Movable Type-- Quality Undergrad Media Studies

I am in graduate school.  By definition, this makes me kind of (really) a nerd about my field of study.  Possibly one of the most nerdy things I've done, and also one of the best, was joining together with a few of my awesome fellow Media Studies majors as an undergrad to found Movable Type, an undergraduate media studies journal for the University of Virginia.

The reason I bring it up today is because the journal didn't close down when the original staff graduated in May.  In fact, it's still going strong, and the second edition is in the process of being released now.  As an online journal, new editions of Movable Type are released a few papers at a time, to keep postings more current.  Even better, all the content is archived and searchable, as well as sorted by keyword.

If you've ever been interested in exactly what media studies majors and scholars write about, Movable Type can give you more than enough insight.  One of my papers on gender and video games, a topic I covered briefly in an earlier post, is up on Movable Type, as well as some of the best work I've read by my fellow undergraduates.  If you're interested in hackers, crafts, Glee, Harry Potter fandom, political campaigns or more, I'd encourage you to check it out, read some material and leave your comments.  It's great to get feedback on work, especially if you're planning to go anywhere with it.

Because the articles and the journal can be a little heavy at times, however, I'll also leave you with "A Media Studies Love Story", a video created by one of the original Movable Type staffers, demonstrating not only her own nerdiness and love for media studies, but a bit of insight into what it is.



In case the video looks familiar, it was inspired by the follow advertisement, "Parisian Love", released by Google for the 2010 Superbowl.  Enjoy!

Gender in the History of Video Games

For today's post, I don't really have time to grab anything out of my old notes-- the end of the semester is packed with things that need to be done, and as fun as it is to keep my blog up to date, it's not really essential to progression in my Ph.D. program. But fear not! What you get instead is an excerpt from a paper I'm writing for my qualitative methods class. A lot of people write about video games and gender, usually not in a complimentary way. They dislike the way female characters are represented and the fact that video games tend to have more male than female players. I'm interested in seeing if these academic perceptions of gender and video games translate to gamers themselves, so I decided to do my research and the required interview for this project around video game consoles, to see if they were conceived of in terms of gender. In short, do gamers view some consoles as more acceptable for girls than others?
 
I'm still hashing out my own conclusions, but the following is an extract from my textual analysis for the paper, where I address what people have said about gender and games, what is going on now, and where my work fits in. This is the "Gender in the History of Video Games" section, focusing specifically on the narratives academics construct around games. Enjoy and let me know what you think! Sorry if it's kind of long, but I couldn't think of a better place to cut it off.  The formatting is also being all wonky on me, so sorry for that.