Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan:

• Working with Text
• Homework

Working with Text

We’ll review the menu designs on Wednesday. We’ll also start our next mini-project, which will involve developing promotional posters.

Today I need your help. I have to finish populating a design template crafted by Molly Riggs for the 2021 Go West Film Festival. I’ve uploaded a copy of the working indesign draft to Canvas and, as the name indicates, it is currently a mess.

Edit: Issue with replacing fonts (since we do not have administrator access to these computers, we can’t add the new fonts we would need to recreate the original document.

When you open the document, you will be alerted that it is missing fonts.

• Durango > Bernard MT Condensed
• Replace all other fonts with Goudy Old Style

Click on all of the text boxes on your screen, but especially the movie description box. Resize the box so that you can see all overflow text.

Homework

The next Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book activity will be Lesson #5 (Flowing Text).

Today’s Plan:

• Sicart Papers
• Project 2: Talking Methodology
• Homework

Sicart Papers

I thought I had gotten all the Sicart drafts back–apparently I missed 2. I’ll do those this afternoon. The final draft is due on Thursday at midnight.

Hi all,

I’ll be updating Monday’s class notes for today; I’ve got an activity planned for today that should give you a sense of how to develop a Project 2 methodology.

Also, remember that you have the Writing a Second Research Annotation due before Friday’s class. We will meet in the Ross 1240 computer lab on Friday.

A reminder that the Sicart project closes Thursday at midnight. You still have a chance to pass in any previous assignments. This includes:

1. Gaming Journal
2. Sicart Summary Paper
3. Walking Dead Episode 1 Responses
4. Sicart “Moral Dilemmas” post
5. Sicart _Beyond Choices_ post

You pretty much can’t write the paper without doing these things, so use them as pre-writing activities and throw something into Canvas so I can give you some credit.

Note: this is a “hard out” on Project 1. You are free to submit any missing Sicart assignments up until Thursday at midnight. On Friday morning I will “zero” any missing assignments.

A few resources:

• A reminder that you can visit the Writing Center to discuss your paper for extra credit.
• If you are visiting the Writing Center, then here’s a copy of the assignment that you can share with them
• If you missed Friday’s class, then here’s a link to a workshop document that contains both useful quotes for discussing key Sicart concepts and a model introduction with a road map
• Here is a copy of the rubric

One last piece of advice for improving style and proofreading: before you turn in the final paper, take the time to read the paper out loud. Physically voicing sentences makes a tremendous difference, since your tongue will catch mistakes that your eyes simply do not see. If you are struggling to read a sentence, see if you can break it up into two smaller sentences. See if you can rewrite it with character/action syntax. See if you can reorganize it as a If… then… or a X, because Y (more logically balanced constructions).

Project 2: Talking Methodology

Let’s take a look at the Burgess et al article and ask the key research methodology questions:

• How did they collect?
• How did they analyze?
• How did they ensure reliability?

Sample Methodology

A few warm up videos.

• What is the Male Gaze
• Suicide Squad vs Birds of Prey

A link to the Google Slides.

A link to the form.

Homework

Complete the Writing A Second Research Annotation assignment in Canvas.

For Friday’s class, read and annotate one of the following articles (they are all located in the files section of Canvas):

• Shaw. 2016. Where Is the Queerness in Games? Types of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Content in Digital Games
• Bayeck et al. 2018. Representations of Africans in Popular Video Games
• Utsch. 2017. Queer Identities in Video Games: Data Visualization for a Quantitative Analysis of Representation
• Burgess et al. 2007. Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers
• Gestos et al. Representation in Video Games: A Systemic Review of Literature in Consideration of Adult Female Well-Being [note–meta analysis, keyword method–focus on findings]
• Bjørkelo. 2020. “Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic”: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimYou can find these articles in the files section of Canvas. The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with different ways of developing research studies–how do you select objects to analyze? How do you analyze them? How do you build your “research machine”?
  

  Writing Annotations

  Writing annotations is a part of any research project: they are essentially a quasi-formal approach to writing reading notes. I teach annotating as a three-paragraph process:

  • Paragraph One: the first paragraph covers the purpose, findings, and recommendations of the article. What did the authors set out to prove? What are their major findings? And/Or what concrete recommendations do they make based on those findings? [You should find this material in the intro, discussion, and conclusion sections]
  • Paragraph Two: the second paragraph details the methods, including how many subjects were in the study, how subjects were found, the location of the study (if relevant), the length of the study, how data was analyzed/synthesized, and any other significant details regarding their research process. [The Methods section]
  • Paragraph Three: What you write in the third paragraph of an annotation is unique to the project at hand. Here’s where you free write, developing ideas about how this source might contribute to your project. In this case, I am asking you to design a study of video games, examining representations of race, gender, or sexuality. So–what in this study is particularly valuable to that project? What ideas do you have? How can we use this? Here’s where you just get to think and fire off ideas.

Today’s Plan:

• Gaming Journals
• Schedule Change(s)
• Project 2
• Homework

Gaming Journals

Scored. You can resubmit a link if you add more before the paper due date (down to the wire!).

Schedule Changes

Here’s how I see our upcoming schedule:

• According to Canvas, the draft of the Sicart paper is due Tuesday at midnight. I’m going to keep that date in place. If you have already finished your draft, great. If not, then you have time to work on it and/or set a Writing Center appointment for this evening or tomorrow. Remember that visiting the Writing Center with a draft of this paper is one way you can earn bonus points toward an “A” this semester
• I am cancelling Wednesday’s class so I can focus on providing feedback on the papers. My goal is to have all the papers returned before Friday’s class. This is ambitious, but I will do my best. If you can turn a paper in early, before Tuesday’s midnight deadline, I’d appreciate it!
• There’s a homework assignment for Friday’s class, one that will get us started on Project 2. On Friday I’ll do two things–we’ll spend 25 minutes or so reviewing the Sicart drafts, and then discuss the reading for 25 minutes.

Project Two: Representations of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Games

Our first project this semester approached games as aesthetic objects; that is, we treated them as artistic objects and analyzed them to learn/challenge how they operate. Our second project this semester will approach games as social objects. Rather than analyze how they operate on us (affect our emotions and/or shape our attitudes), our analysis will focus on how games represent marginalized groups (particularly in the gaming sphere, which has a notorious reputation for being white, male, and hostile to difference).

You will work together in groups to analyze representations of gender, race, or sexuality in a specific genre of video games. You will work as a team to design a research methodology, collect “artifacts” (which collectively form your “corpus”), and analyze those artifacts. As a group, you will construct a heuristic for that analysis (a list of yes/no or a likert-like scale of things you can see). Unlike our first project, we do not have time to actually play the games for this project. Your group will analyze something like:

• Game covers
• Character selection screens
• Game trailers
• Significant NPC’s

You will work collectively to gather objects and generate your data. Here’s a few projects from the past couple of years. This means developing a methodology to select games to analyze. Here’s an example of a past methodology I helped a group develop that focused on female protagonists in story-driven games. This produced a list of games. And then this lead to a refined methodology.

Then, you will (collaboratively or individually–your choice) develop a paper of around 2000 words. Drafts of the paper will be due the Friday before spring break. Final drafts will be due Friday, March 26th. The paper will follow the “traditional” outline for qualitative or quantitative research:

• Outline
• Literature Review (we will likely skip this step by incorporating it into the introduction)
• Methodology
  • How did you find the artifacts in your corpus?
  • How did you analyze them?
• Data
• Discussion
  • How does your findings compare to previous studies?
  • What didn’t surprise you?
  • More importantly, what did surprise you?
  • Why do you think you found what you found? What do you think you would find in 5 years [is there a trend? a reason to think some things might change?]
• Conclusion

Let Me Do the Literature Review for You (Sorta)

The inspiration for this project lies in the work of This will be built off of the work of two other game scholars. First, the work of Extra Credit–I want to watch an example of this (to plant the seed for a future project), but also stress that this is the kind of deep analysis we can’t do for this second project.

Second, Anita Sarkeesian, and her “Tropes in Games” project. Tropes in Games started as a kickstarter in 2013; Sarkeesian produced a series of videos examining the stereotypical portrayals of women in games. Let’s take a look.

We might need this.
And this: Hawkeye Initiative.

Sarkeesian has done considerable work in this area. I see two ways of building off her work. First, we might explore whether representations of women have progressed: are contemporary games making the same mistakes? Are there some genres where this is more of an issue than others? Can we extend her analysis of Beyond Good and Evil to find other positive representations?

Second, we can extend her robust methodology to other representations: can we identify and develop a list of racial tropes for characters of color (for instance, “the criminal,” “the athlete,” “the minstrel,” “the black panther,” “the rapper”). Can we investigate representations of sexuality in games? Are there tropes for LBGTQ+ characters? Can we (maybe outside of the Mass Effect series) identify positive representations of non-CIS/heteronormative/binary sexuality?

Full disclosure: I originally wrote the paragraphs above in 2018, and I just copy/paste them every time I teach this class. However, I do think there is some progress that suggests we are seeing better representation (even if Sarkeesian herself has done research that leaves her underwhelmed).

Homework

To recap:

• The draft of your Sicart paper is due Tuesday at midnight
• Class is cancelled on Wednesday so that I can focus on getting the Sicart papers scored and back to you ASAP
• Those folks invested in getting an “A” should make an appointment with the Writing Center. If your appointment would be after the Tuesday midnight due date: then submit whatever you have by Tuesday at midnight with a Canvas comment that you have a WC appointment planned and that you will resubmit the paper to Canvas after that. I will hold off on your paper until after the resubmission
• For Friday’s class, read Burgess et al (2011) “Playing with Prejudice” in the files section of Canvas. There’s a writing assignment in Canvas called Writing a Research Annotation that you need to complete before class.