What are social experiments and some relevant examples

What are social experiments

Social experiments are described as being: "an experiment with human subjects, which typically investigates effects on groups of persons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_experiment).

Various people did all sorts of social experiments in order to study human behaviour, to gauge the effect of certain stimuli on the human mind, or purely for medical reasons. For this project I am interested in researching social experiments done with the purpose of analysing human behaviour patterns and how they can be affected by changes of circumstances, changes of environment, or maybe, even when individuals are role playing. If role playing is proved to produce "mutations" in personality and character, then I think, my initial question: Are games just social experiments? will have an answer, as any video game player is basically inheriting a different set of characteristics form the game character while playing. Will he or she be affected by this in real life, will they forget when the game is over and console is shut down, that they are here, now, or will they carry on behaving as a soldier/assassin/race driver/cowboy/samurai, etc?

In August of 1971, the Stamford Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led an experiment called The Stamford Prison Experiment. The aim was to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard.

"Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available.

Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. Participants were recruited and told they would participate in a two-week prison simulation. Out of 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.^[3] The group was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal background, psychological impairments or medical problems. They all agreed to participate in a 7–14-day period and received $15 per day (roughly equivalent to $85 in 2012).

The experiment was conducted in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's psychology building). Twelve of the twenty-four participants were assigned the role of prisoner (nine plus three alternates), while the other twelve were assigned the role of guard (also nine plus three alternates). Zimbardo took on the role of the superintendent, and an undergraduate research assistant the role of the warden. Zimbardo designed the experiment in order to induce disorientation, depersonalization and deindividualization in the participants.

The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy ... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."^[4]

The researchers provided the guards with wooden batons to establish their status,^[5] clothing similar to that of an actual prison guard (khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store), and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Prisoners wore uncomfortable ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name.

The prisoners were arrested at their homes and charged with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They were transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip searched and given their new identities.

The small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. There was a small space for the prison yard, solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and warden. The prisoners were to stay in their cells all day and night until the end of the study. The guards worked in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards did not have to stay on site after their shift." (Stanford_prison_experiment)

check out http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/31

...
possible ending for the essay:
"Really though, this is already happening in video games, where non-player characters are becoming ever more complex, both in terms of visual representation and “intelligence”. In narrative adventures like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead, players stay with the same characters over the course of several games, communicating with them through simple conversation trees and trying to keep them safe through endless dangerous encounters with aliens and zombies. Mass Effect even allows players to form sexual relationships with other characters, which can have a profound impact on the gaming experience – even if the sense of reciprocity is minimal. In Mass Effect, the love affairs are story functions and the AI characters merely pawns in a set of narrative possibilities. They don’t love you back. Not really.

But what if they could? In some ways this is more likely than the scenario envisaged in Her. Unlike operating systems, which are the practical interface between us and the computer, video games provide a playful environment in which we’re invited to identify with the onscreen avatars and events. Just as literature has done for hundreds of years, games invite us to identify with characters, they function to make us feel. It may be just a matter of time before a clever game designer uses cutting edge AI routines to simulate emotion. We know that basic speech recognition and conversational abilities are already possible, but can these be extended from chatbot programs into sophisticated game characters? 

Will we see AIs capable of falling for players?"

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/feb/28/love-affairs-with-video-game-characters

Initial research proposal - Are games just social experiments?

Subject chosen for the project:

Are games just social experiments?

Does playing a utopian scenario affect the way you live your real life? -Can we identify a phenomenon of transfer of personality from game to reality?

Can games influence and remodel the player's personality?

• Social experiments that have been done, in general, and by Sophie Calle in particular, can certainly be regarded as games. She has played with situations and people, in order to find out and map people's reactions to different situations. 

• newspaper articles (GTA V) Guardian Tech
• game reviews  (gamespot.com)
• testing sessions (youtube videos)
• World of Warcraft - creating dependency
• Sophie Calle - the address Book
• Sophie Calle - M'as tu vue
• mention GTA and  connection between  in game and real life violence attributed to it 
• second life ?
• I M V U  - kid being abandoned by parents due to addiction to playing IMVU videogame - social services had to intervene - lots of articles with real life stories about how playing teh game made them abandon their real life
• "the affects of pro social video games on pro social behaviours"
• results of a social survey about online experiences

Research: The Address Book by Sophie Calle is a book which documents a really interesting social experiment. This is what, in my opinion, games are: social experiments, and it is very interesting to find out if games, as a virtual reality aspect life, can have a direct effect on one's attitude, personality, etc in reality.

"Sophie Calle is well known for her unique brand of ‘socially engaged’ projects,5 regularly involving strangers and members of the public, often unwittingly, in her work. Her oeuvre, as a whole, can be understood as a series of games in and through which she conducts bizarre and interesting social experiments, all of which involve a dialogue between texts and images "(http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary/issue3/Issue3article6.htm)

Research google scholar!!!!

K Squire - Int. J. Intell. Games & Simulation, 2003 - webertube.com

YB Kafai, M Resnick - 1996 - books.google.com

designing, thinking and learning in a digital world - very interesting article!!!

some interesting books : example of books

pro social videogames

effects of pro social video games on prosocial behaviour

(ex: one experiment she did - documented in one of her other books - Sophie Calle, M'as tu vue. Centre Pompidou & Edition Xavier Baral, 2003- was to offer her bed for people to sleep in over a set period of time and document it. That experiment created quite a hype around it and a while after it had finished, she had received a letter from a stranger who read about it and has requested to "borrow" her bed for a while, as he though that will make him feel better after having been through a traumatic situation. So, this has given me the idea to study further the effect of social experiments on people's real lives, and in particular, how games can influence a player's real life behaviour, attitude and social interaction in general.

check Curiosity - What's inside the Cube - another social experiment game done by 22Cans ( Peter Molineux)

*secondary research sources: colour code the bibliography (ex: black for article to read, green for article read and orange for article I have already written about)

*primary research sources: interviews (face to face, telephone, mail)
*plan: time organisation: make a schedule for work

Word circles

Word circles is a concept, a way of coming up with ideas for essays.

STEP1
First we need to decide on a subject, and write down words related to that subject, lots of words, uninterrupted, uncensored. After about 5-6 minutes of this process, stop and read them all, pick the best and put them in a circle. Start developing those ideas in a brainstorming manner. Similar to mindmaps.


My idea: Immersion in video Games.

IMMERSION in video games and its effect in real life

• let loose
• alter ego
• alternative life
• experimentation
• pushing boundaries
• utopia
• scenario
• social networking
• heaven
• wonderland
• dreamworld
• action
• angle
• social experiments
• effect
• real life
• ideal situation
• character
• after effect
• repercussion
• consequence
• outcome
• issue
• ramification
• can of worms

STEP2

Get a few related words and make questions with them:

1. How can letting loose in video games create an alter ego in reality
2. When does experimentation in video games start pushing boundaries in reality
3. Does playing a utopian scenario make the player live an alternative life?
4. Can "opening a can of worms" in an abstract environment, have real life consequences

STEP3

Find some answers for these questions

1. When playing video games and using a completely different personality from the real life one, a player can have "mutations" in his/her own behaviour after the game is over.
2. Everything (or more or less everything) is possible in video games and more or less everything is aloud, that is the place for someone to try and push boundaries with no real consequences. Can this behaviour have an effect in real life, can this push someone to the point of doing the same thing in day to day life? (see GTA V)
3. If a well built video game provides a very immersive utopian environment/reality, will the player be drawn in, to the extent of not being able to let go, not being able to distinguish between virtual and real life? Will  

Barthes, Foucault and the Death of the Author

Shooting the messenger

Barthes, Foucault and the Death of the author

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

In the first session, we have discussed the idea of the Death of the Author in the sense that, as Rolland Barthes said, "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author".  (Barthes, 1968)
So, in order to stop thinking about the author of a piece of art and their personal context, we must put the reader forward, and unfortunately, their context. So by neglecting the author when interpreting a work of art,  you will have to substantially take into account the reader's position, context and personal interpretation. So, this way, every single work of art will be interpreted differently by every reader/viewer.

The concept of Meta-narrative came into the conversation, and by this we are referring to narratives that explain things as they are, they will give you matter of fact information that will not be questioned, such as religion, philosophy, science.

We have been talking about the author not necessarily being the person that created the text/work of art, but the one that gives meaning to the text. Barthes is actually freeing the author, when he says that " It is language that speaks, not the author". The meaning of a text, film, painting, changes every time the text is read by someone else. Barthes says here that "every text is eternally written here and now"

Now, when this subject, of lack of "authorship" is being discussed,  the first artist that comes to mind, is Tracey Emin.

http://www.platonphoto.com/portraits/arts/index.html

 Her artwork is extremely controversial and depending on the viewer, it is not only wide open to interpretation, but it is viewed differently by every single critic, every single exhibition visitor. Depending on the viewer, Emin's artwork will be either brilliant, exquisite, or a complete mess, not understood and debated whether it should actually be considered art.

Tracey Emin -  My Bed - shown at Tate Gallery as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner prize in 1999

My Bed, was shown in the Tate Gallery and was shortlisted for a Turner prize in 1999. Just by looking at it, it is sure to create controversy, as it is a bed, a messy one of them, stirring mixed emotions for the viewer.

Without knowing the background, her work will hardly ever be understood or appreciated at its value.
It seems, somehow, that Tracey Emin has got multiple personalities, which, each, had an influence in her art works. She has got a degree in Fine Arts from Maidstone College of art, she has been awarded an MA in painting by the Royal College of Art, and also, she has been awarded " an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, a Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University and Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent" http://www.egs.edu/faculty/tracey-emin/biography/) . But, at the same time,Emin had a "difficult childhood, Tracey Emin squatted in London after dropping out of school at thirteen. " (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/tracey-emin/biography/ ).

So, of course, all these mixed emotions and situations that Emin has been experiencing, throughout her life, have modelled her character, have created her style, a very unique one, a style that will possibly never be understood by some, but at the same time will be highly acclaimed by others. 

So, to come back to Roland Barthes and The Death of The Author, Tracey Emin's persona is intrinsically associated with her artwork, one couldn't exist without the other, so by removing the author (Tracey Emin) from the work (art), we would open the gates for a completely different perspective every time.



Below, are the extracts from The Death of Author by Roland Barthes (1967) and Michel Foucault, The Author Function (1970), which were the base for this discussion.

The Death 

of the Author

(Extract)

-

Roland Barthes

 The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real “alienation:’the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level,the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author,
when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks,suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born
simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate;there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here
and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation
of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writersput it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxfordschool, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it isuttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; themodern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, accordingto the “pathos” of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly “elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.—We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a ready made dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, “he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes” (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
—Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society,history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is “explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only
that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even “new criticism”) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered;structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in orde rto evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meanings finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.— Let us return to Balzac’s sentence: no one (that is, no “person”) utters it: its source,its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus
of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent
investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings,each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by “the tragic”); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of
multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with eachother, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost,
all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without
history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the
birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.— translated by Richard Howard

Michel Foucault, The Author Function (1970),

From Foucault, Michel "What is an Author?", translation Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp.124-127.

In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses. If we limit our remarks only to those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features.
First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtably in others as well discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.
 Secondly, the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Text, however, that we now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates said..." or "Pliny tells us that..." were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or a pathological syndrome.
 At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology or medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliability" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory).
 The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. (...)  

YEAR 2 - CONTEXT OF PRACTICE 2

New year, new subjects to discuss... Here they come.

Book micro project - Drawing crime noir for comics and graphic novels

Book Micro project

For this project we had to chose a book from the library, unrelated to the Contextual Practices subject and chose either a paragraph to talk about, or go through the whole book in a general way.

I have chosen Drawing Crime Noir for Comics and Graphic Novels.

I haven't looked into crime noir until now, as I have always considered myself as being a cartoon character artist, and I think I might have limited myself to drawing cute things, when there is such a big world to explore. So, this book was chosen in order to open myself to a new territory, a new way of drawing, and new way of setting the mood. I really like Film Noir movies, and exploring this style of drawing, will hopefully, help me develop as an artist. 

A really interesting thing this book has taught me, is that " Any book about the art of crime noir would be incomplete if it were only about the principles of drawing. Mood. Atmosphere. Style. they're what crime noir is all about...

... This genre focuses on the slick, rainswept streets of the city, shadowy figures, heartless women, men without conscience, reluctant heroes and boulevards of fear."  ( Introduction - Drawing crime noir for comics and graphic novels / Christopher Hart) 

In crime noir, characters have got certain aspect specific only to them.

Rugged cheekbones, deeply set eyes, a tight mouth and a square chin give this character a dramatic look.
(pg 10, Drawing crime noir for comics and graphic novels / Christopher Hart)

As I have already mentioned, in crime noir, the characters need to look strong, tough, serious. There is a big difference between comics characters and crime noir, and simple shading done the right way, the addition of small features, make a great difference and make this particular genre stand out. 

Here's a n example of how the same character from a normal comic book can be imported and transformed to achieve a crime noir one.

It is very obvious how in the first image, with very few additions ( sunglasses and cigarette), the transformation was done through mainly giving the character attitude. The stance was changed, to make her look in control, sunglasses add to the mysterious air surrounding her and by simply adding the dramatic shading, the artist has achieved a new, completely different, much stronger character.

The same simple transformation was done in the last image (bottom right image). The only props added were the sunglasses and the motorcycle helmet, but again, like in the first image, the attitude is entirely different. Instead of the easy going pose the character had, initially, he was given a strong, in control, stance, he was half covered in dark shading, making him this tough, mysterious, can-get-any-job-done kind of guy. 

All in all, I found this book really interesting and I have already used it for reference in one of my drawing projects. I find Christopher Hart, the author, really easy to understand, as the way he explains the different techniques  used, is very clear and he goes into enough detail, to make everyone understand why he has used certain features. 

I would definitely recommend this book to any character artist.

Gender in games and other media

Gender in Games

       Gender in games, as well as gender in any form of media is a very hot and controversial subject. It creates a lot of animosity between people of different opinions and it has been at the centre of many video game industry, as well as, political talks.

Ever since the late 18th century, when feminism was born, there have been many discussions and debates, about what Feminism means, what it should mean, and what can and should be done about it. There have been both men and women involved in this, even though, the name of it, Feminism, might suggest differently.

Feminism is described by the Oxford dictionary as: "the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

The issue of rights for women, first became prominent during the French and American revolutions in the late 18th century. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late 19th century that there was significant political change. A ‘second wave’ of feminism arose in the 1960s, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood; seminal figures included Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer"

(http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/feminism?q=feminism)

The subject I have set up to discuss today, is gender issues in games and I feel quite strongly, that if there were no references towards women being under-represented in this form of media, I would have no subject to talk about. So, in order to base my comments on real data, I have set up to find some statistics regarding the number of male vs female video game players.

However, instead of finding demographic data, I have come across a very interesting article about an experiment done at Stanford University School of Medicine By Allan Reiss and his colleagues on the different way a man's brain reacts and creates a pseudo-addiction to the conquering, territorial based videogames, in comparison to women's brains.

Reiss said this research also suggests that males have neural circuitry that makes them more liable than women to feel rewarded by a computer game with a territorial component and then more motivated to continue game-playing behavior. Based on this, he said, it makes sense that males are more prone to getting hooked on video games than females.

“Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory- and aggression-type games,” he pointed out.

(http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2008/february/videobrain.html)


Here's a link to the entire article as well, as I found it quite interesting.Stanford University School of Medicine experiment

So, in other words, men's brains respond slightly different to games, compared to women's ones. This is just a matter of fact, it is how the brain works. I am in total agreement with women having equal rights to men, however, I think it is probably time to recognise the fact that men and women are different and should act upon it as well. This is, by no means to suggest, that women are inferior and should not be allocated certain roles in media, and by media, I am referring to videogames, as well as, movies and other forms of related forms of mass communication. These are all very powerful means and extremely capable of influencing and changing mentalities... And this makes me ask a very big question: Why is Gender and issue in videogames???

Along the years, there have been many movies where the protagonist was a female, and not just any females, but truly strong, extremely influencing characters.
I can mention a few:

• The Alien series, who gave us Ellen Ripley - the woman who is a survivor, warrior, saint and mother all in one." Carolyn Petit, editor of GamespotUK, said, in the article titled: Fear of a woman Warrior (Feb 22 2013), that: " Any reasonable understanding and appreciation of what made Aliens a great film acknowledges the important role of women in it." (http://uk.gamespot.com/features/fear-of-a-woman-warrior-6404142/). And this is very true. Ellen Ripley is just the superlative of any team leader, she is, as a "genderless" human being, what anyone can dream of becoming, when aspiring to lead a mission, she is a role model for both male and female audiences.

• The Terminator series, created Sarah Connor - "the legend of Earth's post-apocalyptic future. " (http://www.totalfilm.com/features/the-100-greatest-female-characters/sarah-connor). Sarah Connor is a strong female, perfectly capable of looking after herself and fending off any type of enemy, both humanoid and robotic.

• Another very famous, strong character was Mrs Robinson from the 1967 film The Graduate. She " doesn't so much seduce Benjamin Braddock as bend him to her will."  said Filmsite.org's Tim Dirks. (http://movies.amctv.com/movie-guide/50-greatest-female-movie-characters.php).

• Strong female characters have had a presence even in fairy tales, and I have to mention Belle here, from Beauty and the Beast. She is the one that changes everything, she has taken her life in her own hands, has decided to exchange her freedom for her dad's safety and in the end, she is the one that "makes everything better", as because of her, the Beast manages to break the spell, and thanks to her, everyone in the castle is back to their normal happy selves.

• Closer to nowadays, we have Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, from the movie with the same name, an air stewardess who ends up getting involved in drug trafficking, only to become the ultimate winner/survivor of a big ploy to bring the whole network down.

• And I shouldn't forget to mention, probably the most influential videogame/movie female character: Toby Guard's Lara Croft, from the game Tomb Raider. The game was created in 1995 by UK developer Core Design , and since then, Lara Croft was awarded a Guiness World Record for the "most successful human video game heroine" (Guy Cocker (2006-04-07). "Lara Croft earns Guinness World Record". GameSpot. Retrieved 2007-08-30.)

So, all these mentioned, I don't think there should be such a big issue with female characters in video games. It is clear that there have been some benchmark ones created, that people enjoyed and still do, after even nearly half a century (Mrs Robinson - The Graduate-1967). I know one of the biggest and most debated subject, is, why, in most games, female roles are limited to damsels in distress, or weak secondary characters. I think, that it would be impossible for male and female to have the same level of importance when it comes to the roles they play in games, as it is the case with everyday life.


My intention here, is not to go against the feminists, but to bring a little reality into this subject. Ever since life started, there were men and women and they all had different roles. Both were just as important, as each other, as without either of them, life wouldn't have carried on, societies wouldn't have formed and evolved into what we know them to be today.  Recently, I have noticed quite a few instances, in which men were being objectified, and this, I'm guessing, just to show that this is a possibility. I don't believe this is the way equality between genders should be manifested, and because this is displayed on national television, which is an extremely influential media, large groups of people will think it is ok to behave that way. Why do we not stop all this and start respecting each other and show that women are as strong as men when it comes to character as well.

Many industry articles mention the fact that the main reason for not creating female protagonists in video games is because the majority of players are male and the games wouldn't sell. Chris Perna, art director at Epic Games, told OXM, "If you look at what sells, it's tough to justify [a female Gears of War protagonist]." (http://uk.gamespot.com/features/fear-of-a-woman-warrior-6404142/). So, an economic strategic decision, was taken by this big video game company, one might think. However, Entertainment Software Association has made a study on 1200 American households in 2011 and came up with this result: "Forty-two percent of all players are women and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry's fastest growing demographics." (ESA. "Game Player Data".)

So, the previous two statements are very conflicting, and we could ask ourselves: did Epic Games not do any market research? Do they not take into account market research? ...
The answer lays in my first reference article - the study done at Stanford University: male audience get more addicted to videogames, they are the ones that create repeat custom, they are basically the ones buying the majority of videogames, with or without female protagonists. I haven't yet heard, of any male video gamer who didn't enjoy playing as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, because she was a female main character...

As a conclusion, I would say that gender issues in video games, are such a controversial subject, only because it is made to be, not because it is a genuine problem. Games are meant to be a way of escaping reality for a short while, a way of fulfilling each individual's idea of Utopia, so if some guys like to play FPS games and shoot everything they encounter, they should be free to do it. Other might want to explore and expand their brains by solving puzzles which life doesn't always throw at them, so they should have the freedom to solve any sort of puzzles in games, as ridiculous or or interesting as the mass audience might think they are. Others on the other hand, might like to explore new worlds, and try new things, things that might be tabu in our society, or things that are unreachable to them in real life. That's why games were invented, as a means for escapism, and they should be able to cater for every single need. I think the most vehement critics might be surprised when talking to video game players, to find out that the biggest feminists play games where they chose an avatar looking as ideal as a woman can look, which I personally find it to be very hypocritical. But then again, there will alway be controversies, and to be honest, without these controversies, the gaming industry would probably not have the place it has today. 

Rhonda Farr once said: "Publicity, darling. Just publicity. Any kind is better than none at all." ([1933 R. Chandler in Black Mask Dec. 26]