http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/04/a-long-way-to-go/

Go Alice!

You can pay by credit or debit card, or download and print our offline booking form for cheque payments.

Full conference passes are £200 (or £125 NUS/unwaged), or £125 for a single day pass. The conference dinner is an optional extra at £35 (venue TBA).

Hope to see you there!

The conference is a meeting of the academy and the industry and this year will focus on the theme of Diversity; diversity in markets, in demographics, in development methodologies and platforms, as well as cultural and ethnical diversity surrounding games. This year we are proud to announce keynote speakers Lorna Evans from TIGA and Professor Valerie Walkerdine, author of ‘Children, Gender, Video Games’.

WIG2010 has extended the deadline for calls for papers to February 12th, and is looking for speakers and sponsorship partners. If interested please check out http://www.womeningames.com or contact the conference chairs at enquiries@womeningames.com for more information.

The conference is a meeting of the academy and the industry and this year will focus on the theme of Diversity; diversity in markets, in demographics, in development methodologies and platforms, as well as cultural and ethnical diversity surrounding games. This year we are proud to announce keynote speakers Lorna Evans from TIGA and Professor Valerie Walkerdine, author of ‘Children, Gender, Video Games’.

WIG2010 has extended the deadline for calls for papers to February 12th, and is looking for speakers and sponsorship partners. If interested please check out http://www.womeningames.com or contact the conference chairs at enquiries@womeiningames.com for more information.

Earlier this year I was invited to edit a special edition of Routledge’s Digital Creativity Journal for Women in Games. The journal is now online at

http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=issue&issn=1462-6268&volume=20&issue=4

An academically-accredited peer-reviewed journal publication is important for the network as by gaining this type of public recognition it becomes easier to access research funds for ongoing activities.

The WiG steering committee is a volunteer group that works with and beyond the WiG events to provide an ongoing resource for all those interested and engaged with this work.

I’d particularly like to thank all the contributors to the journal for their tireless work in creating this Special Edition over the summer and also all those we couldn’t fit in. Well done everybody!

The difference between hardcore and casual games, we were told, was based on the learning curve, the level of abstraction, and complexity of the interface.  This brought Braxton to the idea of the threat of feminisation, whereby based on masculine anxiety it being contained at a visual level meant a divide between masculine high culture and low culture, between active and passive.  Braxton saw this as a re-emergence of a gendered divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, making it almost kitsch. Thus, the objective of this talk was to show the complexity in ‘Diner Dash’ so that previous methodology might be applied.

Braxton began by stating that the gameplay experience of this game was very similar to women’s experience temporally. This was based on an assumption that women and men are afforded the same quantity of leisure time, but women’s is more fragmented. Therefore, playing ‘Diner Dash’ fits in well with this. Also Flo’s initial experience of attempting to flee the ‘masculine’ world of suits, in which she is both empowered (starting her own business) and regressive (return to a stereotypically feminine space: being a waitress). Braxton also stated that the gameplay remains about taking orders, which hardly differs from the job she left. However, it was stated that this is a displacement of difference in favour of reinscribing familiarity.

Braxton brought up the fact that Flo is yawning when she is not doing anything, which might be connected with indifference or overwork equally. This is taken further when she is transformed into a goddess with four arms towards the end of the game: her eyes being closed are representative of her being able to do this job in that state. Yet, the idea of her having four arms means that more work can be extracted. Braxton asked us to think about whether these final ten levels were a dream sequence or not, for Flo has her eyes closed as though sleeping, and regular items are transformed into fantastical ones (chairs as hands, for example).

Finally, the ending was stated to reflect the external world of the player. The goddess must get back to her own restaurant is considered almost a wake-up call for the casual player to return to reality. Braxton said that is was tempting to read the entire sequence as a repetition-compulsion, or as a wish for more (uninterrupted) time. Time itself becomes interrupted when even the word ‘destiny’ can not be stated without being cut off.

Braxton’s final point was the idea of Flo’s character as being in a dream-within-a-dream scenario, whereby one is dreaming the real.

Questions asked regarded change of experience within the game and narrative expectations.

Hanna conducted interviews with various individuals involved in this scene of modification. She stated that they wanted to mention that they did not play for long periods of time and that play made them feel guilty because they did not feel like they had done anything (she referenced later the idea of women not feeling as though they have the right to leisure time). One individual, we were informed, stated that it was bad enough to be a geek, let alone a female one. Creativity in this scenario, Hanna stated, was a form of resistance.

This resistance here is considered active. Hanna said that these players are resisting by being female players, by beingThe Sims players (which they considered different from other types of game), and by being atypical players (by building and emphasising content). Making skins, therefore, is also a resistance.

Making skins was stated to be because people do not necessarily like the original skins. EA’s perceived understanding of this allows players to create new skins. Skins here, Hanna stated, are a desire to improve play and to help others. This moves us from resistance.

The anonymity is important, too. Hanna pointed out that because it is so anonymous individuals do not enjoy any form of identity boost from the process. Therefore the resistance becomes guilty and silent. Hanna stated that these skinners do not necessarily talk about such things with their friends, only with other skinners. These achievements, however, can be separated from default achievements in games, although these individuals were stated to not necessarily be bothered to do such things if the tools were not available in the first place.

Finally, Hanna pointed out that the virtually male-exclusive The Sims skinning is isolated from other modding groups, and that there is no communication between the two. Hanna suggested that this is partially due to insecurities in their own experience, and therefore an inability to share this with anyone outside of that community.

Questions included whether or not Hanna had shared this analysis with respondents yet, if there is visible resistance required with regards to subcultures, and the lack of awareness amongst these communities of other modders or places to put their mods.

The research itself is based upon what people do in everyday life (and the outcomes of this) and how new communication patterns may be formed through the combination of play and everyday life. The research involves discourse analysis, participant observation, emails, interviews, qualitative face-to-face, and game lab setups. Something that they found from this was that gaming life was very much considered to be interconnected with everyday life.

Jessica showed us a Mountain Dew commercial in which two women are at a supermarket, notice that each is buying the opposing coloured Mountain Dew and break out into World of Warcraft characters. This was shown as an example of play mixing in with/becoming part of the everyday.

The idea of the mother, Jessica explained, was a fixed role. The mother was expected to be policing or supportive, and certainly outside of gaming discourse. Jessica stated that she found that gaming mothers mostly played alone, to have time to themselves, even when playing online games such as WoW. Jessica asked what productivity meant with relation to gaming mothers and suggested that productivity lies away from established norms.

Gaming mothers tended to give sensible reasons for playing when asked, such as to relax or to spend time with the children. Also worth a mention here is the weightloss club “Wii Mommies” in which the Wii Fit system was used to lose weight, with consistent reports of weight loss.

The way gaming mothers talk about play, Jessica stated, is interesting because it’s as though they make excuses for play. An Example cited included it not being fair on others if they stop playing. Jessica said that excuses are made for playing in the first place and also for continuing play. She also asked why it is that they speak this way, and why it is hard to accept or admit that they actually like playing rather than playing games to be good for them or for pragmatic purposes.

Questions included how many of these mothers brought the consoles into the household, how this play affected the family, why you would choose to play alone, and the decrease of play with age.

In this particular forum, the only place accessible to non-members of the guild is the recruitment page. Beyond this page, players are able to make texts about themselves and their characters, and these texts encompass self-description at many levels. Here, Anne-Mette showed us one player’s descriptions by way of an example. This, she said, showed a typical example of the player’s coherency and ability to shift between texts.

We looked at said individual’s application to join the guild, whereby he stated himself as male and his profession, at which point the text was changed (he stated that he had Worg pups rather than children, a reference to the game). He then switched directly into the game as he spoke around the character of his female dwarf and congratulated himself for choosing her rather than a Night Elf. Anne-Mette questioned here whether this was because he related to the characteristics of the Dwarf better. Finally, he stated that he could be online for two afternoons per week.

Later, after being accepted into the guild, this individual posted about joining in the action, the later about what had happened. Later still, he posted a YouTube clip of something outside of the game. He also on occasion invited other guild members to stay at his.

Anne-Mette discussed the matter of the description of the main character being in the third person and how this might complicate matters and how players are shifting between positions and identities without issue. Finally, she brought up the idea of the cyborg: these self-stories might be reminiscent of the cyborg being assembled and disassembled. Furthermore, the cyborg as a symbolic figure of the breakdown of dualities was an interesting element. I would be interested to see what conclusions Anne-Mette draws from looking at other player/characters.

Questions were regarding Anne-Mette’s position in the guild, how she was accepted as a researcher in the guild, how the other guild members react to this, and Anne-Mette’s desire to be accepted both as a player and as a researcher.

Shira’s talk involved the entitlement of women to leisure time, how this is achieved, and how the structure of certain games might be seen to reflect this structure. Shira spoke about how women manage their time, Simulated Productive Play, and the idea of simulation and the spectator as housing a duplicated identity which might be achieved through both physical and representational spaces.

Developer Big Fish Games had the following to say of their franchise: “Manage time, customers, and money in games for the serious goal-setter.” Shira pointed out here that this hardly sounds like a game at all. She moved on to speak more on the Diner Dash series, whose audience is apparently 95% female of average age 35, with 60 million downloads in the franchise, giving it quite an expansive network. Shira explained that the reason these titles were so popular with women was because it represented the household, the stereotypical domain of the woman. The labour, she stated, is emotional, and this household structure is replicated through the game. It is productive: the structure involves waiting on tables, seating customers, cleaning messes, and so forth. This is work in a game.

Shira mentioned the third Diner Dash game, where the main character is on vacation and is roped into assisting on a cruise ship after an incident in which the crew quits. Shira stated this as the main character using her traits as a powerful woman to case for others.

Finally, Shira asked about Simulated Productive Play and whether or not that was a third shift for many women.

If you want to know more about Shira’s work, please do contact her with questions at the aforementioned site.