Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games
Samantha Tecson, Guest Contributor
The relationship between gamers and race, gender, and sexuality has long been a contentious one. There still exists a set of gamers armed with a keyboard and ready to rally on social media to complain that female bodies on their screen cannot have “unrealistic” muscles. Other gamers are prepared to open voice channels to throw around slurs of the anti-Black and ableist variety when they perform poorly in a game. For many women, the LGBTQ+ community, disabled persons, and people of color (POC), these cruel instances are not unusual. As a half-Asian female gamer myself, I can attest to witnessing and being victim to various forms of sexist and minority-based attacks in gaming. So, how do we deal with and analyze these events? Where do these desires to bully and oppress those who aren’t the “typical” (hetero-, white, able-bodied, and cis-gendered) gamer seep from?
The 2017 scholarly book, Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press), edited by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, seeks to find the answers to these questions. The book collects essays from a number of media scholars examining videogames, gaming-adjacent events, and gaming-related media such as online machinimas. It analyzes its subjects from the perspective of the post-Gamergate era, as evidenced by the way it focuses on women’s and other minorities’ places in gaming. Gamergate supposedly pushed for the “ethics of journalism” but was in reality an attack on women in gaming and overall nerd spaces such as pop-culture conventions. Women were perceived as threats to the purity of gaming, leading to increased harassment for them.
Courtenay Taylor (voice actor of Jack from Mass Effect 2) with an Assassin's Creed cosplayer (Author) SDCC 2013 (Source: Author)
Within Gaming Representation, each essay uses intersectional analysis of gender, race, and sexuality in its discussion of video games. Intersectionality, as coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the concept of how individual characteristics such as class, race, and gender “intersect” and overlap. The authors of the essays in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games collectively show that gaming has far overlooked minorities and, even in its best efforts to tackle “controversial issues,” has negatively reinforced the norm of straight, white, able-bodied, and cis-gendered “hardcore” gamers.
Malkowski and Russworm organize their book into three parts: Gender, Bodies, Spaces; Race, Identity, Nation; and Queerness, Play, Subversion, so readers can “establish a quick sense of topics, games, and issues.” This sets the tone for the book. The contributors, who are “multi- and transdisciplinary,” tackle these overlapping sectors of gaming and sociology, building off data analysis (statistics and trends) of the videogame audience in relation to the ideas presented in the games themselves. Many of the essays revolve around how sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes present in gaming communities create hostile environments, as well as questionable or ideological business choices.
For example, Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek’s essay on women’s participation in the gaming industrial complex (GIC) expresses that because the tech industry privileges men’s points of view, it often overlooks women’s participation in tech and consumption of tech products. When women do participate in the GIC, they often face gatekeeping, harassment, or isolation, which in turn drives future women away from the industry. Similarly, in Nina B. Huntemann’s essay, she details how even in seemingly inclusive spaces like gaming conventions, fraught ideas about women’s bodies and gaming knowledge exist. In “hardcore” gamer’s eyes, cosplaying women and booth babes must be “fake gamer girls,” because beautiful women cannot be gamers, thus they need to be questioned and receive the inappropriate attention they must be craving.
Beyond sexism, there are dedicated essays within the book on homophobia and racism within gaming. Russworm’s essay on The Walking Dead and The Last of Us details how even in the best efforts to include Blackness in gaming, some narrative choices still reproduce harmful points of view. Videogames frequently rely on a Black character “needing” to be sacrificed, so white characters can grow, while other games narrowly associate Blackness with problematic imagery, such as the prison industrial complex. Jordan Wood in his essay on queerness in Jade Empire and The Binding of Isaac analyzes each game’s success and failings dealing with queer elements, concluding that most games still tend to have an overall heteronormative (heterosexual point of view) narrative, despite attempts to be inclusive.
The Walking Dead: Season One screenshot (Source: Epic Games site).
The book really shines because of the way these essays and other contributions challenge the dominant culture of gaming. The contributors don’t stop at examining a videogame at surface level but show how it connects back to their audience, to players. Each essay deftly weaves together gender, race, and sexuality into analysis of games. Taken together, they show that within gaming, there are prevalent issues demeaning minority communities and that solving these issues can be extremely complex. This book remains very relevant, because even though Gamergate is supposedly in the past, its ideas still linger in groups like MAGA supporters and online trolls criticizing women and POCs in gaming.
There are some issues I have with the book as a whole. The first is that I wished more essays would have discussed the disabled perspective so often left out of or mocked in games and by players. Too often many on the neurodivergent and disability spectrum become subjects of ridicule as they’re believed to be lesser than more abled-bodied folks. For example, toxic gamers use “autistic” to mean a bad or dumb player, marking autism as a stigma. If at least one essay covered how the lack of or poor representation of disabled and neurodivergent people in video games affects gamers, the book would offer a more comprehensive and intersectional approach to differences in gaming.
My second qualm is that the book’s final part needed at least two more essays for the sake of balance. The first two parts of the book had five chapters and the last one only had three. This made it seem as if the last section on queerness, play, and subversion came off as less important. Some of those ideas are entwined in the other parts but in its own section, there were just less works to be found in the book.
Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games is a solid introduction to issues of race, gender, and sexuality in gaming. As a female gamer myself, the essays highlighted what I’ve seen and gone through, especially during the height of the GamerGate era as a teen and even now as an adult. I remember going to conventions and seeing the signs for “Cosplay is Not Consent” springing up to aid the female cosplayers being accosted and the internet reacting in vitriol, much to my and many minorities’ discomfort. I still have the emotional scars from “needing” to prove to my many male gaming friends that I wasn’t a “fake gamer girl.” I wish that during my teens this book had existed and that there was wider access to game studies. Now as an adult, I see that what the book gives is context and analysis to the thoughts and processes behind anti-inclusive movements.
I would advise if you were a victim of harassment in gaming spaces, reading the essays may be triggering in nature or just a bit hard to get through. None went too deep into details of different attacks, but the review of certain events such as the multiple threats against Anita Sarkissian and Zoe Quinn might be upsetting to some readers. The hate and disrespect any minority gamer have experienced and felt should not be repeated. What Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games shows is that video games need to be explored from various angles, its effects on minority communities evaluated, and both audiences and production teams need to be held accountable for abuses.
Indiana University Press provided a review copy of Gaming Representation.
