Out of the readings for this week, I found the Anne-Marie Schleiner article to be the most intriguing. In particular, I found her analysis of the Nude Raider patch to be quite fascinating. It is obvious that many consider Lara Croft to be a modern sex symbol, even though she is a fictional digital character, so it does not come as a surprise to me whatsoever that individuals would go through the pains of modifying the game to produce Lara Croft in the nude.

Her analysis of the nude patch as creating a fetish object of the male gaze is particularly revealing, as it is clear that such mods enhance the gameplay in no way, but merely serve to strip the already skimpy clothing from Croft’s person. The fact that a single search engine logged over one million hits for the patch serves to illustrate the popular desire by fans of the game to witness Lara Croft without her clothes.

In addition, the fact that the official Tomb Raider homepage at one point contained a direct link to the Nude Raider patch only serves to reinforce the idea that the choice to create such an attractive female character was deliberate. Without a doubt, many copies of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were sold solely based on the fact that the main character was a scantily clad and well endowed female. The developers of the game clearly used this identifying factor to their advantage, and their indirect endorsement of a patch meant to remove Lara Croft’s clothing only serves to further their commitment to using their character as a sex symbol.

I found the Schleiner article very interesting because of the extensive justifications that people came up with for playing with a female character. I realize that characters are pre-dominantly male, but still, nobody ever asked why a woman might want to play a male character. While I do think that there are cases of people playing Lara Croft for specific reasons, I also think that some people might have played it because it was a popular game or because the premise sounded interesting. I have heard that many boys would find the cheats to see Lara naked, but is that why they chose the game in the first place?  I may sound negative, but I think that the author is reading way too far into this. For the boys who chose to play this, they probably wanted to watch a drastically dis-proportioned woman run around and shoot bad things. When we had the guest professor he joked at the presence of a deeper meaning of why he plays as a woman, but ultimately confessed to it being because he wanted to watch a woman rather than a man all day. I confess that I do think the rest of her justifications are a bit farfetched. I find this  topic of gender in videogames very interesting because of what people think it says about our culture.

I found the Koster Chapter “Different fun for different folks” to be quite intriguing. While I had considered personality types when thinking about the types of friends people gravitate towards and the jobs people are naturally good at, I had never thought about how they could affect the video games one is drawn towards playing. Koster mentions how different methods of personality sorting, such as the ones from the Myers-Briggs formulas, can say a lot about the types of games one prefers. I have taken the Myers-Briggs test before, so I decided it might be fun to try to relate my personality type that it gave me with the games that I typically play. I have tested ENFJ every time I have taken the test (I have even taken different versions of the test to see if it would come out different), which is the type known as “The Giver.” ENFJ’s are known for their desire to be extremely socially oriented and primarily gain satisfaction in life through their relationships with others and their ability to help other people who they have these relatiships with. When playing video games, there are a few types of games that I typically play: sports games, first person shooters, and adventure games. Out of the sports games that I play (Madden, Mario soccer, and the SSX snowboarding series to name a few) , I usually only play them enough to get to a point where I consider myself “good” at the game (which usually means I can compete with my friends to an extent that I feel that I am comparable or better than them). I sometimes beat these games, but much of the time I do not require myself to do so because I see no ultimate meaning in these games beyond the pure enjoyment of getting good at the game, other than the ability to have a good time playing the game with my friends (so often I only play these sports games with my friends). The same can be said of the FPS’s that I play: I will only take the time to beat the game if the story line is compelling enough for me to feel the need to complete it (meaning I feel like the people in my game really need my help and I therefore must beat the game to help them), otherwise I only play them with friends. The adventure games that I play are the exception to the social aspect that I seem to have with video games (meaning that I really only play the other games so that I can enjoy playing them with friends). However, the adventure games also appear to fit my personality type, just in a different way. When I thought about the specific adventure games that I play, they all include some compelling story line of helping others or saving the world (or both). These games include The Legend of Zelda series and the Pokemon games, both of which require the player to perform numerous tasks that directly help the people in the game, and ultimately lead to saving the world (or Hyrule of course) in some way. I found it very interesting that I appear to fit the stereotype of my personality type so much in the games that I enjoy, and would be very interested to hear if other people in the class found similar results when considering their personality in relation to the types of games that they play.

Even in modern times gender is a big deal in many facets of society.  Videogames are one section of our culture where gender and sexuality is still being explored in terms of how it will effect gamers and how they view the game.  Several recent games have experimented with making the main protagonist in the game female.  Most of these games have been role playing games or RPGs, which give the player a choice of making their character male or female and have different interactions between characters in game depending on which gender they choose.  This gives each player the option to tailor their character how they want to and can lead to the female characters looking like how the player chooses to play them.

Take the game Dragon Age for example.  There is a wide range of appearance options for the character makes it possible to have a relatively average looking avatar but most male players pick a more extreme look to their female character.

On the flip side, when male gamers create male avatars they range in appearance from realistic looking characters to the extremes similar to the female avatars.

The use of female characters in videogames also affects the use of romance in the storyline.  Many story driven games incorporate at least one romance  into their storyline but it is usually from a male perspective.  With female characters the interaction with the players has to change as far as romances go and in this area Bioware has lead the way.  The way that their recent games have handled gender and sexuality has been something not seen in mainstream games before.

It seems gender stereotypes are coming into play, so to speak.

Like ijohnson says just below me here, as a generation of gamers we are getting better at… something.  Perhaps that something has a little to do with what Koster talks about in chapter 6 and what Heeter et al talk about in their study; namely, the various averaged qualities of each gender.  For example, Koster says those of the female persuasion on average seem to have more trouble with certain spatial perceptions, but by playing games and practicing this can be permanently changed.  The important point here is that it will become a learned attribute.  And then Heeter comes along saying that 5th and 8th graders can easily pick out games designed by their own gender and sense something “alien” in those designed by the opposite.

Combining these ideas, maybe part of this “something” we’re getting collectively more comfortable with is being able to identify these stereotypes, analyze them, and then design games to either suit or challenge them.  My limited gaming experience means I can’t cite great example of each for both genders, but I’m sure they’re out there.  Something like Quake or Resident Evil on one end of the spectrum and the Orisinal stuff on the other for males (that was the online flash game where you had to save the bambis from hurling themselves blindly across the ditch with your pong bar, accompanied by soothing music and a waterfall).

The central question that stuck out for me in these readings is “how can games, as a media form, be improved?” To me, many of the more specific questions that were raised reduce back down to this basic question. What strikes me is that if you try to just answer this question, you immediately run into problems. You’re forced to ask questions like “what would girls and women be drawn to in games?” or “how do we describe the medium in which the game and the story blur together?” just to be able to get started with, much less finishing, the process of answering this question. To me this is then an almost perfect question: it’s very easy to understand what it’s asking and why we should care, but very difficult to actually answer it.

One idea that I had about attacking this question involves an idea from a TED talk I saw recently. The idea essentially inverts this question, in that it asks “how can reality be improved using games?” While this may sound a little silly at first, the speaker makes a good case for why we should make reality more like games. She has a sizable argument, but her central point is that people of this generation are spending a tremendous amount of time playing games, and in the process are getting very good at…something. She makes an effort to pinpoint what that “something” is, and asserts that we should try to find some way of harnessing it to solve real world problems. This can of course be done on both sides: games can be made to be more like real world problem solving and vice versa. I think doing this would be a great way to improve upon games, both because of the potential to achieve more goals in the real world and because games like that might just be more fun, if done correctly. I also think that this mode of thinking matches the ideas of the “girl games” in the Heeter et al. reading nicely, in that the goal of these sorts of things would probably not be to win but to succeed.