From Pixels to Text: Articulations of the Body in Digital Landscapes and Imagined Space(s) (original) (raw)
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Gender construction in video games: A Discourse
All new technologies follow a familiar cyclicality in terms of their perception and assimilation as they move from the phase of an initial celebration of a "new" technology to a phase where they attempt to appropriate themselves in the existing socio-cultural context. In this process of "appropriation", technologies domesticate themselves in the dominant paradigm of sociocultural norms.
Changing the Core: Redefining Gaming Culture from a Female-Centered Perspective
2016
In the mid-2000s, the spread of casual, social, and mobile games led researchers, journalists, and players to believe that video gaming was opening up to previously marginalized audiences, especially women. At the same time, game culture has seen a significant increase in incidents of sexism and misogyny. This dissertation uses a critical exploration of industry texts and practices, as well as interviews with thirty-seven female gamers, to explain how these conflicting narratives can co-exist and how women navigate their contradictions. The dissertation posits that industrial changes and the broadening of gaming audiences have motivated a Gramscian crisis of authority, where previously hegemonic male gamers fear losing their privileged position in this space. As a protective measure, they have reacted with both overtly and implicitly sexist forces, such as gender-based harassment, that marginalize nonmale gamers, barring them from cultural power. This works to maintain what this project describes as a "core" of gaming culture that is exclusionary and misogynistic. At the same time, women and other marginalized audiences express deep pleasure in gaming and have developed nuanced strategies for managing their exclusion, pursuing positive gaming experiences, and competing with men on their own turf. In doing so, they put themselves in a complicated position, often simultaneously enjoying their identity as gamers while being told they should not possess that identity. By embodying their conflicting identities in diverse and negotiated ways, however, they work to break down the idea of "women" as an essentialized group and instead outline new ways of being female. This performs feminist action not only by diversifying ideas of who women can be, but also in demonstrating how they are already deeply iv connected to technologies like games despite their historic masculinization. Women are barred from gaming identity in many ways, but they are also still already part of its "core". In addition, their management of conflicted identities illustrates pathways along which players could build networks of affinity across gendered lines, encouraging the development of a more equitable power structure in gaming, and perhaps in other masculinized and sexist spaces as well.
On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming: Invading, Creating, and Reclaiming the Cultural Clubhouse
2018
This dissertation uses intersectional feminist theory and Autoethnography to develop the concept of "cultural inaccessibility". Cultural inaccessibility is a concept I've created to describe the ways that women are made to feel unwelcome in spaces of game play and games culture, both offline and online. Although there are few formal barriers preventing women from purchasing games, playing games, or acquiring jobs in the games industry, this dissertation explores the formidable cultural barriers which define women as "space invaders" and outsiders in games culture. Women are routinely subjected to gendered harassment while playing games, and in physical spaces of games culture, such as conventions, stores, and tournaments. This harassment and abuse is intensified toward female journalists, developers and academics who choose to speak publicly about sexism within the culture, particularly since the 2014 rise of Gamergate. This dissertation illustrates the parallel development of games culture and women's continued exclusion from it, from the exclusionary sexism of J. R. R. Tolkien's writing to the development of the "Gamer" as a fixed (and stereotypically cis-male) identity in the pages of video game magazines of the 1980s and '90s, to the online "Gamer activism" of today. At the same time, I also explore my own experiences as a female gamer and academic in the 2010s, using projects I have been a part of as a means of reflecting on developments in the broader culture. I first discuss a short machinima (a film made within a video game) that Elise Vist and I created within the 2007 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Lord of the Rings Online entitled Lady Hobbits. Lady Hobbits becomes an entry point to consider the historical cultural inaccessibility of women's representations in seminal male-dominated media such as The Lord of the Rings. I then discuss the gender and games advocacy group that I co-founded at the University of Waterloo, The Games Institute Janes (GI Janes), and the many gaming events that v we ran, comparing the experience of our gender-integrated and women-only game nights. The challenges I experienced organizing GI Janes fuels my analysis of the cultural inaccessibility of game play for girls and women, as demonstrated by the tangled gender dynamics at play in the eSports community and Super Smash Brothers fandom. Lastly, I discuss my experiences as a staff member, and eventual first female editor-in-chief, of game studies publication First Person Scholar (FPS). This chapter interrogates the cultural inaccessibility of writing and publishing about games for women in the academic field of game studies, and the ways in which game studies' links to gamer identity replicate games culture's troubling sexism. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the more recent connections between games culture, Gamergate, and conservative political groups such as the Alt-right. The conclusion asks how women can study games culture and the politically-motivated violence with which it is has recently been linked if doing so puts us at risk of becoming a target of harassment and abuse. It underscores the importance of future social justice-oriented work in academia and at large. In summary this dissertation moves from examining the historical inaccessibility of representation and participation (chapter 2), to the inaccessibility of game play (chapter 3), to the inaccessibility of participation in the discourse of games culture (chapter 4), before finally moving to a conclusion about Gamergate and politics in 2018 and how cultural inaccessibility has become a problem that is much larger than just games culture (chapter 5).
Stories and Changing Social Norms: Representation of Gender in Video Games from 2007 to 2017
Proceedings of DiGRA, 2022
This paper focuses on how a games' characters and story reflect changing cultural norms in the period during which a game series was developed and released. This is done through qualitative evaluation of the Dragon Age series (2009-2014) and compared to two other game franchises with similar release dates and production location: the Mass Effect Trilogy (2007-2012) and the Uncharted series (2007-2017). Stories reflect cultural and societal norms of the periods and places that crafted them, providing a unique avenue of second-person stories, containing bits and pieces of their creators and their sociocultural biases. Using these digital games as artifacts and texts of focus, a change in social and cultural values and norms of modern society appears when evaluating and comparing the content of previous games in a series to the current ones, as these works reflect the environment in which they were created.
Three Shadowed Dimensions of Feminine Presence in Video Games
Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG
Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference to the most popular games, their protagonists and their sexist predicament. This framing leaves in shadow other dimensions. We aim to identify some of them and to open a broader horizon for examining and designing femininity and gender in games. To this end we look into games with creative portrayals of feminine characters, diverging from the action-woman trope: The Walking Dead, The Path, and 80 Days. We talk in dialogue with scholars, but also with a digital crowd-critique movement for films and games, loosely centered on instruments such as the Bechdel-Wallace test and the TV Tropes.org wiki. We argue that the central analytical dimension of female character strength should be accompanied by three new axes, in order to examine feminine presence across ages, in the background fictive world created by the game, and in network edges of interaction.
2021
Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies have long identified ocularcentrism, or the privilege of vision in culture and thought, as one of the prime causes behind the tendency to manipulate and categorize matter, bodies and meanings. This paper examines the power of computer-generated images to produce a kind of digital interaction which upsets gendered visual and listening conventions, such as those traditionally experienced in cinema. The article will take into consideration Valve's Portal (2007), a first person videogame which proposes a 'topological' way of seeing relying on the synaesthetic working of the human sensorium. Images do not simply represent objects and places, but allow for countless configurations of space. The visual effort to confront with images of pure potential brings about an affective intensification of sensory faculties, especially of the senses of touch and hearing. As a consequence, images are endowed with tactile qualities which make possible the a...
Gaming Lifeworlds: Videogames in Culture
The University of Sydney, 2022
This thesis examines gaming lifeworlds and seeks interventions into the hegemony of gaming culture tied to a persistent imaginary of ‘Gamers’ as young white heterosexual males. Despite attempts to cultivate diversity, most approaches to improving representation in videogames do not demand significant structural or environmental change, and thus generally continue to foster precarity. In thinking about precarity, I establish the concept of ‘(not)coping’ to challenge the assumed dichotomy by which every instance of ‘not coping’ designates a failure ‘to cope’. Rather than viewing ‘coping’ and ‘not coping’ as positive and negative binaries, I write ‘(not)coping’ to highlight the liminal zone in between these affective states. (Not)coping is thus used to further describe the transformative affective spaces necessary for the refusal to cope within and against hegemony. I use qualitative mixed methods, combining semi-structured interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and discourse analysis to examine everyday struggles and how people can become affectively (re)orientated towards and away from certain videogame assemblages – assemblages of objects, communities, and practices. My findings are presented as three main chapters, which investigate videogames in relationship conflicts, videogames in drunk spaces, and videogames in self-care discourses. In the field of game studies, methods of investigation are frequently configured around studying play, players, or the creation of play. However, this focus can ignore non-players, non-play relationship dynamics, and non-play-centric spaces that themselves also significantly shape videogame and play assemblages. Since the study of gaming lifeworlds crucially apprehends videogame assemblages as embedded in materiality, rather than separate from everyday life, I hope to demonstrate its use as a generative framework and model for feminist games, media, internet, cultural researchers to study videogames in culture.
Gender Identities and Relations in Video Games
2020
The role of gender in the design of technologies has been a topic of growing importance in fields such as interaction design, HCI, and games. Understanding that technology development and usage practices emerge within the cultural processes, the authors propose in this chapter a discussion about the notions of traditional femininity, its relation to video games, as well as new approaches to female representation. It is also assessed the cultural understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as how these notions may influence the players experience. The issues discussed and briefly analyzed here point to a production and regulation of gender by technologies such as video games. Therefore, the goal is to assess how gender notions and relations influence the design and use of games in terms of visuals, narrative and sociability.