:lectures:

Listed below are presentations I have previously delivered for college, high school and community audiences. Other topics regarding media are possible. If you are interested in scheduling a lecture, please email me.

Play Like a Man: Masculinity in Video Games

Although video games are enjoyed equally by men and women, boys and girls, the vast majority of action genre titles are played by male gamers. These games, which utilize the cutting edge of computer technology, send very particularly messages about what it means to be a man. Significantly, the overwhelming lesson about masculinity is that violence is the preferred means for accomplishing goals, resolving conflict and even for creating and maintaining interpersonal relationship with women. This presentation explores the gendered nature of video game violence and critiques the meaning of masculinity presented to young male players. Media literacy strategies are presented as important methods for intervention and policy-making. Click the lecture title to see presentation slides.

Beyond Ms. Pac-Man: Images of Women in Video Games

This presentation is a critique of the representations of female characters from contemporary video games, which focuses on three common features of women in video games: 1) body size and proportions; 2) roles assigned to female characters, including their relationship to male characters; and 3) the hyper-sexualization of women in video games. The presentation begins with a brief historical overview of the changing role of female game characters from damsels in distress to ass-kicking, modern-day warriors. In contrast to the helpless victim of the 80s and mid-90s, contemporary video games have introduced the strong female figure (ie. Lara Croft) who can defend herself against enemies. Like her male counterparts, she inflicts justified violence without punishment. She is often highly intelligent self-sufficient and self-confident. However, the trade-off for the strong female game character is the depiction of her as a hyper-sexualized woman, ultimately present for the playing pleasure of a largely male audience. Click the lecture title to see presentation slides.

Video Game Violence: It's Not What You Think

There is no research that conclusively links video game violence to real life violence. In fact, over forty years of research on media violence and audience aggression that attempts to find a direct correlation between exposure and behavior has produced contradictory findings. In order to address the issue of violence in video games and its influence on players, we need to investigate video games as cultural artifacts, not as behavior triggers. Examined as artifacts, we can see how video games (and the industry within which video games are produced and distributed) depict a certain kind of violence: Violence in the video game world is almost always justified; players are rewarded for escalating their violent behavior; vigilante-style justice is favored over due-process; the player often serves as judge, jury and hangman; white characters typically represent heroes and thus perpetrate justified violence, while nonwhite characters more often represent villains and are punished by the hero for their violent behavior; the majority of female characters in video games are victims of violence, and are often sexually violated by both villains and heroes. By taking a closer look at how violence is represented in video games, we can learn much more about its influence on how audiences think about aggression, conflict resolution, gender and race relations, and moral responsibility.

Virtual Warfare: Video Games and the New Militarism

Like the early days of the Internet, the history of video games also begins with the Pentagon. The first computer game, Space War, was created in 1962 by electrical engineering graduate students at MIT who were working with a government-funded PDP-1 computer. This presentation is an historical and contemporary analysis of the relationship between the video game industry and the military. In particular, I focus on war and military-themed video games, which represent a large portion of games sold in the US, and argue that today's video games are the Why We Fight films of this generation. One purpose that these games serve (as war games throughout history have served) is to teach society, particular young people, about the ideology of war. By paying hyper-attention to the details of warfare technology and tactical strategy, military-themed games show players how we fight wars, but rarely address questions of the moral responsibility and local and global consequences of military action.