Dr. Lambiase, I just dropped off the hard copy of my final project in your mailbox, the one in the Journalism office of the GAB. I've really enjoyed the class, and I've learned a lot; thanks for teaching it.

Final Project

Not much has changed in video game box covers

Men are featured much more frequently than women on the box covers of the best-selling video games, and rarely less than fully-clothed. Any women that appear are often depicted as partially nude, sexualized, marginalized, or some combination thereof.

The previous study was conducted by Smith, Pieper, and Choueiti, in 2004 and covered 74 best-selling games spread across the three major consoles (also called platforms or systems): 25 each for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation 2, and 24 for Nintendo’s Gamecube. It revealed that men dominate covers, and are rarely coded as “partially nude” or as wearing “sexually explicit attire.” The opposite was true for women: less than a third of all video games studied have even one woman on the cover, but 73% of those that did featured partial female nudity. The study made similar findings in every category; of the covers with sexually revealing clothing, 73% put women in that attire, only 33% did so with men. Even games rated E (the video game equivalent of a movie rated G) featured partial nudity, to the tune of 36%.

The most relevant previous study was done by Provenzo in 1991, and looked at 47 of Nintendo’s best-selling video games. This study was the first to analyze box cover art, as the Smith study later would. It found that men outnumbered women on box covers 13 to 1, and also found that even non-gendered characters like aliens and mythical creatures outnumbered women. Also, it determined that men were often portrayed as dominant, while a full third of women were not only not depicted as dominant; they were submissive.

My corpus consists of 74 video games, the 25 best-selling games each for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and the 24 best-selling games for the Wii, according to Amazon.com. Essentially, I am recreating the Smith study almost exactly as it was performed, except on the new generation of video game consoles; the consoles in my study are newer and better, and each one replaces one in the Smith study (Xbox 360 instead of Xbox, etc). My method includes a quantitative analysis of simpler aspects such as the number of men and women, game ratings, etc. I then did a qualitative analysis wherein I coded the amount of nudity, the sexual nature of a character’s clothing, a character’ submission/dominance and any sexual behaviors displayed. Worth noting: many video game characters are soldiers, mercenaries, spies, or otherwise engaged in career violence, so I coded characters with bloodthirsty, determined, stoic, or otherwise difficult-to-categorize appearances as simply dominant. Results were compiled and divided according to each game’s rating: either E, T (like the PG-13 rating for movies), and M (comparable to the R rating; games with this rating cannot be purchased by anyone under 17 without a parent present). Additional provision: games are often developed “cross-platform,” meaning the same game is made for several game consoles in order to reach more of the market; I counted each occurrence of the game separately. For example, Call of Duty 4 is available for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, and was counted as two instances of an M-rated game with one fully-dressed, non-sexual, dominant man and no women on its cover.

Predictably, I found that men still dominate video game box covers. Men were present on 49 of the 74 box covers; women could be found on only 23. Of the 49 depictions of men, 48 were coded as fully clothed, leaving only 2% partially nude. Women were depicted as fully clothed in 11 out of the 23 covers they appeared on; 56% were partially nude. Just 6 box covers featured a woman as the main character; two were coded as partially nude, one as as sexual, two as both, and only one as neither fully-clothed nor non-sexual. One game, Mass Effect (rated M), featured a male main character and a fully-dressed non-sexual woman slightly behind and left of him in a supporting role. But there was an alien behind and to the man’s right, in a similar supporting role, and another alien’s face spanning the width of the cover across the top; this one had a menacing look and was apparently the main bad guy. Here, exactly as in the Provenzo report, non-gendered characters outnumbered women. Men appeared dominant on 34 covers, or 69%, while women were dominant on 3 covers, or 13%. The Nintendo Wii had more E-rated best-selling games than the other two systems combined, but men were just as prevalent and women just as rare. Overall, the typical depiction of men on T- and M-rated game covers was dominant, fully-dressed, and often carrying one or several weapons. I was unable to come up with a typical depiction of women; they were literally too rare to draw any meaningful conclusions.

The results of my abbreviated study fall very much in line with the results of previous studies. I found a steady supply of women on box covers from games like Guitar Hero, where women were often depicted as partially nude band members (but never as the band’s leader). I also saw a pronounced split between the Xbox 360 & Playstation 3, which had many best-selling M-rated games, and the Wii, whose best-seller list is almost exclusively populated with E-rated games. If I could do a more in-depth study, I would go beyond the box cover art and explore the correlation between characters’ representations on game covers versus in the game. The game mentioned earlier, Mass Effect, features a relatively marginalized woman on its cover, but my research indicates she is an important major character. Other possible avenues to explore include finding out how often a woman depicted as partially nude and/or sexualized on the cover actually plays a minor role, or wears more clothing, or acts more demurely in the game; like she was being used as window dressing. I could also examine sexuality vis-à-vis body language, vocal tonality, innuendo, situations, camera angles, music and so on, and compare men and women in this area.

Bibliography

Smith, S.L., Pieper, K., and Choueiti, M. (2004). Video Game Packaging and Ad Copy: Are Gaming Publishers in Compliance with the ARC. Previously unpublished raw data.

Provenzo, E.F. (1991). Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

As promised, here is the next batch of old posts, saved up because of a logging-in problem I'd been having until recently. Also, since I will most likely be posting my final project today, it will appear below this post, since I think that's how blogger does these things. I may re-post it tomorrow morning to make sure it appears at the top, though. Anyway, as promised:

Eleventh Post: The Axe/Dove Conspiracy

Seeing that these two companies were owned by the same parent company wasn’t a big deal for me. I honestly don’t think it reflects poorly on Dove, or at all on Axe. It’s great that Dove is trying to get their message out, and the Axe video we watched was so blatant that it was hard to see it as a threat to feminism or whatever. I don’t think people should ignore whatever Dove has to say simply because another company with the same owner happens to use contrarian images and themes in their ads. It’s not the same company; in fact these two companies operate completely independently of one another. Not a big deal at all in my opinion.

Twelfth Post: Heineken Robot Girl

Wow. I had seen that ad a few times before; I found the music annoying, and that was why I didn’t like it. Also the girl in it looked a little creepy, with her permanent smile and fact that she was a robot. I hadn’t even considered the whole Heineken-keg-as-uterus angle. Pretty shocking stuff. But I wonder, after the ad man got the idea to have a mini-keg stored inside someone, where else can it conceivably fit? I mean, assuming (since it is a beer ad) that they’re using a 108-pound girl, there simply is nowhere else put a mini-keg. They can’t move the keg up and have it come out of her chest, since that would means that for a few seconds, we would be looking at a beer ad without boobs, and we can't have that. Let’s be realistic; that is simply a part of the world we live in. If the ad guys came out and said it was an accident, I would believe them; if they said it was deliberate, that they meant to imply women would be better off with beer for a uterus, then I would be offended and actually pretty pissed. But it’s not like I was going to drink Heineken anyway; it’s not my brew.

Thirteenth Post: Gay-Vague

I’m not sure I follow this whole ‘”gay-vague” concept. If I understand the book and lecture, it’s advertising with secret gay messages encoded, stuff that us in the straight community won’t get, but gays can? Very odd. Isn’t this just the sort of thing that people are always accusing ad men of, that they program in subliminal messages? How have those allegations made people in the industry look so far? And now they’re apparently doing it deliberately. That aside, I think it’s good in a business sense to advertise to gays. All most stereotypes are at least grounded somewhat in truth, and the gay dudes I’ve met are always the best dressed; why not advertise to them? How many straight guys do you know who will see a shirt in an ad and then rush out to buy it? We just don’t shop that way. Advertising to gay dudes may be a way to move more men’s products, since they apparently don’t shop like normal men. So gay-vague advertising is good, I guess.

Fourteenth Post: Pornographic Themes

This was interesting. Everybody knows the first rule in advertising is “sex sells,” but this is taking that to a whole other level. As a guy in college, I am not entirely unfamiliar with porn. Dominance/submission and other long-standing conventions have a proud heritage within the porn world. However, with this concept crossing over into everyday advertising, one worries about the ramifications. Who knows what effect that could have on the psyche of a young girl when she gets older? If she’s internalized, for example, the submissive role women (always) play in porn (except in dominatrix fetish stuff), but she got it through advertising, how many different things are going to be wrong with her? There’s a reason we don’t let kids buy porn, and I don’t actually think it has anything to do with, you know, the actual sex, or at least not exclusively. Thematically, a lot of the stuff in porn (I hear) is stuff for, literally, more mature audiences. A porn viewer needs to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and for that to happen I assume the person has to reach a certain age; ads don't have a minimum viewing age. If this porn theme stuff is out there, it's getting into people's heads long before they'll have developed the ability to seperate the messages within an ad. The girl may be sprawled half-naked at the feet of some dude, but a child wouldn't be able to tell that the message isn't "women should always be sprawled at the feet of men," but rather "buy this shirt."

Fifteenth Post: Complicity in Stereotyping Continued

Women. I hear all the time how women still get less pay than men (although every time I check information.com, law firms are paying both genders the same), and how women still aren’t treated as equals, and I believe it; it’s a problem that needs working on. But when I’m buying groceries, I pass, as I suppose we all do, the celebrity rags, Cosmo, and the Cosmo-like magazines. Every time, it’s always “how to tell when he’s cheating," “how to keep your man interested,” and “new secret ways to please your man that he won’t tell you.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about equal pay and equal rights, but come on. We all know that men are biologically geared towards leading the pack, and women are biologically geared towards having children; we know this. So this is how women fight that huge uphill battle? “How to Tell When He’s Cheating?” Men may be genetically predisposed to think of women as child-rearers without a place in the workforce, but to a certain extent, you (women) do it to yourselves. This is perhaps a little more honesty, or at least forthrightness, than can be found in most people, but this is just the way I feel. Women want to be treated seriously, but you don’t get respect by waving banners; you get it by acting seriously. “How to Keep Your Man Interested?” Try putting down the Cosmo and reading something of substance; engage him in a serious conversation. I've really enjoyed the rare candid conversation with self-aware women, even, especially, when she disagrees with me, provided she can back it up. I’ll be the first to admit, men need to meet women halfway; maybe an agreeable first step for everyone could be to hide all the Cosmos.

Dr. Lambiase, I have been having problems logging in. However, as of now, they appear to be solved. So now I have this backlog of posts I've been writing every week, and I'll just post them as a batch, with four now, and another batch when my hands have recovered.

Seventh Post: Dove Evolution

I think the Dove Evolution spot was pretty interesting. I’ve met models in real life (not bragging here, most of them were pretty dumb), and while they have all been really attractive, most of them bear only a passing resemblance to the photos in their portfolio. I had always assumed there was a lot of hair and makeup work that went into the process, but I had no idea how powerful Photoshop was, how completely it could change a person’s facial structure. I had heard of the spot before, but never watched it. And by the by, the issue is serious, as far as the effects advertising has on girls’ self-esteem and the expectations they place on themselves, but Slob Evolution was pretty hilarious.

Eighth Post: A Girl like Me Video

This video just made me sad. I already knew that lighter-skinned black women were preferred over darker ones in advertising, but I had no idea; I hadn’t even considered the possible effects that bias could have on young black girls. That part when the narrator asked the girl to pick the doll she thought was prettier, and she picked the white one, and then asked her to pick the one that looked like her, was probably the saddest part. The poor girl hesitantly slid the black doll over towards the narrator; she didn’t even pick it up. This video was really eye-opening.

Ninth Post: Nerds

This wasn’t really a big revelation to me, just based on what I see around campus. There is effectively no such thing as a black nerd. Sure, there are white nerds aplenty, but if a black kid dresses, acts, or talks like a nerd, he seems to be ostracized. I wonder what happens if a black kid gets really good grades, if he’s looked down on as being somehow a traitor to his race. I thought that one line from Bamboozled we heard was pretty insightful, when Pierre was on the radio show talking about how anytime a black man tries to lift himself up, all the others pull him back down, “like crabs in a bucket,” or something like that. That line paints a pretty ugly picture of the fate that awaits black nerds.

Tenth Post: Music Videos

I used to watch MTV, mostly for the music videos, back when I was in high school. I think most people nowadays do, like it’s a phase we go through. But even when I was in high school I was smart enough to tell the difference between the fiction created in the music videos and the real world. It didn’t ever occur to me that this was normal, that normal people lived like that, with the champagne and the women and so forth. I was aware at the time that the lurid images I was being shown would occur, if ever, only rarely, during the wildest excesses of the most lavish parties that only the entertainment industry elite attended. However, something else that didn’t even occur to me until recently was that a lot of people somehow don’t make that distinction; they assume if they get rich enough they can live the life they see on MTV. I don’t know what to say to those people. Just realizing that some people see this as possible is eye-opening, and has warranted some reflection on my part.

Sixth Post: Complicity in Stereotyping

I was walking to the library today when I heard/saw a black guy leaving Kerr yelling out the lyrics to a hip-hop song. I paused to listen, and in a few seconds heard the words Fu--, Bi---, Cu--, Pu---, A--, Sh--, and of course Ni----. Some of them I heard repeatedly, and I stopped to listen for no longer than ten seconds. My thoughts ran somewhere along these lines:

For more than a hundred and forty years blacks have been fighting to be taken seriously, to be thought of as equals, and to eliminate all racial slurs from the vernacular of the allegedly oppressive white majority. Members of the black civil rights movement have rallied; they've boycotted; they've brought a million men to the steps of the National Mall. They've adapted to our system of government and lobby for a cornucopia of legislative agendas. They've made real progress and have had to fight tooth and nail for much of it. And in the early years, when the old guard of the deep south was still in power, where they fought they often paid dearly for it. They were beaten, raped, or both. They had lye thrown in their eyes, been attacked by dogs and been firehosed, tear-gassed, and tasered. They've been lynched.

And then there's this kid, walking down the sidewalk, with many people in earshot, literally yelling out rhyming couplets of vitriol and ignorance. Completely unaware of the suffering and the resiliency of all who had come before. He was acting like an attention-starved child, who resorts to yelling out bad words because negative attention is better than none at all. Or like a coward with low self-esteem who uses shocking and provocative behavior to say, "look at me, pay attention to me!"

The more I thought about it, the sadder I became. I felt sad for the wasted sacrifice of everyone who died, or suffered, or knew someone who did, so that this guy could own property or vote or attend college (not to mention not be a slave). I felt sad for his parents, who most likely have memories from the civil rights movement, and who see what their son has reduced it to. But most of all, I pity him, for being completely oblivious to all of it.

Fifth Post: Video Game Imagery

Speaking as a person who dabbles in the occasional video game, I can speak from some experience. It has been my opinion that video games, being primarily marketed to guys from the early teens and up, sometimes reflect some of the same imagery as music videos. Or at least, their creation stems from the same set of fantasies. However, the rules regarding sex in video games are very strict. The ESRB, the governing body for the video game rating system has, for better or worse, all but enacted a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to showing sex onscreen. Interesting to note, the most infamous violations of this policy, in the highly publicized Grand Theft Auto games, involve no actual onscreen sex, only some deliberately cartoonish moaning and a car bouncing up and down for a few seconds. With graphics advancing rapidly, it has become possible to faithfully recreate actual naked bodies, but this too is exceedingly rare.

As to stereotypical portrayals of women, I would say that the industry as a whole has a long way to go. If there is ever an unattractive woman in a video game, it is as a joke. And every character designer knows that when women are in video games, from martial artist ninjas to special ops commandos, the clothing credo is always "less is more." However, I don't think there's a causal link between violence in a video game and disrespectful attitudes towards women. Just the opposite, in fact. When I see a violent video game that features a female character (often of unlikely proportions) slicing and dicing or shooting her way through a legion of bad guys in little more than lingerie, it only reminds me that the whole thing is fantasy.

Fourth Post: School Gunman Race

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071011/ap_on_re_us/school_shooting

At first I didn't think anything of how and why the shooter's race was mentioned. It seemed a normal thing to mention in the course of such an article. But later I got to thinking that maybe they mentioned it as if to say that they were surprised that he was white. However, I honestly still think it at wasn't a bad idea to include his race. I see no harm done to anyone by accurately telling the full story. Maybe there's a level to this I'm missing out on, but this is how I see it.

Second Post: Stereotypes of Disabled Persons

When I think of disabled people, my first thought usually doesn't go to mentally handicapped people. So I thought I'd examine some of the depressing stereotypes about them.

I think most people don't tend to see mentally handicapped people as people. I think they're usually thought of as punch lines that rather conveniently don't know people are laughing at them. However, I don't think these stereotypes are from news coverage or mass media. Rather, I think these assumptions and attitudes are part of a whole mindset that is instilled from a very young age. One of my earliest memories is playing soccer after school, making some sort of mistake, and thus being called a retard. From then on, I noticed that most everyone uses "retard," "tard," or "f**king retard" as a sort of go-to insult, one you can use in any situation, and are used at least as commonly as any cuss word.

If anything, I think mass media and news coverage should be applauded for their sensitive, PC approach to referring to the mentally handicapped. I usually get pretty frustrated with how PC everything has to be nowadays, with all the time and effort spent avoiding hurting anyone's feelings, but in this case, I think I see the light.

Third Post: The Jena 6 Coverage

To be honest, I hadn't really kept up with the whole Jena 6 thing. I know it's a cause celebre being championed by Al Sharpton; I know that six black kids beat a white kid into a 3-hour mini-coma, and that they were subsequently charged with attempted murder. I didn't really see any legitimate controversy. Of course there is the usual blind solidarity one sees from some of the more prominent members of the NAACP, in this case unhappy with the attempted murder charge. To which I say, you don't pit six guys against one if all you're looking for is a fight; they should have reasonably known that a fight stacked that ridiculously to one side puts the one in reasonable fear for his life. I would think that much was common sense. I was prepared to just ignore the rest of the coverage, however, there were some black students at the free speech area the other day, one just silently holding a rather poorly-tied hangman's noose. I think this could be considered a sort of coverage, albeit one lacking subtlety and any sense of objectivity. The Jena 6 thing wouldn't be such a big deal if there weren't people across the country with small demonstrations like this one, and I bet I'm not the first one to get new information walking by one.

I generally try to ignore racial issues, as they seem to only drive people apart, rather than make forward progress. For my money, taking sides in a legal case where one side's cause of action goes to race usually equates to choosing between a rotten guy and a rottener guy, with both sides racing to the nearest collection of cameras to talk about how they're fighting for justice, to implicitly call the other guy a racist, and to generally make melodramatic and indignant noises for as long as those cameras are on. I try to ignore these cases because after watching the whole process repeat itself to the point of predictability, they began to annoy.

However, that noose got my attention, as it was surely intended to, and once I got over the poor knot-tying skills, I got on some cable news and the BBC online. The BBC had an article about how David Bowie gave $10,000 to help in the Jena 6's defense. Predictably, the NAACP' chairman put words in Bowie's mouth by saying that he "shares our outrage." And that pretty much set the tone for the rest of my afternoon, as almost every article quoted someone who either felt vehemently that the Jena 6 were wronged, or someone that tip-toed around the idea that they did viciously beat another kid in a six-to-one fight, and that they can legally be tried as adults under certain circumstances, this being one of them. Honestly, I just hope the whole thing ends soon so I can stop hearing about it. I know that sounds apathetic, but even the most shocking case can be made to bore people if you put it on every news channel 24/7 day after day. To sum up, I would characterize the media's coverage of the whole Jena issue as obsessive, sensationalized, and (quite literally) mind-numbingly ubiquitous.