Because of last week’s reading from Nayar, I had feminism and depictions of females with reference to technology on the brain. Likewise, Halo: Reach came out last week, so I have video games on the brain as well. My wife does not think so highly of my video game habit--her words: “I hate them [video games]”--so I looked to the past to find out why this might be. Recalling my youth, I went to YouTube to scrounge up old (circa 1985) commercials for Nintendo games quickly finding this gem, an advertisement for the first Legend of Zelda game. The message of this video seems pretty apparent: Video games are made for white, upper-middle class teenage boys who may or may not be nerds and/or Vanilla Ice wannabes. While I am certain that I was the target audience for this commercial when it was released, I shudder to think that I could have, at any age, been influenced by such an awkwardly pitched item.
Bad rapping is not the only thing that is going on here, however. From Nayar: “...[T]he woman’s projected and real role in the use of...technological artifacts has prompted the artifact’s development in particular ways” (p. 116). I reviewed other early video game commercials, from Atari and Sega as well as Nintendo, and in almost every case it was males playing, with women either being non-present or acting as spectators to the action. Granted, there were market forces at work here, and pre-teen/teenage boys had likely already been identified as the most likely video game players from early video game trends of the 1960’s and 1970’s (i.e. SpaceWar). Yet, I can’t help but think that these commercial set the popular tone of video and computer games being a primarily male-oriented medium all the way up to the present day. Whether incidental or intentional, the exclusion of female players from the commercials of the first generation of home video game consoles created a cultural precedent.
Of course, it’s not just males that are being given the privileged position in this commercial. Certainly, as depicted in the commercial, nerds of the 1980’s could take pride in being the subject matter experts of contemporary gaming (“You mean you haven’t played it yet!? You can play it on my Nintendo Entertainment System!”). Likewise, my “digital native” ears found especially jarring the narrator’s “...your parent’s help you hook it up.” I forget that the Regan-era power dynamics hadn’t yet adopted the concept of youth being tech savvy to the point of (rather comfortably) usurping authority. Although this is taken for granted today, the proto-hacker character that Matthew Broderick portrays in WarGames (1983) was a novel concept at the time. I remember my parents hooking my various series of video game consoles only once--the very first time because (and this was probably because I was only four and couldn’t read the instructions).
Fast forward a quarter of a century or so. A commercial exemplar from the present day is the recent campaign for Halo: Reach and it provides an enlightening contrast about where video games are today. A few glaring things stand-out. First, the “players” are gone. Segments of the commercial are even shot from a first-person perspective. Gaming has evolved into an ‘experience’, an ‘immersion’. Second, gender is non-present. There is even suggestion of female features in the wounded protagonist's face. Third, the game system is vastly de-emphasized compared to the 1980’s. Although this last point can be contributed to a change in the industry’s business model (emphasis on selling games [software] over new systems [hardware]), it is still important to recognize that the shift is contextualized visually in the presentation of the experience of gaming itself. Gone are the controllers and TV screens, the living room and couch: the fourth wall has been removed completely from the the gaming experience and thus it’s need for a rhetorical player--be it nerd or white-boy rapper.
Bad rapping is not the only thing that is going on here, however. From Nayar: “...[T]he woman’s projected and real role in the use of...technological artifacts has prompted the artifact’s development in particular ways” (p. 116). I reviewed other early video game commercials, from Atari and Sega as well as Nintendo, and in almost every case it was males playing, with women either being non-present or acting as spectators to the action. Granted, there were market forces at work here, and pre-teen/teenage boys had likely already been identified as the most likely video game players from early video game trends of the 1960’s and 1970’s (i.e. SpaceWar). Yet, I can’t help but think that these commercial set the popular tone of video and computer games being a primarily male-oriented medium all the way up to the present day. Whether incidental or intentional, the exclusion of female players from the commercials of the first generation of home video game consoles created a cultural precedent.
Of course, it’s not just males that are being given the privileged position in this commercial. Certainly, as depicted in the commercial, nerds of the 1980’s could take pride in being the subject matter experts of contemporary gaming (“You mean you haven’t played it yet!? You can play it on my Nintendo Entertainment System!”). Likewise, my “digital native” ears found especially jarring the narrator’s “...your parent’s help you hook it up.” I forget that the Regan-era power dynamics hadn’t yet adopted the concept of youth being tech savvy to the point of (rather comfortably) usurping authority. Although this is taken for granted today, the proto-hacker character that Matthew Broderick portrays in WarGames (1983) was a novel concept at the time. I remember my parents hooking my various series of video game consoles only once--the very first time because (and this was probably because I was only four and couldn’t read the instructions).
Fast forward a quarter of a century or so. A commercial exemplar from the present day is the recent campaign for Halo: Reach and it provides an enlightening contrast about where video games are today. A few glaring things stand-out. First, the “players” are gone. Segments of the commercial are even shot from a first-person perspective. Gaming has evolved into an ‘experience’, an ‘immersion’. Second, gender is non-present. There is even suggestion of female features in the wounded protagonist's face. Third, the game system is vastly de-emphasized compared to the 1980’s. Although this last point can be contributed to a change in the industry’s business model (emphasis on selling games [software] over new systems [hardware]), it is still important to recognize that the shift is contextualized visually in the presentation of the experience of gaming itself. Gone are the controllers and TV screens, the living room and couch: the fourth wall has been removed completely from the the gaming experience and thus it’s need for a rhetorical player--be it nerd or white-boy rapper.
No comments:
Post a Comment