Digital Library Keyword Archives

gender

- 41 articles or papers

 

Killing Time in Diner Dash: Representation, Gender, and Casual Games [Abstract]

Soderman Braxton
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In the ongoing debates concerning the emergence of game studies, ludologist approaches often dismiss or marginalize narrative and visual elements of games while privileging games as formal systems of rules and game play mechanics. Indeed, the visual representation of games is frequently gendered—for example, when Espen Aarseth dismisses the visual importance of Lara Croft or when Chris Crawford refers to graphics as “cosmetics.” This discourse inevitably reinscribes stereotypical gender formations where the “hardcore,” abstract, formal, mathematical systems privileged by these approaches to games are masculinized while the “casual,” material, visual content, and non-essential aspects of games are feminized. This gendered distinction seems eerily similar to the recent fears and anxieties expressed by the hardcore gamer community over the rise of casual games which can be linked to a distinctive gendering of the hardcore as masculine and the casual as feminine. Thus, this paper will analyze the hardcore “fetish” (in gaming and in game studies), attempting to expose the gender dynamics that structure and subtend the distinctions between the hardcore and the casual.

 

Jane Fonda’s Wii Fit: Continuity, Contingency, and Concordance in Fitness Gaming

Boyer Steven
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

In order to investigate the implications of new gaming technologies, this paper turns to an unlikely source of parallels in comparing Wii Fit with Jane Fonda's Workout video. This historical and discursive analysis complicates the relationship between consumer and producer with regard to emerging technologies, turning to Celeste Condit's concept of concordance to investigate the negotiations at stake in the adoption and promotion of these devices by a broad audience. Moreover, it examines the centrality of women in the adoption of supposedly male-oriented technologies, the impact of these devices on the social construction of the body, and questions the consequences of a reliance on novelty that has become embedded in the video game medium's focus on innovation.

 

Transgressive Gender Play: Profiles and Portraits of Girl Players in a Tween Virtual World

Kafai Yasmin B. Fields Deborah A. Giang Michael T.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Little is known about how girl players navigate through virtual worlds, negotiate their identity, and challenge cultural norms and practices. We investigated over 500 players in a science-themed tween virtual world called Whyville.net with girls being the majority (68%) of its 1.5 million registered players. Using logfile data collected over a six-month long period, we identified three distinct groups: core gamers (7% of all players), semi-core gamers (34% of players), and peripheral gamers (59% of players). We found that all groups participated in common practices but that core players also participated in non-traditional, transgressive practices. These included private flirting with other players and aggressive scamming of others for personal profit as well as public denials of such activities because they violated gender and social norms. Often hidden, these facets of girls’ play indicate the value of virtual worlds as digital publics that offer youth opportunities to engage in identity exploration and border crossing.

 

Troubling ‘Games for Girls’: Notes from the Edge of Game Design

Flanagan Mary
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper presents notes from the field focused on a large project to design an activist, multi-user game aimed at middle school girls. A thorny issue in developing games for girls is the categorization of female players and universalizing their preferences. In the paper I provide diverse feedback on current game-based research project, RAPUNSEL, hoping to provide a multiplicity in the category of "girl" so that new game designs may challenge the many stereotypes inherent in computer culture. I then discuss the game design in RAPUNSEL and how a designer may provide for multiple play styles.

 

Contexts, Pleasures and Preferences: Girls Playing Computer Games

Carr Diane
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

In this paper, issues of girls and their gaming preferences are explored through observations of computer games sessions at an all-girl state school. What emerged is that preferences are alterable, and site specific. Gaming selections relate to the attributes of particular games – but they also depend on a player’s recognition of these attributes and the pleasures they entail. Players accumulate these competencies according to the patterns of access and peer culture they encounter. Thus preferences are an assemblage, made up of past experiences, and subject to situation and context. The constituents of preference, such as access, are certainly shaped by gender. As a result, gaming preferences may manifest along gendered lines. It is not difficult to generate data indicating that gendered tastes exist, but it is short sighted to divorce these outcomes from the various practices that contribute to their formation.

 

Her own Boss: Gender and the Pursuit of Incompetent Play

Jenson Jennifer de Castell Suzanne
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper examines gender and computer game playing, in particular questions of identity, access and playful engagement with these technologies. Because computer-based media are not only central tools for learning and work, and because games and simulations are increasingly being recruited as educational and instructional genres, it is likewise exceedingly important, from an educational equity standpoint to examine the ways in which rapidly evolving computer game-based learning initiatives threaten to compound and intensify girls’ computer disadvantage, a cumulative dis-entitlement from computer-based educational and occupational opportunities.

 

Girls Creating Games: Challenging Existing Assumptions about Game Content

Denner Jill Bean Steve Werner Linda
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

In a reinforcing cycle, few females create games and fewer girls than boys play games. In this paper, we increase our understanding of what girls like about games and gaming by describing the content of 45 games that were designed and programmed by middle school girls. The findings suggest that that when given the opportunity, girls design games that challenge the current thematic trends in the gaming industry. The most prominent theme was the way they expressed and worked through fears and social issues in their stories. Most used bright, vivid colors, and their stories took place in real world settings and involved moral decisions. Few used violent feedback. Girls also used the games as spaces to play with gender role stereotypes by challenging authority figures and using humor. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate on whether games should be gender-specific or gender-neutral.

 

Girls and Gaming: Gender Research, “Progress” and the Death of Interpretation

Jenson Jennifer de Castell Suzanne
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper is about the persistent absence of critical interpretation in work focused on gender and gameplay. Since its beginnings, research (and resulting practice) in this area has moved little if at all from the early work in the path-breaking Cassells and Jenkins volume dedicated to girls and gaming. In the currently very well-regarded and oft-cited volume on “girl-friendly” game design, Sheri Graner-Ray re-instates the gamut of gender stereotypes by now so familiar as to have become “canonical” for the field. In this paper we illustrate some theoretical, research, and practice dilemmas, and, drawing upon sophisticated interpretive work in gender studies and on socio-cultural approaches to research, we propose some tactics for rethinking the very terms and conditions of this by now clearly resilient orthodoxy about “what girls like best,” arguing that until we are able to be surprised by its findings, we can be fairly confident that games studies research into gender accomplishes little beyond re-instating and further legitimating inequality of access, condition and opportunity. This is no game: no fun, and no fair.

 

Pretty good for a girl: gender, identity and computer games

Beavis Catherine
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Young people’s participation in online digital culture is one of the most efficient means by which they become proficient in the management of Information and Communications Technologies and the new literacies emerging there. This paper reports on a small project investigating the gendered dimensions of teenagers’ engagement in and out of school with stand-alone and multiplayer computer games. The study explored the game playing practices of a group of students in an English curriculum unit and the social and game playing practices of a group of young women of South East Asian backgrounds in a LAN café who had formed their own Counterstrike clan. It found that expertise is not just a matter of specific skills, strategies and familiarity, but is more broadly located within the complex dynamics of in- and out-of-school discourses and contexts that need to be factored in to the construction of gender-equitable pedagogy and curriculum.

 

Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family Gender, and Gaming

Enevold Jessica
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds.