Blog Post #5

This I sadly our last week of blog post and we’re ending it with world gaming for social change. This topic is controversial to me, I have mixed feelings on it. I have much respect for all those who game, You Go! But I guess being a 90’s baby I still don’t understand and fully support that kids/parents/families spend most of their time inside and stuck on a screen rather than out enjoying something else. Anyways something that did catch my attention and even though I don’t game it got me to want to support gamers was threatening negativity towards female gamers! In Chris Suellentrop’s article of Can Video Games Survive?, he mentions of a campaign called GamerGate who has nothing to do but to target and put down women who game or want to make a change in female portrayal in videogames. It upset me reading that two of the three women who received recognition in the gaming world had to flee there homes for receiving threats. Suellentrop also mentioned a woman who had to cancel her speech at a university on a threat of a mass shooting if she spoke. I find this beyond saddening and disturbing. Women are put down for every single little thing in the world, I don’t understand why males can’t seem to handle the fact that women can be just as good or even better at the same things as males are. Its sad because Suellentrop’s article does like he said make it seem like videogames could possibly have a backlash do to this negativity but I do believe that they will survive. I believe this because women have put up and fought so much more that I know this won’t stop female gamers, females in general especially when nearly half of all video gamers are women. In the article Nearly Half of All Video-Gamers Are Woman by Larry Frum talks about how women do undergo harassment and all this negativity for gaming and wanting to be involved in gamer communities but he also mentions how there is almost just as many females as males gaming. Frum says that there are 45% of female gamers, 46% are female game purchasers and 31% of adult women make up the gaming population. This is huge. Women are making it happen, they can accomplish so much if they all unite, keep gaming, creating and making positive changes. Frum also mentioned how there are some men gamers who sometimes stand up and defend women gamers just to look like a hero or as they are called “white-knights” once again. The thing is I truly believe that more and more female gamers will start showing that they are their own hero’s, that they are no longer damsels in distress rather the knights, and that they are just as good as anyone else at being gamers. This is why I have mixed feelings in gaming because things like this I’m like “yes go game make a change!” I guess all I can hope for is that games really do bring positive change for the world and humanity. I enjoy gaming and I will participate whenever I can but I am more of an outdoors kind of person if there is ever protests and events to support any good cause and I will be there!

If anyone wants to try out some games that help give a different perspective on social justice issues visit http://www.gamesforchange.com

I played the game called parable of polygons and it was okay but it was kind of intriguing. There’s two different types of shapes yellow triangles and blue squares and they all have faces. They are all mixed up and the point is you want to make them all happy or at least content as to where they are placed. So some will already be happy but some won’t and you want to move those who aren’t but the thing is the polygons will only stop being unhappy if there is at least 1/3 of their same shape living in their surrounding area. At first it was pretty easy but as you went on it became harder. There were more of one shape than the other or they were placed in a certain way that couldn’t be arranged to please both shapes. It just made me think of minorities and whit Americans how we all live in areas separated from each other and when a minorities start moving into white neighborhoods someone will be unhappy and when gentrification starts happening in low income neighborhoods we as minorities are very unhappy. Guess it’s just hard to please everyone.

Frump, L. (2013). Nearly Half of All Video-Gamers Are Women. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/tech/gaming-gadgets/female-gamers/

Suelletrop, C. (2014). Can Video Games Survive? The Disheartening GamerGate Campaign. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the-disheartening-gamergate-campaign.html?ref=international&_r=0