Just over a year ago, Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a video project exploring the representation of women in digital games. When the funding campaign for her project “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” began, Sarkeesian was already an established feminist media critic. Her videos touched upon a range of subjects, from liquor ads to BitTorrent, from LEGOs to Kanye West. Her YouTube channel had thousands of subscribers, and those of us who teach media and gender studies often turned to Sarkeesian’s short, witty, and accessible video essays for classroom examples of media literacy in action. My students were inspired by her work to make videos of their own.

Following a six-part series she created for Bitch magazine examining gender tropes in film, television, and comics, Sarkeesian turned to video games, and made an appeal to her subscribers and followers for capital support for her work. The now-infamous online harassment that Sarkeesian faced from thousands of anonymous abusers in response to her Kickstarter campaign was shocking in its intensity, but not at all surprising. In a space where sexism and homophobia is performed and reproduced as if it is part of the digital code, feminist attention to video games and game culture is threatening. Those who wield gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and other forms of social power in order to intimidate, silence, and oppress others will fiercely reject a feminist lens focused on the cultural products that serve as platforms for that oppression. The mere suggestion that these cultural products are not the domains of white, heterosexual men unleashes a torrent of vicious border policing.

So Sarkeesian, and many others before her who had far less social support, faced a predictable backlash. But what was new in 2012 was the vocal, public response to the backlash, and increased visibility to the issues that the backlash elevated. For Sarkeesian, the visibility led to a massive outpouring of financial support. “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” was funded more than 25 times over the initial $6000 ask and has expanded into a 13-part series. For the world of games generally, the public response to the backlash highlighted that the work feminists and their allies have been doing since the first quarter fell into Ms. Pac-Man is needed now more than ever.

In the inaugural issue of this journal, Mia Consalvo challenged feminist media studies scholars to confront toxic gamer culture, like that faced by Sarkeesian, through our research, by documenting, archiving, analyzing, and responding to sexism, racism, ageism, and homophobia in games and game spaces. I am thrilled to serve as editor of the second issue of Ada focused on feminist games studies. This issue features six original articles that, in unique and methodologically diverse ways, respond to Consalvo’s challenge.

In the lead article, Adrienne Shaw asks a question fundamental to game studies: “What is a gamer?” The answer, Shaw explains, is often described in relation to how the video game industry constructs the audience for games and thus is wrapped up in marketing logics that do not reflect the gaming experiences of women and other marginalized players. Drawing upon feminist and queer theory, Shaw contends that understanding players’ complex relationships to games must reject ‘we game too’ arguments intended to change how the industry speaks to and makes games for its perceived audience. Instead, she calls for taking stock of how people play games — or chose not to play games — in relation to their everyday lives in order to draw an inclusive picture of gaming as a lived experience regardless of who claims the “gamer” identity.

Aubrey Anable’s analysis of time management games, like Diner Dash, contests the popular notion that casual games are frivolous pastimes played between work tasks. She traces the emotional value that these games provide players, and argues that, like the female “complaint genre” described by Lauren Berlant, time management casual games highlight the disappointments of 21^st century work culture. Anable’s application of affective labor also demonstrates a conceptual bridge between computational and representational frameworks, opening a space for more nuanced understandings of the cultural meaning of games.

Continuing the discussion about causal games, John Vanderhoef follows the gendered discourse circulated by journalists, developers, and marketers that marks casual games as feminine. While the genre boundaries around so-called causal games are not well defined by the industry or players, Vanderhoef illustrates how the gendered characterization of casual games, Nintendo Wii games in particular, powerfully legitimizes the reactionary assault by some hardcore gamers to any alternative to heteronormative, masculine gamer culture.

Jordan Youngblood provides a deep read of queer-coded characters in Persona 4 in order to explore the possibilities for transgressing heteronormativity in game narratives. His intervention pulls Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric and Judith Butler’s ideas about gender performativity into conversation, proposing new theoretical ground for assessing the transformative potential of virtual identities.

Kishonna Gray delivers a valuable account of the activities of marginalized Xbox Live players who use the online game space to create organizational and/or resistance activities to racist, sexist, and homophobic play. Gray is not interested in the efficacy of these tactics for changing game spaces universally – though that may be a hopeful outcome – but instead considers these virtual actions as strategies akin to those enacted by marginalized communities who must navigate racial profiling and misogyny in the physical world.

The final piece by Alex Layne and Samantha Blackmon frames the online conversations about gender-focused events in gamer culture – such as the Sarkeesian Kickstarter campaign and the sexual assault narrative in the latest Tomb Raider title – into what they call “post-play narrative modding.” The authors propose that the talk produced around these events can alter the ways in which players read the meanings of games. Along with industrial discourses (marketing, game journalism, reviews, etc.) and dominant player discourses, Layne and Blackmon call for feminists to “becom(e) part of the discourse of gaming” and thus influence how players and non-players experience game culture.

This call by Layne and Blackmon reflects the conversational goals of Ada outlined by Kim Sawchuck and Carol Stabile in the first issue introduction, and certainly echoes the ambition I have for this themed issue. The Fembot Collective is a project that aims to bridge disciplines and institutions, and challenge traditional, closed publication structures. I invite you in this open, multimodal space to engage with the second issue authors and generate productive, progressive feminist discourses about games and game studies.

—

The second issue of Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology is the first to employ a multi-level open peer review process that is central to the aims of the publication. The initiation of this process required time, patience and commitment that was voluntarily donated by many already busy people. As editor of this issue, I am deeply grateful for the assistance, guidance and leadership provided by Carol Stabile, Radhika Gajjala, Bryce Peake, and Karen Estlund. At the Fembot Collective unconference in February hosted by the University of Oregon, generous attendees participated in a workshop review session of the issue articles and continued to contribute their thoughtful comments online. And finally, the Fembot Advisory Board provided me with invaluable support, clarity and confidence during this exciting endeavor. Thank you to all.

—CITATION—
Huntemann, N. (2013) Introduction: Feminist Discourses in Games/Game Studies. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N37D2S2F

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Simone de Beauvoir (1989 [1949]): one is not born a gamer, one becomes one. [T.L. Taylor makes a similar twist of the classic phrase in Play Between Worlds when she says "One is not born an Everquest player, one becomes one" (2006, p. 32).] This is perhaps even truer of being a gamer than it is of women in Beauvoir’s original formulation. As an identity defined by consumption, identifying as a gamer is more clearly a choice than are identities more directly written on the body, defined by kinship structures, and/or dictated by legislation. It is not, however, a consequence-free choice as the interviews described below indicate. Like other forms of identity, being a gamer is defined in relation to dominant discourses about who plays games, the deployment of subcultural capital, the context in which players find themselves, and who are the subjects of game texts.

We might relate the experience of gamer identity to the notion of interpellation. In his canonical text, “The Ideological State Apparatus,” Louis Althusser uses the metaphor of being hailed by a police officer and asserts that it is in the turning that a person realizes she/he is the “you” being called on, and thus becomes interpellated by, or a subject of, the state apparatus (1998 [1971], p. 185). This article seeks to understand the intersections of investment in a medium, audience construction, and diversity of identities represented in game texts. In it, I explore how and if people who play video games turn to the hail “hey gamer,” and the implications this has for diversity of in-game representation if they do not believe that they are the ones being hailed. Moreover, I question how useful “gamer” as a term is to the broader goals of feminist game studies. Rather than expanding who might be included in  “gamer” identity, how might we argue for greater representation in games in a way that works outside the market logic of the term itself?

As games became a niche consumer product during the late 1980s and 1990s, following the U.S. game market crash (Kent, 2001), the content of both games and the construction of the audience were profoundly homogenized (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, & De Peuter, 2003). Over time and through a focus on core gamers as the primary market, gamer as an identity category has become an invested position describing more than just a person who plays digital games.[1] It requires investment, both social and economic, in the medium. Calls for more diversity in games have in many ways focused on proving that gamers as a group are more diverse than previously thought (Shaw, 2012a). Indeed many feminist game scholars have analyzed the limited ways in which gamers have been constructed and the impact this has had on how women in particular are represented in games (Cassell & Jenkins, 2000; Kafai, Heeter, Denner, & Sun, 2008; Taylor, 2006). More and more researchers are also looking beyond the console and PC to see how casual and mobile gaming complicate prevailing notions of how, when, and by whom games are played (Consalvo, 2009; Hjorth & Richardson, 2010; Juul, 2009). Building on their insights, I want to make sense of how players who fall outside the constructed norm of “hardcore,” white, heterosexual, cisgendered male players within the U.S. context relate to this medium and how this might reform arguments for representation in the medium. Drawing upon the insights of feminist media scholars like Ien Ang (1991), Janice Radway (1988), Julie D’Acci (2004), and Liz Bird (2003), I make this argument by working outside the limits of the constructed audience, looking at the way game play fits within players’ everyday lives, and rethinking representation outside normative identity categories.

In previous work I have described the way gamer identity intersects with gendered, racial, and sexual identity categories (Shaw, 2012a). In that article I found that how people related to gamer identity seemed closely tied to whether and how they had been marketed to as specific niche game audiences. Branching out of that work, this article offers insights into how gamer identity is performed, particularly in relation to subcultural capital, social contexts, and the impact individual players’ relationship to the medium has on demands for representation. I use the insight offered by critical theories of identity, primarily from a feminist and queer political critique of identity categories, to disentangle the mechanisms by which gamer identity is formed. I do this not toward the end of reforming the category, but to point out that demands for representation in this medium can be made outside of inclusion in marketing discourse. I also discuss the way interviewees distance themselves from game play, describing the games as “silly” and thus not to be taken seriously, as an issue game scholars must take much more (paradoxically) seriously. In part our efforts must be directed towards changing audiences relationship to the medium more than redressing the limited ways in which various gaming audiences are constructed.

Critical Identity Theories

Identity as a gamer, like all identities, exists as a conversation between the individual and social, structural discourses. Critical identity theory that build on post-structuralism are particularly useful in parsing how and when gamer identity is adopted by those that play video games. Indeed, the institutional construction of identities is a prevalent theme in both media representation and social theory. Many contemporary theorists have argued that identity exists between rather than within individuals (see for example Appiah, 2005; Gilroy, 2004; Hall, 1996). There is empirical evidence, moreover, that identities are experienced at the nexus of the individual and the social (for two recent examples see Gray, 2009; Valentine, 2007). We are not, as earlier structuralist theorists argued, wholly shaped by external forces; that everything we do is inherently social, does not mean that social structures determine our actions.

In many ways identification is a more useful way of understanding identity formation than identity per se, as Hall (1966) describes. Identities and subjects are made in specific moments, via the process of identification.

The notion that an effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires not only that the subject is ‘hailed,’ but that the subject invests in the position, means that suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than a one-sided process, and that in turn places identification, if not identities, firmly on the theoretical agenda. (p. 6)

Hall argues that a focus on identification is more politically useful than a focus on identity, as it allows for the self-definition of the individual rather than on defining them from the outside. In this article I focus on how people identify as gamers, rather than gamers as a fan group or industry construction. Identification does not entail audiences creating their own “identities,” but rather working within a context in which particular identities are being articulated. That is not to say that identity is wholly self-defined, but rather researchers can look at how structures shape identities through individuals’ reflexive articulations of their identities.

In this project I use how interviewees’ identifications as gamers are articulated through Judith Butler’s twinned notions of performance and precarity. According to Butler, identities are performed in ways that make categories like genders seem natural: “[P]erformativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effect through its naturalization in the context of a body understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (2006, p. xv). Performativity here is not akin to Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical self, as she explains in her response to Benhabib in the edited volume Feminist Contentions (Butler, 1995). People are not simply playing parts in different social contexts. Rather, for Butler the performance of gender is like much more like a speech act (Austin, 1962). The performance of gender is what constitutes gender. These performances must draw on a broader system of meaning which helps render those utterances, those performances, intelligible. As I discuss below, we can think of gamer identity to as something that is actively performed by those that claim it.

However, it is not the case that anyone who wishes can perform gamer identity. Indeed, central to this analysis is the ways in which gamer identity as a construction and performance is closed off for some players and in particular contexts. It is in this sense that I use Butler’s discussion of precarity. Butler (2009) has proposed that precarity works hand in hand with performativity. Precarity refers to the ways in which one must perform identities in an intelligible way, in a way that can be read by others, in order to be recognized. One might perform in a variety of transgressive ways in order to destabilize categories, but “to be a subject at all requires first complying with certain norms that govern recognition – that make a person recognizable. And so, non-compliance calls into question the viability of one’s life, the ontological conditions of one’s persistence” (p. xi).  Although she is discussing this at the level of the nation-state and citizenship, in particular the way marginalized populations are at the mercy of neoliberalism and the violence of nationalism. I argue, however, that her articulation is useful in the realm of consumer culture specifically because such a term allows us to argue for a politics of representation that comes precisely from the edge rather than reimagining the center. Butler writes, “Performativity has everything to do with ‘who’ can become produced as a recognizable subject […] Precarious life characterizes such lives who do not qualify as recognizable” (p. xii). In using this charged term to refer to the sphere of consumer culture I do not mean to diminish precarity’s ties to life and death. Rather, I think drawing on it helps charge feminist game studies to make an argument for representation that does not only reinforce the importance of those who are already marketable as audiences. What can our demands for representation look like when we move beyond just broadening out who counts as a gamer?

Method

The broader study from which this paper is drawn focused on why, when and how media representation is important to individuals who are members of groups which have traditionally been marginalized in mainstream U.S. media, focusing on the intersections of sexuality, gender and race. This was a three-stage study. First, I used a general survey, administered online, to locate potential interviewees.[2] A group of interviewees[3] who identified as non-heterosexual, non-cisgendered male, and/or not solely white[4] were then selected from the completed surveys. Additionally, I was interested in people who play video games, rather than “gamers” per se, so I sampled across the types of games, platforms, and amount of time they play. In addition, I had the opportunity to speak with two heterosexual, white male partners of two of those interviewees, and the non-gaming, queer white female partner of one other participant. I conducted two separate interviews. During the first interview I focused on their general backgrounds, thoughts on media representation and how and if they identify with fictional characters. The second interview was a “gaming interview,” as described in Schott and Horrell (p. xi), during which interviewees played a game they were familiar with while I watched (or played with them depending on their preference) and asked questions.

The goal in this project was to see how and if representation of various identities became important to these players, as well as whether or not they identified as gamers. This was done in part because much of the discussion of representation in games tends to focus on self-identified gamers, but I argue that an even more compelling case for representation can be made by looking at the edges of game play. Indeed, as T.L. Taylor (2003) has shown, female gamers play despite their under- or mis-representation. I wanted to investigate those who play but do not necessarily identify as gamers to see what they thought about representation in video games.

Performing subcultural capital  

Whether or not individuals identify as gamers is done in the context of certain social constructions of gamer, though there is not necessarily a static standard of gaming to which people might compare themselves. Certainly “gamers” in the popular imagination are presented as particularly gendered and raced bodies who engage in certain types of play and for a pathologized amount of time (discussed in Shaw, 2010). Yet, as Bourdieu describes, culture is a representative practice, a symbol, more than it is an objective reality (1977, p. 2). The narrow construction of gamer as an identity has been heavily critiqued for some time, as I have discussed previously (Shaw, 2012a). What I am arguing for here, however, is that rather than try to disprove these assertions and articulate a new definition of gamer identity, I will demonstrate how players understand their relationship to video games as a medium through this construction of “gamer.” In particular I look at the way interviewees do or do not perform the consumption of games in relation to what they think of as gamer subcultural capital (drawing on the terminiology of Bourdieu, 1997; Consalvo, 2007a; Thornton, 1996).

We can see the many intersections of the ways gamer identity is constructed and performed in the first interview I conducted with Devon. When he arrived for the interview on a rainy October day, Devon sported an orange t-shirt with a picture of a 1980s-era Nintendo controller and the word “Gamer” printed across the chest. When I first asked him to tell me a little about himself in the interview the first thing he said was that he was a gamer. Specifically, he defined this identity in terms of various types of consumption:

Devon: It’s my main hobby. […] I like to play games, board games, video games, it doesn’t matter. I also play WoW[5] […] I played Everquest when that was out. Oh my gosh, wasted so much time on those games […] I think a lot of people that identify as gamers have similar personality types even if — you know outside of the fact that we all like video games — if we weren’t talking about video games we could also talk about similar things.

First, being a gamer is tied to a particular level of time commitment (“it’s my main hobby”), but also an economic investment in clothing, types of games, and in subscription-based PC games that demand time, money, and expertise to navigate. It is also defined in terms of affect, as he likes to play all types of games and feels that the social connections made by identifying as a gamer encompass more than just playing games. He went on to describe a love of anime and comics as central to his gamer identity as well, demonstrating the intersecting consumption practices that are tied to “geek” subculture generally (Tocci, 2009). Gamer identity, as described by Devon, is performed through a myriad of consumption practices as well as in particular social alignments.

While gaming as an activity has become more and more ubiquitous in recent years, as games have undergone what Jespur Juul (2009) describes as a “casual revolution,” “gamer” as a category (according to my interviewees) still maintains an aura that ties it to particular forms of subcultural capital. Consumption, the spending of resources (time, money, energy) on selected texts and objects, has long been described as a way of displaying identity or group belonging (Bourdieu, 1984; Hebdige, 1979; Simmel, 1957; Thornton, 1996; Veblen, 1965). This is particularly true of studies of fan cultures (Hebdige, 1979; Thornton, 1996). Moving past leisurely play, T.L. Taylor (2012) has described the high levels of commitment involved in professional gaming, from purchasing the material objects required to participate in e-sports as well as the time to practice. Although game scholars have demonstrated that gaming is becoming more and more popular across audiences (Consalvo, 2007b; Juul, 2009), many of my interviewees still stressed that games are different than other media. They thought this not because they thought only particular kinds of people play games, but rather because playing games and being a gamer were distinct in their minds. Indeed only about half of my interviewees identified as gamers.

Consumption in terms of the purchase of material objects of play, whether new computers, consoles, or regular game purchases, was identified throughout my interviews as directly tied to gamer identity. Connie, for instance, stated: “I think of gamers as folks who play video games very often, owning not just older game systems but also new systems and games.” Economic investment is articulated here as continuous. Indeed, Tanner and Rusty both identified as gamers, at least at times, and pointed to the collection of old consoles in their basement as evidence of that identity. Ownership of particular types of products are more associated with gamers than others as Klara pointed out: “a gamer by today’s definition is either someone who either plays WoW or Halo, and like a PS3 or Xbox. I mean I have a Nintendo 64 and a Wii and those aren’t usually associated with gamers.” Klara went on to define gamer identity as something that was specifically masculine and indirectly associated her own Nintendo platforms with femininity. Particular types of consumption were noted throughout interviews as signs of gamer or non-gamer identity.

Certain types of games and amounts of play also constituted gaming subcultural capital. Sometimes interviewees said they were not gamers because they did not play certain types of games such as games with deep narratives or games focused on killing. Amy might play a game “on the caliber of World of Warcraft” once every few years, but as for the puzzle games she plays on a more regular basis she said: “I don’t really consider them video games as much.”  Certain types of games were often deemed outside gamer subcultural capital. Ephram described his sister as a casual gamer because she only plays Dance Dance Revolution and Rockband. Similarly, just playing a certain type of games for a certain amount of time does not a gamer make, but neither can one really be a gamer without engaging in video game play in some particular ways.

Not identifying as a gamer was articulated, in every instance, by a lack of what interviewees considered to be adequate consumption. “I don’t play enough” was a sentiment echoed by seven out of eight interviewees who said they were not gamers. Their inability to play ‘enough’ was often tied to other demands on their time, like work or school, or because it was just one of many leisure activities for them. Sasha, the final non-gamer, still tied that fact to consumption: “I don’t think I would spend my last dollar on a game. I wouldn’t pay to go to a video game show.” Unlike the other non-gamers, Sasha played often, and was quite adept and well versed in the games she did play (Madden NFL games and Capcom vs. Marvel in particular). She was not willing to go out of her way to learn more about gaming in general, however, nor was she going to make a monetary commitment beyond purchasing the games she sought out. It is also worth pointing out that her boyfriend had professionally competed in gaming tournaments and thus, though she did not say this, her claim to gamer identity was inflected with gendered discourses about who gets to be called a gamer.

In addition to consumption, interviewees described gamer identity as a general approach to games often tied to a willingness to sacrifice one’s time for a form of consumption (under capitalism, time is money after all). Elaborating on this theme, Bryan has many friends that play video games of various types, but he doesn’t consider any of them gamers. He identified as one, however, because if he had nothing else he had to do, his first choice would be playing a video game. This is because for him, “gamer” signified not just one’s playing habits, but one’s attachment to the medium. Hatshepsut, for example, identified as a gamer even though she doesn’t currently own a game system. Her old console was stolen and upon moving to Philadelphia from California she was still in search of work at the time of the interview: “But once I find a job I’m going to go out and buy video games [laughs]. It’ll be my first priority after that.” Both Pouncy and Christine did not consider themselves gamers yet both keep up with video games to some extent by following reviews and new releases. Instead of gamers, Pouncy identified as a nerd and Christine a casual gamer.

It is not as simple as playing games or not, or being in possession of the cultural capital symbolic of gaming culture (a murkily defined concept at best). Rather it is using these as part of one’s performance of gamer identity. Tala, for example, identified as a gamer because, as she put it, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I play video games and I truly enjoy them and that I don’t feel that an evening is necessarily wasted by playing a video game.” This also requires, she stressed, a willingness and ability to be critical of games, a reflexive distance cultivated by true consumers but not casual dilettantes. Chuck described getting “in jokes” and knowing developers’ names as part of why he identifies as a gamer. In turn, lack of gaming knowledge was another major reason people gave for not identifying as a gamer. Julia did not think of herself as a gamer because “I don’t think I know enough about games to you know to go into a game store and start throwing stuff around like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t know what I’m talking about!” Her partner Elise, however, countered “but you get into it with the guy, [to me] there’s a guy in GameStop over in a strip mall by us, and like you [to Julia], to me it seems like you know what you are talking about.” Julia went on to explain that this was only in the context of the specific game she was discussing. Julia did not feel she could perform gamer identity outside of a very narrow expertise. It is not just purchasing power or being part of the constructed audience, but instead how people are invested (or not) in this medium that is important here. Knowledge of gaming beyond the texts themselves was discussed throughout interviews as indicative of gamer capital, and in turn felt as a pre-requisite to identifying as a gamer.

Tied to this issue of consumption and dedication, we can see the way in which class excludes some from becoming “gamers.” Taylor argues, for instance, that “play is situational and reliant not simply on abstract rules but also on social networks, attitudes, or events in one’s non-game life, technological abilities or limits, structural affordances or limits, local cultures, and personal understandings of leisure” (2006, p. 156). That is to say, if performance of gamer identity is predicated on material consumption and expertise, those who do not have access to the necessary resources cannot claim gamer status. Several interviewees pointed out, for example, that they did not play as children because their families could not afford consoles. Some saved money with siblings to buy them. Others only played computer games, because their parents could justify the purchase of a computer for academic purposes, and in turn long term economic success. Still others received used consoles from family friends. Even now, cost affects their decision to buy consoles or identify as gamers. Gregory played many games, and has for most of his life, but he did not think of himself as the kind of gamer that seeks out tournaments or would pay full price for a game: “$60? That’s a T-Mobile bill! Girl, that’s electric!” As a child he played games owned by his better-off cousins. As an adult he buys nearly all of his games used, and stressed that when he had a PlayStation2 part of the logic for buying it was that it could also play DVDs. He got his PlayStation Portable after his cousin found a sale on them and because he can access the Internet through it, as he must share a computer with his other family members. Though class does not solely determine who identifies as a gamer, it does shape at a basic level how people engage with the medium. Income directly affects whether or not people can afford to engage in the proper amount of consumption to earn gamer status. This is not to say that economic capital is a necessary precursor to subcultural capital. Other resources, however, like time (to seek out deals) or commitment (to save up funds) are necessary to compensate for a lack of economic resources. Related to this, interviewees, or people they knew, who lacked certain levels of manual dexterity or who possessed physical disabilities could not play certain kinds of games.[6] Julia, for example, was limited in what games she could play by her multiple sclerosis (MS) and the impact it had on her vision. Others played because health issues required them to spend a great amount of times indoors and it provided them with a more engaged form of entertainment than less interactive media.

Finally, how interviewees identify themselves must be understood as a momentary articulation rather than a solidified identity. Thus they must be seen as a performance that occurs in the research moment, as I describe below. Identifying as a gamer was not a constant state for interviewees, as Janet discusses:

Janet: I always think of that as a comparative term and I know people that are so much more into gaming than I am. […] But it’s — I guess in more of an objective sense than I am. It’s like I don’t really think of myself as a hardcore biker but then I talk to people who don’t ride bikes at all and they’re like: “Wow, you ride seven miles a day?!” […] So I guess in that sense I don’t think of myself as a gamer. But I guess I am.

When interacting with those who play more than she does, Janet does not see herself as a gamer. If she simply considers herself a gamer because she plays every day and others do not, however, she does see that gaming is something specific she chooses to do with her leisure time. Gamer identity, claiming gamer as a status, is in part a marking of gaming as something peculiar, something distinct from other types of media consumption. As I discuss later, however, it is this exceptionality of games that must be dealt with more directly in demands for representation, as it is this exceptionality so often used to defend their lack of diversity.

The continued performance of gamer identity, as discussed by those who do and do not identify as gamers, is what constitutes this category as something distinct against which game play as a practice is understood. Identifying as a gamer does not necessitate fulfilling a specific set of criteria, and yet being recognized as a gamer implies a certain level of social readability of the codes of game consumption. We must be careful as scholars to not assume that people play because they love games, or do not play because they do not understand them. It is those at the precarious edge of gaming, as discussed above, who are often lost in attempts to locate gaming solely within the bounds of gamer identity and dominant forms of commerce. Identifying as and being seen as a gamer, as with anything, is also contextual and socially fraught.

Social capital, context, and gamer identity

In addition to making sense of how gaming subcultural capital is deployed, what performance allows for, as Butler describes it, is a way to conceive of the self, individual, and identity as results of momentary, fraught and complex intersections between the social and the individual. The relevance of particular identities in particular social interactions helps make sense of how people come to identify with categories like gamer. Gamer identity, moreover, is highly contextual. In her ethnography of Everquest, Taylor found that her identity as a player on one server became relevant during a ‘real life’ Everquest convention (2006, p. 30). This shared space made her identity as a specific kind of gamer relevant. The research moment too can make gamer identity relevant. When recruiting people to talk about video games, for example, there is an assumption that you are calling upon them to answer as gamers. Snowball sampling and distributing the recruitment announcement through my social networks allowed me to encourage anyone who had played any sort of digital game to fill out the survey. Yet even then many people wondered why I wanted to interview them, particularly as they did not see themselves as gamers. In many ways, this is the precise reason I did not emphasize that I was looking for people who were members of marginalized groups in the recruitment announcement. It would, as it had in my past research, put individuals in the position of answering as representatives of a single, specific group (Shaw, 2012b).

Related to this, interviewees who did not identify as gamers were not sure what they had to offer. Conversely the two interviewees who fit the standard image of a gamer assumed that their viewpoints were “a dime a dozen,” as Chuck put it. There is an expectation that as an interviewee one is being called upon to speak from a particular point of view. Interviewees wanted to know which identity I was attempting to hail when I made them research subjects. Certainly, researchers must be conscious of over-simplifying the identities of their participants. And yet, at the same time, in any social situation people perform in particular ways and interviewees were quite conscious that they were being called upon to take a specific role.

In addition to cultural capital, we can also think of gamer identity as a form of social capital, both in a positive and negative sense. Positively speaking, Devon said: “Whenever I make friends I’m always excited if somebody else plays video games.” Having a social circle defined by gaming was part of what defined the gamer identities of Zahriel and Ephram as well. Connie attributed part of her newly rekindled gamer identity to the fact that she now talks with other people about games. Those that did not identify as gamers related this to the fact that they are not social about it. Violet discussed the fact that she does not play online as one of the reasons she does not consider herself a gamer. Indeed, World of Warcraft, a widely popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, was mentioned by several interviewees as a touchstone of gamer credibility. When he stopped playing the game, Malcolm felt he had lost his gamer social capital. When asked if he identifies as a gamer Malcolm said “I don’t really have any gaming cred, as it were, anymore.  So yeah, I would still check that box, but that’s just because I would still sort of think of myself as that. But I don’t think a gamer would consider me a gamer.” There is an uneasy tension between how players self-identify and how they are identified by others as gamers. While playing games at all might enable one to form connections with other people, and even mean one has gamer cultural capital, in Malcom’s case, deeper connections might be troubled by how other gamers read his play.

Interestingly, gaming can also act as a positive form of social capital outside of gamer circles. Klara’s mother is Japanese and her father is Norwegian. She said that her mother was not a gamer, but she would get into games when around her Japanese friends because of games’ association with Japanese-ness. That is, performing as a game player in certain social contexts allowed her to express her Japanese identity. Renee, who did not identify as a gamer, still felt like she gained status from her familiarity with games.

Renee: It’s funny, because I’ve always played them I don’t even think about it anymore […] Again not a gamer, so it’s not geeky, because geeky means gamer and playing games is something that is totally different. But at this point, I’m 30. I’ve been playing video games as long as I can remember. I had some friends over and we were playing video games and I was like, “Oh I got a new game. Like you guys aren’t game people but you will like this” […] One of my friends was like, “It’s kind of cool to see you totally geek out.” And I’m like (looks shocked), “Pardon you I’m not ‘geeking out’!” […] So it’s kind of like a little identity thing I guess. Like a little feather in the cap (Laughs).

Even though she does not convert her cultural capital into gamer social capital or gamer identity, Renee gains a sort of status from her gaming abilities. Gaming as a skill set, as a consumption practice, is not a field open to everyone and thus having expertise can be a status symbol in certain interactions.

Gamer identity can also be a disadvantageous social position to take, however. Generally interviewees, much like Yates and Littleton’s (1999) focus group participants, discussed this in terms of the negative connotations about gamers. From high school coolness to romantic relationships, interviewees discussed the many ways in which playing video games can be a problematic social practice. This is because the performance of identities in the social sphere has important implications:

Evan: Actually being with [my boyfriend] changed my perception of gaming a little bit. Because I never felt guilty or like, it should be a guilty pleasure that once every six to nine months I’d play games. I was like, I don’t do it often. It’s not like I waste my life away doing it. But even that little bit [he] criticized and I was like now I’m starting to think it’s juvenile, maybe I should get rid of my game system.

As with a variety of marginalized genres, from soaps (Ang, 1989) to romance novels (Radway, 1984), there is a stigma attached to certain media, a guilty pleasure as it were. Some texts, genres, and media are viewed as either feminine or juvenile, both of which are commonly viewed negatively. Along similar lines, many interviewees described games as “silly” and thus not to be taken seriously. Moreover, claiming gamer cultural capital, for anyone, has social repercussions. Like other identities, choosing to identify as a member of a particular group affects one’s relationship to others, as well as the investments one has in that identifier. When it comes to gamer identity, defined by consumption, this investment, or lack thereof, is applied to the medium as well. People tied their opinion of games to whether they thought representation in video games is important.

Beyond understanding gamer identity in relation to proximal social contexts, we might consider the role age and time play in how people identify with the category. Indeed, several interviewees mentioned identifying as gamers at some points of their lives, but not at the time of the interview. The research moment only gives me glimpses into interviewees’ identities and tastes. In an email exchange a few months after the original interviews Connie said that she would not have identified as a gamer at the time of the interview, but as she had recently bought a Wii she currently does: “I had been a gamer growing up and now am it again.” Chuck said that he identifies as a gamer now that he plays so much, but he went through a long period where he did not. Moreover, while he was a child though he did play video games he did not identify as a gamer because “that wasn’t a thing. There wasn’t a gamer. You were an 8 year old boy, you played Nintendo.” For Connie, as a girl growing up gaming was less normative and this perhaps is why she saw her childhood play as “counting” for gamer identity, but for Chuck growing up game play was normative and thus gamer identity not a salient category. Interestingly, twenty-two interviewees brought up playing Mario Bros and eleven mentioned The Legend of Zelda, but these shared cultural texts were viewed more as part of a general conception of generational culture than as part of gaming fan culture (though they exist as both). One thing that might be worth further research is that at present just as gaming is becoming a more diffuse practice, gamer as a category has a great deal of cultural weight. As this is a particular construction that both researchers and marketers have helped create, both have a role in recreating the category of gamer. So far this has only involved developing new ways of defining gamers. What if we simply got rid of gamer as a category in our research? Can we start talking about game play as normal without in turn saying that everyone is a gamer now? Beyond that intentionally provocative question, I argue that the focus should be on how audiences view their relationship with this medium and, in turn, if and how they expect to be represented in games.

Identifying as a gamer and demands for representation

As discussed above, “gamer” as a category carries social weight and bespeaks a particular level of investment in the medium. Being a gamer can result from, and in, establishing connections with other gamers. For some people, not having connections with others who self-identify as gamers was a reason they did not identify as gamers. At the same time, the negative “geeky” connotations of video game play led some people to reject gamer identity. In order to maintain their social status, they deny, downplay, or even hide their gaming. In sum, not everyone can or does equally convert their gamer cultural capital into gamer social capital. In turn, gamer social capital shapes, in some ways, whether one’s game play counts as gamer cultural capital. More than just helping make sense of how gamer identity is performed, these issues also connect to questions of representation in video games.

Cultural production studies argue that the lack of representation of marginalized groups is attributable to the fact that the gamer market, at least in Europe and the North America, is constructed as primarily young, heterosexual, white and male (Kerr, 2006). Part of the limited construction of gamer as an identity has often been tied to the way members of marginalized groups are represented in games. This, in turn, is tied to the way game makers have often been critiquing games assuming that their audiences are “like” the game designers. In making games for people “like them” AAA designers make games for a heterosexual, white, male audience (following from industry statistics anyway).[7] “What unfolds in the managed dialogue of commercialized digital design is a process in which commodity form and consumer subjectivity circle around each other in a mating dance of mutual provocation and enticement” (Kline et al., 2003, p. 196). Game developers create games that they think appeal to their target market. These games are successful and thus the companies continue to produce them over time. As only really successful genres are reproduced, this results in a narrower vision of what ‘gamers’ play. This is particularly displayed in what Kline et al. (2003) describe as the “militarized masculinity” prevalent in many video games.  In response activists, scholars, media producers, and other stakeholders find ways to demonstrate that a given marginalized audience is indeed a viable market or that those that play games are more diverse than is typically thought (discussed in Shaw, 2012). This is certainly an important line of inquiry when it comes to the politics of representation. As discussed above, however, we can also look at how individual players relate to this constructed target audience. The audience is an industrial construction, yes, and these constructions shape how people  approach media, but other factors are important factors as well. As I have discussed, whether people see themselves as members of the intended audience or not shapes their reactions to the medium. What happens to arguments for representation when players are not that invested in the medium?

Players I interviewed who are members of marginalized groups accept, if begrudgingly, the lack of representation of that group in video games because they are not part of the adolescent, white, heterosexual, cisgendered male gaming market. At times this results in a sort of defeated apathy or the assertion that their groups are indeed good markets for video games and that not marketing to certain groups is both discriminatory and illogical. Carol recounted a scene from the television show Mad Men in which executives from a television company clearly allow their racism to trump their desire for money when the character Pete tries to convince them to sell to African-American markets: “It’s stupid to not market to people who have money to spend on your product.”  Sasha, another interviewee, made a similar point: “by excluding certain characters you are more likely to exclude certain markets […] that’s why they made a black Barbie.” While not all games are designed for “gamers,” the definition of what a gamer is impacts how games for both gamers and non-gamers are designed.

Of course, asserting one’s presence in the marketplace does not ensure an equal place in mainstream gaming texts. The ‘girl games’ movement, for example, did not result in the creation of a place for female gamers in the mainstream video game market, but rather the active marking of content designed to be ‘for girls’ (Cassell & Jenkins, 2000; Hayes, 2007; Kafai, et al., 2008). Carol described this in one interview: “The marketing for girls’ games that I see is so atrocious. It’s like everything has to be pink.” In the context of discussing whether games will be marketed to a gay audience, partners Devon and Ephram brought up the girls’ games example as well:

Ephram: I think it can happen I don’t think it’s really going to happen a lot. Like it’s happened with girl gamers already where they had these awful awful…

Devon: oh those were awful…

Ephram: here’s girl games, and everything is pink and has ponies and you can decorate stuff and cook

Devon: and yeah that’s what girls want

Interviewees recognized that representation is tied directly to expected profits. Marketing to particular groups, however, results in the same sort of marginalization that mis- or under-representation does.  A dominant thread in much of my research is that in many ways marginalized players do not care about the lack of representation in games, or at least do not expect it to happen particularly when they do not see themselves as gamers.

The need to simultaneously recognize difference without codifying it, is a fundamental paradox of the politics of representation, described by Julie D’Acci (2004): “We face the importance of recognizing the need for groups forged within the terms of the binary’s inequalities… at the same time as we try to break the binary apart.” Even as studies of representation critique media portrayals of marginalized groups, they often reify, in some ways, the identity categories they interrogate, and I suggest that this is the case with how gamer as category has been used. The challenge now is to demand representation without redrawing the circle of gamer identity to encompass more bodies.

Conclusion

The construction of the video game audience may affect the representation of groups in games. It also shapes, though it does not determine, who identifies a gamer. Demands for representation cannot simply focus on making the category of gamer more expansive, however; attempts thus far have simply resulted in the further marginalization of marginalized audiences. Female gamers, for example, have been appealed to as “girl gamers.” Gay gamers are marketed to via advertisements placed in gay magazines (Sliwinski, 2006). As I have discussed elsewhere, explored targeted marketing defines marginalized groups as particular kinds of gamers who are discursively distinct from an implied mainstream gaming audience (Shaw, 2012a). Targeting specific markets via representation in game texts or working to prove that members of marginalized groups play games has dominated how we understand the relationship between audiences and representation. Other factors, however, shape one’s relationship with this identity. Rather than change how gamer identity is understood, and the marketing discourse that it calls upon, I argue that the goal should be to change how audiences think about their relationship with this medium, in part by rejecting “gamer” as the dominant mode of understanding playing games. More than making games “for everyone” as the casual revolution as done (Juul, 2009), in some ways I think we need to work harder to make more people “for games” and in turn feel invested in them as cultural texts.

Relying on the construction of particular kinds of audiences means that the only members of marginalized groups who are represented are those in the position to be “good” consumers. Katherine Sender (2004), for example, demonstrates much of the “progress” made in gay representation in marketing in the 1990s focused on “good gays”: those who were middle- or upper-class, usually white, homonormative[8] and, more often than not, cisgendered male. If my interviewee Gregory, for example, were to say that it was important to him that he see himself represented in games, then that would only be of interest to those marketers that wish to target him as a consumer. As he was at the time of the interview an unemployed, gay, African American male in his early 30s who lives with his mother, he was unlikely to be a target market for many game makers, let alone other media industries. Market logic makes a social argument personal, as it stresses an appeal to individual consumers via an appeal to “group-ness.” The emphasis on consumer choice obscures the social and political importance of representation. Related to this, I think that feminist game studies must look more closely at why people do not play, do not identify as gamers, and do not think representation in games is important. Making the personal political, as a long history of feminist activism has called for, means that we can take as our starting point for inclusion arguments about the rejection of gamer identity by some women, and marginalized groups more generally.  Indeed gamer identity has been made to matter in particular ways as I describe above, which I have found shapes how those that play games relate to the medium. In turn, identifying as a gamer seems to shape if and when diversity in game texts was important to interviewees. As an intervention in this conversation, in this article I argue that game scholars must find a way to talk about audiences and representation in texts that accounts for a wide variety of relationships with the medium.

Some might argue that demanding representation in a medium and a subculture that have been historically unfriendly to women amounts to dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools.  Indeed, Sender asserts that it is problematic for marginalized groups to look solely for tolerance in consumer spheres (2004, p. 242). If we dig deeper into Audre Lorde’s essay castigating the structural racism of much of second wave feminism in which she makes the master’s tools analogy, however, I think we actually see a way to reconcile demands for representation, more flexible understandings of game play outside the “gamer” label, and feminist politics. In that famous essay, Lorde calls on feminists to learn “how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1984, pp. 112, italics in original). What she discusses, however, goes beyond the way the analogy is often used. She argues that the oppressed are often called upon to educate the masters, the oppressors. To assert that the marginalized demand that the center acknowledge them, however, is a displacement of responsibility. That displacement is the very core of the market logic argument for representation. Market logic is more precisely the master’s tools, which “may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde, 1984, p. 112). Rather than call upon groups to demand representation, or display their need to be heard, researchers, activists, and interested producers can argue that everyone shares the obligation to acknowledge and celebrate difference. Women, and indeed all marginalized groups, need not simply be represented “well” in the games they play or when they are being targeted as a particular type of audience. Those placed at the precarious edge of gaming by economics and/or embodiment, those denied the charge to “properly” perform gamer identity are inevitably left out of demands for representation that center on reconstructing the center of the audience.

Rather than argue that the gamer identity is too narrow or blissfully democratic (it is neither), I assert that critical perspectives, such as feminist and queer theory, offer an approach to video games that can focus more attention on the lived experiences of those who engage with these games outside the dominant audience construction — indeed outside of identifying as gamers — and make an argument for representation that takes seriously those perspectives. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asserts that “to intervene in the name of social transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality” (2004, p. 27). It is in this spirit that I argue here that the focus on gamer as a privileged position can result in arguments for representation that are pre-determined by consumer demand and market segmentation. Working beyond this I suggest that feminist game studies can make an argument for diversity in the audience and texts that can better account for the complexity and intersectionality of identities. Not arguing that those at the margins of the “gamer” construction could be gamers, but that their play practices and representation in all types of games is important regardless of whether they are gamers or not.

[1] “Gamer” can be displayed as a politicized identity, for example, as in the blogs GamePolitics.com and Videogamevoters.org (among others), as well as reviews of candidates‘ platforms regarding video games released by gaming magazines and websites during national elections.

[2] The survey allowed me to sample from marginalized identity categories I use as the starting point for this study without making it necessary for me to signal that these identities were of interest.

[3] Of the fifty-two total people who fit into one or more of the selection criteria, 38 were contacted and 27 of those agreed to be interviewed. In addition, partners of three of my interviewees (two heterosexual men who play video games and filled out the survey and one non-gaming, queer woman who did not) also took part in the interviews.

[4] A note on terminology: cis-gendered is used in this paper to call attention to the presumption, invisible in many discussions of gender and gaming, that peoples’ assigned gender and lived gender identity are constants. Unless interviewees identify as cis- or trans-gendered however I do not refer to them as such. Moreover, “white” is a long contested and mutable category, but in this study refers broadly to those who are of European descent but specifically those who selected “white” on the survey but checked no other race/ethnicity/ancestry boxes. The complete list of categories was: African-American/Black; Latino/Hispanic; Middle Eastern; Native American/Alaska Native; White; Arab/ Arab American; Biracial; Multiracial; Other (please specify); Prefer not to say.

[5] Shorthand for World of Warcraft.

[6] Making games accessible to individuals with visual, hearing, and physical impairments is a small if growing area of interest in the game development community as well as game studies. There is, for example, a special interest group in the International Game Developers association dedicated to accessibility issues. Accessibility was also given center stage at the recent Different Games conferences at NYU-Polytechnic.

[7]This demographic outline is drawn from the raw survey data from IGDA’s 2005 workforce diversity survey. I was given permission to use this data during another research project (Jason Della Rocca, Personal Communication, July 20, 2007).

[8] Homonormativity refers to “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan, 2002, p. 179).

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—CITATION—
Shaw, A. (2013) On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N33N21B3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Casual games are stupid and they are taking over our lives. This is what a recent New York Times Magazine article concluded. Sam Anderson, the article’s author, writes, “Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.” [1] The industry classification of “casual games” encompasses several genres—digital puzzle, word, and card games such as Candy Crush Saga, Words with Friends, or Solitaire, and also time management and social games such as Diner Dash and Farmville. These very different games share some basic similarities: they have simple graphics and mechanics, they are usually browser or app-based, and they are free or cost very little to play. Most importantly though, casual games are designed to be played in short bursts of five to ten minutes and then set aside. As such, what makes a game “casual” is that it functions in the ambiguous time and space between the myriad tasks we do on digital devices; between work and domestic obligations; between solitary play and social gaming; and between attention and distraction. Anderson continues,

Stupid games…are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird. [2]

Anderson’s representation of casual games as all-consuming but also as blank spaces neatly summarizes the way critics seem unable (or unwilling) to attach meaning to casual games beyond their popularity and impact on the video game industry. Similarly, Anderson is unable to come to any conclusion about how and why we play them. According to him, our play is both incidental and taking over our lives. Casual games seem too banal and too significant to analyze. With some notable exceptions, casual games are often figured like this in both popular and academic accounts.[3] Despite their popularity and importance to the industry, these types of games are widely dismissed as culturally insignificant. Even the term “casual game” itself performs this distinction: designating, implicitly and by contrast, an aesthetic, narrative, and procedural formalism to other types of video games.

This dismissive attitude partly comes from the kinds of feelings—shame, guilt, disgust, stress, boredom, etc.—that circulate around these types of games and their association with work and procrastination; but casual games are also dismissed as culturally insignificant because they are so strongly associated with women players. In North America, for example, casual games are the only type of video game where women over the age of thirty-five have constituted the majority of the market for many years.[4] Yet, some industry observers reject this fact as an oversimplification because it neglects the changing demographics of casual games now that small downloadable games appeal to a wider range of players.[5] While it is true that not all casual games are explicitly gendered and that player demographics across all game categories are shifting; it is also true that the cultural meanings generated through and around casual games cannot be completely divorced from the genre’s past and continued associations with women. The extent to which casual games are perceived as in need of being rescued from feminized mass culture or preserved as a site where woman are actually playing video games is less important than the fact that game studies tends to dismiss the entire category because these seemingly simple games do not fit neatly into an emerging field that privileges procedural complexity, expensive hardware, and graphic realism. A feminist engagement with video games, then, must be in part an engagement with how the field of game studies shapes inquiry according to the implicit gender binaries of hardcore/casual, mechanics/narrative, and computation/representation.

This article proposes that the ambiguous status of casual games—in relation to what exactly they are, when they are played, and who plays them—is not a sign of disagreement over an essential definition, but rather precisely where their cultural meaning resides—in the spaces between. Rather than being blank spaces in our day, casual games are affective systems that mediate relations between players and devices, workers and machines, and images and code (and our feelings about those relations). As such, casual games constitute a contemporary “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’ term, that gives shape and expression to emergent ways of being in the world as well as emergent ways of understanding what being in the world means.[6] I am interested in casual games as affective processes on two levels. One, all video games work on us in various ways that cannot be completely described through representation, hardware, or code. What it feels like to play a game cannot be broken down into semiotic, phenomenological, psychological, or algorithmic units. Our experience of video games is a more complicated give and take between these systems of meaning-making and affect is one way to begin to describe this experience.[7] Second, regarding video games as affective systems can tell us something about contemporary culture—as ‘a whole way of life’—that is distinct from how other media express this.

In this essay I consider a sub-category of casual games—time management games, specifically the game Diner Dash (GameLab/Play First, 2003) and its many spin-offs—as a case study to illustrate two points. First, all casual games are bound up with work, and time management games, in particular, are affective systems that operate on various levels as mediations of “women’s work.” Second, when we open a time management game on our phone, tablet, or desktop, we open up an affective system that involves the player, the game’s representations, code, and hardware. Through the concept of affect, I am trying to expand how we imagine action and how video games “work”—work in the sense of the work of bodies, of machines, and digital processes, but also how games work culturally, ideologically and how they work on us and work us over in terms of impinging on our feelings, our identities, and our everyday lives. Affect is often described in terms of action—as the capacity to act and to be acted upon. As such, it evokes a cybernetic system of inputs and outputs. Video games compel us to act (and to be acted upon) through the procedures of their algorithmic structure, but video game action is also filtered through representational practices. In a very basic sense, we make choices and push buttons in games because of how games structure our feelings about those choices and actions. I am especially interested in notions of affect as something that flows between people and alights on cultural objects, such as that explored in the work of Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant, among others.[8] This approach has important lessons for expanding the homologies and slippages between the actions of a player’s body, the actions of a game’s mechanics, and the actions of ideological signification; and for getting at how video games as particular cultural formations are affectively charged. Using Diner Dash and the many similar games it inspired, I analyze the way these games put the player into an affectively charged relationship to both the working woman represented on the screen and the working body of the player, the work of hardware, and the procedural actions of code. Regarding these games this way allows us to see the relationship between their more visible representational practices and their less visible digital procedures and how “affect” is not a neutral or non-ideological term, but rather always culturally situated in relation to the gendering of the bodies and objects of mass media culture.

Casual Games and Work

Ian Bogost offers a brief but useful discussion about casual games that illustrates the gendered dimensions of taste and distinction in game studies. Asking if there is such a thing as “kitsch” in the video game world, Bogost concludes that casual games fit this description.[9] Using Thomas Kinkade’s paintings as an example, Bogost defines kitsch as “an art urging overt sentimentality, focused on the overt application of convention, without particular originality.”[10] For Bogost, kitsch functions in the relationship between the aesthetics of sentimentalism and their display as markers of class location and aspirations of class mobility. It is the problem of display that troubles Bogost. While aesthetics similar to Kinkade’s can be found in games, we don’t display video games like we do paintings on our living room walls. Bogost resolves this difference through a consideration of the casual game Diner Dash. In Diner Dash, players lead the protagonist, Flo, through a series of levels as she works her way up as a restaurant owner. First released in 2003, it is one of the top-selling downloadable games of all time, spawning numerous sequels, and inspiring countless imitators. Diner Dash is kitsch, according to Bogost, not because it deploys the “naturalistic sentimentalism” of a Kinkade painting, but rather because it deploys “occupational sentimentalism” in its depiction of the virtue of hard work.[11] He sees Diner Dash as the equivalent of the motivational poster hung in an office cubicle that validates the protestant work ethic. You cannot hang a video game on a wall, Bogost notes, but casual games are displayed all over the virtual walls of online social networks publically marking the players’ aspirations, progress, and rewards. Bogost writes, “by surrounding ourselves with posters, or [casual] games, that espouse ideals of control, the timeworn hope of pure will breeds the wistfulness that makes kitsch appealing.”[12] Rather than stopping at “kitsch” we might take Bogost’s analysis further. By comparing casual games to motivational posters and aligning the form with “occupational sentimentalism,” Bogost points to precisely what is significant about them: casual games are bound up with feelings about work, many are explicitly aimed at the working woman, and they tap into a perceived shared longing for a better working life.

Casual games are about work in a number of ways. As a form, they connote the bored office worker sitting in front of her computer with a game always in progress in the background of her desktop, behind the windows of “real” work for which she is being paid. After all, casual games are designed to be played in the context of work.[13] Their short levels and simple gameplay are forgiving to interruptions by phone calls, meetings, or a boss peering over our shoulder. Casual games also often represent work and, especially, working women, in their settings and narratives. The “occupational sentimentalism” of Bogost’s example, Diner Dash, can also be found in scores of other casual games. The Dash series and spin-offs include titles such as: Hotel Dash, Garden Dash, Cooking Dash, Wedding Dash, Dairy Dash, Diaper Dash, Pet Shop Hop, Dress Shop Hop, Teddy Factory, Betty’s Beer Bar, Nanny Mania, Dr. Daisy Pet Vet, Magic Farm, Airport Mania, Sally’s Spa, Ranch Rush, Hospital Hustle, Wendy’s Wellness, and even Grave Mania (where you play as a zombie undertaker). As the titles indicate, the Dash games tend to focus on careers, activities, and interests that are usually coded as feminine. More often than not these occupations are portrayed through white female protagonists. The narratives and graphics also tend to frame these occupations as “dream” jobs that the protagonists have come to after escaping a less fulfilling job elsewhere. Perhaps more than anything, though, the titles of the Dash games speak to their time management structures. These games are organized around a mad rush, dash, hustle, or hop to complete repetitive tasks in a limited amount of time. However, as the titles also indicate, playing at these “dream” occupations is not entirely a sentimental endeavor, but also a mania.

The most common stereotype about casual games is that they are played during stolen moments, as a break or distraction from work that the player should otherwise be doing. Some of the earliest games for personal computers, for example, came with a “boss key” that, when activated, masked the current game on the screen behind fake spreadsheets designed to give the impression that work, rather then play, was being done on the computer. Michel de Certeau’s example of la perruque offers us a way to think about casual games as a tactical response to our conditions of labor.[14] Literally meaning “wig”, la perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. De Certeau writes, “La perruque may be as simple as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room.”[15] De Certeau’s problematically gendered distinction between the simple and complex still understands both practices as antagonistic to capitalism’s uses of the worker and as a tactic for workers to preserve a portion of their labor value for themselves.

It is tempting to see casual games as separate from the work we do for an employer. Yet casual games are entirely embedded in work culture. Recently, with the gamification of education, work, public health, and other areas of everyday life once hostile to video games, the stereotype of casual games as an activity that distracts from productivity has receded. Whether played surreptitiously at work, as part of official job training, or on one’s “own time” (e.g. on the commute between work and home), casual games are intrinsically about the organization, rhythm, habits, and management of time devoted to labor. Furthermore, shifts from manufacturing to service-based economies and “flexible” just-in-time production chains have altered the type of work many workers now do and have explicitly extended the time and space of labor into leisure in ways that Horkheimer and Adorno could not have imagined.[16] Yet, we cannot completely collapse casual games into immaterial labor. The pleasure casual games provide cannot be entirely expressed through institutions of labor or leisure. What is missing from the immaterial labor critique of video games then is the crucial understanding of how from their very beginning video games were a platform for the reconceptualization of work—and our affective relation to work—emerging just as the context of labor in North America was shifting from manufacturing to service and information industries.[17] It is the idea of video games as platforms for mobilizing affect that I wish to add to our understanding of the cultural function of casual games and the discourse surrounding them. Perhaps, then, it is more useful to consider la perruque of casual games as the work of affect disguised from ourselves. Time management games, in particular, stage the affective work of being a woman worker (what it feels like) as well as the work of being a subject who longs to feel differently in relation to work during a time when affective and immaterial labor has become the model for most work regardless of gender.

Diner Dash

To develop this analysis I examine Bogost’s example of Diner Dash in more detail. While the game may set itself up as a sentimental escape from the lived realities of work, it is also very much a supplement to and critique of work at the same time. Diner Dash’s introductory manga-style sequence begins with the text “Somewhere in a dreary office.” We see Flo sitting at her desk quietly simmering as faceless co-workers shove more and more paperwork onto her desk. Erupting with frustration, Flo runs screaming past cubicles and out onto the street. Exhausted, panting, and leaning against a building, Flo exclaims, “Man! There’s GOT to be something better than THIS!!” At this point she notices a run down restaurant that is for sale and decides to quit her stressful office job and open her own restaurant.

Through this opening sequence we can see how the narrative and tone of Diner Dash both represent the working woman and represent dissatisfaction with the “dreary office.” Owning a restaurant is figured as a literal escape from the grim cubicle and piles of paperwork. In the opening illustration, the restaurant, though boarded up and shabby, is rendered in bright primary colors; while panels depicting Flo’s office job are colored in drab grays and browns. Flo’s escape from the office mirrors the player’s own presumed escape from a similar type of dreary work and into the game. On a software level the game reinforces this effect. When the game loads, it automatically takes over the entire screen, completely obscuring any non-game digital processes for which the device might be used. The entire screen becomes occupied by play.

The introduction’s theme of escape from work is brief, however. After clicking “let’s play”, the game leads the player through a tutorial level where, as Flo, she learns the ropes of being a restaurant owner that in the perverse logic of the game means learning to be a waitress. The tutorial level also serves as an introduction to the mechanics of the game: the clicking or tapping, dragging, and clicking again to achieve the stated goals of quick, efficient, and friendly service.

On the levels of representation and mechanics, games like those in the Dash series can seem like fantasy workspaces. These games portray women as entrepreneurs who are successful because they love the work that they do. Their tasks are clearly defined and always rewarded. Their work environments are safe, colorful, and full of zany characters. But the experience of actual labor in the games bears more resemblance to grim Taylorization than to occupational sentimentalism. In these games, the more work that we do and the more efficiently we do it, the more complicated, sped up, and vast our tasks become.

In Shira Chess’s smart analysis of the Diner Dash series she discusses the importance of time management mechanics for the meaning of work in the games. Time management games structure play through a series of simple actions that must be quickly completed over timed intervals. The pacing of the game and the difficulty of the tasks increase as the player progresses. Thus, Chess argues, “While the game is intended for play/leisure time, thematically it involves work spaces that bear a great deal of similarity to work in the non-game world.”[18] Even the name of the game’s protagonist, Flo, speaks to the perceived goals of time management games and to the flow of efficient labor that she is meant to embody. Chess understands this conflation of work and play as part of the appeal of time management games for women. Citing the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild on working women and time management, Chess points out that games like Diner Dash might appeal to women who already feel the pressures of juggling multiple shifts at work and at home. Time management games, according to Chess, do not save time for the busy working woman; rather they convert leisure time into time management training for their already overextended lives.[19]

There is a disjuncture between Bogost’s and Chess’s description of the Diner Dash games. Bogost, who is concerned with how they look, sees them as kitschy and sentimental. Chess, who is focused on their mechanics, finds social realism. The occupational sentimentalism that Bogost finds fails to address the ways the game’s cheerful cultural layer is repeatedly undone by its time management mechanics, and Chess’s analysis of the game mechanics does not get at the odd interplay between the images and the actions. Of course, at the level of image and narrative there is nothing realistic about these games. Beyond the uniform whiteness of their protagonists, the games condense the complexity of running a business down to one or two actions. Except for the brief appearance of the chef in the background, we never see Flo’s staff. From seating guests to bussing tables, the heroic Flo appears to do it all herself. Knowing this, we can hazard a guess that players are not attracted to these games because they offer realistic representations of their working lives nor do they provide simple, sentimental escape. Instead we might think about how the disjuncture between the images and the mechanics is precisely where meaning and pleasure in that meaning is produced. Time management games do not simply offer a representation of work, they also offer digital procedures that impinge on, skew, or intensify feelings about work. Through the interplay between their digital procedures, representational practices, and gameplay actions these games offer a rhythm that addresses a desire for flow in a digital landscape that is defined more by distraction and interruption.

In time management games, where work is both the subject and presumed context of play, our physical relationship to the machines of our labor is momentarily transformed through these games’ expressive proceduralism. Time management games are also sometimes referred to as “click management” games, connecting the player’s manipulation of the interface (clicking a mouse or tapping a touchscreen) with the goals of the game. The player clicks or taps on various tasks to complete them, always juggling multiple tasks and making decisions about order and rhythm in order to complete the tasks effectively. Video game genres are often classified by mechanics (i.e. first person shooters, platform games, racing, fighting, etc.). As Jesper Juul puts it, game genres are named “after what you do as a player, rather than after the fiction.”[20] This fact is often used to shore up claims in game studies that game mechanics are more significant to the player’s experience than any of the more obvious signifying units. What casual games make clear, however, are both that game mechanics are intimately tied to the representational practices of games and that game mechanics are themselves kinds of fictions.

What we do in a game—the actions—and how we feel about them, are shaped by the game’s representational fictions, and the player’s actions are themselves signifying practices that create meaning. Indeed, we experience video games as digital procedures, but our very access to their procedural expression is necessarily couched in and framed by the visual, aural, and narrative dimensions of the game. The opposite is also true. Our experience of a game’s representations is always informed by the invisible digital procedures the game asks our bodies to make visible.

The actual experience of labor in these games is absurdly easy. The act of harvesting a crop or working an eight-hour shift on your feet is reduced to a series of clicks of the mouse or taps of the touchscreen. What can seem like a discontinuity between the banal activity of tapping our digital device and the representation of increasingly difficult and endless work is actually a transformation of our relationship to the digital device on which we perform so much labor. The physical acts of touching a touchscreen or maneuvering a mouse are detached from their usual search and selection functions and replaced with the abstract though quite material repetitive labor of click management. The supposed labor saving digital device, and the way we feel it and feel about it, is momentarily transformed through play. The maniacal and rapid tapping and clicking of the player to complete a timed task is a highly visible form of work on a smooth machine that is designed to conceal our labor and to conceal the digital processes that structure our lives. In this way, our actions in the game make the time and work of digital devices visible in ways that reflect on how these same aspects of our everyday digital experiences are often submerged beneath the rhetoric of ease, efficiency, and flow.

Time management games (and all casual games to some degree) function as rhythmic interludes that mediate the gaps, pauses, and glitches that are part of everyday digital rhythms. The timing and rhythm of the games interrupts our workflow in precisely the way that interruptability, fragmentation, and piecework have come to be the common conditions of labor in the digital age. The digital worker is constantly asked to move from one task to another and to juggle multiple and varied tasks simultaneously. On our computers we move from one window to another, negotiating the different languages, rules, and logics of the different software programs that we are using. The digital landscape is not only about the easy flow of the hyperlink or seamless touch navigation, but it is also about constant procedural and ergonomic shifts between windows, programs, devices, interfaces, and lexicons. The everyday experience of digital media is equally, if not more so, an experience of pauses, breakdowns, interruptions, eruptions, and glitches as it is an experience of flow.

In light of the gendered discourse around these games and their relationship to work, casual games can be productively linked to other types of mass media geared towards women. In Tania Modleski’s 1970s study of soap operas and women viewers, for example, she argues that the conditions of reception for soap operas correlate with the rhythms of women’s work in the home.[21] For Modleski, the soap opera’s highly fragmented, repetitive, and drawn out narrative structure as well as the commercial interruptions and the flow between soaps and other daytime programming units, “reinforces the very principle of interruptability crucial to the proper functioning of women in the home.”[22] Similarly, we might think of casual games as punctuating and providing a rhythm and timing to work wherever and whenever it is done—mediating shifts between different tasks, different emotional tones, and attention and inattention. Since Modleski conducted her study, television soap operas have all but disappeared in the U.S. and video games have become a dominant form of mass media. Perhaps casual games are filling in for and significantly revising at least one of the cultural functions once performed by the soap. The interruptability of casual games, their relative simplicity and short levels, offer the player a type of pleasure, a structure of feeling, that speaks to the way her work is already structured.

At the level of narrative, time management games often reflect on their own endless work procedural rhetoric. Again, consider Diner Dash. At the end of the original game, after Flo has completed all the tasks of becoming the head of a restaurant empire, she is transported above the clouds where a Hindu Goddess challenges her to ten waitressing trials. To complete the trials, the goddess endows Flo with four arms allowing her to carry twice the amount she could before. After Flo has worked her way up and has built a restaurant empire, her reward is extra appendages with which to more efficiently serve.

This tongue-in-cheek ending speaks to the procedural and narrative mania of the entire genre that we can link to Sianne Ngai’s exploration of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category with particular significance for late-capitalism.[23] From Lucille Ball to postmodern literature and Frogger, zaniness is an aesthetic category that emphasizes the labor of the performer. Ngai writes, “Like a round of Frogger, Kaboom! or Pressure Cooker, early Atari 2600 video games in which avatars have to dodge oncoming cars, catch falling bombs, and meet incoming hamburger orders at increasing speeds [...] zaniness is essentially the experience of an agent confronted by—and endangered by—too many things coming at her at once.” [24] Beginning in the post-war period, Ngai argues, zaniness becomes a particularly loaded aesthetic category in relation to shifting labor and gender contexts. Zaniness “calls up the character of a worker whose particularity lies paradoxically in the increasingly dedifferentiated nature of his or her labor.”<href=”#footnote25″>[25] Citing the work of Nikolas Rose on neoliberal conditions of labor, Ngai continues,

Post-Fordist zaniness in particular suggests that simply being a “productive” worker under prevailing conditions—the concomitant casualization and intensification of labor, the creeping extension of the working day, the steady decline in real wages—is to put oneself into an exhausting and precarious situation. This can be all the more so in postmodern workplaces where productivity, efficiency, and contentment are increasingly measured less in terms of “objective exigencies and characteristics of the labor process (levels of light, hours of work, and so forth)” than as a factor of “subjective attitudes” about work on the part of the worker.[26]

Just as the ending of Diner Dash clearly acknowledges the perversity of the conflict between its cheerful visual fantasy and its grim mechanics; so we might acknowledge the possibility that the pleasure found in casual games is not based on any simple notion of escape, distraction, or, on the other hand, social realism. The rhythm and aesthetic of time management games—their zaniness—is a quality that is represented by and that also exceeds their narrative and mechanical processes. It is felt, not as an emotion tied to subjects or digital objects; but rather as something more fugitive, as affect passing between them.

The Work of Affect

In Chess’s analysis of the Dash games she links their time management structure to the management of emotions as affective labor. In Diner Dash, for example, customers are pictured with a series of red hearts over their heads to indicate their mood based on the service they are receiving from Flo. We can see affective labor at work in most time management games, from their predominant focus on service-based occupations to how the player’s progress is measured and visualized through feeling-based icons. In Marxist theory, affective labor is the labor under capitalism that produces and manages feelings—service with a smile, caring for the sick, or the products of the entertainment industry. Feminist analyses of affective labor have connected this to undervalued “women’s work” in the family and in service industries—such as caring for children and spouses or working as a flight attendant. In both Marxist and feminist analyses, affective labor functions on the level of the subject as the producer and manager of feelings that smooth over the otherwise brutal and alienating conditions of capitalist labor. Citing Hochschild again, Chess links these representations in the game to the ways women are called upon to do emotional labor in the workplace and at home.[27] Chess writes, “if the Dash games construct a complicated relationship between work and play—then the games, too, have the potential to become a form of emotional labor.… [E]motional play becomes retuned into a kind of emotional labor. And just as emotional labor takes a toll on many women, so might emotional play.”[28]

By focusing on affect, however, I am interested in how the representation of emotional labor in casual games is only a trace of the affective processes that get called up into representation. For Brain Massumi, affect names the relational forces and intensities that circulate through culture and between subjects, but are not yet tied to or named by subjects. Once tied to subjects and named as love, fear, happiness, boredom, etc. affect becomes representable and observable as emotion.[29] About the difference between affect and emotion, Steven Shaviro writes, “Emotion is representable and representative; but it also points beyond itself to an affect that works transpersonally and transversally…and that is irreducible to any sort of representation.”[30] By shifting attention slightly away from emotions and onto affect, I want to pry open a space for the ways these games, as affective systems, cannot be completely pinned to any subject or representational practice; but rather function as mediations between subjects of labor, the devices of labor, and representations of labor.

While affect works in the spaces between representation and computation, between the representation of work and the experience of labor in the games, and between the player and the device; it is clearly not an entirely fugitive process. Affect lands—as image, as algorithm, as interface—and becomes present and readable to us as feeling, mood, and emotion. If time management games are zany according to Ngai’s formulation, they are also sentimental in that they speak to a longing for a different, less fraught, relationship to labor. We can view time management games as contemporary sites of what Lauren Berlant calls “the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture.” Looking at mass mediated women’s culture mostly in the form of mid-twentieth century film and literature, Berlant identifies the female complaint genre as media that, “foreground witnessing and explaining women’s disappointment in the tenuous relation of romantic fantasy to lived intimacy.”[31] Berlant writes,

Over more than a century and a half of publication and circulation, the motivating engine of this scene has been the aesthetically expressed desire to be somebody in a world where the default is being nobody, or worse, being presumptively all wrong: the intimate public legitimates qualities, ways of being, and entire lives that have otherwise been deemed puny or discarded. It creates situations where those qualities can appear as luminous.[32]

The time management games in the Dash series can be productively added to the female complaint genre, yet here the complaint is not only about women’s disappointment over lived intimacy, but also a complaint that expresses a whole range of disappointments. Not the least of which is the ways work culture and labor conditions in the 21^st century seem to exacerbate gender inequality while at the same time universalizing women’s precarious status as workers to massive segments of the population, regardless of gender. Time management games create affective situations that call into question the myths and failures of the digital workplace, the constantly increasing bleed of work into our private lives, and the role of emotional labor.

Conclusion

Theories of games that focus on the actions of code, algorithms, and hardware before narrative and representation are important and compelling developments in game studies. But they are also shaped by a rather narrow concept of what counts as a video game. They seem like overkill when applied to games that require no devoted gaming system, no honed gaming skills, and, as procedural objects, can appear quite repetitive and obvious. The divide between representation and computation in game studies mirrors other gendered binaries like nature/culture, emotion/logic, passive/active, humanities/hard sciences, etc. and makes it difficult to ask of casual games questions that seek to understand how computation and representation may actually work together to convey cultural meaning. Like the field of game studies, casual games are meaningfully gendered.

Conceptualizing casual games as affective processes stresses the relationship between games as cybernetic systems and their role in larger inter-relational systems of representation, labor, identity, play, etc. This is an approach to culture that recognizes how much of the sense we make of the world and our actions in it are not entirely caught up in or articulated by clear-cut ideologies or institutions, nor by overt resistance. Affect speaks to the spaces, forces, and moments that fall outside of the discursive boundary lines of work, home, or our social lives—say, the moment of the commute between work and home, on public transportation, daydreaming, tapping at our mobile phone screens playing a game to pass the time. These spaces and moments and what they constitute are hard to articulate or theorize and yet they form the closest thing we know to be “everyday life” and a vernacular digital culture. Berlant writes, “The object [of women’s mass media] is an opportunity for the reanimation of a critical and transformative longing in registers that include power without elevating its normative conventions of transformative fantasy over other ones.”[33] This is not to say that casual games are inherently radical or even progressive media forms, but it is to say that they animate a different structure of feeling— than other types of video games, other media forms, and other digital processes with which we engage. The casual game as affective system holds potential for this reanimation of longing and complaint precisely because it is a process that always seems to escape the boundaries of any single ideological discourse or institutional practice.

NOTES

[1] Sam Anderson, “Just One More Game … Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games,’” The New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2012.

[2] Anderson, New York Times Magazine

[3] Some notable exceptions are Mia Consalvo, “Using Your Friends 2.0: Social Mechanics in Social Games,” FDG 2011 Proceedings of the 6^th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, ACM, p. 188-195; Shira Chess, “Going with the Flo: Diner Dash and Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2012; Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010); Erica Kubik, “Masters of Technology: Defining and Theorizing the Hardcore/Casual Dichotomy in Video Game Culture,” in Cyberfeminism 2.0, edited by Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012).

[4] Casual Games Association, “Casual Games Market Report 2007,” “Social Network Games: Casual Games Sector Report 2012,” and “Mobile Gaming: Casual Games Sector Report 2012.”

[5] Though 98% of the respondants to Juul’s survey of players for A Casual Revolution identified as female, Juul and the game developers he interviews repeatedly emphasize that the association of casual games with women is a misleading one, p. 9-10. 175-218.

[6] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131-135; Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 168.

[7] For other work linking affect theory to video games see Eugénie Shinkle, “Feel It, Don’t Think: the Significance of Affect in the Study of Digital Games” Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play, 2005, p. 1-7; Shinkle, “Video Games, Emotions, and the Six Senses,” Media, Culture, and Society, Vol. 30(6), 2008, p. 907-915.

[8] See for example, Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012);

Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

[9] Ian Bogost, How to do Things With Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 83-88.

[10] Bogost 83.

[11] Bogost 86.

[12] Bogost 87. This view of casual games can be understood as continuing the long tradition of dismissing cultural forms that are coded as feminine as insignificant. Andreas Huyssen analyzes this history well in, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-Modernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986) 44-64. See also the now classic study by Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

[13] This relationship between casual games and work is widely acknowledged by the industry. PopCap September 2007 press release, “Survey: One-in-Four White-Collar Gamers Play at Work – Senior Executives Have Most Fun,”.

[14] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Randall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

[15] de Certeau 25.

[16] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1944]); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Christian Marazzi, Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011); Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[17] Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone Magazine, December 7, 1972; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996).

[18] Chess 90.

[19] Chess 91-92. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2001).

[20] Juul 37.

[21] Tania Modleski, “Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (University Publications of America, 1983) 67-75.

[22] Modleski 72.

[23] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. Thanks to Radhika Gajjala for pointing out this link.

[24] Ngai 183.

[25] Ngai 9.

[26] Ngai 10. Citing Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1999) 70-71.

[27] Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), cited by Chess.

[28] Chess 96.

[29] Brain Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 27-28.

[30] Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: O Books, 2010) 4.

[31] Berlant 1-2.

[32] Berlant 3.

[33] Berlant 270.

—CITATION—
Anable, A. (2013) Causal Games and the Work of Affect. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N3RN35SV

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

There has been a long history of linking mainstream or popular culture with the feminine for the purpose of denigrating both (Huyseen 1986). So-called casual video games lend themselves well to mainstream or popular audiences because of their pick-up-and-play nature and intuitive controls. In fact, some developers even prefer the name mainstream or mass market games to casual games, although they fail to see the way those terms are equally devalued by certain sub-cultures, including a vocal contingent of core gaming culture (Juul 2010, 214). Once linked with popular culture, casual games become discursive representations of passive consumption and femininity for hardcore gamers and as a result are treated by a significant number in the gaming community as either threatening because they supposedly herald the end of so-called hardcore games or irrelevant because casual games do not count as legitimate game experiences. The cultural opposite of casual games, hardcore games, are thus paired with masculinity and celebrated as the authentic and superior game design and experience.

Today, popular video games, particularly those associated with the core base of players, are arguably dominated by a white, hegemonic masculinity (Everett 2009). Early work on masculinity and video games emphasized the relationship between video games and children even as this same work aptly explored gender stereotyping in games, gendered game design, and the disproportionate number of men in the games industry (Cassell and Jenkins 1998). Today, although more women than ever play games, the industry and culture remain fixated on a masculine gamer identity (Kafai et al. 2008). Although the Entertainment Software Association, the American video game industry’s flagship lobbyist group, reports that 47% of game players are now women, Kafai et al. contend that the same issues of gender representation that plagued video games and their industry in the 90’s still persist, regardless of the increased female player base. Indeed, one important reason for the abiding marginality of the feminine in gamer culture is arguably the absence of women from the video games industry. While female players may have increased in number, the percentage of women in the industry has remained between 11 and 12 percent for years (Miller 2012). Moreover, recent work by Nina Huntemann (2013) illuminates the often invisible or neglected feminized labor of video game hardware production and promotion, usefully drawing links between low-wage and low-skilled female labor in manufacturing plants with the use of “booth babes” at trade show events that perpetuate a culture of sexism while continuing to marginalize or render invisible the contributions of women in the industry. This work accentuates the need for a continual interrogation of not just video games and their audiences but also the industrial cycles of production and promotion that help construct the total discursive matrix of video game cultures. Along with Kafai et. al, Huntemann, and other scholars, I agree that the continued exploration of gender and video games remains as important as ever and thus situate my case study within the ongoing discussion of video games and gender.

Not enough scholarship currently investigates how the popularization of the feminized casual games genre has impacted masculinized video game culture. However, Erica Kubik tackles this exact problem in a chapter of Cyberfeminism 2.0 titled “Masters of Technology: Defining and Theorizing the Hardcore/Casual Dichotomy in Video Game Culture.” Here Kubik suggests the terms casual and hardcore are relational and each constitutes the other; definitions for these terms help construct gaming identity by denigrating the casual gamer and celebrating the hardcore. Equally, Kubik deftly points out that “the end result is a normative value to the masculine hardcore gamer, and devaluation for the feminine casual gamer” (2012, 136). The majority of the work for this article was conducted between 2008 and 2010, and unfortunately I did not encounter Kubik’s work until recently. As such, my work reaffirms many of her salient observations and arguments. However, while Kubik focuses largely on casual as a modifier for the identity of the gamer and couches part of her argument in online social spaces like World of Warcraft, I explore casual as a modifier for gamers, games, and hardware, perpetuated not just by game players themselves but by an array of discursive forces, including industry professionals and marketing teams. Ultimately, I hope this essay compliments and builds off the work of the scholars above, in general, and Kubik in particular.

In this article I analyze the spectrum of gendered discourses surrounding so-called casual video games over the last half-decade, or roughly between 2006 and 2011 across popular culture, the video game industry, and in core gaming culture. This particular period was chosen because the commercial success of Nintendo’s Wii, released in 2006, publicly galvanized what was already a thriving casual games industry and arguably brought the phenomenon to popular attention. However, as with everything in the technology industry, the landscape of digital games changes rapidly and the “casual games” moment has largely subsided, giving way to an era of social and mobile games. Although the same gendered discourses circulate around these new forms of games, I limit my study to the commercial and discursive zenith of the casual video game, with an emphasis on the Nintendo Wii. Through an analysis of interviews, advertisements, and articles in mainstream and trade publications, I argue that journalists, developers, executives, and marketers have contributed to the cultural feminization of casual video games resulting in the recreation of a traditional, gendered cultural hierarchy in the medium of video games. Troublingly, this broader cultural feminization supports the discursive sentiments of some core gamers found on several popular video game blogs, sentiments that continually delegitimize and marginalize the feminized genre of casual games, despite the co-presence of voices that counter this assault, which I acknowledge near the end of this article. Together, sectors of commercial culture and core gaming culture work to position casual games as first feminine and then, tacitly if not vocally, as inferior and lacking when compared to masculinized hardcore video games. As a culture established upon a vulnerable masculinity with anxieties of infantilization and illegitimacy, hardcore gaming culture perceives these feminized casual games as a threat.

The Mom Test: Industry Logics

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2010, all three major console platform holders – Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft – reiterated and reproduced the casual and hardcore binary during their always anticipated and carefully planned press conferences. As the current leader in the casual home console space at the time, Nintendo surprised many attendees by focusing on their core franchises rather than the family-friendly line of casual games that made them so successful over the last several years. Many enthusiast press outlets took note of this and celebrated Nintendo for their returned focus on the “hardcore” gamer. As one Kotaku writer wrote for the title to his impressions post, “Nintendo finally remembers what E3 is for” (Plunkett 2010). Plunkett implies here that E3 is not for just any video games, but for core video games and core video gamers. Impressions like this suggest any time spent at E3 promoting casual experiences is an inappropriate use of stage time at the expo.

On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft devoted large amounts of time in their press conferences to their attempts at motion-controlled gaming, Move and Kinect respectively, and the same enthusiast press similarly criticized both for the time spent on their new casual experiences (Oldenburg 2010). In this response and in the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Nintendo’s showing, the prejudices of core gaming culture find an encouragement in video game journalist practices. Some in the enthusiast press celebrate the attention paid to traditional, core gaming titles, while attention paid to newer, culturally assigned casual experiences is met with derision and tension. The acknowledgement of the casual and hardcore schism being epitomized in “Mom,” on the one hand, and the mid-20s male gamer, on the other, by the platform holders during their press conferences and the enthusiast press in their impressions of the conferences, exacerbates the gender dichotomy. Even though the platform holders value their customers who purchase their intentionally branded casual offerings for contributing significant revenue to their company, these corporations still create the conditions for the “othering” of these casual game players within gaming culture. While Nintendo might use the terms “active” and “casual” (Ohannessian 2010) and Microsoft the terms “blockbuster” and “family,” (Xbox 360 Tranforms 2010), all the platform holders recognize and reproduce the dominant genre binary in gaming along with the implicit, yet often understated, gender dimensions of this binary.

The video game industry treats the term casual as a beneficial target consumer, a potential profit, but this enthusiasm is tempered by the subtle devaluation and more blatant feminization of this same market. The gaming industry helped coin and popularize the terms “hardcore” and “casual” in the first place and has used them historically for marketing and product differentiation purposes, although more recently these terms have shifted to “core” and “family,” as noted above. For industry professionals, the term casual has come to be associated with non-traditional gamers, none more so than the proverbial mother-figure or Mom.

It is difficult to determine if the gaming industry was the first to connect mothers, non-traditional gamers, and females to casual games, but it is evident that the discourse continues to reflect this connection.  For instance, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Steve Meretzky from the casual game company Bluegill, stated that one way to define casual games is by describing them as games for casual gamers. This definition seems obvious when isolated, but when combined with articulations of the audience for these casual games, casual games become games targeted toward a feminized audience. This association began to emerge when Meretzky mentioned that casual games are games for people who would not define themselves as gamers, as he here was constructing a binary between the casual player and the gamer who would describe him or herself that way (GDC 2007). Casual game designer Dave Walls (GDC) expresses the sentiments of many people when he suggests, “You know it when you see it.” For many developers, there is something about a casual game that announces itself as such to an audience.

This casual gamer “who would not describe herself as a gamer” almost always eventually gets articulated as the mother-figure or Mom in industry discourse. The game we know as casual when we see it is a game that has been created for Mom. One 2006 survey indicates 71 percent of the casual gaming audience is female and most of these players are over the age of 35 (Dobson 2006). Another survey by Jesper Juul indicates that as many as 93 percent of casual gamers might be female (2010, 154). Walls (GDC) summarizes how the industry views casual games when he articulates, “If my mom can play it, it’s a casual game.”  In fact, Popcap’s Jason Kapalka gives the games he produces “the mom test,” meaning that if a mother can understand and take pleasure in the game, then he is producing a game that will sell to the casual market (Sheffield 2009). Hence, such sentiments discursively link the proverbial Mom with the casual video game.

Another example of video game marketing positioning mothers within the casual paradigm in the last few years occurs in Electronic Art’s early 2011 media campaign for the game Dead Space 2. Encapsulated in the slogan, “Your Mom Hates This,” the campaign incorporates various commercials featuring the horrified look upon the faces of “mothers” as they view the game on a monitor. Here the marketers for Dead Space 2 want to situate the game firmly in the hardcore category. They accomplish this by highlighting just how far from the tastes of Mom the game strays. While casual games are not mentioned in this campaign, the cultural link between mothers and casual games is utilized to position Dead Space 2 as distinctly hardcore, masculine, and edgy. Equating female players, articulated as Mom, with casual games not only feminizes the category but also connects it to middle-class luxuries of disposable income and devoted leisure time this proverbial figure is assumed to have.

Along with the link to mothers, the industry often speaks of casual games as those games that lack the qualities of core gaming titles.  Rebel Monkey’s Nick Fortugno (GDC 2007) suggests casual game players are not familiar with gaming culture and gaming history; these players do not have those “desire structures.” The desire structures Fortugno mentions refer to conventional gaming expectations. These might include fighting and shooting mechanics, or anticipations of difficulty and complex level design. Here game players who prefer experiences designated as casual are defined by their lack of cultural gaming knowledge and literacy, their lack of desire for violence and sexuality in video games.

Descriptions provided by the designers and develops above imply that gaming culture and hardcore game design share similar values and expectations, but that casual game design and so-called casual game players necessarily exist outside of this culture. If hardcore games are defined by their adherence to these cultural expectations, such sentiments suggest casual games are defined by the absence of the traditions, tropes, and gameplay of hardcore titles. This assumes that just as a casual gamer lacks the cultural knowledge a core gamer possesses, a casual game lacks the aesthetics, content, and interactions a core game allows. In other words, the casual space is defined negatively by a lack of hardcore gaming qualities. The repeated association of casual gaming and “lack” echoes the state of the feminine as defined by Lacan, a cultural feminine that lacks the ultimate, phallic expression of masculine power.  Owing to this lack, feminized casual games are positioned as inferior to hardcore games, existing in their shadow. They are seen and discursively positioned as deficient.

Despite the construction of the feminized casual gamer as deficient when compared to the “proper,” core gamer, the game industry still understands this new, feminized audience as a valuable market, at least in terms of profit. To the industry, the rise in popularity of casual games, and the cultural feminization of these games, means a wider consuming audience and higher profit. According to Popcap’s Dave Rohrl, casual games earned nearly half a billion dollars in 2007, and that is excluding mobile earnings, a market space which has greatly increased in recent years thanks to the proliferation of smart phones and tablet devices (Casual Games Sector Report, 2012). Yet this enthusiasm for profit does not keep the gaming industry from positioning casual games as inferior or lacking in comparison to hardcore games in multiple, albeit often inadvertent ways.

Gender, Technology, and the Living Room

Another aspect of the feminization of casual video games involves the video game console design, specifically the Nintendo Wii, the gendered dimensions of hardware aesthetics, and the contentious spatial dynamics of the living room. Lynn Spigel (1992) points out that the problem of integrating new media technology into the home has always been a spatial problem. The recent integration of HDTV has signaled a similar dilemma. As Newman and Levine suggest, “A desire at once to hide and display the flat-panel bespeaks a tension between the excitement over television’s reinvention as masculinized, legitimated HDTV and ambivalence over the incorporation of massive hardware into feminized domestic spaces” (2011, 111). Newman and Levine argue that the massive size of the HDTV required a rethinking of the living room’s domestic space, a rethinking that revealed the gendered tension present when masculinized technologies are brought into the domestic space structured by feminized interior design aesthetics.  Bernadette Flynn outlines the migration of video games from the video arcade to the home living room in her article, “Geography of the Digital Hearth,” but recognizes that, at the time she wrote, there was “little attempt by video console manufacturers and distributors to present the video-game console as a domesticated object” (2003, 557). This remains somewhat true for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles, although in the last few years they have both released motion control peripherals and issued console redesigns to capitalize on the Wii’s success. Regardless, Nintendo has aggressively pursued the domestic sphere and the non-traditional game players that inhabit that sphere for years now.

In her examination of female electric shavers, Oost finds that “[m]asking the technology was a systematic element of the gender script of the Ladyshave” electric shaver (2005, 206). In other words, Oost suggests covering up the technology involved in the operating process feminized the shaver. Weighing in at a little less than four pounds, the Wii is a small white rectangle, about the size of three DVDs stacked. As a simple white rectangle, the Wii understates the technology behind it. Additionally, rather than the hard-to-miss presence of the older PS3 and the 360 models, the Wii easily disappears into the domestic, living room setting. The console can exist in the family room space without clashing with the décor. The emphasis for the Wii isn’t on the technological look, but in the gestural controls of the console. With its minimalist design, similar to the aesthetics that have brought Apple such mainstream success, Nintendo’s Wii opened itself up to a cultural re-gendering that has de-masculinized the technology behind it. While Flynn is right when she proposes “the design of the console has changed from a toy, to an entertainment unit, to a futuristic appliance,” and thus the Nintendo Wii has reintroduced the console-as-toy concept (564). Yet rather than positioning it as just a masculinized toy, Nintendo has successfully created a family toy, harkening back to early home console system marketing of the Atari 2600 (Atari Commercial 2006).

Game Libraries

Although the Wii offers titles that fit into both culturally constructed casual and hardcore categories, the casual games discourse around the system overshadowed the hardcore offerings and skewed the general perception of the system. Nintendo did not exclusively market its Wii console toward the “casual market.” In addition to the Mom figure, the elderly, and children, the company also reached out to the core Nintendo fan base, many of whom grew up with Nintendo franchises. The commercials for more “core” titles like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 tended to feature solitary males seated alone in dark rooms in front of the television, heavily engaged with the action on screen, despite a few foreign versions of the Metroid 3 commercial featuring a female Samus Aran lookalike, the protagonist of Metroid (Zelda Commercial, 2008; Metroid Commercial, 2008). Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3 do feature gestural controls, taking advantage of the Wiimote’s spectrometer for motion controls, but these features were deemphasized and balanced with more traditional controller inputs such as analog stick manipulation and button-mapped actions. The result is that for Zelda, the primary motion performed was a quick flick of the wrist for sword swiping (this could also be controlled with a button), and for Metroid, subtle movements of the Wiimote to direct the first-person camera around the environment. Both games featured expansive game-worlds and narratives that required many hours to experience in full. Indeed, these two games represent just a few of the many “core” titles on offer for Nintendo’s Wii console. Other examples include No More Heroes, MadWorld, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and Sin and Punishment: Star Successor. However, none of these games sold particularly well, with the stylish, gory, black and white MadWorld performing particularly poor commercially.

One reason for this sales performance may be that advertisements for these “core” games, like the games themselves, tend to be marginalized in Wii marketing and popular discourse in favor of titles with a broader, family appeal. For instance, the top selling games for the Wii include Wii Sports (79.6m) and its sequel (30.14m), Mario Kart Wii (32.44m), Wii Play (28.02m), and Wii Fit (22.67m), all of which cater to quick play sessions, intuitive motion-based controls, and were heavily positioned discursively in advertising and the popular press as emblematic of the Wii’s status as a casual console (Nintendo Software Sales 2012).

“Sometimes I Play for Me”: Marketing Casual Game Devices

As two of the most popular examples of the casual games movement, the marketing of Nintendo’s Wii and DS has been instrumental in the gendering of casual gaming. The feminization of Nintendo’s consoles, and the casual play associated with them, begins even in the color associated with their business strategy. After the 2004 launch of the DS, the 2006 re-launch of the DS Lite, and leading up to the launch of the Wii, Nintendo began to describe its business strategy as a Blue Ocean approach, an approach that relies on creating a new audience rather than fighting for an existing one and allowing your consumer-base to stagnate. Speaking of the book Blue Ocean Strategy, Nintendo’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Reggie Fils-Aime claimed that the book “cites successful companies who’ve looked beyond the bloody, red waters of ruthless competition. Companies who pushed the accepted definition of their markets and found so-called blue oceans, where they were able to expand business while their competition remained behind” (Casamassina 2005).  Fils-Aime goes on to describe the DS and Revolution (the code name for what would become the Wii) as adopting this approach, as seeking out new audiences of non-traditional game players.

The Blue Ocean metaphor participates in the gendering of casual games in a way that becomes apparent when it is contrasted with the Red Ocean approach. In a Palermo Business Review article, Patricio O’Gorman suggests, “The video game industry has been locked into what can best be described as a Red Ocean, where the focus is on beating the competition, winning market share, capturing consumers and outselling the competition” (2008, 97).  The verbs O’Gorman uses in relation to the Red Ocean business model – beating, winning, capturing, outselling – are aggressive, competitive ones married to traditional masculinity, as well as to free market capitalism and gaming culture itself. When contrasted with the Red Ocean business approach, Nintendo can be seen as embracing a cultural feminization, a softening, of their game platforms.

Whereas the Red Ocean strategy of Sony and Microsoft is one characterized by fierce competition, struggle, the allusion to bloodied waters, and the intense loyalties and caprices of core gamers, the Blue Ocean strategy of Nintendo is tranquil, untainted, and characterized by an audience interested in cooperation, friendly family fun, and non-violent types of gameplay. Even though Nintendo has replaced the “bloody” Red Ocean approach with a more “serene” Blue Ocean tactic, the company is not anti-capitalist.  Nintendo is still competitive in its search for new markets; however, the company chooses to characterize its approach as peaceful and calm, juxtaposing its efforts with the aggressive, violent, and cutthroat approaches of Sony and Microsoft. However, problematically, these qualities have been historically feminized in our culture and contribute to the feminization of the Wii.

This feminization can be seen in the way these experiences were sold to consumers as well as in the company’s market discourse. Indeed, looking at the advertising surrounding these game systems is important to understanding the ways gender is constructed through them and how Nintendo welcomes a feminization of their technologies as a way to enhance the bottom line.  Shira Chess (2010) argues that Wii and DS magazine advertisements targeted toward women essentialize feminine play and restrict this play to productivity. Chess suggests that advertisements for the Wii system and the games Brain Age, Wii Fit, and EA Sports Active are “targeting a feminine readership, and suggesting a proper time and place for video game play” (10). In other words, Chess argues that Wii ads targeting women construct and limit feminine play as another form of productivity and self-improvement, either through sharpening an aging brain or tightening a sagging body. While it is troubling that these advertisements construct productivity as a requirement of feminine play and also reproduce damaging feminine beauty standards, I offer Chess’s work primarily as evidence that Nintendo has actively sought out feminine players with the Wii and DS and aided in discursively feminizing their products in the process. Moreover, other ads Chess does not consider for the Wii and DS strengthen the link between these systems and a female, or at least feminized, player.

In 2008, Nintendo launched the celebrity-fueled campaign “I Play for Me,” a campaign that featured popular female stars America Ferrera, Carrie Underwood, and Liv Tyler playing Nintendo products. Importantly, this campaign complicates Chess’s assumptions about the essentializing of feminine play in a few ways. Rather than focusing on self-help or fitness in the form of Brain Age and Wii Fit, these ads highlight the independence of play the DS offers female players. The ads do not necessarily suggest women play to maintain a youthful brain or culturally ideal body shape, although the use of successful, beautiful celebrities does not dispel these notions, but rather these ads suggest that women can play for themselves, for fun, a time away from family, as a way to further define their unique identity and create a personalized space. The Carrie Underwood online ad shows her smiling while holding a white DS Lite, the ad copy reading, “I play for me” (Underwood Ad 2008). The viewer is also prompted to click on the online ad to see which game Underwood plays in her free time. The linked video is a documentarian style commercial where Underwood plays her (now pink) DS as her tour bus barrels down an American interstate (Underwood DS Lite 2008). With its focus on Underwood’s amused expressions, her relaxed posture on her tour bus couch and her tactile interaction with the game Nintendogs, a game about virtual puppy rearing, this ad is emblematic of the whole campaign and attempts to normalize the celebrities and thus emphasize everyday women having fun and kicking back with video game software, something almost unheard of in the popular imagination prior to the rise of the “casual” genre. In slight contrast, however, the America Ferrera series oddly includes the qualifier “Sometimes I play for me,” perhaps alluding to Ferrera’s job as an actress or player of roles, including Ugly Betty at the time (Ferrara Ad 2008). Taken more critically, however, the ad may suggest that feminine play often revolves around the needs of others, and that occasionally, sometimes, feminine play can be individually focused, such as when playing the Nintendo DS alone. Although Ferrera’s ads are the only ones that include the qualifier “sometimes,” they nonetheless reveal that these ads, just as much as those Chess analyzes, still characterize feminine play in a limiting way, contextually if not purposefully.

Because They aren’t Us: Fear of Feminization in Gaming Culture

Through industry and marketing discourses and hardware aesthetics, the culturally feminized modifier casual has been applied to game players, game experiences, and console platforms. At the same time, video game culture online has also actively engaged in this feminization. Whereas the industry subtly devalues casual game players for their preferences and casual games for their lack of hardcore qualities, many people who post on hardcore gaming blogs make no effort to hide their gendered disdain for casual games and casual game players. In fact, the marketing, industry, and mainstream discourses may enable the more overtly sexist treatment of casual games by this aggressive community of gamers.

In order to access a contingent of this community and its relationship to casual games, I examined conversations happening on the popular Internet video game blogs Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid, sites chosen as much for their traffic rankings as for their structures that facilitate and encourage user comments and conversations on every piece posted. According to traffic data collected by Compete and Quantcast, Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructroid ranked fifth, tenth, and fourteenth, respectively (eBiz Top 15 2013). The majority of this research was conducted in 2009 and referenced stories posted between 2006 and 2009; accordingly, the sentiments examined should be understood as historically contingent, even as the masculinist discursive affect they represent remains active today. Furthermore, since the time of data collection, all three sites have gone through significant design changes, and this has unfortunately led to the deletion of many of the articles referenced or comments analyzed. Nonetheless, I provide the original links in my references for accuracy’s sake and in case a personal archive of them ever arises. Although this development significantly hinders the validity of my arguments in some cases, it also points out the ephemerality and fragility of online sources. Seen another way, my use of the comments below now works doubly to capture a particular cultural mood at a specific historical moment and as an archive of alarming sentiments toward casual games that would otherwise have been lost to the ravages of Internet erosion.

Centered on casual games, these conversations suggest a vocal contingent of hardcore video game culture privileges a specific type of hegemonic masculinity, one that adheres to and interpellates a heterosexual, male identity. Despite the co-presence of dissenting voices that critique these gendered attacks, the core gamers I highlight utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to degrade casual video games, employ post-feminist sarcasm that ends up reifying the hardcore/casual binary even as they critique it, and evoke a protest rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on destroying and replacing traditional, masculinist games. It is through this often disdainful and sexist treatment of the casual genre that some core gamers constitute an anti-fandom of casual games, a group Gray (2005) discusses as forming around a mutual hatred for a specific cultural text.

Part of the gendered distain for casual games in core gaming culture has a direct connection to the industry and commercial logics of always connecting the wife or mother-figure to the casual category, as I discussed above. For instance, whether users proudly proclaim, “My Wife loves ‘em” (Strider_mt2k 2007), whether they negatively chirp, “i dont like my mom playing tetris all day on my game boy” (Rojo 2007), or whether they blatantly state, “Girls can have their types of games and guys can have their own” (Joeshie 2008), the marrying of females and femininity with the casual game space continually reproduces and cements itself as common sense. Casual games are understood by these so-called representatives of hardcore gaming culture as games wives love, as games the proverbial Mom plays, and as games specifically for girls or women. As a result, this discourse promotes notions of difference and distinction that ultimately recreate gender and power hierarchies in games culture and beyond.

In addition to marrying the feminine with the casual space, part of this positioning of the other happens through the labeling of casual games as other in sexual orientation. To these particular gamers, hardcore games not only represent the masculine, they represent the heteronormative ideal. A discourse exists in this community that links casual games with homosexuality. This is exemplified in comments such as “Casual games? GAAAAAAAY!” (samfish 2007) and “Casual Games are for gay people or men that are very very very in touch with their feminine side; so in touch it’s scary” (Cyro 2007). Both comments explicitly conflate casual games with homosexuality and femininity. However, the second goes further by evoking a masculine heteronormative anxiety at the thought of a male in touch with his emotions. Indeed, if this discourse links casual games with emotions, it would make sense that “men don’t talk about casual games because they aren’t worth talking about. Playing, perhaps, talking no” (Batzarro 2007). In this way, like emotions or homosexuality, “real men” are not supposed to discuss casual games, even if they do secretly play them. This reflects the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that limit men from discussing their feelings. Additionally, this comment echoes historical regulations in America’s armed forces that were founded on the credo, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy that supports the invisibility and indeed the annihilation of queer lifestyles.  In this logic, playing casual games, like homosexuality, is something to be ashamed of and kept secret. In core gaming communities, even if males play casual games behind closed doors – and according to this reasoning they should only be played behind closed doors – the discourse suggests that male players are culturally encouraged not to bring it up.

Not all comments are so easily read, however. Angela McRobbie (2007) argues that contemporary culture produces a post-feminist mindset that announces the victory of feminism while marginalizing its current efforts and surreptitiously undoing all the advances it helped achieve regarding gender and sexual equality. In a post-feminist culture, sexism and misogyny appear not as proof that feminism failed but as proof that it succeeded. That is, because women supposedly no longer suffer inequalities in society, sexist jokes are taken to be self-aware and ironic; any overt devaluation of women or the feminine is meant to be seen as sarcasm. As enlightened cultural and consuming beings, we are meant to be in on the joke. These types of post-feminist comments appear on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid, and serve to poke fun at the assumed connection between femininity and casual games and the antiquated concept of ideal gender roles. However, while most are meant as tongue-in-cheek remarks, this kind of language still reproduces and reinforces the marrying of casual games and gamers with the feminine and duplicates traditional gender and power hierarchies.

These post-feminist comments appear on popular gaming blogs when male-coded gamers link females with casual games in degrading and pre-feminist ways. In one post on Kotaku titled, “Who Knew: Men Like Casual Games, Too,” a commenter named Onizuka-GTO writes, “female presence = casual. It’s a fact.  Honest. ” (2007). This comment is reinforced by two others. A user named THE-HATER comments, “All you guys who bought Puzzle Quest [1] are proof of the horror of casual games. Casual games are evil, they are the worst thing ever. They keep women at the computer instead of in the kitchen” (2007). Additionally, ParadoxControl quips, “listen, I don’t play games unless they come with a full rack of ribs, a 2lb sirloin, Mashed Potatoes, Budweiser, a shotgun, camo pants, and a stack of playboys, because I’m a real man!” (2007). The first of these comments explicitly joins casual games with the female, stating it as a fact beyond reproach and effectively gendering those types of game experiences. At the same time, Onizuka-GTO uses an emoticon that resembles a face sticking its tongue out, a sign that he is aware of his own absurdity and is joking around. On the other hand, THE-HATER’s words are less playful, conflating the already established feminine space of casual games with evilness and then finishing his comment by evoking pre-feminist gender roles, metaphorically plucking the woman from the office computer and plopping her back in front of the stove. However, his sarcasm is revealed by the comment’s exaggerated nature, just like ParadoxControl’s satirical tirade about what makes a man, and more importantly here, what makes a manly game. Though varying in tone and execution, ParadoxControl and THE-HATER both use humor to play with gender stereotypes to reveal the performative nature of masculinity and femininity and to reveal the artifice of gendering casual games as feminine; although their intentions might be to deconstruct these notions, they might also, if misread, reinforce, reproduce, and strengthen the ideologies that link masculinity to “serious” games and femininity to casual games in the first place.

In her ethnography of male gamers in Northern Ireland and southern England, Helen Thornham suggests games “are claimed by adult [male] gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes” (2008, 142).  Part of taking games seriously and rationally for the users on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid is staying informed and making smart purchasing decisions, traits typically assigned to masculine consuming habits.  In contrast, these commenters position casual gamers as “simple people…[and] you can sell them stupid games” (TrenchyC 2007). Moreover, what “worries [them] most about casual gamers is that they’ll stupidly throw so much money at tech that they know nothing about, and have not researched at all” (human-cannonball 2006).  Here, hardcore gamers position casual gamers as passive, naïve, and mindless consumers of popular culture. To the hardcore discourse community, casual gamers become feminized shoppers lacking agency and intelligence. Rather than doing proper (masculine) research such as reading games news, reviews, and previews, “Casual gamers DON’T care about reviews” (Jeff 2007), don’t seem to understand “that generally [a] video game movie=suckage” (SoCoolCurt 2007), and “have the attention span of a three month old dog mixed with a squirrel” (mix 2008).  Here, feminized casual gamers are depicted as less intelligent, less informed, and less important than their masculine hardcore counterparts.  Most strikingly and troubling of all, they are positioned as sub-human and animal in their worth and intellect.

In contrast to the so-called ignorant purchases of the casual masses, the hardcore gaming discourse seems to suggest that even if hardcore gamers do play casual games, they are smart enough not to spend money on them. Indeed, hardcore gamers “won’t actually buy ‘casual’ games, since most are shameless clones of earlier casual games” (ShaggE 2007). As one user commented, “I download all my casual gaming for free. Who’s crazy enough to pay for it…oh yeah, wii users. All their games are casual” (nxp3 2008). These comments suggest that hardcore gamers do not spend money on casual games because they are not serious and real games. They lack the blockbuster budgets, visual fidelity, and narratives associated with traditionally masculine game titles. Here too the Wii is evoked as one of the worst offenders in the casual game space, a system that has opened up gaming to girls, women, and the elderly, if not millions of non-gaming men. This is reinforced when the gamer badasscat argues that casual games are “not some sort of stepping stone to ‘real’ gaming” (2007). [B]adasscat suggests that casual games are not real games. They lack the qualities of masculine games and are thus denied the right to call themselves video games at all. As feminized entertainment, casual games are annihilated from the landscape of serious games and serious games culture, quite like the feminine in general.

This annihilation can be seen as part of a greater taste struggle by hardcore gamers against casual games and the femininity attached to them. In this struggle, hardcore gamers position themselves as the victims and position the growing number of casual players and games as an invading, threatening force. Ann Johnson has analyzed a similar phenomenon in her article, “The Subtleties of Blatant Sexism.”  She argues that The Man Show, a masculine comedy program that gains laughs through largely sexist humor, utilizes protest rhetoric and “depicts women as the dominant group in society and addresses viewers as potential agitators in a struggle against women’s dominance” (2007, 167). Johnson contends that even while patriarchy continues to operate relatively unopposed, The Man Show creates a reality where men are relegated to subordinate positions in both the public and private spheres, always at the mercy of dominant women in their lives. This same logic is used in the hardcore gaming community when discussing casual games. To core gamers, casual games represent a very real threat that is gradually blighting their cherished pastime with products that do not resemble the games they are used to.

Part of this protest rhetoric in the hardcore community is fueled by fears that casual games will gradually take away limited retail space and developer resources from “real” games, eventually replacing them altogether. In this logic, traditional, narrative-driven games will eventually die out as casual games flood the market. No longer will there be Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or Call of Duty; instead, there will just be clones of Peggle, Wii Sports, and Solitaire. Indeed, this fear persists even though core games are still cash cows for the industry. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, arguably a traditionally masculine video game, earned an estimated $550 million in its first five days on sale (McElroy, 2009). Just the same, Destructoid user Necrozen positions core gamers as a dying breed when he writes, “We are a minority now. We = Less Money than Them. So you know that it’s a losing battle” (2009). Furthermore, as an imagined minority, core gamers believe their interests are no longer being taken into account by game developers and publishers. More than anything, they “hate the fact that more immersive games are gonna disappear because everyone is into the casual games now of days [sic]” (Ambitious009 2007). Ultimately, their protest can be summed up in the words, “It’s the attack of the killer casuals, and we need to make sure we’re not lost in the noise” (Ketsuban 2007). Although casual gamers do not make much noise in gaming culture because they exist outside of it, the attention the mainstream press pays to them and the interest developers have taken in them are seen as signs of a very significant threat by core gamers. In the hardcore gaming discourse surrounding casual games, core gamers on Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid utilize hegemonic conceptions of gender to denigrate casual video games, exploit post-feminist sarcasm within the discourse of casual games, and evoke a protest rhetoric of victimization by positioning the casual games movement as a dominating, oppressive force bent on usurping traditional, masculine games.

Moreover, some “core gamers” fall closer to the developers discussed earlier, complicit in the gendering of casual games but not adverse to them; though they accept, even love, casual games, these game players can still perpetuate their feminization. For example, Kotaku user indiemike freely admits to playing casual games but also connects these games to the preferences of his girlfriend and her female friends: “I find that my girlfriend, and all of her friends that I’ve played games with prefer the casual games I have on hand, and don’t want to get wrapped up in a story within the game” (indiemike 2007). In fact, many commenters on the blogs I analyze openly support casual games and admit to playing and enjoying them, but just as many also reproduce the feminine gendering of the category. Even when some game players make an effort to embrace casual games, as Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett did in the article, “Instead of Laughing at ‘Casual’ Gamers, Try Helping Them” (2010), they still inadvertently reproduce the effect of otherness by maintaining the stereotypes and assumptions of the casual audience and the casual game experience as feminized.

I want to be clear that this argument does not suggest women are easy victims in this discourse nor that there has not been and does not continue to be significant critique of this derogatory feminization from within video game culture by gamers who are part of the blog communities analyzed. Additionally, I do not mean to imply here that all hardcore gamers share these historically contingent discursive sentiments or actively support the kind of gendered hierarchy I propose exists in this culture. Indeed, significant work to critique these masculinist arguments has been done by feminist games critics like Patricia Hernandez on Kotaku, Leigh Alexander on Gamasutra, Mattie Brice across multiple venues, and many other writers on emerging community hubs like Border House Blog, Critical Distance, and Nightmare Mode.

Still, why does a contingent of core gamers feel so threatened by the culturally feminized genre of casual gaming? This intense reaction to casual video games and casual game players by the core gaming community suggests a vulnerability in the specific masculinity of core gaming culture. This vulnerability may stem from the low cultural status of the video game medium. Like the medium of the graphic novel or comic book, video games historically have been infantilized and seen as immature. Also, since video games stem from early computer culture, which even today often gets conflated with geek culture, video games share that culture’s emasculated stereotypes. Regardless of the fact that a whole generation of men and women have grown into adulthood while still playing video games, video games continue to be understood culturally as a childish distraction, at best, or a complete waste of time, at worst. Michael Kimmel (2008) suggests in his book Guyland that many men in their 20s and early 30s use video games as a form of escapism to put off growing up and taking on the responsibilities of male adulthood, including starting a family. A myriad of online opinion pieces focus on whether games will ever grow up as a medium (Alexander 2009). Additionally, in an examination of gamer identity, Shaw (2011) reveals that one of the main reasons players are reluctant to identify as “gamers” is not so much the association with hegemonic masculinity but instead the continued stigmatization of the medium in popular culture. Most notable within this larger discussion is the ongoing argument, fueled by the comments of famous film critic Roger Ebert (2010), of whether video games can ever be art. Though this marginalized cultural status may be changing, as Felan Parker (2013) suggests in his examination of art games, the other side of gaming’s popularization, the acceptance of casual games into the family entertainment sphere, has only further irritated the masculine anxieties of core gamers.

Gamers have traditionally been characterized by a marginalized masculinity, one that mimics but does not match real-world soldiers and athletes. Being good at video games does not grant the same social and cultural benefits as being good at a sport or a traditionally masculine trade. The masculinity associated with gaming is a fragile, defensive one that has relied repeatedly in its short history on extreme violence, the sexualization of women, and strong, male homosocial bonds for its sense of power and personal legitimacy. The introduction of a feminized, popular category of video game to gaming culture might be seen as undermining the fragile masculinity that has had to continuously defend its cultural position for several decades.

Conclusion

I have argued that casual video games, epitomized by Nintendo’s Wii console in the late 2000s and strengthened today by the proliferation of mobile devices, have been discursively feminized in popular and industry cultures by associating casual games with a feminine audience. Although the feminization of casual games by the industry is largely tied to market demographics and branding, it remains nonetheless troubling, especially given that this cultural labeling enables some disgruntled, anxious core gamers to engage in sexist and misogynistic attacks on casual games and game players. Some in the core gaming community, invested as they are in hegemonic masculinity, reject femininity and therefore reject casual games as a potential infection, rather than an extension, of the video game medium. The gendering of casual games in industry, marketing, and fan discourses not only continues the troubling and limited understanding of what it is to be feminine but it limits the cultural understanding of casual games to a single gendered standpoint.  Moreover, there is a contradictory positioning of casual games by hardcore gaming culture as either inconsequential and worthless or domineering and threatening.

In the first case, when core gaming culture marginalizes and delegitimizes casual games it does so by adopting the dominant gender hierarchy that always privileges the masculine and devalues the feminine. Feminized casual games become insignificant, frivolous, and a waste of time and money as opposed to masculinized hardcore games, which are viewed as important, serious, and worthy of investment. When casual games are denigrated as feminine, and therefore “trivial,” and traditional video games are celebrated for their seriousness and authenticity, both of which are qualities nested in masculinity, a power hierarchy is created that places the masculine in the superior position and the feminine in the inferior position, the result of which is the reproduction and perpetuation of gender inequalities. Hardcore games become the dominant masculine while casual games become the subordinate feminine. This reveals the way hegemonic masculinity goes beyond the mapping and categorizing of the human body in damaging and consequential ways and maps onto every other aspect of our lives, including technology. When this happens, that technology is employed in the maintenance of patriarchal, masculine power in society and culture, even when that technology is meant for entertainment, like video games. The consequences of this are far reaching and can be seen to perpetuate the dearth of females in science and technology sectors, among other social inequalities.

In the second case, rather than espousing the insignificance of casual games, core gaming culture views casual games as a Trojan horse for femininity to creep in and fundamentally alter the gendered game experiences that culture values. Here we see the power of the dominant gender position to incorporate and adopt defense techniques from those in the subordinate position. Even while hegemonic masculinity continues to dominate in culture, it is positioned as subjugated and oppressed after the successes of second wave feminism. This occurs throughout popular culture, as Ann Johnson argues in the case of The Man Show, but until recently has not been seen in video game culture. The adopting of this dominated, protest rhetoric by masculinized hardcore gamers reveals the vulnerability of that gender position in the realm of gaming and points to the equal vulnerability of the hegemonic masculinity it seeks to emulate.

While the category of casual games was prominent during the period of my study, the terms mobile or social are now more widely associated with the casual game type; likewise, smartphones and tablets are the current popular devices to play these games on. As Shaw suggests, while continuing to explore marginalized communities within gaming culture, we ought not to forget the marginalized position of video games themselves within larger culture and the ways that marginalization influences those prejudices and identity politics ever shifting within gaming culture.

The audience for video games is growing. Along with this growth comes a shift in the focus of the games industry toward this broader audience. Both of these shifts have had and will continue to have a profound and gendered impact on video game culture. The casual game has become yet another threat, whether real or imagined, to the vulnerable masculinity of video game culture. This vulnerability manifests itself in an aversion to the feminine, to the queer, and to the non-masculine in general. Moreover, the discourses surrounding gender and video games also speak toward larger cultural discourses around gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Moving forward, the “casual threat” we see here is not from the video games that fall under the casual moniker; the threat is from a gaming culture that continually reproduces a dominant, hegemonic masculinity that is just as damaging to those who adopt this position as it is to those groups subjugated, denied, and excluded from its ideal world. This threat is anything but casual.

Notes

[1] Puzzle Quest is a hybrid of the role playing game and puzzle genres.  It features traditional puzzle-based gameplay while asking the player to level his or her character to gain more abilities and further the narrative.

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—CITATION—
Vanderhoef, J. (2013) Casual Threats: Feminizing Casual Video Games. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N3RN35SV

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

In her 2009 article “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games,” Adrienne Shaw poses an extremely valid question to the fields both of video game theory and queer theory: “Why then, when video games have been a popular medium since the 1970s, are questions about the representation of diverse sexualities and gendered identities only now being discussed?” (230). As Shaw notes, the relatively nascent field of video game studies has rarely turned its eye towards the question of queer sexuality and gaming, with a much larger body of work existing on questions of race, the presence of male or female characters, or the omnipresent question of video game violence. Intriguingly, however, Shaw’s question of a renewed academic study of queer sexualities and gaming finds a stopping point even within the article that specifically calls for it.

Through a series of interviews with game developers and a sample of contemporary popular games, Shaw focuses upon “the attitudes of those in the video game development community, the construction of the gamer audience, the expected backlash for having GLBT content,” and ultimately “the potential for representing sexual and gendered identities in the medium” (230). The purpose of her project is, in many ways, one of explanation and correction, as Shaw focuses primarily on presence of material rather than analysis of it. In fact, Shaw is quite explicit about her project’s lack of engagement in larger theoretical concepts about deviant sexualities and gaming, as her interest is “not whether video games can be ‘queered,’ but rather how members of the industry understand the place of and problems surrounding the representation of different sexual and gender identities within video games” (232).

Admittedly, my own interests lie precisely in this question of whether video games can, in fact, be “queered”—particularly around the subject of the digital body. This paper is an attempt to open up the question of queering games by first offering a short theoretical history of performativity and the digitally “free” body in both queer and gaming history, followed by an examination of two particular teenage digital bodies in the 2008 PlayStation 2 role-playing game Persona 4: a young punk named Kanji terrified that he might be gay, and his relationship with a young cross-dressing female detective named Naoto. Rather than the liberating realm of bodily escape that critics like Edward Castronova (2005) and Miroslaw Filiciak (2003) suggest the digital body provides, I read Persona 4’s construction, deployment, and control of Naoto and Kanji’s bodies as a meta-commentary on the means by which the idealized vision of queer utopia within the digital is disrupted by the player’s engagement in the game’s encoded processes. While the game does ultimately engage the player in a series of actions meant to intervene and ultimately destroy the prospect of “trans”-gressive bodies, the ruptures this creates in exposing and involving the player in queer play (so to speak) offer a fascinating tension between the game’s intended outcomes and the result brought about through engagement in its procedural rhetoric. In so doing, I hope to reveal some of the ways in which game theory and queer theory can enter into a discussion with one another that can potentially expand the definition of both fields.

Theoretical Crossroads: On Butler and Bogost

In his works Unit Operations and Persuasive Games, video game theorist Ian Bogost develops a theory of what he calls procedural rhetoric: namely, the ways in which a persuasive argument is developed in a game via the various structures and policies written into the game’s programming in computer code. Rather than studying purely visual or verbal rhetoric in games, Bogost suggests looking at the way in which games interact ideologically with their players by the encoded controls or rules of the virtual environment. Instead of an insulated, objective realm where the player experiments without impacting “real” life, Bogost argues that virtual worlds are in fact an open two-way exchange “through which players and their ideas can enter and exit the game, taking and leaving their residue in both directions” (2006, 135).  To play a game is both to act upon it and be acted upon in return; the player’s participation in the game subjects them to means of control not only in questions of how high their character can jump, but in what moral choices the game extends to them to make. As Bogost suggests in Persuasive Games, players must ask themselves, “What rules does the game enforce, and how do those rules correlate, correspond, or conflict with an existing morality outside the game?” (2007, 284). Asking such questions, as game critic Simon Penny adds, dismantles the idea of complete freedom within a digital world, particularly since “[e]ach work affords, accommodates, or permits only certain types of behavior. So, the user’s behavior is constrained and in a sense, modeled. The quality of this behavior becomes a key component in the user’s experience” (2004, 83).

If this modeling of behavior through gameplay mechanics is a way of constructing and enforcing a particular ideological performance within the game, I am struck by its possible impact on another theoretical field deeply interested in questions of control and ideology. Bogost never cites her by name, but I find a distinct similarity between his idea of procedural rhetoric’s persuasive force being enacted through repetitive, encoded processes, and Judith Butler’s groundbreaking queer theoretical work in Bodies That Matter on the societal codes that construct and configure the body. In a famous line from the book’s introduction that strongly resembles Penny’s comments about gaming, Butler asks, “[t]o what extent is ‘sex’ a constrained production, a forcible effect, one which sets the limits to what will qualify as a body by regulating the terms by which bodies are and are not sustained?” (1993, 23). Over the course of the text, Butler undertakes deconstructing the means by which sex and gender are naturalized, in particular through the repetition and performance of gendered concepts. To return to the title pun, “matter” is invested with meaning not by an a priori essence, but in how it is shaped and transformed by the discourse around it. For Butler, “the body is not an independent materiality that is invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive” (34). Instead of a heteronormative conceptualization of natural bodies that arrive with “pure” ideas of gender and sex, Butler conceives of a way in which bodies are constantly in the process of “bounding, forming, and deforming,” which “is animated by a set of founding prohibitions” (55).

Thus, as Butler notes in Gender Trouble, if the illusion of agency “rel[ies] on the consistent and repeated invocation of rules that condition and restrict” (198), we must also consider the dynamic of actions between player and game via the established rules of play. Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, in an essay aptly titled “Video Games and Configurative Performances,” call for an articulation in video games of “a philosophy of action,” which examines “the availability of certain intertwined modalities of action to find out what is possible, necessary, prohibited, permitted, or obligatory to do in the game, and what the players do or could know, believe, or wish regarding those action schemes” (2003, 213). Alexander Galloway usefully complicates this idea of action beyond the player, as the video game is an “action-based medium” (2006, 4) not merely of the player upon the machine but of the machine back towards her; the two actions exist as a single, unified phenomenon where “the action of the machine is just as important as the action of the operator” (5).

So what can be done in this borderland of control, performance, and repetition between game theory and queer theory? One possible avenue might lie in exploring the potential ramifications of Bogost’s idea of “residue” in relationship to Butlerian concepts of performativity—particularly in examining what kind of residue is both left and taken away by the player in their excursions into digital play, and its impact on the body. Rather than positioning the digital realm, as some critics in both queer and game theory have suggested, as a place where the body is finally free from physical constraint, the following section hopes to trace how various critics have begun to unpack how cycles of bodily power relations and prohibitions akin to those we see in Butler end up being enforced through certain forms of actions as established by the game’s processes. From this, a central question emerges: what repetitions of gendered and sexual performance through the body are encouraged by games, and in our “interactions” with games—not simply of player upon machine, but machine and player in tandem creating new possibilities—how might we find ways to reconsider or even resist these repetitions?

“Any Kind of Body They Desire”: Digital Embodiment and Queerness

To begin a discussion of utopian digital bodies, it is essential to start with their most cited forebear in Donna Haraway’s influential “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In the manifesto, Haraway looks towards a fusion of the mechanical and the organic that has the power to disrupt and subvert societal norms. As she states, “[t]he cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (2003, 517). As critics like Mimi Nguyen (2003) and Anne Allison (2001) have explored in greater detail, the queer potentiality of Haraway’s cyborg as a perverse oppositional force is evident, as it challenges many of the heteronormative perceptions about the body and its purity that govern larger societal conceptions of sexuality. Such possibilities were clearly evident to Butler as well, given that a line from Haraway’s manifesto is the very first epigraph of the introduction to Bodies That Matter: namely, “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (1993, 1).

While Butler is more interested in disrupting the epistemological certainty of “matter” and bodies in physical spaces, later queer critics and feminists drawing on Butler have taken on this question of where the body ends as it relates to cyberspace. As Alexander Galloway notes, “the place of the body is central to cyberfeminism. Yet in this analysis, bodies are not natural objects made of flesh and blood, but rather are complex intersections of materiality and meaning” (2004, 190). This act of redefining the body in relation to digital realms has taken on a utopian cast; Hannu Eerikäinen, in a discussion of cyberfeminism, suggests that the field “rewrites human corporeality into a posthuman morphology of the subject living in a new kind of artificial paradise of prosthetic supplementation” (2000, 59). Such trends can also be seen in what is called the “cyberqueer,” as articulated by Nina Wakeford. While not espousing a paradise, Wakeford does recognize the online world as holding the allure of offering queer bodies a venue “with a particular focus on the advantages compared to ‘real’ physically-located space” (2002, 410). If the flesh is bound to a series of constraints—geographical location, bodily appearance, and so forth—the potential of a new realm of experiences that can exceed the limits of the body holds a very notable appeal.

This question of what advantages digital realms provide to the body has become a core focus of game theory as well, materialized more concretely in the form of the digital avatar. As Laetitia Wilson suggests in an analysis of avatars, “Could not the possibility to explore a plurality of personalities allow for empowerment and self-realization beyond the hegemony of ‘real’ life norms and habitual social conventions?” (2003, 4). In his essay “Hyperidentities,” Miroslaw Filiciak moves even further, claiming that this exploration of digital personalities is not just a form of empowerment, but a cyborgian fusion of man and machine where “[t]he subject (player) and the ‘other’ (the onscreen avatar) do not stand at the opposite sides of the mirror anymore—they become one” (2003, 91). This moment of suturing is linked directly to what the digital body provides to the confined physical flesh, as avatars represent “a longed-for chance of expressing ourselves beyond physical limitations…a post-modern dream being realized” (100). The heavily implied utopian vision of a realm at last capable of providing expression outside the body—of moving “beyond” the physical—is made decidedly explicit by Edward Castronova in his description of synthetic worlds:

The Earth is very nice, but there are experiences we can imagine in our minds that we cannot have here. We cannot switch from male to female and back again; we cannot become fat or thin as we wish…People entering a synthetic world can have, in principle, any kind of body they desire. At a stroke, this feature of synthetic worlds removes from the social calculus all the unfortunate effects that derive from the body.  (2005, 25-26)

Castronova’s mention of the malleability of sex and the body in a digital world—the ability to switch “from male to female and back again”—would seem to offer a sort of disruptive, unhindered queer playground for identity, being freed from the “unfortunate effects” of the body. However, both queer critics and gaming critics have found this dream of being “freed” from the body problematic. Mary Bryson, in an examination of lesbian online communities, finds that the physical world and its control of the body never fully leaves, as the enforcement of gendered behaviors, gestures, and identity performances online “caution against monolithic utopian conclusions concerning the transformative potential of the Internet for QLBT women” (2004, 249). Wilson, following her first, optimistic question about the potentiality of avatars in gaming, offers a more cynical second option, wondering if such hopes are “merely a symptom of digital utopianism” when in fact games are “bits and bytes and habitual social conventions [that] merely cycle through their programmatic repetitions at a remove from tangible encounters” (4). And in comparison to Castronova’s dream of complete bodily freedom, Martti Lahti states that the procedural rhetoric of games in fact “sets limits to the mutability of the body,” offering a limited range of forms for avatars that “invoke and reinforce a narrow set of highly codified, preexisting categories” (2003, 167). Thus, the utopic dream to leave the “social calculus” of the player’s own body behind is hindered not only by the cybernetic interface between player and machine which fuses rather than liberates the body, but the constructed rules laid out within that interface for creating bodies which so often adhere to the social conventions the player potentially sought to escape.

Penetrating the Facility: Kanji’s Queer Panic

It would then seem more productive, rather than pursuing potentially non-existent digital utopias, to seek out places of tension and rupture within the existing framework of gaming and see how a queer consideration of the body might reveal particularly fraught examples of this. I turn now to the image of Kanji and Naoto in Persona 4 as an example of how the seemingly utopian possibilities of digital bodies are foreclosed and rendered inaccessible to specifically queer characters—and how these foreclosures draw attention to themselves, thus breaking down the apparent “resolution” to gendered identity that the player participates in bringing about. Persona 4’s plot revolves around a murder mystery in a mostly quiet Japanese town, where people have abruptly disappeared only to later turn up dead. Upon investigating, the player discovers the existence of an alternate world that these victims have been thrown into; within the world, the abducted individual comes face to face with their “shadow,” an embodiment of their deepest fears, and is eventually destroyed by the shadow if the player does not intervene in time. As the male leader of a group of adventuring teenagers, the player is tasked with the goal of entering this alternate universe and—through the process of fighting various enemies across multiple floors of themed dungeons—reaching and saving each abducted person before their shadow awakens.

These events eventually bring about Naoto’s arrival in the town, summoned by local police to help investigate the crimes. When first introduced, she is performing the identity of a male, cross-dressing as a boy ace detective to investigate the details of the murders—and her first source of questioning is Kanji. As the son of a textile shop owner, Kanji’s natural gifts for sewing and design cause him to be ostracized by his peers, leading to him reimagining himself as a leather-clad fighter who regularly gets into battles with peers and police. A later conversation reveals that this reimagining was linked not only to his sewing, but his desires as well; early encounters with girls were mostly unsuccessful, and as Kanji admits, “So I started thinking…What if I’m the type who never gets interested in girls? And I couldn’t accept that, so I kept spinning it around and around in my head.” It is thus appropriate that the player’s first encounter with Kanji is happening upon him talking to Naoto, who is still performing as a boy and asking questions about the recent murders. Misinterpreting her “interest” in him as potentially romantic, Kanji mutters under his breath as she walks away, “Did he say he was interested? He’s a guy…and I’m a guy…But he’s interested in me?”

From the outset, the two are linked through a queer cycle of performativity and interest: Kanji acting more “manly” to disguise his potential fear at being gay and seeing Naoto as both threat and possible liaison, and Naoto dressing as a man in order to be the detective she has always aspired to and to satisfy her interest in the case. Their queerness is constantly alluded to in comments by the player’s teammates, noting that “I get this weird feeling about them” and that “there’s something funny going on here—I can sense it.” What exactly is “funny” becomes evident upon Kanji’s abduction and appearance on television at night, where his “shadow”—having switched his usual attire of leather for nothing more than a few small scraps of cloth—appears in the midst of a giant steamy bathhouse and speaks to the viewers in an incredibly exaggerated feminine lisp: “Hel-lo, dear viewers… it’s time for ‘Bad, Bad Bathhouse.’ Tonight, I’ll introduce a superb site for those searching for sublime love that surpasses the separation of the sexes. I’m your host, Kanji Tatsumi, serving you this scandalously special sneak-in report! Goodness gracious, just imagine the things that might happen to me there!”

The clear resemblance to a modern reality show, meant for the “dear viewers” who will have a chance to peek into Kanji’s scandalous desires, at once invokes the voyeuristic pleasure of viewing a forbidden desire while also mimicking the player’s own tenuous relationship between spectator and actor while playing the game itself. As Marie-Laure Ryan notes,

without [the] possibility of watching an image of the game-world, players would have no idea of the consequences of their actions, and they would not be able to play the game intelligently. This means that players are not only agents but also spectators of their own pretended actions. The game experience is therefore halfway between living life and watching a movie (2006, 190).

In this case, the game suggests that the player imagine herself as the audience to (and thus non-active participant in) Kanji’s queer desires, yet it is precisely due to the player’s actions in moving the plot forward that such an imagination comes to fruition; they will not just “imagine” the “things that might happen to me in there,” but will actively bring them about by progressing further into the level. In fact, by progressing through the level, some of those “things” will in fact happen to the player’s avatar as well, collapsing the barrier between the viewed queer subject who has things happen “to me” and the viewer who “sneaks in” to watch.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Persona 4 explicitly invites the player to recognize how her own desires have not only continued these deviant actions, but even shaped the environment they take place in—only to quickly shut off this revelation. Should the player reach the last “true” dungeon of the game, the final boss—a goddess who inflicts the world with the heavy fog and shadows of the other dimension—reveals to the party that the game’s dungeons (known collectively as the Midnight Channel) were brought into being by those who watch, not just those within it: “it was always your individual wills that would determine what appeared on it. Humans ache to expose their suppressed sides, while the prying eyes around them are curious to see them laid bare. The want to show, and the want to see…I granted a ‘window’ that catered to both.” This tension between “showing” and “seeing,” which lingers at the very heart of the player/avatar relationship, is thrown into disarray, along with the player’s complicity in the queer desires placed on display before her. At the last possible moment of gameplay (and, depending on the player, as much as 80 to 90 hours of game time from the narrative’s origins), the game throws an abrupt wrench in the gears in terms of the player’s relationship to bodies within the game—and then, by killing the boss and destroying the Channel to “win” the game, requests that the player move on as if no such revelation took place.

Kanji’s particular level within the Midnight Channel is, as previously mentioned, a large wooden bathhouse that the player must fight through, attempting to pick out enemies in the midst of the lingering steam which covers most of the scenery. The motif of steam, while clearly playing on the “steaminess” of Kanji’s suppressed desires, also points to the larger rhetoric of concealment and uncertainty. As the player moves through the dungeon, her spatial experience mimics the larger confusion of Kanji’s sexual needs: objects appear and disappear, bodies are harder to locate. Along the way, Kanji’s shadow continues to stress the queer context of the level, lisping to the player that “at last, I’ve penetrated the facility” and that this “steamy paradise” has his body “tingling with excitement”; he then urges the player “onward and deeper” to find him, moving closer to the intended goal of a “charming encounter.” In many ways, the level becomes a body itself for the player to queerly experience via the avatar, penetrating deeper (often literally penetrating, as the main character’s weapon is a large sword) with each floor of the dungeon and experiencing a set of increasingly sexualized enemies—large snakes, cupids with bows and arrows, and finally muscled wrestlers—in pursuit of finally reaching the central “charming” encounter with Kanji. The “tingling excitement” of the shadow’s body is passed to the player through the conduit of the avatar, as the growing difficulty and added tension of approaching the boss battle as each floor is defeated inspire a physical reaction in the player as well.

When the player at last reaches Kanji, the game reveals him in a heated debate with his shadow, who at last explicitly invokes the word ‘queer’ while declaring women to be the source of all his problems:

Ohh, how I hate girls. So arrogant and self-centered. They cry if you get angry, they gossip behind your back, they spread nasty lies…they look at me like I’m some disgusting THING and say that I’m a weirdo. Laughing at me, all the while! “You like to sew? What a queer!” “Painting is so not you.” “But you’re a guy.” “Why don’t you act like a guy?” “Why aren’t you manly?” What does it mean to “be a guy”? What does it mean to be “manly”? Girls are so scary…Men are much better. They’d never say those awful, degrading things. Yes, I vastly prefer men.

Each comment links to a question of performativity, with—in a rather fascinating inversion of hegemonic expectations—the female community as arbiters and controllers of heteronormative behavior, while the male community offers acceptance, respect, and the freedom to determine manliness. Being a “queer,” rather than a label instituted by male peers as a failure to meet certain expectations of behavior, is here declared by the shadow as a failure to live up to the other sex’s assumptions of male identity. Yet the shadow’s idyllic construction of a safe space within the confines of male discourse intriguingly both elides the prominent existence of homosocial communities where men do say those “awful, degrading things” in judgment of behavior [1] while at the same time highlighting the extent of the fantasy necessary to imagine the Midnight Channel—or any environment—as a place where the rules of masculinity no longer apply. In order to sustain this dream (and in a decidedly Foucauldian move) the shadow’s language also suggests a replacement of bodies for discourse: men are preferred because of what they might not say, rather than the previously mentioned desire for what they might do. The body-driven dream of “things that might happen to me there” is reassembled into the avoidance of masculine labeling through language. Thus again, the “social calculus of the body” decidedly intervenes within the digital fantasy of the bathhouse; the previously quasi-utopian landscape of unrestricted queer play provides as chimeric a potential for escaping the defining structures of the body as the shadow’s imagined male discourse community.

The weight and expectation of “manliness” bleeds over into the boss battle that follows, as the shadow transforms into a large, muscular body divided down the middle into white and black halves; the two large arms carry Mars symbols as weapons, while Kanji’s torso emerges out of the neck surrounded by roses. It is flanked by two similarly muscular servants, titled “Nice Guy” and “Tough Guy,” that respectively heal the shadow and attack the player. While there is a clear evoking and mingling of the gay manga genres known as bara and yaoi (bara being akin to a more masculine, “bear” depiction of gay desire, while yaoi takes a more feminine approach) in the two wrestlers, the shadow’s neck wreath, and the roles of effeminate “nice guy” and overtly masculine “tough guy,” the split black/white appearance of all three bodies also indicates a mixing and rupturing of sexual expectations along the lines of race as well as gender.  The shadow’s repeated taunt during the battle, claiming “You don’t accept me! You’ll never accept me,” further stresses the threat these queer bodies represent to the larger social order—and subsequently, the bodies are knocked out of existence by the player and her party of fellow adventurers. Kanji is “saved” from his shadow by her efforts, and in a scene meant to show his “acceptance” of his fears, claims that the issue was never sexuality at all: “I’ve known all this time I had something like you [the shadow]. It ain’t a matter of guys or chicks. I’m just scared shitless of being rejected. I’m a total pansy who tries to make everyone hate me.”

The sidestepping of “something like you” suggests the unspeakability of Kanji’s queerness; indeed, the only specific invocation of his sexuality is the “queer” epithet ascribed to the girls at school. Yet for the remainder of the game it hovers, and the threat of his body disrupts the normative homosocial space inhabited by the player avatar and his friends.  One scene in particular highlights this tension: on a school camping trip, Kanji shares a tent with the player and fellow adventurer Yosuke. After a short conversation, Yosuke begins to quiz Kanji, asking, “This is as good a time as any, so I want you to be honest with us. A-are you really…you know?” Kanji’s response—“Am I really what?”—is met with an allusion to the even more unspeakable act: “What I mean is, uh…are we gonna be safe alone with you?” Despite the player’s various forays into demon-filled dungeons, wielding massive weaponry, and casting magical spells, what constitutes a risk to “safety” is not the threat of monsters but the lurking possibility of the queer body within the player’s midst. For the rest of the game, then, Kanji will be on a quest to “prove” that his desires follow a non-queer path—but as hard as he tries, the body he feels the closest attraction to is still his queer partner, Naoto.

“You Needn’t Suffer Anymore”: Naoto’s Impossible Needs

Sometime after Kanji is rescued from the shadow world, the player discovers that Naoto, in an attempt to discover the culprit behind the kidnappings, has allowed herself to be abducted. At this point, the knowledge of her identity as a girl is still hidden; the police and school community believe her to be “the Detective Prince,” heir to a lineage of male detectives from the Shirogane family. After being thrown into the other world, however, a dark, imposing image of Naoto appears on television at midnight, declaring to viewers, “I will be experimenter and experimentee both in a forbidden yet wonderful bodily alteration process! You shall witness my departure into a new realm…The moment of a new birth! From the chosen day forth, I shall walk a completely different path in life! And I will share this glorious occasion, this memorable day, with all of you!”  As the shadow walks away, its surroundings look like what appears to be a futuristic laboratory, surrounded by blinking lights and terminals while bathed in an eerie green hue.

Here the game immediately establishes an epistemological model for experiencing Naoto’s “other” self, as upon reaching the laboratory through exploring the shadow world, the dungeon is described as “a secret lair for a superhero”—somewhere hidden away and escaped to as a means of exchanging identities. Unlike the majority of the game’s dungeons, where the player ascends a series of floors to reach a final boss battle, Naoto’s dungeon is a descent downward; the player moves spatially deeper into the mystery of Naoto’s identity, and is forced to obtain and locate a series of keys that “identify” them as able to pass into further restricted areas. In fact, they must backtrack at one point to an already-cleared floor and open a locked “research” section in order to progress further. The linear progression of climbing upward to a set goal is replaced with a winding set of locked doors and shifting targets. Even the usual premise of the shadow taunting the player forward (or pleading for rescue) is replaced by a mechanical alarm system: “ATTENTION INTRUDERS! LEAVE THE FACILITY IMMEDIATELY! I REPEAT: LEAVE THE FACILITY IMMEDIATELY!” Instead of encouragement, the player is warded off and redirected, signifying a discovery not meant to be found.

After overcoming these obstacles and reaching the bottom of the dungeon, however, the player discovers Naoto in a room with one particular centerpiece: a gleaming operating table complete with blood-stained laser and an enormous oscillating saw. This table is the place where Naoto will undergo the aforementioned body alteration procedure, intended to allow Naoto to at last become a fully male detective. In a mixture of Naoto’s shame of both being young and cross-gendered, the shadow mimics a moment from her childhood, weeping gently while saying “I wanna be a grown-up. I wanna be a big boy right now…Then they’ll see who I am.” Taunting Naoto’s inability to fully complete this change until now, the shadow marks the distinction between the masculine name Naoto has assumed and the failure of her body to uphold it: “But a name doesn’t change the truth. It doesn’t let you cross the barrier between the sexes. How could you become an ideal man when you were never a male to begin with?” The shadow then turns to the operating table as the means of enacting this barrier crossing, a process through which Naoto can enter the male-oriented society of police work and thus “needn’t suffer anymore.”

In centering this scene of digital queer unveiling—of Naoto’s “coming out,” so to speak—around the image of the operating table, Persona 4 depicts a complex weaving of the desire to modify the physical flesh mixed with the supposed utopian ease of fluid bodies within gaming. Jay Prosser, who has written extensively on transsexuality and the process of transforming the body physically, notes in his book Second Skins that “[i]f the urge to break out of one’s skin or bodily encasing is not a metaphor, the skin—as the surface mediating ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the body—presents itself as the point of contact between material body and body image, between visible and felt matter” (1998, 70). If the avatar is seen to be similarly as a point of contact between the material body and a desired body image—a place in which the flesh can be broken out from—what significance can be taken from the game’s insistence on directing us to what will occur to Naoto’s digital flesh? Given Castronova’s dream of sex exchange “at a stroke,” Naoto’s virtual body is still governed by the fact that she is not a “real” man; the utopian vision of barrier disruption is promptly restrained by the shadow’s reminder that merely “a name” cannot change bodily truth. Naoto’s potentially queer body, even within a world that can alter the depiction of the avatar with a few changes of lines of code, can instead only be transformed through the tearing and violence of the saw; even the image of the laser, a futuristic means of cutting and severing, is shown to be covered with blood and fluids. The inescapability of the skin is once again placed before the player, as the dream of being free of the flesh in inhabiting a digital avatar suddenly points to the “residue” of the body within the game.

More than this, the possibility of bodily transformation is not an act to be desired, but a terrifying, disruptive process; the saw gleams, hovers over the table menacingly, and in the battle that follows, the boss taunts the player with the endless threat of cutting flesh: “No no, that will never do! Patients must lie still for me to drill proper holes into them!” At one point, the player and his party members are referred to as “irritating patients,” and the offer that “you’ll all become your new selves” is given a decidedly menacing edge. Far from a liberating process, the potentially transformative body is rendered as a subject under attack, at risk from being pierced, shattered, and ultimately eliminated. The fear of losing wholeness—of having holes drilled in the self—is, in many ways, a reaction to the implied physical connection between the avatar and the player, where the player recognizes damage done to the avatar’s body as happening to “me.” As Bob Rehak notes, “imagining ourselves as the addressee of the computer screen’s discourse, the ‘I’ misrecognizing itself in the computer’s ‘YOU,’ is part of video games’ lure” (2003, 112). The game constantly invokes this relationship between the self and other, as each encounter with a shadow begins with a character’s denial of the shadow’s role in their identity, declaring “You’re not me!”, only to realize after fighting that “I was wrong…I am you. And you are me.” The struggle between this dynamic—what is both “me” and “not me”—plays out continually in Persona 4, often threatening to derail the experience of gameplay into what Bogost calls “simulation fever,” where “the struggle between the omissions and inclusions of a source system and the player’s subjective response to those decisions” throws the player out of the illusion of the game and calls attention to the constructed nature of its ideology (2006, 132).

In response to this threat, the game deploys none other than Kanji, who in the midst of the revelations about Naoto simply declares that “we’ll just do our job and kick the shadow’s ass.” The irony of this statement—of the player “doing their job” to defeat Naoto’s queer self—relates to the impossibility of doing anything other than that job. The player is bound to this negative relationship with the shadow precisely due to the form of Persona 4’s encoded narrative; no possible outcome exists in the game code for Naoto to undergo the process of transformation, nor is there any other option given to the player than to fight against her achieving it. As Henry Jenkins notes, the struggle of developing a gaming narrative revolves around “trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory” (2004, 126). While the saw looms threateningly over Naoto’s digital body, it will never fall—precisely because the game’s narrative is structured in such a way that it will never supply the player with the freedom to pursue a future where it does. Losing to the boss loops the player back to the main menu, where they will fight the shadow again and again until it is defeated. The narrative is, in a sense, stuck in an atrophied state until the desired outcome of defeating the boss is accomplished.

While the game offers no freedom in terms of offering Naoto the prospect of transsexuality, it does, however, allow the player to push her towards heteronormativity; later in the game, the player can choose to begin dating Naoto, where dialogue options allow the player to tell her that “they are happy that she’s a girl,” and in a direct connection to her performance of gender, encourage her to wear a form-fitting red dress and speak in a higher, more feminine pitch. In the original Japanese version of the game, the encouragement is even more jarring; rather than asking Naoto to speak in a higher voice, the player can tell Naoto to stop using the masculine pronoun for “I” and switch to the feminine version—to literally assume a new name for the self that matches the gender of her body. Similarly, while the player can initiate a relationship with Kanji as friends, no homosexual possibilities exist for the player to pursue with him. To answer Bogost’s question of instituted moralities, the game’s rules define a moral outcome in which heterosexual gender performances are allowed to be shaped, while the presence of queer potentiality is never anything but a threatening, sinister shadow that must be physically battled and destroyed.

If we examine that image of the shadow—specifically Naoto’s second “shadow,” the version that appears in the boss battle—a further ironic twist appears. The most dangerous form of Naoto’s body, which can actually fight and kill the player, is that of Haraway’s cyborg: a half-machine, half-organic flying body whose brain is exposed and metal limbs gleam. It jokes with the player, taunts them, embraces an ironic subject position. The disruptive, utopian, perverse queer cyborg emerges fully manifested in a digital realm, and the player’s sole task is to ensure it is destroyed. Far from Filiciak’s utopian embrace of hybrid identities, the cyborg is instead situated as the major obstacle in the player’s path to continue onward, and the goal of gameplay shifts to saving Naoto from its queer influence. Such a relationship elides out of memory the always-already cyborgian nature of the player’s interaction with a mechanical interface through playing a game, and sets up in its place an oppositional divide between the “natural” bodies of the player’s party and the “perverse” body of the cyborg other.

Furthering the epistemological construct surrounding Naoto, the shadow (unlike any other boss) is able to “read” the player and their weaknesses, changing its attacks accordingly and “knowing” the right abilities to use while regularly switching its own weaknesses. Yet this knowledge is not sufficient; as the battle continues, this mechanized Naoto begins to slump under the player’s attacks, a visual indicator of the player’s success as well as a sign of its inevitable doom. There is no way around watching the cyborg Naoto lose; at the scene of its death after being pummeled by the player, its wing engines pop and burst, hovering in air for a few moments before crumpling to the ground and evaporating in a cloud of black smoke. The game provides no residue of the cyborg’s demise—it fades into nothingness, an aberration meant only to exist for a moment until conquered by the player.

Coda: “Who I really am”

As the smoke fades, the game cuts to Naoto’s “real” body getting up and speaking to the party.  After a scene of reconciliation and confession about Naoto’s cross-dressing, a female character declares to her, “You must know already what you yearn for isn’t to become an adult or become a boy”—to which Naoto replies, “You’re absolutely right.” Within the confines of the game’s procedural rhetoric, Naoto will always come to this answer, always assert the primacy of her “natural body” and foreclose the utopic possibilities of change with the conservative sanctity of the unified flesh. As she states just a few lines later, “What I should yearn for…no, what I must strive for isn’t to become a man. It’s to accept myself for who I really am.” The question of “who I really am,” instead of an open ground of experimentation and fluidity, is in Persona 4 a question always linked to a coherent, controlling body; thus it is not surprising that a few scenes later, when all the characters are brought to the doctor for a medical checkup, a character reveals the news that Naoto in fact has the largest breasts of any female member of the team. Even while bound and hidden most of the game, Naoto’s femaleness—what she “really is”—must be asserted and reminded to the player.

And who she “really is” is crucial most of all to Kanji, the queer colleague she has been tied to from the outset. One final scene exemplifies the endlessly shifting and arbitrary grounds by which Persona 4—and all gendered performance—attempt to establish the “natural” boundaries of identity. Naoto, along with the other female members of the team, is eventually entered into a beauty pageant by Yosuke outside of her will. Protesting this turn of events, she considers turning to the school officials for help until Kanji insists otherwise. “I beg you, please be in it,” he declares. “If you do, my, uh, doubts will finally be cleared.” Turning to the one character denied the ability to change her gender, he makes his final plea: “C’mon! Make me a man!” The necessity of an affirmative gender performance—to know that what he wants is really and truly a girl—demands Kanji ask of Naoto the one thing she was unable to have: to be “made” a man. The impossibility of this request on multiple levels indicates the difficulty of Castronova’s dream of leaving “the social calculus” of the body behind in the digital realm. Far from being able to shift from female to male and back again, the queer bodies at the heart of Persona 4 find themselves turning to one another for answers to “who I really am”—and find that answer still out of reach. It is in the tension that process brings about that we might find fruitful ground for queer and game studies to meet, to interact, and examine why that question continues to find an answer locked in the rules of the body.

Notes

[1] The idea of a male space outside the rule of female intrusion—where women are seen as annoyances and hindrances that ask the wrong questions and infringe upon male performance—echoes in a rather noticeable way the larger defensive rhetoric surrounding game space by the male-dominated player community; one need look no further than Anita Sarkeesian’s attempts to produce her feminist “Tropes vs. Women” series with an entry on video games to see the response from the male gaming community, with “tits or back to the kitchen, bitch” one of the many hundreds of derogatory comments left on her YouTube channel (Watercutter, 2012).

Works Cited

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Atlus Games. Persona 4. Tokyo: Atlus Games, 2008.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

—. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge: MIT, 2006.

Bryson, Mary. “When Jill Jacks In: Queer Women and the Net.” Feminist Media Studies 4 (2004): 239-54.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Psychology Press, 1993.

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Eerikäinen, Hannu. “Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex,’ Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse.” Conference Proceedings for Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies. Ed. Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen. Turku: University of Turku, 2000, 55-74.

Filiciak, Miroslaw. “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Mutiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003, 87-102.

Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 516-54.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 118-130.

Lahti, Martti. “As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games.” The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003, 157-170.

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Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar.” The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003, 103-128.

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—CITATION—
Youngblood, J. (2013) “C’mon! Make me a man!”: Persona 4, Digital Bodies, and Queer Potentiality. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N3QC01D2

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

We are steadily witnessing the appropriation of new communication technologies to facilitate collective organizing and mobilization. As Eltantawy and Wiest (2011) explain, the development of social media creates opportunities for digital and web based social movements to change the reality of collective action. Cyberactivists have incorporated a host of tools to facilitate their organizational activities from staging boycotts, staging public protests to planning demonstrations (Langman 2005). The types of new communication technologies that have been used include short messaging services (SMS), social networking sites, and as the current research will examine, virtual gaming communities. Typically, one would not assume that collective organizing and resistance would take place in a virtual gaming community. But this is exactly where a cohort of female gamers experience and resist hegemonic inequality every day. This paper explores their community within Xbox Live [1] and documents their struggles with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other intersecting oppressions experienced at the hand (voice) of other gamers. They have responded with various in-game tactics to counter the perceived source of their (linguistic) oppression, the default gamer.

By employing virtual ethnography, I examine if these tactics are reminiscent of actual collective organizing, merely reflect individual acts of resistance, or are simply griefing activities used to disrupt gameplay and harass other players. Regardless of their intended purpose, this project will privilege the voices and experiences of these marginalized gamers, a luxury not afforded them inside this gaming community. Before delving into a discussion of the oppressed status of marginalized populations in Xbox Live, it is important to situate video games within a context of dominance – privileging whiteness and masculinity. This often creates a negative environment for women and people of color within the larger gaming culture.

Linguistic Profiling: The origins of inequality in Xbox Live

Although literature on Xbox Live is beginning to emerge, there are very few studies that examine inequalities within this virtual gaming community. One such study did find that linguistic profiling was the origin of inequality within this space (Gray, 2011). Given that Xbox is largely a voiced based community, it is important to critically examine social interactions within this space.

Baugh (2003) reveals that linguistic profiling is similar to racial profiling. Racial profiling uses visual cues “that result in the confirmation or speculation of the racial background of an individual, or individuals (p. 158),” and linguistic profiling “is based upon auditory cues that may include racial identification, but which can also be used to identify other linguistic subgroups within a given speech community” (p. 158). Scholars have long studied linguistic stereotypes finding discrimination based on accents and dialects against speakers of various ethnic backgrounds. What is seen in the corporate context is that voice discrimination and linguistic profiling are used as effective means to filter out individuals whom one may not want to do business with. For instance, the executive director of the National Fair House Alliance noted that insurance companies, mortgage companies, and other financial institutions may refuse to extend services to you if they think you sound Black or Mexican. Now this discrimination is more subtle since they won’t come out and say it to you directly, but rather they will not return your phone call or respond to written correspondence (Baugh, 2003).

Linguistic profiling frequently occurs within virtual communities that utilize voice to communicate. Joinson (2001) suggests that the anonymous spaces of the internet compel users to disclose personal information about themselves knowing that the party on the other end will never find out the true identity. However, in virtual communities where voice can be heard, much of our personal information automatically is emitted into virtuality. Voice based communities are unique from their text counterparts. Text based communities rely on users to type information or upload textual information. In voice based communities, information is revealed automatically when someone speaks.

Xbox Live, being mostly an audio-visual community, requires users to employ the voice option to communicate. Although some users may have the ability to alter the voice, the console does not automatically come with this feature. So your real world voice can be heard by others within the community. As many women and people of color explain, this mere technological advance creates the most havoc in their virtual lives – racial and gendered inequality based of how they sound (Gray, 2011). As a result, women of color have organized themselves to resist the intersecting oppressions experienced at the hands of the default gamer whom they describe as the white male. Furthermore, the current research will examine the virtual methods these women employ to resist as well as the virtual resources at their disposal to employ.

Resource Mobilization Theory

Resource mobilization theory emerged during the 1970’s as a reaction to collective behavior models that attempted to explain the how people with little power were able to organize, resist, and/or challenge those in power (Oberschall, 1973, p. 102). Resource mobilization theories suggest that participants within a movement are rational actors and decision-makers (Calhoun, 1992), and collective behavior should be understood in terms of the logic and costs and benefits as well as opportunities for action (Larana, Johnston, & Gusfiel, 1994, p. 5).

An important assumption within resource mobilization theory is that groups engaged in social movements should have the opportunity to challenge those in power (Jenkins, 1981). Extending this premise further, McCarthy and Zald (1977) recognize that the resource mobilization approach emphasizes both support and constraint of societal forces (what can hurt can also help). It also examines the multitude of resources that could be utilized to support the movement as well as other groups that can aid and assist. Resource mobilization theory also recognizes that movements are dependent upon external support for success. With these factors in mind, resource mobilization theory can aid in the understanding of how social movements emerge and develop and become successful (Melucci, 1989; Tarrow, 1998).

It is important to gauge the literature on virtual organizing and understand the dynamics for a virtual community to be successful in their social change. To do this, there are two main perspectives within resource mobilization: 1) the organizational-entrepreneurial perspective (McCarthy and Zald, 1973, 1977); and 2) the political process perspective (Gamson, 1975; Tilly, 1978; McAdam, 1982). As Gamson (1975) argues, organization is required in order for a group to launch a social protest or movement. Early resource mobilization theory considers that strong, bureaucratically structured social organizing is crucial for a successful movement (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). On the other hand, the current research does not have that type of organization structured as described by McCarthy and  Zald (1977). The current research reflects a virtual organization and as Ahuja and Carley (1998) describe, a virtual organization is an organization that’s geographically dispersed and bound by a long-term common interest or goal. Most importantly, a virtual organization communicates and coordinates through information technology.

An organization may consist of virtual teams, a group of people who interact through interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose and work across space, time, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies. (Lipnack and Stamps, 1997, p. 7)

By employing ICT’s, members of virtual teams are able to communicate electronically from different geographic locations and are able to virtually organize. Several key characteristics of a virtual organization have been identified by scholars. First, a virtual organization is not bound by borders (Kristof, Brown, Sims, and Smith, 1995; Mowshowitz, 1997; Travica, 2005) and exists for a specific goal (Ahuja and Carley, 1998; Foster, Kesselman and Tuecke, 2001).Within this borderless, virtual system, membership and organizational structure change over time (Travica, 2005). In addition, a virtual organization relies on an electronic network (Grenier and Metes, 1995; Lipnack and Stamps, 1997; Travica, 2005) and uses advanced information technology to facilitate the movement. Given that, a virtual organization is assumed to be able to quickly unify a group, even though the resources, services, and people that comprise a virtual organization can be single or multi-institutional, homogenous or heterogeneous (Travica, 2005).

Resource mobilization theorists posit that after a group or a movement has organized to some extent, there are certain factors which will influence its success. Cohen (1985) argues that success is enhanced by the ability to mobilize resources, gain recognition from those in power, and have flexible organization, among other things. Linking to groups in power has a direct impact on a group’s ability to launch a successful movement. The more supportive connections the social movement has with groups in power, the greater the likelihood of the group’s success (Aveni, 1978; McCarthy and Zald, 1977). However, being linked to a powerful group is not always possible among groups organized for change. Another factor which may influence the success of a social movement is the choice of strategies and tactics. Jenkins (1981) reviews resource mobilization theory and classifies three types of tactics used with elites: 1) persuasion, 2) bargaining, and 3) coercion. Another factor which needs to be taken into consideration in evaluating a social movement is the structure of the group itself. Jenkins (1983) argues that groups which are organized bureaucratically are effective in fighting technical battles but not effective in mobilizing grassroots support. Given the virtual nature of the current research, tactics and strategies have to be adapted to fit the space. Also, measuring success must be modified to fit the overall goal of those organizing. As will be explored in this article, marginalized virtual groups have to modify their strategies and tactics to elicit change within hegemonic structures.  To explore these strategies, virtual ethnography was utilized.

Methodology

To uncover the extent that women of color collectively organize and resist hegemonic practices deployed within Xbox Live, virtual ethnography was employed as a means to privilege their actions and to critically evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies within Xbox Live. Specifically, I employed participant observation, in-game observations, and narrative interviewing. While gaming, I instructed each participant to narrate her actions or provide commentary on her in-game strategies. During gameplay, I would make note of specific actions that were employed during the game to discuss when the gaming session was complete. This process was referred to as debriefing. This process allowed gamers to reflect on their actions and reiterate their purpose and intended goals.

Procedure

The unit of analysis within this study was Xbox Live game play specifically utilizing the following Xbox Live multiplayer games: Gears of War I and II; and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Although more games were played, these three allowed the research participants the most freedom in carrying out their tactics and resistive actions hence the focus on them. I examined types of game play and identified three major types of game play the participants engaged in: 1) normal game play (no disruptions); 2) individual resistance/griefing (a single player interrupting game play with griefing strategies); 3) collective resistance/griefing (more than one player interrupting game play with griefing strategies). The latter two options were directly used to challenge the authoritative and hegemonic establishment of Xbox Live as well as to disrupt the game play of the source of their virtual oppression. Other real world strategies and methods were examined as well, such as boycotting stereotypical games, but for the purposes of the current research, these will not be examined in this article. For a period of seven months, averaging four hours of gameplay each day, I collected data (approximately 850 hours). IRB approval was granted prior to conducting any interviews or observations.

Participants

Random sampling was not feasible in this community.  Snowball sampling was utilized to generate the population of gamers as soliciting violated the terms of service within Xbox Live. The participants within this study were members of two clans [2] which are similar to guilds seen in World of Warcraft. Many game researchers have studied the motivation behind joining guilds and clans within online gaming and found that most players join guilds to strategize within the game and complete difficult objectives (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore, 2007); guilds are also very popular given that 78% of online gamers were members of guilds (Seay, Jerome, Lee, and Kraut, 2004). Guilds/clans are not organized in this manner within Xbox live and clan membership is not imperative to completing objectives. Clan membership within Xbox live appears to have more social value than anything although no studies have yet emerged on clan membership in Xbox live (Gray, 2011). Members of Puerto Reekan Killaz and Conscious Daughters agreed to participate in this study (see table below for demographic information):

Since Donkey Kong tossed his first barrel in 1981, princesses in video games have served one purpose: to be saved.  Successful completion of Donkey Kong (Nintendo 1981) sees Kong defeated and Jumpman and Lady lovingly reunited. Lady had found her hero and Jumpman had won his prize. Women were cast as damsels in distress and have predominantly been trapped in this role. More than three decades later little has changed. Female protagonists in video games are still almost non-existent. When we do encounter the elusive heroine, she is typically either portrayed as a sexual object to be gazed upon and controlled, or she is simply a female “skinned” version of the male protagonist. Cast into these roles, it is hardly surprising that women and games have long had a troubled relationship, ranging from who is creating the games to who is playing them to who is talking about them.

This paper explores and investigates the myriad of ways that video game narratives get modded post-play for feminist purposes (intentionally and unintentionally). We will look at modding through cultural critique of the medium as well as through online discussion surrounding game play and game design that happens without the intent of feminist critique or modding. “Modding” as an activity emerges differently in each context, and we explore examples that show the richness and instability of this concept below. Specifically, we are interested in the way women change the way others experience the game (modding) in order to help expose or improve the gaming environment for other women (feminist purposes). For the purposes of this discussion we are defining post-play narrative modding (PPNM) as any significant changes to the narrative or to a gamer’s perception of the narrative that happens post game development and without actually changing the code. With constant downloadable content (DLC) and updates, video games are rarely static. PPNM, however, attempts to focus on what happens after the game’s initial release, which is typically the time when it receives the most attention. While we focus more strongly on players who have already played the game, it is possible, and probably common, that players who have yet to experience the game may also have their read of the narrative affected by the post-play narrative modding that they encounter. “Post-play” does not intend to suggest that the play is ever finished or that it is a linear activity. Instead, “post-play” in this context is meant to indicate all activity that happens after the moment the game goes public and players are able to interact with the game.

There are many ways that the narrative of a game can be modded. Some games, like Half-Life (Valve 2007), Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks 2011), and Civilization V (2K Games 2010) offer options for their players to create worlds on their own that can become part of the game. This level of interaction can very directly change other players’ experiences with the game. This is not the kind of modding that we focus on in this piece, though we recognize that important feminist modding can and does occur through this type of modding. Another, often less explicit, way that game narratives can be changed is through forums, blogs, fan-fiction sites, and novels devoted to further development of the story. Classic games, like Mortal Kombat (Midway 1992), have experienced this kind of modding of the players’ experience with the game through subsequently released movies. Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft is another character significantly changed by modding through movies, fan-fiction, and other forms of fan participation.  Croft has been modded in a way that enhances her visibility and changes her cultural meaning beyond the narrative provided solely through gameplay. One cannot pick up a controller to play Tomb Raider (Core Design 1996) without being influenced in some way by this type of modding. The type of modding we are exploring in this paper is most closely connected to this second type of modding: modding that takes place through player and critic participation after the game has been created through discourse but primarily not through coding.

As we discuss what we believe are the benefits of using post-play narrative modding actively and seeing how it may happen unconsciously, we find it is crucial to keep in mind the nuances of this and other feminist work in gaming scholarship. In other words, we believe post-play narrative modding to be one tactic in the ever more vast feminist toolkit. For example, Cornelia Brunner (who asks us to think about gender on a queer theory-influenced butch-femme continuum) discusses the way animation can be a type of “tinkering” that leads toward feminist action and women becoming familiarized with in an IT environment (Brunner 37-40). By teaching girls how to create their own game environments, Brunner suggests that this opens up the possibility for “femme play” (40). PPNM works in a similar way, though it is much more abstract, its users mod narratives, not code, and action is more open-endingly collective, rather than having a fixed number of participants.

Feminist game scholar T.L. Taylor talks about the importance of inhabiting a game environment. She writes, “The context and structure around game play matter…a lesson we can learn from looking at women who inhabit game culture is that social networks and access…are core considerations for play” (52). She goes on to examine how power relations and other non-game factors end up profoundly affecting women’s play. We hope to situate post-play narrative modding in response to this type of revelation. As more and more communities are built that support women’s entrance into technological environments like games, as we will discuss later, the more we are able to control the factors that Taylor talks about in her piece. Thus, the problem that Taylor discusses of “sidelining” women’s gaming communities begins to fade, because women’s issues become part of the mainstream discourse, as we have seen happening recently on gaming hubs like Kotaku that now regularly include pieces about sexism in their mainstream news flow.

To enter into this rich conversation, we analyze post-play narrative modding in three sections. First, we look at the way post-play narrative modding can work for critics within the gaming community and industry. Through this section, we can see just how powerful PPNM can be and just how violent reactions become when “outsiders” begin to challenge the norms that dominate gaming. The second section examines the way PPNM works in the player-game relationship. We work through several extended examples to see how this type of modding shows up in this relationship. The third section discusses other ways PPNM can be used to create positive change in the community, as well as considering potential ways of using PPNM as a method of creative resistance.

Critics’ Post-Play Narrative Modding

Recently, two important (and controversial) figures have changed the way that players experience games: Anita Sarkeesian, a cultural critic responsible for the site Feminist Frequency, and Jennifer Hepler, a narrative developer for Bioware Corp, a video game company. Anita Sarkeesian came into the spotlight while trying to raise funds through a Kickstarter campaign for a project that uncovers the tropes that she argues dominate the portrayal of women in video games. Her call for funding for a series of videos on this topic was met with outrage, disgust, threats, anger, and resentment from some sectors of the gaming community online. Memes started to sweep across the Internet that showed Sarkeesian’s face with photoshopped bruises and black eyes. While threats and representations of physical violence were particularly prominent in this case, there were also articles published claiming that Sarkeesian is just trying to scam people out of money because “she just wants to use the fact that she was born with a vagina to get free money and sympathy from everyone who crosses her path” (Lewis 2012). One group made a “beat up Anita Sarkeesian” Flash video game which featured a close-up of Sarkeesian’s face that the gamer could punch (with his or her mouse) to make it look bruised and swollen (Sterling 2012).

But anger wasn’t the only response to Sarkeesian, and in fact, it seems that the anger and threats of violence incited more support for her project than had existed previously (and may have existed at all). One responder wrote, “Just from an academic standpoint I was extremely excited to see what you churned out with these videos. When I saw the backlash, I was moved to back you. Do what you do.” Those in the gaming community who were supportive of Sarkeesian’s project (or as a backlash to the negative reactions) responded by giving money to the Kickstarter campaign. While it was the goal of the project to raise $6,000 for the production of her web series on women in video games, the campaign ended with over 6,900 backers and raised $158,922. While players and funders may have had disparate opinions of her project, ranging from violence to encouragement, the strong reactions she garnered demonstrate just how emotional and passionate people in the community can be about uncovering the hidden narratives at work behind the games we play (and supporting those interested in doing so).

The mixing of positive and negative responses, especially to these extremes, also characterizes the Jennifer Hepler incident. Hepler, who worked as a narrative designer on games in both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, came under fire when she supported the inclusion of more narrative choices in video games. When it was announced that Mass Effect 3 would have a narrative mode (along with the traditional gameplay modes) that would allow players to play through the game and focus on the narrative (making the gameplay ostensibly easier), there was a huge backlash in a very vocal segment of the gaming community. Hepler was called  “the cancer that is killing Bioware” (Sterling 2012) and was threatened in multiple online forums. She was accused of ruining the Dragon Age series by giving players the ability to pursue (or be pursued by) same sex love interests (or in the words of her harshest critics “shoehorning homosexual relationships down gamer’s (sic) throats”). Hepler’s attempt to expand the way gamers can play to include those who want more narrative than fighting was seen as a direct attack on the traditionally male, white, and heterosexual gamer.

The thread that ties the online attacks against Sarkeesian and Hepler together is that both are engaging in a type of post-play narrative modding that exposes some very ingrained, and very powerful, narratives that are present in the gaming community’s history. For example, in some cases it seems that the presence and focus of the narrative elements of a game is seen as feminized. For some, this focus on the narrative is something that hardcore (also heterosexual, white, male) gamers see as something feminine and as having no part in “their” games for any reason other than to string together the interactive battle sequences. The idea that games should not only include but celebrate and expand the narrative elements implicitly suggests that interactive battle is not the only way to play–something that deeply offends some players. Similarly, Sarkeesian is exposing some of the extremely sexist, racist, and misogynistic natures of much-beloved video game heroines. Players who are entrenched in the traditional narratives surrounding these avatars (players who have always securely been the audience for video games) are threatened by the possibility of narratives on which they have built part of their identities being drastically altered.

Interestingly, Sarkeesian is purposefully using critique to expose the sexist depiction of many female video game characters. However, this activity also is a type of PPNM because it fundamentally changes the way that players are able to engage with the game because of their knowledge of her critique and the community’s response to it. Once these tropes are exposed and brought into mainstream discourse, the player’s experience of the game is modded. Likewise, Hepler’s initial act of responding to an interview question was likely not done with the intention of modding players’ experience of Mass Effect.

The stories of Sarkeesian and Hepler give us, as video game theorists and researchers, the opportunity to explore how the narrative of video games get modded after development. While Sarkeesian is actively seeking to mod our understanding of the roles of female characters in video games after the games have been completed (and usually after we have experienced the game itself), Hepler is changing narratives in a more traditional way in addition to post-play narrative modding. Hepler’s changes to the games’ narratives occur during production, but we do see post-play narrative modding occurring through her interview and responses to it post- game release. What is of import to us in this project is the backlash, both positive and negative, that has created a layer of modding that–though Hepler may not have intended–fundamentally mods the way players interact with the games.

When the now infamous interview was published in which Hepler talks about how she sees the narrative as being equally important (if not more so) to the fighting in the dungeon crawlers and first person shooters that she is writing for she is modding the narrative in a way that immediately makes some people in the gaming community uncomfortable and leads them to react violently. Hepler became the victim of sexist, racist, and misogynistic attacks that eventually led Dr. Ray Muzyka, the co-founder of Bioware, to make a public statement about the situation and pledge $1000 to Bullying Canada in Hepler’s name (Chalk 2012) This led to a tertiary modding of the narrative that results from the support of the developer itself and the implication that it supports not only Hepler, but her understanding and valuing of the narrative elements of games in general.

Mia Consalvo reports that the violent reaction from gamers is indicative of a “toxic gaming culture.” She writes, “The rage we see expressed by threatened individuals and groups seems to be based on at least two factors — sexist (as well as racist, homophobic and ageist) beliefs about the abilities and proper place of female players, and fears about the changing nature of the game industry” (2012). Consalvo also discusses the stories of Hepler and Sarkeesian to show just how violently the community responds when confront with a conflicting view. By recognizing and utilizing PPNM, we hope that academics and those in the community can try to undo some of the toxic gaming culture Consalvo writes about.

Sarkeesian and Hepler’s approaches to PPNM end up looking slightly different, having distinct reactions and context specific impacts. By visualizing the way that each of these figures engage in PPNM, we can begin to see ways that feminists can begin to directly participate, and even create, the type of modding that many of us see as necessary to overcome the overwhelming masculine and sexist discourse that dominates video game discourse specifically (and technological discourse generically). As can be seen in this visual, after creating an event, there is a cathartic response from the white, male, heterosexual, hegemonic community–usually consisting of hatred, death threats, threats of rape, violence, and so on. This type of reaction to feminist (re)action has been seen over and over again with women who have created an event that questions, criticizes, or violates the status quo of the video game industry. [1]

In response to this negative catharsis, Sarkeesian then received increased financial and ideological support. Of course, this type of response has not always been possible, but as online feminist communities begin to grow and as video game executives begin to stand up for their female employees, the response to the violence becomes more prevalent. This is where the PPNM happens: because support quickly follows the catharsis, the creators of the event are able to continue to mod our understanding of video games. The violence of the original cathartic event brought more notoriety to Sarkeesian’s work, and the financial and ideological support for her project increased significantly. Further, the more violent the reaction became, the more popular gaming sites like Kotaku and Rock, Paper, Shotgun published about the issue, thus reaching a larger audience than the original Kickstarter campaign would have likely reached (Plunkett 2012 and Meer 2012). Of course, direct causality is difficult to show in this kind of situation, but we can at least see the effects of the vitriol on the reach of her project.

With some important differences, Hepler has gone through a cycle similar to Sarkeesian’s. What is interesting, and worth noting, is that the Hepler event actually consists of two events, inextricably connected but also years apart. Hepler’s interview (originally published six years earlier) would have probably never been brought into the spotlight without the changes that happened to the narrative in Mass Effect 3. Likewise, without having a “meddling” woman, Hepler, to blame, there would likely have been far less violent of an outcry against the changes.

Rather than the direct financial support Sarkeesian received for her project, Hepler found support through the executives at Bioware Corp that defended her and continue to support her and others’ innovative visions for video games (through employing them and defending them in public). Like Sarkeesian, Hepler’s PPNM allows for growth as a response to attacks rather than shirking because of the threats. Not long ago, there was no community to support those who found themselves stuck in the catharsis stage of this cycle, leading many women to give up on their attempts to change the culture and retreat to safer spaces (and virtual obscurity). Now there are numerous sites like GeekFeminist, Border House Blog, Not Your Mama’s Gamer, and fatuglyorslutty.com devoted entirely to supporting women in the gaming community.

A prime example of video game narratives that have been modded post-play with a feminist bent would be the discussion and publicity surrounding the 2012 trailer of Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics 2013) in which a pubescent Lara Croft is forced to defend herself from a sexual attacker after being shipwrecked and captured by a group of scavengers. At the Tomb Raider debut, it was explained that as the player you would be able to defend Croft’s honor and by successfully doing so it would do more to build the narrative of Croft as survivor in your mind. In this video game equivalent of the bildungsroman, the rape (or rather the successful defense against it) was yet another “coming of age” moment for Lara Croft. The game’s executive producer, Ron Rosenberg, said in an interview with Kotaku that players would want to protect her from being raped by the scavengers because she “hasn’t become a woman yet.” He goes on to say that, “[s]he is literally turned into a cornered animal” and that this sexually violent and dehumanizing situation made her more human in his eyes and that in these circumstances, the infantilized Lara Croft “is even more enticing…than the more sexualized version of yesteryear”. On the rationale behind the brutal treatment of the teen aged Croft, Rosenberg claims that “[s]he literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”  He believes that all is fair in the pursuit of “a great origin story” (Schreier 2012).

After significant uproar in the online games community, Karl Stewart, director of Crystal Dynamics, defended Rosenberg’s comment, and the Tomb Raider title itself, by saying “rape is not a word in our vocabulary.” Stewart went on to argue in his interview that because they never used the word rape when developing the scene where Laura has to defend herself from a sexually aggressive scavenger, that–essentially–there is no harm done. Seemingly, in their minds because they don’t say rape, it is a “pathological” situation, not a physical one. Like the Sarkeesian and Hepler events, the reaction to this interview was widespread, from mainstream sites like Kotaku to sites that specialize in feminist critique like Border House and The Kernel. In a much-popularized editorial, The Kernel author Mic Wright writes, “I’ve played a lot of Halo and I don’t remember Master Chief ever being anally raped to help us empathise with him more. Was Mario forced to give a Bowser a blowjob so we could understand his head-smashing rage better?“ Wright, and many other authors push up against Crystal Dynamics’ defense of their treatment of Lara by forcing them to put Lara’s narrative in conversation with other game narratives. Many gamers in the community are rewriting Lara’s narrative before the game is even released, and they are purposefully resisting the narrative that the developers are attempting to sell.

For example, Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez on The Mary Sue, a self-proclaimed “guide to girl geek culture,” writes about the way Lara Croft has been changed from an ass-kicking heroine into a victim with the most recent iteration of Tomb Raider. Foxx-Gonzalez writes,

Personally, the worst part about this reboot is that it is taking a traditionally feminist character (who has been embraced as an empowering fantasy in spite of the canonical hypersexualization of her character), one of the most beloved ass-kicking female protagonists in gaming, and warping her and her story to cater to a male-dominated gaming culture (and culture at large).

This article shows the resistance of women in the gaming community against gaming companies’ attempts to change characters that the community has invested in and built narratives about in fan fiction and art. This becomes a moment of tension between the ability of the game developer to modify an extant character and the desire of the community to have their own view of the character to not only be the dominant one but also to be reflected in future game version.

The way Sarkeesian and Hepler have been able to both modify the gaming community and garner support for further feminist community building shows just how powerful creative resistance strategies like PPNM can be. While it is likely neither of these women intentionally employed this strategy, particularly because Hepler’s incident was separated from what turned out to be its cathartic moment by several years, articulation of exactly what is happening in these situations can help map the way that future modifiers can change their communities. Amanda Phillips writes about this kind of resistance in her blog titled, “5 Things Academics Might Learn From How the Rowdy Social Blogosphere Handles Fucknecks.” She provides several examples of positive feminist action that has emerged from the violent threats from misogynistic gamers. As we can see, change is happening. And the truly creative strategies that are emerging have the potential to become productive methods used by critics, academics, players, and others to critique, analyze, and change the video game community.

Players’ Post-Play Narrative Modding

While cultural critics undergo these cathartic and explosive events that create sudden and significant change, players often mod game narratives in more subtle ways. It is not uncommon that players are unaware of the fact that their actions modify the game for themselves and others. However, uncovering more about how this layered relationship exists between the player and the game (as it is never a straight line between those two entities) can expose gaps that can be filled by the scholarship of feminist new media theorists and cultural critics in order to create change that encourages game developers to recognize women as an audience for their games and to subsequently create better female characters in the games themselves. This article attempts to fill one of those gaps by revealing some of the productive ways that feminists and those concerned about women in the gaming community can modify gaming narrative, protagonists, and the community in a positive way.

Female main characters in games like Epic Games’ Gears of War 3 (2011) and Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 (2012) often have characters that are more female “skinned” versions of the male characters that are the default in the respective series. This is especially true in the case of Mass Effect’s female Commander Shephard (FemShep). The female Commander Shephard does not seem to be different in any way from BroShep. While one would not expect (or want) a female character that was essentially different or downgraded from the male version of Commander Shephard (BroShep), the lack of acknowledgement of her femaleness reinforces the idea that the standard, default character is male and that developers are unwilling to make essential changes to the (male) commander based on biological sex. In a more utopian model this would not mean that FemShep’s quarters are painted pink or that she encourages her crew members to “share,” but this representation might occur in her interactions with others, the responses that she gets from others, or just the simple realization that a male Marine would probably not goad a female commander into a pugilistic battle. In this situation it would also seem strange that FemShep’s interactions with the Krogan race (which values females for their reproductive value above all else because of their viral sterilization as an attempt at genocide by their former enslavers) would not be influenced by her sex. Logically, FemShep’s interactions with male Krogan soldiers (and their responses to her as a female soldier) would be influenced in some way by the fact that she is able to physically reproduce and is instead focusing her efforts on militaristic endeavors, as it would not be likely that she would be unquestioningly accepted as one of the guys. The fact that sexual differences exist in the Mass Effect universe, but do not exist for Femshep, further indicates that FemShep is simply a female-skinned BroShep. Further contrast can be seen between FemShep and the women that surround her, as squad mates and/or her possible love interests, who do seem to respond to characters and situations based on their own experiences as women.

The lack of female qualities in FemShep both exposes the fact that the gaming industry believes the default player, and thus the default character, is and should be male and indicates a perspective that gender-blindness is the key to equality. By making the female characters exactly like the male characters, developers can sidestep any accusations of stereotyping or misrepresenting women. The problem with this, as with most times a gender-blind defense is invoked, is that the default rarely incorporates any female attributes, but is solely based on traditionally, historically, and contextually male characteristics. This is a difficult pitfall to avoid, and can only be done through nuance in the game, diversity on the team behind the game, and, most importantly for this paper, through post-play narrative modding.

In essence, the characterization of FemShep as a “real” woman does not happen with the printing of a FemShep version of the game cover (hidden on the back of the cover emblazoned with BroShep), or even with the inclusion of the choice in the game itself, but rather in the modding of the narrative that the player does during and after gameplay. For most players of the Mass Effect series, it is the interpretation of the actions of FemShep and the conscious choices that they make for FemShep that make her female.[2] This modding begins as soon as the opening sequence rolls and the tutorial begins. For example, the simple act of choosing not to take a frightened and abandoned child along during a firefight in order to keep him safe because the player consciously wants to make choices that are not stereotypically feminine is a kind of modding of the narrative that takes place during gameplay and begins to shape the narrative that will continue to unfold for the player as the game progresses.

Acting against or for perceived female traits is play that is not only in conversation with the game, but with societal norms, player context, and game context. Not saving the child changes the narrative. Even if the developer’s intent was not to include space for female action or counteraction, the player can choose to interact with the game in this way. Thus refusing to save the child can become a type of feminist action through PPNM not because of the game itself but because of why the player chooses a particular path. While playing through this section of Mass Effect 3, one of the co-authors of this article struggled with making the decision whether or not to save the child because of the way that she felt it could be perceived or how it would “write” FemShep as a maternal figure rather than a militaristic one. This kind of action, then, becomes a complex one, layered with the narrative of the game, the narrative the player herself has constructed about herself as a gamer, the narratives working in the gaming community about the game, and also the perhaps more invisible narratives dictating gender norms. It is because of this complexity that it is so difficult to label a game as “feminist” or “anti-feminist” because it is always situated in the specific narratives surrounding the player. Though it’s complex, it does not make it less powerful. In fact, the kind of flexibility allowed the player is the very thing that makes the space for PPNM.

Violating the way the game was “intended” to be played has long been one way that players can mod their experience and others’ experience of the game, particularly with the popularity of online forums, machinima, vlogs, podcasts, blogs, and the other countless ways that people connect online and offline. Since there have been games there have been cheats, walkthroughs, and communities based on giving and receiving new information that can change one’s experience of the game. From a PPNM perspective, this is one way that players can make their voices heard in the community, even if it’s on a smaller scale. All female guilds, groups like FragDolls, and sites like geekfeminist.org have been quietly chipping away at the notion that women don’t belong in the gaming industry. This environment is primed for a positive response to events like those incited by Hepler and Sarkeesian. By faithfully participating in this community building, modding play and community, players have had a major hand in creating the environment that allows us to move beyond the hatred and catharsis stage to the PPNM stage.

As authors, we have been dedicated to being part of the PPNM that takes place in games through our podcast and blog site nymgamer.com. Through this work, we have seen our direct and indirect influences on players. Whether it is making a “suggestion” that allows a player to read a game a little differently, or if it is the validation of a “sense” that the player already had, through comments, feedback, emails, and other communication avenues we continually hear that players’ experiences of games are changed as a result of a podcast or a blog. When sites much larger than ours, such as GeekFeminism, take on issues in the gaming industry, the feedback is similar in tone. We have experienced it over and over: once it has been suggested that you read something differently, your experience of the narrative of that game changes–whether it’s noticing the cultural representations in Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games 2010) or seeing the feminist side of Lollipop Chainsaw (Warner Bros 2012).

The player-game relationship is complex and it is not nearly as static as some theories of game studies that focus on the mechanics or the procedures may suggest (such as Procedural Rhetoric and other theories that focus on algorithms). As we play, read, interact, discuss, rant, narrate, research, and fictionalize, we change the narrative of the game. As feminists, the more we engage in this kind of narrative changing, the more likely we will be able to encourage players to both demand better games and read games more critically. By becoming part of the discourse of gaming, feminist reads will be central to how everyone experiences the games themselves. The more voices there are that demand recognition for female players, better heroines, and princesses that save themselves, the more the games industry will have to take this audience into account or be left behind.

Moving From Here: Future Feminist Modding

Feminist research strategies enacted in an environment as complex as video game studies/research/community show up in a myriad of ways. In this article, we have mapped one way that post-play narrative modding can work for those inside the environment to create positive change. The change is not linear, or painless, but as we can see in the increase of feminist communities, it can be effective. To conclude, we would like to sketch a few ways that post-play narrative modding can be used or analyzed in other ways for feminist purposes.

One of the primary features of PPNM is that it creates choice. In an environment that is so entrenched in code, choice is a tricky thing. While we have the perception of choice in games, our choices are actually limited and pre-decided by the game’s developers. I may choose to be one of several races or classes in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (Blizzard Entertainment 2012), but I cannot choose to be a dragon (at least not yet). PPNM supports and creates choice. One thing that Jennifer Hepler’s work in the industry is doing is creating a new type of choice, the choice to play the narrative of the game without much combat. Creating alternatives can be a controversial one for those who are used to things being one way. In the gaming community, players who are white, heterosexual, and male have traditionally been both the ones creating the games and the audience for the games. By making room for choice in games, designers — like Jennifer Hepler — are implicitly making room for the inclusion of Others, thus disrupting the norm.

In these terms, PPNM can be used as a type of creative resistance, by both disrupting what exists and insisting upon choice that acknowledges a diversity of viewpoints. This article has explored one way PPNM can work, through the modification of the narrative of the game in articles, blogs, interviews, and other community-driven practices with the result of altering the way players experience a game. Even when working for seemingly different purposes, such as Sarkeesian does when she critiques video game tropes, in the end she does modify the players’ experience of the game through her critique. Other ways that PPNM could be used is in the exploration of a more mechanical view of modding by looking at the code-level modding that occurs within the games themselves and an interrogation of issues of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in games. While we look specifically at the ways that women are modding games after development, our research could easily be used as the foundation for looking at the ways that other traditionally marginalized groups have also come together to form sub-communities and safe havens while they participate in their own versions of post-play narrative modding (and even more complexly how these different and differing forms of PPNM intersect and what those intersections have to offer for a broader understanding of identity politics). We have been treating modding as a more nebulous term and narrative as a more fixed one (in this instance the narrative of the game is somewhat more stable than in the traditional sense because of its coded nature, until disrupted). Treating these terms oppositely is also a viable path of resistance that many people are already engaging in online — a practice that needs to be abstracted in order to be more fully understood and, hopefully, more widely enacted.

We have attempted to outline a method of feminist intervention in a traditionally hostile environment in order to continue the work that feminists have been doing since before Ms. Pacman got her bow. The work in this community of scholars is vast — from empirical studies to theoretical pieces to personal reflections and so on. We have discussed post-play narrative modding here because we believe it holds potential for both players and scholars to shape their and others’ experience of gaming without needed to be programmers. Women like Jennifer Hepler and Anita Sarkeesian are already modding the way a wide range of people experience games, and we think that is powerful.

For a long time in the gaming community, little support has existed for traditionally marginalized Others, and more specifically women, who have attempted to modify the norm. As the online gaming community continues to grow and flourish, there are a number of sub-communities that exist for the sole purpose of creating a safe environment for women who are looking for an ingress into the larger video gaming community. While cathartic and violent reactions to the impending r/evolution will likely continue for the foreseeable future, we believe it is encouraging to see just how many ways women are enacting change and just how members (of various and varying ilks) of the larger gaming community are positively responding to the disruption of the traditional notion of narratives — narratives in the games themselves and narratives surrounding the games. We hope that with the rich body of scholarship presented in this journal issue, feminists will continue to see video games as a rich and important venue to explore feminist ideas and enact creative resistance.

Notes

[1] For other examples see Kathy Seirra, Noirin Shirley, or consult the 2002 study by Lisak and Miller.

[2] These are the same choices that one can make for BroShep, but it is within the sequencing of the choices and the rationale behind them that the modding occurs.

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—CITATION—
Layne, A. and Blackmon, S. (2013) Self-Saving Princess: Feminism and Post-Play Narrative Modding. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.2. doi:10.7264/N3RN35SV

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On a warm October day, nearly three years ago, a group of feminists at the University of Oregon got together to talk about shared research interests in gender, new media, and technology. We kvetched, as academics are wont to do, about publishing, about how so much of our work was locked away in journals and books that weren’t accessible on the internet, and about the amount of labor we perform (publishing, reviewing, reading) these publications with so little compensation, of either economic or intellectual varieties. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick put it in Planned Obsolescence, which some of us were reading during its online peer review, we found ourselves “entrenched in systems that no longer serve our needs” (2011, 13), if indeed they ever did.

The seeds of the Fembot platform and its online journal Ada were planted that day. As ideas for the project began to germinate, those of us located in Oregon knew that if Fembot was going to work, it had to move beyond a single institutional host – we had to grow organically, rhizomatically and horizontally, rather than institutionally and vertically. And we did not want to create an Old Girls’ Network made up of affinity networks that sprouted from individual members. Instead, we wanted to avoid the pitfall of many feminist organizations – what Jo Freeman described so many years ago as a “tyranny of structurelessness,” which enabled affinity groups rather than transparent rules and procedures to govern organizations.

So we began to hold meetings at conferences – at the International Communication Association’s conventions in Boston and Phoenix, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ conference in New Orleans, at Console-ing Passions in Eugene and Boston, at the Crossroads Conference in Paris. Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford, and Mat Wall-Smith of Fibreculture spent an inspirational coffee hour with us in Sydney, talking about their project and process, and how they had so effectively, in Chris’s words, “performed legitimacy.” With a group of visionary professors and graduate students at Concordia who connected with us at an early meeting in Boston, we began to map out a possible platform. At every meeting, participants came up with new ideas for creating interest and collaborations. At a preliminary meeting in New Orleans, Carrie Rentschler from McGill commented on the dearth of short, teachable pieces of feminist media criticism. And like that, Laundry Day was born! Graduate students at UO mentioned how hard it was to find sample dissertation prospectuses – our Professional Potpourri now has two of those samples and plans to expand to include grant applications and job letters. Hye-Jin Lee and Carol Stabile had a conference hotel lobby coffee break that produced the idea for Books Aren’t Dead, which has become one of our most popular features. There isn’t a single feature of Fembot that wasn’t the product of collaborations like these.

Throughout our conversations, we heard one unified call: smash open the black box of publication. This has led to the formation of an interdisciplinary, open access, multimodal journal committed to innovation, experimentation, and creating leadership possibilities for feminist graduate students and faculty members. Many of us can recount stories about not ever feeling at home in institutional spaces, about difficulties with peer review processes that stemmed from our political orientations. Indeed, feminism is threatening enough to the status quo. When you add to that a feminism that critically allies itself with digital culture and new media, the combination can be downright terrifying to non-feminist or anti-feminist academics. Our experiment in open access publication would need to create a support system for feminists engaged in this kind of research, as well as leadership possibilities for feminist graduate students. It would also – centrally – need to transform how we work. Ada was born of this shared sense of the need for feminist platforms for creativity, collaboration, and mentoring. It addresses the need for a new kind of intellectual home.

Of course, our conversations have been tempered by reservations, qualms, and a host of uncertainties. How could we model the forms of inclusivity the project requires? How can we attend to relations of power and hierarchy in academia, which measures and assess the value of academic work through metrics and indices that are take seriously by hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees? How could we confer legitimacy on the kinds of conversations we wanted to have, while avoiding abstract references to “excellence”? How could Fembot and Ada be truly international, given our limited translational capacities? Why would graduate students and assistant professors want to publish in a new online journal? How would we get work done, given how overcommitted we all feel? And why now? Why not wait until some of these issues could be more systematically addressed and more funding secured for the project?

This inaugural issue reflects our decision to be bold – to take this opportunity to seize the means of production (albeit in a limited fashion). In this spirit, we launched Fembot’s Laundry Day in January 2012 and now this first issue of Ada. In addition to this first issue, “Conversations Across the Field,” we have committed to the following issues, which take us into 2016!

• Issue 1: Conversations in the Field Issue (November 2012), co-editors Kim Sawchuk and Carol Stabile
• Issue 2: Feminist Game Studies (May 2013), editor Nina Huntemann, Suffolk University
• Issue 3: Feminist Science Fiction (November 2013), editor Alexis Lothian, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Issue 4: Open Call (May 2014), co-editors Kim Sawchuk and Carol Stabile
• Issue 5: Challenging the Ideology of the Digital Divide: Feminists of Color and New Media Studies (November 2014), editor TBA
• Issue 6: Open call (April 2015), editor TBA
• Issue 7: Archives and Archiving (November 2015)
• Issue 8: Militarism and Technology: Fighting the War Machine(s) (May 2016), editor TBA

This first issue is comprised of articles we solicited from feminists whose work we valued and respected. From the start, we imagined this issue as a wide-ranging conversation across fields. The conversation begins, as it rightly should, with Krista Geneviève Lynes’ compelling call for vigilance in understanding the “frictions between media activists and media objects in the global sphere.” Lynes effectively challenges the “presumption of solidarity among feminist media activists around the world,” cautioning us to continue to seek affinities or resemblances between media works and media activism in the global system with care and attention to the centrality of very different material and historical contexts.

Sarah Kember’s contribution to Ada enacts the question of feminism as a writing practice, invoking the idea of the manifesto, re-considering the vital contributions of previous generations of feminist writers, like Hélène Cixous and Donna Haraway. In her pointed reflections on the need for a genealogical approach to media history, she asks us to consider interventions into with science and technology through a consideration of “feminist methodologies” as forms of intervention that take us “from dissent to dialogue back to what Derrida calls dissension – the internal revolutions or overturnings that might afford us non-entrepreneurial opportunities or spaces for some serious play.”

Together, Mia Consalvo and Lisa Nakamura look at persistent harassment in video games and other online environments, calling for more feminist work in those areas, but also increased understanding of the structuring roles of gender, race, and class. By linking the constituent elements of what she describes as a “toxic gamer culture” in a time line, Consalvo vividly illustrates the systematicity of these behaviors, asking feminist scholars to continue the work of documenting these abuses, as well as continuing to research related topics and work on strategies for intervention. Nakamura would also have us direct our attention to the myriad ways in which race and gender privilege play out in videogame culture, analyzing the important role played by very gendered and raced forms of gaming capital.

Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo’s contribution addresses pedagogy, another key component of a feminist project for the transformation of the university. Written as a dialogue, they recall their reasons for creating FemTechNet, a sister project to Fembot, that is a transnational experiment in online feminist course delivery that uses virtual space to create new collaborations and connections between different nodes of intellectual activity. A crucial feminist intervention into the growing field of online education, FemTechNet emerges from the crosscurrents and yearnings for feminist community that also inspired Fembot.

Importantly, Vicki Mayer’s contribution reminds us of the materiality of more privileged people’s device-driven worlds and the increasing fragility of the infrastructures that support these. Mayer begins with her recent experience following Hurricane Isaac in New Orleans, a city that has seen much more than its share of climate change driven sorrow over the past decade. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of parts of the Caribbean and the US northeast, Mayer offers us the cogent and always necessary reminder that our ventures into the brave new world of digital publication are fundamentally linked to a material infrastructure grounded in harsh economic disparities.

In the spirit of building a community of critics, readers, and engaged students, we hope that you will participate in this inaugural conversation across the field by commenting on the contributions, tweeting links to it, and engaging with the ideas and research featured in this issue. Because we wanted to invite speakers to comment on broad issues in the field of feminist media studies, this first issue was not peer-reviewed. Our next issue, on Feminist Game Studies, will be fully peer reviewed in a system designed to make the process open, accessible, and useful to all those who participate in it.

Because of the collaborative nature of this project, we have many people to thank for making it possible. Thanks first to our good-natured contributors for their lively and thoughtful contributions to this, our first issue, and for their patience with the process.

A longstanding debt of gratitude to the librarians at UO who made Fembot possible: Karen Estlund, who is also a member of the Fembot Advisory Board; Annie Zeidman-Karpinski, who attended many of our early meetings; Andrew Bonamici, who was a booster from the start.

Many professors (full, associate, assistant) gave freely of their time, enthusiasm, support, and advice: Alisa Freedman, Joan Haran, Nina Huntemann, Polina Kroik, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Tara McPherson, Lisa Parks, and Carrie Rentschler.

Graduate students made this project hum. For their insights, energy, labor, myriad talents, and tech savvy, we thank Fiona Barnett, Chelsea Bullock, Hye-Jin Lee, M.E. Luka, and Jacqueline Wallace. Mara Williams provided the wonderful cover image for this and several upcoming issues. A huge shout-out to Staci Tucker, who took on the work of designing Ada and helping to get it launched.

Thanks also to Chris Wilde and Milo Miller from QZAP, for advice about building community and the platform at a very early stage of our development.

The Fembot Advisory Board has provided guidance, reality checks, and inspiration over the past year. Our gratitude to:

• Anne Balsamo, who provides a key link to FemTechNet and has shared critical resources with Fembot
• Karen Estlund, who has wrangled designers, domains, and so much more from her vantage point in the UO Libraries
• Radhika Gajjala, who reminds us of the importance of internationalizing Fembot and whose collaborative skills are amazing;
• Mél Hogan, whose Nomorepotlucks has been a design inspiration!
• Sarah Kember, whose commitment to experimentation continues to move us all forward;
• In the midst of completing her own dissertation, Hye-Jin agreed to manage “Books Aren’t Dead,” a series of podcast interviews between authors of new books in feminist media studies and junior faculty members and graduate students that will go live on Fembot on 1 December 2012;
• Bryce Peake, our web mistress, who has made sure that our content is visually compelling and fresh and who has handled crises with aplomb and good humor;
• Jacqueline Wallace, whose creative industry experience has made her a sharp and wonderful reader of this project.

We owe Chelsea Bullock a huge thank you. Chelsea oversaw far more doodles than anyone should, she helped organize a symposium, and is helping us with two upcoming unconferences, among other logistical feats (including the first Fembot baby and a dissertation prospectus).

And finally, thank you to the Fembot Collective. Ada – and Fembot – are meant to be forums for lively discussion: for what Sarah Kember refers to as “dissensus,” in an engaged, respectful fashion. We can’t do that without you.

—CITATION—
Stabile, C. & Sawchuk, K. (2012) Introduction: Conversations across the fields. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.1. doi:10.7264/N3RN35SV

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A scene in Sandra Schäfer and Elfe Brandenburg’s Passing the Rainbow (2008) exposes a compelling predicament in transnational feminist media studies: the search for connections, comparisons or adjacencies between feminist media objects in disparate locations around the globe. Schäfer and Brandenburger’s experimental documentary and art project reflects on and theorizes the media landscape of post-Taliban Afghanistan and the scene in question reveals an interview with an activist from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) about the media activism the group undertakes. In it, the interviewer asks whether RAWA works with other feminist media organizations, referring obliquely to the work of the Self-Employed Women’s Association’s Video SEWA program in India. The question was rooted in an understandable desire to see the connections between the activist use of video for self-empowerment across national and cultural spheres. The RAWA representative, however, responds as follows:

We have no direct organizational contacts with them in the sense that they can force their views on us and we have to conform to them. Unquestionably, a person’s thoughts and mentality depend on his or her social environment. In less developed countries, of which Afghanistan is one, women have been told for years that they should only perform certain activities. In Europe, women already engage in all these activities. […] They say: “Women can neither do agricultural work nor work as an engineer!” But that is simply not true! What a European woman can do, an Afghan woman can do, as well. There are no mental or anatomical differences between us. A European woman, for example, has very different expectations and ideas. Maybe her notion of equality is different. A European woman who works in a factory demands the same wages as a man. But the Afghan woman doesn’t even think about such demands. And why not? Because in Afghanistan there aren’t even the factories in which women could work. Even if some women in Afghanistan do not yet have the self-confidence, for some the main issue is finding work!

The RAWA activist’s response not only reverses the interviewer’s question (shifting registers from cooperation to cooptation), but also used the opportunity presented by a question about transnational cooperation to discuss the failures of equality-based models of feminist politics.[i] Her statement thus poses a challenge both to the presumption of solidarity among feminist media activists around the world, but also to the search for affinities or resemblances between media works and media activism in the global system.

The caution about cooptation is to a great extent grounded in RAWA’s experience working with Western feminist partners, particularly the Feminist Majority Foundation. In the spring 2002 issue of Ms. Magazine, under the new ownership of the Feminist Majority, an article entitled “A Coalition of Hope: How the International Feminist Community Mobilized around the Plight of Afghan Women” proposed that the Feminist Majority itself was the primary force behind the shift of U.S. policy toward the Taliban. The Feminist Majority Foundation Board Chair Peg Yorkin stated, “If we had not prevented the U.S. from recognizing the Taliban, think of how much worse this all would be.”[ii] In an open letter to the magazine, RAWA accused it of being a “mere mouthpiece of hegemonic, US-centric, ego driven corporate feminism,” and emphasized RAWA’s role in providing education, relief, medical assistance, and political organization for over two decades in Afghanistan.[iii]

The RAWA activist’s statement serves to highlight the fact that feminist groups around the world are not equal — the terms of their exchange may be unequal, as may be their access to resources, and their political weight at the national and transnational levels. Likewise, demands for equality may be articulated along different axes (of class, for example, rather than gender), or equality may not serve the interests of feminist struggles at all. Feminist media activists frequently work parallel to one another, within distinctly different economic, political and social frameworks, and through media whose conditions of production, distribution and reception are incommensurable. Intersections or sites of cooperation occur through the difficult work of political alliance, the circulation of media objects in transnational circuits or through new media platforms, and through the very labor of feminist scholarship that attempts to understand the global dimensions of feminist media production, circulation and spectatorship.

As feminist scholars of global media, we are driven to identify the considerable gaps in our knowledge and practices at the scale of the global, the transnational or the cross-cultural. This very scale demands an imaginative leap across specific instances in the interest of a critical scholarship that understands and engages the effects of an expansive global capitalism, in the interest of forging sites of solidarity and resistance, and in the service of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty terms a “feminism without borders.” Such scales of analysis (in media, activism and academics) focus on questions of production and reception in cultures of exchange, attending specifically to the differential relationships in the global system and the uneven terms of cooperation, even as the aim of scholarship and cultural production remain to discover possibilities for alliances, alternative histories or new identity positions. Mohanty argues that feminist analyses that cross national, racial or ethnic boundaries produce and reproduce difference through the naturalization of analytic categories, categories that presumed cross-cultural validity, arguing instead that unity needs to be struggled towards by “uncovering alternative, non-identical histories that challenge and disrupt the spatial and temporal location of a hegemonic history.”[iv]

For the transnational feminist media scholar (and indeed for a filmmaker in political solidarity with RAWA), the connections, for example, between RAWA and SEWA are generative for a “feminism without borders,” just as the conflict between RAWA and Feminist Majority Foundation serves a critical warning, an example of an expansive and reductive transnational feminism searching not for instances in a cultural-historical conjuncture so much as family resemblances.[v] A rejection of familial, analogical, or (worse) presumptive associations between media activists and video works around the globe raises the very question of how scholars might find productive intersections in feminist activism within the global system. To focus merely on local cultural production obscures the manner in which, in Stuart Hall’s terms, “historical processes with different time-scales and trajectories […] may be convened in the same conjuncture.”[vi] The current context of globalization, neoliberal politics and late capitalism focuses our theoretical attention on both the very real and immediate effects of a globalizing political economy, as well as the relational geographies of power at the local, national and transnational scale. In theorizing the contemporary conjuncture, however, we must be attentive to discrepancy, to multiplicity of the contexts of globalization as, in Lawrence Grossberg’s terms, “overlapping and competing geographies of locations, places, and diagrams, with their different logics of boundaries (coding), connectivities (territorializing), and stratifications.”[vii] A “discrepant conjuncture” signals also the limits of a conjuncture to account for all historical processes, and specifically those (subaltern) processes that operate outside the logics of globalization, capitalism and liberal democratic forces.

The RAWA activist’s caution provides an important guideline for transnational feminist scholarship: the incommensurability of different feminist struggles, and thus the specificity of the aesthetic and representational strategies mobilized in media work, are themselves generative of feminist theorizing in the globalized present. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in our knowledge and practice, then, these gaps themselves might shed light on the differential positions of women in the global system, and the uneven character of cross-cultural exchange. Such an approach entails a complex understanding of the material, cultural, and political conditions of global contact and of the discrepancies that continue to make contact impossible. The work of feminist scholars of new media, therefore, might be to make manifest these discrepancies as theoretical, cultural and political objects.

The necessity of such a practice is evidenced by the compelling desire to examine RAWA and SEWA together, to work at elucidating in theory the discrepant conjuncture between these two associations. The drive behind such an endeavor is not a taken for granted universalism, but an articulation of what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “universal aspirations.”[viii] Rather than hastily dismiss universals in favor of culturally specific analyses, Tsing argues that universals allow scholars, activists, and cultural producers to conceptualize the global, even as a fiction, imaginative act or aspiration. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s compelling statement that ‘we cannot not want the universal, even as it so often excludes us,’ Tsing argues for a scholarship of global connection through “generalization” from small details, a generalization that involves, first, a unification of the field of inquiry through “spiritual, aesthetic, mathematical, logical or moral principles,” and second, collaboration among different knowledge seekers to turn disparate forms of knowledge into compatible ones.[ix] Such collaboration involves patient, provisional work of bridging and negotiating across incompatible differences. Tsing observes, however, that both features of generalization mask one another: “The specificity of collaborations is erased by pre-established unity; the a priori status of unity is denied by turning to its instantiation in collaborations.”[x] The interplay of these two forms of generalization, according to Tsing, define the global scale.

Rather than resolve the tension between universalization and negotiation, Tsing uses the term friction to describe the unstable, unequal and creative forms of interconnection across difference. She notes, “Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.”[xi] Her method: ground the work of universalizing in specific historical contexts, through the unstable and shifting arrangements of power/knowledge in the global system; likewise, frame the work of negotiation and collaboration in the aspirational and unfulfilled imaginary of a (perpetually unachieved) universalism. The work of encounters across difference in the world thus becomes a model for critical and cultural production, the careful theorization of discrepant conjunctions rather than a single-minded cultural explanation.

Tsing’s concept of friction becomes a powerful metaphor for transnational feminist media production, circulation and criticism, for the entangled technologies, politics, geographical locations, semiotic codes, and subjective processes involved in visualizing sites of struggle across local contexts. Friction challenges the models of proximity, instantaneity, speed and flow, networks and webs that govern the more utopic visions of communications technologies. These latter metaphors ally new media with the discourses of freedom, self-actualization and transparency that governed (capitalist) models of globalization from the 1990s onward. The term ‘friction’ is both material and metaphorical: it highlights the difficult work of transnational translation across media cultures, the specific encounters of cameras and web applications, technical training, technology transfer, censorship, incommensurable platforms and exhibition spaces in which media objects emerge. Metaphorically also, friction points to the generative and repressive aspects of global connection through new media channels. Tsing stresses that friction is not a metaphor for resistance: “Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction.”[xii] Friction is productive of global connection but also importantly impedes the smooth operation of global power.

The focus here on a “discrepant conjuncture” of media activists, cultural objects, and political processes functions as an invitation to conceptualize the gap in our knowledge and practices as precisely the space of friction in and across transnational spheres. On what grounds—through what generalizable categories—might RAWA and SEWA may be compared? Through the lens of video as a mediating voice in women’s political activism? Through their common social justice work? The search for a common lens provides a generalized model for approaching the two organizations, even as the concepts vital to this scholarship necessarily shift from one context to the next, are fleshed out in frictional, paradoxical or competing terms in different contexts. The critical ground of such a feminist media analysis lies not in exposing a common underlying structure in each case—and thus identifying a form of mimesis in aesthetic strategies or political actions—but in examining a generalized category across incommensurable social, cultural and political spaces. It also involves a careful parsing of the material connections and discrepancies to illuminate the historical and cultural differences between media activism, even as one might envision and enact common political and cultural projects across these differences. Questions emerge not only about the vastly different political reality of contemporary Afghanistan and India, but also about the position of women in public life, including within the international division of labor.

RAWA was founded in 1977 by a number of Afghan women intellectuals as a political and social organization fighting for human rights and social justice in Afghanistan. It aimed to involve Afghan women in social and political activities, and fought for the establishment of a democratic and secular government in Afghanistan.[xiii] After the coup and Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, RAWA became involved in the resistance movement, and separated itself from the Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting against the Soviet occupation. They played an active role in providing basic services for women and children—many of whom were refugees in camps in Pakistan—under the repressive regime of the Taliban. Their work providing schools and hostels for Afghan children and a hospital for refugee women and children in Quetta was largely framed by the resistance to the brutal conditions of women brought upon by occupation and political repression.

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), by contrast, is a trade union, started in 1972 out of the Textile Labour Association, India’s oldest and largest union of textile workers founded in 1920 by a woman, Anasuya Sarabhai. The textile labor movement drew from Mahatma Gandhi’s successful strike of textile workers in 1917, and formed a Women’s Wing in 1954 to assist women in mill workers’ households. By 1968, the Association offered classes in sewing, knitting, embroidery, spinning, typing and stenography. Finding the exploitation of women workers still rampant, and the rights of self-employed women largely unprotected, the leaders of the TLA and the Women’s Wing, on an appeal from women who worked as used garment dealers, formed the Self-Employed Women’s Association in 1971.  Its initial aims were to represent poor and self-employed women workers. Their main goals are to mobilize women to demand work security, income security, food and social security, meeting basic needs such as health care, childcare, and shelter. They aim to organize women to be self-reliant, both economically and politically (in their decision-making ability).[xiv]

While both organizations emerge—led by women—in the 1970s, the extension of the labor movement in post-colonial India to the informal sector (a labor movement that had its roots in decolonization) meant that the video activism undertaken by SEWA served to build unity among self-employed women and voice explicit demands for social justice and economic rights. The members of Video SEWA included women working in the informal sector (head loaders, vegetable vendors, home-based workers), many of whom produced documentaries representing their living conditions and political struggles. They formed a cooperative in 2002 to produce educational and informational video programs to shed light on the social and economic conditions of self-employed women, to provide information about the services provided by SEWA (including healthcare and childcare), and to bring awareness to women in an effort to create solidarity and mobilize women workers. Their videos include documentary accounts of the conditions of self-employed women (as vendors and hawkers, home-based garment workers, or agricultural workers), alongside informational videos about the work of SEWA in organizing self-employed women into a worker’s movement. They include information about unions and cooperatives, about microfinancing, or housing projects. Ultimately, Video SEWA aims to provide a tool for communication between groups of self-employed women, and between them and policy planners and government officials.

RAWA’s use of video, by contrast, is constituted by the persistent and chronic state of emergency in Afghanistan, under Soviet occupation and through the multiple human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban regime. The use of video activism served to provide evidence of human rights violations perpetrated by the Taliban, and resisted both the ban on image making and on women’s participation in public life. The graphic images of beatings, executions and stonings served largely to bring international pressure to bear against the Taliban regime, as well as to solicit material support for their social work. The video work is thus largely aimed at an external audience, international human rights organizations and the international media. The videos and reports are largely distributed through RAWA’s website, although they are also included in some of RAWA’s publications.

Yet, SEWA and RAWA both work with women largely cast out from the structures of democratic citizenship and wage labor. The work of visualizing their experiences, of mobilizing collective experience stems from their location in an impossible space, both within the structures of global capitalism (as the last instance in a chain of super-exploitation) and illegible and unrecognizable as political or economic subjects (either through the political ban on public life or through the economic exclusions in the informal economy). The generalizable category—the speculative universal described by Tsing above—turns out to be not the media activism that makes both groups appear to transnational audiences, but rather the gendered nature of economic exclusion at the heart of their social justice work.

Interestingly, this fact was laid bare in the very statement by the RAWA activist with which I began, and in its invocation of the work involved in transnational feminist media scholarship. Her emphasis on the impossibility of demanding income equality in Afghanistan (“the main issue is finding work!”) signals the importance of examining how women are differently situated in and by global processes. The media activism each group undertakes serves as an important site of generative friction, rather than as the generalizable lens through which the feminist media scholar might undertake cross-cultural comparison. For RAWA’s framing of human rights abuses conforms more readily to the documentary function of investigative journalism, while SEWA’s documentary projects are modeled more fully on participatory models of community video. The RAWA activist’s statement served to unseat the notion of the commonality of oppression as well as of the specificity of discourses of empowerment. Her warning to the interviewer serves to remind the scholar that the use of media in activist work engages the specificity of the political struggle undertaken. And further, that common strategies or aesthetics may obscure the differences between the same term across contexts. The frictions between media activists and media objects in the global sphere invite scholars to write (rather than paper over) the discrepancies between the social, political, aesthetic and cultural worlds in which media emerge in meaningful imaging processes. The important gaps—the incommensurable ways in which imaging practices function in specific contexts—rather than disabling transnational feminist media work, become rather the generative site of feminist critical engagement and an important predicament for thinking through the multiple contradictions and multiplicities of feminist politics in a globalized present.

As I start to write this brief contribution to the launch of Ada – an exciting initiative not only in feminist publishing but also in the wider questions it raises about the relation between politics and technology now – it is not clear to me whether, or to what extent, “we” need another feminist manifesto, let alone a futurist one![i] Futurism is inherently problematic, not so much in its tendency to make predictions that may or may not (usually not) prove accurate, but in its adherence to technology-driven visions that play out a limited dualism of utopias and dystopias, of secularized heavens and hells. Notwithstanding the rich and often wonderful visual, popular and literary culture these visions have produced, have we not learned enough about the complex relation between technology, politics and the social to be done with the future today?

Maybe not. I’m reminded of David Lyon’s intervention in the Information Society debate (1995). Neither a celebrant nor a skeptic, Lyon simply refuses to separate technology from ‘some view of the good society’ (7). For him, futurism is legitimate if it is neither ignorant of technology nor driven by it. When it comes to technology, we are still learning to think outside of the terms of all or nothing and to regard it, in short, less as an independent agent – that will either supersede us (in intelligence, in the evolutionary stakes) or act as a panacea on our behalf – and more as a co-constituent of what we call human –  a form of agency that we work and are simultaneously worked with (Haraway 1991; Hayles 1999; Stiegler 1998; McLuhan 2006). If technology is not our friend, it does not need to become our enemy. It is important to recall the master/slave history of human-machine relations at a time when we’re being told that our smart devices and environments are designed solely to meet our individual needs, wants and whims (Suchman 2007). That is because these technologies are serving us in a double sense. They are serving us – up. They are converting their servility into a praxis of TTL (Targeting, Tracking and Location), integrating systems of marketing and surveillance and, by degrees, turning human subjects into data objects destined for advertisers and app developers. Industry-led visions of the technological future have always been disingenuous, but never more than now. There is therefore the distinct possibility that we’ve never been more in need of alternatives. A feminist futurist manifesto – especially one with an eye on the past – might offer one such alternative.

History is often deployed against the errant, beguiled, forward-looking lover of media and technology. I use the military metaphor advisedly. This is a long, drawn out and frankly tedious war between the technophobes and technophiles and their alignment, respectively, with what is properly academic and scholarly and what, on the other hand, is at best the sort of intellectualizing that serves as an indirect apology for capital and progress. Marshall McLuhan’s trajectory has been described and dismissed in this way. Yet his work says so much about the technological environment we inhabit and comprise — so troubles the paranoid dialectic of use = use or be used — that it is being reprieved, refashioned. I am one of a number of theorists who wants to think with McLuhan again, with provisos, but without (academic) prejudice (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Lister et. al. 2009). I’m certainly troubled by aspects of his work, not least its gender blindness. Still, I find its imaginative reach more fruitful than the grounded, but ultimately flattening approaches that oppose it and that use history as a/their weapon. Is the internet really no more than ‘an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory’ (Marvin 1988: 3)? The very premise is absurd. It proposes that history is linear and simply tracks back what the opposition has projected forward, creating, precisely, nothing but a counter-progressive, anti-teleological argument. Following Bolter and Grusin (following Foucault, following Nietzsche) I think of history as genealogy, not teleology – it simply does not move in straight lines.[ii] In this scenario, we’re faced with the remediation of the telegraph through the internet and that process is at once iterative and transformative.

Feminists have co-opted Foucault’s genealogies of hospitals, prisons, schools, workhouses, asylums and so on to tell hidden histories of our own.[iii] Our genealogies of feminism itself are also important precisely because they are not an investment in linearity – in going backwards to go forwards – but rather in ways of recognizing the complex, contested process of iteration and transformation. I appreciate Vikki Bell’s yoking of feminist histories and futures and most of all her observation that ‘the alternative vision of feminism is a display of an imaginative faculty’ (1999: 5). I am drawn to Clare Hemming’s account of what is at stake in feminist stories about feminism, and to her courage in suggesting that we might want to tell these differently – without recourse to narratives of progress, loss and return – if we are to sustain the ‘radical potential of feminist theory’ (2011: 2). Feminist genealogies, in addition to genealogies of feminism, rather than deploying history against the future, engage it through an investment that is necessarily imaginative, even speculative, in the possibility of political change. The premise, as Hemmings urges us to both see and tell, is that (our) politics are far from lost.

I want to highlight two aspects of a feminist genealogical approach to a technological future that isn’t (and never was) all about technology. The first consists of taking stock, of re-reading and of bringing forward, particularly those silenced, forgotten or marginalized areas of feminist debate so that we may avoid the tendency to repeat ourselves or indeed to make ‘turns’ that are predominantly or in part returns to concepts, categories and methodologies we have known.[iv] What, I wonder, would the now effectively silenced discourse of feminist psychoanalysis contribute to the current physics-inspired emphasis on agential relationality?[v] Is the need to extend our range of analysis from people to particles enough to justify the elision of an entire dimension of desire and other-than conscious drives? Do we presume that the subjects of contemporary technological culture lack an unconscious (that desire is a two-dimensional, mind-body affirmation of our becoming) or are we merely happy to leave that realm, that third dimension (or is it fourth?) to the writers and artists of science fiction who, presumably, have nothing to do with us? Do we no longer trade in desire when we write our feminist theories? My own re-reading of the once ‘new’ French feminists (who lie behind Haraway as solidly as Whitehead does), of Cixous in particular, was nothing short of stirring from the outset: ‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do’ (1985: 245). Did we stop speaking about this because of an essentialism that was never, at least unproblematically there, that was never not framed or contested from within, from the recognition by Cixous herself that there is ‘no general’, ‘no one typical’ woman? What Cixous highlights is richness, diversity, non-homogeneity. ‘Women’s imaginary’, she says, ‘is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing…’[vi]

Cixous’ injunction to write – ‘write, let no one hold you back’ – is, broadly speaking, the other aspect of a feminist genealogy that I seek to highlight here, in my proto-manifesto that is necessarily a manifesto of the ‘manifestoes’ that came before it, that also marked the launch of new journals and that sought, as I do too, to trouble the waters of feminist successes and failures and to persist in the project of transforming knowledge and/as life via the exposure of a certain masculinism that – surely – continues to reside there: ‘The frightful masculine fashion of speaking always surprises me. Speaking in order to be right – how ridiculous!’ (Gauthier 1985: 200).[vii]

Xaviére Gauthier lambasts an imitable and imitated (by “us”?) tendency to speak in order to be right or ‘in fact, to put someone else in the wrong’ (200). This is speech without reference to the vocal or the spoken, deaf to ‘the mutilation of meaning’ that must otherwise occur. It persists, she says, even ‘while a new voice is beginning to be heard’ through the gaps, speaking ‘on behalf of the unsaid’. This, perhaps never really new spoken – and written – voice continues to come through the gaps in ‘a socio-symbolic order’ that is not only, but still significantly masculine not least in its persistent claim to be right. If we call this claim representationalism,[viii] and the counter-claim is performativity[ix] then the question for me – following the logic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis – concerns the kind of critical languages (Franklin 2007), the modes of communication and critique (formed by and forming of a voice that speaks and writes on behalf of the unsaid) that are made possible or even necessary by the particular problems and challenges we now face.

The second part of my virtual[x] manifesto addresses this question of problems and, if not solutions then strategies to tackle them. The key to the latter will include, especially, a re-appraisal of ‘our’ — meaning not exclusively women’s, but post-cyborg, feminist — writing. Broadly, and from the standpoint of my own research in media, science and technology, those problems are threefold.

We are faced with exacerbated asymmetries in gendered forms of power and knowledge including or especially where those asymmetries appear to be addressed. This of course is characteristic of a neoliberal rationality[xi] which is embedded and naturalized in contemporary embedded and naturalized forms of so-called ubiquitous computing and in the partially present futurisms of supposedly human-centric, relational, affective, intelligent and intimate environments of the home and/or city. The re-orderings (of human subjects as data objects for integrated systems of surveillance and marketing) that structure these environments are rendered opaque by industry-driven investment in, even colonization of the quotidian, the ordinary everyday life of the individualized user/consumer. It is of note that the machinations of Facebook and Google are assimilated within specific, branded developments of ubiquitous computing known as Ambient Intelligence and Ambient Media. These emergent technosciences seek to reinforce a notion of everyday life even as they change it almost beyond recognition. We need to expose this sleight of hand – this Trojan Horse – especially in the light of reifications of everyday life in aspects of cultural studies (Hall 2008); notions of use and user-driven social media (Lovink 2011) and a tendency in current forms of theorizing to regard processes of affect and relationality as solutions to asymmetries of power rather than as questions we have begun to pose to them (Suchman 2007). Re-orderings at the level of subject and object privilege feminist ethical, political, epistemological and ontological interventions.

Another key problem concerns the extension of reductionism or the alignment of women with particular forms of re/productivity including, now, precarious labour plus a move away from the reduction of bodies to code (courtesy of internal as well as external critiques of genetic determinism) towards a more diffuse alignment between computationalism and (everyday) life itself. I’m thinking here not just of the segue from Artificial Life to Synthetic Biology but of Artificial Intelligence to Ambient Intelligence. The apparent downsizing of contemporary science and technology from claims to artifice (machines that can think and live) to those of ambience and augmentation are deeply disingenuous and, in as far as they extend the reach of biopower through i.e. gendered visions of the smart home,[xii]servile agents and avatars embodying female stereotypes etc, they require a gendered form of biopolitics.[xiii] Even within the short life span of Ambient Intelligence, the iconic agent of servility has shifted from that of the butler to that of the nurse. Ambient intelligent nurses, designed to manage and regulate an ageing population @home rather than in the care of the state, would know when they were needed, come when they were called and cost next to nothing compared with the flesh and blood variety who are already ever more precariously employed.

I would also want to highlight the ongoing mechanization and commercialization of the entire life process through developments in genetic engineering, Synthetic Biology and their alignment with apparently less hubristic projects like Ambient Intelligence and Augmented Reality that are actually anything but. If we were to look back at our concerns in the 80s and 90s with a rationality of total control particularly in the context of imaging and reproductive technologies (Stabile 1992; Treichler 1990) we might ask what happens to that argument about control and totality now that it is, perhaps, more visibly about what markets do than science and technology per se.[xiv] What and where are the limits to control when there is no recourse to nature/body/life outside of their instrumentalisation?

Feminist methodologies are forms of intervention, of making a difference and my own trace a course (not necessarily a progressive one) from dissent to dialogue back to what Derrida calls dissension – the internal revolutions or overturnings that might afford us non-entrepreneurial opportunities or spaces for some serious play. Dissensions occur through the non-homogeneity of all fields of praxis, including our own. They occur through technological limitations, hubristic absurdities and for me, especially through the entanglements of science and storytelling. My recent re-reading of the cyborg manifesto, rightly distanced by Haraway due to its cold war connotations, reinforced my determination to pursue and advocate storytelling as theory for post-cyborgs and writing as a pre-eminent technology of intervention (1991). Bearing in mind that anthropologists as well as novelists, feminists as well as scientists are storytellers and that writing long exceeded the word to include cells, sounds and media-making – I don’t think we have reached the full potential or implications of this approach. If the potential is there for us to do knowledge differently, for example through cell-making that is not for profit and through generating forms of media that are always already critiques of media (Juhasz 2011) then the implications are that we can no longer retreat into our own forms of story-free scientism, disown our own failed writing experiments or talk of the limitations of off-the peg categories and concepts – subject/object, nature/culture, human/machine – in theory as if theory weren’t already a form of practice, experimentation, speculation.

Of course, not all forms of storytelling are treated equally so we need, I think, a re-appraisal of writing strategies such as parody alongside our pursuit of innovations in publishing, trans/mediality and disciplinarity and a shift, perhaps in how we see ourselves in relation to the academy, industry and publics.[xv] [15] In one possible vision of a feminist future steeped in post-cyborgian storytelling, we take more responsibility for our becomings within, and without the academy.