Anita Sarkeesian talks about online misogyny in the video game community, and her experience with harassment because of her work. She is a media critic and the creator of Feminist Frequency, a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives.
Most interesting is her actual project which can be found here. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBBDFEC9F5893C4AF
"There's an amazing amount of innovation just waiting under the surface for us to tackle - and yes, perhaps violence will be some part of it; we are no simple beings. But we as a self-aware species of gamer - and game developer - can evolve to a more varied diet as a start; a one-course feast of blood and shell casings can perhaps sing its last with this generation and never return, a relic, discarded as the cyanide trappings of our adolescent industry and its hopefully brief era of strip mining for the social soul."
relevant to yesterday's class. "In a way, this act of dismissal could be construed as furthering the conversation, for how many questions it raises: Is it more harmful to analyze a work than it is to dismiss its critics? Is creating a public work an act of submission to critical analysis? When we make things, do they transfer out of our ownership? Where do we draw the line between creator and creation? We can (and will, I hope) pursue these threads, but at the root of all this is an attempt to cut off a branch of discussion."
I met this company out at CES in Vegas this past January. They have some really exciting and dynamic technology on the horizons and I think that this is the route gaming is going to go. It would be really interesting to discuss what we believe will happen to gaming when the content is able to catch up to the technology.
Hard science on the importance of play for human development. How are games and play different? What are the categories of play? Can video games give us the same result as play? Should we have a category of "video toys" separate from "video games"? If we move toward video game education we need to make sure play is a portion of that education.
An in depth look at the guy who penned the entire overarching narrative of the Assassin's Creed series. More importantly, an article pointing at the growing need and want of storytellers for the design of games. Good stuff!
Recently there's been chatter that Valve - the company behind the massively popular gaming service Steam - has been considering getting into the hardware business. Specifically, there have been rumors that the company has been toying with the idea of creating a proper set-top console which could potentially pose a threat to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
This is an interesting development. Console games have been the domain of the "Big Three" for years (XBox, Playstation, and Nintendo). Now, another player is threatening to break into the market. Steam is a digital distribution service with over 40 million active users. Users install the Steam software and then purchase and play various computer games through the Steam interface. When I was helping to develop an indie game a few years ago, it was considered a huge accomplishment to be listed on Steam. It boosted the game's exposure and user base significantly. It will be interesting to see if the console is released and how it fairs in the difficult-to-enter market.