Blips: Girly Games

Source: Girly video games: rewriting a history of pink
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: The Guardian

Back when the NES was a current-gen console, my whole family shared it, though my older brother and I played it way more then anyone else. We had dozens of games, including two "girly games" that were supposed to be mainly for my little sister to play (she was pretty little at the time too). However, I still think my brother and I spent more time playing Barbie and The Little Mermaid than she ever did, even though she felt particularly betrayed when we eventually traded them in at Funcoland for newer titles. The Little Mermaid is a solid sidescrolling action game, and Barbie is a super weird, surprisingly tricky action-adventure title, and had I not had a sister, I doubt I'd have ever played them. That'd be kind of shame, seeing as "girl's games" are routinely dismissed as trite, poorly made, and unworthy of serious consideration. Yet ironically, Barbie and The Little Mermaid are actually pretty interesting.

In 2012, Rachel Simone Weil founded the Femicom Museum, an archive of games containing feminine design elements. Some of this archive was shown in a recent exhibition at The Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, where Weil constructed a kids bedroom TV setup as an image of an imaginary past, serving as a shrine to girl games and pop culture of the 90s. In a recent profile in The Guardian covering the show, Weil states that "works by or for women are so often deemed marginal or embarrassing or inadequate or inappropriate, and therefore omitted from history. And then decades later, we're wondering, ‘Where were the female writers, politicians, artists? Where were the girly games?" Weil's exhibition and the Femicom Museum come out of a desire to preserve a facet of gaming history that, even in the 90s, wasn't really given the time of day in the Western press or larger cultural recognition of the medium. Girly games are still around to some degree, and they have a genealogy. It's great that Weil is intent on providing resources for better understanding that lineage.

Blips: Theatrically Inclined

Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collide,  The immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games
Author(s):Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Thomas McMullan
Site(s): Eurogamer, The Guardian

Starting off the week, here are a couple articles from across the pond that center the Punchdrunk theatre group, whose recent performance, The Drowned Man, is finding common ground within the video game community. As both Jakob-Hoff and McMullan's pieces report, theatre and games actually have quite a bit in common, especially in staging/level design, making crossover function rather naturally. Punchdrunk has been putting on performances with interactive elements for years, and even inspired certain aspects of Gone Home, but The Drowned Man appears to be their most ambitious project to date.

Not only are there interactive components to The Drowned Man, but the performance takes place in a 4-story complex, with actors on different floors performing simultaneously (if I'm understanding the description correctly). So you could be opening a "prop" drawer and reading a note for additional narrative context while a soliloquy takes place above you, and another viewer is selected and pulled into a room next door for a one-on-one performance. It's the sort of show that you can't see the entirety of in just one go. And that's a key difference between working in digital and real world "theatre;" in games the action can be programmed and instanced to always make you the center of attention, and thus able to have every actor wait on your arrival to begin. But I also like the idea in live theatre that the world doesn't revolve around you; in some ways, I find there's more immersive potential in that arrangement.

Blips: No More Excuses

Source: Video games need more women – and asking for that won't end the world
Author: Keza MacDonald
Site: The Guardian

So, I just started playing Mass Effect for the first time, and I selected female Shepard for my protagonist. Now, I know a lot has been written about the Mass Effect series and FemShep, and I'm too early into it to have much to say, but something about this game feels a bit fresher because the protagonist isn't short-haired, white, 30-something, military dude. And to be fair, my Shepard is a short-haired, white, 30-something, military lady, though there are options provided to change race and hair if you so choose. Still, the gender difference is something. I simply found the default male Shepard terribly boring, and lackng any sort of charisma. He appears on the cover of every Mass Effect game, looking empty and sullen. That's not to say that FemShep placed in the same marketing materials drips with character and nuance, but she's an alternative: a new lens through which to view a robust, yet by-the-book sci-fi universe.

The logic of Keza MacDonald's article about implementing more female protagonists in games is straightforward and to the point. There's no good reason not to, and many good reasons to do so. Want to sell more copies of your game? Well, how about trying to appeal to the other half of the human population? I don't think my selection of FemShep is in any way special, but anecdotally it shows that male players don't exclusively want to play as male protagonists. Give us something else for a change! I know others feel differently about this, but for me, it's not a question of games literally matching the make-up of the real world's population. With all the power games have for projection and identity expression, literalism ill-serves these causes. However, greater diversity, even if the level of diversity goes beyond what is literally the case in the real world, is a force for a wider range of interesting stories and interpretations.

Blips: Apple Bans Again

Source: Apple bans Joyful Executions iOS game that satirizes North Korea
Author: Stuart Dredge
Site: The Guardian

I can't say this is much of a surprise. Apple has rejected Joyful Executions, a satirical game where you play the leader of a North Korean execution squad, from sale in its App Store. Seeing as games like Phone Story and Sweatshop didn't pass Apple's archaic test, it was likely that Joyful Executions would be turned down as well. I really have to wonder how long Apple is going to go before changing this policy of viewing games as less appropriate venue for personal expression than other forms of media on its digital shelves. I'm sure it's burning through some goodwill from the development community even if it's not currently impacting the corporation's bottom line.

Though I assume developer 8-Bit Underpants would have loved to see their game available to the vast iOS market, these days, being rejected from the App Store brings it's own kind of publicity as well. I mean, I might not have heard of the game had it otherwise just been released quietly into a crowded marketplace. Who's to say, though as this kind of news becomes more frequent, I'm curious how perception of banned games will change. I think I smell a banned games Android Humble Bundle in the works...