Cultural Issues Essay

Question: Video-games are profoundly sexist, and largely reflect a dominant ideology, which reinforces unequal power relations between men and women. Agree or disagree, use at least three examples.

Hernandez, Bladimir

Game100: Cultural Issues Essay

4/30/12

I agree that video games are deeply sexist, not all games are but a majority of them are. Either the game has no women throughout the entire game play or women play the role of the sidekick to the male and rarely ever partake in being a hero. Not only does this show sexism, but also those games that do have women, they make them out to have a perfect figure and complexion. I find that a vast majority of games show that men prosper among women.

For example, in all of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, there are no women. I understand that the game is played through the eyes of a modern infantry soldier and in real life there are no women in front line combat, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the developers of CoD: MW 1-3 can completely leave women out of the equation. There are many jobs and positions that women have in the military. The developers could have added a woman and have her be a Field Artillery Officer (13) or an Air and Missile Defense (AMD) Crewmember (14S), and she would still be able to contribute to combat. However, the developers didn’t use any females in the series.

In Addition, the game Assassins Creed series have some women and one woman that is an assassin. But even so they have women in the game, Shao Jun; a Chinese assassin who plays a semi big role in the series doesn’t show up until Assassins Creed: Revelations, which is the 4^th game. Throughout the first Assassins Creed game, there are multiple women coming up to the protagonist Altair asking him for money and food because they are poor. The women in the game are dressed poorly like they are hopeless; meanwhile the men are dressed in fancy attire. The developers of AC could have easily not showed women as weak and poor, and yet they did.

Furthermore, when women are shown in video games and if they aren’t portrayed as weak, hopeless, or a sidekick, then they are shown in the game as having the perfect woman hourglass. In all of the Tekken, Soul Calibur, and Street Fighter series, all their women are incredibly busty with wide hips and strong legs. All the women in these series have that perfect woman hourglass that in real life we know isn’t real to most women. The developers did this either to show that women are perfect or to show their sexiness. Either way, that isn’t how the woman body is in real life and shows sexism because it isn’t factual.

          

  In conclusion, I definitely agree to the idea that most video games are sexist. There are multiple examples which show how they are and these aren’t all of them but only a mere few examples. Either most video games don’t have women starring in them at all or they play a sidekick to a bigger masculine hero. It’s even worse when women are in video games and they are shown as perfect. I completely agree that most, not all, video games are sexist.

Epsilon: Delta 6 Full Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jNkRsTay73a6pdtYQoooV9TiAAoF8KQ6UxLCQEg_Chc/edit#slide=id.p

Design Practice Questions

1.	How do you plan to deal with the issue of new players arriving in the middle of a long game? Get rid of the victory condition, or find a way to make sure that players are matched with those of similar ability? All of the players will have a ranking and obviously a score of which team side is winning. For example, if team Alpha is winning and some player tries to join the game, then he will automatically go into team Bravo to help balance out the game. There will also be a sorting so that the best higher ranked players will be evenly distributed into the teams. Not one team will have the "best" players.
2.	What will happen to the gameplay when a player vanishes? How will it affect the other players’ experience of the game (what they see and hear)? Does it disrupt the balance of the game? Will it make the challenges easier or harder? Is the game even meaningful anymore? When players vanish, the players who leave mid-game, will lose all their experience they earned throughout the game. However, when a player leaves it will not affect the team at all. The next player looking for a game session will automatically join and replace the player that left. If the replacement player that joins is a high ranked player making the whole team high ranked players, then they will switch out for the best player and the worst player.
3.	What happens to the game’s score when a player vanishes? Is the game still fair? The score stays the same, but for instance, the replacement of the player will be a higher ranked player so they will make up for the score.
4.	Does your game offer a player an advantage of some kind for intentionally disconnecting himself (whether by preventing himself from losing or by sealing his own victory)? Is there any way to minimize this without penalizing players who are disconnected accidentally? If the player is accidentally disconnected, they will have to write a report what time they were playing and what happened. Upon submitting the report, all experience that was gained will remain with the player. This report will prevent people from willingly disconnecting themselves because they wouldn't want to write the report. While the player who has disconnected by accident, will want to write the report because their disconnection was an accident.
5.	In a turn-based game, what mechanism will you use to prevent a player from stalling play for the other players? Set a time limit? Allow simultaneous turns? Implement a reasonable default if the player does nothing? The players will have a time limit, if the time limit ends and the player has yet to make a move, then the move will be overturned.
6.	If you offer a chat mechanism, what features will you implement to keep it civil? Filters? A complaint system? An ignore system? Or will your game require moderated chat spaces? To filter the chat, the players will have the ability to manually "mute" other players.
7.	Is your game designed to prevent (or alleviate) collusion? Because you can’t prevent players from talking to each other on the phone as they play, how will you address this? Or can you design your game in such a way that collusion is part of the gameplay, as in Diplomacy? The players will be able to form a diplomacy and thus will take a vote. Upon voting, the players on both Alpha and Bravo teams who were opposed will now be a team Delta and fight against AI's. However, their must be enough votes to do this.

Epsilon Delta 6: Game Idea (work in progress)

Epsilon Delta 6

Zombie FPS

Scene: Street Corner.

Scene: Side View.

 Scene: Arial View.

Hero Builder Exercise

Delta 6 is a character developed for a FPS game. He is the squad leader of his delta unit and carries the ranking of a Major. He's been on multiple missions, some including: danger close extractions, neutralizing all infectious humans in a sector, and various stealth missions around the globe. In the gameplay, If you plan on being silent and stealthy, then you can add silencers to your weapons. If the player is more violent and likes the attention of being in a firefight, then you can add power to your ammo and sacrifice stealth by not using silencers on your weapons.

Oknar is a character developed for an RPG game. He is the Captain of the 402nd Battalion and Commander of the 7th Legion of the West. In his past, he has commanded over a hundred armies and conquered multiple villages and other armies. In the gameplay, you can decide wether he uses his army to supply the townspeople and defend them to strengthen them as a civilization or to leave the townspeople and conquer other civilizations but sacrifice unity in your civilization. So its up to the player, grow a unified strong civilization, or expand and control other civilizations.

Ox is a character developed for a FPS game. He lost his parents to a mistake that the military made when he was in high school. His parents used to always go to his football tournaments and always wanted him to be a bodybuilder later on in life. Since the death of his parents, he now seeks vengeance against everything and everyone, especially the military. He is powerful and sluggish and carries heavy arsenal. For the gameplay, the players will decide wether or not if in the end, based on your decisions throughout the game, he will kill  the individuals behind his parents loss or let them go. 

Game World: CONTRABAND

CONTRABAND

Scene: Checkpoint into the gated community.

 Scene: Firefight outside the drug cartels estates.

 Scene: Another firefight outside houses.

 Scene: Screenshot of the Drug Cartels estate.

 Scene: Hostage situation.

Questions:

Physical Dimension:

1: Does my game require a physical dimension? What is it used for? Is it an essential part of game-play or merely cosmetic?

 Yes the game requires a physical dimension to provide the player a sense of being in the "magic circle". It’s essential to the game play to create a sense of a small community. In the game you can use these buildings for cover and other ways to survive. 

2: Leaving aside issues of implementation or display, how many imaginary spatial dimensions does my game require? If there are three or more, can objects move continuously through the third and higher dimensions, or are these dimensions partitioned into discrete "layers" or zones?

The game requires 3 spatial dimensions and everything but the buildings will be moving.

3: How big is my game world, in light-years or inches? Is accuracy of scale critical, as in a football game, or not, as in a cartoon-like action game?

The game world is going to be accurately proportioned to the size of a normal small town with small gated communities. The game requires the proportions to be 100% accurate because this is going to be a first person shooter game.

4: Will my game need more than one scale, for indoor versus outdoor areas, for example? How many will it actually require?

 The game will only require 2 scales, one for indoors and one for the outdoors.

5: How am I going to handle the relative sizes of objects and people? What about their relative speeds of movement?

The average person is going to be around 5'8" so the buildings around them have to be proportioned to their size. The speed will be accurately equivalent to real life.

6: Who is my world bounded? Am I going to make an effort to disguise the "edge of the world," and if so, with what? What happens if the player tries to go beyond so?

 The game is going to be bounded by houses and natural trees and mountains. There is going to be an "invisible wall" that the players can’t pass but it’s going to be disguised by the houses and trees.

Temporal Dimension:

1: Is time a meaningful element of my game? Does the passage of time change anything in the game world even if the player does nothing, or does the world simply sit still and wait for the player to do something?

            No time will not be meaningful in any sort of way. 

2: If time does change the world, what effects does it have? Does food decay, and do light bulbs burn out?

2 - 6: Time will not affect the game-play in any way.

3: How does time affect the player's avatar? Does he get hungry or tired?

            N/A

4: What is the actual purpose of including time in my game? Is it only a part of the atmosphere, or is it an essential part of the game-play?

            N/A

5. Is there a time scale for my game? Do I need to have measurable quantities of time, such as hours, days, and years, or can I just let time go by without bothering to measure it? Does the player need a clock to keep track of time?

N/A

6. Are there periods of time that I'm going to skip or do without? Is this going to be visible to the player, or will it happen seamlessly?

            N/A

7. Do I need to implement day and night? If I do, what will make night different from day? Will it merely look different, or will it have other effects as well? What about seasons?

The only time the day and night are going to effect the game-play is going to be in different missions throughout the game. Some missions will be "night" missions while the rest are going to be "day" missions.

8: Will any of the time in my game need to be anomalous? If so, why? Will that bother the player? Do I need to explain it away, and if so, how?

No, there will not be any sort of time or timings in the game.

9: Should the player be allowed to adjust time in any way? Why, how, and when?

No they wouldn't, if it’s simply a night mission then it’s going to remain night until the mission is over, same with day missions.

Environmental Dimension:

1: Is my game world set in a particular historical period or geographic location? When and where? Is it an alternate reality, and if so, what makes it different from outs?

The game world is set on earth maybe somewhere in Cuba; however it has no historical locations. The time period is in 2012 so it’s going to be a modern first person shooter game in Cuba.

2: Are there any people in my game world? What are they like? Do they have a complex, highly organized society or a simple, tribal one? How do they govern themselves? How is this social structure reflected in their physical surroundings? Are there different classes of people, guilds, or specialized occupations?

There are going to be people in the game world. Most of the game-play is going to be in gated communities revolved around a small town. There are going to be roaming people going about their daily normal tasks; walking, driving, carrying groceries, etc. The people are going to be independent and will be scared off when they hear gun fire and explosions. The other groups of people will be the drug cartels body guards and private security. They will guard the estates and shoot down (you) the U.S Task Force soldiers who are trying to clear the drug cartels in Cuba. 

3: What do my people value? Trade, martial prowess, imperialism, peace? What kind of lives do they lead in pursuit of these ends? Are they hunters, nomadic, agrarian, industrialized, even postindustrial? How does this affect their buildings and clothing?

The community people will just be in the game-play simply for cosmetics. The drug cartels body guards for example, will roam around the estates of the drug cartels and defend their boss from the U.S Task Force soldiers, they will stop at nothing to defend them. You and your team, the U.S Task Force, will take down the drug cartels and their security. Your team will follow you in missions and depending on how well you strategize, your team will either all live or they can die. 

4: Are my people superstitious or religious? Do they have institutions or religious practices that will be visible in the game? Are there religious buildings? Do the people carry charms or display spiritual emblems?

Yes there will be some religious institution but it won’t be exactly a specific detail in the game-play. 

5: What are my people's aesthetics like? Are they flamboyant or reserved, chaotic or orderly, bright or subtle? What colors do they like? Do they prefer straight lines or curves?

The people of the communities will be reserved and won’t be able to interact with, they will have a destination point and once they get to that destination point they will disappear by going inside a building or a vehicle (however the player won’t be able to go into a building or a vehicle unless it’s part of the missions to go inside the building or a vehicle.) The guards will be very curious and will walk around the estates checking everything around their area they are guarding. If they see suspicious activities, they will alert the other guards and gun you down. Your team, the U.S Task Force will all follow the rules of engagement. For example, they won’t start shooting unless you shoot first, or if they are being shot upon. 

6: If there aren't any people in the game, what are there instead, and what do they look like and how do they behave?

            N/A

7: Does my game take place indoors or outdoors, or both? If indoors, what are the furnishings and interior decor like? If outdoors, what is the geography and architecture like?

            The game "Contraband" takes place indoors and outdoors. The outdoors is in a gated community and you will be able to see the big mansions of the drug cartels and checkpoints. You can see houses and cars etc. The indoors will be mostly a well furnished fancy house. 

8: What are the style and mood of my game? How am I going to create them with art, sound, and music?

The style is a first person shooter game; the mood of the game is a serious action based game-play. The mood will be created by the dramatic music that will be playing during the missions and the sounds of guns, explosions, and vehicles will also set the mood of a serious action based game world.

9: How much detail can I afford in my game? Will it be rich and varied or sparse and uncluttered? How does this affect the way the game is played?

The detail is going to be rich and varied; it’s going to affect the game-play because it takes the player to have a more sense of actually being in a U.S Task Force trying to clear the drug cartels in Cuba. The detail will show the culture of Cuba but also the details of the soldiers. 

Emotional Dimension:

1: Does my game have a significant emotional dimension? What emotions will my game world include?

The game wouldn’t really have "emotional dimension" only in the case of the player. If the player connects with his soldiers on his unit then he can have a deep emotion connected to them, therefore the player will be more tactical and have to use strategy in the missions to take the drug cartels down and keep their soldiers alive. It all depends on the player and if they want that connection to their soldiers.

2: How does emotion serve the entertainment value of my game? Is it a key element of the plot? Does it motivate characters in the game or the player himself?

Emotion will make the game-play either harder or easier. If the players want to have that connection with their soldiers, then they will be tactical so that their soldiers will survive, thus making the chance of completing the mission much greater. If the player doesn’t have an emotional connection with their soldiers, they won’t be tactical and their soldiers will most likely die and the chances of completing the missions are going to be slim. Caring about your unit and your soldiers is motivation because you want to complete the missions. 

3: What emotions will I try to inspire in the player? How will I do this? What will be at stake?

The emotions that will arise are something along the lines of creating a brotherhood with your soldiers. You would want to keep them alive so they can help you take down the drug cartels and finish the mission with the least amount of U.S Task Force casualties. The stake of not caring about your soldiers is asking for a harder game-play because you won’t have back-up because since you’re not using strategies, they will die making the game-play harder to complete missions.

Ethical Dimension:

1: What constitutes right and wrong in my game? What player actions do I reward and what do I punish?  

The civilians walking around the communities won’t be able to be targeted upon. If you try to shoot a civilian or a hostage you are trying to save, you’re going to have to restart the mission or go back to a checkpoint. The reward of taking down the drug cartels is the satisfaction of cleaning Cuba and saving their communities, also with ever mission completed, you can upgrade your weapons and armor for your unit.

2: How will I explain the ethical dimensions of the world to the player? What tells him how to behave and what is expected of him?

The game will have tips and rules that will show up like "remember, no shooting your team or civilians" or "complete missions with less than 1 causality in your team to upgrade weapons and armor".

3: If my game world includes conflict or competition, is it represented as violence or as something else (racing to a finish, winning an economic competition, outmaneuvering the other side)?

The representation of conflict (the drug cartels and the U.S Task Force) is going to be representated by violence. It’s simple, take down the drug cartels.

4: What range of choices am I offering my player? Are there both violent and nonviolent ways to accomplish something? Is the player rewarded in any way for minimizing casualties or is he punished for ignoring them?

The players won’t have a choice in killing the main drug cartel boss, however, they will have the choice to either sneak around the security and just only kill the boss or go all out and kill all the security as well as the boss. Both will be rewarding, the sneaking around the security effectively and completing the mission will result in upgraded weapons to have silencers, more tactical gadgets, and tips on how to sneak into the next mission. If you take the other approach, killing everyone and being loud with no causalities, then this will result in upgraded weapon firepower and more armor.

5: In many games, the end -winning the game- justifies any means that the game allows. Do I want to define the victory conditions in such a way that not all means are acceptable?

The end of the game will simply just be a mission in whom the player has accumulated the weapons and tactics from previous missions and take down the biggest drug cartel in all of Cuba. 

6: Are any other ethical questions present in my game world? Can my player lie, cheat, steal, break promises, or double-cross anyone? Can she abuse, torture, or enslave anyone? Are there positive or negative consequences for these actions?

No, the player will not be able to make choices on who to kill, they have to kill the drug cartel. However, they can choose not to kill the security guards. 

7: Does my world contain any ethical ambiguities or moral dilemmas? How does making one choice over another affect the player, the plot, and the game-play?

The only moral dilemma is if you’re going to allow the security guards to kill your unit or if you’re going to use tactics to make your unit survive and also sneak around the security. In the end, it’s up to the player if they have morals or not. If they have high morals then they will try their hardest to sneak around the security to prevent casualties. If the player has no morals or doesn't care, then they simply wouldn't care if their unit dies. 

8: How realistic is my portrayal of violence? Does the realism appropriately serve the entertainment value of the game?

The violence in the game is going to show blood but to a minimal. For example, when you shoot the guards or if they shoot your unit, there will be a blood splatter but it wouldn't be exaggerated. When the guard or a soldier dies, their body will lie on the floor and there will be a small blood pool around them. Their won’t be any "head-shots" with explosive brains flying or dismemberment. The realism of the violence is going to serve the game-play evenly because it’s going to be enough to show blood but it’s not going to be exaggerated to the point that it makes the players not want to play.

Donkey Kong

Time limit for exercise - 20 minutes.

Answer these questions & post on your blog:

1) How would you describe the level of engagement compared to more action oriented games from the same period?

            The level of engagement in the game Donkey Kong is more player involving compared to the rest of the other action games in this period. You play as this plumber trying to save a blonde girl named Pauline from a gorilla who is throwing barrels down at you. Your goal is avoid the barrels and get to the princess. Its not really action based but more upon stratgy because you have time everything correctly so you can avoid the barrels. Other action games are based on survival and reaching a high score while here is about strategy and saving someone.

2) What role does setting and characterisation play in the game?

            Characterisations plays a great role in Donkey Kong because it also gives the player a chance to empathize for the character Mario. An overweight plumber trying to save a blonde kidnapped girl named Pauline from a gorilla named Donkey Kong. There is a small story line to this with a reachable goal so it gives the player a chance to empathize for Mario and his determination to save the kidnapped girl Pauline.

3) How do spells, pickups and power-ups assist the game play?

            There was no spells, pickups, or power-ups to assist the game play in this game Donkey Kong.