Alison Harvey

Histories of Hating

This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media.

“Everyone Can Make Games!”: The post-feminist context of women in digital game production

After over a decade of scholarly research and well-documented harassment, sexism, and other forms of exclusion and marginalization, digital games culture is currently the object of heightened attention and discourse related to diversity and inclusion. This paper considers the context of this shift with a particular focus on the relationship between gender-focused inclusivity-based action in the form of women-in-games incubators, post-feminist discourse, and the neoliberal context of digital games production. As opposed to rife anti-feminism and similar “backlash” sentiments, articulations of post-feminism within the digital game industry provide insights into the tensions inherent in introducing action for change within a conservative culture of production, particularly for women in the industry. At the same time, the contradictions and tensions of the post-feminist ethos allow for actions that function through this logic while subverting it. Through a brief consideration of three exemplary post-feminist articulations by visible female figures in the North American digital games community, this article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gaps and contradictions of post-feminism in games culture and production. It concludes with equal measures of caution and optimism, indicating future directions for study and activism.

MAKING A NAME IN GAMES

This article explores the development and implementation of a Toronto-based incubator supporting local women in developing their own games. The incubator was created to help change the current (male-dominated) status quo of game production, promising participants skills sharing, support for the development of a new game, and entry into the local community of indie games developers. It was at the same time part of a large network of commercial and non-commercial interests with a shared agenda of promoting the local digital innovation scene. These different motivations and actors are considered to understand the nature of this complex social network market and the circulation of particularly feminized affective labour therein, detailing how value, reward, and benefit are conceptualized throughout this network. The article focuses on how and where these understandings are in alignment and where they fall apart, revealing problematic structures of power and control linked in particular to gender and entrepreneurialism in the area of digital innovation.

When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design:

Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professionalization and support of the existing industry norms as credible and legitimate, while relegating other types of participation, including that by women and other marginalized creators, to subordinate positions within hierarchies of production. Using the example of a women-in-games initiative in Montreal as a case study, we indicate how linkages between affect and competencies, specifically creativity and technical abilities, perpetuate a long-standing delegitimization of women’s work in digital game design.

Growing pains: feminisms and intergenerationality in digital games

Abstract In response to a growing focus on inclusivity in digital games culture, both in mainstream journalism and academia, a range of collaborators have organized for change in this domain under the umbrella of “feminists in games” (FIG). This article explores how moments of tension between women, groups, and communities self-identifying as FIG can productively be understood not solely through rigid conceptualizations of feminist “waves” but also through generational and intersectional differences that can shape approaches related to equality, equity, and diversity within this movement. Drawing on qualitative case studies on two feminist game-making organizations in Canada, we argue that such an understanding of generational approaches to feminism and gender-based action provides a clarifying lens by which to better understand the differences and symmetries that comprise intersections of gender (both cis and trans) with race, age, class, education, and other subject-positions. We also indicate how these moments of intergenerational rupture can be linked to the broader corporate context in and around which FIG activism is situated, before indicating the radical potentialities for feminist praxis, a praxis which we argue is structured more by politics and intersectionality than generation.

The Fame Game: Working Your Way Up the Celebrity Ladder in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

This article examines the simultaneously acclaimed and vilified mobile celebrity game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (KK: H). Through an analysis of popular discourse about the game in dialogue with its play experience, this article showcases the ways in which this scrutiny is tied to value judgments about celebrity culture, affective labor, and emerging monetization strategies in games. By exploring the game’s content, mechanics, and economics, I argue that KK: H’s mixed reception is a product of how these make visible celebrity labor and the work of self-branding, intimacy, and engagement in the attentional economy of social media. Through its form and functioning, this game reveals the intensities of women’s work in low-status activities, across play and celebrity culture, and, through this, challenges their devaluation. It is via this simulation of invisible labor, I argue, that KK: H represents an exemplar of what new ludic economies can indicate about the future of digital play.

ARCHITECTURES OF PARTICIPATION IN DIGITAL PLAY

The tensions between empowerment and exploitation are especially heightened when discussing the activities of children and youth online. Discourse in the mainstream press around youth participation in online spaces wavers between anxiety and hope, and corporate frameworks and dataveillance practices structure many of these sites. Yet little attention has been paid to the underlying architecture of social norms that work with stereotyped visions of gendered play to provide the foundation for the interactions of young technology users. This paper investigates how domestic practices constrain and enable particular forms of user participation, focusing in particular on gendered access to digital play and notions of technology use. Using data from interviews with 25 young people aged 8–15 and their parents, this paper examines how social norms work in tandem with essentializing design to mutually constitute gendered expectations around technology use. It then considers how these young users and their parents in turn challenge and reaffirm these constraining and enabling norms through their practices.

Ludic Economics 101: Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games – their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism - as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions – as important as these are – the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.

Networked (in)justice: an introduction to the #AoIR17 special issue

For the last 10 years, Information, Communication & Society has published a special issue including some highlights from the annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This, the 11th special issue, continues in the tradition of sharing rigorous, interdisciplinary, critical research from the event. #AoIR2017 was themed on ‘Networked Publics’ and took place from 18 to 21 October in Estonia in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. The conference was hosted by the programme chair Andra Siibak, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tartu, and facilitated by the Institute of Social Studies and the Centre for the Information Society. Held at the Dorpat Convention Center in pic- turesque downtown Tartu, the conference drew together attendees from a broad range of national, disciplinary, and methodological backgrounds, and we present here a selection of papers reflecting this broadness and diversity of internet research.we propose a focus on networked (in)justice drawing attention to:. How mainstream scholarly conceptualizations of publics and platforms prioritize some networked publics and marginalize others. How networked publics are shaped as an assemblage of hardware, design, algorithms, discourse, bodies, collectives, and affect. How networked publics reflect and shape intersecting power relations of geography, gender, sexuality, race, and sexuality, among others. How networked publics are distinctively local, but simultaneously shaped by transnational and global dynamics.

Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies: Ludic Economics 101

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games – their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism - as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions – as important as these are – the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.