#men are more likely to have a masculine gameplay style because society socializes men to be more aggressive
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sharryash · 5 years ago
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nnnnnnn feeling incredibly motivated to write an entire academic paper about masculine vs feminine gameplay styles
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garp19-alexgorcik · 5 years ago
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Quotes from “On Being a Feminist in Games Studies” re-upload
“The difficulties were more about not being a hard-core gamer. Really, to stay in the industry you needed to be a gamer who loved games more than anything else. More than having friends and relationships and, basically, a life.”
 “During crunch times ahead of milestones, people were working 80þ hours a week.”
 “But the ethos of “manning up” and working really long hours at the expense of any other priority in life is also one that permeates the industry in ways that make it hard for anyone with parenting duties, relationship interests, and so on, to participate fully in the industry.”
 “Issues of labor conditions in the games industry and their gendered implications continue to the present day (see de Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2005, for an early depiction of conditions).”
 “But it was clear that the structures and ethos of production were quite masculinized."
 “The pathways into gaming are social––we often learn to game, are introduced to games, and find our way into competence, through our social connections (Taylor, 2008). We sit in front of the console with our friends and play together. We learn together and spend many hours gaining expertise.”
 “Scholars in games studies have tried to counter the myth of the socially isolated and inadequate “gamer identity,” arguing for the sociability of games.”
 “Social context is a big part of games and gameplay. Which makes it difficult for someone like me, who has friends my own age and older, who are queer women with feminist politics, who look at the games available to them and say “I don’t want to waste my time on that stuff––it’s violent, sexist and horrible” and then refuse to play with me.”
 “Inclusivity is a constant project. Exclusions don’t just “happen” in games or in games studies research, just as they didn’t just “happen” in the furniture-making industry. They are the product of active behavior on the part of those in power. If we want to have an inclusive society, culture, subculture, medium, or academic discipline, we have to work at it by pushing through the barriers of exclusionary behavior ourselves, or making sure we are not part of the snarling pack defending its territory from the “threatening other.”
 “In games, we still have the princesses and hyper-sexualized characters, but there are more games with women characters I can bear to look at, and play as. And online there are spaces in games where I don’t feel vilified and hated. But there are also persistent spheres of misogyny and hate that work to exclude me and other women. Just as in the offline world.”
 “If you identify as a hard-core gamer, maybe you wonder whether I should be entitled to write about games because I am a casual gamer, or a middle-aged lesbian, or really, more a media studies researcher than games studies. But does policing the boundaries of who is entitled to identify as gamer, or write and research about games, make the discipline of games studies stronger? What do we lose by such policing and what do we gain? More broadly, in games cultures, the boundary policing of gamergate embodies some of the drawbacks that can ensue.”
 “Culturally however, digital games negotiate a constant struggle for legitimacy, derived in part from the way that games are not seen as serious. They are still seen as marginal-to mainstream culture, as are the people who play them. Yet, they can be seriously tied to the cultural production of values and norms, just as other forms of media can. It is this very position on the edge––of the mainstream media, but also of serious/not serious––that is used as a rhetorical tool of some of the worst outbreaks of misogyny and hate speech we have seen in recent times.”
 “Eglash (2002) points to the ways in which geek masculinities are racialized, with African- American men cast as an opposition to the geek through tropes and stereotypes that align African American men with physicality and White men with more intellectual pursuits. That geeks and the bearers of other nerdy styles of masculinity have been the recipients of bullying behaviors from other men and sometimes women is observable, although with the rise of the importance and valorization of the high-tech industries, the geek male is less on the outer than he used to be.”
 “Gamergaters characterize themselves as out siders, maligned and misread, trying to protect the safe spaces they occupy in games from the invasion of diverse “others.” This strategic foregrounding of the marginalized characteristics of games and geek masculinities neatly elides or obscures the much more central and powerful positions these men occupy through their race and gender positions in culture more broadly.”
 “The stereotypes of gamers perpetuate the idea of marginal geek masculinities, and at the same time virtually obliterate women and anyone else from the category of gamer. In this, they are aligned with the gamergaters.”
 “the context of games cultures rather than broader cultures, we can see that hard-core gamers are at the center––and this group is generally young, White, heterosexual, and male.”
 “The marginalized geek gamer of the broader culture here occupies the center. The games industry perpetuates this centrality of the hard core. It also perpetuates the centrality of the Triple A titles as the most important games. Triple A titles tend to be the most risk-averse titles, while the indie games and mobile and casual markets exist on the margins.”
 “But the industry, perhaps because they view the hard core as central to their profit margins, is slow to change.”
 “Consalvo (2012) points out that publishers perpetuate the idea of the Triple A titles as the ones that matter through discourses which suggest that casual games are feminized.”
 “In other words, “real games” are the hard core Triple A variety and they are also the masculinized games (Vanderhoef, 2013). Vanderhoef also suggests that feminized casual games are perceived as an active threat to the hegemonic White male hard core. This concatenation of identity, content, and capital is potent.”
 “I want to touch on in this consideration of shifting margins and centers is games studies. As a discipline carving out a space for itself, it exists on the margins of the more established disciplinary areas. It maps onto the Humanities and Arts, but also exists in relationship to the IT, Computing Sciences and Design disciplines.”
 “Wasn’t the whole ludology/narratology debate of a decade ago about trying to create a meaningful and formal distinction between games and literary texts, and therefore methodologies?”
 “Although the Triple A titles were the predominating form of games in the earlier years of games studies, it is notice able that there were gaps in games studies around some very popular genres––sports games, children’s games, early casual games, games that didn’t reflect the researchers’ own interests, and have left gaps, some of which persist.”
 “Chess and Shaw (2015) point out that the initial academic event that captured the attention of gamergaters was a “fishbowl” session designed to attract more of the game studies scholars into the discussion on diversity. They felt the need to do this because of the ways in which “diversity” was being hived off into a marginalized strand of the field rather than incorporated into the key concerns and rhetoric of the field.”
 “As J. Sunde´n (personal communication, October 21, 2016) has commented “separatism is not primarily (or even secondarily) about exclusion, it is not about those who are not there, but about gaining strength collectively as a subordinate group”.”
 “In terms of gamer cultures and groups set up to support women and gay or lesbian players, Richard notes that “ . . . counter-communities within subcultures offer unique affordances for pushing boundaries and rebelling against hierarchy, and they allow members to form and foster skills, confidence, and networks that begin to level the playing field” (Richard, 2017, p. 173).”
 “The vestiges of marginality still permeate the sensibilities of at least some of the gamergaters. The ways in which gamergaters have constructed and us against- the-world mentality that is manifested through a kind of besieged and defensive reaction to critique”
 “While not trying to defend gamergater actions, we can see where the rhetoric of marginality might have arisen from. This does not make it acceptable. Clearly the kind of misogynist rage we witness in gamergate and other events like the PAX dickwolves, or the trash talk on Xbox live, comes from men wielding power that emanates from a privileged central position.”
 “The reality is that making more diverse games will not cause the current range of games so beloved by the gamer gaters to disappear. It is not a zero-sum game. “Having multiple game cultures does not inherently displace others. . . . Multiple communities can exist without taking away from one another” (Shaw, 2017, pp. 159–160).”
 “The impacts of these enraged attacks on women and on feminists and on women and/or feminist academics are clearly to chill speech (see Chess & Shaw, 2015, p.22; Ruberg & Shaw, 2017, p. xxi). If you think you may be subjected to campaigns involving doxing, hacking, and public humiliation, you think very carefully about whether you are going to say anything. The very same people who perpetrate these acts will argue they have a right to their hate speech as free speech. This “all rights, no obligations” approach ignores the limits to free speech that have always existed, and the ways in which hate speech curtails the ability of others to speak.”
 “It aligns with the cyber-libertarianism of the much broader cultures of geek masculinities. The culture of hate speech and hate mobs in cyberspace is heavily gendered and needs to be understood as such––it is not an accident (Citron, 2014). It draws from the structural power that men gain from their position at the center of a patriarchal culture. It functions to exclude women, queers, anyone else who games but is not part of the hard-core male center.”
 ” For as long as the industry understands this to be their core market, it will continue to validate the values being expounded by the hard core. This tacit acceptance of misogyny is not confined to games publishers. Shaw (2014, p. 275) suggests that “Misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc., were not invented by the internet, but they are enabled by technology and the cultural norms of internet communication in which this behavior is supported, defended, and even valued”.”
 “This is borne out in Massanari’s (2015) study of Reddit moderation, and the ways in which controversial posts drive up ad revenue. Sarkeesian (2017), in a talk at 2017 VidCon, also pointed to the ways in which the misogynist men who harass her constantly make money from their harassment. Fox and Tang’s (2016) study on sexual harassment in games shows that, as with more conventional organizations, if management is seen to act to close down harassment, then women will stay, but if they are perceived to either condone, or only pay lip service to censuring harassers, then women will often choose to exit rather than endure. The ability of games publishers to create change in this space is clear, and their unwillingness to do so on occasion can be attributed to either a supportiveness of the culture, or a perception that it is more profitable to allow it than not, or both.”
 “The games industry is diminished as a result. For as long as it remains risk averse, conservative, sexist, and complicit in cultures of racism and homophobia, it will remain marginal to other media cultures. It misses the opportunities to explore the complexities and nuances available––the rich possibilities of games to be so much more than they currently are. It puts a brake on innovation. But the impacts of the practices of gamergaters and the industry’s complicity in them are much broader than that. The exclusion and silencing of all but the few hard-core gamers, and the hate attacks, and execrable behavior toward all who are seen as “other” have a terrible impact on those people.”
 “Now, 30 years later, with the gamergate hate crowd, I did think twice about whether I wanted to write about identity and margins. Having witnessed the harassment of some of our colleagues, I really don’t want that going on in my life. Even though the gamergate crowd might be relatively marginal, they can have a strong chilling effect on speech. Again, there is a self-censoring process that is related to safety as Sunde´n also writes about in her research (see Sunde´n & Sveningsson, 2012, p. 149). However I also understand that if no one stands alongside those women who have been targeted nothing will change.”
  “We need to take these ideas seriously. As game designers, working out the ways that the affordances of games can minimize the game becoming a conduit for misogyny and sexist, racist, homophobic cultures. As publishers, the perception that the misogyny of the hard core is more profitable than the reduction of harms to the nonhard-core needs to give way to understanding that in the long term publishers are about culture as well as money and need to be alive to their responsibilities to cultural diversity. As players, users, and spectators of games, we also need to not be bystanders when the hard core exerts their power. And as games studies scholars, we need to maintain the current path toward inclusivity as a norm and be alert to the gaps and silences in the field.”
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