Settling The Confusion Of Stereotypes

From science to day to day life, people prejudge situations and others based on past experience. This is a natural and essential part of being alive, for if you didn’t prejudge, you would die very quickly. If I didn’t prejudge that my food was poison free, I would starve, and if I didn’t prejudge that the big mean scary guy with cauliflower ear was potential dangerous, I probably would have told him to go to the back of the line. In both of these cases I used my experience to make generalizations about people or situations that I had no evidence for in that specific instance. Is this stereotyping or is it something else? Read more »

A Desperate Housewife’s Guide to Gaming

I stumbled across a blog post on the “Real Women’s Guide to Technology” that pretty much embodies the stereotypical soccer mom turned DS owner. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen the commercial with Lisa Kudrow making kung pow chicken with her daughter and a handful of other ads with [insert famous woman here] giggling while poking at the touch screen.

In the case of blogger Lee Doyle, who does not yet have a DS (though it is on her wish list), she discovered games were not “a dumb waste of time” when she secretly started playing her husband’s Xbox 360. Congratulations Captain Obvious. Games are extremely varied, and for the most part, quite intellectually stimulating.

Am I against casual, female, or mommy gamers? Of course not! I’m female, and I’ve been gaming since before I stepped foot in kindergarten. Read more »