Assignment: find 3 existing projects and answer what why how and so what for each of them.
• ‘what?’ – the identification of a ‘hunch’ or
tentative research proposition, leading
eventually to a defined and viable research
question
• ‘why?’ – the need for your research in
relation to the wider context, in order to test
out the value of your proposition, locate your
research position, and explore a range
of research strategies
• ‘how?’ – the importance of developing an
appropriate methodology and specific
methods for gathering and generating information
relevant to your research
• ‘so what?’ - challenges you to think about the
significance and value of your research contribution, not only to your practice
but to the wider research context, and how this is best communicated and
disseminated.
Mis/Represent: Women & Visible Minority
Representation in Videogames
OCAD University, Digital Future, Masters Thesis,
2015
Sherif Taalab, 2015
What?
Taalab seeked to illustrate the ways in which
“visible minorities and women are represented in AAA video games.
Some of the questions Taalab is asking her
thesis are
- What are the obstacles being
faced by women and visible minorities in how they are represented by AAA
video games?
- How can we empower women and
visible minorities through gaming platform and social media?
Why?
Today, mainstream AAA video games companies have addressed issues of diverse representation of women in their video
games. Of course, it is still a work in progress, especially for other visible
and non-visible minorities. However, this thesis was written in 2015, just one
year after the Gamergate controversy so identity and representation issues in
the gaming industry were still being debated.
How?
Taalab tackles her research questions first by
looking at “modes of meaning making and authorship engaged by children as they
play and learn. The focus is to understand how individuals assess their
surroundings as children, carrying certain notions regarding identity into
adulthood”. She then proceeds to examine “videogame demographics and character
creation in the AAA industry with the intent to shed light on the different
practices used in the development of a skewed projection of different groups of
individuals in society, affecting the way individuals view themselves and
others.” Taalab used the creation of the LGBTQ guilds in World of Warcraft and
the response to them by Blizzard (the creator of WoW) as a case study. Finally
Taalab created a interface “that allows users to choose from signifiers that
relate to their personal identity that mimics the idea behind many avatar
creator applications within AAA games, but rather than having physical elements
combined to create a character, they simple make selections based on textual
signs.” After the questionaire is completed, “they are given an artist’s
rendition of a famous videogame character, redrawn to resemble a visible
minority or a positive female representation.”
So What?
This research project is has social and cultural
value and significance due to the impact of Gamergate and the ugliness that the
controversy in 2014 revealed about games, the industry, and its fans and players.
The Tearoom
https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom
Robert Yang, 2017
What?
How do we design games that explore queer male
sexual practices that is situated in history yet related to today’s politics? How do we design games that challenge notions of
censorship? How do we address the idea of uselessness (or useless affordances) in games as a site of queer possibility?
Why?
Video games don’t deal with sex very well,
especially queer, non-normative sexual practices. Robert Yang is one of the few
if not only game developer that design games about gay male sexual practices.
How do we design games that allow for queer sexual practices yet is able to
communicate the importance for these practices not just visually, but also in
the mechanics of the game itself?
How?
Yang developed and designed the game through a
research period of gathering all the historical facts from the book, “Tearoom
Trade” by Laud Humphreys, “a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who
have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms ("tearooms" in
US, "cottages" in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived
"rules" for participating in the tearoom trade.” (Yang, 2017) Yang’s
game took on the statistics from Humphrey’s study and implicated them into the
mechanics of the game, such as how often you might encounter a African-American
man while cruising or the percentage of police violence faced by the LGBTQ
community would reflect on how often you encountered a police officer in the
game. Yang also references current policing of gay cruising in New York and
Toronto.
One way to mitigate the censorship of sex games
for Yang is to depict guns instead of actual penises. This is a method based on
irony and humour. Lastly, Yang subverts the site of the toilet which usually exists in games a useless space that has ammo or other power ups (because video game avatars don't actually have to use the bathroom) as a space for queer play. By using the useless space as the space as the main game level for The Tearoom, Yang subverts the ides that spaces that are useful are often linked to ideas of heteronormativity, capitalism and productivity, whereas useless spaces are seen as leisurely, feminine, queer and anti-productive.
So What?
Gaming communities, especially ones that exist online, have historically been unsafe spaces for many players who don’t
subscribe to the white, cis, het, male identity. There hasn’t been massive
progress made either, the issues women, queer and other players face today
are not much different then before. Examples include Gamergate, the death threats
sent to women in games, the homophobia and transphobia that proliferate the
language used on online gaming communities. The gaming industry, although not
necessarily the same as the world where the fans operate, are complicit in how
unsafe spaces are created by its fans. Twitch bans many games that are about
sex or depict sex, a few of which are Robert Yang’s games. Of course, some sex
games are extremely violent and misogynistic but Twitch doesn’t care about the
politics of a game, just its content. Robert Yang’s work is significant and
valuable in that it challenges the hegemonic attitude the gaming industry has
against players who play differently.
Queering straight space:
Thinking towards a queer architecture
Carlos Jacques, 2016
What?
What is the queering of
architecture and to a larger extent, what is the queering of space? This is
different to the idea of queer space, where a sexual identity defines the space
itself. How could we use the politics of queerness to help us understand space
and the meaning of constructed space?
To begin this research, Jacques further ask,
what are the possibilities to queer architectural practices that “imbricate
matrices formative of space” but also allows for “matrices of
sex-gender-sexuality construction”. How does architecture move between and
within these two matrices as architecture has “a hand in the constitution of
patriarchal space, but that may also subvert its role, through a queering
practice”?
The goal of this research is not to put down
design rules or methodologies in how to design for queer architecture, but
rather it is to more imaginatively explore the possibilities of what queering
space and architecture could potentially mean. This is done through the
confluence of three concerns: “the significance of queer thought and practice,
as a response to sexism; architecture as a practice of creating spaces that
contributes to the construction of repressive identities of sex, gender and
sexuality; the meaning and possibility of a liberatory queered and queering
architecture. The concept that will serve to unify these three concerns
will be that of matrice, the matrices of gender and space.
Our question then is can we imagine architectural space in such manner
that the queering of our lives becomes possible?” (Jacques, 2016)
Why?
“Space is not absolute, fixed and indifferent
reality, a mere container of agencies and events. Space is rather
conceived of as existing in and through events; events that are themselves
composite, complex and plural.”
Modern architecture is deeply influenced by the
work and thinkings of Le Corbusier. It was him who defined modern architecture
as concerned with the house. Le Corbusier’s house was “the ordinary and common
house for normal and common men.” “It was to be rooted in the human: ‘the human
scale, the typical need, the typical function, the typical emotion.” (Le
Corbusier, 2008, p 102) Elizabeth Grosz has expressed this to be the politics
of this type of architecture, “the relations of complementarity and of
expression between a kind of human subjectivity and the space or dwelling which
contains or enables that subjectivity. (Grosz, 2001, p 51)
Architecture and space is therefore political,
as it is constituted with ideas of oppression and power. Architecture gives
shape for patriarchal and heteronormative ideas a place to live because it is
created with those ideas. This is because for Le Corbusier, architecture
assumes that since all human experiences are
universal, then all architecture should be universal. “Yet just as state
sovereignty establishes a legal order by excluding those outside the law, and
thus defining who are the legal subjects of the sovereign, and as it also
stands both inside and outside the law so as to be able to call upon
exceptional powers to assure its authority, should the need arise, (Schmitt,
2006) so too does modern architecture exclude while it includes.” “ Le
Corbusier’s “normal and common men” are not women, working class,
lumpen-proletariat, blacks, gays and bisexuals, nomads and criminals: all of
these kinds of people, and there are many more, are marginal to the production
of the “family”. And if architecture does not have the power of a
sovereign state authority, it nevertheless can and does, with other agencies,
constitute spaces of inclusion and exclusion; what may be called the political matrices
of space.”
If we take on this position,
that architecture is political, and that it is not absolute, then we have a
reason why this research is valuable in the larger context of questioning how
we understand space itself, specifically how space produces and reproduces
power relations that support and sustain patriarchy and heteronormativity while
repressing women, queer people, people with a disability, the working class and
other marginalized groups. In order to imagine for a “potentially radical
political architecture, architecture must position itself immanently with regards to its
practice and to a wider way of life, of which it is a part of.
How?
This research project mostly takes on the theorists who write on architecture, gender and sexuality, queer theory and spatial studies to speculate what queering architecture could look like. Jacques also used historical examples such as the Situationist and the utopian architecture from the late 60s to suggest what have been done already and what we could do better.
Jacques draws a conclusion that
addressing the social and political issues in architecture will not materialize
in formal, structural ways. “Queering space thus involves a potentially
extraordinary variety of events of appropriation and transformation of straight,
hierarchical spaces and the creation of counter, queer, horizontal,
autonomous spaces in the interstices/margins of dominant space for the
proliferation of new pleasures, desires, subjectivities. As
possible examples, one may cite Aaron Betsky’s deformation of locations through
temporary appropriation, making possible “useless, amoral, and sensual space
that lives only in and for experience.” For Betsky, “the goal of
queer space is orgasm.” (1997, pp. 5-7) And Christopher Reed imagines
queer spaces as a more stable claiming of space against the dominant
heterosexual matrix, exemplified in gay bars, lesbian archives, student groups,
sex toy stores, social services, political organisations, and the like. (1996)”
Another example is the
Situationist, who critiqued urban space through playful intervention, and the
key word here is “play”, as they saw play as a anti-political and
anti-economical activity that predates human history. The Situationists were of
course inspired by the works of Johan Huizingha. “The Situationists proposed
and endeavoured to develop theoretically and practically a global and total
intervention in social relations capable of generating a new
civilisation. (McDonough, 2009) The means for this transformation would
be the derive, the movement through organised space with the aim of
opening up to and engendering ludic-constructive behaviour; détournement,
the subversive appropriation of spaces and movements, gestures and
comportments; the construction of situations, “the concrete construction
of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher passionate
nature.” (2009, p. 94)”
“Perhaps then to queer, to be queering,
is to be at this threshold between order and disorder, the liminal point-moment
of freedom, formed and formless, in permanent metamorphosis. Against the
architectural guardians of our lives, to follow George Bataille, a path opens
towards “bestial monstrosity.” (Bataille, 1970, p. 172)”
So What?
I believe that this research is significant not
in that it will radically change the face of architecture or spatial design but
addresses issues that architects and other designers probably don’t often think
about. The underlying issue in this research is to open up the conversations
around the political and social implications of space and how might we create
and design spaces that allow for a politic that is not hateful, one that is
fun, loving and caring. In times like this, where we become increasingly
divided I believe that more research into the role of spatial organization in
creating inequality is crucial to understanding systemic oppression.
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