Incollection,

Games and gender

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Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, Polity Press, Cambridge, (2006)

Abstract

One of the more interesting paradoxes within the existing computer games literature is that while the majority of players are reputed to be male, most of the critical attention directed at questions of gaming and gender has focused on girls and women. For some researchers these issues are important because the marginalisation of girls and women within gaming culture is sexist and thus reflects troubling inequalities in society more generally. Other analysts, particular those focusing on equity and education, have proposed that the use of leisure software including computer games could help to interest girls and young women in technology, science and maths related subjects (see Gorriz and Medina,2000, Gansmo, Nordli and Sorensen, 2003). There is concern that girls avoid these subjects at school, with the consequence that women are not entering related high-status professions. Some game producers and designers, meanwhile, have studied girls and gaming because they have an interest in expanding and diversifying their audience. (Laurel 1999, Graner-Ray,2003) As this suggests, issues of girls, gender and games have been tackled by an array of theorists with different interests, motivations, methods, and professional backgrounds. In order to introduce these debates in this chapter we will touch on questions of representation, players and player culture, as well as aspects of the games industry. When it comes to questions of gender and computer games, it would be possible, and valid, to limit our discussion to the analysis of representations of the gendered body onscreen. Yet, if meaning (as in ‘the meaning of an image’) is associated with interpretation and reception, we also need to be looking at the player. Players (and analysts, of course) are informed by and situated within social and cultural contexts. In addition to this, computer games are developed, published, publicised and distributed by an industry that has typically addressed a male audience. In this chapter, therefore, issues of text, gender and representation will be introduced, and followed by a consideration of contexts: contexts of reception, and contexts of production.

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