product: toys/games

Julie M. came across a bow and arrow set for sale at a Wholesale Sports store in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. The set is called the “Lil’ Sioux.” Notice any oddness about the description?

It’s the Lil’ Sioux…and also the “Sherwood Forester” set. What’s Sherwood Forest? Why, where Robin Hood and his Merry Men hung out. Because when you’re appropriating Native American cultures, you might as well conflate them with mythologized, and possibly entirely fictional, noble outlaws from another continent.

But given the popularity of “Native American” fashions these days, I guess it shows restraint that the kid isn’t wearing a feathered headdress.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

There is a tendency in Western culture to envision white people are more modern and progressive than people of color who are seen as more traditional, even tied to ancient ways of life (see this post and its links).  This tendency is illustrated in Mattel’s new Japanese Ken and Barbie dolls, released this year:

When was the last time you saw a Japanese person dressed like this?  Regarding Ken, Dolls of Color put it:

Right, because an Asian Ken can’t be wearing jeans and a tshirt? Or a tuxedo if one must get fancy? An Asian Ken must be some kind of exotic fantasy and not just that cool dude next door? Right.

We’ll know that we respect people of color as people when we start portraying them as people instead of exotic objects or historical artifacts.

UPDATE: Of course, as several commenters have pointed out, these costumes aren’t at all historically accurate.  Instead they exoticize a stereotyped notion of the traditional Japanese person.

Via Racialicious.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite.  More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.

…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.

(source)

The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game.  In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.

…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…

Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.

(source)

So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America?  Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”

(source)

In other words:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

(source)

* Title borrowed from BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Carol C. sent in another example of the male = active, female = passive dichotomy, this time from Lego. They have a line called Lego City, which contains four figures and various accessories:

While you can obviously pose the characters however you want, Lego’s description of the set clearly assumes men are in more active, with specific work-related roles:

Meet the residents of LEGO® City!

LEGO® City is one busy place! As the girl listens to the radio on the park bench, the nearby policeman directs cars at the traffic light, the delivery boy hurries with an important package on his cart, and the businessman heads to his next meeting. Includes minifigures, street signs, accessories and more!

The men have jobs and things they are going to do. The girl — the only one here not in a uniform — sits on a bench.

Though she’s listening to the radio (on a boombox from, like, 1989), and possibly being hit on by the delivery boy, so maybe those are supposed to count as being active.

In this ten-minute talk, super-famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about cultural differences in the perception and orientation towards time… and  how that translates into boys dropping out of high school and underperforming in college.  How does he make the link?  Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In the game of Monopoly, as the title implies, the object is to get as much money as possible, ideally bankrupting all the other players until you are the only player left.  The game, then, socializes children into a particular version of economic interaction, one quite compatible with capitalism as we know it.

The idea that Monopoly is a socializing agent is brought into stark relief by The Landlord’s Game (from which, it is believed, Monopoly was derived).

Patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904, the object of this game was to illustrate the economic inequality inherent in the renter/owner relationship.  From Wikipedia:

Magie based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

The game was manufactured beginning in 1910.  In 1935 the patent was ultimately purchased, ironically, by Parker Brothers; they wanted to buy the patents of all competing economy-based board games so as to have a monopoly on the genre.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Previously we’ve posted on the sexy makeovers recently given to Dora the Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, Holly Hobby, and the Sun Maid.  Here we have three more.

Lisa Frank

Andy Wright at the SF Weekly recently posted about a new look for Lisa Frank art.  If you’re a woman in your 30s, like me, you probably remember this art vividly.  As Wright describes it, it “…was a branded line of school supplies consisting of Trapper Keepers and folders that looked like they were designed by a six-year-old girl on acid.”

When I was a kid, Lisa Frank didn’t include any people. But today it appears that they’ve added, well this:

Wright: “I have to wonder if little girls actually are more interested in bizarrely proportioned nymphets dressed like sexy hippies than a righteous day-glo tiger cub.”

Trolls, now Trollz

Remember Trolls?  Growing up, I remember them looking something like this (source):

But apparently now they look like this (source):

Cabbage Patch Kids

This is a vintage Cabbage Patch Kid from 1983 (source):

This is the front page of the website today:

They still make “Classic” Cabbage Patch Kids, but now they also make “Pop ‘N Style”:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Majd A.-S. sent in a link to a review at The Brainy Gamer of the Wii videogame Heavy Fire: Special Operations, which was released last week. Michael Abbott, the reviewer, starts by saying that he doesn’t find First-Person Shooter (FPS) games inherently problematic, but that after playing the game he found this one disturbing. He suggests it should be renamed “Arab Shooting Gallery.” Here’s an extended trailer:

Notice that the game specifically points out that it has a “destructible environment”; not only can you kill enemies, you can make sure you leave the surrounding city as demolished as possible. Woo hoo! Fun!

Abbott mentioned the article “Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games,” by Vit Sisler, so I checked it out. Sisler conducted a content analysis of 90 European and American video games and 15 Arab-language ones, all set in the Middle East (or fictional settings clearly derived from the Middle East):

The methodology used for content analysis involves playing the whole game while taking notes and screenshots of relevant visual signifiers, recording the narrative and analysing the structure of gameplay… Correspondingly, other paratextual materials related to the game were analysed (booklets, manuals and websites).

There are a number of video games set in the Middle East broadly defined (Sisler lists Delta Force, Prince of Persia, Conflict: Desert Storm, Full Spectrum Warrior, and others). In most, the shooter is a member of the U.S. military or the coalition forces associated with it. Sisler says,

While the US or coalition soldiers usually are humanized and individualized by their nicknames or specific visual characteristics, the enemy is collectivized and linguistically functionalized as ‘various terrorist groups’, ‘militants’ and ‘insurgents’ (Machin and Suleiman, 2006). At the same time, the moral mission, professionalism and courage of the forces controlled by the player are emphasized by the in-game narrative and scripts. However, the enemies are presented in a way that suggests they are not ‘real’ soldiers, thereby removing the legitimacy of their actions (Machin and Suleiman, 2006). This could be manifested even on the level of the artificial intelligence controlling the enemy soldiers via scripts including undisciplined poses, shouting and yelling (Full Spectrum Warrior), or raising weapons above their heads, laughing mockingly after they kill (Delta Force).

Some Arab groups have responded to this by creating video games of their own that present a more sympathetic view of Arabs and/or Muslims. For instance, Hezbollah released a game called Special Force (Al-Quwwat al-Khasa):

The game presents members of Hezbollah as heroes or martyrs while the Israeli Defense Force is the enemy. As Sisler points out, this doesn’t change the basic narrative of the games mentioned above, it just switches the roles of “us” vs. “the enemy.”

On the other hand, the game Under Ash (Tahta al-Ramad), based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (from the Palestinians’ point of view), humanized Palestinians by giving them significant backstories that explained how they came to be involved in the Palestinian resistance. It presented Israeli soldiers as the enemy but specifically prohibited players from harming either Palestinian or Israeli civilians (in a sequel to Under Ash, titled Under Siege, Tahta al-Hisar, killing a civilian automatically leads to a “game over” message). It doesn’t allow any type of peaceful interaction with Israelis, but it is one of the few games based on the Middle East that presents cities as full of inhabitants whose lives are valuable, regardless of which side of a conflict they’re on.

Sisler argues that the depictions of players and their enemies have implications beyond all of these video games themselves. Particularly when games are set in locations with current real-world conflicts, the narratives presented in cultural products such as video games help shape understandings of the conflict, including its morality, hero-izing some groups while dehumanizing others, and normalizing particular forms of warfare. In the U.S., these types of images, as well as those included in movies like The Siege and TV shows such as 24, also reinforce the perception of Arabs and Muslims as racialized Others, bloodthirsty terrorists whose acts of aggression are inherently illegitimate, while any by the Coalition forces are, by definition, moral and justifiable in the face of such an enemy.

For other examples of how Arabs and Muslims (the two categories are usually conflated), whether in the Middle East or in the U.S., are culturally depicted as untrustworthy, brutal, and/or backward, see our posts on representations of Arabs in TV and movies, the unseen Middle East, and anti-Arab signs in Pennsylvania,