Radio Play

Radio has long been a brilliant medium for provoking empathy.. so what if we were to take the "video

Digital Collector’s Edition Soundtracks: A Missed Opportunity?

Steam now offers game soundtrack downloads - but is this really any different to collectors' edition

Side-By-Side: Timeline and +Me

In which I muse upon Facebook Timeline and the new Google+ profile layout. Which feels more homely,

 

Women in Games Development

February 10, 2012 in Culture, Industry

As my Goodreads friends will already know, I am currently reading Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide. I’m reading up on the subject after a long-running and heated debate about women in games development erupted on my Facebook wall. I’ve always been interested in the topic, but it feminism fascinates me now more than ever, and I’m dead pleased that the debate itself will soon be mentioned in Develop.

We were discussing the “merits” of women in games development, in pretty broad fashion: why they need promoting; if it even merits discussion; and why and how women are discouraged from this and other, supposedly masculine fields. It is in this particular frame that I find myself drawn to Virginia Woolf’s work. To quote Jenainati and Groves’ book:

In A Room of One’s Own, [Woolf] explored the cultural and economic constraints on female creativity, and pondered the historical and political obstacles which have hampered the establishing of a female literary tradition.

Of course, her work also went on to decry the ridiculous social pressures which were put upon those women who dared to have minds of their own. Interestingly, her work also covered a very real and present double standard which is applied to the assertion of feminine sexuality – but I digress. The important point I found was that in the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf was pushing for greater female representation in the literary genre. Books were being written by men, for men and women, with only a masculine viewpoint on who and what women are. Not only does this have an impact upon employment, barring all but a few women writers, but it also has gross a social impact. Women were left to the mercy of an overwhelmingly masculine media view, dictating the value of their own identities worth in society. This does arguably spur the more pioneering women to challenge the medium and write their own stories, but that sort of motion is till fraught with obstacles.

Now look at the present day. I even cited literature in one of these discussions, as an example of a medium with good gender representation: for every J.K. Rowling there’s a Philip Pullman, and for every Stieg Larsson there’s a Patricia Cornwell. But sacrifices had to be made and campaigning had to be done to get to this point. Would anyone argue that diversity amongst authors makes for anything but a better medium?

This is why we need to encourage women into games, with an eye to achieving something more balanced and sensible. Theoretically no woman is actually blocked from this industry (though reports of sexism in the workplace and at interview still crop up), but they are subtly discouraged, certainly in comparison to men. The fact that video games themselves remain a somewhat masculine medium does not help, and it’s likely borne of the cycle in which women are discouraged from designing them, and so a woman’s perspective is not felt in future games’ design process.

It’s hard to argue that games have as much of an impact upon our society as books have done and continue to do, but many academics and developers are making powerful arguments that they can and should. The day may come when, as Jane McGonigal suggests, games will have a social responsibility ingrained in their structure, and that they will achieve good. The pressing question is: will that game be made purely by men?

 

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Parks as Game Spaces

February 7, 2012 in Theory

Despite best intentions, I am still not yet a professional game designer, although work does slowly continue over at our Blue Demon Studio. In the meantime I work as an admin. assistant, helping to run a variety of charity and community groups. Fear not – I’m not about to write a lengthy CV post! What I am interested in is the surprising crossover between these two types of work, and as ever, I hope you are too.

My task at the moment is to create a leaflet and generally spark a recruitment campaign, engaging locals in a ‘friends’ group for our municipal park. Such groups essentially act as a buffer between councils and the public, bridging the gap between those who might wish to use a park, and the authorities who own it. Where this community bridge is in place, each party can then contribute in a much more meaningful way to improving the green space, and generally livening the community up. It was only when I started looking past the peripheral, graphic design concerns in this task to those sorts of motivations that I realised how relevant games design can be to this sort of community work.

I choose to see parks as game spaces. My focus at the moment lays in engaging local people with this space, bringing them on board so that the ‘friends’ group has more power to enact change. The best way I know how to do that is to convince them that their actions will have an impact. Of course, parks are arguably far more interactive than many games, because the fundamentals of that space can be altered after release. There is also an element of illusion, however. No one person is going to be suddenly granted the right to ban dog walkers, or uproot great rows of trees and install more football pitches instead, just as World of Warcraft‘s Chosen One is not allowed to single-handedly assassinate King Varian Wrynn and claim Stormwind for the Horde.

There’s a similar analogy amongst councils, who are far from tyrannical conservatives – I’m not trying to make a political point here! – but they do generally want to keep green spaces under their control. There are a variety of very logical reasons for this. Councils and politicians both stand to benefit from granting local communities an illusion of participation and choice in what happens locally, though it’s up to groups like ours to actually enact some of the more reasonable change – patching in the death of the Lich King, if you will.

All of which basically engages me as the park’s community manager, helping to balance the fundamentals of this metaphorical game space against delivering on promises to users who signed up on the basis of interactivity. My goal is certainly the same in either sphere – I just want to see people having fun.

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Women in Game Worlds

December 31, 2011 in Culture, Miscellaneous

'Left 4 Dead' is an agile and adaptive game with an impressive cast, but where are the female equivalent to Bill and Francis in this and other games?

When a friend and colleague of mine showed me a clip of some brilliant dialogue from PS3 title Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, he then asked if I recognised the female character in it at all, since the animators made use of motion capture during their performance. I didn’t, as it goes – I heaven’t seen Farscape or Starget SG-1 - but I realised I couldn’t see past Chloe Frazer’s slim physique, attractive hairstyle and general air of an action girl in her late twenties. She looks like every female character I think I’ve seen in games, at least outside the mould of the pneumatic dominatrix.

I don’t mean to single these games out in particular, nor rant unnecessarily about a topic which has already been covered with greater authority on quite a few occasions (but which sadly has yet to yield results). In fact, although I haven’t played Uncharted 3 myself, I was told to look out for its antagonist, as her placement on billboards marks some new ground for games. Katherine Marlowe is her name, though the Uncharted wiki link there is probably awash with spoilers. In her we have an older woman of rich and interesting character, who one hopes is unlikely to confront the game’s protagonist in an underbust corset with a whip in hand as so many villains seemed to at the turn of the century.

The points I want to get across are twofold:

  • matters of equality,
  • and downright interest.

The former is a tricky one, as while I can point to casts like that of Left 4 Dead and ask for the biker chick, successful businesswoman and female army veteran, men too can be quite limited when it comes to a choice of protagonist. Marcus Fenix (Gears of War), Axel Stone and Adam Hunter (Streets of Rage), and the admittedly shadowy Master Chief (Halo) represent one type, of the gruff-voiced and muscle-bound hero. More realistic characters come in the form of Tommy Vercetti (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City), Louis and Nick (Left 4 Dead), and Nathan Drake (Uncharted). It’s understandable, as men and women alike probably derive greater pleasure from inhabiting the skin of a good-looking, cool and capable hero. But where is the female Gordon Freeman? It’s still far more common to find variety in the body types and ages of male characters than female ones, and most women really are reduced to eye candy, be it as a result of impractical armour or somehow inhabiting a world in which men are allowed to be ugly, but less glamourous women appear to have been nudged out of the gene pool. I recently saw this in Overlord, though it’s common to many such adventure games:

Two scenes captured in close sequence, of wives typical to the Overlord's realm, and the male NPCs with which he interacts.

The latter point is the more positive one to make, and is really the crux of my wish. Not only do I want there to be a character I can relate to somewhere in these games, but I want the more realistic ones to do a better job of portraying reality. The world is filled with interesting characters, from the real ale enthusiast to the camp confidante and, of course, the science fiction geek. There’s a broad spectrum of men in games (though you’d be hard pressed to find a feminine man portrayed at all, let alone done well), but women are relegated to narrow types, and it just makes game worlds that little more dull.

I don’t much care for the token blonde thrown into a military unit of socially- and racially-diverse males – her figure is stunning and her presence such a transparent box-ticking. Show me the single mother trying to raise four kids in your gang’s neighbourhood; the misandrist W.I. leader who’s realising the futility of her attitude in face of the Outbreak; or the non-conformist teenager who embodies the real and genuine population of masculine women. There are men this interesting throughout the games I play, but the closest I think I’ve come are Midna and Tetra from the Legend of Zelda series, both of whom surrendered their individuality upon becoming the token princess.

As ever with issues I try to cover in this blog: I just think it would be more fun.

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Social Cataloguing

June 26, 2011 in Theory

I’m currently working on a social website, due for a public beta launch pretty soon. Working on the project has led me tothink long and hard about the medium, and about social cataloguing in particular. This aspect of the so-called ‘social web’ is particularly fascinating to me, as I love organising and displaying collections. The web as a whole has developed some pretty consistent standards, all of which allow obsessive-compulsives like myself to pour hours into a website which in turn benefits from my input to a community, and the raw data of what it is I own and buy.

Examples

I’ve used quite a few such websites in my time, but the ones which have stuck are Goodreads and My Animé List; I also have collections up on Board Game Geek and Gdgt, and Amazon, although its features are arguably quite insular. Firstly, what is it about these ‘sites which makes them social catalogues, and where do the common features lay?

Goodreads' home dashboard

Goodreads is a combined book catalogue, reviews website and social network. My Animé List works on a similar premise, but for Japanese-influenced TV, DVD and comics media.

  • It encourages its users to search a variety of catalogues (from Goodreads’ own to local and foreign Amazon stores) for books in their collection. Users can then rate these, arrange them upon virtual shelves to suit their tastes, add reviews or just appreciate the bulk of their collection.
  • Goodreads features status updates quite prominently. These inform others – within the wider community, closer friendship circles or whole other networks (e.g. Facebook) – of one user’s activity within their own collection. One user can invite another to follow their reviews, keep track of what they’re reading, and offer to do the same in return. This ‘toing and froing’ of content forms the backbone of Goodreads’ community.
  • Users and Goodreads both end up benefiting from a near-spontaneous side-effect of this activity; they can target recommendations. This seems to my untrained eye to be where social cataloguing ‘sites start to earn an income, as easy links to purchase a book your friend has recommended to you make for a very effective advertisement. There are other, more conventional adverts, of course.

Board Game Geek's home index


Board Game Geek is a much older-looking website, similar to My Animé List in that their design places greater emphasis upon user input feedback. They’re targeted at more ‘hardcore’ fans, in relative contrast to the minimalistic Gdgt.

  • “BGG” and “MAL” allow their users to browse large, manually-submitted databases of media and read detailed information on their releases and make-up.
  • Board Game Geek prides itself on hosting a variety of board game manuals, some of which can be hard for collectors to find; it also provides links to market websites like eBay in the same mode.
  • My Animé List features a prominent ‘recommendation engine’, actually powered by its users. By forming links to media which they believe to be similar and writing a short explanation, these users provide visitors and members alike with informed suggestions. It also taps into the ‘fansubbing’ community, allowing fans of subtitled animé (as opposed to the more common dub releases for Western audiences) to base their community on “MAL” ‘s catalogue.

Gdgt's home dashboard


Gdgt certainly stands out for its interface, but shares the same fundamental features as the ‘sites above – particularly My Animé List’s focus on informed user reviews and recommendations.

  • Users can browse its catalogue of gadgets, find a product they may own or are interested in, and gauge its worth or find an answer to any issues they may have, all without signing up.
  • The website is predominantly targeted at experts, although it encourages non-experts to make use of their input as two sides of the same coin. In summary, Gdgt seems to rely upon a particular type of user – one who’s enthusiastic about solving other people’s technology problems – in order to create its community. Maintaining a collection of your own is a secondary attribute to this, though it’s still valuable to its users, presumably to back up their status and expertise.

 

Social Cataloguing Communities

In all these examples, community is built up not from the catalogue, but users’ interactions with the catalogue. Each does have an impressive database to which any user can refer, in the same way they might at Wikipedia, IMDB or MobyGames; where these become social cataloguing ‘sites, capable of attracting an active user base, is that value shifts from the data to the user and their actions. I believe that the rewards here are manyfold:

  • The user is drawn in by the prospect of curating ‘their own collection’. Although some may find brief and compulsive reward in ‘logging their collection, the majority of users do this as a basis for further social interaction. Users being made to feel like they own a collection does, however, foster loyalty and emotional investment at a foundation level.
  • Interest can then develop from these collections in different ways: in Goodreads, the fun lays in seeing if your friends have any books in common; at My Animé List and Gdgt, it lays in sharing your expertise about the media and devices you own. These sorts of incentive – to compare, impart knowledge and compete – keep the users logging in regularly, and generating more content in the form of reviews and commentary.
  • As a result of this, the ‘site owners create a community whose investment in the ‘site keeps them coming back – ripe for impressions by advertisements. The users are also motivated to generate recommendations as mentioned before; these have their own value to retailers and service providers.

That, I think, is why I find social cataloguing ‘sites particularly intriguing. They start with a catalogue, add social elements, and then basically rely on user momentum to keep the ‘site running. There usually comes a time when users take over the roles of cataloguing, allowing administrators to move away from databases, and instead manage this fascinating social medium.

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