Alright, here are some general guidelines regarding how we see the grades as we read the journals. Some differences may exist between your tutors, so make sure to check first before taking this post as gospel. (^__^) I’ll be starting from the description of what I believe is a D grade then move up to an A at the end of this post.

I will also try to write a sample journal for each grade letter as well to try to facilitate in a clearer understanding of what the requirements are. In general, the main requirements for the journals are that they appear coherent, comprehensive and concise. Together, these elements should form for a brief yet sophisticated and powerful argument.

I’ll just kick this post off beginning with the most dreaded D grade~ LOL

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Grade D Expectations
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A grade D paper would be one that demonstrated near to no effort in reflection. This would be a paper that not only goes along with everything that was said in the course, but it would also be one that appears to have very little relevance to anything required of the question. These papers do not have much of an argument and demonstrates clear ignorance of the lecture as well as readings. To make it harder to give it a higher mark, a D grade paper would also sometimes artificially prolong a pointless argument and end with no relevant conclusion.

To achieve a D grade, a person simply needs to never go to lecture, never read the lecture notes, and never read the readings. On top of that, they will also need to be completely unreflective of the media’s relationship with crime, or anything for that matter. (^__^)

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Grade C Expectations
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A grade C paper would be one that seems to have had little reflection on their personal stance on the subject. This would be a paper that strongly takes one side of an argument and generally provides evidence to support that position. The problem these papers encounter is that their arguments don’t properly anticipate, consider and effectively address opposing arguments. This makes it hard to give it a good mark because it demonstrates a bias that is easily countered by opposing claims.

Occasionally, it is possible for the argument to stray away from its point and coherence may be problematic as these papers are generally following the format of the questions as their plan. Achieving a C grade requires that one go to the relevant lecture, read some of the lecture notes, and possibly address some of the readings. In general, the author does seem to think about the question but the effort placed into identifying the central theme of each question is unclear. (^__^)

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Grade B Expectations
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A grade B paper would be one that has placed a fair reflection on a personal stance in response to the question. This would usually manifest itself in writing as the author notes different sides of the argument but still manages to push the paper towards a personal opinion. In this way, the paper does appear fairly balanced in regards to the arguments made. The place where these papers tend to fall over is in the organisation of the paper and thus, making it slightly difficult to follow their argument sometimes. There may also be a tendency to argue at too wide a scope in these papers.

Achieving a B grade requires that not only go to lectures and do the relevant readings, but also demonstrating that they have thought about and could draw out as well as analyse the most important arguments from each. In general, the author appears to have thought about the question and it is clear that they understood what the question required of them, but somewhere along the execution of their arguments, they managed to stumble a little.

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Grade A Expectations
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A grade A paper would demonstrate a serious reflection on the issue at hand and manages to push forward their personal stance on the issue. The author not only balances their arguments, but in doing so also effectively demonstrates the weakness of those opposing arguments through that balance. The paper also has a clear vision of its conclusion and as the journal begins, it moves the argument forward seamlessly towards that end point. It also isolates the most important arguments central to addressing the question by setting limits around its own consideration of alternative perspectives.

Achieving an A grade requires that one demonstrates sensitivity to topics covered in the lecture and readings, but only utilises them when it is relevant to their argument. For an A, the author appears to have thought carefully not only about the question but also on their responses to that question and effectively puts out a strong response to that end.

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Alright, so now with all these “requirements” jotted down, allow me to give myself a made-up question to answer and then answer them to demonstrate what each journal may look like. For these purposes, allow me to ask myself the question:

Locate video games in English about women as offenders and as victims. How are they portrayed? See if you can find any other images in the Japanese gaming industry. How do the portrayals of women compare with the findings in other countries (as described in other readings)?

Before I begin, I must say that none of the sample journals are truly representative of any of my views—not even the grade A one. I wrote all the journals with my mind in other people’s heads (so to speak), so you should not take any of these positions as my own and you certainly should not believe everything that is said in these sample journals (there are some clear mistakes—if you want to clarify and “be sure” about what is “wrong”, do ask and I will happily tell you).

Right then, off we go then~

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Grade D Response (Here, “D” stands for “DO NOT WRITE LIKE THIS!”):
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For this question, I have chosen the English video game called Bio Shock to portray a woman as an offender and another game called Mario Bros. to show a woman as a victim. I played Mario Bros. a long time ago, but I still remember it and one thing that I always remembered about it was that the main character, Mario, is always trying to save Princess Peach from a big evil turtle.

Princess Peach is annoying because she is always shouting and so stupid too—why is she always being kidnapped by the turtle? Why does she not think of maybe putting GPS on her and carrying around something to defend herself with? With GPS, Mario can track her instead of having to go to every castle and jumping on flag poles to find her in the turtle’s big castle. Also, Princess Peach should learn Tae Kwon Do or carry around an umbrella to fight with! She is always getting kidnapped, so she should learn to protect herself!

Bio Shock is a more modern game and you can see that because it has beautiful graphics. The game has an evil woman character who has a very long name that I cannot completely remember, but she is very evil and looks very evil as well. She wears an ugly purple dress and her face is always angry and she also has a very big and crooked nose. She is evil because she kidnaps children and does crazy experiments on them. How can her heart be so cold to do that to children? So unforgivable.

I think these two games can be quite fun though. But Japanese video games are difficult for me to talk about because I don’t play any video game in Japanese. But I think that the Japanese are very conservative and women are therefore probably going to be like Princess Peach in their video games. I can imagine Japanese video games with woman screaming “tasukete kudasai” (my friend told me that is how the Japanese say “Help me!” but I am not sure) all the time! That must be so annoying! I will never play Japanese video games, they must be so bad. What video games do Japanese make anyway? All the games I play are English and have nothing to do with the Japanese.

I also think that the Japanese just copy all the English games because I see my friends playing sometimes. For example, there is a game I really like called Resident Evil, but I was so shocked when I saw my friend playing the same game but he told me it is called Bio Hazard. I look at the game and it is exactly the same game! 100% the same! Even the things they say and the movies in the game are the same! I told my friend that they copied another game, but he dare says that it was the English game that copied the Japanese game!

That’s crazy. The Japanese have no creativity, how can they make a game like Resident Evil? Also, all the characters in the game speak English even in his “Japanese game”, so how can he believe that it was Japanese who made it first? He’s so stupid. Anyway, in conclusion, the Japanese can only make good games if they copy from other people. Otherwise, their games are not worth playing.

WORD COUNT: 564

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Grade C Response (“C” for “Comely”, yes? (^__^)):
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For this question, I have chosen the English video games of Bio Shock to portray a woman as an offender and Mario Bros. to depict women as victims. Mario Bros. is a series of video games, but each one always begins with the capture of Princess Peach.

In every instance, Princess Peach is always portrayed as defenseless and whiny, making her the image of the typical woman in trouble. Her name also portrays the ideas of “womanliness” with the associations of “princess” and “peach” as well as her everlasting affinity with the colour pink. All these ideas depict her womanliness, but more importantly, they also convey the idea of vulnerability and non-resistance (Cho 2009), which eventually requires the unlikely male character (he’s a fat Italian plumber with a poor sense for fashion), Mario, to save this poor princess.

In contrast, Bio Shock is a more modern game for the current-generation of computers and consoles. The main female villain of the game goes by the name of Dr Bridgette Tenenbaum and the evil that she represents is quite clear. Not only is she dressed in the stereotype of the evil English nanny, her main crime is the use of children for her experimentations. As if that were not enough, she actually looks evil as well (Reiner 1997)—there is nothing beautiful about her, she has a crooked nose and seems to wear an eternal smirk on her face.

This is comparable with Japanese video game portrayals as well. I have chosen two Japanese video games to compare. The game, Rei~Zero~, will be used to discuss the woman as a villain and the game, Devil May Cry 4, will be used to demonstrate woman as a victim in Japanese video games. It is interesting to note that the women that I will discuss in both games share a similar name, Kirie for Rei~Zero~ and Kyrie for Devil May Cry 4.

In Rei~Zero~, Kirie is the root of all evil in a haunted Japanese mansion. She is the most powerful ghost that haunts the mansion and her appearance actually elicits fear but she is slightly different from the villain as described in Bio Shock because she is actually well-dressed in a white Japanese kimono. In many ways, it is hard to tell her beauty although the game does imply something of it, which forms the stereotype of the femme fatale—the beautiful evil woman (Reiner 1997).

Kyrie of the Devil May Cry 4 franchise, on the other hand, features the classic portrayals of the female victim and certainly shares all the same characteristics of Princess Peach from the aforementioned Mario Bros. series., except maybe that she is wearing a white dress instead of a pink one.

As we have seen, the portrayal of females are quite similar regardless of where the video games are from and certainly, this says a lot about the conception of females in the world we live in. Berrington and Honkatukia’s (2002) study is also relevant as the female as mad is also seen in the evil characters of these games (the mad scientist in Tenenbaum and the viciously vengeful spirit in Kirie). Also, Princess Peach and Kyrie do fit the molds of the poor thing as well, although both were purely victims and did not commit any crime unlike in Berrington and Honkatukia’s study.

WORD COUNT: 568

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Grade B Response (“B” for “Bounteous”, for lack of a better word (@__@)):
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For this question, I will analyse the concept of the female as an offender and as a victim through several video games as it is difficult to appreciate the full scope of portrayals by looking at only one or two games. In general, it seems safe to argue that the stereotypes of an “evil woman” (as found in Berrington and Honkatukia 2002, and Cho 2009) apply to the world of video games as well, although each is not as simple as the stereotypes may convey.

For example, in Bio Shock, the “evil” Dr Tenenbaum may appear as simply evil by her actions and thoughts about the world, but a fairer analysis would likely conclude that she is more “determined” than she is “evil”. Certainly, her choice for using kidnapped children as her experiments to carve them into monstrosities may be considered wrong, but a closer examination of her actions and speech also reveals that she knows that she has dealt much unnecessary suffering to others and is working hard to undo her transgressions—but not by repenting, rather by actively working alone on a solution to return her subjects to their innocence.

While it is easy to characterise her as “evil” because of what she has done, that judgment would unfairly wipe over the complexity of her character that the game’s creators have endowed upon her. The same argument would also apply to the female villain from a Japanese video game, Rei~Zero~, where the vengeful ghost, Kirie, also has a backstory that made the evil understandable.

It seems important that this journal acknowledges the complexities in the reasons behind the motivation for such evil to be perpetrated because the creators of both games have gone to extents to provide stories in an attempt to make their stories more believable. In saying this, the concept and significance of the audience in shaping how content is formed cannot be ignored (Ditton et al. 2004).

Of course, this may seem odd as many people consider games to simply be just that: games. Some are unconvinced that games have any stories to tell or that they’d be any good even if they did. Consider the thoughts of film director, Ube Boll, who worked on turning several video games into movies and commented, “A lot of video games have no story. I did the movie House of the Dead and got bashed and I said, ‘What were you expecting, Schindler’s List?’”

So audiences for video games may not necessarily be expecting any stories in their consumption of video games, which then frees the game’s writers to ignore any sense in the game’s story elements. However, the converse could also be true that because there is no expectation of a story, the game’s writers are more free to explore and express concepts and ideas that may not be available to other media. Critically-acclaimed games, such as flower and Shadow of the Colossus, are examples of games that have explored the concepts of “peace”, “time” and “justice” in completely different ways—both allowing the player to experience these ideas on their own.

Then there is the concept of the female victim in games which has been around from as early as the Japanese sensation, Mario Bros., and more recently games like Devil May Cry 4 and Dead Space. While there have been some developments in the concept of females as victims in games, it is clear that generally the discourse on this issue has not progressed as far as it could have.

Yet, the problem may lie with the understanding of “What is a victim?”, because it is quite clear that game developers are very sensitive in portraying women in these situations—for example, female victims are always treated with an odd degree of respect in games, especially when compared to male victims. For example, in games, where males and females are victimised, it is more likely that the same amount of brutality is not depicted to the female when compared to the male victim (e.g. Onimusha, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Afro Samurai and so on).

Of course, this is not always true as there are also some games that do not distinguish between male and female victims and depict them as equally “victimisable”, but these games are usually those that provide freedom for the player to victimise. In other words, the player is the one that controls the way in which the game’s protagonist treats other game characters and that is not determined by the game’s story (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Saint’s Row, Metal Gear Solid, Samurai Spirits, Fallout and so on).

In conclusion, it is important that we do not oversimplify the concepts of the female as portrayed in video games because although there may be some truth in Berrington and Honkatukia’s (2002) dichotomy, it also ignores the larger and sometimes conflicting concepts of the “female” in video games.

WORD COUNT: 820

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Grade A Response (“A” is, of course, for “Awesome” \(^o^)/):
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I begin this journal in objection to the question because I feel that to classify women into either offenders or victims completely misses the point since game portrayals are not the simple dichotomy that some may wish to argue. While I will not refute Berrington and Honkatukia’s (2002) two models to make sense of female criminality, I came to my conclusion when I found myself struggling over what a pure female “victim” and “offender” was within the context of video games.

While it is understandable that this clear division can sometimes exist within movies, news, and other forms of media, it is not altogether clear that this is true for video games as well. Take, for example, the Mario Bros. character of Princess Peach—a “perfect” victim with her pink dress and sheer naivety in dealing with the world. Yet, the concept of Peach as a victim is a time-limited argument because in other games in the series, she would assume various roles including Mario and Luigi’s last hope for salvation in Super Princess Peach.

Certainly, a fair analysis of women in the video game world requires an understanding of the backstory as well as context of the game itself. It is neither fair nor objective to take one video game, especially if it is from a series, and then analyse it only within the specifics of that particular game. The same is true for female villains and to demonstrate, let us consider Dr Bridgette Tenenbaum of Bio Shock.

While she has committed what is likely to be the most horrendous of crimes—kidnapping children for her experiments, the game does not allow her to be constructed purely as the evil villain that Berrington and Honkatukia (2002) argues for and neither does she fit into the evil female moulds that were portrayed in lectures.  Throughout the game, it was clear that Dr Tenenbaum was constructed as a determined scientist and her stubborn nature led to a refusal to admit her mistakes and work on a solution alone (something which is stereotypically attributed to men instead of women, see Werner and LaRussa 2004).

In Dr Tenenbaum thus, gender only plays as much a part in her actions as an observer would like it to. In other words, any claim that her actions are to do with the ideology of gender is misled because the game clearly does not portray her as purely evil but rather as a highly intelligent scientist that believes that certain sacrifices need to be made for the advancement of scientific progress (an argument akin to the contemporary debate on embryonic stem cell research).

From this analysis, one may criticise my point of view for being uninformed on the concepts of patriarchy, so I hereby refute this point by noting that contemporary studies into patriarchy have moved beyond understanding it as a male-female dichotomy—with some going so far as to de-gender the concept by reconceiving it into what Eisler (1996) calls “domination culture”. Of course, this is not to deny the oppression of females in society today, but rather it is to provide more informed view of what patriarchy actually means and does in society.

At this point, it seems important that I concede to only using two games to demonstrate my points due to space restrictions, but I am sure that any fair analysis of most games regarding the concept of victim and offender will reveal that none of them are as clear-cut as Berrington and Honkatukia (2002) makes them out to be.

This difficulty in distinction may be unique to games however because it is an interactive media form and as more games go online, the evidence of an active audience and participatory culture have never been so clearly realised (Robinson 2008). In this culture of gaming then, it appears that the gamer can not only shape what the protagonist is like but also perform what they believe she would do in any given situation and thereby decide whether the characters they play are “female” or “male” regardless of the character’s virtual gender.

In conclusion then, it seems that I am unable to furnish an answer to this question because female video game characters today are neither “victims” nor “offenders”, “American” nor “Japanese”, and, strangely enough, “female” nor “male”.

WORD COUNT: 718

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Right, I hope this helps but again, don’t take this to be a good example of anything because I certainly didn’t spend too much time working on it, well, I used up about three hours working on all four journals and also failed to proofread them (so you could see how poorly thought out they are)… so… yea… LOL. I did try though…

Nonetheless, try to capture the spirit of the argument and what differences there are in that regard instead of reading it for any meaningful content (I pulled most of the “facts” from memory, so… LOL).

All the best with the journals and look forward to another post on this journal writing series later.