Author: hschatte

Journalism Final: St. Edwards, the Gaming Industry, and Women.

The above is a short documentary in I’ve had in development for a while. The project was semi-completed to submit for a media communications course, but serves as a trailer to a full length documentary I currently have in production about heroism in gaming, and how it relates to the lives of women in the industry.

 

St Edwards works at redesigning its Interactive Game Studies Program in order to provide more opportunities for those seeking skills with real world applications.

After many hard fought battles with the School of Humanities, the IGST team has created a four-year degree plan that implements many of the changes students wanted to see. There are less required courses, such as quantitative applications and discrete math that relate in no way to a humanities based major. There are also more opportunities to find an internship within the program.

These internships are incredibly valuable for those looking to break into the Austin gaming business. Many production studios require experience for even their entry level positions.

The problem is that workplaces like these disproportionately affect women in the industry than they do men. The video game world has always been a bit of a boys club. Women are often seen as incompetent or intruders.

According to the latest THEESA reports, women make up a full 46% of gamers, while they occupy only 22% of the industry. This number represents all industry positions, not just programmers or designer, positions in which female employees represent an even smaller percentage.

Females in video games have been historically underrepresented, oversexualized, and disenfranchised. They play princesses and playthings, and women gamers have had enough. Many women who seek to take power into their own hands find themselves discouraged from entering computer programming or game design fields. Those who stick with it find the impenetrable boys club of a gaming industry to be filled with harassment and disrespect.

Things are slowly changing, with more women led design teams and positive female representations in video games, such as the most recent Tomb Raider release, but there’s still a long way to go. St. Edwards has been doing its part by encouraging women in Art and Design majors to explore IGST courses. They’ve adjusted the course schedule to include special topics in gaming, which are often courses created by student contributions. They have also been working hard to help IGST women into internship programs at companies which value their contribution, and, like St. Edwards, are doing their part to elevate the gaming industry.

In order to contribute in my own small way, here is a version of the classic Super Mario Brothers recoded to feature Peach as our main protagonist.

Use the arrow keys to move and jump

S to start

 

Shelter reflection

This was by far my favorite project of the semester. It was really invaluable to be able to explore my own idea, but within a group of people. They were able to temper my idea until we got it to its purest form.

Love/ Memories as a shelter from death or extinction.

The original idea was to have a tomb-like enclosure made of chicken wire enclosed with love notes. This idea shifted in order to include the campus, and include as many people as we could into this protection. We asked people from around campus to write love notes to those that they lost, missed or had fond memories with. We took these notes and hung them with red string from the tree on campus traditionally used as the ‘wishing tree.’ In this way, we were able to shelter people both on campus and from around the world by preserving their memory and sharing it with as many people as possible as they stopped to read the notes.

I realized about halfway through the project, while we were tying the notes up, that the reason this idea resonated so deeply with me is that I wanted, more than anything, for someone to do that for me. It was born of a selfish wish to be remembered by those who loved me, and partially to prove that there were those that loved me in the first place. I discussed this with my group, and Myrka came up with a great idea. After reading the common theme book, Just Mercy, she had written a paper that required her to visit the database of all of the Texas prisoners who were executed. This database listed their names, ages, date of execution, and their final words, if they had any. Myrka suggested that we create notes for them to hang on the tree to preserve the memory of them as well. I decided to focus specifically on those who were executed between the ages of 20 and 30. I was really touched when writing their last words, to be preserved by us, the St. Edwards community. I hope I did right by them. I think I did. DSC_0407 DSC_0394 IMG_0095 IMG_0101 IMG_0107

Reading #4

1. I don’t think it’s that he doesn’t care about his work, I think it has more to do with the fact that he doesn’t put an excess amount of thought into his work. He creates because he enjoys creating, he doesn’t create for any audience, and I don’t think he thinks much about his art outside of himself. I also think that rather than not caring about his work, he doesn’t care what people think about it. He might create it on the scale that he does because he’s popular, but he doesn’t care that he’s popular and he doesn’t try and figure out why.

2. We had to kind of let go of control of the last project. We couldn’t stage the pictures the way we wanted to, and we couldn’t make anything perfectly. Andy mentions that he’s always surprised at the way his paintings turn out, but he doesn’t ever seem disappointed by that. We need to be able to roll with the punches and create for the sake of creation rather than to accomplish a goal. If we end up thinking too much about it, we just end up getting frustrated at not being able to create our ‘vision.’

 

Personal Reflection

1.  I’m usually pretty full of excitement over my ideas. This leads to trouble in letting go of things that I might find essential but really have little meaning or serve any purpose to the project. But I don’t get terribly self-conscious. I don’t even know what there is to be self-conscious about. Are people going to like it? Doesn’t matter. Am I going to get a good grade? Well, did I follow the instructions to the best of my abilities? If the answer is yes than I’ve done what I can so.

2. First I think it’s a pretty great attitude to have. If you live a ‘grand theft auto’ life, there aren’t any limits. You create for yourself. The con of this is that you can also lose standards. If you don’t care whether people like your work or not, you have little reason to push or challenge yourself to create.

Shelter

toes in sand

fort

animal

refuge(e)

tomb

sheltered

Reading 3

Clement Greenberg Recentness of Sculpture
Paul Rand Politics of Design
Vilem Flusser About the Word Design
Hal Foster Design and Crime

1.

Greenberg only explicitly mentions design a few times, an when he does, it’s in the context of ‘Good Design.’ Greenberg views Good Design as a negative, something where novelty art lives, and something that true artists need to ‘rise above.’

Rand refers to design as a problem solving activity that requires talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. However, Rand identifies a problem in that Design is often tainted by bureaucracy and the need to sell things en masse.

Flusser deals with the literal definition of design and how it is used outside of an artistic context, in order to examine the connotations of the word inside that context. A designer here is cunning, luring an audience into traps. Plato would here view designers as traitors to ideas because they take that which is in its purest form and mold it into something else.

Foster discusses how the modern designer has succumbed to the consumerist culture, and how postmodern design has turned into branding.

2.

Greenberg uses his definitions of ‘Good Design’ to imply that design in this context is a separation from art, a form of expression made by non-artists to live in the artistic world. Rand also makes design into something less than an artform, but does so in an entirely different way with an entirely different tone. It is viewed in two forms, depending on the audience: When viewed by the artist, it is design; when viewed by anyone else it becomes a good or a product. Designers are artists not only for art connoisseurs, but also for the crowd, since their work is now consumed generally in a public space (especially in a business context). The way these two authors view ‘Good Design’ is in direct opposition. While Rand refers to good design as ‘appreciated and ardently accepted,’ Greenberg clearly finds it unpalatable.

Flusser finds a certain truth about the purpose of design in the real world when discussing a Designer being a deceiver. When working for, say, an advertising agency is aiming to entrap viewers, a designer’s job is to garner a certain response with the result (hopefully) of the viewer buying into whatever the ad is for. Design does, however, form a bridge between technology or machines (quantifiable, scientific) and art (aesthetic, expressionistic). A great example of this would be modern architecture. Design is deceiving nature by means of technology.

Flusser is also in opposition to Rand. Where Rand discusses how the designer is entrenched in consumerist culture through no fault of their own (and is still above it), Flusser finds that postmodern design had turned into branding.

 

Personal Reflection

1.

I think that keeping an open mind while considering a project  from several different angles helps artists to better understand what will work aesthetically. I also think it is ridiculously important to view art as an iterative process. The fear of making a mistake stifles work endlessly. You are never going to create your best work the first time you try anything. Craft is such an important aspect of art, and it’s necessary to practice before perfecting craft.

2.

I journal constantly, and keep a dream journal as well. Writing fiction and world-building is what I use to bring the images in my head into reality.

Visual Dictionary

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11blWFLaDFpD9ugKCah8_MxvpqCAqJziSGbscZzPWEJ0/edit?usp=sharing

4D Teach me how to Dance

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