You’ve probably seen the many dissertation posts I’ve made throughout the previous year. Sam calls them cheater posts, since I don’t write it specifically for NYMG (I say it’s half and half). But regardless, with the accomplishment of finishing, passing, and turning in the diss last week, it feels remiss […]
Alex’s Dissertation
13 posts
I realize this post is far shorter than the norm, and I apologize. I am just finding it too difficult to string words together. Trust me, I did you a favor by making this short. I defend my dissertation tomorrow. I have to admit, it’s a little hard to concentrate […]
Lemme start this blog all feminist-style with a story. I got some feedback on my work recently that made me question what I’m doing with my dissertation. My diss work is on a theory I made up called procedural ethics (PE). PE, essentially, asks game scholars to start at the […]
Below is a post that follows in the vein of arguments I have made here and here about procedural ethics. Where many theories of games, and ways of analyzing games, start at the code and move forward, procedural ethics starts at the code and moves backwards. Rather than see code as something […]
What is a gamer? This question is at the center of what it means to study women or feminism in games. It is in this label of “gamer” that we are most often excluded. Of course we couldn’t be “gamers” because girls don’t play games, they don’t play real games, […]
What does it mean to call a game a companion? Referring to a story, or a favorite fictional character, as a companion seems easy enough to understand. I imagine that most of us had our own fantasy worlds growing up, where we were Peter Pan or Dorothy, or Falcor. We […]
Change is inherently a discursive project. This means that change is restricted by the structures of language and by the conventions of language use. Change will be a product of what can be legitimately said (or written) in a specific context at a specific moment in time. (For those of […]
Businesses restrict their own growth potential when women are unintentionally excluded from key training and advancement opportunities. Whether the economy is up or down, who gets promoted — and who gets left behind — has substantial consequences for business success. Ilene H. Lang, President & Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst (For […]
Zynga is a particularly interesting company to study because they pioneered a new type of gaming company. Founded in 2007, Zynga led the social game revolution that continues to take in astonishing profits. As of 2013, Zynga has three of the top five games on Facebook and has 265 million […]
(For those of you who did not read my last blog, this is part of my dissertation which focuses on a visual analysis of video game company policy. Obvs what I put forth in my diss is more nuanced and situated in academicy stuff, but this is more fun.) […]
This is a visualization based on word frequency. It has not been adjusted in any way. For my diss, I am using a two-pronged approach for analyzing gaming industry company policy. The first is a hermenuetic analysis and the second is a visual analysis. Using various methods of data visualization […]
In case you missed part 1 of Games and Feminist Research Methodology, I’ll give you a brief overview of what I’m up to. My literature review is set up in a way to put fields into conversation that really aren’t in conversation. I make the argument that the research done […]
It’s difficult to find provocative topics to write about each week when I am drowning in dissertation work. Right now I’m working on my literature review, which though often a throwaway chapter, is crucial to my argument. The lack of overlap between important fields, and the ways I suggest we […]