Modesty Studios

Since the podcast was canceled this week and I had a rant I wanted to get out, I'll vent here. Today we were suppose to review a comic called "GG-Guys". Don't ask what "GG" stands for I couldn't find out. :( I won't give my full review for this yet but here's what I first thought after reading through the archives: "Another one?" Yes. Another clone of the ever popular formula of "gamer comics" as set forth by the Gamer Comic Gods of Penny Arcade. The formula can be expressed in colorful/non-work-safe language here: Zero Punctuation . In My words, which will be work safe here is what the formula is. Two guys, usually roommates living out their gaming fantasies. Usually there is one angry girl character to represent the entire female demographic of gamers. (insert many frownie faces). She will also be one of their girlfriends. Two Male-Dominant Industries in One Comics and the Game industry are two largely male-dominant industr...

This entry is inspired by the research I was reviewing on InvestiGaming . This time I was filtering through the "avatars" tag and summarizing the research and finding highlights. Since all the research is specifically about gender studies and gaming you can be sure there was LOTS to be said about female avatars. The one that I reflected on the most was an article about Samus Aran from the Metroid Series. So on we go. Back to the Past Personally, I have never played the Metroid series, but I know it well enough from videos, research and reviews from other players. And mostly from a presentation someone gave in a college class about gender and minorities in film and television...but branched off into video games. (Which was a LANDMINE). At that point in time, I had learned that Samus Aran was female through Super Smash Brothers where she is a fighter character. (I read her bio which described her as female.) But I had no clue about the series until this presentation. The gentle...

I went to a conference this past weekend for Michigan Women in Computing (MICWIC). And while I was the only sort of game related person there, I had great fun discussing games with some peers and many older women. (And I gave a presentation on gender and gaming). One of the games that came up in our discussion was "Zork" which I have only read about. (If you think about that it's kind of a pun.) It was a text-based adventure game where you would type "Go North" and a new description of a dungeon room showed up. It was kind of like navigating a maze through text. Kind of like a choose your own adventure. So I'm going to reflect a bit about what these text-based adventures evolved into and what has become of them today. Literacy Required to Play Last blog I spoke a bit about MUDs which were online text-based worlds similar to the game Zork. Except there was no game...just socializing and roleplaying. A text-base game is good at a few things. 1) A sort of int...