Jenkins

I’ll be using Jenkins in my paper. Jenkins focuses more on gender roles and video games. He talks about what makes a game a boy’s  game and what makes a game a girl’s game, or at least labeled as such. I am going to focus on how Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is directed towards young males. It is directed towards males because the only gender the player can be in the game, except for one character, is male. People like to be able to relate to the character they are. If a female wants to play the game and they cannot be a character they relate to, then they most likely will not play the game, leaving it open to only being played by males. Males seem to like violence and pranks. As Jenkins mentions, guys are conditioned to prove their value through their physical abilities. In Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground pranks are performed for some missions that involve spray painting public places. Another mission involves checking people, or knocking them down. Both fit into Jenkins’s comment about guys liking to perform pranks and be violent. In Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground there are also insane tricks that a player must perform. Most of the tricks are impossible to perform in reality, due to terrain or weather conditions. Due to the improbability of the ability to perform the tricks, they become dare devil tricks, which goes with Jenkins statement of guys liking to perform pranks and do other dare devil stunts that go against social norms.