Mia Consalvo

The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games

A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in proportion to the games that were actually played by the public, and thus allowed the first statements able to be generalized about the content of popular video games. The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly. Overall, the results are similar to those found in television research. The implications for identity, cognitive models, cultivation and game research are discussed.

There is No Magic Circle

Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts. However, to understand gameplay, we must also investigate contexts, justifications, and limitations. Cheating can be an excellent path into studying the gameplay situation, because it lays bare player’s frustrations and limitations. It points to ludic hopes and activities, and it causes us to question our values, our ethics. In comparison, the concept of the magic circle seems static and overly formalist. Structures may be necessary to begin gameplay, but we cannot stop at structures as a way of understanding the gameplay experience. Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules and in relation to multiple contexts, across varying cultures, and into different groups, legal situations, and homes.

Women and games: technologies of the gendered self

This study examines how individual differences in the consumption of computer games intersect with gender and how games and gender mutually constitute each other. The study focused on adult women with particular attention to differences in level of play, as well as genre preferences. Three levels of game consumption were identified. For power gamers, technology and gender are most highly integrated. These women enjoy multiple pleasures from the gaming experience, including mastery of game-based skills and competition. Moderate gamers play games in order to cope with their real lives. These women reported taking pleasure in controlling the gaming environment, or alternately that games provide a needed distraction from the pressures of their daily lives. Finally, the non-gamers who participated in the study expressed strong criticisms about game-playing and gaming culture. For these women, games are a waste of time, a limited commodity better spent on other activities.

Console video games and global corporations Creating a hybrid culture

This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. As an exemplar of this process, the Japanese game publisher Square Enix is the focus of this case study, as it has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture.

The Monsters Next Door: Media Constructions of Boys and Masculinity

These are a few of the headlines that appeared in US newspapers and news magazines concerning the April 20, 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Although school violence in the US accounts for only a small fraction of violence involving children nationwide (John Cloud 1999), the unusual, recurring character of these crimes has focused attention to them out of proportion to their actual numbers. Over the past few years, there have been similar occurrences every few months. Previous to Littleton, there were incidents in Oregon, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi, along with others stretching further back. They have become a grim list of referents brought out and re-hashed with each new outbreak of school violence. On April 20, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris entered their high school in Littleton, Colorado, and went on a shooting spree. At the end of the day, one teacher and fourteen students were dead, including the two shooters who killed themselves before authorities could apprehend them. Police investigators found many unexploded bombs throughout the school, and also learned that the pair had been planning the attack for at least a year, to coincide with the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday. It was the deadliest school shooting ever to have occurred in the US, and it received extensive media coverage. Studies that explore how gender is represented in news coverage of violence have tended to focus primarily on women. Many have documented how women are portrayed, often as victims of male violence (see, for example, Helen Benedict 1992; Cynthia Carter, 1998; Deborah Jermyn 2001; Katherine Kinnick 1998; Judith Marlane 1999; Marian Meyers 1997, 1999; C. Kay Weaver, Cynthia Carter, and Elizabeth Stanko 2000). Studies of men and the media have until recently been few in number (Fred Fejes 1992; Diana Saco 1992). More recently, Jackson Katz (1999) has addressed how masculinity and violence intertwine in deadly ways in his video Tough Guise, but scholarly analyses in this area are relatively new (see also John Beynon 2002).

Performing the Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance and Group Identity in Second Life

This article explores avatar appearance of 211 individuals in the virtual world Second Life (SL). Through analysis of observations, online interviews, and a survey, it examines the ways that players use avatars to perform self contextualized by group identities, from gender, race, and sexuality to specific communities, such as furries or role players. Drawing on literature from fashion and dress, we examine how players choose avatar appearance in relation to participation or alignment with groups and their prevailing social norms. We found that although Second Life provides unprecedented freedom in appearance, local social contexts, as much as external ones, created powerful boundaries and expectations, leading many participants to seek socially acceptable appearance that would be interpreted in certain ways as part of their interactions.

Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet

This article examines media fans’ Web sites devoted to Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to determine how the code of the Internet allows fans some creative control over media artifacts of interest to them and how such actions pose a challenge to media corporations and their copyrights. However, this challenge is also limited by the changing code of the Internet, at varying levels, as corporations seek to change open code to closed-proprietary code and limit such actions. Thus, this article explores the resistances of fans to corporate actions and how the code of the Internet is gradually changing into a system more conducive to corporate capitalism than community creation or any other transformative space.

The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games

As players craft and enact identities in digital games, the relationship between player and avatar gender remains unclear. This study examines how 11 in-game chat, movement, and appearance behaviors differed by gender and by men who did and did not use a female avatar – or ‘gender-switchers’. Drawing on social role and feminist theories of gender, we argue that gender differences in behavior align with the social roles and norms that establish appropriate and inappropriate behavior for men and women. Thus we complicate questions of ‘gender-switching’ by examining not only player gender, but also player psychological Gender Role as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory to examine how gender does – and does not – manifest in digital worlds. Analysis revealed that men may not necessarily seek to mask their offline gender when they use a female avatar, but there is evidence they do reinforce idealized notions of feminine appearance and communication. Movement behaviors, however, show no differences across men who do and do not gender-switch. That is, selecting avatar gender may be less a matter of identity expression, and more a strategic selection of available multi-modal codes that players take up in their navigation of this digital space.

3 Shot Dead in Courthouse: Examining News Coverage of Domestic Violence and Mail-Order Brides

This study examined news coverage of the Blackwell murders in Seattle. This case concerned the domestic violence murder of a “mail-order bride.” Mainstream coverage positioned Tim Blackwell as deviant and sick and Susana Blackwell as deserving of the crime, because of stereotypical assumptions about women as well as foreigners. This coverage was compared to two minority presses in Seattle to determine how they succeeded in breaking out of dominant ideological frames.

Using your friends: social mechanics in social games

This paper analyzes the social mechanics in top social games. It identifies several mechanisms by which social games encourage sociality: the friend bar, gifting, visiting, challenge/competition, and communication. Different implementations of these components result in varying gameplay experiences. However, no mechanics were found to offer very deep or sustained social interactions between players.