Gender & The Gaze: -Who's looking at Who?- (22/1/2013)

During this session we looked at genders and how they are treated in different mediums e.g. how they are written and presented.
You can read my notes on what I understood about the presentation below:

• Gender is cultural as it is what people choose to be, and Sex is biological as it can't be helped. However, gender is viewed differently depending on the region and nation.
• One reason to why I personally think some genders are represented less fairly than others is because of the region that game is released in. For example, in the West the female roles would fulfill the role of sex appeal, whereas the male roles would fulfill male players' desires. My lecturer was interested by this idea and even said that it was one we should hopefully cover next week, thus making it a good example.
• Gender stereotypes include the above mentioned and even the 'Damsel in Distress' as demonstrated most noticeably by Princess Peach in the Mario games as she is always getting captured. These stereotypes are based on Nature/Culture Binary instead of Nurture as Nurture is cultural and women in the past weren't treated fairly for many years or portrayed well in the medium e.g. the silent movie image of a women tied to a rail track or the view that women should stay passively at home during a war.   
• Ancient mythological gods were portrayed as active whereas goddesses were portrayed as beautiful and the subject of attention from others.    
• The term parenting is now being used to refer to fathers as well as mothers as in the past. Therefore more men are staying at home to look after children and doing more 'motherly' things like feeding their child with a bottle. An act that only women in the past could do as most babies were breast feed. 
• Mentioned Suffragettes (Women who formed a group in the early 20th century to gain votes for women and championed women's rights in general).    
• Feminism questions Binary Thought and Patriarchal Binary Thought.
• "Your just being hysterical" is an insult thrown at women in the past as they were meant to be seen as sweet. However, they were also considered to be related to the moon (by men) as it is also odd and mysterious.
• Feminism challenges ingrained perceptions of women.
• Sterotypes have also appeared in fairytales e.g. shouldn't the prince in Snow White have helped with the cleaning?
• Art is the least censored medium out there.  Is it?
• Women in the 70's and 80's used their own naked bodies as an art form in order to portray their art and point towards audiences. Image and text were also used by them as they would take an add and chnage it e.g. 'Your body is a battleground'.
• Magazines also follow stereotypes as women magazines tend to be fashion, health and gossip based, whereas magazines for men as quoted by a member of my group are "cars and boobs".
• My lecturer used Eddie Izzard as an example of a man who dressed in women's clothing and was beaten up for it. He was known to say in court in his defence that he didn't just dress as a woman in parks to antagonise people.
• Ryan said that in the last forty years art has tackled more sensitive themes and subjects. Therefore I am glad to be brought up in a time that is more accepting than other previous times, and as a result can include the mentioned themes in numerous mediums today.  
• A women's body may get in the way of the male view of her as a person. 
• Some artists didn't include a body from a piece of art and asked their audiences to understand it to be a representation of their gender. One such example included Tracy Emmen's bed with all the objects relating to a women except for the occupant.
• "Do women posing nude become empowered or lose power?". This is a difficult question that the class had many different views on, some of which even argued for their opinion. I don't have a clear answer as I can see it being a mix of both. 
• The term 'camp' is anything that takes a gender quality to an extreme e.g. being too feminine or even too masculine.  

After the presentation we were then asked to read a paper entitled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' by Laura Mulvey. People agreed, including myself that it was very black and white in its thinking. It was also rather dated as it was written in 1975 and didn't even include the opinions of female audiences.
I must also say that I don't agree with what Mulvey stated as she wrote that the female character was pointless to the story. You could argue that this was due to the time of the article, but had she never seen 'Casablanca' made in 1942? That's a masterpiece of film in which the female love interest (see below) is just as important to the story as the rest of the male cast. And judging the article in 2013 I have to completely disagree with it as many films and other mediums have had leading female characters or supporting ones that were vital to the narrative and equally as relevant as male ones.
This said, I know that many movies in the past used to have female characters for simply 'eye candy' and as a means of selling tickets. Also, some films simply reflect the period they represent and therefore women's roles in the past have been repressed by men who were seen as the providers whereas the women could be seen as the house wife (lower class) or the decorative wife (upper class). This even relates to today with certain countries repression of women.   

At the start of the presentation I noticed that the lecturer was showing an image of the character Naoto Shirogane (see below) from my favorite game 'Persona 4'. He didn't speak of her but it was most likely that he included her due to her gender confusion and therefore relevance to the presentation. Intrigued by this I remembered that my group had also spoken of her during our group presentation and thus wondered if he had decided to use her because we mentioned the character, or perhaps it was his own research. When I approached him with the question he told me that he had played the game and that he used her image as she was a good example of a character going through that situation. Pleased to hear that he had played the game I asked if he knew of any other games that included similar content as seen in 'Persona 4' with the same fairness and approach. He couldn't think of any examples but I was happy to hear that he would look out for me and even send me a link to a second year's work looking at the same issues brought up in today's presentation. I look forward to that read as I feel very strongly about these subjects in video games.

Harvard Referencing: 

• Periale, E. (2012) Casablanca screenshot [Online image]. Available at: http://xoxoxoe.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/best-movies-ever-casablanca.html#.UZKJg8oqKY0 (Accessed: 22/1/2013).  
• Soejima, S. (Unknown) Naoto Shirogane [Online image]. Available at: http://videogamesheaven.net/movie-persona-4-characters.htm (Accessed: 22/1/2013).

Digital Arabs in Gaming Presentation (15/1/2013)

During this session we looked at the presentation version of the paper by Vit Sisler entitled 'Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games' (October 2006). 

I found this presentation interesting but also quite challenging.   

Since this presentation however I have reread this weeks and last weeks presentations in order to try and get a clearer understanding of them both.

Overall as with any new subject matter presented to someone unfamiliar with it, I feel that I will be able to understand the content more over time, particularly as it has raised my awareness of stereotyping orientals in games. I think I have been aware for some time of stereotyping in relation to women and good and evil characters, but I have not considered specific ethnic groups. Perhaps I have been guilty in the past of this, but now think I will be more aware when playing games and writing narratives of my own.

However, I do look forward to next week's subject on gender and its representation in gaming as not only do I have strong opinions on this subject matter, but I also know multiple good examples from various games. I hope that I will be able to contribute more to next week's presentation because of this.

The Others - a look at Post Colonisation and Orientalism (8/1/2013)

During this session we looked at both Post Colonisation and Orientalism in the form of a presentation called ''The Others' Theories of Post-Colonialism & Video Games Level 1'. We also looked at a hand out written by Vit Sisler on 'Orientalism in the Digital Age'.
It was a very fascinating lecture as not only did it look into the history of the past relating to these themes, but it also considered the relevance of these themes today.

You can read my notes on this session below:

• The term post coloninalism means the interactions between European countries and the areas they once colonised and how these nations have shaped one another. 
• By the end of this module I will know 'what makes a game' e.g. how to create convincing worlds in gaming. 
• Edward Said's writing was refered to throughout the presentation as he has written a lot of books on western and oriental culture and therefore is a very interesting person to look at in this field of study.
• Rudolf Ernst painted a picture titled 'A Sultan With A Tiger' from his own imagination of what he believed the East to be like e.g. very exotic and appropriate for sultans to own tigers as pets. And yet the piece is in fact a mixture of cultures which are depicted by clothing and architecture.  

• To keep tourism some Eastern / post colonial areas end up portraying themselves in a way which they think will be attractive to outsiders and as a result influence our western perceptions, particularly for westerners who have not visited the East. In the same way people from the East may be influenced by images of the west which show only certain aspects of our life and culture.   
• Supposedly twenty four Plymouths exist all over the world as boats from Plymouth traveled to other lands, colonised them and used the same city name for places over and over again. 
• Watch 'Blade Runner: The Final Cut' as not only was I not around around to see it last year like the rest of the class, but it is also a very good example in this field of research. For example, in the movie multiple languages have been mixed together and are spoken by the inhabitants as they live in a world where people constantly travel and therefore need to know multiple languages. This is similar to how languages in general are created as languages consist of words and phases adopted and adapted from other languages over time.
• 'Plundered' is an interesting term. For example, countries may plunder things from other countries and cultures e.g. food, clothing etc. and adapt them into their own culture. Countries also plunder actual artifacts from other countries and keep them for themselves in museums for example. This has happened in the case of the Elgin Marbles although Greece wants them back. Thus making the word still relevant today.

Since writing the above I have watched the recommended version of 'Blade Runner'. I regonise the themes in it are very familiar to those discussed by my lecturer and now I also understand the presentation a little more. Although the film was very good it confused me and therefore had the lecturer not brought up the themes we were looking at I may have missed them completely.

After watching the presentation I read the paper by Vit Sisler which proved to be a very interesting read as it changed some of my own opinions on the matters of post colonialism.

You can read my personal thoughts on the subjects discussed in the lecture below:

Originally I didn't have a problem with representing different cultures by using selected images and objects. But, after reading Vit Sisler's work and looking back at the presentation for a second time I have reconsidered my opinion. I understood this even further when I read how war games use Eastern terrorists as a regular foe in gaming and that not only are they represented as primitive, but are also labeled as only the bad guys which is just wrong. Also it is worrying that sales for games involving the killing of such ethnic groups increased after the shocking world events of 9/11. Furthermore, the president at the time George W Bush said how America was 'Good' and the enemy (in this case the East) were 'Evil' and although this was understandable given the circumstances, what he said was clearly stereotypical. 

Personal Research - examples of stereotyping in gaming:

One example of a game I can think of with terrible stereotyping in it is 'Resident Evil 5' in which the game takes place in a country in Africa which is plagued by a zombie virus.

Initially, many gamers seeing its earliest trailer in 2007 were concerned that the player would only be killing black zombies. Even the developers were surprised by this reaction as the producer Jun Takeuchi said when interviewed in 2008 by MTV that the company "certainly didn't anticipate the reaction". Thankfully when the game was released it contained a more mixed ethnic group of zombies despite the game's setting, thus showing that outside opinion can change a game for the better.

However, the biggest mis-interpretation of the country came from certain black zombies which were dressed as primitive tribesmen and used spears and shields against the players arsenal of guns. This ended up stereotyping black people. Whilst I can understand the developers wanting to make the African setting as realistic as possible they did not need to depict the enemies as primitive tribesmen since many African tribesman have now adopted modern day cultures so the way they are depicted in the game seems out of place. Especially since the game was only released six years ago in 2009.  

Adding insult to injury, the player can unlock a costume that dresses one of the main characters (a black African girl) in tribal wear. This insulted a lot of people as not only was it stereotypical of her race, but it was also incorrect both in tribal style and in the way it oversexualised her.  

Perhaps it was a lack of research by the Japanese games' company who made the game? Or, perhaps it was because Japan isn't as concerned about the representation of different cultures as the western world. Regardless, someone in the company should have assessed the risks and ethics of setting their game in Africa and therefore shouldn't have included stereotypes or racist misconceptions within the game. This is surprising as in the previously mentioned interview producer Jun Takeuchi mentioned that "there are black members in the development team...who are aware of the historical background and we are constantly checking these kinds of things with them."   

Overall:

Even though I have mentioned the above examples, I still don't believe that using objects from other cultures is a bad thing in gaming. I understand how using cultural references is a good way of helping an audience, reader or even a player understand or recognise the location and authenticity of an area without need for constant reminders. At the same time this can lead to stereotyping and similar mistakes as seen in the painting 'A Sultan With A Tiger' and in the examples above. Therefore, as long as it is used sensibly, ethically and morally I believe that is is something that is still useful and can continue to work in both the games industry and others. I also recognise the importance of improving some of the areas mentioned above. For example, if you are going to have a game about terrorists then at least make them more human and have a reason for why they do what they do and don't just say they are simply the 'bad guys'.

Harvard Referencing: 

• Goldstein, H. (2009) Editorial: Is Resident Evil 5 Racist? Available at: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2009/02/10/editorial-is-resident-evil-5-racist (Accessed: 8/1/2013). 
• Groenendijk, F. (2009) Tribal Wear [Online image]. Available at: http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2009/03/13/resident-evil-5-cheats-for-unlockables-like-bsaa-emblems-easy-money-playable-sheva-and-new-modes.htm (Accessed: 8/1/2013). 
• Unknown. (Unknown) Zombie Tribesmen [Online image]. Available at: http://residentevil.wikia.com/Ndipaya_Kingdom (Accessed: 8/1/2013).
• Unknown. (Unknown) Shooting gun screenshot [Online image]. Available at: http://news.bigdownload.com/photos/2009-console-games-that-should-be-pc-games/ (Accessed: 8/1/2013).