Girlfriend Mode: Gamer Girlfriends, Support Roles and Affective Labour Mahli-Ann Rakkomkaew Butt A thesis submitted to the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Honours degree of Bachelor of Arts Word count: 14,974 November 17, 2016 I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, even though I may have received assistance from others on style, presentation and linguistic expression. Signed: Date: 15/11/2016 i ABSTRACT This thesis is an investigation of ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ and deconstructs the stereotypes surrounding this particular phenomenon by presenting the accounts of the lived experiences of those who may be labelled as a ‘Gamer Girlfriend’. In its place, the term ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ gestures towards the complexity of affective relationships at the nexus of gaming, romantic relationships and the experiences of women. Exploring the particular barriers in gaming faced by women, this research has conducted interviews with women who have played videogames with their partners, so as to form a more nuanced and multifaceted picture of the role of women in gaming. This thesis critically examines the dynamics of what are otherwise considered to be positive relationships, and examines how these dynamics may impact on women’s experiences of gaming. Focusing on relationship dynamics and the interplay of gender, constructs a framework that apprehends gaming as a culture which is situated within wider social contexts, rather than insulated or segregated from everyday lived experiences. This thesis uses the critical identity theory of existential feminism to shed light on the underlying heteronormative limitations imposed by the games industry, the gaming ‘community’, and media discourses. This research’s ethnographic data is analysed with the theories of ‘affective labour’ and ‘gender performativity’. These discussions explore the negotiations and sways of affective powers in relationship dynamics, traditional gender roles, and the ‘hypermasculinity’ of gaming culture, conveyed in the ‘modulation’ of gender performance and gaming practices – the limited ‘modes’ in which women are afforded to express themselves in gaming. ii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................iii Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Literature Review ............................................................................................ 8 Chapter 2: Method and Results ....................................................................................... 23 Chapter 3: Affective Labour, Relationship Dynamics and Gaming Practices ................ 30 Chapter 4: Affordances of Gender and Identity in Gaming Culture ............................... 42 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 55 References ....................................................................................................................... 58 Ludography ..................................................................................................................... 66 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 67 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremostly, I would like to acknowledge my supervisor Dr Thomas Apperley. His wisdom, wealth of knowledge, compassion, cheeky humour, dedication to diversity, and his enthusiasm for the feminist anthem “No Scrubs” by TLC, have been invaluable to my overall growth as an intellectual, academic and active community member. It has been an honour and my great fortune to have been mentored by Tom. Thankyous to my first teachers, my parents, who taught me how to be compassionate through their boundless empathy, love, and support. Thank you for nurturing my eclectic passions and instilling a love of learning. To my friends and mentors, Robbie Fordyce and Kyle Moore. Thank you for always freely sharing with me your piercing insight, top advice and quality puns. Additional thanks to the “Pomodoro Crew” for the respectful study space and numerous motivational gifs. Thankyous to everyone who taught me at UNSW for nurturing my intellectual development throughout my undergraduate degree. Particular acknowledgements must go to my honours tutors, Dr Michael Richardson, Dr Sean Pryor and Dr Mark Stevens. Thank you for sharing with me your expertise and for expeditiously developing my critical and research skills during the steep learning curve of honours. Thankyous to my fellow Press Start editorial board members: Matt Barr, Landon Berry, Daniel Dunne, Charlie Ecenbarger, Sarah Evans, Lorraine Murray, Michael James Scott, and last but not least, Lars de Wildt. Thank you for being a wonderful and intelligent collective, for the generosity shown to your fellow academic colleagues, and of course, for the rainbow emoticons. iv I am incredible grateful to have been a part of an exceptional honours cohort. This year wouldn’t have been nearly as hilarious and inspiring without each of their fierce smarts and interminable encouragement. Particular thanks must go to my dear Kyla Allison for being my rock and closest friend. I truly cherish our most beautiful de Beauvoir x de Beauvoir friendship. Thanks to my enduring friend Chris, for always being there for me over the years, for his unconditional love and support, and for all the memories and laughs we’ve shared. Thankyous to my friend Tor, for his endless enthusiasm, his inquisitive mind, and for being a sweet cinnamon scroll. Thank you Em for her loveliness, letters and for her flippin’ amazing cookies. Thank you Alex for his amusing dedication to snapchat, playing Destiny with me, and for being cool. Many thanks to all my friends whom I unfortunately cannot fit into this list of love and gratitude. Thankyous to my interviewees for their crucial role in this research. It is their statements which are undeniably the backbone of this thesis. This thesis is dedicated to the bravery and invisible affective labour, performed everyday by the girls, women, and voices appealing for diversity, in and on the peripheries of gaming. Thank you to the intersectional feminists working in gaming, and to the academics who conduct and support such research. Thank you to all who fight for diversity and inclusivity, even in the face of systemic adversity and persecution. Thank you to everyone carrying revolutionary flames, who create safe spaces for healing, refuge and solidarity, and who stand with us against inequality. We fight together (๑•̀ㅂ•́)✧و 1 One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. – Simone de Beauvoir 1 Gender is the cultural meaning and form that that body acquires, the variable modes of that body's acculturation. – Judith Butler 2 One is not born a gamer, one becomes one. – Adrienne Shaw 3 INTRODUCTION The three of us stood in a triangle while we reminisced about World of Warcraft ([WoW] Blizzard Entertainment 2004). Before long, we discovered that in our halcyon days of exploring the virtual Kingdom of Azeroth, we had each chosen to play as a ‘healer’ class. Sylvanas 4 remarked, “I like the power of letting someone die if they piss me off.” We all laughed and nodded knowingly. We were women bonding over the shared empowerment of subverting the social assumptions of ‘support roles’ – of healers and women – as being subservient. Healers are seen to be a feminised class since they are ‘non-aggressive’ roles in gaming. Traditional gender roles observe women as self-sacrificing, naturally maternal and instinctive carers. 5 In turn, these gender essentialist assumptions (the belief that there are innate, fixed differences between men and women as defined by biological sex) 1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London: Vintage, 2010, 293. Originally published as Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1949). 2 Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex,” Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986), 35. 3 Adrienne Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 2 (2013). 4 For individual anonymity and privacy, names have been changed to pseudonyms. We have chosen the names of videogame characters. 5 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex. 2 enforce the expectation – even requirement – for women to play multiplayer games as healers and support roles. 6 When I expressed that we had ‘chosen’ to play as healers, it is perhaps, dishearteningly, an overstatement of agency, certainly in my own case. I was introduced to the game by my boyfriend who was a long-time WoW player. Originally, I wanted to play as a DPS character (Damage Per Second), such as a Mage, but my partner convinced me that it would be for the best if I played as a healer instead. He proposed to create a new character in a ‘tanking’ class, and so together we would be able to skip dungeon queues as a couple – it would be a partnership in life as well as in our gaming practices. This thesis is an investigation of ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ and deconstructs the stereotypes surrounding this particular phenomenon by presenting the accounts of the lived experiences of those who may be labelled as a ‘Gamer Girlfriend’. In its place, the term ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ gestures towards the complexity of affective relationships at the nexus of gaming, romantic relationships and the experiences of women. Exploring the particular barriers in gaming faced by women, this research has conducted interviews with women who have played videogames with their partners, so as to form a more nuanced and multifaceted picture of the role of women in gaming. This thesis critically examines the dynamics of what are otherwise considered to be positive relationships, and will investigate how these dynamics may impact on women’s experiences of gaming. This thesis contextualises the particular manners in which ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ are marginalised within the more palpable expressions of misogyny made visible in the history of gaming and the mediascape of gaming networks. The dominant ideology of patriarchy is performed in particular ways within the toxic masculinity of gaming culture, expressed in the patterns of normalised verbal abuse, exclusion and objectification of 6 Rabindra A. Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man: An Examination of Gender Disparity in League of Legends,” Games and Culture, vol. 10, no. 5 (2015): 438-462. 3 women. 7 This ‘new gaming public’ is delineated by ‘hypermasculinity’, which privileges masculinity over femininity, and is hostile towards femininity – observing femininity as undesirable and ‘other’. 8 The amplification of the new gaming public through social media obfuscates everyday expressions of misogyny by forming hypermasculinity as a status quo of gaming culture. 9 The new gaming public points to the practices of inclusion as reciprocally being practices of exclusion, as women are ‘included’ in highly regulated, hypersexualised or defeminised manners. In order to investigate how the hypermasculine status quo of gaming culture, 10 and affective gendered social dynamics, 11 shape the affordances of women – not only in gaming spaces, but both online and offline 12 – this research coalesces theories and approaches from across multiple disciplines. While this thesis situates itself within the interdisciplinary field of game studies, this research’s theoretical framework draws on approaches from media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. Through the focus of negotiating relationship dynamics, this research offers an account of how everyday social relations shape the identities women are afforded in gaming. This thesis contends that gaming is not essentially an isolated, autonomous or private practice, but one which cannot be separated from our everyday ‘lifeworlds’. 13 By examining 7 c.f. Fat, Ugly or Slutty (blog); Jen Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, “Cheerleaders/booth babes/ Halo hoes: pro-gaming, gender and jobs for the boys,” Digital Creativity, vol. 20, no. 4 (2009): 239-525; Sian Tomkinson and Tauel Harper, “The position of women in video game culture: Perez and Day's Twitter Incident,” Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 4 (2015): 617-634. 8 Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity and Dickwolves,” 401. 9 Ibid., 401-402. 10 Ibid. 11 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Cameron Lyanne Macdonald and Carmen Siriani, Working in the Service Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Michael Hardt, “Affective Labour,” boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (1999): 89-100. 12 danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” in Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. by Zizi Papacharissi, 39-58 (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2010); Brian P. Bloomfield, et al., “Bodies, technologies and action possibilities: when is an affordance?,” Sociology, vol. 44, no. 3 (2010): 415-433. 13 Michael Jackson, Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 4 gaming as a shared activity practiced by couples, this thesis recognises gaming as being part of broader, social dynamics, and makes sense of lived experiences within an ecology of media use. 14 This is founded on the premises that: a) gaming is submerged and entangled within our daily lives; b) the identities and gaming practices of women are influenced by these lived experiences and social pressures; and c) women are not amorphous beings, but exist complexly in processes of ‘becoming’. To first understand the extent of the marginalisation of ‘Gamer Girlfriends’, this thesis will trace the historical marginalisation of women in gaming. From the institutionalised discrimination during the formation of computer programming industries, 15 to the present milieu of gaming culture and its visceral hostility towards women and feminism, 16 this segment of the literature review offers a chronological account of systematic oppression. By foregrounding the hostility against women, it unravels the present hypermasculine state of gaming, and sheds light on the peculiar manners in which gaming culture impresses its norms on romantic relationships. 14 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994. Originally published (New York: Mentor, 1964); Thomas Apperley, Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010). 15 Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012); Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Brendan Keogh, “Hackers, gamers and cyborgs,” Overland (2015). 16 c.f. Mia Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for Feminist Game Studies Scholars,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 1 (2012); Dan Golding and Leena van Deventer, Game Changers (Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2016); Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 56, no. 3 (2012): 401-416; Katherine Cross, “Empire of Dirt: How GamerGate’s Misogynistic Policing of ‘Gamer Identity’ Degrades the Whole Gaming Community,” Feministing, October 23, 2014; Dustin Kidd and Amanda J. Turner, “The #GamerGate Files: Misogyny in the Media,” in Defining Identity and the Changing Scope of Culture in the Digital Age, ed. by Alison Novak and Imaani Jamillah El-Burki, 117-139 (Hershey: IGI Global, 2016); Adrienne Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures,” New Media & Society (2015); Maureen Ryan, “The Threats Against Anita Sarkeesian Expose The Darkest Aspects Of Online Misogyny,” The Huffington Post, October 15, 2015; Adrienne Shaw, “The Internet Is Full of Jerks, Because the World Is Full of Jerks: What Feminist Theory Teaches Us About the Internet,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 3 (2014): 273-277; Brianna Wu, “No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry,” Polygon, July 22, 2014. 5 From this foundation, this thesis examines the relevant academic literature of affective dynamics of couples who game together. In one study, it was found that women were expected to play as support roles for their male partners. 17 In another study, women were found to feel as if they were ‘widows’ to their gaming addicted partners. 18 In each study, the authors made a call for further qualitative research, in order to continue documenting the experiences of women as affected by relationships and gaming practices, so as to form interventions into the unique problems and pressures faced by women in gaming relationships. This thesis addresses this gap of knowledge by presenting ethnographic data about the affective negotiations of women who play videogames with their partners. This literature review acts as a collection of evidence against claims that women are: a) more privileged in gaming spaces due to their ‘desirability’; 19 b) ‘professional victims’ and ‘sexual predators’ who exploit ‘defenceless geek boys’; 20 and c) that the current state of gaming does not need to change, and should be responsive only to the ‘gaming market’. 21 Throughout the literature review, this thesis embraces a feminist theoretical framework in order to evaluate the ways in which these constructions are enacted through relationships and impact the everyday experience of gaming. The second part of this thesis will report on the collected ethnographic data. This research provides ‘thick descriptions’ from in-depth and semi-structured interviews, in order to 17 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man.” 18 Jason C. Northrup and Sterling Shumway, “Gamer Widow: A phenomenological Study of Spouses of Online Video Game Addicts,” The American Journal of Family Therapy, vol. 42, no. 4 (2014): 269-281; Sarah M. Coyne, et al., “Gaming in the Game of Love: Effects of Video Games on Conflict in Couples,” Family Relations, vol. 61 (2012): 388-396. 19 James Robson, “Women In Gaming Receive More Praise And Privilege Than Men,” Reaxxion, February 15, 2015; Alexander Anderson, “Gamer Girl Privilege Is Real,” Reaxxion, December 1, 2014. 20 Ashley Lynch, “Gamergate Myths: Corruption, Collusion and Professional Victimhood” (blog), January 21, 2015; Jay Sherman, “How Patreon Is Getting Gamed By Privileged White Women,” Reaxxion, March 13, 2015; Zennistrad, “Video Games and the ‘Professional Victim’ Narrative” (blog). 21 c.f. /KotakuInAction, “Why Diversity Doesn’t Matter, Despite the Cries of Media Critics” (online forum); Leigh Alexander, “‘Gamers’ don't have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over,” Gamasutra, August 28, 2014. 6 consider how the dynamics of romantic intimacy shape women’s gaming practices and complex gamer and non-gamer identities. The analysis of the data applies Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminist sensibility (The Second Sex is a thematically appropriate text in terms of critiquing traditional gender roles), combined with the method of existential ethnography, as proposed by Michael Jackson, in which the unique experience of each woman interviewed in this research is valued in and of itself.22 This analysis follows the theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler 23 and Adrienne Shaw, 24 in observing gender as a construct. As quoted in the epigraph of this thesis, each author has expressed a progression of ‘becoming’: becoming into womanhood, becoming into ‘modes’ of gender (performing a spectrum of masculine and feminine signifiers), and becoming into the ‘gamer identity’. This research observes notions of ‘identity’ as being an assembled speech-act between people and spaces, rather than an internal, static or definitive locus of objective truth. 25 These theories of becoming are further integrated into the methodological approach, as this thesis considers the identities of interviewees as being in continuous and nuanced processes of becoming. 26 In this methodological framework of becoming, this thesis focuses on contextuality and richness in qualitative data, over universal claims. 27 This approach is crucial in this thesis since women have often been silenced by the oppressive hypermasculinity of gaming. 28 A feminist existential ethnographic approach allows this research to perform as a platform for women to reclaim their voice in gaming. 22 Jackson, Lifeworlds. 23 Butler, “Sex and Gender”; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). 24 Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 25 Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers.” 26 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 293; Butler, “Sex and Gender,” 35; Shaw, “On Not Becoming Gamers.” 27 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, 47; Apperley, Gaming Rhythms; Sarah Pink, et al., Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publishing, 2016). 28 Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 7 In its reflection of the themes from the gathered ethnographic data, this research’s analysis is divided into two parts using the theories of ‘affective labour’ and ‘gender performativity’. Overall, the discussions investigate how gaming affects intimate relationship dynamics and, in turn, how the gender dynamics in relationships impact the gaming practices of women. 8 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW This literature review examines previous studies of gender essentialism and the hypermasculinity of gaming, in order to locate what norms may be entrenched within the gender dynamics of couples who play videogames together. This literature review firstly maps out the history of women in computing, observing the exclusion of women from gender essentialist notions about the natural competencies women and men have with technology. In turn, these gender essentialist assumptions have resulted in the absence of women in computing careers and have discouraged women to study computer science. The second section of this literature review traces a history of hypermasculinity and observes the gender essentialism of marketing by gaming magazines forming the restrictively masculine gaming demographic. Altogether, the normalised production and marketing of hypermasculine videogames has created a hostile environment for women, as they become seen as outsiders, or are only included in limited and sexist roles. This hostility has palpably accumulated in the 2014 ‘Gamergate’ controversy and its coordinated harassment targeting women in gaming. In this post-Gamergate climate, these hypermasculine norms influence gaming practices within intimate relationships. These have been observed in previous studies which report that women feel pressured to act self-sacrificing and play as support roles for their boyfriends in gaming, 29 and that women feel as if they are ‘widows’ to their gaming addicted partners who neglect their relationship in order to play videogames. 30 A History of Women in Computing In 1967, an article in Cosmopolitan advertised: 29 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man.” 30 Northrup and Sterling Shumway, “Gamer Widow.” 9 Now have come the big, dazzling computers – and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store. And if it doesn’t sound like women’s work – well, it just is. 31 (See: Appendix: Figure 1) Arguments of gender essentialism are often deployed to explain the absence of women in male-dominated spaces, careers, and communities – such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. What is often overlooked in gender essentialist statements – ‘women do not belong in STEM fields’ – is how these spaces were not always male-dominated. Janet Abbate 32 questions the gendering of computer programming by tracing the development of what was once considered to be “women’s work” through to its sudden drop of women in 1984. 33 Through an investigation of newspaper archives, and by conducting interviews with the first generation of programming professionals, Abbate reveals how the gender imbalance in computer programming occurred when the young industry ‘caught on’ that this supposed ‘feminised’ secretarial task was not at all what was assumed to be (simple and unchallenging), but rather required the ‘masculine-coded’ problem-solving skills of logic. Computer programming suddenly rebranded itself as a profession ‘for men’, sidelining the pioneering women in the field, and fairly abruptly began to discourage women, through skewing interview requirements by evaluating arbitrary masculine behaviours and favouring the qualifications which white men would traditionally acquire. 34 Abbate’s research not only exposes the structural exclusion of women and people of colour from 31 Lois Mandel, “The Computer Girls,” Cosmopolitan, 1967, 52. 32 Abbate, Recoding Gender. 33 Caitlin Kenney and Steve Henn, “Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding,” Planet Money (podcast), October 17, 2014. 34 Abbate, Recoding Gender, 72. 10 the computing industry, but furthermore, how the stereotypes of the gendered spaces of computing have been built upon gender essentialist assumptions which are entirely self- perpetuating and artificial. In light of Abbate’s research, we can see that women are underrepresented in computer programming, not because they are naturally incompetent at the task, but because they have been excluded by the re-gendering of the computer industry. It would seem that through a sharp reformation of ‘who’ would be considered to be the imagined ideal employee of the industry, women have been directly and indirectly discouraged by their potential employers, in order to preference and privilege men. The role of gendered toy purchases by parents has had a further impact on the incidental discouragement of girls and women from computers and gaming. In Unlocking the Clubhouse, Jane Margolis and Allen Fisher interviewed university students majoring in computer science (1995-1999) in order to understand the gender gap in computing and the significant drop of women in computing since 1984. 35 They noted the importance of students who started out by playing digital games on computers at home. Their data showed that only 17 percent of women, compared to 40 percent of men, were given a computer early on in life. 36 For men, the introduction to computers was quite often through their fathers, while girls were only encouraged later in life after they had begun to have shown an interest. While girls were given computers around middle school (8- 10), by this time, boys were already familiar with computers. Margolis and Fisher noticed that the gendering of computers being bought for children reflected the same manner in which toys are often uncritically gendered (i.e. ‘dolls are for girls’ and ‘cars are for boys’). This resulted in a tendency of parents to buy computers for boys, as if it were an innate interest, but not for girls. This is unsurprising since games are marketed towards boys 35 Kenney and Henn, “When Women Stopped Coding.” 36 Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 23. 11 (see below), and these games are a core interest for owning and tinkering with a computer at a young age. 37 A History of Hypermasculinity in Gaming In Graeme Kirkpatrick’s extensive analysis of the formation of gaming culture by UK gaming magazines between 1981 to 1995, 38 he observes that the archetypal gamer was fabricated as a marketing strategy to distance the ‘uncool parent figure’ from games, by refashioning gaming culture as ‘cool’ and ‘desirable’ for a target market of young, white males. Gaming is a culture which revolves around a highly commodified product, and this element of being a commodity is often overlooked (by both consumers and researchers) when gaming is considered as purely an activity. In March 1985, the term ‘gameplay’ was introduced by magazines in order to create a ‘normative’ criteria to critique games. Focusing on how gameplay was used in gaming magazines, Kirkpatrick’s study revealed that ‘good gameplay’ was thus a mark of a ‘good game’, but did so without clearly explaining what ‘good gameplay’ was, other than being desirable: it simply signified the ‘good taste’ of a ‘cool’, ‘authentic gamer’. ‘Gameplay’ therefore aided in the cultivation of the ‘authentic gamer’ identity: “the true gamer is one who understands and appreciates good gameplay and the ‘gamer’s game’ is the one that has it in abundance.” 39 Kirkpatrick’s research illuminates the ‘authentic gamer’ archetype of the ‘straight-white-cisgender-male youth’ as being largely manufactured by gaming 37 Ibid., 24; Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, “Chess for girls? Feminism and computer games,” in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games, ed. by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, 2-45 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 38 Graeme Kirkpatrick, The Formation of Gaming Culture UK Gaming Magazines, 1981-1995 (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2015); Graeme Kirkpatrick, “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981-1995,” Game Studies, vol. 12, no. 1 (September, 2012). 39 Kirkpatrick, “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field.” 12 magazines to create a target market in order to sell games and gaming magazines to young men. The market for digital games has grown alongside the aging audience and now accommodates adult gamers. Nevertheless, it is still largely masculine. The assumed target demographic is apparent in AAA gaming 40 where the majority of characters represented are male. 41 Targeting an imagined demographic for the entirety of the medium of gaming, not only homogenises the gaming industry (making it static and uninnovative), but also creates an atmosphere that excludes those who do not fit the identity of the limited, presumed target market. In gaming, this exclusion has notoriously severe consequences for women, people of colour, people with disabilities and the LGBTQ+ community as gaming is blanketed with whiteness and hegemonic masculinity by the narrowness of the market. Kirkpatrick identifies how the masculine gamer identity was cultivated by the games market, and further reveals that the assumed gendering of the original ‘gamer identity’ does not exist beyond the superficial marketing ploys of gaming magazines. Kirkpatrick observes the shift of gaming from the ‘family orientated’ target market, towards a new market aimed at ‘boys’, and in this process, deconstructs the stereotype that gaming industry itself is and was always only ‘for’ boys. Ultimately, Kirkpatrick’s study highlights that girls and women have been marginalised from gaming, primarily as a marketing strategy to target boys and men. In turn, this critiques those who regulate and uphold the notion of a true ‘gamer identity’ as merely conforming to a fabricated marketing narrative. To contend that ‘gaming is an economically successful market and therefore has no need for diversity’ is a short-sighted argument. 42 Diversity 40 Pronounced “Triple A”, AAA games have the highest budgets for development and marketing in the industry. 41 Williams, D., et al, “The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games,” New Media & Society, vol. 11, no. 5 (August 2009): 815-834. 42 Adrienne Shaw, “Representation in Games” (keynote presented at International Games Developers Association Scotland, Dundee, Scotland, August 2016). 13 in gaming does not ask to ‘take away’ the games currently dominating the market, but appeals to create additional different types of games which gaming audiences have rarely or not yet seen. 43 In terms of the representation of women in games, Alicia Summers and Monica K. Miller observe a shifting trend in the portrayal of women characters in gaming magazines from 1988 to 2007.44 Gradually moving away from the ‘Damsels in Distress’ trope, which depicts benevolent forms of sexism, the more contemporary commercial art demonstrates an increasingly hostile form of sexism, with representations of women as “sexual objects, who seek power over men.” 45 This shift is limited between the pervasiveness of merely two, one-dimensional, problematic representations of women. In the increased representation of ‘hostile sexism’, Summers and Miller voice a concern that, “Hostile sexism, in particular, is often correlated with rape myth acceptance.” 46 This does not insinuate that gamers are all rapists, or that hostile forms of sexism will create rapists, but that it nevertheless projects a milieu in which victim blaming is acceptable behaviour. It has been well documented that the toxic masculinity of gaming culture has become increasingly hostile towards feminist critique, in which the extreme displays of overt misogyny have become more frequent over the past few years. 47 The concern that hostile sexism may encourage a climate which sees sexual violence against women as acceptable – even entertaining – has already been observed in gaming culture, for example in Penny 43 Shaw, “Representation in Games.” 44 Alicia Summers and Monica K. Miller, “From Damsels in Distress to Sexy Superheroes: How the portrayal of sexism in video game magazines has changed in the last twenty years,” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 14, no. 6 (2014): 1028-1040. 45 Ibid., 1038. 46 Ibid., 1037. 47 Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture”; Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes”; Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 14 Arcade’s 2010 ‘Dickwolves’ rape joke controversy, 48 and in the frequent accusation of targets of harassment as being ‘professional victims’. 49 The Post-Gamergate Climate Since August 2014, Gamergate has been and continues to be a harassment campaign against women in gaming, masquerading as a crusade against corruption in games journalism. 50 Many academics and journalists have written in great detail on the subject of Gamergate, 51 including myself, 52 however space prevents me from recapitulating much of the event here. Gamergate rose out of the building tensions between feminism and gaming culture, 53 in which, “[Young male gamers] felt threatened by the perceived intrusion of progressive politics into their private, escapist power fantasies.” 54 The harassment included doxxing (publishing private and identifying information, such as leaking nudes), 55 death threats, rape threats, bomb threats, 56 swatting (deceiving 48 Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 49 Lynch, “Gamergate Myths.” 50 c.f. Mahli-Ann R. Butt and Thomas Apperley, “Vivian James – The Identity Politics of #Gamergate’s Avatar,” The Refereed Proceedings of Digital Games Association Australia (November, 2016); Nick Wingfield, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign,” New York Times, October 15, 2014; Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2014; Jon Stone, “Gamergate’s vicious right-wing swell means there can be no neutral stance,” The Guardian, October 13, 2014; Jesse Singal, “Gamergate Should Stop Lying to Journalists – and Itself,” New York Magazine, October 20, 2014; Stuart, Bob, “#GamerGate: the misogynist movement blighting the video games industry,” The Telegraph, October 24, 2014; Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes”; Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening”; Golding and van Deventer, Game Changers; Kafai et al., Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming (Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2016), 3-4. 51 Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate”; Ryan, “The Threats Against Anita”; Cross, “Empire of Dirt”; Wingfield, “Feminist Critics”; Singal, “Gamergate Should Stop”; Stuart, “#GamerGate: the misogynist”; Zachary Jason, “Game of Fear,” Boston Magazine, May, 2015; Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening,” 6-7; Golding and van Deventer, Game Changers; Kidd and Turner, “The #GamerGate Files.” 52 Butt and Apperley, “Vivian James.” 53 Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture”; Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves”; Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes”; Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening”; Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “We Are All Fishes Now: DiGRA, Feminism, and GamerGate,” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (2016): 21-30. 54 Alexander, “‘Gamers’ don't have to be your audience.” 55 Alice E. Marwick, et al., “Best Practices for Conducting Risky Research and Protecting Yourself from Online Harassment” (Data & Society Guide) (New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2016); Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening.” 56 Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes,” 210; Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate.” 15 emergency services and sending SWAT teams to attack a target’s home), 57 and a university massacre threat. 58 Gamergate has marked how gaming cultures are shaped and characterised by toxic masculinity, in a way that demands an urgent need for research and immediate interventions. 59 In the context of this thesis, the key issue that Gamergate highlights is how deeply embedded toxic masculinity is in elements of gaming cultures that perceive women as natural outsiders – now intruders – separate from gaming. 60 If the more outrageous activities perpetuated in Gamergate are attributed to extreme individuals, the many other members of the new gaming public, 61 who have been sympathetic or nonchalant towards Gamergate, have allowed the harassment to thrive by tacitly sanctioning it as admissible behaviour. 62 The vicious, ‘big harassment’ 63 campaign of Gamergate – one which is decentralised and seemingly nebulous in its accountability64 – exemplifies the way in which gaming culture, “stews in oblique, day-to-day expressions of misogyny,” 65 where participants are complicit in fostering its ‘technocultural hegemony’ 66 in observing toxic behaviour as a cultural norm. Separately, each event in this literature review is troubling – strung together in a timeline, the pattern of misogyny becomes abundantly clear. 67 Abstracted, all these flashpoints in the history of gaming’s marginalisation of women point to a hypermasculine and 57 Alice E. Marwick, et al., “Best Practices for Conducting Risky Research.” 58 Ryan, “The Threats Against Anita.” 59 Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture.” 60 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man.”; Cherie Todd, “Commentary: Gamergate and resistance to the diversification of gaming culture,” Women’s Studies Journal, vol. 29, no. 1 (2015), 66. 61 Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 62 Butt and Apperley, “Vivian James”; Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening,” 13. 63 Ben Abraham, et al., “Minority Players: Negotiating Harassment in Gaming Culture” (paper presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, Melbourne, Australia, December 2015). 64 Ibid; Butt and Apperley, “Vivian James.” 65 Butt and Apperley, “Vivian James.” 66 Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening.” 67 Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture.” 16 misogynist status quo. I once asked a friend, “Why do we call women gamers, ‘Gamer Girls’, but we don’t say, ‘Gamer Guys’?” He answered matter-of-factly; “That’s because all guys play games.” As Simone de Beauvoir argued: “Representation of the world as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth.” 68 For my friend, there was no need to question his status quo: ‘Gaming culture is a boys’ club, and that is just how things are, and so that is just how things are meant to be.’ In gaming, arguments of gender essentialism imply that women are not meant to play videogames because, for women, playing games is seen as an androgynous and heterodox activity. If a woman shows an aptitude for gaming it is often attributed to masculine and rebellious qualities within her, whereas expressions of femininity are possible indicators of a ‘Fake Girl Gamer’ 69 (See: Appendix: Figures 2 and 3). In the words of de Beauvoir: “Man [is defined] as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, she is said to be imitating the male.” 70 While men are the ‘real gamers’, women must earn their gamer credentials, and even when they do so, it is frequently assumed to be an adoption of masculine traits. The marginalisation of women in gaming resides in the broader social issues of the wider patriarchy. 71 Within gaming, it seems that there is a particular gendering of specific media consumption (observed in the research of Abbate, Margolis, Fisher and Kirkpatrick) which has been tied to a gender essentialist notion that only boys and men can be considered ‘real gamers’: this has created a climate of hostility against women in gaming. In this gender essentialist logic, women are considered to be illegitimate ‘fake gamers’, 68 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 166. 69 Zach Parsons, “Spotting the Differences Between a Gamer Girl and a Girl Gamer” (blog), March 21, 2014. 70 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 61. 71 Jenson and De Castell, “Cheerleaders/booth babes/ Halo hoes.” 17 and consequently this has sharply segregated women from gaming spaces, identities and practices. Since the ‘gamer’ identity is highly regulated and gendered as masculine, women are therefore not ‘authorised’ to voice opinions about games, or even talk about their experiences of discrimination and harassment, without the constant threat of becoming a target of online and offline abuse and harassment. When there is a historical lineage of women being aggressively ‘othered’ and pushed out of gaming, there are no privileges in being a ‘rare’ woman inhabiting a male-dominated space; gaming spaces, in fact, have historically and habitually dismissed, sidelined, policed and harassed women for being a woman in a male dominated space. Gaming Practices and Relationship Dynamics In a recent mixed method study72 with a sample of 18,627 League of Legend ([LoL] Riot Games, 2009) players, out of the 4.1% who identified as female, 73 73% of female players reported that they played with their male romantic partners, 74 and that they would more likely play as support roles in correlation to the frequency with which they played with their romantic partners. 75 The study observed that women who play LoL with their male partners would generally have less confidence in their own skills, and furthermore, would focus on supporting their boyfriend’s characters and in-game advancement rather than their own. 76 For the qualitative component of research, interviewees expressed frustration of the stereotype of ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ as playing support roles, and the stigma of women and support players as being inferior gamers. 77 Yet female players remained to 72 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man.” 73 Ibid., 450. 74 Ibid., 453. 75 Ibid., 454. 76 Ibid., 438. 77 Ibid., 444. 18 play as supports during the observed matches, 78 and in order to support their boyfriends. 79 The researchers considered ‘Stereotype Threat Theory’ 80 as a possible explanation, which posits that minorities are more likely to conform to negative stereotypes when they are reminded of the stereotype. 81 To be sure, the research saw no difference in the rate of skill accruing between female and male sexes 82 and observed a level of competency required for support roles equal to the more aggressive playstyles. 83 The authors concluded with the suggestion that more research is required in order to, “Not only document but also possibly help intervene into this current state of play, if female players are ever to stand apart from their male gatekeepers.” 84 The ‘gamer widow’ is an individual who has lost their partner to gaming. Gaming addiction in husbands has been observed as detrimental to families, to the extent that a phenomenological study regarded ‘gamer widows’ as displaying similar experiences to the spouses of alcoholics. 85 These accounts often show partners in competition with media consumption. My wife started playing [World of Warcraft] in about December of 2007. Two weeks before our 38th wedding anniversary she came to my room and told me she was leaving me. She wanted to find ‘something different.’ That something different turn[ed] out to be WoW.... I am destroyed by a videogame and have no idea how to proceed. 86 78 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man,” 444. 79 Ibid., 446. 80 C. M. Steele and J. Aronson, “Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans,” Journal of personality and social psychology, vol. 69 (1995), 797, quoted in Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man,” 447. 81 Ratan, et al., “Stand by Your Man,” 447. 82 Ibid., 453. 83 Ibid., 444. 84 Ibid., 458. 85 Northrup and Shumway, “Gamer Widow,” 278. 86 Coyne, et al. “Gaming in the Game of Love,” 388. 19 In a 2012 study on the effect of gaming on conflict in couples, 87 the research confirmed a trend of increased conflict in relationships correlating to the amount of time spent playing videogames. Significantly, the study found that these trends of increased aggressive behaviour correlated with men, but did not with women’s gameplay. 88 The study hypothesised the lack of interpersonal aggression for women’s gaming as possibly due to women primarily playing together with their partners. 89 As suggested by anecdotal evidence of gameplay as a means of enhancing relationships, 90 women playing videogames with their partner would thus reduce time otherwise lost between a gaming and a non-gaming couple. While the research acknowledges the positive reports of using media as a form of bonding between couples, gaming’s demand for the player’s full attention, 91 in hand with excessive amounts of invested time, was seen to cause the displacement of necessary domestic and social duties, inciting feelings of neglect in the non-gaming partner, and leading to resentment and conflict. 92 Due to the nature of quantitative research, the cause of provocations was regarded as unclear and requiring further study. The authors indicated possible sites of tensions, such as disagreements about partners trying to intervene and ‘control’ leisure activities, and disapproval of the in-game content. 93 “Girlfriend Mode” On 13 August 2012, the developers behind the successful Borderlands franchise promoted a new ‘skill tree’ 94 for a playable avatar in Borderland 2 (Gearbox 2012). 87 Coyne, et al., “Gaming in the Game of Love.” 88 Ibid., 392. 89 Ibid., 392. 90 Ibid., 394. 91 Ibid., 389. 92 Ibid., 390. 93 Ibid., 394. 94 Often provided in the genre of roleplaying ‘RPG’ games, a ‘skill tree’ is a set of attributes influencing the character’s abilities which is customisable. 20 Although this skill tree was designed with the progressive intent to include more players who prefer supportive styles of play, during the interview, the focus became exclusionary and sexist when the lead designer described the skill tree as the game’s ‘Girlfriend Mode’. 95 The blasé use of the term ‘Girlfriend Mode’ was one of the many watershed incidents indicating the habitual micro-aggressions made towards women and continued to enforce the stigma widely associated with women in gaming. Taken for the sexist comment that it was, it incited substantial internet backlash. The concept of a specific ‘Girlfriend Mode’ – essentially as an ‘easy mode’ – negates the intended inclusivity of the game mechanic, as it trivialises gameplay for women and normalises ‘standard’ forms of gaming for men. These assumptions of gendered gaming literacy feed from the gender essentialist dichotomy 96 where women are assumed to be inept, ‘casual’ or ‘fake’ gamers, while men are assumed as being computer literate, ‘hardcore’ and’real’ gamers. 97 ‘Girlfriend Mode’ reinforces these sexist, gender essentialist stereotypes of women being naturally bad at gaming, and pejoratively emphasises that women only know how to play games if they know someone masculine who plays games – able to only support their boyfriends – which further insinuates that women do not play games autonomously. Moreover, ‘Girlfriend Mode’ implies heteronormative gender roles, presuming that women perform the support and affective labour in relationships and that their experiences are secondary to the ‘protagonist role’ of men (See: Appendix: Figure 4). The consequences of these heteronormative assumptions are observed in the pressures for 95 Wesley Yin-Poole, “Borderlands 2: Gearbox reveals the Mechromancer's ‘girlfriend mode’,” Eurogamer, August 13, 2012. 96 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, time, and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995); Nancy Jay, “Gender and Dichotomy,” Feminist Studies, vol. 7, no. 1 (1981): 38-56. 97 Rachel Kowert and Julian Oldmeadow, “The Stereotype of Online Gamers: New Characterization or Recycled Prototype?” (paper presented at the Digital Games Research Association Nordic, Tampere, Finland, June 2012); Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter, “The Gendering of Computer Gaming: Experience and Space,” in Leisure Cultures: Investigations in Sport, Media and Technology, ed. by Scott Fleming and Ian Jones, 3-22 (England: Leisure Studies Association, 2003); Jenson and De Castell, “Cheerleaders/booth babes/ Halo hoes.” 21 women to play as support roles for their partners. 98 By reinforcing a compulsory heteronormative and masculine narrative, ‘Girlfriend Mode’ not only dismisses the experiences and competencies of women but the LGBTQ+ community as well (See: Appendix: Figure 5). While ‘Girlfriend Mode’ does include women in gaming and assumes women as players, it also marginalises them in particular and obscure ways due to the hypermasculine status quo of the new gaming public. 99 As a predominantly unexamined phenomenon, women are often recognised as gaming participants through the ‘Gamer Girlfriend’ stereotype, 100 which sees women who play videogames as being ‘wife material’ (See: Appendix: Figure 6). While ‘Gamer Girlfriends’ are included in gaming, the label continues to marginalise women in unapparent ways due to the hypermasculine status quo of gaming culture, which arguably shapes the affordances of women in the networked publics of online gaming and social media. 101 The marginalisation of women, as seen through the lens of the ‘Gamer Girlfriend’ stereotype, observes the particular ways in which women are affected by the toxic masculinity of gaming cultures. Considering women who play games as being ‘wife material’ trivialises gameplay for women and reifies them as merely desirable accessories to be acquired by men (See: Appendix: Figures 7 and 8). Unpacking the problems indicated by the ‘Gamer Girlfriend’ stereotype demonstrates the underlying heteronormative limitations imposed by the games industry, the gaming ‘community’, and media discourses. 98 Ratan, et al., “Stand By Your Man.” 99 Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 100 Mahli-Ann R. Butt, “Girlfriend Mode: Gamer Girlfriends, Support Roles and Affective Labour” (paper presented at Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, Newcastle, Australia, July 2016). 101 boyd, “Social Network Sites”; Bloomfield, et al., “Bodies, technologies and action”; Salter and Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves.” 22 Focusing on women and the tangles of affective relationship dynamics constructs a conceptual framework which situates gaming culture within wider social contexts. Observing the historic exclusion of women in computing and gaming indicates the particular manners in which the hypermasculine status quo of the culture may continue to marginalise and impact the lived experiences of women, in both their intimate relationships and their gaming practices. 23 CHAPTER 2: METHOD AND RESULTS In comparison to quantitative approaches, it is often noted that qualitative methods are unable to make universal claims, reproduce data, or observe consistent causational trends. However, previous quantitative studies which examine ‘gamer’ relationships, as outlined in the literature review, 102 have specified the need for qualitative research to develop the documentation of the particularities and impetuses of the observed toxic behaviour, in order to create effective frameworks for interventions. “I believe this is an opportunity,” offers Mia Consalvo, “to demonstrate the usefulness of research and particularly how it can help to give us a firm foundation on which to stand in order to shed light on the persistence of particular issues, point to historical solutions for overcoming similar difficulties, and thereby push for a more welcoming kind of game culture for everyone – not simply girls and women players.” 103 As Consalvo suggests, 104 through archive building and collecting histories, feminist media studies can magnify the exacting patterns of toxic behaviours by showcasing the continual or shifting attitudes within gaming culture occurring over time. Documentation and analyses can also act as a living record for future researchers to observe and build upon a timeline, allowing reinterpretations of history in light of current events, and vice versa, as well as the opportunity for others to improve prior research and use new knowledge to reflect and mediate gaming as an evolving culture. One of the feminist objectives of this study is to provide a recentering of the marginalised voices of women in gaming. In order to achieve this, this thesis uses an existential,105 contextual 106 approach to ethnography. In this approach each woman’s experience as 102 See: Coyne et al., “Gaming in the Game of Love”; Ratan et al., “Stand by Your Man.” 103 Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture.” 104 Ibid. 105 Jackson, Lifeworlds. 106 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge. 24 valuable in and of itself, and considers the role and place of gaming in each individual women’s experiences, as well as practicing the feminist act of listening and giving women a space to talk. 107 Ethnographies of gaming have tended to be informed by what Shaw calls “demographic- based” research. 108 Such research methodology apprehends subjects as relatively stable identities over time, which often leads to a “descriptive” rather than a “critical” framework. 109 Consequently, this project’s methodology focuses on “social context” rather than “social categorisation” 110 to address women as gaming subjects. Focusing on the individual experience does not deny broader social issues of sexism and racism, but rather points to the tangles of social life and such cultural structures. As noted by Nick Couldry, “To reflect on the individual experience of culture does not mean turning our backs on the social; instead, thinking about the individual story plunges us immediately into the web of relationships out of which we are formed.” 111 Ethnographic data of the lived experiences of those who may be considered as “Gamer Girlfriends” enriches how game studies understands the role of relationships and how heteronormative dynamics impact the experience of a woman’s gaming practices. With care to deconstruct the stereotypes and gatekeeping practices of gender and gaming, this research was conducted without the intention to discover or define who are or are not ‘gamers’ and includes interviews with ‘non-gamer gaming participant’ identities. 112 In Shaw’s 2011 study, women were found to be significantly less likely to consider themselves as ‘gamers’ and often felt as if they were unable to claim the highly regulated 107 Sara Ahmed, “Resignation is a Feminist Issue,” feministkilljoys (blog), August 27, 2016. 108 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, 6. 109 Shaw, “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies,” Games and Culture, vol. 5, no. 4 (2010), 418. 110 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, 43. 111 Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2000), 7. 112 Shaw, “What is Video Game Culture?” 25 ‘gamer’ identity, even if they habitually played videogames. 113 Therefore, there has been no prerequisite for participants to identify as a ‘gamer’, and this research does not impose gender essentialist universal claims about how women play games or what sort of games women play, but focuses on the contextualities of affective relationships in relation to gaming practices. To locate potential interviewees, a Survey Monkey was dispersed among my Facebook social media network and posted to WiDGET (a women in gaming closed group) with the request to share the link with interested women who play games with their partners. Limiting the circulation to my personal social network was a necessary precaution against harassment and intentional data manipulation by Gamergaters, as they are notoriously hostile towards feminist research of gaming culture, 114 especially since my supervisor and I have previously been marked by Gamergate as targets for our research. 115 The research and recruitment methods were approved by the UNSW Human Ethics Committee, HC Number HC16628. The survey questions offered a list of multiple choice answers, as well as optional text boxes for open, descriptive, and ‘other’ answers (See: Appendix: i. Table of Survey Results for list of questions and answers). The survey accrued 58 respondents, with 46 providing their contact details and permission to be emailed about participating in interviews. The participant pool was reduced to those who did not identify as a man, answered that they played videogames, and answered that they played videogames with their partners. The research being limited to face-to-face interviews on UNSW’s Kensington campus meant that the potential interviewees were narrowed down to the 23 113 Adrienne Shaw, “Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity,” New Media & Society, vol. 14, no. 1 (2011): 28-44. 114 Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes”; Jennifer Allaway, “#Gamergate Trolls Aren't Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group,” Jezebel, October 13, 2016. 115 Butt and Apperley, “Vivian James.” 26 who lived in Sydney. 12 local individuals were chosen and emailed to participate in face- to-face interviews. These 12 individuals were chosen out of the 22, with the intention to have a balanced representation of age and gamer/non-gamer identities. A total of 8 interviews were conducted with 7 individual participants (my first interviewee was requested to return for a second short interview). Interviews were held between 20 minutes up to approximately 1.5 hours, depending on the enthusiasm and availability of the participant. The interviews were semi-structured 116 (See: Appendix: ii. Semi- structured Interview Questions), which allowed room for participants to be explorative in their answers. 117 The interviews were guided by a laddering technique, 118 which asked questions such as, “Why is this important to you?” and, “How does that make you feel?” to encourage participants to reflect deeply on their experiences in meaningful chains of thought. Transparency of being a researcher and explaining the intentions of the research were made explicit, and I welcomed participants to ask me questions about the research being conducted. Confidentiality has been ensured through anonymity with pseudonyms chosen either by the participants or myself (we have chosen character names from videogames). Pseudonyms are untraceable to individuals (i.e. no ‘Gamertags’). All identifying information was removed from transcripts. Interviews were documented with a digital audio recorder application on a mobile phone with the consent of the participants. Through this process, 465 minutes of interviews were recorded, which, transcribed, amounted to 68,600 words. The transcribed interviews were analysed to draw out the relevant material on affective labour and gender dynamics within relationships. 116 James Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Boston: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 1979). 117 Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2002). 118 Thomas J. Reynolds and Jonathan Gutman, “Laddering Theory, Method, Analysis and Interpretation,” Journal of Advertising Research, vol. 28, no. 1 (February/March 1988): 11-31. 27 All seven women interviewed (See: Appendix: iii. Table of Participants) were currently in relationships with a gaming partner. All participants interviewed were in their 20’s (24- 29), which was an unintentional demographic (half of the invited interviewees were in the age bracket of 31-50, as well as 40.4% of survey respondents, although these individuals could not find time to travel to UNSW) – but this remained to be an applicable age range for the research. One interviewee identified as “Australian, with no identifying ethnicity”, one identified as “Cantonese”, one identified as “East Asian”, four identified as “Caucasian/White”. All interviewees were currently dating men. Two interviewees had played videogames with a previous female partner. No couples had children. None of the interviewees were married, but most lived with their partners. Those who did not currently live with their partners would spend a few nights every week at their partner’s house. Gaming together as a couple was mostly arranged within a domestic environment, with online games noted by some couples while living apart (before moving in together, and in long-distance relationships). The interviewees had complicated relationships with their gamer and non-gamer identities, expressing a wide range of sentiments: 119 Revan: I’m a gamer because it’s a consistent in my life. It doesn’t make sense to not call myself a gamer. Although it’s still just one of many facets of myself. For the most part, I don’t like labels. Jessie: I see that people think there is a hierarchy in games and depending on what games you play lets you be called a gamer. I play a lot of mobile games all the time and I’m really good at those, and I play other games too but my skills just 119 NB: These are not direct quotes, but my own qualitative, phenomenological and summative analyses of the essences of the lived experiences. See: Northup and Shumway, “Gamer Widow.” 28 aren’t there. I struggle with deciding if I am a gamer or not and it changes depending on how I feel. Shepard: I love games and spend a lot of my free time these days playing games, but I feel that I can’t call myself a gamer because I don’t know as much about new games compared to actual gamers, like my boyfriend. Bianca: I never really thought about being ‘a gamer’ because I grew up thinking that everyone just played videogames. I like playing Nintendo DS and retro games, like MS-DOS and SNES, but my boyfriend considers himself more of a gamer than me because he plays more ‘hardcore’ games – the ones you associate with gamers nowadays. D.VA: I am going to claim the title of being a gamer today. I feel like I have to fight within myself and against others to be able to claim the ‘gamer’ title, even when I know I should because I do play games all the time. Piper: I would never call myself a gamer. I play games, but I don’t present myself or dress like one. It’s not my whole life. Gaming is just something fun I do sometimes with my partner. Ellie: I don’t want to call myself a gamer. I don’t want to be associated with that culture, but I guess I am one – depending on how you look at it. Gaming is a large part of my life, even if the identity doesn’t sit well with me. All interviewees played videogames as children up until high school. The women who did not consider themselves as ‘gamers’ were those who reported that they stopped gaming in high school. One of the interviewees mentioned that they continued to play specific types of games. This suggests a productive angle for future research in this area. 29 It is uncertain if participants necessarily stopped gaming habits completely, or if they merely shifted towards different forms of play which are not considered as ‘real games’ by gamer policing. Another potential study would be in the common occurrence of interviewees reporting First Person Shooter (FPS) games as a large cause of nausea. Instead of research which stems from a biological assumption, I would be interested in observing if this nausea is linked to the discontinuation of certain types of gaming (such as console) during adolescence and the subsequent gap between becoming accustomed through habituation or sensitisation to certain types of controls and virtual motions. Similar research has previously been requested by danah boyd following her psychological study on ‘simulator sickness’ 120 which questioned results which only suggested biological and hormonal factors, and advised future researchers to regard the gendered difference between girls and boys in their access and experience of computer use as a potential cause. 121 Limitation of the research was primarily enforced by the requirement of face-to-face interviews and thus constrained to locality. While it was possible to disseminate the surveys on an international scale through online means, the interviews were bound by the geographic location of the UNSW, Kensington campus. This has limited the research to the demography and locality of Sydney, Australia, and to those who could travel to the university. Since the method of this project proposes to focus on qualitative contextuality, a local sample size does not negatively limit the rigour of the research, especially since this research has an emphasis on depth and richness, rather than breadth of data. 120 danah boyd, “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?,” Quartz, March 28, 2014; danah boyd, “Depth Cues in Virtual Reality and Real World: Understanding Individual Differences in Depth Perception by Studying Shape- from-shading and Motion Parallax” (Honors thesis, Brown University, 2000). 121 boyd, Depth Cues in Virtual Reality, 21-22. 30 CHAPTER 3: AFFECTIVE LABOUR, RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS AND GAMING PRACTICES This thesis unpacks the consequences of gaming practices and how they impact intimate relationships. Observing the complexities of negotiating affective labour between couples and gaming practices, this chapter holds a particular concern for the conditions where devotion, commitment and passion turn toxic and shift into abuse and emotional exhaustion. Social expectations around gaming can influence how women should perform affective labour within their relationships. These pressures to perform acts of care become sites of tension between couples in cases where gender dynamics and gaming result in neglect. In order to maintain their relationships with gamers, women feel obliged to perform more intensive forms of affective labour than those which already exist in heteronormative relationship dynamics. What is Affective Labour? Affective labour is a continuous process, 122 which contours relationships and gaming practices into a manifold of consequences. Affects are not emotions, but are pre- emotions, 123 concerning both the body and the mind, both reason and the passions.124 Affect theory observes the capacity of causal powers to affect and be affected, as well as the relationships between these powers. 125 Affects are observed and revealed in the intensities of relational powers; 126 emotions being one such potent expression of affect which has been acknowledged and possessed. 127 Affective labour thus is a capturing of 122 Michael Hardt, “Foreword,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), xi. 123 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 27-28. 124 Hardt, “Foreword,” ix. 125 Ibid., ix. 126 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25-27. 127 Ibid., 27-28, 35. 31 the invisible and unwaged forms of cognitive, emotional and gendered economies. 128 It occurs in the negotiation of relationships, where individuals become responsible for the care and well-being of others. Performances of affective labour can range from social obligation (family, friendships, traditional gender roles, and cultural customs of politeness), professions which require working with people (nurses, customer service, and flight attendants), to the manifestations of passions, pleasure, and love. As described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, affective labour is, “labour that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.” 129 Simultaneously recognising both the embodied intellectual and emotional forms of production, affective labour engages with “immaterial” or “biopolitical”130 forces, such as divisions, hierarchies, and exploitation. 131 Thus, affective labour not only observes “material goods”, but furthermore, the relationships of the social life of the production of labour. 132 Through a close examination of interviewees’ transcripts, this chapter explores interviewee’s lived experiences and the consequences of affective dynamics in gaming relationships. These dynamics are contextualised within the routines of gaming practices and quotidian social pressures for women to perform traditional gender roles, with particular attention to the counterpoise of partners, and the manners in which affective labour is performed to maintain intimate bonds. Gamer Girlfriend Grooming 128 Hardt, “Foreword,” xi. 129 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (City of Westminster: Penguin Books, 2005), 108. 130 Ibid., 109. 131 Hardt, “Foreword,” xi-xii. 132 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 109. 32 Jessie and James have been living together for two and a half years, and dating for four and a half years. While Jessie enjoys and regularly plays games, she does not consider herself a gamer – expressing the parallel analogy of her fondness for baking, while feeling that she would not claim the title of being “a baker”. She is quite happy to play games when they are of interest, but has noticed the heightened enthusiasm from her partner whenever she shows interest in any slight amount. [Jessie]: We were watching YouTube videos of people playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn [Good-Feel and HAL Laboratory 2010], I was like, ‘That looks super cute’, and it’s two player, and because I showed like the mildest of interest in it, he went and got it and we played the whole thing together, like start to finish, made it through. So, like as soon as I show any interest in any game, he’s like, ‘Let’s do it, let’s make it happen’. And that also goes for like playing by myself, as well. Like I showed an interest in FEZ [Polytron Corporation 2012], which is another steam one, and 1000000 [EightyEight Games 2012], which is another steam game, but he bought them for me and set them up, like encouraged me to play, so. [...] Um, I think it was a really nice gesture but then I think also like he’s trying to merge our interests so that we can – he can spend more time playing videogames but still be with me. I feel like he probably doesn’t realise that he’s doing it himself, but I feel like that’s like base level of, ‘If Jessie likes videogames, I can play more videogames, because we’ll be together playing videogames’. For Jessie, gaming is an enabled practice. This encouragement is a nurturing of a shared interest which is performed to strengthen the romantic bond between the couple. Although, James’s enthusiasm for Jessie to play games also concerns an ulterior pragmatic motive: merging their interests allows James to play more games – grooming her to become a ‘Gamer Girlfriend’. His generosity and attentiveness to creating gaming 33 moments for Jessie acts as a projection of ‘grooming’, since if Jessie was ‘a gamer’ it would resolve the neglect she feels, and furthermore, his own feelings of guilt in situations where he prioritises his own gaming habits over spending time together with Jessie. In a reoccurring argument, Bianca’s boyfriend would tell her to “get [her] own hobbies”, or to “play [her] own videogames”, so that she would “leave him alone” to play World of Warcraft [WoW]. [Bianca]: He does like it when I do my own thing because it takes the pressure off him. We have had an argument before where he pretty much says, ‘Just do your own thing. Just let me play my games. Don’t stick to me every moment of the day.’ [...] Just telling me to get my own hobbies – which I had. [...] Playing my own games, or just going to my room and playing on my DS [Nintendo DS], and he’s happy doing whatever. Bianca explains that with the games that she plays, she is able to pause and put them down at any time. Handheld gaming is one of her preferred platforms for that reason. “Like [I want him to] spend more time with me. Like I know it’s weird hearing that, especially coming from someone who plays games as well.” The tension between Bianca and her boyfriend has arisen between the differences in the demands by particular games and playstyles, rather than the habit of gaming in itself. Bianca and her boyfriend’s gaming practices operate within different rhythms and temporalities: while he plays real-time and synchronous games, she plays turn-based and asynchronous games. In contrast to Bianca, her boyfriend often plays ‘hardcore’ computer games which are time-consuming and more difficult to leave at any given moment – it is not possible to ‘pause’ WoW during group challenges (such as dungeons and raids) without ‘letting your team down’. In games such as WoW, often when an individual player disconnects mid-game it ‘wipes’ 34 out the rest of the players, killing all the avatars, because these instances are designed to require coordination between all party members in order to survive and successfully beat the encounters. The encouragement for Bianca to play her own games uses gaming as a means of compensating for her feelings of neglect. To improve and maintain the relationship, the answer to the emotional affects of her boyfriend’s gaming translated into the request for ‘more gaming’, because ‘less gaming’ would be a more palpable sacrifice for her boyfriend. When Shepard first moved in with her boyfriend, due to their differing work hours she would wake up early while her partner would sleep in, and so she would feel as if she had nothing to do on weekends while waiting for him to wake up. Her boyfriend suggested that she should play videogames, reintroducing her to gaming and to new games, such as Mass Effect 3 (BioWare 2012). Her boyfriend recommends, purchases, and sets up all of Shepard’s games on her behalf. She feels embarrassed that she has little knowledge of how to use the console, how to turn it off, or how to access the online store. She jokes through her embarrassment that her reliance on her partner to set up gaming “is alright” because her role in the relationship is to “order pizza.” Shepard has always wanted to play games but had found financial difficulties to be a large barrier to gaming, such as being unable to upgrade to a new console since her Nintendo 64. Her current relationship with a gamer – who not only plays games regularly but also works in the games industry – has facilitated her gaming though his possession of a videogame collection. For Jessie, Bianca and Shepard, to resolve the expression of women’s feelings of neglect and loneliness, gaming is seen as an ideal solution for their partners. The onus is thus placed on the girlfriends to play games in order to resolve tensions in their relationship. Gaming becomes an act of affective labour for the woman to conduct within her relationship. She is required to increase her own gaming practices, so that the boyfriend
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