More of the aforementioned conversation:
> -We could bring the whole gender argument into it - which would be a
> great reason to add Fight Club to the book list. Are there any girl
> themed video games? Maybe, like, one or two. What is a girl-themed
> video game, anyway?
Consider the big reveal at the end of the first Metroid -- if you beat it,
your character takes off her helmet and space suit and you learn that
*you've been playing as a woman the whole time*. Pretty massive in its
assumptions about the player audience.
> What does this tell us about how videogames add to
> the rhetoric of what gender should and shouldn't be? To take it 15
> steps further in a crazy direction, you could read excerpts from the US
> Army Survival Manual on shooting guns, or a boxing or martial arts
> manual, and explain the relation between fake and real "masculine"
> heroism.
I'll bet the famous recruiting video game, America's Army, will have
valuable stuff for that too... maybe it's worth teaching that alongside
GTA.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I'm curious what "girl-themed videogame" means (to either of you). Presence?--does Lara Croft make the Tomb Raider series "girl-themed"?
The Metroid reveal is pretty cool.
I'm asking because I'm scratching my head over here. Metaphorically.
I think (but then "girl-themed" wasn't my term) that Lara Croft, in that she is very much a pin-up girl, fits more readily into a [hetero] "boy-themed" model.
Particularly "boy-themed" games do assume, I think, the heterosexuality of the user (we're still saving the princess, no?).
Samus fights a particularly threatening *Mother* Brain iin the first Metroid (I haven't played any of the sequels)... hrm.
Agreed re: Lara Croft; having thought that, however, I was at something of a loss.
(The only Tomb Raider I've played is part of TR: Legend.)
Maybe Dreamfall? Perfectly well playable by boys as well as girls; Dan's finished it, I haven't.
Some would probably argue that Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts count as "girl-themed," insofar as some women who play any videogames will play those but won't touch stuff with more violence or complex puzzles/quests. I wouldn't count that, though, since plenty of men are crap at (e.g.) FPS (to turn the stereotyping around a bit).
Still at a loss.
I wonder whether one could generate any consensus about the notion of princess-saving amongst butch lesbian gamers.
Kingdom Hearts is a princess-saver among princess-savers. It's organized around the search for (and competition for) Sora's love interest, Kairi... not to mention the weird instrumentality of the Disney "princesses" throughout the game.
In KH2, perhaps, things turn around a bit when Sora is searching for his buddy Riku... I leave it to webcartoonist Scott Ramsoomair [http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=209] to sum it up, rather crudely.
True, but whatever-themed need not center upon being able to identify
sexually with the protag. Some women play KH because it's (a) Disney and (b) cute. Cute might trump sexual ID here. (I'm not a fan of (a) or (b)--watched Dan play both.) Also, I see subjective differences in sexual appeal / request to identify amongst TR, KH, and the various Mario games....
I note that while apparent-het male players writing walkthroughs/hints for FFXII sometimes include asides about Fran or Ashe, apparent-het female players have turned out quite a bit of fic (slash, het, and gen alike); I bumped into it at the Pit of Voles. Despite letting one swap in characters and choose a leader, the game maintains Vaan as pri protag, but Vaan's status doesn't seem to have hurt players' latitude for imagining what else might occur. Perhaps these two paragraphs are about two different things and my grasp of the topic is sliding around too much.
[that last comment was from skg046, btw: Blogger wouldn't let her through]
Post a Comment