Gender and Agency Presentations (13/2/2013)

At the start of this session we looked at a presentation simply named 'Gender' that was deliberately made to poke fun at the stereotypical perception of men and women in games e.g. tough guys and happy girls. It was both rather comical and interesting as even though we laughed we also recognised the seriousness of the subject matter.

We were then given a task to do for after reading week in which we had to look at numerous examples of both good and bad gender characters presented in both video games and movies. I believe this was so that we would become more aware of the current gender stereotypes found within video games.

Afterwards we had a long presentation based on Agency that took up the rest of the lecture. It was an interesting one to say the least and therefore I took the following notes.

• How much control should the player have over their character? e.g. a blank slate or charatised. 
• Don't have the character do pointless things unless it means something more e.g. 'Minecraft' in which things like digging which should be counted as a mundane thing is actually a big part of the whole game. 
• When the player impacts on the in game world they feel greater agency (connection).
• Achievements and Trophy's can be an illusion of agency if they reward you for trivial things e.g. in 'The Sims' you have to buy furniture for your Sims to rest on, so to be given an Achievement/Trophy for buying one out of twenty available sofas is rather silly as it is something you need rather than being rewarded for something epic such as slaying a dragon. 
• Hard games can be rewarding if they result in the player being able to overcome the set challenges, as they give the player great satisfaction for finally overcoming something difficult.   
• There is a psychology within Facebook games as 'Farmville' keeps the player returning to play by explaining the rules before rewarding them for their actions. They further explain that, if they come back in around an hour then not only will their crops have grown, but their avatar will have enough energy to do even more things and even help out on their friends' farms, thus convincing those players to help out each other and get satisfaction from that. 

McMahon's 3 conditions for Immersion are as follows...

1. Users expectations of the game or environment must match the environment’s conventions fairly closely.
2. User’s actions must have a non-trivial impact on the environment.
3. Conventions of the world must be consistent.