Posts Tagged 'geek'

”Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games”
Anthropology, Games / gaming, Online communities, Study of geek culture

”Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games”

·5 comments

Errant Signal released a wonderful video yesterday about politics in video games and the importance of engaging in critical discourse about them.

Title ”Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games”, the video opens with a description of gamers’ attitudes towards critical discussions: on one hand, they want video games to be taken seriously and respected. They want their gaming knowledge and skills to be acknowledged. On the other hand, they can react rather aggressively to any form of critical analysis of, say, the representations of ethnic groups, women, LGBT or gender roles in games.

Geek Girl Survey Update
Anthropology, Definitions of Geek, Geek Girl Survey, Gender, Study of geek culture

Geek Girl Survey Update

·0 comments

Greetings geeklings!

I will soon finish compiling data from the Geek Girl Survey I announced last August! Thanks to everyone who answered my call or shared it! I have been swamped with emails from enthusiastic geek girls of all ages, and I am delighted to have obtained a lot more data than I originally expected. So many people made Portal references that I’m considering creating a new slogan for this blog: something like ”For science”. It’s a work in progress.

Geek Girls: I need your help!
Anthropology, Definitions of Geek, Geek Girl Survey, Gender, Study of geek culture

Geek Girls: I need your help!

·30 comments

I am looking for geek girls and women of all ages to answer a few questions about their involvement in geek culture and their experiences with geek peers. Whether you are 16 or 50 years old, a trekkie, a pegasister or a browncoat, whatever your gender identity or sexual orientation is, or even if you consider yourself more of a nerd than a geek, I want to hear your story.

Confidentiality will be respected, so don’t be afraid to contact me!

Review / 1: Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames by Mia Consalvo
Anthropology, Book Reviews, Games / gaming, Online communities

Review / 1: Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames by Mia Consalvo

·2 comments

I admit without shame that I often cheat when I play video games:  I have skipped missions on Starcraft when loosing repeatedly became too frustrating. I don’t think I have ever played Quake on anything else than Godmode. Cheating allows me to manipulate the game experience, exploit the aspects of it I enjoy the most and free myself from some of the more demanding aspects when I don’t enjoy them. 

However, because I cheat to enjoy easy and fun gaming, I would not go out of my way to cheat. Additionally, I would not cheat if the game-play is enjoyable and rewarding. And I have found that cheating can rob you of some of the best rewards games have to offer. When I got stuck on the final stage of Portal 2, I looked up a walk-through and ended up discovering the final step without wanting to: to this day, I wonder what kind of amazement I would have felt had I been able to figure it out for myself.