Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

new jam game: Where's the beef


I released a quick little jam game about 2 weeks ago, but I realized I never posted it here, so here it is:
"Where's the beef is a silly little beef-finding web browser game made in zero hours for 0h game jam 2023 (http://www.0hgame.eu/) where we make games in "zero hours" when daylight savings time switches over (in Europe)"

"15 levels of beef finding; literally photorealistic graphics; can YOU find the beef???"

For all the zoomers / teens reading this -- "where's the beef?" was a popular catchphrase in a Wendy's ad campaign back in the 1980s...

Friday, November 10, 2017

Behold the bildungsspiel: the coming-of-age game


NOTE: There are somewhat vague spoilers about the general plot for several games in this post.

US high school students are generally required to read novels like The Catcher In The Rye -- stories about growing up and finding a place in society. Many of these students also learn about the technical literary criticism term for these narratives, the German term bildungsroman. (Bildungs means "educational" and roman means "novel", and so we usually translate this as "coming-of-age novel")

While there are many well-recognized coming-of-age films, I'd like to figure out the equivalent bildungsspiel -- the coming-of-age game. This also seems like an especially urgent genre for game criticism to consider, since there are so many children and young people who plays games, and form their identities partly around these games. (Meanwhile: something like opera has a much weaker association with youth culture.)

One small obstacle to this critical project is that "bildungsspiel" already means something. Based on my cursory Google searches, it seems to refer to rudimentary educational toys for very young children, to help them develop basic cognitive abilities and motor skills. Curse the German toy industry!...

Well, I'm taking the word back. Let's talk about the bildungsspiel, which isn't for babies, it's for teens!

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Queer Game Studies, "On FeministWhorePurna and the Ludo-material Politics of Gendered Damage Power-ups in Open-World RPG Video Games"

For the upcoming book Queer Game Studies (2017), I contributed a chapter on the "FeministWhore" scandal in the game Dead Island. It is a "ludo-material" political analysis, looking at gameplay as expressed by source code, intended for general audiences. Here, I'll talk a bit about the ideas and process behind writing the chapter, and then briefly summarize the main argument.

First, to remind you, here's the reporting on the scandal back in 2011 from Kotaku:
One of the unlockable skills for Dead Island leading lady Purna allows her to deal extra damage against male victims. It's called Gender Wars in the game, but the original skill was named "Feminist Whore."
There's a lot to unpack here, and one goal of my chapter is to expand what we mean by "representation" in games. Currently, whenever we criticize a game character for its politics, such as a racist or sexist stereotype, we tend to focus on the character art, animation, writing, and voice acting. Why not expand representation to encompass the richness of the entire game experience and game engine itself?

My analysis follows Mark Sample's excellent "Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames" in focusing on the procedural politics of game mechanics and balance, and comparing that to the systems as intended from the source code. FeministWhorePurna is an ideal case study: it was a contemporary event with modern game engine architecture and a player / modder community that practically did the gameplay and forensic analysis for me already. (I also forced myself to play a bit of Dead Island to verify everything.)

You'll have to checkout the full book from your library, or buy it, or whatever, to see the full essay, but I'll try to briefly summarize the argument here, and in more game developer-y language as appropriate: