The cats are doing great. Much more like themselves today after a bit of anesthesia and dental work yesterday. Poseidon is basically back to normal. Phoebe has been a bit sleepy, but late this evening is behaving as we’d expect, which is great, because she is loving and cuddly. They’re eating and purring and I’m sure everything will be back to normal tomorrow. They have to get a bit of medicine, which we’ll put in their food for a few days, but otherwise great. I am petting them extra much. They deserve it.

In Rituals and Traditions, we wrapped up a few days discussing fans. I ask the class to try to see fans from the perspective of a team or school or league, as if they’re working for them. We talk about sociology via Goffman, and then three theories here, first the classic social identity theory and then role identity theory and, finally, identity fusion theory.

This time out I added new bit about highly identified fans, as I recently learned a family story that is illustrative. I got a laugh out of it, too. Now, I think, I will add a little more to that story every time — like I’m trying to work on a stand-up routine.

In Criticism we discussed media aesthetics. I showed stills from the documentary we watched last week to talk about framing and shot composition. We also talked about two stories about e-sports and gaming. And one of my colleagues, who teaches in our e-sports program was very generous with her time and joined us for the conversation. I was grateful for the additional insights.

First, we talked about Why So Many Esports Pros Come From South Korea:

Much of their decisions to go pro hinged upon schooling. South Korea is a famously well-educated country where roughly 70 percent of students pursue higher education after high school. However, the academic environment is also intensely competitive, to the point where cram schools are a given for most Korean students who hope to score well on the Suneung, South Korea’s nationalized college entrance exam.

For Korean students whose families can’t afford private tutors or cram schools, the odds are stacked considerably against them. PC bangs—gaming cafés where you can rent a PC and play popular games for hours on end—however, are innumerable and very affordable. Most PC bangs charge about ₩1,000 an hour, which roughly comes out to $1.

So here’s the math: South Korea is the most fiercely skilled gaming region on the planet, but that’s because it has a bunch of working-class kids with little social mobility and a lot of free time (no tutoring, no cram school) with ubiquitous access to dirt-cheap internet cafés. South Korea’s gaming infrastructure and culture is what gives Korean kids the means to become the best players in the world, but the country’s structural inequality is a big part of what drives them to go pro in the first place.

So, right away, we were able to figure out if the social dynamics in South Korea are similar to some sports in other parts of the world. (They are.)

That was an interesting story all the way around, and, again, I was able to call on a real expert. That was even more helpful in the second story, which was No girls allowed which is an insightful history piece that explains some of the ouroboros of game development, and perhaps hints at what preceded Gamergate. It’s also an examination of marketing.

When Romero’s daughter Maezza was 8, she returned home from school with a story for her mother. Maezza had told her classmates that when she grows up, she wants to be a game designer. She was a level 90 in World of Warcraft. She loved wearing her Blizzard T-shirt to school. She wanted to learn how to code and make games. A kid in her class turned around. “Girls don’t play games,” he said. “Fortunately, my daughter had a great response,” Romero says. “She said to the boy, ‘My mommy makes games.’ She owned him entirely.” That the concept of “girls don’t play games” exists even among children in schoolyards today has less to do with the actual numbers of players as much as it has to do with an idea that was heavily circulated from the ’90s through television commercials, magazine ads, video game box art and the media. After all, a person who grew up in the ’90s would have little or even no reference for what came before. Their first game marketing experiences would have sold a very black-and-white picture about who video games are for. But this idea is starting to break down. According to Cotteleer, industries tend to look beyond their existing target demographic only when the market has become totally saturated. It can take a while” sometimes more than a decade. And when that happens, they ask, “Who’s next?” She says Nintendo mastered this with the launch of the Wii console, which went on to break records in console sales and introduce video gaming to audiences who had previously never bought a console or played a video game. Its advertising also deliberately targets a different audience, using celebrity spokespeople like Beyoncé, Penelope Cruz and Robin Williams and his daughter Zelda. But the process of breaking down the widely held stereotype of games being for boys doesn’t end with game-makers targeting diverse audiences, Bogost says. In fact, he doesn’t believe that is the right approach, in the same way he doesn’t believe that the industry going after the male audience was a smart idea. “It seems to me an enormously stupid idea, actually,” Bogost says. “All you have to do is look at the most successful games to see that it’s only been possible for them to be massively successful if they don’t systematically exclude half the population.” In order for video games to overcome their existing stereotype, they have to be sold to us as general purpose products. Bogost uses bookstores as an example. No one is surprised when they go into a bookstore and find that there are books for children, books about gardening or books about cooking. It’s accepted that books are a general purpose medium that can address lots of interests. The same applies to television” it doesn’t surprise people that there are channels dedicated to cooking, sports, animals or news. Bogost says that games are already there in terms of there being a diverse variety that can do different things” it just hasn’t effectively gotten the message out there yet. When the message gets out there” when video games are seen as a general purpose medium, and a person who plays Angry Birds can associate that with playing games on a PlayStation 4″ then perhaps the stereotype will begin to fade.

We read and discussed these stories because the students from last semester rightly pointed out we didn’t talk about gaming at all. And we should! Big business, and full of important content. I’m glad I received that suggestion, and was happy to address it this term.

The snow is still here. As of late last week this was one of the longest persisting snows in recorded history. They measure that by inches. So they had it that three inches had been on the ground for however many days was the mark. It ranks third, and a more depressing snow site hadn’t been seen since the 1960s.

We are in week four of this snow, but it is lessening.

With more threatened. But that’s for another day. Tomorrow, I’m going to shovel our sidewalk.