Gender Disparity in Video Game Usage: A Third-Person Perception-Based Explanation

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Cruea ◽  
Sung-Yeon Park
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ciccoricco

Faith, the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, marks an empowered female character that is not hypersexualized, and the decision to employ a first-person perspective (thereby subverting any gaze offered by a third-person view) supports this design objective through gameplay. But despite Faith’s welcome debut on the main stage of commercial gaming, the game raises more significant questions through its engagement with the multifarious concept of “fluidity” or “flow,” which is integral to both the gameplay of Mirror’s Edge and the themes in it. Is Faith’s flow—in line with radical critical moves in literary history and cultural theory of the late 20th century to gender this trope—essentially or inevitably feminine, or for that matter, feminist? Does the game ultimately avoid, perpetuate, or contest the gendered discourses that it evokes? What can its simulations of a fictional mind in action tell us about our own? This article draws on cognitive, feminist, and narrative theoretical frameworks to question what the concept of fluidity means for a video game that mobilizes it through both narrative design and gameplay.


Author(s):  
Pedro Cardoso-Leite ◽  
Morteza Ansarinia ◽  
Emmanuel Schmück ◽  
Daphne Bavelier

This chapter reviews the behavioral and neuroimaging scientific literature on the cognitive consequences of playing various genres of video games. The available research highlights that not all video games have similar cognitive impact; action video games as defined by first- and third-person shooter games have been associated with greater cognitive enhancement, especially when it comes to top-down attention, than puzzle or life-simulation games. This state of affairs suggests specific game mechanics need to be embodied in a video game for it to enhance cognition. These hypothesized game mechanics are reviewed; yet, the authors note that the advent of more complex, hybrid, video games poses new research challenges and call for a more systematic assessment of how specific video game mechanics relate to cognitive enhancement.


2008 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Sun ◽  
Zhongdang Pan ◽  
Lijiang Shen

The tool identified for data collection of this research project is a video game, which makes the topic of the representation of space in videogame an absolutely relevant aspect for the project. This work bases on the statement of Jenkins, according to which “game space never exists in abstract, but always experientially”. In the current generation of video games, talking about position of the camera assumes a different value than in film or television language, assuming the meaning of point of view from which the game is visually (and auditory) presented and determines the spatial perspective of a computer game. The most common distinction, with respect to the position of the camera, is between First Person Camera, where space is presented from the perceptive perspective of the player's avatar and Third Person Camera, where the perspective is not directly the one of the avatar. This category, in fact, is very extensive, and poorly lends itself to a single definition. Under the umbrella of Third Person Camera are both perspectives associated with the avatar, but framing it externally (a camera follows the avatar) and those in which the camera is fixed. Moreover, the position of the camera compared to the avatar (from behind, left, right, Orbit Camera, etc.), or with respect to the environment (from above, from a precise point of reference) is not a neutral choice. In the present work, we use the categorization proposed by Britta Neitzel (Neitzel, 2002), which, taking up the work of Jean Mitry about The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Mitry & King, 1997), distinguishes between subjective, semisubjective or objectives views. The chapter provides examples of different perspectives, and introduces the concept of Natural User Interfaces, which include movements based on input and output, on discretion, on voice, and evolve towards an efficient use of the senses in the interaction with machines.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Black

This essay seeks to answer two questions raised by the success of video games where the player looks at the character she is playing rather than seeming to inhabit the same coordinates as the character within the game space. First, why is the experience of playing these games not innately inferior to that of playing games with a first-person point of view, given that the sense of being a character sensing and acting inside the game space could be expected to be much stronger when the character’s body seems to be one’s own rather than a separate entity in the game space? And second, if the first-person point of view is so “immersive” and provides such a sense of being “inside” the representational space as is sometimes claimed, why has it never been so prominent in other audiovisual entertainment media such as film and television?


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