Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture

329 Pages·2014·2.165 MB·English

by  Adrienne Shaw

Gaming at the Edge
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GAMING
AT THE EDGE
Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture
Adrienne Shaw
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shaw, Adrienne.
Gaming at the edge : sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer
culture / Adrienne Shaw.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9315-3 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9316-0 (pb)
1. Video games—Social aspects. 2. Electronic games—Social aspects.
3. Gender identity. 4. Sex role. 5. Sex. I. Title.
GV1469.17.S63S53 2015
794.8—dc23
2014005527
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and
employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction. Clichés versus Women: Moving beyond Sexy
Sidekicks and Damsels in Distress 1
1 From Custer’s Revenge and Mario to Fable and Fallout:
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Digital Games 13
2 Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft?
Unpacking Identification in Video Games 55
3 He Could Be a Bunny Rabbit for All I Care!
How We Connect with Characters and Avatars 97
4 When and Why Representation Matters to Players:
Realism versus Escapism 147
Conclusion: A Future Free of Dickwolves 201
Acknowledgments 233
Notes 237
Gameography 265
Bibliography 269
Index 297
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Preface
In the late the 1980s, my mother, sister, and I lived in Japan for four
years. Stationed on a military base, we received a steady stream of
U.S. programming via the military broadcasting network and state-
side relatives sending us VHS recordings of shows. Still, my earliest
memories are of living in a place where the majority of people and
media were not “like” me. Indeed, I spent a great deal of my child-
hood moving, always being out of place. Adding to that, growing up
as a queer woman meant I rarely had mediated narratives to which
I could fully relate.
One Christmas in Japan, my mother bought us a Nintendo En-
tertainment System console and a handful of games. All three of us
played it regularly for many years. At the time and, indeed, for most
of my childhood, video games were something everyone did. My
mother played everything from the board game simulation Othello
to the vampire hunting game Castlevania.1 My sister and I fought
over California Games, stayed up late playing Tiny Toon Adventures,
and blew off the steam of adolescence on Doom.2 My sister still plays
with her husband and daughter, though as more of a spectator now
(or so she claims).
Growing up, most of our friends played regardless of gender,
race, or class, even though not everyone had a console in their own
home. Because of all this, it never really occurred to me that gaming
was something only a certain type of person did. In fact, it was only
in my adult life that I heard people talking about the heterosexual,
white, cisgendered male gamer as the norm. That is not to say such
stereotypes did not exist also during my childhood and adolescence.
Ads and popular representation did often construct a “boy” player
as the main game audience. There was, however, a disjuncture be-
tween the audience hailed by these constructions and the lived
vii
viii Preface
experience of game play with which I grew up. I am fascinated with
the way the male (white and middle class) image of the digital game
player has become enshrined as common sense to the extent that it
has eclipsed a much more diverse picture of the medium’s history.
One need only compare a 1982 feature in Electronic Games Maga-
zine proclaiming that “women have officially arrived in the world
of electronic gaming”3 to numerous twenty- first- century articles
that announce with surprise that “nearly half of all video- gamers
are women”4 to see that there is a disjuncture between how players
are imagined and who actually plays games.
The stereotype persists despite the constant reaffirmation that
players exist outside the common gamer construction. There has
been a shift, however, in how this “unexpected female audience” is
courted via representation. In 1982 Midway spokesman Stan Jarocki
described how representation was shaped in honor of an already
existing market: “Pac-M an was the first commercial game to involve
large numbers of women as players. . . . Now we’re producing this
new game, Ms. Pac- Man, as our way of thanking all those lady arcad-
ers.”5 In the 1990s and early twenty- first century, though, most dis-
cussions of representation in games were focused on pulling those
who do not play into games by way of representation. Before, it
was a problem of texts not responding to the existing audience, and
now, it is a problem of people needing to be convinced to try this
medium. Representation in games has always been tied to expecta-
tions about audiences, but throughout this book I question some
of the easy assumptions made about which groups are particularly
concerned with representation and why representation matters to
audiences.
There are many ways in which this book grew out of those early
formative experiences. I grew up taking what I could from media
and my surroundings, even when they didn’t exactly represent me.
Sure, it was hard to find people exactly like me, but I could still
find aspects of myself reflected somewhere in the mediated world
around me. Sure, I wanted representation. At the same time, I re-
member cringing while watching movies and television shows that
were supposedly about people “like me.” In addition, game play
has always been something much more omnipresent in my life than
most definitions of gamer culture reflect. I am sympathetic to the
project of making game spaces more open, but I also have spent my
Preface ix
entire life playing a medium that never marketed to me directly. I
have found my place in the many spaces that were supposed to be
closed off to me. For these reasons, it comes as no surprise that my
research has always focused on questioning the commonsense log-
ics of representation.
I care about representation (a lot). At the start of my graduate
research, I was committed to cracking open the underexamined area
of representation in games. My first project was a virtual ethnogra-
phy of a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender gamers.6
And it turned out . . . many of them did not really care about rep-
resentation. This was a shock to me at first, but the more I dug into
that project, the more it made sense. Homophobia in gaming com-
munities was much more important to these players than was tex-
tual representation because many of my interviewees played games
online. When it came to textual representation, they found and
shared queer representations or queer readings as they found them,
in games as well as other media. They figured that in time the indus-
try would find a way to tap into the gay gamer niche the way other
industries had. My studies of gaming in the Middle East, Finland,
and India generated similar themes.7 Over and over again, people
kept telling me that they just did not care that much about having
their group, whatever that group may be, represented in games even
if they cared about representation in other media. Teaching classes
on minority representation in games, I heard this refrain repeated
yet again by my students. Video games are a niche medium; they are
fantasy environments; and they are designed for a narrow market.
Of course games are not diverse— so what?
I could have easily dismissed these responses as a desirability
effect, cognitive dissonance, or false consciousness. But such a dis-
missal seemed both uninteresting and unethical. Instead, I adopted
a position I had learned from feminist ethnographic media schol-
arship: I took my interviewees at their word. I set out to reconcile
scholars’ compelling research demonstrating the importance of
representation with marginalized audiences’ ambivalence about
representation. What does a call for representation look like when
we take both seriously?
In exploring this question, I realized that I recognized myself in
my participants’ responses. After all, I too grew up playing a me-
dium for which I was not the primary market and media in which