Stephanie Fisher

“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.

Disavowing ‘That Guy’: Identity construction and massively multiplayer online game players

Using Goffman’s ‘keys and frames’ as an analytical framework, this article explores depictions of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) players in newspaper coverage, popular media (South Park and The Big Bang Theory), and Web-based productions (The Guild and Pure Pwnage) and player reactions to these largely stereotypical portrayals. Following this discussion, we present data from a longitudinal study of MMOG players, focusing on our study’s unintentional provoking of participants to react to (and ultimately reject) these stereotypes in their survey responses. We argue this is of particular interest to researchers studying MMOG players or members of other heavily satirized communities, as these stereotypes influence the ways study participants practice identity management and frame their own gaming practices, even in the context of an academic study that was explicitly not about addiction or the negative effects of digital game play.

Producing alternative gender orders: a critical look at girls and gaming

ABSTRACT This article examine some of the ways in which girls are discursively set up as subordinate in relation to boys and men by and within the digital games industry and culture at large, and how they push back on these imposed subjects positions when engaging in media production (game development) under both regular and inverse conditions. Expanding on our previous research on gender and game play, this project explores how the hegemonic discourses of female participation in games culture are taken up by girls who want to make their own digital games. We employ a poststructural understanding of gender and power as fluid and produced through and within social relations to demonstrate how participants are not helpless victims of subjection. Rather, these girls are active in the construction of their own subjectivities, leveraging different aspects of their identity and/or exercising an institutionally sanctioned (albeit temporary) autonomy to resist discursive positioning.

A course on serious game design and development using an online problem-based learning approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel undergraduate course on serious game design and development that integrates both game and instructional design, thus providing an effective approach to teaching serious game design and development. Very little effort has been dedicated to the teaching of proper serious game design and development leading to many examples of serious games that provide little, if any, educational value. Design/methodology/approach – Organized around a collection of video clips (that provided a brief contextualized overview of the topic and questions for further exploration), readings, interdisciplinary research projects and games, the course introduced the principles of game and instructional design, educational theories used to support game-based learning and methods for evaluating serious games. Discussions and activities supported the problems that students worked on throughout the course to develop a critical stance and approach toward implementing game-based le...

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.

Learning Instruments: Baroque Music Gets Game

In the context of diminishing opportunities for music learning in formal education, our team of educational researchers was given the opportunity to create a learning game for the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Toronto, Canada. In this chapter, we document the design and play-testing of a Flash-based Baroque music game, Tafelkids: The Quest for Arundo Donax, focusing on the tensions that arose between the directive to include historical facts about Baroque music and culture on one hand and, on the other, the need to produce opportunities for pleasurable play for an audience aged 8–14. We begin by setting out the concept of “ludic epistemology” in order to situate our design efforts within an emerging pedagogical paradigm, and we review key instances in our design process where we encountered this tension between two very different notions about the relationship of play to learning. Similar tensions arose in our play-testing sessions with over 150 students. We conclude with a discussion of the particular challenges for this educational game in enacting a bridge from propositions to play, digitally remediating a traditional approach to Baroque music education to address the broader epistemological question of what and how we come to know through play.