Reflections

The project we did was on gender stereotypes. The biggest reason we ended up going this route was because we’re all gamers. Some of us console or computer, others pencil and dice, and a combination therein. The majority of our group takes exception to the fact that men and women have expected rolls in some form or another. It’s problematic to say the least. We wanted to combat this as best we could. The way we went about that was to create a card game.

We created a scenario where you have to pick very gendered and stereotyped characters to solve a solution based on their stats. The ability to solve the situations was dependent on the diversity of the team you picked, and the scenario they’re in. So if you pick the Military General, the Scientist, and the Engineer, (which are all male characters) that’d be a really great combination in some situations. It leaves you out in the cold though when you need a woman’s touch. And it’s the same way if you pick all female characters. Sometimes a man is just the right guy for the job.

That’s the really important thing about our game, and something we worked on extensively. You need all sorts on a team. I mean look at the Avengers. Tony Stark is a megalomaniacal, alcoholic, egomaniac. He’s just as important as everyone’s favorite Star Spangled Man with a Plan. And too be fair, Cap has his own fair share of shortcomings. Cap is too humble, Tony is too proud. You put them together and you get something that resembles some version of a proper team. And that’s the next stage we wanted to add to our game. Put in perks for picking characters that didn’t seem like they’d go well together. Bonus to stats if you put the Housewife and the Gamer on a team together.

There was also some critique of our game that I really want to address. A classmate told us that our game wasn’t feminist, and even more it was actively misogynist. I want to take a minute to retort. So feminism doesn’t mean women don’t have to be housewives anymore. It means women have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives with no judgement. It also means that men and women are equal. So yes, we did use misogynist stereotypes. We also used misandrous stereotypes. Some men rock as stay-at-home dads. We used these stereotypes for a reason.

The stereotypes are so ingrained in us one way or the other and we don’t even realize it. The point was to make people think about the stereotypes and realize they have biases. The only way we’ll succeed as a culture or a society is by admitting everyone has equal value.

That’s sorta what led to it being a game. We didn’t want to address it head on. We wanted it to be subversive. We wanted people to play thinking it’s a game, and finish realizing it’s social commentary. On that I think we succeeded.

Sorry “Bro,” Games Aren’t Just for You

Okay so before we get started I’m gonna point out that I play video games. And I play them a lot. I get into tons of genres. Adventure, FPS, Platforming, Racing, RPG, Survival. You name it, I’ve probably tried it, at least when it comes to the genre. I’ve been gaming since I could walk. I’ve been to midnight releases of big games. I’ve lost save files and been upset about it for weeks. Hell, I’ve got a game right now that I’m refusing to play because it glitched and I lost all of my in-game currency.

I’ve got a group of friends that I game with. We get online, we kick some ass, we take some names, and of course, we give each other shit constantly. If someone were to listen to the conversations we have while we’re playing 75% is probably making fun of each other, 20% is #realtalk. For those of you that aren’t hip, that’s basically just talking about our lives. The other 5% is about the game we’re playing. You get to a point where you just run the mission and based on each person’s strengths and weaknesses someone else picks up the slack.

In my squad I’m usually the wheelman, I’m the best driver in most games. My friend Bacon is the pilot and sniper. He also runs enforcer (that means he just goes hard and gets stuff done). Beast is our jack of all trades. You name it, he can do it. Ninja is always running back up for the squad. She’s always got the team’s six. Mopping up enemies we missed, calling in reinforcements, or setting up the next job. She’s our fixer for most things.

Yes. You read that right. I said she. Ninja is a girl. She’s also a crazy badass. And I don’t think my squad gives her enough credit for what she does, myself included. I was chatting with her about this and she said she gets really annoyed because she get’s more flak if she messes up. If Bacon, Beast, or I screwed up the same thing we wouldn’t have been given as much crap as Ninja gets. And in looking at it I totally agree with what she’s saying.

She also doesn’t play with really anyone except for us. We all know each other irl. The guys in the squad, we don’t usually mind playing with new people for a bit. Whenever we get someone new though, Ninja gets really quiet. When she finally does speak up she’s instantly hyper sexualized It’s bullshit that just because she’s female and likes xbox that she automatically is put in the line of fire for her hobby.

Women are the majority of gamers. Ninja has kicked my ass to the curb more times than I can count. It’s high time that the industry starts making more games with strong, non-sexualized, female protagonists. The reboot of Tomb Raider is one of the highest rated games of the past three years. The Last of Us has another extremely strong leading female cast. It’s a widely regarded, critically acclaimed game. Clearly there is a space for female lead games. The gaming industry just needs to realize that these games have an audience that avidly wants more.

Comics and Journalism

Joe Sacco hit on a very select niche that I am very impressed by. He’s found this ability to translate these very intense and horrific things in a way that some people can relate to. Moreover, he’s addressing issues that we as a western culture have trouble understanding. Especially when he covers anything that’s going on in the Middle East. Americans especially tend to disregard the Middle East as a conglomerate of terrorists. We don’t as a whole care enough to figure out what is going on before we form opinions on it.

Sacco does something else very interesting. He inserts himself into his comics. He talks more about that in an interview with Grand Valley State University. He addresses how there are so many journalists that go into the Middle East and say they’re completely objective. His opinion is that it’s impossible to report anywhere objectively. That’s something I completely agree with. If you’re going to report on anything, you’re gonna have to know something about it, that means you’ve formed opinions about it.

Even if you haven’t researched it or looked into it, you’ll still have opinions on any issue. Look at gay marriage, abortion rights, gun rights, the war in the Middle East. everyone always has opinions on these issues. That’s part of being human. I completely agree with Sacco’s sentiment that it’s better to report and say what you think rather than reporting like you’re a fly on the wall just saying “he said/she said.” It doesn’t do anything. You can’t be objective, it’s not possible. We need to embrace our subjective ideals and run with them.

I have a couple issues with Sacco’s work. The first one is that it sounds like he’s making the effort to try and make the stories and atrocities that he’s reporting on accessible. He uses comics in an effort to make the events easier to understand. While I appreciate the effort, I think the comic created a feeling, at least for me, of being thrown into the deep end. It made it very difficult to read. He didn’t pull any punches, which, of course, he’s a war reporter. He wasn’t pulling any punches with his illustrations either. It made it difficult to read in the same way it’s difficult to look at pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or World War II prison camps.

Combining that shock level with such heavy and complex issues is what lost me. I was interested in the stories, and I really thoroughly enjoyed his writing, and I liked his illustrations. I would’ve read just the picture book, as well as just reading his prose. The combination was too much for me. Part of that is because of the knowledge that those pictures are real things, and the words are about real things. It’s a problem I admit to having as well as, as far as I can tell, most other people in Western culture. We’re very adept at the “Out of sight out of mind” mentality.

I suppose that is part of Sacco’s point. And I respect that, but I don’t know if I’m quite ready to take it on.

Comics, Culture, and Connection

When you sit down and read Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” you can’t help but identify with the characters. Moreover, you can’t help but to identify with the struggles she’s going through. And to be clear, the Iranian Revolution is not something that you can really relate to unless you’ve gone through a revolution. Last time I checked, most people in the Western world haven’t had a revolution in at least a couple decades. How does she do this?

She gives her story pictures. She makes a graphic novel. All of her illustrations are extremely simple. This allows you to take them in and process all of the meaning behind one simple picture rather than get bogged down in how beautiful the pictures are. Julie Gerstein talks a bit more about that here.

Specifically I want to address something she talks about in reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. She talks about how he turns the story of The Holocaust into something about cats and mice. This allows us to connect or disconnect from it in a productive way. Whichever we have to do, it allows us to talk about it. Instead of talking about Nazis and Jews, we’re talking about cats and mice.

What I want to address is how not only comics, but also film allow to do a similar thing. Most notable is the work of Disney Animation Studios and Disney/Pixar. When you think about a movie released by either of these studios you have to consider the theme. I’m going to use The Lion King as an example. And since I’m a film major, SPOILERS.

So in the Lion King our protagonist’s dad is killed and he spends the rest of the movie blaming himself for his dad’s death. NO MORE SPOILERS. So of course the theme is don’t get trapped in a stampede of wildebeests. Okay so actually the theme is coping with grief and learning how to move on. Now we can all watch this movie and say “Hey, I’ve lost someone. I know what Simba is going through.” From there we can talk to other people who relate to Simba.

I want to be clear none of these people would start off talking about themselves. They would talk about Simba first. They would externalize, or disconnect. This allows them to talk about the heavy, deep, dark stuff in their lives that they’ve never known how to talk about. Because let’s be real, death is hard to talk about. Disney addresses a lot of these serious themes and they’ve recently been dabbling in abuse, anxiety and depression, and the struggles of growing up.

Disney has something of a monopoly when it comes to widely accepted family entertainment. Something about 5 theme parks with another on the way. Dreamworks has begun to follow suit as well with some success. I think it’s widely important that our most popular pop culture mediums allow us to discuss such difficult topics so easily. The only way we solve problems is to talk about them.

Exemplary Documentary

Documentaries fill a very interesting niche in the United States. We all love to learn. We love hearing about nonfiction. Michael Moore talks about this briefly in his 13 Rules for Making Documentary Films. While reading this one of the things that popped into my was  Serial. A podcast that could be argued is something of a documentary. Really, in my opinion, the only difference between investigative journalism and documentaries is that one of them is on screen. I find Serial, This American Life, Criminal and other nonfiction podcasts are more accessible than a documentary. This is said as a film major, mind you.

What really got to me was Mr. Moore’s first rule of documentary filmmaking. You can’t ever turn off the stuff you learn as a film major, so you’re always analyzing. When I’m watching a documentary I’m analyzing it the same way and so many of them are just pedantic. It’s a lecture rather than something interesting and engaging. NOVA does a really excellent job of creating engaging and interesting nonfiction TV shows. And I think there’s value in those shows. A lot of value. I have a younger brother that’s a brilliant scientist and he got interested in science through Mythbusters.

The biggest issue documentaries have is that they get such a bad rap. Nick Fraser talks more about this here. I agree with a lot of what he’s saying too. People don’t like documentaries anymore, and I find that so strange since we enjoy stories so much. We as a culture love the idea that something can be, to turn a phrase, stranger than fiction. I’m so curious as to how we have this fascination with stories and yet we knock them.

Now I do realize I’m arguing both sides at the same time. I do think a change needs to be made. Millennials are into quick and dirty intake of information. We live our lives at 140 characters a minute (I think I’m over the limit with this one). If there was a way to do documentaries in quick snippets that would be great. In my last post I talked about the value of reality TV with Sweatshop- Deadly Fashion. It is a documentary, and it’s in a format that is accessible to Millennials.

As an aside, I thought about not linking Sweatshop again, but I realized that if I was reading this, I wouldn’t want to go back and find the link. I think that’s really telling on some level about the ideas of Millennials. That’s another blog post for another day.

Netflix has been getting into the nonfiction too. Most successfully they’ve recently released Making a Murderer. It’s a TV show that’s told as a story or drama. Humans love stories, no matter where they’re from. We all love a good story. In my experience, the worst documentaries don’t tell a story, they just throw information at people.

The way I see it to make a documentary you have to find information, make it a story, and then make a movie. Like Michael Moore said, don’t make a documentary.

Reality TV- cont.

There was an episode of This American Life I was listening to the other day. It was talking about status updates. The episode can be found here. I just want to focus on the first act in which a trio of 14 year old girls were interviewed about their Instagram usage. It’s only about fifteen minutes long. Instagram is really beneficial for them. It helps their confidence, and I think thats really cool. I see a trend here though. Reality tv is typically viewed by the same demographic that religious uses Instagram. Both of these clearly have benefit in some form or another. So why is it that we as a culture are labeling things young women enjoy as inherently vapid and senseless? I’m guilty of it too. I’m pretty sure I used the word vapid in my last post. I think it’s high time we stop policing what women or anyone for that matter are allowed to enjoy and stop making them feel guilty about how much they love the Kardashians.

Reality TV- A Force for Good or Evil?

So I just watched a ted talk on why reality tv is important. You can watch that video here. I suggest you watch it and then come back. And I mean, I guess I agree with the guy on some level. I definitely agree with the Mr. Rogers bit. Fred Rogers is a HUGE deal. This is a video of him accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award. He doesn’t make it about him, and instead he makes the entire audience cry. The man is a saint and there’s endless value in what he did. However I don’t know if I’d consider it reality television.

That’s the really big issue I had with this ted talk is he never once defines reality tv. Not explicitly anyway. When I think of reality tv, I think Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It’s like porn, I’ll know it when I see it. And I suppose maybe his lack of explicit definition is part of the point he’s making. Reality tv is a MUCH bigger genre than we think about. And like in Sweatshop- Deadly Fashion (linked here) it can be used for good. I mean, Anthony Bourdain taught me tons about culture and food with No Reservations and I suppose that’s reality TV too. Do I see value in reality tv? Depends. I still think E! network is vapid.

I want to talk about Sweatshop for a minute.

That shit is unbelievable. I mean, I know these awful things are happening and they’re treated horribly. That’s just how the world is though.

That right there, what I just said, is something of a westernized excuse to get out of doing anything about it. Hannah Clare McFarlane does an excellent job of pointing out that excuse, although she doesn’t call it that. Her article here talks about how even though we all know there’s awful things happening, we don’t do anything to change it. McFarlane does an excellent job of pointing out that this show makes the situations EXTREMELY real. I can’t even imagine going to the grocery store with only nine dollars to spend on groceries. I also think it’s pretty cool one of the trio got We Need $160 tattooed in support of raising the minimum wage. More on that movement here.

The most interesting part of the Sweatshop show for me was how at the beginning the show the trio are all super bubbly and excited about the experience. Like, ya I get it’s cool to go to a new place and learn all these new things. They seemed really oblivious to the conditions though. They were learning quickly and first-hand how awful the conditions really are.

That’s a big part of why I think the reality tv angle was so great for this. Because it took the demographic that stereotypically watches reality tv and is oblivious to issues like sweatshops and puts them in it. And then markets it to the young people of the world to see this stuff and make it clear that it’s problematic. Hopefully the result will be that the young adults who see this will strive to make a difference.-