For those of you who couldn't make it to the tute last Friday :)
Mia Consalvo’s article, ‘Hot Dates and Fairy-tale Romances’ takes a look at two popular games, Final Fantasy and The Sims, and discusses the construction of sexuality and gender within them. Discussion about Final Fantasy was mostly tied up around the idea that the game player automatically inhabits the male character Zidane, who engages in a romantic discourse with the princess Garnet, and who is ultimately responsible for ‘saving her’. Consalvo also discusses the interesting notion of the ‘erotic triangle’- which exists within FF and how it is weakened when the game player is female.
In discussion of The Sims, Consalvo focuses on the wording of the user manual which states things like ‘a same-sex relationship does not have the option of marriage’, but at other times goes to great lengths to use vague language in discussions about the characters- which is supposed to reduce pigeon holing.
Overall, I found the most interesting part of the article was when she spoke about how within the game ‘The Sims’, sexuality is considered an activity, rather than an unchangeable aspect of personality chosen when the character is created. Consalvo outlines that some gay activists have a problem with this- saying that by making sexuality ‘merely’ a choice, it gives weight to the argument that homosexuality is optional. On the other hand, some support the way the Sims game is structured in this aspect, because they believe that saying the body is ‘innately’ sexual is too essentialist.
The second article in this weeks reading ‘From Quake Grrls to Desperate Housewives: A Decade of Gender and Computer Games’ opened with (in my opinion) a very bold statement; “today, few worry about women’s access to cyberspace- the gap between the sexses in online participaton has largely closed… we scarcely think about [the web] as a male-dominated space”. As this is central to my research essay, I have done quite a bit of reading around this issue and the general consensus seems to be that the web still is considered a male-dominated space. Does anyone else find the above extract a bit unstable?
I won’t write any more on this article because my copy in the course reader is missing what looks like every second page and thus is very hard to get any sense out of!
Third article: ‘as we become machines’: talks about body as cyborg. Old Haraway argument.
Thinking like a computer
2D to first person perspective- making the body ‘grunt’ in pain etc... screen shudder, fade to red etc...
Occupy role of camera operator as well- shifiting postion.
Arcade games- actually sit on a replica motorbike.
Wii- extention of this idea. Using body as the apparatus, not a joystick.
While you can change skin colour in a game, your character and the world around still behaves in the same way.
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Overall, I found the most interesting part of the article was when she spoke about how within the game ‘The Sims’, sexuality is considered an activity, rather than an unchangeable aspect of personality...
I found this interesting too. I thought about it the other day, when some of my friends were talking about a girl they knew who had "gone gay" and come out of the closet and then changed her mind and turned "straight" again. It was pretty clear that everyone in that conversation thought of sexuality as an essential characteristic, and they found this girl's behaviour almost ridiculous because of that. In this case, I think, the idea of an essential sexual identity was anything but freeing.
Something that I think is important in considering the treatment of sexuality in The Sims is the fact that Sims will never engage in homosexual activities unless the player has instructed them to. I think Consalvo does discuss this in her article. Here, although homosexuality is offered as an option, heterosexuality is coded (literally!) as the norm, and homosexuality as deviant.
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