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Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity and representation in video games, including journalists and bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Foreword / Anna Everett
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies Beyond the Politics of the Image" / Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm

Part 1: Gender / Bodies / Spaces
1. "I Turned Out to Be Such a Damsel in Distress": Noir Games and the Unrealized Femme Fatale / Jennifer Malkowski
2. No Time to Dream: Killing Time, Casual Games, and Gender / Braxton Soderman
3. "Aw Fuck, I Got a Bitch on My Team!": Women and the Exclusionary Cultures of the Computer Game Complex / Carly A. Kocurek and Jennifer deWinter
4. Attention Whores and Ugly Nerds: Gender and Cosplay at the Game Con / Nina Huntemann
5. Machinima Parodies: Appropriating Video Games to Criticize Gender Norms / Gabrielle Trépanier-Jobin

Part 2: Race / Identity / Nation
6. Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us / TreaAndrea M. Russworm
7. Journey into the Techno-Primitive Desert / Irene Chien
8. The Rubble and the Ruin: Race, Gender, and Sites of Inglorious Conflict in Spec Ops: The Line / Soraya Murray
9. Representing Race and Disability: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a Whole Text / Rachael Hutchinson
10. Entering the Picture: Digital Portraiture and the Aesthetics of Video Game Representation / Lisa Patti

Part 3: Play / Queer / Games
11. Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games / Bonnie Ruberg
12. Romancing an Empire, Becoming Isaac: The Queer Possibilities of Jade Empire and The Binding of Isaac / Jordan Wood
13. A Game Chooses, a Player Obeys: BioShock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness / Edmond Y. Chang
Afterword: Racism, Sexism, and Gaming's Cruel Optimism / Lisa Nakamura
Index

Sujets

Gender Studies

Activities

Gender

Video

Sexuality

Games

Video game

Identity

Mobile

Race

Informations

Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	03 juillet 2017
Nombre de lectures	5
EAN13	9780253026606
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

GAMING REPRESENTATION
DIGITAL GAME STUDIES
Robert Alan Brookey and David J. Gunkel , editors
GAMING REPRESENTATION
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games
EDITED BY JENNIFER MALKOWSKI AND TREAANDREA M. RUSSWORM
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02573-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02647-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02660-6 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For Kim Malkowski and Armand Millender, our siblings and most formative gaming partners and rivals
CONTENTS
Foreword | Anna Everett
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies beyond the Politics of the Image | Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm
PART I. GENDER, BODIES, SPACES
one
I Turned Out to Be Such a Damsel in Distress : Noir Games and the Unrealized Femme Fatale | Jennifer Malkowski
two
No Time to Dream: Killing Time, Casual Games, and Gender | Braxton Soderman
three
Aw Fuck, I Got a Bitch on My Team! : Women and the Exclusionary Cultures of the Computer Game Complex | Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek
four
Attention Whores and Ugly Nerds: Gender and Cosplay at the Game Con | Nina B. Huntemann
five
Video Game Parodies: Appropriating Video Games to Criticize Gender Norms | Gabrielle Tr panier-Jobin
PART II. RACE, IDENTITY, NATION
six
Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us | TreaAndrea M. Russworm
seven
Journey into the Techno-primitive Desert | Irene Chien
eight
The Rubble and the Ruin: Race, Gender, and Sites of Inglorious Conflict in Spec Ops: The Line | Soraya Murray
nine
Representing Race and Disability: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a Whole Text | Rachael Hutchinson
ten
Entering the Picture: Digital Portraiture and the Aesthetics of Video Game Representation | Lisa Patti
PART III. QUEERNESS, PLAY, SUBVERSION
eleven
Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games | Bonnie Ruberg
twelve
Romancing an Empire, Becoming Isaac: The Queer Possibilities of Jade Empire and The Binding of Isaac | Jordan Wood
thirteen
A Game Chooses, a Player Obeys: BioShock , Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness | Edmond Y. Chang
Afterword: Racism, Sexism, and Gaming s Cruel Optimism | Lisa Nakamura
Index
FOREWORD
NOW IS AN OPPORTUNE MOMENT FOR VISIONARY THINKING ABOUT THE gaming industrial complex (GIC) vis- -vis the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and the ludic imagination, especially as we look toward the third decade of the twenty-first century. Since the remarkable rebound of the video game industry in the 1990s following its near total collapse in the early 1980s, there have been phenomenal transformations in the business, technology, and culture of gaming. Among gaming s more notable paradigmatic shifts are theoretical debates about the primacy of narratology versus ludology in games meaningful play and procedural rhetorics; interrogations of gaming s structures of play and affective engagement on- and off-line; the rise of professional gaming; and, most recently and interestingly, the neo-formalist tech turn to platform, software, and code studies. Moreover, humanities disciplines finally joined the social/behavioral/cognitive and computing sciences in recognizing video games and the GIC as legitimate objects of study. Subsequently, the humanities fields have incorporated vibrant academic gaming studies programs, especially and fittingly in film and media studies. Most pertinent for my consideration here is the fact that humanities and cultural studies qualitative analytics and critical discourse methodologies have crafted particularly insightful analyses for understanding and deconstructing race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability matters in society and culture. And yet there apparently is a notable retrenchment from addressing critical theories of identity politics in gaming, if it ever was fully embraced.
Nonetheless, a sign of our millennial times is how willing gaming journalists are to raise concerns about race, gender, and sexuality discourses in gaming culture and in the GIC. Additionally, today s moral panics reflect heightened concerns about society s increased aggression, violence, misogyny, and racism (to a lesser degree) often attributed to so-called addictive gaming. Consequently, perpetrators of school shootings and even the Gamergate controversy, for example, signify to the public addictive gaming s inevitable dark side. Moreover, the explosive rise in critical discourse analyses of games and gaming cultures in the academy with a concomitant mushrooming in multiplatform gaming journalism-that rightly tracks with the global economic juggernaut that is the GIC-have engendered a robust and ever-evolving gaming media ecology of developers, gamers-users-fans, critics, and industries. Exemplary here is popular gamer, citizen (games) journalist, and YouTuber Satchell Satchbag Drakes, who exposes his audience to advanced game analysis concepts like ludonarrative dissonance, a tension that arises between some games competing imperatives of story arcs and play mechanics.
Thus, it seems safe to say that Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games enters this incredibly important and fractured discursive fray with prescient, timely, and forward-looking treatises on gaming that push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, cognition, speculation, imagination, and creativity. In fact, when Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russ-worm invited me to contribute remarks reflecting on my scholarly writing on race and video games as a foreword to this volume, I was honored and delighted. I realized immediately the potential impact and import of Gaming Representation to the evolving critical terrain of media studies focusing on gaming, identity, and society. Equally significant, I see this volume as fulfilling my and other scholars hopes for and expectations that new research and scholarship will recognize, build on, and move well beyond our own early contributions. Gaming Representation represents, for me, just such an important undertaking. After all, gaming has evolved and is characterized now by new levels of cultural complexity and technological sophistication that demand new voices and insights.
There are several developments in gaming that strike me as necessary to probe (if briefly) before any honest assessment can proceed regarding just how gaming has evolved in the years since my essay Serious Play: Playing with Race in Contemporary Gaming Culture was first published in 2005 in the MIT Press collection Handbook of Computer Game Studies . First, gaming s persistent racial, gender, and sexuality problematics seem particularly disarticulated from our so-called postracial, postfeminist, and post-civil-rights existential imaginary, also known as the Age of Obama. Second, the population of gamers in the United States continues to climb, with 63 percent of US households currently boasting at least one invested gamer. 1 Third, news flash! Adult women far outnumber teenage boys in gaming, and this fact complicates perceptions of the Gamergate debacle (more about this later). Also, African American and Latino American gamers still play more video games than other demographic groups. Fourth, wide-ranging as well as sophisticated critical discourses online that address gender, race, and sexuality in gaming have increased exponentially in the years since I penned my own interventionist writing on race and gaming at the beginning of this new millennium.
These four key developments provide a useful lead-in to my retrospective gaze on conducting research about gaming and identity in the early years of game studies. In this conversation I consider the stakes involved then and now. Starting with development number one, the fact is that society was not then in the throes of a postracial or color-blind societal imaginary. When I began studying gaming in the late 1990s, Toni Morrison, apparently, unleashed a controversy that mythologized Bill Clinton as America s first black president. With Senator Barack Obama elected as America s actual first black president in 2008, the racial discourse in the nation reached a fever pitch, toggling back and forth between racial tolerance and progressivity, on the one hand, and racial polarization and intolerance in American civil society, on the other hand. Millennials, that group of people born roughly between 1980 and the early 2000s, were formidable in the election and reelection of President Obama, and they embraced the idea that their group s political power helped to usher in a postracial, post-civil-rights American society. While there is some truth in the changing attitu