Game developers want to answer this question. Studies and interpretations have formed as psychological researchers delve into the differences between male and female gaming. One of these studies in particular found that “spatial performance was significantly better among fifth-grade boys than among fifth-grade girls on a video game assessment of mental rotation” (Blumberg 152). The problem with these analyses is that researchers are not considering other key pieces of information that influence the outcome. According to Fran Blumberg and Lori Sokol of Fordham University, a study released two years later determined that boys tend to have “more overall video game experience than did girls, which may have contributed to their superior video game performance” (152). Blumberg and Sokol tried to alleviate that problem by studying not so much the performance, but how boys and girls taught themselves to play. In the end, they found that while boys seemed, as predicted, to have more previous video game experience, “gender was not implicated in our findings concerning either citation of internally or externally based video game strategies or game performance” (Blumberg 157). Simply put, the researchers could not attribute any differences in how children approached new games to gender: males are not inherently “better gamers.”

Dr. Elizabeth Hayes, a widely published professor on gender and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, expands on this. In “Women, Video Gaming & Learning: Beyond Stereotypes,” she says that gaming tends to be one of those “masculine” activities in society today, making women less prone to taking advantage of gaming opportunities. When women do game, they game differently than the males who have been playing for years, causing game companies and researchers to misinterpret it as a “feminine” style of play. However, that lack of experience causes “female” gaming practices, not innate gender-specific preferences (Hayes 24). In addition, many other characteristics that are not gender-related tend to be grouped together to show a gender difference. She gives the following example:

For example, the number of middle aged women who play puzzle-type games has been interpreted as representing an innate female preference for “problem-solving,” when it could be just as likely that women play such games because they can be played in short periods of time and that they are readily available on internet [sic], both factors important for incorporating game play into schedules full of adult responsibilities. (Hayes 24)

In the end, Hayes puts forward that the mistake is when developers make gender distinctions at all. Many people, regardless of gender, have different tastes in games. It is just as common for males as it is for females that society generalizes characteristics of some small group—adolescent girls, middle-aged women, and teenage boys—to cover the entire gender, ignoring the gaming practices of the masses. For example, there are many adult men who “do not have a luxury of endless hours gaming, want more depth of game play or who are just as turned off by bimbo female avatars as many women are” (Hayes 24). Any statement that characterizes an entire gender must be inherently false.

Video game companies are realizing that women are not just arriving to the gaming scene; they have been there all along, and are not getting the attention they deserve. On October 13, 2009, Yukari Iwatani Kane wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal concerning the companies trying to jump onto the female-gaming bandwagon for the 2009 holiday season. Software developer and distributor Electronic Arts released Littlest Pet Shop and Charm Girls Club, for younger and older girls respectively. Sony, maker of the PlayStation series of consoles, distributed a “lilac version of its PlayStation Portable device with a ‘Hannah Montana’ game” (Kane B4). Ubisoft Entertainment released a physical fitness game and a dancing game, and Nintendo released the sequel to its Wii Fit fitness game.

Personal training, dancing, and fitness games in a Wall Street Journal article about women and gaming? Dr. Elizabeth Hayes would disapprove. This fails to get past the stereotypes Hayes points out: “Yes, they may enjoy these activities, but they may also enjoy beating up monsters, driving fast cars, saving the world, getting a lot of gold and winning the game” (Hayes 27). It is the tendency to release games like this—and the accompanying press—that reinforces the gaming stereotypes that are hindering the development of more games for females to enjoy.

Those developers trying to break that mold have to compete with more well-established development houses. In the October 2010 issue of Canadian Business, Lyndsie Bourgon writes about a Canadian startup named Silicon Sisters, not coincidentally the first video game company owned and operated by women. The goal of Silicon Sisters, says Bourgon, is to develop games that connect with females without “pinkifying” male games, a word Bourgon uses to describe when game creators simply “add female characters or pink armour to traditional ‘male’ games” (20). Silicon Sisters co-founder Kirsten Forbes says that they are steering away from “genres like first-person shooter,” genres typically dominated by male gamers (Bourgon 20). She also mentions the work of Emma Westecott, professor of game design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Westecott says that this type of thinking is vital: “The game industry needs to continue trying to better understand its players, and as a result of this dialogue we’ll see different types of game experience making it to market” (Bourgon 20).

The gender gap present in gaming was self-inflicted by the gaming industry. Quickly made stereotypes took hold in the early years without competent research, resulting in a situation where games were developed and marketed to a single generalized proportion of the population. While the perfect “female gaming experience” is yet unrealized, the industry is at least in discussion on the topic. One thing is certainly clear: gender in itself has little to do with the situation. Is the typical gamer male or female? The answer is “neither.” There are many types of people, and games need to evolve beyond the question of male or female to appeal to them all. As Dr. Elizabeth Hayes says, “designing games that will appeal to women […] is a lot like designing good games in general.” If game developers add content to their games that appeal to more than the targeted male audience beyond simple “pinkification,” more females will be interested in gaming without feeling blatantly ignored or patronized.

Works Cited

Blumberg, Fran C., and Lori M. Sokol. "Boys’ and Girls’ Use of Cognitive Strategy When Learning to Play Video Games." Journal of General Psychology 131.2 (2004): 151-58. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.

Bourgon, Lyndsie. "Lady Gamers Level Up." Canadian Business 11 Oct. 2010: 20. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.

Harris, A. B. "Average Gamers Please Step Forward." 2007. Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 465-67. Print.

Hayes, Elisabeth. "Women, Video Gaming & Learning: Beyond Stereotypes." TechTrends: Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning 49.5 (2005): 23-28. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.

"Industry Facts." The Entertainment Software Association. The Entertainment Software Association. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp>.

Kane, Yukari Iwatani. "Videogame Firms Make a Play for Women." Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition 13 Oct. 2009: B4. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.

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On one hand, relief simply did not come fast enough.  On the other…what more could McAfee have done to repair the damage?  McAfee rolled back the virus definition as quickly as it found out, and released an addendum file that could be manually applied to infected PCs.  The servers hosting the offered file were strained by the demand, resulting in disconnect errors and failures to update the McAfee software.

“We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally, and a fraction of that within the consumer base,” said Barry McPherson, on McAfee’s blog Wednesday.  He goes on to identify the error in the update, stating that it was an attempt to detect a potentially damaging virus, and the update “clearly did more harm than good.”

>>> Continue reading at GearLive.com >>>

DISCLAIMER:  At this time, Office Live Small Business gives free webspace in the amount of 50 MB.  If your books are smaller than this, then you will be fine.  If you choose to upgrade your server space, you can do so by purchasing additional space.  $4.95 a month plus taxes gets you 1GB of space.

If you are only using Windows Vista or 7 machines, you will NOT want to use this method because there are free WebDAV providers out there that OneNote will be compatible with.  Only use this method if you are looking for a free or cheap way to sync with multiple computers that include Windows XP computers.

If you want me to explain how I set up my personal Vista machine to sync via WebDAV with a public provider, let me know.

Let’s get started.

1) Sign up for Office Live Small Business

http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/

Why?  Because standard Office Live will not allow this feature to work the way OneNote needs it to.  We all know OneNote plays nice with WebDAV and Sharepoint.  (Note: WebDAV support is currently limited to Vista without some server-side allowances that I frankly don’t recommend for security reasons.  Google it, the info is out there if you’re curious.)  The Office Live environment is a watered-down Sharepoint, however the mainstream Office Live does not have the extensions needed for OneNote to communicate directly with it (read: you’d have to manually upload and download all your files–what a pain).

Office Live Small Business has some extra features which are more than what most people need, specifically aimed at Small Businesses.  It just so happens (whether intentionally or not, remains to be seen) that OneNote is able to talk to the Small Business application as if it were Sharepoint.

Oh, and don’t worry, it’s free to sign up for a basic account.

2) Sign into your Office Live Small Business account

You will be presented with the following screen (click for larger):

3) Click the “More” option, followed by the “Business Applications” link

The previous picture showed the location of this menu highlighted.  If you’ve never used it before, then you will be prompted to activate it for free.

Then you will be presented with the following:

Here is my current Business Applications screen.  You’ll notice in the corner there that I am COMPLETELY out of space.  My OneNote notebooks are around 160MB in size, so until I upgrade my space, I’m receiving “out of space” errors in OneNote.  Keep this in mind when continuing.

4) Get the link needed for your OneNote root location

You can either use the default “Document Manager” provided, or, if you’re using this for other things as well, click “Add Application” and add another Document Manager module with a name of your choosing.  You’ll see in the screenshot above, I added one I called “Writing” for containing my Writing OneNote books. 

Whichever you do, now click on the name in the left column to bring up that application.

Now, pay special attention to the URL on these pages.

When I click on my “Document Manager,” the URL is as such:

And my “Writing” application URL is:

The OneNote root location will be everything BEFORE the /FORMS part.  So, in a more generic sense, your URL will be something like:

http://CompanyNameTypeOfficeLivecom.officelive.com/NameOfApp/documents

Now that you have your root location, let’s go set up a new notebook in OneNote 2007.

5) Create a new notebook in OneNote 2007

In OneNote, click “File” and then “New” | “Notebook”

Choose a default template, give it a name and a color, and click “Next".

Choose that multiple people will share this notebook, on a server.  Then “Next.”

In the next window, type the Root URL you found from Office Live.  Here is a shot with mine.  Notice I did not add the actual notebook’s name to the URL.  The Full path line underneath that does that for us.  Then, Click “Create".”

The first time you do this, it’s gonna run you through the whole sign in with your Passport thing.  (SEE SIDENOTE BELOW.)  Then, the book is created and syncs automatically.  Start creating sections and such.

Sidenote on Passport Login:  I had used the Office Live Workspaces as well, and as such, had the Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office 2007 installed on my computer.  It is very possible that this may need to be installed for this process to work, I don’t know, and don’t feel like uninstalling to test it.  If you find you can do it without the Add-in, or can confirm it is needed, let me know!

For completeness sake, the add-in is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/DownLoads/details.aspx?familyid=36BAC9DA-1EE4-40DF-B06C-A327269F2B63&displaylang=en

ONE FINAL NOTE: Opening previously created books from other computers

Okay, so you’re putting it on a server so you can open it later from another computer right?  Use “File” | “Open” | “Notebook” and then type in your root URL.  Then you will get a window like the following:

This will list the folders in that directory, one of which will be the name of the notebook you created.  Highlight and click “Open.”

ONE MORE FINAL FINAL NOTE: DISCLAIMER

You will notice that at no point does any of this process use SSL (https://etc).  This means the data is NOT ENCRYPTED.  For security reasons, if you are hosting something SUPER SENSITIVE, you may want to consider official hosting options.  1and1.com, my personal host, offers SharePoint hosting for $19.99 a month, and there are many hosts out there to give you these options.  On my Vista machine, I can use WebDAV over a secure connection with free WebDAV provider MyDrive.ch.

Have fun folks!

Email for the common user is increasingly web-based.  Gone are the days where a mail ISP just dropped your mail in a box somewhere, and the preferred (only?) method of doing anything nice with it was to have a client installed on your machine.  Gone are the days where web-based email was a horrible thing to have to navigate, used only in the emergency where you had no choice but to check it online.

But, Windows has yet to truly acknowledge this.  Send To | Mail Recipient is limited to the client you have installed on your computer.  Every one of us has done it: right click a file, choose Send To | Mail Recipient, and then moan in displeasure as some client we never use (read: Outlook Express) would pop up and declare that you need to set up your account!

This has been driving me crazy.  I use Google Apps for my email, and I was trying to find some solution around this.  There are some odd registry hacks out there that can jimmy-rig it for sending emails and handling some mailto links, but then you run into the problem of sending attachments (read: having to do it manually).  I found relief in the form of Affixa.

Relief, at least, for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail users.  As Affixa’s website puts it: “It’s 2009, and email is web-based.  So why is Windows still partying like it’s 1999?”

By acting as a go-between between your computer and the web client, whenever you choose to send a file to a mail recipient in Windows, Affixa launches, logs into your email account, and creates a draft with the attachment uploaded for you.  You go to your drafts folder, and you see a pre-made email waiting, complete with the standard email subject and body when you do the same a la Outlook.

In what I find a most unique feature, Affixa also keeps an eye out for the so-called “problem attachments.”  If you attempt to send a file that your client does not accept, either because of type or size, it notifies you, and then lets you upload the file to drop.io, which hosts files up to 100MB in size.  Then it generates the email like normal, albeit with a link to download the file instead of the attached file.  This is almost worth it just to never have to hassle with size limits!  Once you set this up, it happens seamlessly.

I asked Chris Wood, Software Development Manager at Draig Technology Ltd and owner of Notably Good Ltd, about how this feature came about.  “I knew that people sometimes struggled with Gmail’s restrictions on file attachments.  As a developer, I occasionally want to send files that are banned by Gmail (e.g. executables, DLLs, etc), so what was once a really easy attachment is now much more complicated because of the malware-infested virtual world we live in.”

“So I looked for a file hosting partner that had an API.  There were surprisingly few choices, but I was equally surprised to find such a good match as drop.io.  They have extremely talented people working for them, great corporate integrity and a vision that’s easy to be impressed by.  So the API was used by Affixa and it became the first product out there to be drop.io-integrated.  We’re looking at increasing drop.io-level functionality in a future release, e.g. use of premium drops.”

The best part is that Affixa is completely configurable so that no program is running on your computer, no consumed memory by an idle mail client, except when the default mail client is specifically called for.  Then Affixa launches, does its thing, and disappears.  That, for me, is a huge bonus, because I have enough useless crap being cleaned off on regular basis as it is.

If, however, you choose to let the Affixa tray program persist, it gives you a number of other benefits.  The Affixa tray client allows you to drag multiple files into a window—called a “basket”—and when you are satisfied, upload them all at once.  On my list, this promoted the Affixa tasktray client from “useless crap” to “much easier way to upload several files at once into my webmail.”

Like many programs out there, this one has a free version, and a paid “subscription” version.  The free version does everything I’ve listed above.  The subscription version is priced at £2 a year.  (Yes, that’s 2 British pounds.  Yes, that’s per year.)  I had to ask.  “Firstly, I never had a desire to get rich off Affixa,” said Wood, “nor do I think it would be possible to do so!  Secondly, I just wanted to cover costs and see some kind of reward for the many days of effort put in.  Again, not any personal reward necessarily, but enough to buy my wife a bunch of flowers for ignoring her whilst doing the programming!”

“The first version of Affixa (which was called ‘gAttach!’ at the time) was donation-ware, yet with hundreds of thousands of users I’d received about £35 in donations, which didn’t cover the costs of development.  Yet the thought of a $20 price tag just seemed completely excessive.  So the penny dropped when my wife said ‘if you’d had £1 for every person that had downloaded the software, you’d have over £100,000 now!’  So I decided to charge 50p a year for it just to cover costs, though the snag there was that micropayments aren’t generally that widely supported yet and transaction charges just made it prohibitive. Which is how we end up at the £2 charge.”

“My hope is that people think ‘I get some neat extra features for less than a box of Corn Flakes – it’s a no-brainer.’  I get the same feeling when I look at the iPhone apps in the iTunes store now – ‘that looks cool and it’s only $2!’”

A list of those neat extra features:

• Setup Multiple Accounts – choose an account each time you send.
• Signature Support – emails created will have your default signature on them.
• Web Browser Choice – assign different browsers to different accounts.
• Zip Support – if you choose to upload multiple files at once from the Attachment Basket, have them zipped automatically.
• Resize Photos – shrink large photos directly from the Attachment Basket.
• Auto To/CC/BCC – If you send to particular people constantly, automatically have their name added to emails you create.

Both the free version and the subscription version allow you to also link with a desktop program.  This is kind of a moot issue with the free version, but when you add in the multiple accounts of the subscription version, things get better.  “More and more frequently,” Wood said, “people use the same computer for work and play. I’m no different: I use Microsoft Outlook for work and web-based email for personal stuff. So by having both Gmail and Outlook accounts configured in Affixa, when I click on a ‘mailto’ link or choose ‘Send To | Mail Recipient,’ I get to choose which account I want to use. That choice isn’t something Windows gives you; you’re locked into one default mail application.”

Affixa has been a handy tool that I’m glad to have downloaded.  It makes my life so much easier, now that I’ve left email clients behind.  Go to www.affixa.com and check it out for yourself.  Affixa is currently available for Gmail (including Google Apps domains), and Yahoo! Mail.

Wood stated that Outlook Web Access, Zimbra, ZoHo, and AOL Mail was also on the list to look into expanding to, so if you are interested in one of those, keep an eye on this.

Knowing it was in the introductory phase, I dealt with certain facts of Chrome, such as the inability to use plug-ins or extensions.  Chrome is a fast little beast, and I enjoy it immensely.

But recently, I have had need to open Firefox once or twice during my work, and I see some of the extensions that I used to use that I no longer do.  I started getting frustrated with the lack of synchronization of bookmarks (Delicious), the inability to check out advanced details of CSS when working with web design (CSSViewer), and my popups. notifications and other various tweaks (FaviconizeTab, Google Reader Watcher, to name a couple.)

Google Chrome is nice and clean, but the bottom line is starting to dawn on me:  It is less functional, in its current form, than Firefox, and even Internet Explorer.  The amount of time I’m spending on bookmarks and dealing with CSS in Chrome is far outweighing the time I’m saving in the fast streamlined browsing experience I get from it. 

My opinion:  Google Chrome can’t compete unless it gets with the program.

And getting with the program it seems to be.  The net is abound with rumors and such that Chrome is getting extensions eventually.  According to Chromeplugins.org, and confirmed by Google, there seems to be a session dedicated to the development of extensions for the upcoming Google I/O Developer Conference, scheduled for May.

It’s just a few months away, but my patience is wearing thin.  I’m tempted to jump back to Firefox for now, and come revisit Chrome after the conference.  If extensions start getting coded.