Default Characters and the Embodied Nature of Play: Race, Gender, and Gamer Identity

This paper examines several recent controversies in the gaming and popular culture fandoms that revolved around issues of sexuality, race, and gender. It uses these examples as a means for examining which roles and identities are privileged when it comes to talking about gamers and gamer identity. The paper argues that a shift toward play as an embodied process allows for more inclusive games and forms of play which would allow for the expansion of who both sees their self in videogames and is able to play like a character of their own identity. Drawing on videogames such as Mass Effect 3 and Grand Theft Auto V, this paper uses visual rhetorical strategies to analyse and identify how specific cultures and identities have been excluded from the tag of gamer. Additionally, it examines canonical videogames of the past to establish how feminine characters have been treated under the male gaze. Finally, it provides a glimpse of the possibilities for videogames to be aware of their embodied nature and potential for inclusivity

Identity, Identification, and Media Representation in Video Game Play: An audience reception study

ABSTRACT IDENTITY, IDENTIFICATION AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION IN VIDEO GAME PLAY: AN AUDIENCE RECEPTION STUDY Adrienne Shaw Supervisor: Dr. Katherine Sender Research on minority representation in video games usually asserts: 1. the industry excludes certain audiences by not representing them; 2. everyone should be provided with characters they can identify with; and 3. media representation has knowable effects. In contrast, this dissertation engages with audiences’ relationship to gamer identity, how players interact with game texts (identification and interaction), and their thoughts about media representation. This dissertation uses interviews and participant observation to investigate why, when and how representation is important to individuals who are members of marginalized groups, focusing on sexuality, gender and race, in the U.S. The data demonstrate that video games may offer players the chance to create representations of people “like them” (pluralism), but games do not necessarily force players to engage with texts that offer representation of marginalized groups (diversity), with some rare and problematic exceptions. The focus on identity-based marketing and audience demand, as well as over-simplistic conceptualizations of identification with media characters, as the basis of arguments for minority media representation encourage pluralism. Representation is available, but only to those who seek it out. Diversity, however, is necessary for the political and educative goals of representation. It requires that players are actively confronted with diverse content. Diversity is not the result of demand by audiences, but is rather the social responsibility of media producers. Media producers, however, can take advantage of the fact that identities are complex, that identification does not only require shared identifiers, and that diversity in a non-tokenistic sense can appeal to a much wider audience than pluralistic, niche marketing. In sum, diversity can address both the market logic and educative goals of media representation. I conclude by offering three suggestions bred from this analysis. First, researchers should be critical of this emphasis on pluralism rather than diversity. Second, rather than argue video games should include more diversity because it matters, producers should include it precisely because representation does not matter in many games. Finally, those invested in diversity in games should not be to prove the importance of representation in games, but rather argue for it without dismissing playfulness

I am Queer. I am a Gamer. I am a Gaymer.: Phenomenology of In/Exclusion of Gaymer Communities

abstract: This study utilizes semiotic phenomenology as a method of inquiry to describe the lived experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) gamers (gaymers). I begin by discussing my issues with the current gaming literature, arguing that the gamer community is a space that privileges cis, heterosexual, and hypermasculine men while oppressing those who may not fit this mold. I discuss the shortcomings of the current literature that attempts to critically look at race and gaming, noting that race in the gaming community is still portrayed as secondary. I focus special attention to how this space allows for more inclusion than the larger gamer and LGBTQ communities while also critiquing those whom this space privileges. Through interviews of members of the local gaymer organization, the Phoenix Gaymers, I discuss ways in which the gaymer community is more inclusive and conscious of others but still follows forms of what I describe to be gaymer privilege. I focus on gaymer privilege within the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, where I argue from the phenomenological descriptions, reductions, and interpretations that there are still overt issues of sexism and transphobia as well as implicit issues of white privilege. While I describe the issues that are found within the Phoenix Gaymers, I also attempt to provide suggestions for change within the organization as well as in academic scholarship to create more awareness and inclusion for female, transgender, genderqueer, and queer people of color gaymers.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Social and Cultural Pedagogy 201

Queer Gamer Assemblages and the Affective Elements of Digital Games

Centering a discussion of gaming as an embodied experience, this essay explores the affective and embodied relationship between LGBT/queer gamers and video games. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seven queer gamers, I argue in that we should understand gamers as socio-technological assemblages, in order to illustrate how gamer identity, subjectivity, and sociality are enacted through the relationship between the body of a gamer and the game technologies. I further expand upon this by tending to how queer gamers talk about their embodied experiences and affective connections to various games through worlding and storytelling elements. These stories illustrate how games create affective possibilities for connection and belonging for queer gamers. I conclude by arguing that an attention to gaming as an embodied experience expands our conceptualizations of play and helps us understand the worldmaking practices that queer gamers often employ

NEGOTIATING MASCULINITY IN TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME SPACES

As video games and other gaming has become a popular media form, with 60% of Americans playing games daily (Entertainment Software Association [ESA], 2018), gaming communities have increased in size and participation. While scholarly research has consistently found that women are marginalized in these communities, little research has looked at how men see these communities. Research on homosociality shows that men use communities and relationships with other men to access masculinity (Bird, 1996; Dellinger, 2004; Houston, 2012). Building on game studies and masculinity studies, this research looks at the way men in tabletop roleplaying game communities understand their involvement and the ways their involvement connects with masculinity. Tabletop gaming communities give men access to a form of masculinity they may be denied, primarily by providing access to other ways of building social capital and relationships with other men

Trans* Streamers on Twitch.tv: The Intersections of Gender and Digital Labor

Twitch.tv is a live entertainment platform where individuals live stream events, including playing video games, playing board and tabletop games, creating art, and more. Twitch has a diverse base of streamers, but Twitch has just begun. The most common approach has focused on cisgender, heterosexual white men in the cases where it has been studied. Though these streamers should be studied in sociology, this focus leaves out the experiences of both cis women and Trans* streamers. This research proposal tries to situate the relationship of Trans* streamers with both the platform and their audience, seeing if these relationships affect their ability to earn income and status in a precarious digital workplace. This study will incorporate a primarily qualitative approach, interviewing cisgender, Transgender, and non-binary streamers about their experiences

Gender and Gaming: Postmodern Narratives of Liminal Spaces and Selves

This study employs a narrative approach to explore the relationship between gender and video gaming using a postmodern theoretical perspective. At issue here is the meaning ascribed to the construction and iterative performance of gender identity by self-identified female gamers. Using an alternative to the conventional multicase methodology (which inscribes stark demarca-tions around distinct cultural identities) this research understands participant cases as fragmented and fluid artifacts of hypermediated postmodern experiences. This study examines three gamers in an attempt to offer some provisional answers to the question: What does it mean to the participant in this study to identify as a female gamer? Furthermore, the following sub-questions will assist in cultivating understandings that offer unique and multifaceted worldviews: (a) How is gender identity enacted within video games? (b) How is gender identity enacted in out-of-game contexts related to gaming? (c) How does the construction and enactment of a gendered identity as part of the gaming experience influence individual gamer conceptions of gender? Data sources—including interviews, observations, audiovisual artifacts, and researcher memos—reveal types of “lived” events (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, pp. 33-34) as opposed to participants’ truths as substantiated by means of “brute data” (St. Pierre, 2013a). Data is represented in narrative form as a means of disrupting the prevailing discourse that stages digital culture as male purview, and opening up the space for reinscription

Out of the Margins: Evolving Narrative Representation of Women in Video Games

This thesis examines narrative representation of female characters in video games and how game narratives and representations contribute to socio-cultural discourse. First, this thesis explores and defines the cultural background for female representation in video games. It then defines video games as a type of text and describes the features that are unique to games, such as the use of avatars, and what impacts these features have on game narratives. The thesis attempts to establish evidence of an evolutionary arc of comprehensive female representation in video games by first exploring historical female narrative tropes, and then comparing them to narrative case studies of female characters within five recent game titles (Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Dragon Age, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Horizon: Zero Dawn). In these case studies, the implications for their representations of female characters are analyzed in the context of socio-cultural discourse. Furthermore, this thesis argues for the importance of diverse representation within video games as a form of media, and as cultural objects that contribute to social discourse

Friends With Benefits: Plausible Optimism and the Practice of Teabagging in Video Games

Recent scholarship in gaming studies has challenged the field to investigate and critique the hard core gaming audience (stereotypically seen as straight, White, cis-gendered male gamers) in a way that does not reinforce either the perceived marginalization of gamers or broader social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and class. This article demonstrates a way to acknowledge the complexity of this audience without dismissing its most virulent tendencies via practice theory and weak theory. Using data drawn from a qualitative survey of 393 self-identified first-person shooter video game players, this article looks at the specific practice of “teabagging” in online competitive gaming contexts. Ultimately, this article argues that drawing attention to the gaps and fissures that local gaming practices can produce in broader structures of gaming, sexuality, and class can help critical gaming scholars encourage and cultivate such practices as well as construct new, reparative alliances between different fields and communities