“Sexy Videogameland.”
What a name, huh? According to Leigh Alexander, this very curious name was chosen for her personal side project blog because she felt like video games aren’t “perceived as “sexy”” by the masses, and because she isn’t afraid to address sexual issues that concern, or are present in, games. Yep, it might be a tiny bit different than your everyday gaming blog, and that’s because its author is a tiny bit different than your everyday gamer. Leigh (pronounced “Lee”) is a video game journalist, and one of the best in the industry at that. She’s the news director of Gamasutra.com (the essential game developer news site), a monthly columnist at Kotaku.com (an extremely popular gaming blog), and has had her work appear in the LA Times, Wired, Slate, and much more. You could say she’s kind of a big deal. I follow Gamasutra and Kotaku daily almost religiously where I am sure to read her posts often enough, so the obvious question arises: why do I still look at “Sexy Videogameland” even though I can read her articles elsewhere? I confess that one of the motives is due the title itself, but more importantly, Leigh’s doing this blog for herself. She’s not making any money off of it, she’s not trying to impress anyone, and she sure as hell isn’t afraid to speak her mind.
Her blog eventually boils down to a collection of posts about things she just felt like writing about. Most of these of course have something to do with games, but a lot of times they concern music, or just really random personal interests. Even within the topic of games, they range from personal memories of great experiences, to commentary on the industry, to even recommendations and reviews. For instance, in the post “Hairy Palms” (http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2010/12/hairy-palms.html) Leigh comments about how the Spike TV Video Game Awards, while highly criticized as being immature and degrading, might be hinting to an uncomfortable reality that respectful supports of the medium try to forget. “We spend a lot of time saying “video games aren’t like this” and yet the stereotypes persist,” she says, “Maybe video games are like this, we’re a vocal minority. Isn’t that a terrifying thought?” To the layman or the non-gamer, this might seem normal and well… pretty much obvious, but to the many developers that pride themselves and the medium on how it’s maturing as an art style this event was seen as a serious blow. She quotes a particularly striking line of the New Yorker profile of the head honcho of Nintendo: “The best analogue for [video games] combined disreputability and ubiquity may be masturbation,” and believes that if your reaction is to blatantly disagree with that view, then “you’re in denial”. That’s not something you’ll often hear from a journalist dedicated to the gaming medium.
On quite a different note, the post “Social Behavior” http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/11/social-behavior.html) delves into her design insights, where she identifies what really engages her in social play. Instead of the usual process of joining an online lobby of a game today, she fondly recalls how social gaming used to take place in its older form. “How did you learn how to get the whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3? How did you learn which walls were breakable in Symphony of the Night? How did you get infinite lives in Contra? You didn't look it up on the internet back in those days -- you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. Someone told you. Someone showed you. One day, you had a pal over, and you had the controller in your hand when he told you where you were supposed to stand to get something neat to happen.”
Leigh posts quite a bit on SVGL, but not as much as she used to. There have only been 2 posts from her this year (understandable, given the fact that it is only the 21st day of the new year!), but 2010 saw 81 posts from her. This is still shy of the 122 posts of the previous year, and the 236 posts of the year before that. I’m sure that all kinds of people read her blog, but I feel that the core demographic includes gamers between the ages of 16 and 28. In particular, her posts probably appeal to a lot of female gamers. In a field where the core market is male dominated, it’s very interesting to have one of the leading voices come from a woman.
I want to make it clear that Leigh’s blog, though also on the topic of games, will not be very similar to mine in terms of content. As I mentioned in my previous post, my blog will be more about the science and art of game design rather than my thoughts of the gaming industry at large. However, I feel like there are a lot of things Leigh does that inspires me in how I wish to write. I really admire her frankness, and her lack of fear in expression. She talks to her audience in what I believe is her real voice, and I really respect that. I don’t know if she’ll be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year. If she is I’d love to give her a high five or something.
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