Gaming, Gender, and Education

GAMING + GENDER

Reading these articles got me thinking about my own relationship with video games, and being in a household with five women and only one man all living under the same roof (my poor dad- even the pets were all female!), and how we got our first Sega Genesis system when I was about 8 or nine years old. The video games we had in the house that I can distinctly remember playing included: “The Little Mermaid,” “Echo” (about a dolphin), “Sonic” (probably the most violent of the games that were given to us), “Bugsy,” and one other game where you were a newspaper boy and you had to go around delivering papers to clients in a certain amount of time. When my male cousin, Andy (who is only 6 days older than I am) would come over, we had to start hiding the Sega or else he would spend the whole time playing our “lame” games (as he would call them). If he got his hands on the controllers, he wouldn’t put it down until it was a.) Time for him to leave, or b.) He had beaten the game completely (something my sisters and I could never do, and to this day still haven’t). As the years passed, my family eventually became the owners of a PlayStation, Play Station II, PC computer, and various handheld devices after relentless begging on my sisters’ and my part. My parents never limited how much time we could play them based on the fact that we would get bored if we played for more than an hour at a time. Our game collection gained a few more violent games (ranging from a couple of World War II games, to Cabella’s Deer Hunting), but the game I see most often in the disc drive is The Sims. I moved from home for freshman year of college and found myself constantly surrounded by people who were video game fanatics! My boyfriend, Luke (now fiancé) lived in a room with three other guys, and if I walked into their dorm room at any given time, I would more than likely find at least 3 of them playing various video games all at the same time. I spent a lot of my time in that room, and learned more about video games than I ever thought I would. Who knew that watching the plot progress in Halo, Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto could be so interesting? Or how detailed the character development is in BioShock or Gears of War? While I never actually actively partook in the games (except for a few lame attempts at Halo where I ran around in circles and get stuck against a wall), I found myself asking Luke to keep playing just so I could see what happened next. Now that I live with Luke, I am still surrounded by all sorts of gaming consoles including: an Xbox360, Nintendo Game Cube, N64, multiple computers, and a Nintendo DS.

After my two different living situations, I’ve had the chance to see how members of opposite genders approach video games. Not only do the majority of males and females seem to have different views and priorities concerning video games, the actual gender roles that are portrayed within these games. In Game+Girl=Advance, the author wrote early on that “As a woman who plays video games, I've had to think about gender in videogames, because it's so obvious that I'm playing in a boys' world.” When you look at women in video games (i.e., Lara Croft, etc.), they are the ideal women with tiny waists, and huge breasts. They can kick ass while looking gorgeous at the same time. This got me thinking about a good friend that I have who is in school to become an animator, and out of the sketches and final projects that I have seen of hers; her characters mimic the ideals of society. The men are tall with great hair and chiseled jaws, while the women are how I described them before. While her work is beautiful, and she has a great grasp on the art of animating, these standards are not going to go away. After reading the 4 aspects of “Genderspace,” I can definitely see why characters are made the way they are and the thought that has to go into them. The creators have to remember that “some people either take great pains to distance themselves from the avatar, or conversely, create avatars with which they identify very closely,” and need to take this into account to be successful.


GAMNG + EDUCATION

There are many people (parents, educators, ect.) who believe that video games are doing more harm than good when it comes to adolescents’ education. While to some it may seem like a waste of time, to others, it is a precious tool that can be used in the classroom to help reach out to students who don’t fully understand what is going on in class. Since I am on my way to become a high school English teacher, I want to try to use video games to enhance my lessons when necessary. Video games can be used in a variety of ways across a school campus, and in the English class, it can prove to be a valuable tool to get students to understand plot development, and different aspects of literature. Take for instance, if you were teaching a regular Language Arts class and you are trying to explain the concept of plot, climax, and character development to a group of young students who just aren’t grasping these important concepts. Many video games have cut scenes that they go to after the player has made it through a level. These cut scenes add to the story and let the player know what is going to happen next. As the player gets further and further into the game, they become more immersed in the plot of the game and often times become emotionally connected to the characters. This goes along the same lines as reading a novel. You get through a chapter and want to know what is going to happen next. You can sense the building climax through a novel just as you can through Halo or Bio Shock. While I wouldn’t want to have video games take over the classroom, I am very open to using pop culture and media with my students and I realize that video games can be used to enhance one’s classroom, and the power it can have when used correctly.

Parting quote (taken from Confessions of an Aca/Fan):
“Our approach respects all that is inventive and exploratory in play while challenging students to grow intellectually. If we succeed in these goals, we hope to offer a model for what a good learning game should be, one that resolves the contradictory demands schools place on this emerging technology.”