(The literature review for this paper can be found in this previous post.) Study overview As indicated above, our purpose for this study was to enter the literature on gender differences in game playing with two variations on the extant literature. One of these was to include male and female assessments of game playing gratifications…
Category: Digital Games
Situational and gender comparisons of digital game players’ preferences
This three-part post comes from a 2007 International Communication Association conference paper. The research was an attempt to understand if gender was as large of a factor in player’s experiences and preferences as specific situations of playing digital games. INTRODUCTION The digital game industry has become a powerful media and cultural force over the…
OUYA Visits Chicago Game Developers
Julie Uhrman, the founder and CEO of OUYA, visited the Chicagoland tonight at a function organized by the Chicago chapter of the International Game Developers Association. Her goal was to introduce to the new open source video game console to local game developers, as well as answer their questions and gather their ideas ahead of…
The Nintendo Wii U Experience
Thanks to the technology grant offered by my wonderful university, I was able to purchase a Deluxe Nintendo Wii U — which means it comes with Nintendo Land so that you do not have to purchase it separately. As part of my ongoing series as Dr. Geek for Clearance Bin Review, I wrote about my initial reaction…
Making Sense of Entertainment in Virtual Worlds
In September of 2008, with the ink on my doctorate barely dry, I jumped a plane and landed in Denmark. I had accepted a post-doctorate research fellowship at Roskilde University with the Virtual Worlds Research Project. My main research project with the group would turn out to be a qualitative experiment to understand how people…
Hypersexualism in Gameplay and the Problem of the Action Heroine
The history of consumption of video games and computer games has largely been of one-sided demographics: the notion that men are more likely than women, boys more than girls, to play the games that had been the backbone of the gaming industry. This notion has also become entrenched in the stereotype of the gamer as…
Playing Digital Games as Scaffolding
[This is a research proposal from 2005 on how a child’s cognitive developmental level could interact with digital games’ formal features. The entire proposal, with references, can be found here.] Introduction The history of the mass media has born witness to a chief concern: how will interacting with this or that medium and/or its content…
Women and Video Game Addiction: Experimenting with research narratives
This is an experimental research paper relaying women’s stories, gathered with Sense-Making Methodology interviews, of times they felt they were addicted to video games. My analysis, and thus the framing for this paper’s “narrative”, focuses on the dynamics of power in and around the women’s lives during this period of addiction. This representation of the…
Wii U: Whoopie?
At E3 today, the boffo electronics bazaar in Los Angeles where companies unveil their latest and greatest to tantalize the geeks in all of us, Nintendo unveiled their (much) anticipated new system to answer PlayStation 3’s Move and X-Box 360’s Kinect. While Nintendo’s Wii was revolutionary when it first came out, its sales have been…
