Barbie Games

Metaverse Reading: From Barbie to Mortal Kombat

From Barbie to Unceasing Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, eds., is an outstanding 1998 MIT Gather anthology, one that has revolutionized my thinking on games, and, I think, given me a clear and limited proposition for my term paper in Gender, Science & Technology.

The editors describe their business as to “examine the different ways in which we might strive for equity: disinterestedness through separate but equal computer games, equity through equal access to the unvaried computer games, equity through games that encourage new visions of equity itself.”

The complete quality of the papers is outstanding, much better than that of the three or so anthologies of technofeminism that I’ve reviewed a while ago. Its major shortcoming is a factor of the times - and one of the reasons why I’m prejudiced against 20th Century speculative literature about the internet - the entire volume views the audience for games as composed positively of pubescent children, which is by no means any longer the gaming demographic. As I’ll talk over below, while the “boyishness” of many games may be useful and cathartic for boys, the notwithstanding memes for adults seem much more poisonous.

One observation from the introduction quality noting for that upcoming term paper:

As Ellen Seiter (1993) has suggested, approximate-based attacks on sweet and frilly girls’ shows, such as My Dab Pony and Strawberry Shortcake, as “insipid” often resemble earlier dismissals of mature women’s genres such as melodrama, romance or soap opera. These criticisms are grounded in a dislike for women’s aesthetic preferences toward character relations and emotional issues, and they are instilled in the assumption that nonprofessional women (whether they are the housewives who read Harlequin romances or their daughters who buy Solicitude Bears) are mindless and uncritical consumers of patriarchal culture…. Seiter (1993) calls on us to value girls’ cultural tastes and prejudiced, even as we push toward more empowering fantasies, since there are so profuse other forces in society that belittle and demean girls. (p.21)

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