
Flo (Diner Dash, a casual videogame)
People who only play casual videogames do not necessarily and sufficiently have the gaming capital to call themselves gamers, I call them casual gamers. But, the label is to strictly differentiate from the proper gamer. I play casual videogames, mostly on Kongregate and the specials on Steam. However, I have some gaming capital that makes me a gamer: I can hold a discussion about videogames’ processes, mechanics, narrative, literary and artistic merit. I read videogame blogs, I know names of some videogame designers, I have some expectations of upcoming videogames, I have opinions about videogame companies and I can talk at length about videogame characters, like why Tali of Mass Effect is my favourite character or the fine points of strategy in many sort of videogames.
Donghee Yvette Wohn (Michigan State University) has published a content analysis of casual videogame characters in Sex Roles. I would point to the preceding paragraphs for the uninitiated why Wohn would conduct such analysis.
Abstract
This paper examines gender and race representation in casual games through content analysis. Study 1 looks at gender and race representation in a random sample (N = 200) of casual games retrieved from the websites of the largest five casual game distributors. Study 2 looks at the most popular games on websites of the same five multinational distributors (N = 54) and analyzes how primary characters are portrayed in terms of appearance and personality. Females are overly represented as primary characters but chi-square analyses indicate no significant differences between sexes in terms of how they are portrayed: of note, neither males nor females are depicted in a sexual manner. These results conflict with previous studies of gender representation in game characters: this paper suggests that sampling methodology and the relatively new trend of casual games excluded this subset of games from prior research. Implications are discussed using a social cognitive framework.
I must say that her paper was the catalyst for my current content analysis project. Continue Reading »

On the subject of Canada, the Adolescent Development lab (


Back in late August 2011, news about Paul Adachi and Teen Willoughby’ (