In this article, we examine the position of women in Czech video game journalism and the strategies they use to cope with sexism. To this end, we conducted eight in-depth interviews with currently ...active women journalists. According to our respondents, their work is judged more harshly because they are women and they have to deal with gender boundaries and stereotypes, sometimes conforming to them to prevent further harassment. In this regard, our respondents were criticized (as well as praised) for their physical appearance and treated as less competent than their male colleagues. All respondents agreed that they were repeatedly told by various parties—players, colleagues, and developers—that they were not good enough as game journalists (and never would be). We argue that women game journalists are pronouncedly affected by sexism and misogyny as their expert role directly challenges toxic gaming masculinities.
This paper aims to analyse the tension between the universal themes of the horror genre that are appealing for the global public and the local character of the digital games developed by smaller ...companies/studios from the semi-peripheral countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To examine in-game representation of game spaces as well as the authorial intention and production processes behind their inclusion, we combine close readings of the two titles with interviews with their designers of two digital games: Someday You'll Return and The Medium. Both games target an international audience but heavily feature real-life domestic locations and landmarks. The digitally represented physical space is also a vehicle for the narration, which is centred around memories of personal trauma of the in-game characters. While using the concepts of hauntology, postmemory, and folk horror, we try to understand the process of creating stories that appeal to an international audience but is heavily rooted in very specific local folklore (Someday You'll Return) or painful national history (The Medium). This phenomenon can lead to both popularisation of new aesthetics in global market, as well as to perpetuating stereotypical narratives about national cultures and histories.
In this article, we argue that fannish histories should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia over past experiences of one's own media fandom. Instead they should be understood as complex narratives ...which combine various historical layers (personal, productional, fictional) and influence the future reception of and anticipation for sequels. They also shed light on the personal histories of fans, which are often juxtaposed with extratextual and fictional histories of a video game series. The subjective nature of these historical discourses is not to be seen as a constraint but as a feature of everyday history which points to the prominence of historicizing in fan cultures of video game series. These topics are examined in the selected multimodal material from the site DeviantArt consisting of fan art pieces, authorial captions, and respective comments inspired by two single-player video game series: Tomb Raider and Mass Effect.
This article explores the strategies of queer playing of video games and their relationship to the heteronormative game culture. Its premise is that most video games are, either implicitly or ...explicitly, heteronormative and the inscribed player of such games is in the majority of cases a heterosexual male. In order to achieve the same level of identification with an avatar and to enjoy a similar gameplay experience as the heterosexual player, the LGBT player may have to deploy various strategies to challenge the game and work around it, or to find the LGBT content which some more progressive games offer. The study is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with six players (5 males and 1 female) who identified themselves both as homosexual and as players of the Mass Effect or Dragon Age series, games that include several opportunities to initiate same-sex romance. We have identified three different queer playing strategies: imaginative play (queer reading of unspecified or heterosexual characters), stylized performance (the use of gay stereotypes to mark one as queer) and role-playing of a LGBT character. However, players do not seek sexuality in games to the same extent as they do in film or TV, and they tend to use these strategies, and especially the latter two, reluctantly or with reservations. These reservations may be linked to our finding that LGBT players consider their gay (or lesbian) identities disconnected from their identities as players or gamers. This can be explained by the mutual exclusivity of gay communities and the heteronormative game culture.
This paper examines the strategies of social media users commenting on the so-called refugee crisis. This qualitative analysis of the role of passion politics discourse on social media primarily ...employs the concept of rhetorical fallacies. It aims to stress the interdiscursive nature of immigration as a topic. It is connected with anti-liberalism, anti-feminism (or homophobia), and conservatism. For the purpose of this study, we used techniques for social-media monitoring to analyze social-media conversations related to migration on the Facebook page of Parlamentnílisty.cz news during the Czech parliamentary and presidential elections. This analysis showed that rhetorical fallacies were used in a relatively small amount of the studied material. Only 13% of all comments contained rhetorical fallacies, among which the most used was the ad hominem fallacy (55% of the total), "call for fear" (11%) and "false authority" (7%).
This paper examines the strategies of social media users commenting on the so-called refugee crisis. This qualitative analysis of the role of passion politics discourse on social media primarily ...employs the concept of rhetorical fallacies. It aims to stress the interdiscursive nature of immigration as a topic. It is connected with anti-liberalism, anti-feminism (or homophobia), and conservatism. For the purpose of this study, we used techniques for social-media monitoring to analyze social-media conversations related to migration on the Facebook page of Parlamentnílisty.cz news during the Czech parliamentary and presidential elections. This analysis showed that rhetorical fallacies were used in a relatively small amount of the studied material. Only 13% of all comments contained rhetorical fallacies, among which the most used was the ad hominem fallacy (55% of the total), "call for fear" (11%) and "false authority" (7%).
Vážené čtenářky, vážení čtenáři, držíte v rukou metodickou „kuchařku“ pro projektový den propojující téma kariérní výchovy a rovných příležitostí dívek a chlapců. Jejím cílem je pomoci rozšířit ...spektrum povolání a studijních oborů, o nichž dívky a chlapci uvažují. Rozšířit jej za hranice tradičních představ o tom, jaká povolání se hodí pro muže a jaká pro ženy. V základu této publikace totiž stojí myšlenka, že každý by měl mít možnosti uplatnit svůj talent a rozvíjet své sny bez ohledu na to, zda to zapadá do stereotypů o společenských rolích žen a mužů. Řada výzkumů z českého prostředí ohledně voleb oboru studia a povolání totiž ukazuje, že dívky a chlapci si svou budoucí dráhu nevolí ani tak na základě realistického zhodnocení svých schopností a dovedností, jako spíše na základě genderových stereotypů. Je tedy důležité nejen systematicky posilovat kariérní výchovu, ale také poukazovat na vliv genderových stereotypů. Lepší kariérní volby jsou totiž přínosem jak pro seberealizaci samotných dívek a chlapců, tak i pro zaměstnavatele, protože budou moci zaměstnávat lidi, kteří jsou pro danou práci opravdu kompetentní. ...
Video game fans participate in the official promotion of video games, either voluntarily, or unwillingly when their fanworks are appropriated and used by video game publishers. The article provides a ...quantitative overview of the presence of fans in the official social media profiles of four selected mainstream games (Dragon Age: Inquistion, Evolve, Mortal Kombat X and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) during a one-year period from August 2014 to July 2015. Combining the traditional method of content analysis and Facebook data-mining, we explore the frequency with which fans appear in social media (including questions of various forms of fanworks and gender) and what user activity is generated by posts featuring fans and fan creations. Results show that fans or their fanworks are featured in 8-24% of all posts depending on a game and in the most common categories of painting and cosplay they generate a comparable level of user engagement as traditional promotional posts.
Video game fans participate in the official promotion of video games, either voluntarily, or unwillingly when their fanworks are appropriated and used by video game publishers. The article provides a ...quantitative overview of the presence of fans in the official social media profiles of four selected mainstream games (Dragon Age: Inquistion, Evolve, Mortal Kombat X and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) during a one-year period from August 2014 to July 2015. Combining the traditional method of content analysis and Facebook data-mining, we explore the frequency with which fans appear in social media (including questions of various forms of fanworks and gender) and what user activity is generated by posts featuring fans and fan creations. Results show that fans or their fanworks are featured in 8–24% of all posts depending on a game and in the most common categories of painting and cosplay they generate a comparable level of user engagement as traditional promotional posts.
This work focuses on a gender analysis of female characters in video games, specifically the action genre of computer games in which players play from the perspective of a third party (ie see a ...playable character on canvas). Pays attention to very specific situations in which the female figure is markedly ambivalent status - show clearly feminine characteristics, it moves but clearly masculine space and pay the archetypal clearly masculine activities. Working with so anlýzou konrkétních computer games and playable characters trying to determine whether computer games as a new medium for his portrayal of female characters contribute to gender stereotypes and whether, therefore, become another medium, that these stereotypes produces and reproduces that deconstructs these stereotypes and changing, or whether it even creates new stereotypes. The analysis is the analysis itself as a representation of female characters in visual, narrative or folder of computer games and interactive component analysis itself - that is playing. In this sense, the work seeks to determine how the female characters look if they present archetypal feminine or masculine characteristics and what pleasure playing them can offer both male and female players. In conclusion, the work also attempts to describe the transformations which...
PDF
