The Play Research Group, UWE, Bristol
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Media has totally prejudged Miss Bimbo during the last weeks. It is accused not only of causing huge mobile phone bills to teenage users but including a "disorted world view" (Iltalehti 27/3/2008) and being "condemned as lethal" (TimesOnline 25/3/2008). Miss Bimbo is an online game for girls between 9 and 16 concenrating on creating a perfect bimbo character. In Guardian, Aleks Krotoski writes that "the first thing I was struck by when logging into the service was that my bimbo, a looker kitted out only in her white knickers, was already almost a stone overweight. How to cope? By popping diet pills or checking into the plastic surgery clinic, of course".
Goal: to create the coolest, richest and most famous girl
- Is it much worse than to create the most succesfull killer (hurdreds of games) or the best warlord?
Surroundings: a disorted world view
- Are there games with something else?
- Is it really so disorted - isn't the world actually as crazy as the game suggests?
It is really difficult to evaluate the game as I could neither log into it nor reach the site - because, I suppose, it is way too popular at the moment. But as the developers say, it is meant to be ironical. I agree that not all the kids understand the irony, but it may be that a game is an easy way to live through some of the extremely difficult social expectations young girls (and adult women) face.
I am in Denmark at the moment, examining the work of my student at the IT University of Copenhagen tomorrow morning. Her game, Prince$$ of the Hood is about fashion and addresses very similar issues as Miss Bimbo. But, ultimately, the goal of the game is to teach young girls to understand how unimportant looks actually are. This becomes clear through the gameplay as in the end, when a player has reached all the best clothes for her character, her friends do not accept her as such because she is too similar to the others and has "lost her self-respect". So, after the game tells you "Congratulations you now look exactly like everyone else!" - you have already lost the game.
Therefore, I think we should give Miss Bimbo a possibility at least. Based on the supposed goal and some tasks in the game (take plastic surgeries / use diet pills), it is impossible to predict how the actual gameplay will be or how the girls use the game in order to make sense of the expectations they face in their everyday life. In his PhD dissertation Miguel Sicart has written about the games that let the players to choose how to act and to make their own moral choices instead of offering only 'right' possibilities as the most ethical ones.
"Players are moral agents, and they do play a significant role in the moral construction of the game as an ethical experience. This means that players are no more the victims of systems designed to conditioned them and turn them into mindless zombies; players have an ethical understanding of the game, which implies increasing their responsibility in the moral landscape of computer games. Because players are moral agents and do behave as such, games have to take that into consideration, allowing for players to develop their moral judgment in the game experience and through the game community."
If there is a possibility, even a more difficult one to reach, in Miss Bimbo to become succesful and beautiful without plastic surgeries and diet pills, it is the player who may decide between the possibilities. And what are the consequences of being the coolest and most beautiful Miss Bimbo? If it means that you can sit on the backseat of a nice car and shop clothes every day when other people are working in interesting jobs, little girls aren't so stupid that they wouldn't understand which choice may be better in their actual lives.
The bad connotations related to being a bimbo are also quite obvious. Maybe it is only good that it is made clear that cutting your body and aiming to Barbie-like 'beauty' belongs to bimbos interested in sexual appeal, not to people who respect themselves and their bodies. To be honest, during my first weeks in Bristol I was very surprised after seeing the incredible amount of pink girly and soap+gossip magasines available in Britain. I am sure a game like Miss Bimbo does not add much on the overall input girls get from all the media. In addition, I think that it is better to see ultra-sexy game characters in games in which they act like bimbos than in games where thay are superheroes or world savers (compare Lara Croft).
Finally, I think we are much more worried about girls than boys as players. Most little boys play war games, fight with sticks and play with toy guns and many parents find nothing disturbing in it. At least Miss Bimbo is honest and clear: it is far from the cute Playboy Bunny logos in children's clothes, pencils and toys that you can buy in every second bookstore.
7pm, Thurs 27 March 2008, Watershed Media Centre
What is the future of film & video within new & ever-expanding media technology?
Vicky Brophy of Wonky Films will chair a Q&A with guest speakers Dr Tom Abba and Rik Lander discussing digital media's interaction with film, how the current industry of viral video marketing is re-defining the boundaries of film, why they're becoming so popular with brands & how they will affect the future of film & media practice as we know it.
Tom and Rik will debate the playfulness of interactive narrative through their respective projects, the Play Research Group, a forum for the development of research into the cultural significance of play and games, and interactive teen drama Wannabes.
The Thought Den team will then host an interactive session about their Happy Packages project and Bluetooth some Dude Corp virals, courtesy of Rubberductions, straight to your mobiles!
Leave your computer & your mp3 player, come on down & share your ideas with the experts.
This is a free event please collect a ticket from the box office on the night.
Cinéformation is committed to developing and sustaining a creative, active filmmaking community in the South West by providing opportunities for media professionals & enthusiasts to meet, show work, exchange ideas and collaborate.
The amount of game and play related conferences is increasing really fast. Some years ago there was just a handful of them and now it is impossile to keep track on every single one.
But here is a bunch of conferences not mentioned in Powerup before:
Homo Ludens Ludens, April 19th-20th @ Paraninfo at the Universidad Laboral, Gijon, Spain
Nordic Game 2008, May 14th-15th @ Malmö, Sweden
The fourth annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference, July 10th-11th @ Madison, Wisconsin
Meaningful PLay 2008, October 9th-11th @ East Lansing, MI, USA
Personally I will have a paper with Olli Leino at ISEA2008 in Singapore (from 25th July to August 3rd). The working title for the paper is "For Interface, Against Regression! An exploratory surgery of the transhuman umbilical cord".
'... I have studied the logic of war. Moreover, I succeeded, a long time ago, in presenting the basics of its movements on a rather simple board game: the forces in contention and the contradictory necessities imposed on the operations of each of the two parties. I have played this game and, in the often difficult conduct of my life, I have utilised lessons from it - I have also set myself rules of the game for this life, and I have followed them. The surprises of this Kriegsspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may be the only one of my works that anyone will dare to acknowledge as having some value. On the question of whether I have made good use of such lessons, I will leave to others to decide.'
Guy Debord, Panegyric, pages 63-64.
Rod Dickinson' s project , with Class War Games, to construct and play the board game that Guy Debord spent the final year of his life designing, has a new website.
The Radical Software Group have an online version.
I've been invited to speak at the Children in Virtual Worlds conference on May 22nd.
BBC Children’s and the University of Westminster invite you to the first conference in the UK to draw together producers and researchers working on virtual worlds and immersive gaming environments for children aged 7-11 online. Keynote speakers include Richard Deverell, Controller, BBC Children's and Dr Adrian Woolard, Head of Innovation, BBC Future Media and Technology. Other speakers include representatives from Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, and Lego Universe; Prof David Gauntlett (University of Westminster), Lizzie Jackson (University of Westminster), Dr Diane Carr (Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media), Dr Seth Giddings (University of the West of England), Marc Goodchild (Head of Interactive and On Demand, BBC Children's), Aleks Krotoski (Guardian Unlimited), Tamara Littleton (eModeration.com) and Paul Massey (K&L Gates). In addition to the panels and presentations there will be demonstrations on virtual worlds and 3D technology.
The conference will be of interest to academics, producers, online community managers, game creators, teachers, and technologists. It aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas between producers and academics on virtual and immersive media for children and to stimulate the production of high quality, creative, social media content for children in the UK.
The Performance and Screen Media Research Group at University of Wales, Newport's seminar series (including one in conjunction with the Play Research Group). Let me know if you are interested in going to any of these - and we'll let you all know if we can offer a lift:
19th March 2008 1700-1900
Room H8 Rathmell
Internal Research Seminar – A response to Geoffrey Batchen “Electricity Made Visible”
Re-animating the Dead - Helen Sear
Bringing the Body back into Play - Emma Westecott
Chair: David Surman
2nd April 2008 1900-2100
Bush House, Top Floor of Arnolfini Building, Bristol
External Speaker in collaboration with UWE
Larissa Hjorth, Lecturer Digital Art, Games Program at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
[Title TBC, but relating to her work with Technology Culture in South East Asia]
16th April 2008 1700-1900
Room H8 Rathmell
External SpeakerDr Diane Carr, Institute of Education, London
[Title TBC, but related to her work with Machinima]
30th April 20081700-1800
Room H8 Rathmell
Reading Group: Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism Velvet Light Trap No 21 Summer 1985 David Bordwell [available for download on http://idisk.mac.com/shenerd-Public?view=web]
We've got a one more Finnish 'game doctor' as Aki Järvinen (University of Tampere) succesfully defended his Ph.D. this Saturday. The thesis called Games without Frontiers: Theories and Methods for Game Studies and Design is available here.
Organiser: International Association for Development of the Information Society, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Date: 25th - 27th July 2008
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 31st March 2008
Themes:
Organiser: ACM SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, CA
Date: TBA, August 2008
Information online: here
Full papers deadline: 24th March 2008 (papers+panels), 30th June 2008 (game presentations)
Themes:
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