Rebel Play - After the Presentation

After Rebel Play's presentation, I looked over some of the questions I had thought of previously and used their answers to generate ideas of answering the question we were posed - 'Do media platforms and genres have specific gender appeal? Why don't more women play console games?'


From the presentation, we gathered the information that women were more interested in playing social games, such as The Sims and Farmville, whereas men were more likely to play shooter games such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. This gives the impression that women prefer to play a game that relates to their life and can help them in some way. The shooter games that the male stereotype play relate to game playing as a hobby. Repetitive games are seen as more likely to be played by males - e.g. an objective where the player needs to shoot 100 objects over the course of the gameplay. The games women play have an objective and social aspect, where objectives don't need to be repeated time and time again.


Another reason as to women preferring different consoles was their styling. Where a Wii is slim-fitting and can be put neatly away, the Xbox or Playstation consoles are larger and bulkier, perhaps hinting at a materialistic reason that women don't use certain platforms.


The presentation gave the impression that the reason women don't play console games is because they are male-based. From childhood, girls play with dolls and pretend household items, whereas boys play with footballs and guns. This difference is reflected in their adult life, and as in childhood, there is little room for crossover. Certain gaming platforms could produce games for women, but if the platforms are initially bought for the males in the house, would women bother to buy a game for themselves to use on it? It seems typical of women to use the Wii or Nintendo DS, or social games on Facebook, that have a certain aim or outcome, and so these consoles become more appealing to them through advertisement.

Rebel Play

On Thursday we have a talk planned with Rebel Play - a video game publishers that are interested in working with video game developers when publishing and promoting their games. The company are interested in creating working relationships with the companies that they help to publish, and so create a more personal feel to their brand.


The question we will be posed is - 'Do media platforms and genres have specific gender appeal? Why don't more women play console games?'


When the company come in, some of the questions I will look to be answered in the presentation and question & answer session afterwards are as follows.

• What consoles do you work with - Xbox, Wii, Nintendo DS?
• What are some of the games that you have worked on?
• Are these games targeted at a male or female audience through their advertising, or not gender specific?
• Are the consoles you work with gender-specific? e.g. Wii-Fit often linked with women, other games linked with families. Xbox-kinect has some female links such as karaoke games, but Xbox games mainly male based - Fifa 12, COD etc
• Are there any games out there aimed at women on the xbox? - How could these be advertised to a better standard?
• Where lies the problem - advertising too gender-orientated or social stereotyping? Several girls I know play Fifa 12, but they don't talk about it as much as men do.

Hurricane Film's

Last Friday, two employees from Hurricane Film's came into our lecture to talk about their project People Stories - http://www.people-stories.com/ in relation to one of the question's we have been asked -

In an age of media saturation how do you generate and maintain an audience and most importantly how do you engage them to participate? This project appeals to an older demographic and has world-wide appeal, a large user base is the Liverpool Diaspora. What would you suggest as a strategy to draw users in and make it easy, but engaging for them to participate in a meaningful way.

The talk outlined the aim of the company - to go to local Merseyside people and gather video's and pictures of their life experience. From video's of children playing in the streets in the 60's, to how specific building's have changed throughout history via photographs, the site documents these people's stories as a sort of historic facebook.


Hurricane Film's gather their documents through visiting local community centres and writing groups, and both filming and keeping copies of the information they are given. The members of such groups are given the means to log onto the site and upload their own content, however this has it's obstacles as not everyone can access the site, regardless of how user-friendly it is. The matter of age and available technology means not everyone finds it easy to use computers, no matter what the task they wish to accomplish. 


In regard to the question, I thought of several ways in which they could generate interest in the site, and how they can give that access to the members that wish to add their content.

• Visit schools - showing the site to pupils and creating a History project for them based around the site's content, would allow the children to hear stories of their relative's history, as well as giving the relatives a platform for their stories to be heard by many others. The children most probably have experience of uploading content, and so it creates a new means of gathering information as well as a means of uploading.
• Go to museums - work with the local museums to create an area looking at Liverpool history, and use the content that has been generated in an interactive manner. Interactivity will excite younger generations, and through them their parents have access to the site and therefore a place to upload their family history.
• Theme's - the company spoke about using themes to generate interest in the site, and I think this idea could tie in with the school visits. If they had a theme that looked at schools and children's memories of what school was like, the children could contrast their own relatives memories of school with their own.
• Overcoming barriers to uploading - Within the local community centres that are visited, the company could work to do a monthly upload - an afternoon where the members could come with their content, whether that be handwritten, photographed or digitally, and the content can then be scanned directly onto the website. It's a small means to help those who are unable to use computers individually, and another option may be to give tutorials at these sessions to help teach the group about computer use.

The First Blog

I'm currently a second year student at Liverpool John Moores University studying Media Professional Studies. I've created this blog to record the work I do in my Applied Media Research module, as a method of reflecting back on the year and the work I do throughout the module.

The first real taste I had of studying Media only came in College, though before this I'd always been interested in making short videos using my mobile phone, and taking and editing photographs of my friends and family. At college I began to study Media as one of my four options, and it quickly became my favourite subject. Whilst at College I was involved in filming short dramatic trailers, creating mock magazine covers and posters, and researching into the history of film and television. I visited Berlin with the media department to visit various Media industries in Germany, and look at how they had evolved from the Nazi propaganda of the 2nd World War, into their current state.

I enjoy a vast range of programming on television, ranging from Downton Abbey to Made In Chelsea, and am really excited at the prospect of working behind the scenes of such formats in my career.

I also enjoy listening to different radio programmes, many from BBC Radio 1, but also local radio stations such as Juice FM and WISH FM, to listen to popular music within my area and listen to the Wigan Athletic Football commentary. Because of this interest in listening to the programmes, I've developed an interest into how such programmes are produced and researched.

Choosing to study Media at College gave me a new and exciting route for my future career path, and after receiving an A at A-level, I was accepted onto the Media Professional Studies course I am studying today.

After my first year, I came to the realisation that my strength's lay in the research and development stages of a piece of work. I enjoy the mixture of theoretical and practical work that the course has involved, but I found that the module I enjoyed most last year was Introduction to Research. My strongest work came when I researched different pieces of work and ideas for filming.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog and look forward to any feedback!