“Whose game is it anyways”, part 1: GENDER

1. “Whose game is it anyways”, part 1:GENDER COM 427 February 8 2017

2. Intro to gender & gaming: is it getting better? “Girls have always played video games, but they weren't the majority. In wake of the video game crash, the game industry's pursuit of a safe and reliable market led to it homing in on the young male. And so the advertising campaigns began. Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.”

3. Gender & gaming culture: What’s changed since 2006? Entertainment Software Association Annual Report, 2006

4. Gender & gaming culture: What’s changed since 2006? Entertainment Software Association, Annual Report, 2016

5. Game production: 2005 “produced by males, for a male audience, and incorporate themes recognisably ‘male’” http://www.igda.org/sites/default/files/IGDA_DeveloperDemographics_Oct05.pdf

6. Game production: 2005 Producers: 77% m 23% f Programmers: 96% m 4% f Artists: 84% m 16% f Audio engineers: 96% m 4% f Game Developer Magazine, April 2013

7. 2014 statistics by the IGDA: pay gap

8. 2006: Wii, Guitar Hero – new controllers, new platforms, new audiences Mid-2000’s on: rise of esports, competitive televised gaming, which remains overwhelmingly male-dominated

9. Mid-2000’s on: - Increased reports of sexual harassment, doxxing, swatting, death threats, organized trolling campaigns, bomb threats, hacking, etc. against female & feminist gamers, game designers, competitive gamers, streamers, activists

10. What is gender? “In everyday life we take gender for granted. We instantly recognize a person as a man or a woman, girl or boy. We arrange everyday business around the distinction.” --- Raewyn Connell, 2009

11. What is gender? • There is more variability WITHIN “male” and WITHIN “female” than BETWEEN them • There is nothing natural about gender. • We “do” gender. Every day, all the time. Games are part of this performance. • There are multiple masculinities” and multiple “femininities”

12. Gender and identity • Gender is one of the primary ways we tell the world & ourselves who we are: • Etiquette & social interactions • Speech, clothing, appearance • Tastes and preferences – including TV shows, movies, GAMES.

13. Because gender is literally EVERYWHERE, scholarship on gender and gaming is broad and varied. • What do the appearances and actions of playable characters say about our understandings of gender? • What causes the gender gap in the games industry? How can they be challenged? • What historical precursors are there to the association between gaming and masculinity? • How do gaming peripherals and platforms reflect gender stereotypes? • How does videogame marketing, journalism and scholarship reflect gender biases? • How do gaming spaces and practices– the cultural contexts of play– reflect and create gender biases?

14. Articles this week: • How do games & gaming cultures reinforce gender? • Kennedy, H. (2002). Lara Croft: Feminist icon or cyberbimbo? On the limits of textual analysis. Games Studies, 2(2). • How do we experience gender at the level of the TEXT – through the game’s representations (hypersexualized female) and mechanics (shooting, acrobatics)? • Lien, T. (December 2013). No girls allowed: Unraveling the story behind the stereotype of video games being for boys. Polygon. • How do we experience gender at the level of MARKETING – through the ways video game advertisements, box art, etc create an “imagined player?” • Wagner, K. (October 2014). The future of the culture wars is here, and it’s gamergate. Deadspin. • - How do we experience gender at the level of BROADER CULTURAL PRACTICES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

15. Helen Kennedy, “Lara Croft” Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo”:Many studies of gender and gaming are shaped by film & tv studies • Assumptions from other screen-based media applied to games: • How a game character LOOKS is their most important feature • The primary way we relate to characters is through IDENTIFICATION

16. Kennedy’s argument -- “Whilst this is a useful framework which allows for a more positive reading of Lara it cannot account for how the processes of identification and desire may be enhanced or subverted through playing the game. By focusing on Lara as an agent and a spectacle there is little here that would differ from a reading of the film version of Tomb Raider (2001), and this does not account for the specificity of the experience of playing as Lara.”

17. What we assume… Desire: Playing WITH “I want to be with her” Identification: Playing AS “I want to be her”

18. What games make possible… Desire: Playing WITH “I want to be with her” Identification: Playing AS “I want to be her” One potential way of exploring this transgendering is to consider the fusion of player and game character as a kind of queer embodiment, the merger of the flesh of the (male) player with Lara's elaborated feminine body of pure information. This new queer identity potentially subverts stable distinctions between identification and desire and also by extension the secure and heavily defended polarities of masculine and feminine subjectivity. Queer potentials Trans potentials

19. Kennedy’s article: - turning point in a long trajectory of gender-based “readings” of digital games who plays, and how, is as important to what a character means as what they look like. mechanics are as if not more important to understanding a character as their appearance.

20. Feminist game criticism Me in 2012: at a public event for game enthusiasts & new media professionals , detailing misogyny in esports • Starting with Anita Sarkeesian’s “Tropes vs Women” Kickstarter campaign & subsequent video series in 2013, and “gamergate” in 2014, the act of critiquing sexism in videogames becomes politicized • A small but vehement corner of games culture views critiques of games as attacks on their identity -- criticism, and reactions to it, become part of the ongoing story of gender divisions in gaming

21. Reactions to criticism: Anita Sarkeesian’sKickstarter project

22. Calling attention to sexism IN videogames… … get punished by sexist gamers

23. a personal game, a series of game criticism videos, and a handful of opinion pieces on the outdated term “gamer” spark a reactionary movement against the alleged “death” of a masculine cultural identity based solely on the hyper-consumption of commercial games…. IT’S ALL CONNECTED …she and a feminist gaming activist receive graphic, detailed threats, forcing the activist to contact the police and flee her home. In response, several sites publish think pieces about the death of the gamer identity. These pieces are, in essence, celebrations of the success of gaming, arguing that it is now enjoyed by so many people of such diverse backgrounds and with such varied interests that the idea of the gamer—a person whose identity is formed around a universally enjoyed leisure activity—now seems as quaint as the idea of the moviegoer. Somehow, this is read to mean that these sites now think gamers are bad. The grievances intensify, and the discussions of them on Twitter are increasingly unified under the hashtag #gamergate(Wagner)

24. “Gaming identity” Your row will be assigned a game. You will be assigned a research task for that game. • Production: what % of the production team was female; which key roles were occupied by women. Question: what role did women play in the design? Bonus: does the studio have an inclusivity policy? • Marketing: Find 2 ads (1 print, 1 video) for the game. If possible, determine where they were released. Question: who is the “imagined player”? (gender, age, race, income, tastes) • Mechanics: What are the game’s mechanics? What sort of activities do players do in the game? What are other analogs or parallels to this action, and are these analogs associated with masculinity or femininity? Question: How are the mechanics gendered? • Representations: Can players select the gender of the playable character? What “look” (cartoony, realistic, gritty, friendly, etc) does the game go for? Question: How are the representations gendered?