Girly Games and Girl Gamers

Where chapter 2 focused on overt sexism, this chapter explores the subtler, but equally damaging, impacts of inferential sexism, or factors that appear to be nondiscriminatory but rest on limiting assumptions about gender and gender relations. The chapter finds that participants feel misunderstood by the gaming industry, which offers women infantilizing or stereotypical “girly games” rather than crafting interesting games for adult women. It also finds that women often face surprised reactions to their presence in gaming spaces or assumptions that they game to meet men. Like overt harassment, this makes female gamers feel abnormal or out of place and serves to preserve gaming’s existing hegemony, limiting women’s ability to affect game culture. Furthermore, this chapter reveals that the rise of casual games has complicated this situation rather than improved it. In this way, this chapter both addresses new aspects of women’s experiences in masculinized spaces and provides insight into the casualized era’s ongoing trials.

Already Core

This chapter focuses on the ways in which women embody a gamer identity, laying out how their preferences in gaming are personal, contextual, and rarely specifically gendered. It provides an update to existing research regarding the pleasures women get from gaming, then draws on theories of community and identity to address how women envision the gaming community and their place within it. Through this, the chapter demonstrates how women are a diverse, rather than essentialized, group and how both gender and gamer identity can be embodied in multiple ways. It also argues that, because female gamers already embody many “core” characteristics, they have a foundation from which to build networks of affinity with their fellow male gamers, which could help address inequality in game spaces. However, this chapter also continues to show that female gamers’ interactions with games in the casualized era are conflicted, with interviewees struggling to embody both their gender identity and their gamer identity without being singled out for this seemingly contradictory combination.

Core and the Video Game Industry

This chapter elaborates on the theoretical framework that serves as a through line for the book in its entirety. Specifically, it draws on discourses about “core” and “casual” games to show how “core” describes a hegemonic set of ideologies that work to frame games in specific, masculinized ways. The chapter also argues, however, that recent industrial changes, from the rise of casual games to the diversification of funding and distribution platforms, serve as counterhegemonic forces, challenging many “core” assumptions about games and audiences. Using a critical analysis of gaming news, the chapter lays out these changes and addresses both their real impact on the games industry and their felt impact on audiences and power structures. Through this, it shows that gaming is in the midst of a crisis of authority, where previously powerful members of the community fear losing control of it. As a result, they are exerting extra force to maintain their privileged position, accounting for the divergent narratives about games that dominate the casualized era.

Conclusion

Collectively, the chapters of this book demonstrate that despite gaming’s perceived diversification, many barriers to true equality between different types of gamers persist. Therefore, the conclusion of this book invites readers to consider what is lost when sexism and misogyny are allowed to persist within a significant subsection of popular culture, demonstrating how inequality in this area can affect broader power structures as well. However, the conclusion also affirms women’s continuing efforts to achieve equality and calls for greater support as they continue to navigate gender and gamer identities on their own terms. The conclusion wraps up, discussing the book’s limitations, calling for future work, and assessing the potential outcomes of a crisis of authority.

In the Aftermath

This chapter reconnects with interviewees five years after their first interviews to address two main questions. First, it assesses how participants interpret events like the 2014 online harassment campaign GamerGate. Surprisingly, interviewees revealed that GamerGate was not particularly significant to them; this situates the event in context, revealing it to be merely a symptom of gaming's deeper structures of sexism and backlash. At the same time, women’s split identity as female/gamer also played out in diverse ways when they were confronted with this event, again emphasizing the casualized era’s struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces. Second, this chapter analyzes how players’ gaming habits have changed more generally and what factors account for these changes, furthering our understanding of player lifecycle and providing a perspective on whether female gamers’ strategies for managing game environments are sustainable. Thus, this chapter serves as a relevant update to the conclusions put forth in the preceding chapters.

Strategies for Play

While the previous chapter discusses women’s engagement with game communities in general terms, this chapter lays out some of the specific strategies women employ to cope with the conflict between core and margins, demonstrating that they are capable managers of their media environment. From choosing an appropriate game to responding to harassment, women are willing and able to fight for equality in an unequal space. Their experiences also show that managing a conflicted identity involves a significant amount of work, and that within gaming, systems of power that valorize masculinity over femininity still exist. From women’s existing strategies, however, it is possible to see where developers or activists could make useful intercessions. In the casualized era, when counterhegemonic forces have started to undermine longstanding associations of gamers with specific, male audiences, these interventions could be particularly significant, starting the process of increasing gender equality in gaming.

Introduction

Video games in the early twenty-first century face a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the spread of casual, social, and mobile games has led researchers, journalists, and players to believe that video gaming is opening up to previously marginalized audiences, especially women. At the same time, game culture has seen significant incidents of sexism and misogyny. The introduction outlines this contradiction and lays out the book’s key questions. First, how and why do these contradictory narratives coexist? Second, what impact does this have on marginalized game audiences, specifically women, as they try to enter game culture and spaces? And finally, what are the impacts of this struggle, and what can be learned from women’s strategies for managing their presence in a masculinized, often exclusionary space? The chapter also addresses the main theoretical concepts that undergird the book’s argument, including gender, hegemony, and feminism/postfeminism.

Tits, Tokenism, and Trash-Talk

Chapters 2 and 3 collectively focus on the forces female gamers encounter that work to maintain “core” as a definable, masculine sphere. This chapter explores the many instances of overt sexism, where the sexist nature of a behavior or trend is obvious, present in gaming. Drawing on interviews with female gamers, the chapter argues that women’s experiences rarely reflect the diversification narrative—that games are becoming more welcoming. Rather, women continue to struggle with hypersexualized female characters, games that lack playable female characters or offer only underdeveloped “token” women, and, of course, interpersonal harassment from other players. These behaviors and themes work to relegate women to the margins of gaming rather than allowing them to enter the cultural “core.” Further, the fact that games’ masculinized hegemony has been normalized over time often encourages female gamers to buy into and accept their own exclusion. At the same time, the obvious nature of overt sexism perhaps offers more opportunities for intervention than the less obvious moments of implicit sexism addressed in chapter 3.