Fair-Play: How Women Experience Sexism within Board Gaming Spaces

Abstract

As a male dominated culture, board gaming demonstrates relative traits to its digital counterpart video games when it comes to accepting women within its spaces. Through the representations of women of both in game and from within the culture, board gaming has a lot to offer in terms of understanding their experiences. Despite this, board gaming has and continues to be a niche community that has been left fairly untouched by scholars and research. Although there has been previous work regarding board games, there has been no full exploration of the fans within this culture. This study aim to change that, and look into the very minority of board games, the women. This study aims to explore how women experience board games on a daily basis when engaging with their own gaming groups and spaces and talks through the labour and challenges that faces them when experiencing sexism and resistance from its male dominated audience. Through the use of twelve interviews with women based in worldwide locations alongside netnographic data taken from the BoardGameGeek forums, we begin to understand how women work within these spaces despite being under represented and dismissed. The study provides analysis on the participants answers by delving deeper into the concept of ‘play’ and subcultural style alongside fannish participatory labour to form a greater understanding as to how women experience sexism within their chosen community