Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tutorial presentation - Work and Play

Hi everyone! We are Mandy and Agnes. Our presentation in this week is Work and Play.

Nowadays, we are avoidable living in digital age. With the help of technology, people have some changes in the field of work and play. Following we will limit the presentation to female to talk about how their sense of self and identity change when they work and play in digital age.

In our presentation, we will divide it into two main sections, work and play. First of all, we will discuss how the technology helps females get into workforce easily. The high technology brings some initial speculations on the ethical challenges facing both feminist and labour politics in the so-called new economy, particularly the information, communication and education industries. The impact of information and communication technologies on work and home life is to break down the distinction between “public” and “private” sphere. A work “flexibility” is mentioned, which can go beyond the binary of “public” and “private” or “work” and “home”. However, as Liu argues that, “the culture of production will become increasingly important as the number of hours spent working as opposed to consuming or ‘leisuring’ continues to climb” The distinction between work and leisured consumption has always been dubious for women given that “leisure” usually encompasses a number of activities taking place within the home.

Since women are the primary care-giver in family relationships, work in paid labour market just their secondary consideration. When and where they choose to work is related to a commonsense manifestation of feminism’s successful accomplishments in the public sphere of work. There are five different reasons that attract women get into paid labour market. 1) software for the creative class, which is growing fascination with the creative sector of the “new economy” 2) workstyle of the frequent flyer, wireless technology makes workforce becomes more accepting of women. 3) working from home, can be more flexible to handle workload at home. 4) moving into work, “welfare to work” provides flexible workplace arrangements. 5) flexible futures, because of the technology, women can seek greater choices in the effort to combine work and home life.

Then we will talk about the involvement of female in game playing and game industry. There was a conference named as ‘From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games
about “gender and cyberspace”’ held. The main concern of it is women were lagging behind in their colonizing of a set of technologies and technological practices. Since gender is a continuum rather than a set of binary oppositions – should design games for people who relate to gender and sexual identities in complex, contradictory and fluid ways: butch/ femme gave us a language to think about certain tendencies without assuming that those categories fit any given human being very snugly.

Nowadays, there is fewer worry about women’s access to cyberspace since the gap between the sexes in online participation has largely closed. Internet is not that male-dominated space. But there are still two concerns: 1) whether girls do and can and should play computer games; 2) women are still vastly under-represented in the fields that design digital technology.

Success of the girl’s game movement
1. Marked increase over the past decade in the number of women playing games
2. Some recent surveys have suggested that the majority of women have at least played games at some point
3. Play game with boyfriendplay less diverse range of games
4. Play games for a shorter period of time per session

We can see the number of female game player has a rapid increase. Female become target customers of game company. Some of them even work in game industry. For the female game market, there is a great potential for development. They would produce smaller and lighter gaming console for the target customer.

There is a new kind of game - women’s game appeared. We can find this category in many gaming website, e.g.http://www.i-gamer.net/?game=8 and http://game.sina.com.hk/cgi-bin/fl/tag.cgi?t=%A4k%A9%CA. The characteristic and type of female’s game usually is different to the others. For characteristic, female’s games are usually more colorful, cute and contain cartoon character. And they are usually about cooking, pet, love etc.

So, we can see that the involvement of female in workplace and game playing is increased. The advance of technology should be the most important reason of it. The main concern is, did the status of women raise because of it?

7 comments:

  1. I think women more or less status had been increased since the advance techonology.
    As what you mentioned the example and the clips that you shown could bring benefit and convenient women working in home.

    For the game part that you raised I guess the advance teachonology could let people play more games no matter boys or girls. They just have to choose their own interest in terms og the genre of the game type. Girls might prefer NDS and boys prefer PSP, Xbox, but I still see some games are not gender specific and there is also girls like to play "boys" game, and boys like to play "girls game".

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  2. Thank you for your presentation =] I think it was very interesting. As I am a gamer myself (and a female XD) I think female status are still not liberated by technology. Like the Home Office, they still confine the woman into their homes and with their kids and family. Work is just an oportion, while housework is their main job.

    As for the gaming aspect I think most females are still being excluded from the gaming culture. I know in Taiwan female gamers are very common, but in Hong Kong it is really still very rare.

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  3. hi agnes and mandy, what a nice presentation! Thank you so much!! i am impressed about what you guys talk about the girl's online/video games movement, I am totally agree that the game industry has been changing and raising attention on female market. I think one of the reasons is not only what you guys mentioned in presentation that the well development of technology help reach a larger target audiences, but also because of the cyberspace actually expand the creativity and the volume of game players, that's why virtual space became a popular platform to netizens to spend their leisure time. And those chnages will definitely attract the games corporations to expand their business, thus, they will release more games in different categories to attract game players, no matter they are male or female.

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  4. Agnes and Mandy, you guys did a great job, HAHA. Actually, you have mentioned that the advanced technology helps females get into workforce easily. Women can work at home. I am interested in this new trend. It breaks down the distinction between “public” and “private” sphere. The binary of “public” and “private” or “work” and “home” are blurred. I agree that if women working at home are more flexible. But I don’t think it is liberate women or increase the social status of women. Women are also need to take care child at home. “Housewife” is always an important role for women. But we would not suppose men stay at home working and doing house work. I think that it is a new kind of “employment” method. But, it cannot liberate women.

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  5. Hi, who can tell me the real name of "Bell"? thanks! I have to mark the register.

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  6. Hi Franco! Bell is Kristel Chung:) and I am Jodie ;) haha:)

    Mandy and Agnes, thank you so much for your presentation. Here's are some comments about your presentation. First of all is about the part of 'play'. In this part, what i like the most is the example of the 'girl's game' category. It is an interesting example that i really did not realize before since I thought that all the action games are 'belongs' to boy and other simple or cute games 'belongs' to girl. It is an good example to let us rethink why the people would categorize games as boy's game or girl's game. There should be no boundaries if there are games launched in digital world. This told us no matter in the real world or in digital, there is always stereotype of women.

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