Artist Entry: Jessica Ivins

Retrotype

It is a major stereotype that video games are the domain of adolescent boys and young men. Up until very recently this is a stereotype that has been very solidly based in fact. Only in the last few years and with the introduction of Nintendo's Wii system have major game developers realized that the market for video games went much further than this demographic. And not only is the primary market for video games young men, but those developing the games are also primarily men. This may seem like a broad generalization, but Computer Science and game development are both very dominantly male workplaces, and unfortunately, the games produced in this kind of stereotype ruled world produced very skewed female characters.

What Ivins has done in her work is to very pointedly show the user how women have been portrayed in mainstream video games over the last forty years. On the main page there is a timeline with a graphical representation of the prototype female character from that block of time. When you enter the program, she has you type in your birth year, then allows you to "customize" your character by changing the basic colors of the image. Finally she show the character in its video game environment, and gives you a summary of how she chose that character based on popular video games of the time, as well as a short history of the character's role in the game.

Overall I find her work very successful. Perhaps I am biased because of my major, but as the only woman in the game design course offered on campus I completely relate to this. And while the entire work is a commentary on women in games, it isn't so overtly feminist that it looses its impact to all but the fringes. It's very personalized, and very easily and effectively opens up the discussion about video games and how they have and haven't changed since the 1970s. My only critical comments about the piece would be that she could have pushed the history and context of the pieces more, or pushed for the user to be more attached to the prototype so that when her role in the game was revealed it would feel more personal. Another choice I don't necessarily agree with is showing the timeline at the beginning of the user's interaction, rather than the end. The way it's laid out the user knows what is ahead and nothing other than the text at the end is really unveiled.