Alan Alda for Atari

By admin on January 18, 2012

Alan Alda with an Atari Computer

Alan Alda, looking particularly gleeful in his role as Atari spokesman.

I recently stumbled across a series of Atari advertisements featuring actor Alan Alda. I have a soft spot for Alan Alda, partially because of his feminist politics, and partially because of a deep love for the series MASH — which Alda agreed to star in only after gaining assurance that surgery scenes would feature in every episode. Alda was worried the show would become too much of a sitcom and move away from showing the horrors and absurdity of war.

The advertisements Alda did for Atari certainly draw on his MASH-related celebrity, but they also draw on his feminist politics. Alda appears in the ads as both a familiar face and an advocate for girls in computing.

In the ad embedded above, Alda introduces the audience to Stacy, a young girl who is teaching herself touch typing using an Atari computer, and a game called “Typo Attack.” A second advertisement, in which a teenaged girl uses an Atari word processing program, plays more directly with Alda’s known investment in gender equality. The girl types, “All men are created equal,” then says that it seems out of date before updating the phrase to “All men and women are created equal.”

I enjoy these ads for the ways in which they play with gender politics to sell home computers. But, they’re also an artifact of a rather specific moment in video game history. Prior to the crash of 1983-1985, Atari had controlled 80% of the U.S. video game market. Atari’s flailing had in many ways set off the crash, and the company’s efforts to regain a toehold in the market resulted in efforts at diversification into other consumer electronics sectors, including computers and telephones. Atari was not alone in these efforts, as several other companies had attempted to enter into the home computing market. These ads, most of which ran in 1984, provide an interesting glimpse at the ways Atari tried to rise from its ashes.

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The Simple Genius of the Gamer Girl Manifesto

By admin on December 29, 2011

I saw “The Gamer Girl Manifesto” (embedded above) by Sexy Nerd Girl Presents thanks to Geekquality. The brief video features a number of young women gamers who identify themselves by their on-screen identities (which range from notable characters like Mario to the more subtly constructed identities from games like World of Warcraft) and by the game systems they use. The video’s message is simple:

Don’t be racist. Don’t be homophobic. Don’t be sexist. Follow that code and everybody will have a good time. And when someone breaks that code, CALL THEM OUT. Don’t just let it ride.

The message particularly strikes a chord with me as I’ve been reading and hearing about some particularly egregious examples of in-game sexual harrassment. For example, Gunthera1 wrote at The Border House recently about how in-game sexual harassment drives home the need for safe spaces. [link] The recent post “All in One” at Not in the Kitchen Anymore is like a greatest hits list of how women are marginalized in gaming spaces. [link] These two incidents may be especially gross, but they aren’t particularly uncommon. In this context, I particularly respect the work being done by those behind “The Gamer Girl Manifesto.” It is essential.

On a related note, there is a Chrome extension that kills the comments on Kotaku. [link]

In closing, the happiest of New Year’s to you all, and I’ll be back in 2012.

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I Said Diamonds: the Aubrey Plaza WoW Spot

By admin on December 26, 2011

The first time I saw the TV ad above, which features Aubrey Plaza (best known for playing April Ludgate on “Parks and Recreation”) explaining in her trademark deadpan how she became a World of Warcraft player, I was rather charmed. Frequently when games are pitched directly to women, they are pitched using cheap tropes of gender. For example, the “I Play For Me” ads used to market the Nintendo DS to women a few years ago used women celebrities like Carrie Underwood to pitch the portable game system as a kind of feminine accessory. (I wrote about the gendering of the DS ads previously for Flow [link].)

The WoW ad featuring Plaza could fall into the same category, but her icy delivery is a sharp contrast to Carrie Underwood’s easy warmth. Further, while the ad is doubtless intended to market WoW to women and girls, it refrains from suggesting that the game is easy or accessible; instead, the game is presented as highly engaging and possibly even addictive. In the ad, Plaza likes the game so much that she ultimately dumps the boyfriend who introduced her to the game after realizing she likes the game more than him.

A casual and icy Plaza in a current TV spot for World of Warcraft

Over at Ad Week, David Kiefaber feels the ad is divisive and may alienate the game’s existing fanbase [link]:

… this is a classic case of an ad laughing at its demographic rather than with it. After the last batch of fun and inclusive celebrity ads for WoW (yes, even the Chuck Norris one), a lazy, alienating one starring a bitchy ice queen was bound to ruffle some nerd feathers.

However, I wonder if the ad actually alienates WoW players generally, or if it may reflect efforts to appeal to women. That is to say, Plaza’s postfeminist sneer may have a broader appeal among WoW players than Chuck Norris’s macho posturing. I don’t want to hate on Chuck Norris so much as I want to note that the fanbase for WoW includes a lot of women. As of 2009, Nielsen numbers showed that over 400,000 U.S. women playing WoW [source]. According to the same data, WoW was also the most played “core” game among women ages 25-54. [source] Given this, the ad may make more sense read as a direct appeal to an existing fanbase of adult women than as a putdown directed at the socially awkward young men assumed to be the game’s largest audience. At the very least, there is evidence that many women enjoy WoW, and sharp advertising intended to appeal to women who already play WoW or who may consider playing seems perfectly sensible.

Further, I find it difficult to separate this ad from the veritable deluge of diamond advertisements that begin in November and run through the holiday season. Jewelers pull out all the stops selling diamonds and fine jewelry, ostensibly to women, but, often they seem to be instead selling diamonds to men as things women want. The message certainly is rarely “buy yourself a diamond,” but is frequently “diamonds are the only acceptable symbol of romantic love.” I’m sure that advertising message hits most viewers, raising expectations among women and creating perceived obligations for men. Regardless, the WoW ad I’m discussing here, in which Plaza says flatly, “I said diamonds, ****,” only to be told she can “mine diamonds in the game” directly plays with the consumer practices so embraced by jewelers like “Every Kiss Begins with” Kay or “I am Loved” Helzberg.

At its center, the ad is a joke about gender assumptions — that Plaza wouldn’t want to play a video game, that her boyfriend is so inept at gift giving that he would give her a game she had no interest in, that, as a woman, Plaza would be obsessed with diamonds. But, these assumptions are overstated and revealed as the flimsy gossamer they are, ultimately collapsing under their own weight.

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Are we not women? The problem with “Geek Girl”

By admin on December 16, 2011

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and patron saint of female geeks. Definitely a (rather glamorous) woman.

Today on Kotaku, there is a piece on “Nerds and Male Privilege.” I saw it go out on Twitter, and I took the bait. And, I was greeted with an article that talks at length about the nasty effects male privilege has on “geek girls.” Girls.

To be fair, this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks. And, the author does at several points actually refer to women as women. But, the easy conjoining of “geek” and “girl” when speaking or writing about women who dare game, or read comic books, or LARP, or engage in whatever other aspects of geek subcultures is problematic. I have a difficult time believing men who say they are advocating for gender equality when they readily admit male privilege in the same breath that they refer to all women as girls. There are contexts in which “girl” makes sense — when it’s referring to teens, tweens, and other youth, for example, it’s correct — and there are specific contexts where it is the preferred terminology. Geek Girl Con, for example, has girl right there in the name. But, Geek Girl Con is organized by and for women, and the same holds for Girl Gamer; if women want to call themselves girls, that’s their prerogative. However, if someone on the other side of the power divide wants to call women girls, then he is engaging in some of the very processes by which women are infantilized, dismissed, and stripped of their power.

When adult women are forced into a box labeled “girl,” it minimizes any of the already limited cultural and political authority they have access to. While I have seen arguments that the word “guy” is somehow parallel to girl, it does not carry the same connotations of youth, or at least does not carry them to the same extent. The true parallel to “girl’ is “boy,” and I rarely see that applied to adult men or even teen boys as anything other than a Clint Eastwood-style macho insult.

“Girl” is always either infantalized or sexualized — I made the mistake of running an image search for “geek girl” to try to find an illustration for this post, and I was confronted with a few pictures of familiar women like Tina Fey and a few images that appeared to be snapshots of real live women who self-identify as geek girls. But, these were lost amidst a deluge of conventionally attractive women in Nintendo underpants sprawled on couches, motivational-style posters celebrating the “merits” of geek girls featuring more women in their underwear, illustrations of large breasted women in Batman T-shirts, and other pinup-type fodder. It’s Cool Chick Carol all over again. The “geek girl” revealed in Google images is one born in the sickly, sexy, soft focus light of the male gaze.

At a less political level, the further problem with the overdeployment of the term “girls” is that it isn’t even correct. At least in video gaming, which is probably the most broadly accessible and highly visible area of geek culture, industry statistics show there are relatively few gamers who are girls in the technical sense. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s most recent data, women over the age of 18 represent 37 percent of gamers, which is to say that women — not girls, women — make up more than one third of gamers. Actual girls make up just 5 percent of gamers. [source]

Besides, I’m sure if you called Tina Fey a girl to her face, she’d roll her eyes and give you a serious dressing down. Perhaps more of us should react the same way.

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Women Gamers as Social Animals in the GameHouse Survey

By admin on December 5, 2011

women who game

Infographic of GameHouse survey results shared with permission of GameHouse.

 

By now, you have probably seen some of the data from the GameHouse infographic above [source]. Collected by Harris Interactive for GameHouse, the data includes a few particularly sexy statistics. In particular, the suggestion that women online gamers have more sex has attracted a lot of attention. However, I find the more general suggestion of the data — that women who play online games are more invested in social activity in general — more compelling, particularly as it offers some potential explanation for that sexy statistic. 42% of women who play online games socialize in person at least once a day, compared to 31% of non-online women gamers. Similarly, 86% of women online gamers socialize via social media at least once per day compared to 71% of women gamers who play offline games.

The differences revealed here are more significant than the 5% increase in sexual activity for women online gamers, and they suggest that women who game online are more social in general than women who gain offline (which, of course, would be a likely contributing factor to the increase in sexual activity). Research like that revealed in this study often creates chicken v. the egg-type debate. Do online games make women gamers more social? Or, do, more socially active women just prefer online games? I would argue that both explanations seem equally likely, and are therefore likely to both be true.

Online gamers often by default have their gaming interspersed with at least a minimal level of social interaction; this may serve as a deterrent for certain gamers. Although only 16% of the women online gamers surveyed cited connecting with others as a primary motivation in playing online games, this social interaction is an inherent part of play. For women gamers who are indifferent to the demands for social interactions in many online games, the games may drive an increase in social activity; for those who are already quite socially active, these demands may serve as an enticement to play. In either case, the structure of many online games seems to offer a pretty direct explanation for the differences in social interaction levels for online women gamers and offline women gamers.

The other results of the survey, particularly with regards to when women play games and how many women parents play game, are interesting as well and suggest points of departure for future research.

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