Kishonna L. Gray

Gerald Voorhees

Emma Vossen

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women’s resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women’s play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

Feminism in Play

David J. Leonard

From #Gamergate to the 2016 election, to the daily experiences of marginalized perspectives, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from groundbreaking research on counter and oppositional gaming and from popular games such as World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, Woke Gaming examines resistance to problematic spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays seek to identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players and gamers toward progressive ends. From Anna Anthropy?s Keep Me Occupied to Momo Pixel?s Hair, Nah, video games can reveal the power and potential for marginalized communities to resist, and otherwise challenge dehumanizing representations inside and outside of game spaces. In a moment of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and efforts to transform current political realities, Woke Gaming illustrates the power and potential of video games to foster change and become a catalyst for social justice.

Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice

Woke Gaming

Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live

In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers—some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed—affect their experiences of gaming. The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably leads to isolation, exclusion, and punishment of marginalized people. Yet, Gray argues, we must also examine the individual struggles of prejudice, discrimination, and microaggressions within larger institutional practices that sustain the oppression. These “new” racisms and a complementary colorblind ideology are a kind of digital Jim Crow, a new mode of the same strategies of oppression that have targeted black communities throughout American history. Drawing on extensive interviews that engage critically with identity development and justice issues in gaming, Gray explores the capacity for gaming culture to foster critical consciousness, aid in participatory democracy, and effect social change. Intersectional Tech is rooted in concrete situations of marginalized members within gaming culture. It reveals that despite the truths articulated by those who expose the sexism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia that are commonplace within gaming communities, hegemonic narratives continue to be privileged. This text, in contrast, centers the perspectives that are often ignored and provides a critical corrective to notions of gaming as a predominantly white and male space.

Black Users in Digital Gaming

Intersectional Tech

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities-Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment. Provides students, researchers, and practitioners with a baseline understanding of the structure of digitally mediated spaces such as Xbox Live Shows how the architecture of virtual spaces can foster racism, sexism, and possibly criminal activity Examines how unregulated virtual spaces lead to deviant acts and should be taken more seriously given the potential for criminal activity

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment."

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities—Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment.

Kishonna L. Gray

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