FEMINISM AND TECHNICAL CAPITAL

Abstract

Taking the computer game as an example of digital technology the paper argues that the embodied aesthetics of technology use are an important dimension of its implication in gender. Drawing on ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Nigel Thrift the discussion rejects analyses that focus on video game content and asserts the importance of looking at what players do with their hands in the course of game play. The experience of form and space in games are best understood as part of a popular cultural employment of dance as a method for the navigation of socio-technical complexes. This situates computer games as a variety of gendered performance that is conflicted and not straightforward, combining agonistic and aesthetic strains. The paper reflects on the importance of using dance terminology to comprehend this, in terms of our reflexive understanding of computer games, gamers and gaming as a cultural practice.

Keywords:

• computer games
• gender
• Bourdieu
• technical capital
• aesthetics; dance

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Cheryl Martens, Sarah Carling, Aki Jarvinen, Nick Thoburn, Nick Crossley, Mike Savage, Susan Halford, Steve Hall and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on previous drafts and in some cases conversations, from which this paper has benefited. I am also grateful to Austin Hall of Dr FrEckle Studios for giving permission to feature still images from his ‘daft hands’ video.

Notes

Leading Sherry Turkle (1995) to speculate that Bill Gates might be the ‘masculine ideal’ for our times because his reputed geekiness is now associated with success.

Mark Poster, for example, writes that, ‘With representational machines such as the computer the question of the interface becomes especially salient because each side of the human/machine divide now begins to claim its own reality: on one side of the screen is Newtonian space, on the other, cyberspace. Interfaces of high quality allow seamless crossings between the two worlds, thereby facilitating the disappearance of the difference between them and thereby, as well, altering the type of linkage between the two. Interfaces are the sensitive boundary between the human and the machinic as well as the pivot of an emerging set of human/machine relations’ (Poster 1995, p. 21).

I have developed this argument elsewhere, see Kirkpatrick (2009).

According to the curators of the Game On exhibition (Game On 2002), Lara was originally designed to appear as a normally shaped young woman but in the course of a series of game design meetings her breasts grew and her form became so hyper-feminized that, were she real, she would be unable to stand up for any length of time.

Domestic environments and practices do feature in many games, from the Sims to cooking simulations in games like Cooking Mama, or the cookie making sequences in Pokemon games for the Nintendo DS.

Aarseth (1997) tells us play is a risky enterprise involving commitment to a struggle, while Johann Huizinga writes that the etymology of play traces back to the Old German ‘pflegan’, which meant to ‘vouchsafe’ or guarantee. Huizinga (1950) writes of an ‘inner hardness’ that is essential to play. These views are consistent with Bourdieu's (1990) comments on the masculine nature of play and games as places where men square up to one another.

Unit operations are chunks of code that define a programmed object and at the same time specify a set of meaningful actions for a human agent. They form the basis of Bogost's project for developing a comparative critical framework that encompasses computer games and other cultural media (Bogost 2006).

I would relate this Juul's (2006) observation that the meaning horizon on gameplay recedes when we are caught up in its activities (p. 135).

This characterization of the feminine as the duplicitous front with a mechanistic interior has a long history in philosophy, for example (Lloyd 1993).

There is little consensus concerning the extent to which women play computer games and estimates of the proportion of gamers who are female vary widely. One industry body claimed 40 per cent of console game sales were to women (ESA 2009), but this figure has been treated with skepticism, with some pointing out that female consumers bought games for male partners and sons. There is evidence in this report and elsewhere of variation according to the kind of games played. Taylor (2006), for instance, suggests that women players may be proportionately more numerous in MMPGs than other kinds of game, while Kerr (2006, p. 107) suggests women may be more inclined to PC gaming than to consoles.

Viewed in this way, making computer games that appeal to women may be a kind of pyrrhic victory, on the same terrain Bourdieu (2001) situates many of the gains of the feminist movement, that is, they have not touched the underlying reality.

The thesis of extra-discursive dressage applied especially to female bodies and a key dimension to female oppression was elaborated first by Lefebvre (2004).

I have borrowed this term from the dance theory, where it denotes energy contained and deployed in the body to produce effect shapes (Adshead 1988).

Dominique Arsenault has provided a detailed analysis of the discrepancies between using the guitar hero controller and playing a real guitar (Arsenault 2008).

Dragonforce are a power metal band who specialize in very long, fast guitar solos. Their songs are available for Guitar Hero and well known for being particularly difficult.

For Immanuel Kant, aesthetic objects involve ‘purposeful purposelessness’ and present us with a ‘finality without ends’ (Kant 1960).

Programmed objects of the kind that prescribe unit operations are, of course, mathematical structures implemented in a computer.

They argue it is necessary to introduce this idea ‘for our consideration of embodied gameplay’ (Dovey & Kennedy 2006, p. 107) but do not explain why or what the ultimate purpose of their analysis is.

Similarly, King and Krzywinska (2006) suggest that players engage in repetitive play in pursuit of a pay-off in the form of ‘visual pleasure’ (p. 130). The nature of this pleasure is not clarified.

In contrast, Thrift also maintains that contemporary artefacts present as ‘specialized feedback processes’ but emphasizes that human beings do not encounter them as ‘finished’, but rather as ‘opportunities to interfere in the flow’ (Thrift 2008, p. 98). His approach is also tainted with a post-humanism that means he cannot explain what motivates such actions.

As Crogan (2010) points out, this does not change with the introduction of the Wii-mote, which still has a button control pad to be used by fingers and thumbs.

This aspect of game design, which involves the choreography of hands and inner sensations is the focus of Swink's (2009) pioneering work in the field of game design.

It also assumes that the male habitus of boys only includes one kind of distinctively male spatial experience when in fact the more self-enclosed space of the computer geek was previously that of the comic book collector, train spotter or home radio enthusiast (see Jones 2004). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this issue.

A similar point is made by Taylor (2006) who argues that women play in the games she studies but do not secure recognition on equal terms with men.

According to Royce et al., many women claimed they had less time than men for such trivial pursuits, but this perception is not born out by other studies of gender and time use (Gershuny 2000).

Ranciere (2007, pp. 97–98) discusses Loie Fuller in similar terms.

Writing in the same volume, Steph Lawlor notes that Bourdieu's views can seem to alternate between determinism and pessimism.

Bourdieu (1993, p. 60) notes that new works can revive old normative standards within a given field. Computer games issue a call to eighteenth-century ideas about the aesthetic form in just this way.