Reaction To Digital Humanities Exhibits

The first exhibit that I had focused on was created by Michaela Fapore. The name of this exhibit was Women In Video Games. For her exhibit she had created a type of powerpoint. From working through the powerpoint I had learned a lot about how women are portrayed in video games. Personally, I do not play video games often. So reading these facts such as how only 2 of the top 20 video games in the United States feature a woman on the cover surprised me. Michaela also talked about empathy studies such as how adolescents whose favorite video game was violent had scored low on empathy scales. After I had finished working through this powerpoint, I felt as though I had learned a lot about how poorly women are portrayed in video games and how video game developers portray them in that way because if the woman in the game was a solider, boys would not find it believable.
The second exhibit that I had looked at was created by Amanda Deasy and was called Video Games: Bringing Social Awareness. The main idea of her exhibit was about answering the question, "Can digital games make users more socially aware". Amanda had focused on 3 video games that share a bigger picture, which it portraying a current social issue. The first game she had talked about was a game that we had talked about in class, Dragon Cancer. This game is about a boy who has pediatric cancer. The second game was named Papo y Yo which focused on child abuse. Lastly, her third example was Depression Quest which had the social issue of depression. I enjoyed working through this exhibit because it was nice to learn about video games that aren't just about violence. These games are about social issues that still give you a fun experience while playing the game. After reading about these three games that Amanda had mentioned, it makes me want to learn more about them and eventually play these games.