Playing with Herstory. Representing Femininity in Historical Video Games

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Elisabeta Toma Cosima Rughiniș
2016 DiGRA/FDG ’16 – Proceedings of the 2016 Playing With History Workshop

We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine characters, and we illustrate them through an analysis of This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days. Historical games may include documented historical characters and fictive characters as well; the latter may aim to represent a type of real persons, or may be individualized as a purely fictional character. We argue that This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days have both strong and weak points in their construction of feminine characters, when taking into account the proposed set of indicators.

 

Time to Reminisce and Die: Representing Old Age in Art Games

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Cosima Rughiniș Elisabeta Toma Răzvan Rughiniș
2015 DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference

Gender has recently increased in relevance as a game analysis topic. Representations of masculinity and femininity in games have become a growing interest for scholars. Still, little has been written about representations of aging and older persons. Starting from this status-quo, we propose an analysis of age displays in a subtype of video games, namely casual art games. These are designed to encourage reflexivity and perspective-taking on a given topic, examining the human condition and offering a critical view of society. We examine several casual art games and we discuss how they depict and model older characters and the process of aging: What are the game-based narratives of aging? How are elderly characters portrayed and what place do they take in the emerging game story? How do game mechanics model the situation of ‘old age’ and the process of ‘aging’?