DiGRA 2009: Braxton Soderman – Killing Time in Diner Dash: Representation, Gender, and Casual Games

This reading of ‘Diner Dash’ involved it being understood as a ‘mother’ of the genre of time-management games, a genre of which many games are stereotypically associated with women. The game was described as repetitive. Braxton stated that narrative/visual elements are often ignored in studies in favour of rule-based and ethnographic studies, and argued that [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Hanna Wirman – The Silent Works of The Sims 2 Bedroom(s)

Hanna’s talk was on women constructing identities. She stated that her work here was based on McRobbie and Garber (1976) and was an approach to the skinning community in The Sims particularly with reference to bedroom culture. She stated that this approach was because of the gendered space of the bedroom, and its alignment as a [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Jessica Enevold – Playing Productive: Pragmatic Uses of Gaming

Jessica’s talk was on gaming mothers, a three-year project on how they juggle time, play and family. The research is based on an awareness that there is currently no other research on gaming mothers. There is, however, Jessica stated, some research on older gamers.
The research itself is based upon what people do in everyday life [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Alison Harvey – Balance Boards and Dance Pads: The Impact of Innovation on Gendered Access to Gaming

Alison’s talk involved women’s access to gaming and the implications of this. She asked us to think about how games are situated gender-wise and the focus on masculinity in games. She stated that it was a very heteronormative and hypermasculine practice, and that females were trespassers on the ground of the male player.
An “historical construction [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Kelly Boudreau and Shanly Dixon – Girls’ Play: Context, performance and social videogame play

The goals of this presentation were to consider the young female voice through an ethnographic perspective. The long-term implication of this was stated to be to create a fuller image of what is going on, and to consider girls’ gameplay and preferences as contrasted with those of boys. Pink games were initially referenced, and questions [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Nicholas Taylor – Where the Women Are(n’t): Gender and a North American, ‘Pro-gaming’ Scene

Nicholas’ talk involved us looking at men and women in professional play and how they structured themselves on the occasions when they were present, with particular reference to a team of players of Halo 3 in North America who called themselves ‘NerdCorps’. Nicholas described their successes at attending various gaming tournaments across the world, including [...]

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DiGRA 2009: Ben Light – More Than Just a Combo of Slaps? Representations and Experiences of LGBT Gamers On and Beyond the Screen

Ben’s talk was explained as looking at the representations of LGBT within the gaming world. His intention was to look at the theory and raise some of the issues of this representation.
Ben had been studying a site known as Gaydar, a large dating site designed to assist men in finding other men, which he described [...]

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WIG @DiGRA 2009 Keynote

By popular demand, here is a PDF version of the keynote PowerPoint presentation from the WIG strand of DiGRA 2009.

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Develop 2009: Gamesification: Turning Other Things into Games

Out of the last talks of the Thursday I was really tied with what to go to, in the end I went with Gamesification panel, which ended up being made up of Maurice Suckling – The Mustard Company, Charles Cecil – Revolution Software, Antonia Saraiva – , Jorg Tittel -  The main emphasis of the [...]

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Develop 2009: It’s Time for Music games 2.0

I was so happy for Matsuura-san to come to Develop, coming all the way from Japan it was an honour to have him attend, especially the year that I happened to be attending Develop. His talk had an introduction for while people were entering the room, which was a video of himself playing some music.

One [...]

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