|
|
representation
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
The study extends research on the Proteus effect by demonstrating that avatars can prime negative attitudes and cognition in desktop virtual settings. Experiment 1 shows that, after virtual group discussions, participants using black-cloaked avatars developed more aggressive intentions and attitudes but less group cohesion than those using white-cloaked avatars. In Experiment 2, individual participants using a Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-associated avatar created more aggressive Thematic Apperception Test stories in comparison to a control group. Participants using the KKK avatar also wrote less affiliative stories in comparison to those employing avatars dressed as doctors. Overall, the resulting pattern of activation of negative thoughts (i.e., aggression) coupled with the inhibition of inconsistent thoughts (i.e., cohesion, affiliation) is consistent with principles of current priming models and provides initial evidence for automatic cognitive priming in virtual settings.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This article should serve as an introduction to a relatively new topic in ethnological studies requiring very specific methods as it involves both offline and online research as well as material objects and immaterial practices. How do we embark on an interdisciplinary venture such as this, and be sure to produce qualitative research of high standard? How should gaming mothers best be studied?
In what follows we try to answer that question. We also assume that not all of our readers are extensively familiar with games and game culture or have engaged with computer games first-hand or as scientific object of study. We thus begin with a short assessment of its current status as a growing genre, whose image is changing as gamers and game culture become increasingly diversified. We also briefly situate games as an academic subject and outline some of the central concepts focused in the fieldii called Game Studies. Furthermore, understanding the ideological underpinnings of play is vital to understanding the contexts in which games and gaming exist because they constitute some of the fundamental conditions of games research. To explain this, we relate the ambiguous status of game/play to the usage of the term ―the magic circle‖ and of historically ingrained rhetorics [sic] of play.
In our survey of the theoretical land, we notice an increasing attention among games researchers to players in addition to the games themselves. We thus assert that ethnologists have a particular methodological edge and a role to fulfill as games research more and more means studying games in relation to gamers, society and political economy and not only the game itself. As part of a huge industry that is a significant economic driver, games take center stage on a global sociocultural and capital market. Educational programs and cross-disciplinary efforts centered on games and gaming grow steadily. Introducing our research project ―Gaming Moms‖ we explain why it is interesting – and now possible and highly apposite – to study gaming from the perspective of culture, the family and the everyday. We give our rendition of how to best study a particular category of players such as mothers and why a marriage between ethnology and the interdisciplinary field of Game Studies is necessary and useful. In doing so, we give specific examples from our ongoing project thus presenting a selection of the various methods we apply in our research. Our examples are chosen around two themes – gaming and time management and representations of mothers in the context of gaming. We conclude with a brief discussion of our findings, having thus proposed an answer to our methodological question, and outline some missing perspectives and future challenges.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper is a component of a three-year empirical study of gaming moms undertaken with the aim to modulate the conventional constructions of gamer identities and examine the contested status of gaming in everyday life. It presents samples of mothers in gaming discourse – from TV, Music-video, forums, and ads. Mothers have been largely invisible in popular gaming discourse or formulaically portrayed as unsympathetic to/ policing the gaming habits of other family members. Now, gaming companies increasingly target women and families, female gamers exceed 40 % of players (US and Sweden), and console gaming is displacing TV-watching as the core living-room activity. The Boy-nerd-in-the-Bedroom is, at least statistically, being dispelled and complemented by the Girl-into-Gaming. Still, a tenacious nineteenth-century icon lingers: the Angel-in-the-House. Mothers today do more than bring Hot Pockets to gaming kids (South Park WoW-Episode) or serve as the implied inferior player populating taunts like “My Momma shoots better than you” (Q3A). Mothers game too. The paper uses feminist critical theory (de Lauretis) to illustrate the situation of the female gamer as oscillating between the fixed sign of “Woman” and the dynamic experiences of “women”. It acknowledges and elucidates both the power and consequences of representation and personal experience in meaning-making processes, to which the growing cultural discourse and practice of gaming belong.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented in mainstream European and American digital games. It analyzes how games — particularly of the action genre — construct the Arab or Muslim ‘Other.’ Within these games, one finds the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world reconstructed into a series of flat social typologies, often presented within the framework of hostility and terrorism. The second part of the paper deals with selected digital games created in the Middle East, whose authors are knowingly working with the topic of self-representation. Recent digital games originating in the Middle East can be perceived as examples of an ongoing digital emancipation taking place through the distribution of media images and their corresponding meanings. A key part of this ongoing digital emancipation involves the construction of Arab and Islamic heroes, a process accomplished by exploiting distinctive narrative structures and references to Islamic cultural heritage.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper presents an imitation learning system capable of learning tasks in a complex dynamic real-time environment. In this paper, we argue that social learning should be thought of as a special case of general skill learning, and that the biases it presents to the skill learning problem radically simplify learning for species with sufficient innate predisposition to harness this power. We decompose skill learning into four subproblems, then show how a modification of Roy's CELL system can address all these problems simultaneously. Our system is demonstrated working in the domain of a real-time virtual-reality game, Unreal Tournament.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper was inspired by the popularity of female video game protagonists despite girls’ and women’s continued hesitance to participate in digital gaming activities. The pilot study examines how the imagery and narrative structure of popular, contemporary video games construct a paradigm of the ideal female heroine. An in-depth content analysis of three best-selling action-adventure video games was conducted. Key findings indicate the recurrence of a paradoxical interplay between beauty ideals and characterization, wherein the female protagonist must reconcile traditional ideals about beauty and body type with the decidedly untraditional gender roles and actions she engages in.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper outlines how representations of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity intersect with strategies of late capitalism in The Sims, arguably the most popular video game of all time. Within an industry known for its social stereotyping, The Sims has been praised as socially progressive for its liberal views towards same-sex relationships, racial equality, and non-sexualized presentation of women. However, I will argue, using the theory of Stuart Hall, Naomi Klein, Henry Jenkins and others, that below its progressive façade The Sims amounts to an exploitation of diversity initiated by targeting untraditional markets to better tap into the consuming potential of millions of non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual people – what Hall sees as the commercial appropriation of difference. I want to suggest that the spike in social liberalism may not be the result of a socio-cultural change in ideology, but instead reflects a change in how traditionally marginalized people are marketed to in late capitalism. The Sims, in this formation, becomes a hybrid entity, fueling both progressive liberal discourse and the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense to those it (mis)represents.
|
