Shira Chess

A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity

Recently, the margins between gaming and feminism have become increasingly contentious (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). This article addresses a cultural moment where masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars by analyzing GamerGate conspiracy documents and social media discussions related to the now infamous “DiGRA fishbowl.” Worries about the opacity of academic practices and a disparaging of feminist knowledge-making practices dominate these documents. By looking at these discussions and practices through the lens of conspiracy theories (Fenster, 2008; Hofstadter, 1952) and counterknowledge (Fiske, 1994) we consider the broader meaning of GamerGates attention to academia.

Augmented regionalism: Ingress as geomediated gaming narrative

As new mobile and gaming technologies become increasingly ubiquitous, they encourage new modes of storytelling and engagement. This article focuses on the Google game Ingress, which combines augmented reality with geomedia to create a robust and complex digital narrative. More importantly, Ingress combines globalism with regionalism in a way that rewrites the regional as global, and vice versa. In turn, the transformative nature of the smaller real-world regionalist narratives help to lend ethos to the overarching globalist (fictional) narrative within the game world. Through narrative analysis of this transmedia game world and community, this article considers ways that information and communications technologies are able to use storytelling to negotiate complex relationships between the regional and the global.

A 36-24-36 Cerebrum: Productivity, Gender, and Video Game Advertising

Recently, video games have been advertised to broader audiences including women. If advertising can be seen as a cultural barometer, examining these changing advertising campaigns becomes a valuable way of understanding larger issues of gender and video games. In this article, I analyze several magazine advertising campaigns for Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii in womens special interest magazines. Ultimately, I illustrate how productivity through self-help becomes a major factor in advertising play toward women.

Lessons down a rabbit hole: Alternate reality gaming in the classroom

Alternate Reality Games can be used to reinforce classroom knowledge by encouraging collective learning practices and focusing on new media literacy skills. An Alternate Reality Game creates a game space from real-world locations by relying on information, both online and offline, to physically involve players in a game “space.” While the majority of large Alternate Reality Games, to date, have been used as part of marketing campaigns, an increasing number of faculty teaching topics in digital media, technologies, and game studies have begun to employ the alternate reality game in the classroom. We argue that the affordances of Alternate Reality Games are best integrated within a “play-revise-design” format. By appropriating this emerging format in classroom spaces, we hope to teach students concepts such as new media literacies, the values of “safe failure,” and social learning, while giving students the tools for interactive storytelling.

Open-Sourcing Horror

On 8 June 2009, a member of the online forum Something Awful began a new thread, challenging members to ‘create paranormal images through Photoshop’. For two days forum members created the expected fare: a variety of ghostly or generally creepy images (often adding half-seen spirits into backgrounds of real pictures). On 10 June, the tenor of the forum shifted dramatically, though, when a user posted two ‘photos’ and a news story identifying a faceless ‘Slender Man’ in a suit who stalked children. Almost immediately, an obsessive interest in the Slender Man took over the forum discussions. Near constant additions were added to the Slender Man mythos with new photographs, drawings, short fiction, and even wood cuttings showing his appearance in different times and places. Additionally, the story was made into a web show called Marble Hornets. In many ways, the development of the Slender Man character as an ‘open-sourcing’ of generic horror conventions can be understood. Within this process, the communal construction of the Slender Man sheds light on genre negotiations in online spaces. In what follows, the Open-Sourcing, creation, and negotiation of the Slender Man as an Internet-born horror villain, paying specific attention to final iterations as they have been portrayed in Marble Hornets is discussed. By exploring how specific (yet, anonymous) individuals construct, debug, and de-construct a newly forming horror monster, the ways that generic form is negotiated both through ‘social action’ and pre-established expectations are examined.

The queer case of video games: orgasms, Heteronormativity, and video game narrative

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have theorized about the narrative potential of video games. These conversations have helped to situate a complex new medium into the parameters of older forms of storytelling. This paper argues that these debates often privilege heteronormative formulations of narrative structure. Building on the work of Judith Roof (1996. Come as you are: Sexuality and narrative. New York: Columbia University Press), I illustrate how traditional narrative theory relies on masculine, heteronormative conceptualizations of a necessarily reproductive climax. Queer narrative theory, in contrast, focuses on the pleasurable possibilities embedded in the middle of the narrative. Similarly, gaming narratives play in the middle spaces where queer narrative thrives. Using this as a theoretical model, I explore how games are more effective in the narrative middle and provide a new lens for both narrative scholars and gaming scholars.

Uncanny Gaming: The Ravenhearst video games and gothic appropriation

As video games are increasingly designed for and marketed to women players, new gaming styles, themes, and mechanics have become popularized. This analysis considers how the games in the Ravenhearst trilogy both reinforce and complicate expectations of women gamers through repurposing the gothic romance. While the series does not market itself exclusively to women, the narrative specifically places the player in the subject position that implies a heterosexual female. By tapping into gothic genre expectations the games help to marginalize the player within the larger scope of video games. The games play with gothic storytelling style, yet push against many traditional conventions of the genre, illustrating how digital spaces have begun to rewrite traditional narrative conventions, but still maintain their gendered affectations. Through gaming, the gothic romance premise is reproduced, but ultimately shifts the player from the role of an onlooker to the subject position of victimized protagonist.

Strange Bedfellows Subjectivity, Romance, and Hidden Object Video Games

At first blush, the romance might seem antithetical to gaming. The masculine hegemony of the video game industry creates specific genre expectations about video games. Just as “extending play” is about opening itself to new kinds of ways that people play, it also encompasses extending to new audiences. At the same time, there is always a risk of ghettoizing new audiences—reinforcing stereotypes that keep gamers marginalized. This essay analyzes one such extension: the complex relationship between the romance novel and the video game. Modleski illustrates how romance in books, television, and film are often dismissed as frivolous, but also demonstrate how audiences use romantic texts for a wide variety of purposes. Although universal, romance is an experience that can be understood as both general and specific as well as generic and subjective. The video game romance, while not a perfected genre, often struggles with these larger questions about identity and subjectivity. This article explores the tension between subjectivity and interactivity, as it relates to romance and gaming, specifically in the hidden object gaming genre. Analysis focuses on three romance-themed game texts: Harlequin: Hidden Object of Desire, Ravenhearst, and Love and Death: Bitten. With each of these games, I examine the different modes of interactive romance and demonstrate how subjectivity functions within the gameplay, complicating traditional notions of identity and subjectivity within the romance. Additionally, I illustrate how the games ignore the potential of player agency in favor of formulaic structures and subjectivities.

A time for play: Interstitial time, Invest/Express games, and feminine leisure style

Games such as FarmVille and other casuals played on social networks and mobile devices have recently become increasingly popular. Research on Social Networking Games (SNGs) often focuses on the “social” aspects—how this newer style of games engenders social relationships from disparate locations. This essay examines the genre of gaming in terms of their industry category, “Invest/Express Games.” Using the Invest/Express label as a means of rethinking the role of interstitial time, this essay proposes that the gaming style taps in to what can be understood as “feminine leisure style.” In many ways, the significance of Invest/Express embodies a shift toward a feminization of popular video games.

Attack of the 50-foot social justice warrior: the discursive construction of SJW memes as the monstrous feminine

Abstract This essay considers the origin and meaning of “social justice warrior” (SJW) memes. Despite each term within the phrase suggesting potentially positive connotations, we argue that as deployed within “alt-right” communities, it implies a kind of monstrous feminine: a woman who is unwieldy and out of control. We catalogue and analyze this meme using a visual discourse analysis of texts gathered through Google Images and Reddit. Our findings suggest that the SJW meme is deployed to emphasize opponents as having non-normative, problematic bodies, different brains (ones ruled by emotion rather than logic), and monstrous characteristics. We argue that such discourse is potentially dangerous, but that feminists may have the tools to recreate the SJW as an image of power.