Nina B. Huntemann's Blog

Affirmative Activision

The latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops, was bound to be a hit no matter the advertising. The blockbuster success Activision enjoyed last year when CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was released predicted with some certainty a repeat performance. On November 9 Black Ops delivered, surpassing the MW2 record by nearly a million units. By the end of launch day, the game sold 5.6 million copies, earning $360 million. Clearly, flak about the "There's a Soldier in All of Us" ad didn't hurt sales.

While Sam Machkovech at The Atlantic called the commercial "twisted" for its "troubling mélange of gun, grenade and rocket combat" and ESPN debated whether Kobe Bryant's appearance was "insensitive" to active-duty soldiers, others heralded the ad for its diversity. Jezebel columnist Margaret Hartman praised Activision for "actually acknowledge(ing)" that women play videogames. The feminist game blog Border House applauded the ad's "inclusiveness" by portraying "people of color, men, women, people of various body types, and even a number of professions" as gamers.

The first player we see is a shot of her stiletto heels. The camera cuts to the face of a black woman in professional attire, unloading an automatic assault weapon. Black female characters are grossly under-represented in videogames, and popular discourse about women gamers overwhelmingly focuses on white players, especially conventionally attractive, white female players. To that point, the second player we see in close-up is a fuller-figured, young white woman wielding a shotgun with apparent self-satisfaction. Her body is the antithesis of the thin, sexualized female avatars common to videogames.

There's much to say about the militarization of play and gamification of war that first-person military shooters like CoD and Medal of Honor exemplify, and I am critical of the claim "there is a solider in all of us." But, the uncommon representation of race/gender in this 60-second commercial for a hyper-masculinized game genre is worth noting. Now, if Activision and the entire industry would correct the lack of racially diverse female avatars in their games and amongst their creative workforce, I could celebrate their recognition of the gamer in all of us.

This post was originally published on December 9, 2010 at In Media Res.

Wilderness Gone

[image error]I just finished making/watching my own version of The Wilderness Downtown, the Arcade Fire, Chris Milk and Google Chrome interactive music video experience available here. You are asked to enter the address of the home where you grew up. A song-length film is then assembled that incorporates Google Earth images of your childhood neighborhood.

Many others who lived in suburbia prior to the development boom of the 90s may have the same relationship to the more recent images of their...

NerdNite

[image error]Thanks to all those who attended NerdNite at the Middlesex in Cambridge last night. Great crowd and wonderful questions. I wish I had time to answer them all! Upon several requests, I've converted my PowerPoint presentation to a QuickTime file (.mov). The audio and video clips are extracted, but the images are intact. Click here for a copy of my presentation.

Props to Jeremy @NerdNite who made sure everything ran smoothly, including coming equipped with a computer nerd's kit full of A/V...

Ethical Gaming

Illustration by Bryant Paul Johnson [image error]

Born of a handful of events and revelations in the games industry over the past few month as well as new directions in my research, this brief post about ethical gaming is a provocation for gamers and game studies scholars. It begins in the virtual frontier of Red Dead Redemption (RDR), a "sandbox" game set in the early 20th century American West from Grand Theft Auto (GTA) creators Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. RDR was released on May 18 with...

Worcester Talks

I developed a public lecture about video games and the military, which I presented at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Worcester State College on Thursday, February 25. Below is an abstract of the talk. The WPI presentation was video recorded and is available in High-Res, Low-Res and Audio-only versions. My friend Darius Kazemi drove me to the WPI talk and took close notes of my presentation. You can read his on-the-fly transcript. The Worcester local paper, the Telegram & Gazette, a

The Tester

[This post also appeared on Antenna]

On January 21 Sony announced the cast for its exclusive PlayStation Network reality TV series, The Tester. This latest addition to the reality-competition subgenre follows a familiar structure: Contestants compete through various challenges in order to land a sought-after and usually glamorous job (model, designer, chef, etc.). However, contestants on The Tester compete for a job in Sony's quality control division testing games. As a friend of mine from...

Irreconcilable Differences

[image error]While popular discourse about the role of women in games is usually limited to the hyper-sexualized portrayal of female avatars or how to lure women and girls to play, the latest controversy over working conditions at a major game development company is a rare public opportunity to consider the gender and class politics of the video game industry.

On January 7 a post from anonymous author "Rockstar Spouse" appeared on Gamasutra, a news and information site for video game developers. The post r...

Sold the farm

[image error]Along with 69 million other users, I've been playing Farmville on Facebook for a couple of months. A simple point and click petri-dish game, Farmville by Zynga starts you off with a modest plot of land and a bit of Farmville (FV) coinage. You buy seeds, animals, trees, buildings, decorations, and seasonal items. You watch your seeds mature into flowers, fruits or vegetables, and harvest fully grown crops for more FV coins. You use FV coins to plow and plant. Some crops are worth more than...