Alternative Media Presentation: Emma Nutter, Alexis Furnans, and Alex Rosario
For our presentation on alternative media we wanted to focus on something other than emerging and/or established social media sites. We decided to focus our attention to a cultural phenomenon--video games. While Emma and I are less knowledgeable on the subject, Alex is a wealth of knowledge. Emma and I felt that the issues within the gamer community and video games themselves, tied in smoothly with some of the issues we has been discussing in class.With these varying backgrounds, we were able to come together to create an informative and interesting presentation. We felt it would be beneficial to start it out on a personal note and then expand it to a broader level. We also wanted to address our gendered experiences growing up and how they contributed to our involvement (or lack thereof) in the culture.
We wanted to have a somewhat recent touchstone to ground our presentation and provide a jumping off point, which is why the timing of #Gamergate was so serendipitous. Our brief overview of the event covers its origins, growth, and backlash. Although #GamerGate is a year old, convoluted, and messy issue to cover, we felt that it was necessary. For the first time, on a mass media level, the game industry was being called out for negative and stereotypical portrayals of gender, race, sexual orientation and anyone who did not fit the accepted default (white male heterosexual). But almost more importantly it called out “Ethics in Game Journalism”.
From there we decided to go into female and male depictions in video games. Alex was able to gather some really good examples of good and bad female characters, as well as males. We felt this echoed a lot of the readings in regard to representation and feeling that if you aren't represented/it's a very limited scope you feel as though you don't belong (as we noted in our reflections).
Then we focused on important feminist voices in the community, namely Anita Sarkeesian. While we've had some exposure to her videos in class, we didn't get to fully dive into her role in the video game sphere and the danger and harassment she is exposed to. We learned more about the work that she does in promoting feminism
in video games. Emma was able to bring in elements of her psychology background in order to further qualify the issues brought up in video game culture.We have a slide displaying
statistics of what game developers look like (within the States, very male, very Caucasian). And next some of the psychological detrimental effects of video
games. We felt these facts highlighted further issues brought up in gamer
culture.
Works Cited:
For our presentation on alternative media we wanted to focus on something other than emerging and/or established social media sites. We decided to focus our attention to a cultural phenomenon--video games. While Emma and I are less knowledgeable on the subject, Alex is a wealth of knowledge. Emma and I felt that the issues within the gamer community and video games themselves, tied in smoothly with some of the issues we has been discussing in class.With these varying backgrounds, we were able to come together to create an informative and interesting presentation. We felt it would be beneficial to start it out on a personal note and then expand it to a broader level. We also wanted to address our gendered experiences growing up and how they contributed to our involvement (or lack thereof) in the culture.
We wanted to have a somewhat recent touchstone to ground our presentation and provide a jumping off point, which is why the timing of #Gamergate was so serendipitous. Our brief overview of the event covers its origins, growth, and backlash. Although #GamerGate is a year old, convoluted, and messy issue to cover, we felt that it was necessary. For the first time, on a mass media level, the game industry was being called out for negative and stereotypical portrayals of gender, race, sexual orientation and anyone who did not fit the accepted default (white male heterosexual). But almost more importantly it called out “Ethics in Game Journalism”.
From there we decided to go into female and male depictions in video games. Alex was able to gather some really good examples of good and bad female characters, as well as males. We felt this echoed a lot of the readings in regard to representation and feeling that if you aren't represented/it's a very limited scope you feel as though you don't belong (as we noted in our reflections).
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