Booth babe or cosplayer? Gamer Jessica Nigri dresses up for E3.

What a year it was for female gamers, geeks and nerds. The Internet was ablaze, especially during the summer months, over ill-considered tweets, Facebook rants, opinion columns, and harassing flash games that policed women and girls’ participation in traditionally male popular culture. In case you missed it, I’m referring to controversies in game and comic book communities that marked 2012 as the year of misogyny in geek culture. Critical attention to this issue is coming from game and media studies scholars, as well as courageous members of these fan communities. In this post, I add my take on all this misogyny by considering how “the booth babe” contributed to a backlash against female fandom.

It all started long ago, though no one is sure exactly when and where. The brief history of booth babes appearing in The Atlantic, notes the first appearance of spokesmodels at the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show in 1967. However, the use of female promotional models to sell technology is linked to the mid-20^th century automobile show and became an international phenomenon, repeated at trade shows around the world. Promotional models are common at expositions for construction tools, audio equipment, guns, cycling paraphernalia, cell phones, cameras, video games, computers, and much more.

The stereotypical booth babe is a temporary employee, hired for event-specific work, which requires standing for hours handing out promotional material and encouraging attendees to approach the product booth. The promotional model is most often, though not exclusively, a woman, and she tends to wear revealing clothing. Or, as demonstrated at the HyperMac booth last week at CES, body paint.

Booth babes may also don costumes worn by characters from the fictional worlds of games, anime, and comics. And thus, like so many female characters from these worlds, often wears Spandex, plate-metal bikinis, or ripped shorts and torn tanks. Photos of booth babes are among the most popular images that emerge from trade show and convention coverage, particularly on fan sites and industry blogs.

During CES 2012, the BBC posted a video about booth babes, which brought the first wave of attention to the phenomenon last year. The video moved swiftly through the Internet, due, in part, to dismissive comments from the president of the Consumer Electronic Association.

In June, game designer and 30-year industry veteran, Brenda Braithwaite, called out Senior Vice President of the Electronic Software Association, Rich Taylor, when she tweeted her dismay at the continued presence of booth babes at the Electronic Entertainment Expo:

“I dread heading off to work at E3 today….It is as if I walked into a strip club w/o intending to. These are the policies of @e3expo and @RichatESA. I feel uncomfortable in an industry I helped found.”

Short-lived attempts to ban booth babes have been made before. The women tech writers appearing in the BBC video and Braithwaite’s tweets provided a much-needed critique of an industrial practice that perpetuates a “boys-only” culture in gaming and technology, and does little to assuage gendered employment and wage discrimination. These moments, and others from last year, reenergized a conversation that deserves sustained attention, organized response, and formal policy changes. However, as summer heated up, the conversation suffered a melt down.

Late one night in June, Destructiod writer Ryan Perez questioned Felicia “Queen Geek” Day’s credibility in a (supposedly alcohol-fueled) tweet: “Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona?” Adding, “Could you [Day] be considered nothing more than a glorified booth babe? You don’t seem to add anything creative to the medium.”

Perez’s Twitter feed was flooded by furious Day supporters, including Wil “King Geek” Wheton, who called Perez an “ignorant misogynist” and demanded Destructiod fire him. They did.

A month after Perez lost his job, Joe Peacock wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com, titled “Booth Babes Need Not Apply,” in which he conflated hired promotional models with female cosplayers. Peacock was apparently disgusted by these “poachers,” claiming “they’re a pox on our culture.”

In November, comic book illustrator Tony Harris ranted on Facebook about “COSPLAY-Chicks” who, in his analysis, are only “quasi-pretty-NOT-hot” and know nothing about comic books. Central to Peacock and Harris’ comments, is the assumption that they have a super power to discern the real female fan from the fake female fan, and the booth babe from the cosplayer.

What these three moments (and many others from last year) reveal is a palatable anxiety from certain dark corners of geek culture. The increased presence of women at cons and expos has sparked a misogynistic backlash. Female cosplayers experience sexual harassment at cons, and are accused of being “attention whores” whose fan knowledge is questioned. Women working in games, comics, and technology attending trade shows are often presumed to be promotional models, and find their creative contributions to the industry dismissed. Standing in the center of this backlash is the booth babe, a misunderstood and misrepresented chimera. She has become a convenient amalgamation and target of many parts of geek culture’s gender problem. It is time to figure her out.

This post was originally published on January 17, 2012 at Antenna.

Panic over spoilers is not new, and certainly not new to games. ***SPOILER ALERTS*** are like red flags on the information highway. And the danger reaches beyond the tight corners of the Internet. This past summer NBC apologized toUS audiences for revealing in its own promo spots the outcome of tape-delayed Olympic events yet to be aired on television. Oops!

In the case of Halo 4, the spoilage started with a leak. Unauthorized images of the game discs surfaced on reddit and NeoGaf on October 11. Soon thereafter, game files were available on torrent sites, and gameplay videos were posted on YouTube. Microsoft responded by warning players that consoles with pirated copies of Halo 4 would face permanent bans of their XBox Live accounts. Regardless of Microsoft’s swift response, in less than a week the Internet was a minefield of Halo spoilers.

In considering the damage done by spoilers, sports competitions like the Olympics deserve protection, but other media experiences do not. AUCSD study found that spoilers don’t actually spoil the fun. In fact, they may enhance it. Tom Bissell wrote about games, “interactivity has everything to do with the how rather than the what.” I would add that long in the tooth game franchises like Halo deserve even less spoiler protection because the universe is so well known, and Halo 4 is hardly a reboot. Furthermore, the technical capabilities of the aging XBox 360 console have been exhausted. While I don’t completely agree with Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot statement that the industry requires new consoles in order to spur creativity, I wonder what could possibly surprise us about Halo gameplay? I’ll concede that playing Master Chief again might be worth an hour, but seeing him on YouTube won’t ruin that for me.

The availability of the game three weeks in advance of the official release has only heightened spoiler panic. “Go DARK. Now.”recommends a forum thread at Waypoint, the official Halo news site. Videos like Ready Up Live offer tips to avoid spoilers, including how to change settings in social media apps (protect your Twitter!) and which forums are “safe.” Spoiler panic serves industry anti-piracy efforts and pre-release hype for yet another sequel, but their warnings sound like desperate abstinence-only campaigns. Guard yourself against spoilers: Stay Off the Internet! Yeah, that’ll work.

This post was originally published on October 30. 2012 at In Media Res.

Logo by Hyun-Yeul Lee.

By Suzanne Leonard & Nina Huntemann

Some years ago when we were both graduate students, we, like many other junior scholars, discovered Console-ing Passions, an encounter that felt a bit like finding an oasis. Here was an organization with a history of supporting feminist media research, founded by a number of feminist scholars we studied and admired, which convened small conferences every other year. The chance some years later to continue this legacy by hosting Console-ing Passions in Boston with our local colleagues Miranda Banks and Deborah Jaramillo is a responsibility we were honored to accept.

The Boston conference, which will take place next week at Suffolk University, holds additional promise and potential: the first ever Console-ing Passions conference occurred at the University of Iowa in 1992, meaning that twenty years had passed since this watershed event. This milestone had the effect of putting our local host group in a mood of reflection. We wondered, what would be the most appropriate way to celebrate CP’s legacy of feminist media research, and to acknowledge how new technologies, delivery systems, and consumption practices have altered what it means to work in this discipline? How to best honor an organization that began focused mainly on television studies, but has expanded to include digital and new media, aural media, and gaming? Finally, we asked, what sort of events would allow us to reflect on where CP has been, and where it is going?

Our opening plenary, “Feminist Media Studies: Pasts, Presents, and Futures” is meant to kickstart such conversations, and features scholars at various points in their careers who will share their impressions of the field’s transformative moments. This group, moderated by two-time CP conference host and Fembot editor Carol Stabile, brings to the conversation expertise in the fields of Latino/Latina media studies, industry studies, feminist theory, digital and children’s media, ethnicity and cultural studies, girl culture, and postfeminism. A glance at the conference program likewise reveals that conversations about media histories are imbued throughout; participants will speak on panels titled “The Future of Feminist Historiography,” “Nostalgia TV,” “Toward a Historical Poetics of TV: Revisiting Seeing Through the Eighties” and “Neoliberalism, Difference and the Posthuman.”

Many of the longstanding interests of CP, known for its focus on gender, sexuality, and identity, feature in the 2012 line up. Speakers will present on online and televisual sexualities, soap operas, lifestyle media, female media makers, fandom, branding, gaming, and stardom. Take a look at the conference in total, however, and it becomes clear that the field of feminist media studies grows increasingly capacious. This year’s CP’s participants, and their proposed presentations, illustrate how feminism lives and thrives in myriad media forms—they are writers, watchers, and listeners, as well as players, designers, bloggers, fans, remixers, and modders.

This belief in media as a vehicle for feminist praxis—and our recognition that such actions are as vital now as ever—also provided the impetus for a keynote plenary, “Female Sexuality, Media Politics, and the War on Women”, a public conversation that will serve as the conference’s culminating event. In response to recent media controversies over women’s health care, and amidst reminders of how troubling conceptualizations of female sexuality and body politics continue to shape national discourse, feminist blogger Jessica Valenti will screen her film The Purity Myth, and well-known feminist media advocate Jean Kilbourne will moderate a panel discussion on social media activism, reproductive justice, and global health politics. They are joined by Daily Beast journalist Michelle Goldberg; technology consultant Deanna Zandt; reproductive justice activist La’Tasha Mayes; and broadcasting and social movement historian Allison Perlman.

As befits this twentieth anniversary year, we are looking forward to using next week’s gathering to take a pulse on the field of feminist studies. Antenna’s new series on Feminist Media Studies is surely an apt locale for such reflections; we look forward to reading your posts, tweets, and updates!

This post was originally published on July 11, 2012 at Antenna.

Illustration by Mara Williams.

I am thrilled to serve as editor of the second issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, which will focus on Feminist Game Studies. You can download a PDF of the call for papers here.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Issue 2: Feminist Game Studies
Editor: Nina Huntemann, Suffolk University
Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2012
Word length: 5000-9000 words
Publication Date: April 2013

Despite worldwide popularity across an increasingly diverse population of players, video and computer games continue to be defined, discussed, debated and derided as “toys for boys.” The gamer stereotype — young, heterosexual men — and reputation of misogyny in video game culture persists, in part, because many corners of the culture perpetuate these assumptions: homophobic, racist and sexist talk is notorious in online play and in the comment section of video game blogs and message boards; women are hyper-sexualized as characters in video games and at trade shows and fan conventions (i.e. ‘booth babes’); women and racial minorities hold very few creative positions in the industry; and game publishers purposely invoke the stereotypical male gamer to sell games, particular hyper-masculinized first person shooter and military-themed games (i.e. Call of Duty, Halo, God of War). As video games have integrated into the everyday lives of millions of people globally, it is no longer accurate (if it ever was) or useful to think of games and game spaces as primarily male domains. As games have migrated onto mobile devices, portable platforms, and cell phones, gaming is no longer (if it ever was) a leisure activity exclusive to young consumers from North America, Europe or Japan. But even as the first quarters dropped into Computer Space, women, people of color and queer players were negotiating their play inside homophobic, racist and sexist game spaces, and notable women and minority designers have created games that challenge a white, hetero-male virtual worldview.

It is the historical portrayal of gaming as male-centered, the disruption of that culture brought on by new forms of play, and the negotiated practices of marginalized players that informs this issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology.

Aims and Scope

The second issue of Ada will focus on feminist game studies. Feminist game studies examines how gender — and its intersections with race, class, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, nation and other axes of power — is produced, represented, consumed and practiced in and through digital games. The issue editor invites unpublished work from students, junior and senior scholars, independent authors, and artists that is centrally focused on feminist approaches to digital games, game play, game culture and/or the games industry.

The editor welcomes submissions from a wide range of disciplines and diverse methodological and conceptual approaches. If you wish to discuss a potential contribution for this issue, please email the issue editor, Nina Huntemann, nhuntemann@suffolk.edu.

Topics and approaches might include, but are not limited to:

● Theorizing feminist game play and game design
● Representations of femininity and masculinity in video games
● Queer gaming / queering games
● Gender and labor in video game production (hardware and software)
● Feminist machinima, feminist modding
● Racism, sexism and homophobia in games, game communities
● Organized (and disorganized) challenges to racism, sexism and homophobia by players

General Submission Requirements

Authors should submit essays of 5000-9000 directly to the editor in Rich Text Format (.rtf) or MS Word format (.doc) by 1 October 2012. If your submission includes images, inquire with the editor about securing proper permissions. All images should be submitted as separate files, not embedded in the manuscript. Please send one JPG image for quick download (< 2mb) and one TIF image for archival purposes (200dpi resolution).

All submissions should be accompanied by the following information in the email message with your submission attachment:

● Name(s), institutional affiliation(s), email address(es) of the person(s) submitting.
● Title of the text and the issue for which it is submitted.
● An abstract of no more than 100 words.
● A short paragraph (40-60 words) about the contributor(s).

Email submission to Nina Huntemann, nhuntemann@suffolk.edu

About Ada: Ada is an online, open access, open source, peer-reviewed journal run on a nonprofit basis by feminist media scholars from Canada, the UK, and the US. We do not — and will never — charge fees for publishing your materials, and we will share those materials using a Creative Commons License. Read more about Ada, including detailed information about submission guidelines and the review process at http://fembotcollective.org/journal/ada-submission-guidelines/.

Feminist game studies examines how gender, and its intersections with race, class, sexuality, etc., is produced, represented, consumed and practiced in and through digital games. Analyses of the representation of gender in games constitutes a significant portion of feminist work, a sub-field of which could be called Croft-studies. Like critical analysis surrounding Madonna in the 90s, Lara Croft from the hit series Tomb Raider attracted much popular and scholarly press when introduced in 1996. At the time, Tomb Raider was one among a few games featuring a lead female character. Like Madonna, Lara’s 34D-cup breasts and double-fisted guns sparked a similar debate about female sexual empowerment, the male gaze and objectification.

While still under-represented in the game world, leading female characters are far more prevalent today, and offer gamers a wider variety of play experiences. Male characters are (relatively) more complex, and offer more diverse depictions of masculinity. These contemporary representations require as much feminist analysis as Croft, if not more so, because so many more people engage with and create systems of meaning for negotiating this symbolic material. Furthermore, feminist game studies can offer a corrective to the seductive discourse of postfeminism, which has often dominated critiques of gender in the post-Croft era.

The popularity of gaming on mobile and other portable devices has broadened where and when people game. It is no longer accurate (if it ever was) or useful to think of games and game spaces as primarily male domains. Those spaces are far more fluid, literally traveling between devices and between home, public, work and back again. How are gamers navigating leisure and work time when they play Words with Friends at the office on their iPhone or Uncharted 3 on their PS Vita in between child care and household chores?

Related to the above, the rise of so-called “casual” gaming has significantly expanded both the market for games and the industrial practices of game production. During the casual games revolution, the traits associated with casual games – who played them, what constituted casual, and how the games were made – were defined against the masculine “hardcore” world of games, and thus became (like soap operas for television) the feminized version of video games. Nintendo’s Wii, also a technology feminized through popular and industrial discourse, contributed to this bifurcation between hardcore and casual.

One area of feminist research I think is particularly interesting focuses on how gamer behavior online performs homophobic, sexist and racist hate speech. The virtual spaces where this behavior thrives exists on privately owned servers that operate as quasi-public social gathering spaces and are occupied by hundreds of thousands of players. How is behavior regulated (or not), what are the ethics of online spaces, and who is defining the rules of behavior in these public/private domains? How can online spaces be created that are safe and inviting for racial minorities, women, and GLBTQ gamers?

Feminist perspectives on video game production are a small, but growing area of research; most of it is focused on the lack of women in the industry. Mia Consalvo has written about the industry phenomenon “crunch time” – mandated extended workday hours for weeks or months on end. Through interviews with women game designers, Consalvo provides a rare look at quality of life issues that deter many women from staying in or even entering the industry. Crunch time controversies like the Rockstar and EA Spouse incidents, expose the quality of life issues vexing the industry and how these industrial practices affect the familial sphere. Feminist production and organizational ethnographies can shed light on these internal dynamics, providing strategies and policies for creating family-friendly workplaces and healthy work-life balance.

Thus far the small amount of production studies has focused on North American, white-collar creative labor, and further investigation is needed there in order to deepen our understanding of how gender, race and sexuality, etc. are produced, marketed and distributed via games. But other, less glamorous areas of labor should not be ignored, such as the hardware manufacturing and assembly of the platforms and peripherals upon which games are played. Feminist game studies scholars can build upon existing feminist perspectives about ICTs, particularly in the global South, where the majority of video game hardware is manufactured, in order to understand the role of globalization in production.

These musings are far from a comprehensive collection of all the past and current work in feminist game studies. There is much happening and much to be done, some of which you can hear at the various games studies panels on the program at SCMS this week. I hope that the feminist media studies series at Antenna is a place where we can continue to find and encourage feminist game studies as well.

This post was originally published on March 20, 2012 at Antenna.

We met in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995 and soon formed the unexplainable but undeniable bond of best friendship. Melissa left for Columbia, Missouri in 2002 and Nina left a year later for Boston. Both of us were ABD and under self- and job-imposed pressure to finish. We both knew exactly one person in our new towns, and we were both facing completely unfamiliar personal circumstances: new colleagues, institutions, career phases, relationships, and homes.

When we left graduate school we lost the community and camaraderie of our peers. As many contributors to the work/life series have pointed out, academic life after graduate school is fraught with stress, anxiety, and loneliness. The structures of the academy are isolating, rewarding independent work over collaboration, single instruction over team-teaching, and competition for resources over collective models of support.

To minimize the impact of the distance, we committed to a weekly one-hour “appointment”: first on the phone, and then on video chat. Truthfully, the chat began as a way to maintain our friendship, but quickly became a way for us to continue to reap the benefits of our mutually supportive work relationship. At the beginning of each semester we find one hour in our weekly schedules to chat. The semester usually starts with a discussion of goals for the term, which we then break into week-by-week tasks. Each chat hour begins with a conversation about the goals we completed the previous week and ends with The List of priority tasks for the upcoming week. Any time remaining we use to discuss work and personal happenings (the fun part!).

The benefits of our weekly chats are many. First and foremost, we keep in frequent contact, which has sustained our long distance friendship for nearly 10 years. We also reap many professional rewards: most important, we have in each other a safe colleague, outside of our departments, with whom to discuss workplace tensions and career moves. Discussion of the conflicts and politics that come with academic life allows us to put things in context, blow off a little steam, and strategize, before (or instead of) taking action. Because many academic environments lack support and encouragement, we celebrate even the most minor of accomplishments and cheerlead each other through difficult tasks. Accountability is another major advantage of our weekly chats. Because we “report” weekly to someone who knows our short- and long-term goals, we are better able to stay on task. If we don’t, we’ll have to explain why! One of the most important functions of our weekly chats is to use each other as a sounding board. In the past, we have both failed to say no to colleagues’ requests that took time and attention away from our professional goals. Through our chats, we have learned (for the most part) to postpone saying yes to requests without talking to each other first. We sometimes take on tasks we shouldn’t, but The List has helped us become more skilled at saying no.

Our weekly chat ritual is not a panacea for all the difficulties we face in our academic lives. In fact, the chats themselves present challenges worth noting for readers considering a similar support ritual. For the chats to work we have to hold each other accountable, which can be very hard to do. This isn’t a punitive system, and we care so much for each other and deeply empathize with all that gets in the way of our goals. It is important to find gentle but firm ways to remind each other of our goals and the consequences of not moving forward.

It is also hard if one of us is feeling off track and the other is soaring through The List. We try to recognize that any set back is temporary and recall times when the situation was reversed. Perhaps most difficult, however, is when our weekly chats suffer gaps and misconnects. Though we are committed to protecting our time, unavoidable conflicts occur. Rescheduling is a nightmare; failure to find a common hour in our overloaded schedules often means we miss a week. We have also dealt with long hiatuses between chats for several months and the impact to our motivation and confidence is acutely felt during these absences. We haven’t mastered how to deal with these gaps, but have found it useful to make a mega-list with a week-by-week breakdown and send an email update, even if our chat partner is unable to respond.

Our weekly chat ritual may not work for everyone, but if you’re looking for companionship to help you stay on task, we definitely recommend you give it a try!

This post was originally published on December 6, 2011 at Antenna.

As Kotaku readers know well, everyone plays video games. The medium has finally, at long last for people like me who have been playing since the 1970′s, pervaded our culture and brought some measured level of respect, admiration and thoughtful criticism. And thank goodness for thoughtful criticism, which not only marks the cultural significance video games has achieved (after years locked in the basement), it also plays a vital role in advancing the medium. (Read on at Kotaku…)

Playtesters play videogames that are unstable, unbalanced and riddled with broken code. Their labor is also unstable in that playtesters are frequently short-term contract workers, unpaid volunteers, or “family and friends.” And yet, from these unstable labor and play environments, testing is “the backbone of software development” (Petro Piaseckyj, Managing Producer, Sony).

Playtesting is recommended as a door into entry-level employment and a training ground for cultivating future designers. Despite periodic exposés about the unfavorable working conditions at game studios (most recently, Homefront’s 6 months of crunch), playing or making games for a living is still a “dream job.” Sony contributed to glamorizing playtesting in its made-for-PlayStation Network reality show, The Tester, in which contestants vie for a fulltime tester position at Sony and a $5000 signing bonus. Playtesting and quality assurance (two related, but different jobs) are the lowest paid disciplines in the production-side of the game industry.

Changes in the economic structure and industrial practices of game development over the past decade, namely the concentration of development into large conglomerates, have lead to the professionalization of playtesting and reflects a trend in creative digital labor generally. The ‘democratization’ of media production brought by digitalization elevated user-generated content, but has the reciprocal effect of depressing wages and decreasing paid opportunities. Playtesting now is less often an entry to future, long-term employment in game design and more often an outsourced branch of quality assurance or an internal division of usability research (see Halo 3 testing at Microsoft Labs). The free labor of gamers during beta testing still plays an important, productive role in finalizing a game, but entry to a career in design is a closing door.

I am not suggesting that all gamers who willingly give free or part-time labor to testing have dreams of working in the industry, and thus are deceived and exploited. My interviews with beta testers, not surprisingly, suggest multiple motivations for playing unfinished, broken games (bragging rights, membership in a community, free stuff). As David Hesmondhalgh cautions, pairing free labor with exploitation in a broad stroke manner dismisses the “genuinely positive experiences” of some creative workers. But a critical account of playtesting – alongside other sites of game industry labor – that recognizes the inequities and opportunities of this work contributes to understanding media production in the 21st century and what it means to “play games for a living.”

This post was originally published on May 3, 2011 at In Media Res.

I’ve scanned a few of the books I’ve discovered thus far, and will continue to add to the collection. Here is a sample.

I am frequently reminded of the canonical status of the Zelda franchise whenever another “best videogames of all time” list is published, which coincidentally happened last week as I was playing through Ocarina. The local weekly paper, The Boston Phoenix, created a top-50 list on which Ocarina was #11 and A Link to the Past was #3 (Half-Life 2 was the #1 game of all time).

Of all the Zelda titles, I chose to play Ocarina for this Late to the Party post because last March when the Penny Arcade Expo came to Boston for the first time, I was reminded once again of the gaping hole in my personal gaming history. I attended a very entertaining PAX East panel lead by videogame critic N’Gai Croal and Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo. As described by the panelists, Croal and Totilo created a game out of ranking the ten best videogames of all time. They started with the aggregate review scores from GameRakings.com, on which Ocarina is listed #1. Prior to the convention, they presented this starter list to thirteen videogame developers, and offered two moves: swap the position of two games on the list, or replace a game on the list with one not represented, adding it to the vacated spot. As Croal and Totilo reported the process to PAX East attendees, the audience cheered or booed each move. While the final list is unsurprising and reflects a certain videogame purist perspective – the extremely popular Madden and Pokemon games are not represented – I couldn’t help but notice the only title I had not played was a Zelda game.

Ocarina, the fifth title in the Zelda series, was released in November 1998 for the Nintendo 64, seven years after A Link to the Past. Nintendo fans were anxious to play a new console Zelda game, especially after witnessing the three-dimensional transformation of Mario in Super Mario 64. Ocarina is a canonical videogame, in part, because of its innovative game mechanics. The game was the first to use a target lock attack system and to incorporate context-sensitive actions, both of which are now staples of game play. The introduction of context-sensitive actions increased how the 10-button Nintendo 64 controller could be mapped, and thus how Link, the beloved protagonist of Zelda, could interact in the 3D world of Hyrule. While not the first example of a videogame using diegetic music to solve puzzles and unlock levels, Ocarina was novel for its integration of music into a classic role-playing, dungeon exploration experience. Throughout the game players collect songs that must be performed correctly on the ocarina in order to summon friends and open time portals (see Zach Whalen’s treatment of in-game music, which includes an analysis of Ocarina).

Playing a free-roaming 3D game from 1998 was a bit frustrating. After spending hours in open-world environments like the Grand Theft Auto franchise, I wanted Link to move faster, and I kept misusing the right analog stick on the Wii Classic Controller in a futile attempt to rotate the camera (I’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty on my PS3 lately). Usually after switching platforms or game genres I need just a few minutes to adjust to the controls. I think I struggled more with Ocarina because the 3D environment was so familiar, even though the game is twelve years old.

My first several minutes with Zelda’s 64-bit music and graphics evoked memories of favorite childhood videogames, particularly the hours I spent with my siblings playing through King’s Quest and Wizardry games. Despite this nostalgia however, my late to the Zelda party experiment hasn’t inspired me to play other past titles in the series, and I probably won’t finish Ocarina. Unlike arcade-style games that I play again and again – Yar’s Revenge on my Atari 2600 and classic Donkey Kong and Mario games on the Wii Vritual Console – I think the Hyrule zeitgeist has passed by me.

Dear defenders of the videogame canon, please don’t eviscerate me for my lack of Link love. I genuinely appreciate Ocarina for the innovations it brought to gaming, and I bow to creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on my favorite third-person perspective games, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Beyond Good and Evil, and American McGee’s Alice. Unfortunately, the dungeon exploration, item hunts and quests feel slow and tired because a dozen years of game development has passed since Link imprisoned Ganondorf.

The next game in the Zelda series, Skyward Sword, is due in 2011. Sword fighting is a central component of game play, featuring the Wii Remote and Wii MotionPlus controller. I will watch (and likely play) Skyward Sword with interest, particularly for how creatively the game exploits motion-sensing technology. After a buggy demo at the E3 2010 Nintendo press conference, there is concern that MotionPlus technology isn’t ready for the action-heavy game play promised in Skyward Sword. Despite these early rumors, Miyamoto has high-hopes that the first Wii native Zelda title of a quarter-century old franchise will attract a new generation of players, and once again innovate game play mechanics.

This post was originally published on December 15, 2010 at Antenna