Establishing feminist critique as pushing against cultural resentment
"Prominent feminist critique — present in every other relevant medium, but new to games — has elicited massive backlash and threats to women working in the field."
"The assimilation of games into the larger culture poses a problem for a reactionary segment of gamers, however. It means engaging with a society that, while it is still capitalist and patriarchal, still suffused with racism, has also been challenged for decades by those it has traditionally marginalized. Wider engagement inevitably changes the parameters of geek culture, as new voices and new ideas are incorporated."
- paper on attacks on women/feminist groups online
"When women gather online, and especially when they attempt to discuss feminism, they are not uncommonly the target of negative attention from individuals, mostly men, who feel threatened by or otherwise uncomfortable with feminism"
- guardian on the events leading to this
"Games magazines no longer had a stranglehold on the dissemination of games criticism. Add in the arrival of online forums and discussion sites, and the birth of social media, and we had a new age in which critics, communities and developers were engaging with each other much more closely. Looking back, that was a powder keg waiting for a match."
- Andrea Braithwaite, 'Seriously, get out': Feminists on the forums and the War(craft) on women
- p. 707 details past harassment against women in games
"Such visceral imagery perpetuates a zero-sum approach to gender and power, rein- forcing broader claims throughout the threads that men are ‘losing’, that feminism is ‘winning’, and that these in-game changes are part of a broader crisis in masculinity." p. 710
"The range of casual-to-vitriolic anti-feminism and misogyny in these discussions is not attributable to video game culture as a different kind of culture, or to digital space as a different kind of space; these are extensions – additional avenues for anti-feminist, anti- feminine and anti-woman sentiment to circumscribe participation and self-presentation. Anxious masculinity intersects with aggressive anti-feminism not because videogames are, as one poster said, ‘the only standing ground a man has in this world’, nor because online communities are autonomous spaces for escaping ‘real’ politics – Azeroth’s con- flicts co-exist with the war on women, and its virtual inhabitants carry this context with them. That such rhetorics reproduced across everyday digital and physical environments means, rather, that gender politics are far from containable. Online venues extend the landscape for their articulation and, notably, for their contestation." p. 715
- Richard, Gabriella Gender and gameplay: Research and future directions. In B. Bigl & S. Stoppe (Eds.) Playing with virtuality: Theories and methods of computer game studies (pp. 269-284)
- p. 279 talks about male spaces being "invaded" by women looking for equality (specifically in games)
- Add a sentence or two about people harassed in the past for the same thing: the bioware lady, the toronto lady, etc. I'll look for sources here.
Research/comment on the "gamer identity" under threat and the response to women in games
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Adrienne Shaw, What Is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies GAC 5 (4)
- No direct quote. See 408/409 for discussion of how we report on who plays games
- p. 414/415 talk about how journalists report on solitary play
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Adrienne Shaw, Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity New Media Society 14 (1)
- p. 39 talks about gamer identity and stigma
- A bit on how they're still gendered spaces and marginalized
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jacobin on "threats" to gamer identity
"When your identity has been manufactured by corporations urging you to consume certain things in prescribed ways, then any change, no matter how small, is an existential threat. When women challenge decades of almost exclusively male fantasies of sex and power, this alters the content the gamer consumes. And when that content is altered, gamer identity itself under threat. The vitriol isn’t contrived or artificially manufactured. It has a source."
- guardian, again.
"But somewhere along the line, this excitement with the meaning and potential of games as an artform started to define itself against the gamer community – or at least that’s what gamers felt. Mainstream video game titles were derided for their sexism and thuggery, players were criticised for endorsing the twisted world views of conventional shooters and hack-’em-ups. Gamers were thinking: hang on, how did we become the enemy here?"
Not sure if this will hold up, but we've got other sources which give the basic "indie/casual -> more women, less hardcore" narrative.
- 2008 book: (article)
- pp. 14-15 on casual games marketed to women
- article on twine
- p. 100 talks about the "legitimacy" of twine games
- broadly, talks about Twine democratizing the industry (in re: diversity), not sure how much emphasis to place on this claim
- New Yorker on quinn:
"This group of games shares few similarities with Super Mario’s spatial-reasoning puzzles and Call of Duty’s shooting-gallery tests of reaction speed, typical attributes of video games that dominate the medium."