Play Session III
Monday 18th May, 4-6.00 pm
Room G4, Grand Parade Campus, University of Brighton
A talk at Brighton in association with The Play Research Group, Film and
Screen Studies Seminar and Media Research Initiatives.
Free to attend, all welcome. No booking necessary.
Reconstructing Gamer Rhetoric: A Feminist Forensics
for Videogames
Presented by Emily Flynn-Jones
Gaming has long been considered and cast as a pursuit for young males. The
male gamer identity has recently been challenged by the changing landscape of gaming as content and audiences diversify and public conversations about progress are being held.
The response to this has been violent and vitriolic as a hate group (Allaway
2014) known as GamerGate has fiercely tried to protect its precious games and ‘gamer’ title from a perceived ‘feminist conspiracy’. This movement is undeniable evidence of the entrenched misogyny and inclusivity issues that exist in gaming.
While this may seem like a contemporary concern, it would be a mistake to
understand our current situation as new or unique.This is a talk in three parts, first extolling the virtues of a ‘feminist forensic’ (Jenson & de Castell 2013) approach. Described as: “a public hearing on where responsibility resides for the formation and
preservation of gender-based disadvantage and exclusion, including a principled practice of evidence-based accounting” (Jenson & de Castell 2013, p. 80), a forensic approach involves an interrogation of our own academic practices and how they have shaped the
knowledge of the subject of gender and games.
In this spirit I will review some of the problems that have occurred (and
continue to) in terms of the way that gender is talked about in gaming culture and how these tend to reinforce gendered stereotypes.
For the second part of this discussion, I move to my historical research
project, a reconstruction of critical theory inspired by the Frankfurt School. Looking at popular discourse on gender and games in the 1990s, a moment of intense awareness of gender issues as the ‘girly games’ arrived, Lara Croft landed on our consoles and
women were becoming more visible as players and critics, I ask “why significant changed failed to occur?”. One part of the answer to this question resides in the pervasive misogynistic, anti-inclusive and entitled rhetoric of gamers. Rhetoric that is still
mobilized today.
Concluding this talk, I present my critically informed practice in the form
of a game, or, more correctly, two versions of the same game set at different time periods (the 90s and now). Collectively entitled Rhetoric Reloaded, these companion games demonstrate the unyielding rhetoric of gamers and how this results in exclusion
and impacts the experience of female players.
References
Allaway, J. (2014). #Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a
Hate Group.
Jezebel.
Available at http://jezebel.com/gamergate-trolls-arent-ethics-crusaders-theyre-a-hate-1644984010
Jenson, J. & de Castell, S. (2013). Tipping Points:
Marginality, Misogyny and Videogames. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29