Assignment 1:

Here is some background about the video game Gone Home: See pp. 138-39 of Bagnall for more info about the game, but here is a short description: “The game opens on the porch of a house: in the lower left-hand of the first person shot rests luggage, tagged for Kaitlin Greenbriar, the player, who has just returned home after spending a year overseas. In a note taped to the glass, the player’s sister Sam apologizes for her absence. … The player later discovers that, while they were abroad, Sam met and began dating fellow student Lonnie. Their parents were unable to accept Sam’s lesbian relationship, and so Sam and Lonnie ran away together.”

Using at least one quote from the reading, explain how the author’s experience of the game Gone Home both reflects heteronormativity and critiques it.

Assignment 2:

Recall our discussion of online harassment as a particular form of misogyny we have seen in popular culture and digital environments. We talked about this at the beginning of unit 3, on the day that we did the #upskirt reading focused on the keyword “surveillance.” In Activity 3.1, you listened to the podcast exchange between an online writer, Lindy West, who had been harassed and her harasser who was apologizing. He specifically admitted that he attacked her because she was a confident woman who was unafraid to write about being fat and feminist.

In our current unit, we have also talked about video games and the misogyny in them. We looked at a youtube video produced by Anita Sarkeesian on the channel Feminist Frequency. I mentioned then that Sarkeesian has faced extreme forms of harassment – both online and “in real life” – simply in response to her commentaries on video games. This sort of violent backlash faced by female and feminist gamers is called “gamergate” and it is covered in the documentary GTFO, available through the library website. In order to get a sense of what this sort of online harassment and trolling is all about, watch this short 3 minute Washington Post video clip: How feminist blogger Anita Sarkeesian fights trolls.

Scroll down to look at some of the comments the video received. (In order to see comments, click on the “Link” in Activity 4.3 to open the video in a new window.) What are the main themes of these comments? What do they imply? What seems to be “behind” them? If we consider this to be exemplary of a “system failure,” what system are we talking about and what, exactly, has failed?