1. I have defended my dissertation, which means I’ll be graduating in just over a month.

The "Best Gamers in the World" photographed in Ottumwa, Iowa for Life Magazine.

My dissertation is a cultural history of the pre-crash video game arcade. Like many great things in my life, my dissertation started at the movies. I took myself to go see The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters one afternoon, and became completely fixated on the Life Magazine image of the best video gamers in the world. Tracking down the historical and cultural context of that image yielded a conference paper which yielded an idea for a dissertation topic. Now, three years later, I’ve wrapped up that dissertation.

I entered the University of Texas in Fall 2004, which means I’ve been floating around Austin for nearly 8 years. Austin has been good to me, and so has my department. The Department of American Studies at UT is the kind of place where a food studies scholar, an expert on circuses, and a dedicated teacher up to his elbows in a project on alcohol and drug policy agree to oversee a project on video gaming. It’s an oddball department in some ways, and the people drawn to it are themselves often oddballs of one kind of another. I have been incredibly fortunate to find myself in such compelling company. I’m smarter, by leaps and bounds, not only because of the structured course of study I’m now completing, but because of the informal education I’ve received from mentors, faculty, peers, and friends. Like they say, it takes a village.

So, while I am excited to complete my dissertation and move forward, parting is, as always, such sweet sorrow. And, I am parting, because:

2. I have accepted a position at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

I am pleased to announce that come August, I will be joining the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies. IIT is a great school, and I am excited to have the opportunity to contribute to developing programs in the Digital Humanities.

I would be hard pressed to find a job that is a better fit for what I do. I still can’t get over how incredibly cool the IIT campus is. Seriously, the architecture is jaw dropping. And, I was led to believe they’d let me play with the 3D printers.

Open Call:

We are inviting submissions for participation in an inaugural “Feminists in Games” workshop to be held in Toronto, Ontario at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in collaboration with York University, Simon Fraser University and OCAD University from May 4-6, 2012. The structure of the workshop is two-fold:.

1) For Participants

We invite young and up-and-coming scholars as well as established practitioners in the field (including researchers, educators and practicing or aspiring game designers) who are interested in presenting a short paper (maximum 3000 words) on questions related to, but not limited to the challenge of advancing gender equity in relation to the following areas:

- game design and development;
- game content;
- socio-cultural constructions of “gameplayers”;
- player communities and online play; and
- the games industry

Applicants will have the opportunity to bring their work into conversation with established feminist scholars and activists during a two-day invitational workshop.

There is a limited amount of money allotted to assist participants with their travel costs. If you wish to apply for this funding please include a short statement (no more than 100 words) with your abstract describing your financial need.

2) For Observers

We invite members from the general public, the games industry and academia to attend keynotes and workshop roundtable sessions, and to lend their voices, perspectives and experiences to conversations and emerging initiatives that support feminist purposes and processes in games education, research, design and development.

Those interested in participating may send abstracts of no more than 1000 words, outlining their research question(s) and approach, to Jennifer Jenson (jjenson at edu.yorku.ca) or Rachel Muehrer (rachel.muehrer at gmail.com) by April 1, 2012. Those wishing to attend as ‘observers’ are invited to reply by April 1, 2012 with a short statement about how attending might be of benefit to you (250 words).

Going Cardboard Trailer from Lorien Green on Vimeo.

As the documentary makes clear, while board gaming is a mainstream activity in much of Europe, it is something of a subculture in the United States. German newspapers publish reviews of games with some regularity, while in the U.S., this kind of information is best found via niche podcasts and websites.

I’m posting about this today because yesterday I spoke to two graduate classes — one in game design, one in technology and culture — and in both instances, the documentary came up. In the first instance, a student had mentioned he had a particular interest in board gaming culture, and in the second, a student had mentioned that his brother, who is an accomplished video gamer, was also a dedicated board gamer.

For anyone interested in gaming culture, it’s worthwhile viewing. The sections of the documentary that follow the trials of an aspiring board game designer to see his game published are especially interesting, and demonstrate some of the barriers designers run into. For those of you more interested in video gaming, the documentary is still recommended viewing. Historically, pen-and-paper and board games have had some significant impact on the development of video gaming.

Besides, it’s just fun viewing.

We quickly discerned that the cake was not a lie.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend THATCamp Games. The “unconference” is one of a number of THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) events held throughout the year. This was the first games-specific THATCamp, and as I’m working on further developing my own “making” skills, the bootcamps and sessions proved quite relevant.

When I first read about THATCamp Games, I was pretty excited. If you’re reading this on my blog, you probably know that I study the history of video gaming, and you may have deduced that I’m very interested in the use of digital tools for teaching and research. For me, THATCamp Games looked like an excellent way to level up some of my existing skills and to get some guidance on broadening my skill set.

Bootcamp

The first day of THATCamp Games was dedicated to bootcamp sessions focused on specific skill sets. In particular, I benefited from the bootcamp on working with Gamemaker, which is a tool I’ve been meaning to get around to playing with. I also learned about a host of other gamemaking and modding tools. One bootcamp I attended covered modding Civilization IV to teach world history, and another had participants building board games by destroying Monopoly Jr. sets.

What was once Monopoly, Jr. is now a Tarot-inspired new-Ouija kind of game called Oracle.

The hands-on aspect of THATCamp Games was a great kickstart for me, as I always think about learning tools, as soon as I find the right tutorial set, and consider trying to figure out how to use a program as soon as I can find someone to show me the ropes. Certainly the workshops involved some rope-showing, but they also served as an important reminder that there’s a lot I can teach myself if I just roll up my sleeves and stop worrying about breaking things. I came back from THATCamp excited to play more with some of the tools I’d had the opportunity to work with, but also excited to spend some time with the tools I heard about but didn’t get an opportunity to fiddle with hands-on at THATCamp Games: Flixel, Unity, Inform 7, and Twine, among others.

For someone like me who is interested in teaching game studies, and who is concerned about what it means to be fluent or literate in gaming, the ability to lead students on game-design projects is an exciting thing to have in my teaching tool kit. If nothing else, I will definitely have board- and card-game design projects handy as assignments.

Sessions

THATCamp Games, like all THATCamps (or, at least all THATCamps to my knowledge) features sessions voted on the morning of the unconference. While I love the flexibility of this model, in that it meant that the sessions featured were the ones the attendees were the most interested in, it definitely took some getting used to. Because the sessions are intended to be interactive, most are essentially very, very large roundtables. The session I found the most provocative, which was a hybrid of several proposed sessions titled “Gender and Video Games/cultural Studies and Queering Video Games,” had around 20 smart, passionate people in attendance. It’s difficult to have a particularly in-depth conversation in a fixed time with so many participants. Many interesting points were raised, and the Twitter backchannel for the session was particularly rich.

Ultimately, the sessions at THATCamp Games felt more like jumping off points and networking opportunities, and considered in this way, the sessions were incredibly rich. The most similar format I’ve seen at a conference is the preformed roundtable session format used for the Flow Conference (which is apparently happening again in 2012). And, as in the case of the Flow Conference roundtables I’ve attended, the THATCamp session experience requires a little bit of letting go, as conversations frequently move in unexpected directions and may or may not fulfill whatever expectations I had when I walked into the room.

Summary

THATCamp Games definitely proved useful for me, and I’ll be looking forward to participating in further THATCamp events in the future. More immediately, I’m enjoying seeing what I can teach myself in Gamemaker and getting ready to dig into some of the other making tools I learned about. While the sessions were interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to have discussions with so many smart, passionate people from such a variety of disciplines, the bootcamp sessions were the real high point for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This television spot for Atari’s Pole Position (1982, Namco) has one of my favorite exchanges of all time. As the camera physically invades the space of the family car, focusing on the bespectacled, bow-tied father driving the vehicle, an aggressive voice shouts at him:

Hey! You look like a real jerk.

Faced with this accusatory insult, the father is far from bothered, and while smiling benignly offers the following reply:

Well, I am a corporate executive.

The family in the vehicle are figured as culturally out-of-touch, in part through subtle class parody. The family of the “corporate executive” are out on a pleasant Sunday drive; their names — Biff, Muffy, Buffy, and Biff Jr. — further position them as parodies of well-established country club types. Through the advertisement, Pole Position is offered as an antidote to their too comfortable, too routine day-to-day life. Contrasted to the routine of a weekly drive, Pole Position is framed as exciting, competitive, and perhaps reckless. Of course, nothing in the game could compare to the surreal excellence of the car being lifted by a giant hand that shakes the passengers into race cars before destroying the sedan.

The point I actually want to make, however, is that Pole Position is advertised specifically as a family game. While the pyrotechnics and parody may separate the game from the trope of a cozy family game night, and the ad’s visual rhetoric appears to specifically target teens, the presentation of the game as a family entertainment is noteworthy. Further, while the presentation is a bit theatrical, the notion of Pole Position as an answer to the routine boredom of family time is a trope that has persisted in advertising and in reviews of “family friendly” video games (and systems, like the Wii, which are marketed as family, rather than individual or peer, entertainments), and of mainstream boardgames.

EA's Family Game Night is clearly branded as a Hasbro product.

EA’s Family Game Night series provide an interesting moment of convergence, relying on the brand recognition of Hasbro’s popular toy and game properties, including Mr. Potato Head, Jenga, Twister, Operation and Clue, among others. Family Game Night offers a nonthreatening entree into family video gaming by relying on the popularity and existing visibility of Hasbro’s toy and game brands. While Pole Position is shown as a thrilling disruption of family time, Family Game Night is an example of video games made familiar and nonthreatening. The transition from Pole Position‘s tongue-in-cheek takedown of family time to Family Game Night‘s enthusiastic embrace is a provocative illustration of the normalization of video gaming, and the ways in which video gaming can converge with board and table games rather than displacing them.