California NOW

Interview: Felicia Day

Our Communications Director, Elena Perez, and our contributing author Mickey Schulz of Geek Girls Rule, interviewed Actor and Screenwriter Felicia Day on her web show The Guild, women in gaming and geek culture, and much more.

Listen here!

Geek Girls Rule will be doing a giveaway contest for two sets of The Guild DVDs, Seasons 1-4, thanks to New Video, who also were responsible for helping us to set up this fantastic interview!

Empowering Play: Games Tackle Violence Against Women

Interview with Ann DeMarle and Lauren Nishikawa of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College

What do you want people to know about the project?

Ann: My answer to that is two-fold. One, violence against women is a huge global problem; that’s the most important thing for people to know. Secondly, we’re using a medium,games, that has been labeled as promoting violence, and we’re taking it and applying it in the opposite direction, to create behavior changes to end violence. It’s not as easy to accomplish as I wish it would be.

What was your impetus for taking on this project? Why a video game, and why one focused on this issue?

Ann: Games are a natural thing for us to be doing here. I began the degree program at Champlain College in game development, and in 6 years it’s become one of our most popular majors, and it’s the first program for game development in the Northeast. Games are an incredible medium, I compare it to the early days of film, they’re just finding their footing. Games provide an opportunity to accomplish communications goals and related tasks that is immense, and there’s a real potential for education if we can unlock it.

The focus on violence against women didn’t come directly from us. At the Emergent Media Center we work with partners, some corporate and some nonprofit. Population Media Center came to us to collaborate with them. They work with the United Nations on issues such as AIDS, teen pregnancy, overpopulation, education, etc., One of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals is Gender Equality and key is to reduce gender violence. They believe that gender violence is one of the root causes of poverty world wide. And I’ve had direct experiences that mirror those statistics, so it has personal poignancy for me as well.

What do you see as the challenges that face people working to promote respectful treatment of women and girls?

Lauren: One of the biggest barriers is the mentality that’s embedded into the cultures young boys and girls grow up in. When we went to South Africa, they felt that violence against women was just a part of culture and a part of life. So just getting over the idea that it’s a normal part of life is a huge challenge.

Ann: We started the project by doing research here in the U.S., and then in the townships of South Africa, and we came away with this one quote from a girl we spoke with. She said, “If my boyfriend beats me, he loves me the most.” So it pointed out to us that for generations people have assumed that it’s ok for a man to control the life of a woman, in Western nations it’s just as prevalent, but people don’t talk about and address it, it’s gone underground.

Just a quick link to GGR

EA Games' advertising department needs a kick in the junk. 

Sexual harassment as a contest...

I... have very few words (for me).  Yeah, contest for guys to photograph themselves committing "acts of lust" with the EA Games Booth Babes.  

Just... Ick.  

ETA:  EA Games is sorry we're a bunch of humorless feminists.

Only Girl at the Table

  My extreme Dorkitude...  Let me show you it. 

Yes, I'm a gamer.  I play pen and paper, tabletop RPGs all the time.  I have several bags filled with funny dice.  I spend hours pretending to be other people or creatures for fun. 

Over at Geek Girls Rule! I just did a piece about why it isn't hypocrisy for me to encourage guys to game with girls, while running a women's only gaming group.  Every so often somebody thinks they've caught me in the greatest of punk rock sins, hypocrisy, and calls me out for it.  Which usually leads to me explaining that I've never said they can't have all-guy games, nor have I ever called them dumb for having all-guy games.  When this happens in forums, I invariably ask if they can point me to where I've said it and they can't, because I didn't.  But that isn't what I want to talk about here. 

What I want to talk about here is something I state towards the end of that piece, and which I will quote here:  
"But it can be intimidating being the only girl at the table.  Particularly in a convention setting where you will probably be outnumbered at least ten to one.  Not only is it a little nerve-wracking to be roleplaying with strangers, but being surrounded by guys they don’t know well also tends to trip the internal alarms that have been societally conditioned into most women."

Keep Children's Toys Safe!

The Ecology Center, a Michigan-based nonprofit, tested over 1,500 popular children's toys for lead, cadmium, arsenic, PVC and other harmful chemicals, and found that one in three toys tested contained "medium" or "high" levels of chemicals of concern.

Scary, right? But knowledge truly is power in this case. Before you give a child a toy this holiday season, search the HealthyToys database for chemical test results.

When you're at the store, you can also search the HealthyToys database from your cell phone. Simply text "healthytoys [name of toy]" -- for example "healthytoys Elmo" or "healthytoys Wii" -- to 41411.