Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat
Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat

Author: Yasmin B. Kafai

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-02-25

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0262516063

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Girls and women as game players and game designers in the new digital landscape of massively multiplayer online games, “second lives,” “modding,” serious games, and casual games. Ten years after the groundbreaking From Barbie to Mortal Kombat highlighted the ways gender stereotyping and related social and economic issues permeate digital game play, the number of women and girl gamers has risen considerably. Despite this, gender disparities remain in gaming. Women may be warriors in World of Warcraft, but they are also scantily clad “booth babes” whose sex appeal is used to promote games at trade shows. Player-generated content has revolutionized gaming, but few games marketed to girls allow “modding” (game modifications made by players). Gender equity, the contributors to Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat argue, requires more than increasing the overall numbers of female players. Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat brings together new media theorists, game designers, educators, psychologists, and industry professionals, including some of the contributors to the earlier volume, to look at how gender intersects with the broader contexts of digital games today: gaming, game industry and design, and serious games. The contributors discuss the rise of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) and the experience of girl and women players in gaming communities; the still male-dominated gaming industry and the need for different perspectives in game design; and gender concerns related to emerging serious games (games meant not only to entertain but also to educate, persuade, or change behavior). In today's game-packed digital landscape, there is an even greater need for games that offer motivating, challenging, and enriching contexts for play to a more diverse population of players. Contributors Cornelia Brunner, Shannon Campe, Justine Cassell, Mia Consalvo, Jill Denner, Mary Flanagan, Janine Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Elisabeth Hayes, Carrie Heeter, Kristin Hughes, Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins III, Yasmin B. Kafai, Caitlin Kelleher, Brenda Laurel, Nicole Lazzaro, Holin Lin, Jacki Morie, Helen Nissenbaum, Celia Pearce, Caroline Pelletier, Jennifer Y. Sun, T. L. Taylor, Brian Winn, Nick YeeInterviews with Nichol Bradford, Brenda Braithwaite, Megan Gaiser, Sheri Graner Ray, Morgan Romine

From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat
From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat

Author: Justine Cassell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000-02-28

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780262531689

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Girls and computer games—and the movement to overcome the stereotyping that dominates the toy aisles. Many parents worry about the influence of video games on their children's lives. The game console may help to prepare children for participation in the digital world, but at the same time it socializes boys into misogyny and excludes girls from all but the most objectified positions. The new "girls' games" movement has addressed these concerns. Although many people associate video games mainly with boys, the girls games' movement has emerged from an unusual alliance between feminist activists (who want to change the "gendering" of digital technology) and industry leaders (who want to create a girls' market for their games). The contributors to From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat explore how assumptions about gender, games, and technology shape the design, development, and marketing of games as industry seeks to build the girl market. They describe and analyze the games currently on the market and propose tactical approaches for avoiding the stereotypes that dominate most toy store aisles. The lively mix of perspectives and voices includes those of media and technology scholars, educators, psychologists, developers of today's leading games, industry insiders, and girl gamers. Contributors Aurora, Dorothy Bennett, Stephanie Bergman, Cornelia Brunner, Mary Bryson, Lee McEnany Caraher, Justine Cassell, Suzanne de Castell, Nikki Douglas, Theresa Duncan, Monica Gesue, Michelle Goulet, Patricia Greenfield, Margaret Honey, Henry Jenkins, Cal Jones, Yasmin Kafai, Heather Kelley, Marsha Kinder, Brenda Laurel, Nancie Martin, Aliza Sherman, Kaveri Subrahmanyam

Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming
Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming

Author: Yasmin B. Kafai

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1365830268

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In Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat, the third edited volume in the series that includes From Barbie to Mortal Kombat and Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, we expand the discussions on gender, race, and sexuality in gaming. We include intersectional perspectives on the experiences of diverse players, non-players and designers and promote inclusive designs for broadening access and participation in gaming, design and development. Contributors from media studies, gender studies, game studies, educational design, learning sciences, computer science, and game development examine who plays, how they play, where and what they play, why they play (or choose not to play), and with whom they play. This volume further explores how we can diversify access, participation and design for more inclusive play and learning.

Beyond Choices
Beyond Choices

Author: Miguel Sicart

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-09-06

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0262019787

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How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players. Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots—provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.

Connected Play
Connected Play

Author: Yasmin B. Kafai

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-10-11

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0262019930

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How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities.

Perceiving Play
Perceiving Play

Author: Torill Elvira Mortensen

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780820497006

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"Computer games are increasingly prevalent, and cause both curiosity and concern in the general public, so understanding these games and play is important. Game researchers need to work quickly to document, report, and analyse the effect on our modern society as an increasing amount of people make new and drastically different choices in how they spend their time. Perceiving Play: The Art and Study of Computer Games looks at the directions and findings of this research, and examines how game research integrates the studies of social science, ethnography, textual analysis and criticism, economy, law, and technology." --Book Jacket.

The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies
The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies

Author: Jennifer Rowsell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 1317510615

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The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies offers a comprehensive view of the field of language and literacy studies. With forty-three chapters reflecting new research from leading scholars in the field, the Handbook pushes at the boundaries of existing fields and combines with related fields and disciplines to develop a lens on contemporary scholarship and emergent fields of inquiry. The Handbook is divided into eight sections: • The foundations of literacy studies • Space-focused approaches • Time-focused approaches • Multimodal approaches • Digital approaches • Hermeneutic approaches • Making meaning from the everyday • Co-constructing literacies with communities. This is the first handbook of literacy studies to recognise new trends and evolving trajectories together with a focus on radical epistemologies of literacy. The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies is an essential reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and language and literacy.

Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context
Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context

Author: Alison Harvey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-03-27

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1317632982

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Western digital game play has shifted in important ways over the last decade, with a plethora of personal devices affording a range of increasingly diverse play experiences. Despite the celebration of a more inclusive environment of digital game play, very little grounded research has been devoted to the examination of familial play and the domestication of digital games, as opposed to evolving public and educational contexts. This book is the first study to provide a situated investigation of the site of family play— the shared spaces and private places of gameplay within the domestic sphere. It carries out an empirically grounded and critical analysis of what marketing and sales discourses about shifts in the digital games audience actually look like in the space of the home, as well as the social and cultural role these ludic technologies take in the everyday practices of the family in the domestic context. It examines the material realities of video game technologies in the home; including time management and spatial organization, as well as the discursive role these devices play in discussions of technological competence and its complex relationship to age, generational differences, and gender performance. Harvey’s interdisciplinary approach and innovative methodology will hold great critical appeal for those studying digital culture, children’s media, and feminist studies of new media, as well as critical theories of technology and leisure and sport theory.

The Middle Ages in Computer Games
The Middle Ages in Computer Games

Author: Robert Houghton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-11-05

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1843847299

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Offers the most comprehensive analysis and discussion of medievalist computer games to date. Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern medium, there has hitherto been little scholarship devoted to them. This book explores the distinct nature of medievalism in digital games across a range of themes, from the portrayal of grotesque yet romantic conflict to conflicting depictions of the Church and religion. It likewise considers the distinctions between medievalist games and those of other periods, underlining their emphasis on fantasy, roleplay and hardcore elements, and their consequences for depictions of morality, race, gender and sexuality. Ultimately the book argues that while medievalist games are thoroughly influenced by medievalist and ludic tropes, they are nonetheless representative of a distinct new form of medievalism. It engages with the vast literature surrounding historical game studies, game design, and medievalism, and considers hundreds of games from across genres, from Assassin's Creed and Baldur's Gate to Crusader Kings and The Witcher series. In doing so, it provides a vital illustration of the state of the field and a cornerstone for future research and teaching.