Unilateral Thinking in a Binary System
”Playing games does not equal being a gamer.” This was the mentality that I encountered as I read and re-read articles about gender inequality in gaming. Then, finally, the article “A Gendered Identity Debate in Digital Game Culture” just came right out and said it in their opening sentence. The response in my head was as follows: “Why the hell not?”
As a woman and a self-identified gamer, I have wondered for a long time why a gender disparity exists in the world of gaming. This week’s annotation readings brought back many of those previous wonderings along with some new ones about where the hostility from these issues is originating from, so I decided to dive deeper into the world of why such a paradigm exists. After searching database collections for an extensive period of time, I came across one that finally addressed the how and the why.
It all comes down to one basic human need: acceptance. The social aspect of needing to be and then eventually becoming a part of a group shapes gamer identity. When the gaming community was being established, the target audience for gaming companies was predominantly men. Games were designed by men for men with qualities that were perceived to be enjoyed by men, so it is not unusual to see how gamer identity took on a masculine tone. Having this established community of gamers led to another social dimension of game play which was identifying the non-gamers. Human acceptance is all about being a part of your own special, secret club and to be a part of your club you must learn who is in it and who is not in it. Collective learning of individuals in the gamer group helped to establish the traits of gamers and non-gamers, and these went uncontested for a long time. Then, as social initiatives began popping up about inclusivity and diversity, gamer identity became threatened.
Social constructions are fluid and susceptible to change, but the established participants involved are not always keen on the change. Just like in the previous human rights movements of the last few decades, a change in the status quo could mean a threat to the status gained by the participants in the social group being changed. Fear of losing something motivates the group members to take a firmer stance on what defines the identity of the group. To help reestablish the masculine traits in the gamer group, three strategies were employed that spanned the gaming and non-gaming worlds.
The first step in reestablishing the gamer identity was to redefine gender binary. The essence of this strategy was to accept females into the gaming circle, but only under the guise of female gamers being considered “casual” gamers as opposed to “hardcore” male gamers. I liken this movement to the “separate but equal” ideals of an earlier era in American history. The second strategy was to change the way women are portrayed in the gaming circle from benevolent sexism (damsel in distress) to hostile sexism (overt sexual objects). Though more power is being given to female leads in games, the trade off is that they are portrayed as hypersexualized objects, further denoting the separation of women from the “hardcore” gamers and continuing to establish male dominance in the gamer identity. The last strategy, postfeminism, is used to enhance the previous strategy. Postfeminism is the idea that feminists have won the fight and the ideals of it are therefore old ideas that no longer need to be fought for. It is used by old school gamers to justify their ability to use subtle but still sexist humor in gaming circles - used almost nostalgically as a way to call back to older times as opposed to being an overt insult to female gamers now. These three strategies have snowballed off of one another creating a bigger divide between male and female gamers while also causing the silencing of female voices within the gaming community. The divide exists virtually and in reality as shown by the gamergate issues that started in 2014. Spanning multiple settings in this case not only pushes back progress in gaming, but it also exists to serve harm to people in real life as seen in the doxxing examples during gamergate.
After getting this sneak preview into the how and why of this gamer identity divide, I see so many connections with the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and LGBTQ Rights battles of previous years. It makes sense to me on a human developmental level why this divide is continuing to spread male and female gamers further apart. What I want to know now is how we can mend this divide? I am also curious to know if this separation is perpetuated harder by online relations versus in real life ones. In other words, do traditional gamers that know and play with one another in real life harbor these same feelings towards female gamers versus traditional gamers that play with others solely online? How do we get to a place where playing games does equal being a gamer?