LINKS - Places to hang, Research, Conferences


HANG OUTS

Game Girl Advance: Major-domo Jane Pinckard is a dedicated gamer and conference panellist, As a consequence this blog has attracted an enormous range of articles from the people she has met along the way: some irreverant, some outstanding. Jane herself posts most days about something.

Women Gamers is an encylopaedic space convened by Dr Kathryn Wright, with rants about everything from stereotypes to a policy on boob sizes. Regular themed pop quizzes invite people like you to answer questions like "what character would you like to be in a game?" Dr Wright herself is a clinical psychologist and writes on a number of topics including violence in games, sexual assault and the psychology of the female market.

Plaything was a major international event organised by Josephine Starrs in 2003 on behald of dlux media arts. Focusing on current and future trends in the field of digital games, a number of Australian and international game designers, theorists and artists came to speak and show their work.

Games Studies - is a journal inviting comment from a range of disciplines. ... check out Helen Kenedy's article, 'Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?'.

The Grrl Gamer site is organised by platform, with special forums dedicated to discussions on Sim City and Everquest. Grrl Gamer also deal with non-electronic games and games for younger girls.

BigKid is a blogspot hosted by a group of Australian gamers.

Trigger: Game Art was an exciting survey exhibition of creative game narratives and riffs on game themes curated by Rebecca Cannon. Originally housed at gamma space in Melbourne on 14-25th May 2002, most of the games are linked from the site and still available for play online. Selectparks is a media laboratory based in Melbourne. The site is packed with playable experiments made using conventional and unsual game design tools. Selectparks' most famous work to date is acmipark, - a multiplayer 3D persistent world that recreates the architecture of Federation Square in virtual space. TERRANOVA is a peer-reveiwed type blogspace about gaming with an emphasis on virtual worlds. Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), such as Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies are discussed and there is a great big "rolodex" of useful research to trall through.

RESEARCH

A recent poll by the Entertainment Software Association of America found that more women were playing games than teenage boys (26% women 18+, 21% boys 6 to 17). Furthermore, 43% of people who purchase computer games are men and 57% are women. 53% of people who purchase console games are men and 47% are women. SIGIS- Strategies of Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society -is a research partnership between five centres in the European Union. All the research is publicly available, although it requires signing up to the site. 'Designing Inclusion: The development of ICT products to include women in the Information Society' by Els Rommes, Irma van Slooten, Ellen van Oost, Nelly Oudshoorn is a bible for strategies for inclusive game design. While all the chapters are not directly addressing game but rather entertainment in general, the vast majority tackle topics such as the role of fun and play, the empowerment of game designers and what women want to see in the characters designed for them.
Helen Jøsok Gansmo, who participated in The Gender Game and Designing Inclusion has also published a leaflet for game designers:Fun and Play: Design, marketing and use of New Media entertainment by and for women and girls.' Aphra Kerr from Dublin University has published a paper called 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun!' which is a very interesting study about four different inclusion stories which to varying degrees encouraged women to play digital games. The case study is based on interviews with two marketing professionals working for a multinational console manufacturing and publishing company and ten interviews with female game players aged 18 and over." 'The Gender Game: A study of Norwegian computer game designers' by Helen Jøsok Gansmo, Hege Nordli, Knut H. Sørensen is a compelling study of attitudes in four game design companies. Based on interviews, it uncovered that none of the informants had researched how to address their female audiences.
'Multiple Pleasures - Women and Gaming'  by T.L. Taylor is an analysis of female players of massively multiplayer games, with an emphasis on EverQuest. T.L. Taylor is also one of the people behind the TERRANOVA blogspace.    

CONFERENCES

Women in Games Conference 2004 was held at the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, 10th-11th June 2004. All the papers are online, and you can read them by clicking on "2004" and then "presentations." We're hoping that big things came out of the Games + Girls one day Symposium at Auckland Town Hall on 7th July 2004. Upcoming is the Womens Games Conference in Austin, Texas, 9th-10th Septemeber 2004.