Changing how Financial Advisers are Compensated could Hurt Less-than-Wealthy Investors Most (Pierre Lortie)
Tax-Assisted Approaches for Helping Canadians Meet Out-of-Pocket Health-Care Costs (J.C. Herbert Emery)
The Disability Tax Credit: Why it Fails and How to Fix It (Wayne Simpson, Harvey Stevens)
Public-Interest Benefit Evaluation of Partial- Upgrading Technology (G. Kent Fellows, Robert L. Mansell, Ronald Schlenker, Jennifer Winter)
Discerning ‘Functional and Absolute Zero’: Defining and Measuring an End to Homelessness in Canada (Alina Turner, Tom Albanese, Kyle Pakeman)
Business Subsidies in Canada Comprehensive Estimates for the Government of Canada and the Four Largest Provinces (John Lester)
Briefing Papers, Technical Papers and Communiques
On the Role & Future of Calgary’s Community Associations (Brian W. Conger, Pernille Goodbrand, Jyoti Gondek)
Why Banning Embedded Sales Commissions Is a Public Policy Issue (Henri-Paul Rousseau)
Social Policy Trends- Labour Force Participation Rate of Women with Young Children (Margarita (Gres) Wilkins, Ronald D. Kneebone)
Surviving and Thriving in the Digital Economy (Goran Samuel Pesic)
Week 9 of the MOOC introduces the theme of sexuality and how it is explored in video games.
In video 1, they focus on the first games that introduced sexuality — adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. Or how most of the text adventure games were relatively straightforward, yet Japan started introducing some sexual role-playing content with Night Life while America was still playing Kings Quest by Sierra. But mostly the video is about the development history of text games from basic parsers to added parsing, added exploration, added audio, added graphics, and expanded narrative arcs. It’s an okay start, but mostly it is just to give you the background so they can then talk about:
The history of sex in gaming
Five ways to imagine sex in gaming
Role of women in the industry
The second video talks about the examples of how it is introduced:
marketers using sex to “sell” to generally single heterosexual males;
designers including sex content (Sierra’s Soft Porn Adventure and eventually Leisure Suit Larry);
exploration of gender through cyber-sex roles; and,
creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) as reactions to games with sex and/or violence.
Interestingly, while some of the big FPS games like Doom do have strong male markets, other games with bigger audiences — Myst, Sims, Farmvilles — have much bigger female markets. But those markets are often dismissed as not “real video games”.
The third, fourth and fifth videos introduce five ways sex and sexuality can appear in games:
a. Sex as an abstraction — namely as a simplified representation, to reduce explicitness, and to add rationality and linear logic for game play, with similar approaches to how it is done in film, literature and advertising;
b. Sex as a game goal — using lust as a motivation (such as an early strip poker game), and with little diversity in the target market (where the gamer objectifies and identifies with sexualized game characters, namely white men pursuing women);
c. Sex as a mechanic (part of design) — some games make the character’s sex irrelevant while others make it explicit, but not necessarily obviously (such as Super Mario Brothers 2 where the male characters are stronger and faster than Princess Peach who can float), but there are some other still who use sex and gender to create a sense of agency;
d. Sex as an aesthetic (part of gamer experience) — some games are heteronormative (with assumptions of inherent differences matching societal perceptions) in their gamer experience, and while important, there’s also the risk of objectification, such as is argued by Lara Croft’s outfits and proportion in the Tomb Raider series; and,
e. Sex as emergent gameplay — some players have imported outside constructions like online weddings into an MMO game, but this pales in comparison to Second Life (with sold services, toys and club memberships).
For the role of women in the industry, they note that women not only play games, they also critique and make games. And while 45% of gamers are female (although that stat includes a bunch of games that some gamers don’t really consider games at all), only 11% of production crew are women, which goes even lower when you exclude HR, admin, etc. and focus on engineering or designers.
Overall, it was a solid week, just not with much depth. In most places, it just lightly touches on the concepts. Which was disappointing. For example, I expected them to talk about Tomb Raider, and they did; however, they could use TR as an entire study in and of itself, with some pretty complex elements. They don’t even mention the agency aspect that you have a strong female character as the protagonist, smart, attractive, strong…a bad ass who makes Indiana Jones look wimpy. They only cover the superficial controversy, without much attention paid to the counter-argument (although they do mention the puzzle-solving aspects). Grumble, grumble.
I’m also disappointed with the timing of the original recording. But they recorded all their stuff (I think) before #GamerGate started (2014), and so there is no mention of it at all. They mention in passing that there are those who face some harassment online, but it is a throwaway line at most. Obviously if they were doing the same pieces now, GamerGate would likely figure prominently in a discussion of women in the industry.
I’m still plugging away on this MOOC. Week 8 of “Understanding Video Games” (hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera) starts off talking about violence in early games and begins with the old platform games (i.e. jumping to or swinging from platforms), ranging from Donkey Kong (static screens) through to Super Mario Brothers (scrolling), and on further into cinematic platform games. Even the cartoonish games attracted concerns of parental groups who wanted to limit ages or locations for arcades.
In the second video, the pair talk about blood and gore, and it’s long artistic roots in art as an aesthetic. They then move on to flagging the different interpretations — gory violence as nothing more than a video game “horror movie” experience; gory violence as a murder simulator; or merely a source of catharsis. Yet it is the same questions that have been posed of art, comic books and television too. In the end, violence can be seen as either gratuitous or as an ingredient to drive a narrative story arc (such as the need to resolve conflict or overcome strategic or tactical challenges).
The third and fourth videos focus on consequences and morality. As a starting point, they assume that there is feedback to all actions in a game, including violent ones, and then look at the cost or reward for committing violent acts, including:
Punishment for attacking “non-player characters” (NPCs) such as Ultima III;
Rewards for attacking NPCs (Crusaders);
Mixed punishments and rewards with competing mechanics (Grand Theft Auto 3);
Mixed mechanics where emergent play (setting your own goals) decides the reward or punishments; or,
Complex mechanics of moral choices (such as avoid, talk their way out, bribe the NPCs, or fight) with differing narrative outcomes, or rewards (the “clean hands” achievement for finding a non-violent solution).
However, some games use “gating” techniques — i.e. you can’t get to the next area until you satisfy the previous area’s requirements in a specific way. In many of these games, there are no “pacifist” solutions. Usually, this is the default option for any game that has a boss.
Watching the video, I was reminded of my first time playing Syphon Filter…there are two levels that are “gated”. In one, you have to kill terrorists to rescue hostages. And no matter what you try to do to stop the one bad guy, he would always end up killing the hostage and the level would reset. Unless you did one very specific thing — killed him with a sniper rifle shot to the head. No headshot, no advancement. A short while later in the game, another level required you to go through the whole level without setting off any alarms. But there were so many guards, the only way to get close to your objective was to repeatedly use headshots to eliminate bad guys. No headshots, no advancement.
The fifth video delves into the idea of the degree of photo-realism to the violence. I found it interesting the example of Mortal Kombat 2 — it was initially viewed as gratuitous violence, yet is now viewed as relatively over-the-top cartoonish violence. However, with increasingly realistic physics mechanics (destructible buildings, bullet trajectories, etc.), the immersive experience increases.
This leads to the final video for the week, dealing with how academia has studied video game violence. It identifies three common threads in the discussion:
Playing video games can cause desensitization to real violence;
Playing causes players to act aggressively;
The more graphic, the more likely they are to be aggressive.
The focus though is on two research questions — does it increase the likelihood of violence and/or decrease empathetic behaviour? The main approach in academia is to rely on social learning theory aka mimicry. The humanities may also look at the political, moral, and cultural aspects of violence and video games. However, some academics identify multiple methodological problems with the research, such as:
Ethical design issues;
Choice of undergraduates as the sample guinea pig;
Lax and flexible definitions of what actually constitutes violent and non-violent mechanics, and how to separate/isolate the violent parameter;
Impossibility to test for real-life violent behaviour in an experiment; and,
Journals have systemic biases towards publishing negative results.
Overall for the week’s videos, I expected more direct reference to situations like Columbine in the U.S. as one of the “hot button” examples that media pundits like to reference. I was also disappointed that they didn’t explore a bit more of the argument by some psychologists that video gameplay was not causal of aggression but more likely symptomatic of aggressive tendencies. In other words, aggressive people were likely to play violent games and commit violent acts, not as cause and effect but as a series of symptoms of their aggression.
