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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Shira—Thank you for putting some necessary pressure on the
discourse of being maligned. I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement to
the many good points made by Jen and Brenda.</p><p class="MsoNormal">I do think it’s important to celebrate the more diverse
gaming landscape that has developed over the past few years--in terms of whose
playing and whose designing games. My comments here have mostly been about my
frustrations with some blind spots in academic approaches to analyzing and
understanding games. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I
would like to suggest that the problems we have all been identifying--in the
industry, the culture, and in scholarly approaches--are connected. </p><p class="MsoNormal">For example, I think it is a problem that most game design
programs in North American universities are closely affiliated with Computer
Science. Computer Science departments have a big gender problem in terms of
being unable—for complex reasons—to attract and retain women in the field. If these
are the programs that feed into the gaming industry, we are still a long way
off from increasing the numbers of women in programming jobs. At the same time,
courses in “game studies” from a humanities or a social scientific approach are
taught elsewhere on campus, often with little or no direct connection with what’s
going on over in Computer Science. This is a problem that affects who goes to
work in the industry, what kind of work they do in the industry, and deepens
the divide between ways of knowing and understanding video games in the broader
culture.</p><p class="MsoNormal">And by the way, Brenda, I would love to hear your thoughts
on the deeper reasons behind GamerGate, as I’m sure others would.</p>
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<div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Aubrey Anable<br>Cinema Studies Institute </div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">University of Toronto<br>2 Sussex Ave.<br>Toronto, ON<br>M5S 1J5<br><br></div></span></div>
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