Alison Harvey University of Leicester, Leicester
University of Leicester, Leicester
Qualitative Social Research, Communication and Media
Publications
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ABSTRACT: Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professionalization and support of the existing industry norms as credible and legitimate, while relegating other types of participation, including that by women and other marginalized creators, to subordinate positions within hierarchies of production. Using the example of a women-in-games initiative in Montreal as a case study, we indicate how linkages between affect and competencies, specifically creativity and technical abilities, perpetuate a long-standing delegitimization of women’s work in digital game design. -
Article: Histories of Hating
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ABSTRACT: This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media. -
Article: “Everyone Can Make Games!”
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ABSTRACT: After over a decade of scholarly research and well-documented harassment, sexism, and other forms of exclusion and marginalization, digital games culture is currently the object of heightened attention and discourse related to diversity and inclusion. This paper considers the context of this shift with a particular focus on the relationship between gender-focused inclusivity-based action in the form of women-in-games incubators, post-feminist discourse, and the neoliberal context of digital games production. As opposed to rife anti-feminism and similar “backlash” sentiments, articulations of post-feminism within the digital game industry provide insights into the tensions inherent in introducing action for change within a conservative culture of production, particularly for women in the industry. At the same time, the contradictions and tensions of the post-feminist ethos allow for actions that function through this logic while subverting it. Through a brief consideration of three exemplary post-feminist articulations by visible female figures in the North American digital games community, this article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gaps and contradictions of post-feminism in games culture and production. It concludes with equal measures of caution and optimism, indicating future directions for study and activism. -
Article: Making a Name in Games
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ABSTRACT: This article explores the development and implementation of a Toronto-based incubator supporting local women in developing their own games. The incubator was created to help change the current (male-dominated) status quo of game production, promising participants skills sharing, support for the development of a new game, and entry into the local community of indie games developers. It was at the same time part of a large network of commercial and non-commercial interests with a shared agenda of promoting the local digital innovation scene. These different motivations and actors are considered to understand the nature of this complex social network market and the circulation of particularly feminized affective labour therein, detailing how value, reward, and benefit are conceptualized throughout this network. The article focuses on how and where these understandings are in alignment and where they fall apart, revealing problematic structures of power and control linked in particular to gender and entrepreneurialism in the area of digital innovation. - [Show abstract] [Hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: The tensions between empowerment and exploitation are especially heightened when discussing the activities of children and youth online. Discourse in the mainstream press around youth participation in online spaces wavers between anxiety and hope, and corporate frameworks and dataveillance practices structure many of these sites. Yet little attention has been paid to the underlying architecture of social norms that work with stereotyped visions of gendered play to provide the foundation for the interactions of young technology users. This paper investigates how domestic practices constrain and enable particular forms of user participation, focusing in particular on gendered access to digital play and notions of technology use. Using data from interviews with 25 young people aged 8–15 and their parents, this paper examines how social norms work in tandem with essentializing design to mutually constitute gendered expectations around technology use. It then considers how these young users and their parents in turn challenge and reaffirm these constraining and enabling norms through their practices. - [Show abstract] [Hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: It has been argued that game studies scholars need to move beyond anyunderstanding of gendered preferences in the content and mechanics of video games. Instead, we need to conceive of play as an assemblage, shaped through content, marketing, competency, experiences, access, context, and milieu (T.L.Taylor, 2008; Dovey & Kennedy, 2006; Jensen & de Castell, 2008). This paper considers and extends some of these observations on the complex networks of gendered gaming in light of the insights of a branch of science and technology studies known as feminist technoscience. Mobilizing in articular the work of Mol (1999) and Barad (1999), as well as preliminary findings from the author’s doctoral fieldwork, this paper considers the value of feminist technoscience concepts such asontological politics, multiples, enactments, and agential realism in examinations of the gendered nature of game play. -
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ABSTRACT: While the emphasis in traditional game theory has been on the rule formations and zone demarcations that distinguish games from play, mobile games tend to deliberately and thoughtfully blur the lines, not just between games and play but between a game and an experience, as well as between places of play (the "magic circle") and places of everyday life. Mobile games often create moments of liminality as they are driven by the idea of playing with and within everyday spaces, technologies, and objects. In this brief paper, I will discuss these boundaries and the liminality of mobile games to date, and focus on one particularly difficult ethical area- that of player and non-player participation. The concepts of play and game are complexly intertwined. According to Johan Huizinga (1950), games can be found on a continuum between the two poles of ludus and paidia. Ludus (frequently understood as a pure game) is characterized by the corseting of exuberance with deliberate and arbitrary conventions that require the player to demonstrate effort, skill, patience, or intellect. Chess is often upheld as a pure ludus game. Paidia (or pure play), on the other hand, is characterized by a shared, ritualistic principle that is found in gaiety and improvisation, as is the case with children's games, with less rigorous boundaries and rules guiding moments and places of play. Confusion often arises when discussing the play of games. For the purposes of this essay, I am discussing games in the sense of ludus and play as a verb to describe people who are taking part in games. When I refer to the magic circle, I am describing the place where a particular game takes place, with -
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ABSTRACT: As pervasive gaming becomes more common, the question of what boundaries and rituals make up play attains greater importance. While commonly-held conceptions of play formulate it as delineated, rigid, structured, and characterized by a stringent set of symbolic boundaries, pervasive mobile games push at the walls of the demarcated magic circle and, in the process of seeking multiple theoretical transgressions, pose questions about the implication of players and non-players in games that can mask their status as such. This paper prods the ethics of transgressing the player/non-player divide through the analysis of several pervasive games and the design frameworks of their creators.
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