Video Game Culture: Instruction, Gender, Race

Video Games: Educational Allies?

This week’s readings asked us to look at the role of video games as they relate to digital rhetoric: their potential for educational instruction and modeling, their misunderstood “addictive nature,” their ability to construct an identity that is as [not] real as the player desires it to be, and their tendency to hint at the racial and gender divides that their user interfaces bring to the foreground. As someone who does not play video games very often (or ever, really), I was looking forward to reading articles that depicted these worlds from the perspective of those who do play often. The first of our assigned gaming articles I read (even though we technically read this particular article for our discussion last week),was James Paul Gee’s “Good Games and Good Learning,” and it surprised me—Gee wasn’t an avid gamer, and instead his article was focused on if one was an avid gamer. One of the most interesting components of Gee’s article is his contention that there exists an inherent paradox of playing video games: They are crafted so that they aren’t so hard that no one takes on the challenge of playing/mastering them, but they aren’t so easy that the user gets bored and abandons play altogether. Simply put, video games are “pleasantly frustrating” (34). Gee puts this frustration into dialogue with the discourse of education and learning. According to him, the willingness of so many gamers to binge-play is quite interesting when one considers that he/she is, in reality, willing to invest countless hours playing something that is “long, complex, and difficult.” (35) “Why video games?” seems to be a central question for Gee—why are people so willing to invest time into this particular “long, hard, and complex” activity… And how (though he does not explicitly write so) do we get them to see the value of applying this motivation to other – namely, academic- endeavors?

Video Games and Transfer Learning: How “Just in Time” is this “Lateral Thinking”?

When one considers this question of transfer learning the various tools of gaming (of which Gee identifies many—situated meaning, customization, ordered problems, risk taking, etc.) into the arenas of academic discourse and writing, I think it’s important to note that some of the principles he mentions are able to transfer much better than others. The notion of “just in time” and “on demand” thinking embody one such component that I believe is not so readily transferable. Gee reflects how people are often poor with dealing with, sorting through, and understanding a large influx of words at once and cites the ability of video games to feed their users “verbal dialogue” (as opposed to written text) “just in time” (i.e. at the moment the player needs such information/instruction) as an alternate means to information processing: “Information should work the same way in school,” he writes, and leaves it at that (35). Unfortunately, information can’t work this way in school—as documents such as Common Core make clear, student instruction is encouraged to take place over the course of long periods of time, for one lesson to build off of another, and to provide a large reservoir of resources (such as the “large influx of words” textbooks contain) for students to draw from. If education operated “just in time,” there would be no state standards or benchmark assessments because the different learning needs of each student would prevent such standardization—some students would reach the “just in time” mark too quickly, and others might never find the motivation to ask for pertinent information and resources “on demand.”

His notion of lateral thinking (as opposed to linear thinking), however, seems much more readily applicable to the arena of standardized education. According to Gee, video games encourage exploratory learning- the user is encouraged to investigate his/her virtual surroundings in order to determine the best/most productive course of action (both literally and figuratively). As mentioned in an article we read for this week (Bissell’s “Video Games: The Addiction”), part of the appeal of gaming is that it requires the user to seek out action- if the user does not act, the video game does not respond, and vice versa. As Bissell describes Grand Theft Auto, “never has a game been more open…so generationally relevant…so awesomely gratuitous.” The ideas of multiple paths to the same goal, or different paths to different goals, can help students to appreciate the benefits of customizing their learning experiences and areas of study/interest while still operating within the carefully constructed confines of the “game” (a.k.a. The curriculum).

The Cultural Construction of Video Games: Gender and Race

Another worthwhile component of both this week and last week’s readings was the notion of gender and race as it relates to the gaming world. Although not talked about as much I would have liked it to have been, the notion of the lack of a strong presence of female gamers and gamers who are people of color (this idea of the marginalized digital presence of these groups first presented to us in Nakamura’s work) still resonated with the discussions found in Stokel-Walker’s “Second Life’s Second Life,” Alisha Karabinus’s post on “Not Your Mama’s Gamer,” and Nardi’s discussion of gender within World of Warcraft. In the section, “Are you a woman or a men?” Stokel-Walker discusses how male-dominated Second Life can be, and that “6 out of 10” female avatars usually end up being men, “in RL” or “real life.” Similarly, Karabinus’s article last week on GamerGate mentioned how the personhood of Zoe Quinn was lost amidst the sexualization of her body: “What matters is that she is a person, and they” (the “they” a referent to Twitter, bloggers, the Internet at large) “are dismantling her piece by piece. This is a person and they are talking about her as if she is just a body, and one that they own.”

The lack of a stronger female presence (whether via avatars or in real life) within the gaming community is the result of this oversexualization of the female body as not just an accepted, but an expected practice within the parameters of game design– female characters with significantly less clothing than their male counterparts for no logical reason, with impossibly unrealistic body dimensions, and with not-so-subtle names like “Quiet” in the Metal Gear Solid series, for example, a character we discussed a few weeks ago and which some reviewers have referred to as “quite possibly the most sexist character in gaming history” (Tassi), have somehow become the norm. Although Nardi’s analysis of World of Warcraft contends that the game contains “feministic, domestic nuances,” she also contends that its discourse is primarily male-oriented. Nardi writes that World of Warcraft is, despite a “healthy minority” of female players (introduced to the game, she notes through a “boyfriend, husband, or brother”), a “male-dominated space”: “The social space was maintained as one in which males set the rhetorical tone. Sexualized, homophobic language was normalized in text and voice chat” (153). The female players, though physically present and able to play, found themselves unable to successfully immerse themselves into the [male] homosocial bonding which comprised the majority of WoW’s commentary.

When it comes to race as it relates to gaming, the playing field is not much more level. A former colleague of mine at Purdue recently wrote this article -also featured on Professor Samantha Blackmon’s, “Not Your Mama’s Gamer”- in which she discusses the video game Destiny: The Taken King, and the slightly improved, though still not at all comprehensive, options it provides for her, as a mixed race individual, to construct an adequate representation of herself via a digital avatar: “…The color pallet skips that tone between honey and toasted caramel… But hair. Scrolling through the hair options I just knew that these curls of mine were going to pop up one ringlet at a time. I scrolled. Scrolled some more. Kept scrolling. Dismayed, I settled on dreadlocks.”Now, for some people the lack of ability to manipulate a digital avatar to produce an exact replica of themselves does not pose an issue- my boyfriend’s Destiny avatar, for example, is modeled to look like Jaime Lannister from HBO’s Game of Thrones. However, for those who do wish to create a virtual extension of themselves via avatars on digital gaming platforms, this lack of choice represents another obstacle to overcome, another insidious, but nevertheless persistently effective, way they are kept from fully enjoying and participating in the gaming experience. 

 

Sources:

Bissell, Tom. “Video Games: The Addiction.” The Guardian. 20 Mar 2010. Web 19 Feb 2016.

Gee, James Paul. “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 85.2 (2005): 33-37. Web. 19 Feb 2016.

Karabinus, Alisha. “On Community, Fragments, and the Fringe: Gamergate, SJWs, and Everyone Between” Not Your Mama’s Gamer. 23 Mar. 2015. Web. 19 Feb 2016.

Nardi, Bonnie. My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2009. Print.

Tassi, Paul. “Quiet’s ‘Sexiest’ Metal Gear Solid 5 Scenes are much better with Revolver Ocelot Instead.” Forbes, Tech. 11 Sept. 2015. Web. 19 Feb 2016.

Velazquez, Ashley. “I Am My Hair: Racial Diversity in Video Games.” Not Your Mama’s Gamer. 10 Feb. 2016. Web. 19 Feb 2016.