Growing-up with games

1 Introduction

Growing up in the 90s in London offered a whirlwind of opportunity. Dressing as Tank Girl, exploring Mozilla and programming CD-ROMs and multimedia kiosks in Piccadilly filled my days. I simply did not see any barriers in my way, well not ones based on my gender any way. But then as a white woman in the West I am privileged, both in time and in place. It was not until later when motherhood came that I began to see how gender stereotypes are adopted. It was in my choices around childcare that I gave ground whilst realising my ongoing duty to my daughter to be happy and strong. For me, it was this wonderful event that made me consider the history and heritage of the feminine, to think about what women before me had done to ensure my privilege. Motherhood made me consider my responsibility to contribute, in whatever modest way, to the ongoing freedom of choice for future generations. Although part of my personal aging process, these type of life-changing circumstances affect us all at various stages and point to the changing nature of our relationship with society over the life course.

Each generation binds to their particular cultural setting, ours is the rise of the digital. Digital gaming has rapidly evolved in the past thirty years to take its place alongside other more linear media as a culturally powerful and commercially successful entertainment form. The status of gaming as a 21st century uber-form can be traced to its explicit inclusion of players as active participants. A primary pleasure of gaming is located in the sensate act of play over any particular audio-visual aesthetic. Gameplay builds a co-creative space in which a player engages with a game world in order to pleasurably progress through digital experience. Digital game form consists an exemplar intersection between the creative arts and digital technologies. Although widely claimed as ‘mere’ entertainment, games provide a framework for active learning, social commentary and artistic expression. Cultural studies show us that the act of play is central to human development and is part of any creative endeavour. The rise of digital gaming holds potential to acknowledge the centrality of play in our ongoing evolution. There is cultural capital to be had in prioritizing play over any tendency to infantilise it contra work in the production of value.

2 Contemporary issues around feminism

The speed of adoption of modern digital technology in world culture sets a requirement to broaden access for all, regardless of age, location and gender. The opportunity provided by technology to include a diversity of voices in addressing contemporary challenges remains substantial. The utopian visions of the 90s saw a possibility for re-structuring the power dynamics of modern society in the realm of the digital, yet nearly two decades later what positive impact has the information revolution had? Beyond the hype and wasted dollars it is possible to see re-wiring at play; from the remote fields of Africa where women sell their crops using mobile telephony to the classrooms of the world where children learn together to the election campaign run online that elected the first black American US president, positive change is underway.

Feminism is commonly divided into three ‘waves’: suffrage, the 1960s liberation movement and more recently a reaction to and against this movement. Toril Moi (1985, p. 12) summarises Kristeva on cultural development as: 1. women demand equal access to the symbolic order; 2. women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference; 3. women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical. In the wider climate of Third Wave feminism, gaming can, at best, be positioned in the first stage of Kristeva's framework. Feminist games studies works across Kristeva's stages in its exploration of the field. Part of the challenge lies in addressing the disassociation of current generations of women from a feminist tradition thereby losing sight of progress to date. In order to effect digital equity there is a real need to counter the self-censorship on display in some feminine engagement with digital futures.

The potential offered by the network's re-configuration of society to deflate the generational differences on display remains under-developed. Effective inclusion of and dialogue between the generations is essential to move beyond the myopia created by our interest in the ‘new’. How can we claim our place within the digital whilst acknowledging all that has come before? What are the truly novel opportunities provided and how do we avoid the lazy reconstruction of existent real world paradigms in this possibility space? Butler points to the constructed nature of gender (Butler 1999) yet the question remains how can we construct ourselves afresh in the digital world to allow a more equitable humanity? Whatever the answers it remains essential to keep asking the questions.

3 Women in Games conference

Feminists have long been concerned with access to technology and have worked specifically with game form since the 80s (Skirrow 1986) long pre-dating any formalisation of games studies. Marked most famously by Brenda Laurel's research that pointed to particular characteristics that typify young girls play preference (Laurel 1999) the discussion about gender and games continues. One problem lies in the commercial construction of ‘suitable’ play behaviour for each sex during childhood that blatantly reinforces gender stereotypes and sanctions particular attitudes to technology. The notorious ‘pinking’ of games devices is part of a wider trend to gender-specific game products available in the marketplace; from Ubisoft's Imagine series to the plethora of online sites aggregating ‘games for girls’ one would suppose that all young girls desire is dress-up, nurturing, makeovers and cooking. Needless to say this rather facile approach is far from helpful in the ongoing drive towards digital equity.

Another area that is often noted is the tendency to highly sexualised representation of female game characters. This phenomenon falls in line with a wider practice of increased pressure to perform a particular consumer lifestyle by reinforcing social norms of behaviour. Many existing games collude, whether consciously or not, with this tendency. As mainstream gaming attracts ever more players it is central that the widest possible demographic is effectively represented in game culture. The industry is increasingly aware of the importance of increasing the range of people making games in order to further develop game form; it is only in the creation of a virtuous circle of this nature that games will continue to mature as an expressive form.

Games Studies is a new field of enquiry that analyses video games from a social science or humanities perspective, that formally emerged as recently as 2001 (Aarseth 2001). The flurry of activity that maps the field looks at: the game object, the player subject and the dialogue between in efforts to understand this precocious new media form.

Although it is commonly accepted that almost as many women play games as men, 45% in the UK according to a BBC commissioned report (Pratchett et al. 2005), the games industry lags behind in terms of representation of women in the workforce, the UK industry standing at 12% according to Skillset's 2005 survey. It was in light of this that the UK's Women in Games (http://www.womeningames.com) annual event was launched by Mark Eyles at Portsmouth in 2004. Currently in its sixth year, WiG highlights the most recent groundbreaking work in computer game research and development to both the academic and industrial worlds. It has consistently addressed empowerment and professional development for women working in, and researching, games and the games industry. Hosted annually at different institutions and attracting projects from across the globe, WiG represents an ongoing effort to promote work that reflects the current state of the art. By providing a forum for discussion and networking as well as academic, industry and outreach presentations, WiG has created a community of interest that has started to look beyond the constraints of individual events to broaden its remit. It is in this context that this special issue of Digital Creativity has been prepared as a resource for ongoing work.

To date the themes addressed by feminist game studies can be broadly seen as: gendered activity in digital games both in game playing and in game content; feminine preference in play style; feminine game-making and access to gaming. There has been a historical tendency to generalise; yet as one half of humanity the category of female consists of a multiplicity of women and girls from all walks of life. Recent work has grown beyond glib generalisations and reactionary statements from the wider community to look at how gaming is re-coding culture. Part of the problem inherent in this project is highlighted in T. L. Taylor's question:

How can we do research and write on the subject in ways that do not a priori essentialise or assume difference through the very construction of our projects, the formulation of our questions, the performance of our ethnographies and interviews? And what does research into gender and computer games look like if from the outset it reflectively and progressively confronts and deals with the always present production and performance of gender? (Taylor 2008 ).

Taylor points to the need to consider both the wider cultural context of gaming and the broader ‘media mix’ within which games function as one antidote to this issue. The field cannot build a deep understanding without acknowledging the complexities of the challenge at hand. Gender is not the only issue, or the only difference that is at stake.

The interest in diversity in gaming mirrors a larger expansion by industry to mainstream acceptance. Digital gaming is a cyclical industry that evolved from the arcades to a domestic family leisure activity in the 70s and 80s and then on to 3D gaming in the 90s. The turn of the century saw a rise in online gaming and our current cycle sees games making a move to mobile devices and back to the living room as family entertainment with the advent of Nintendo's Wii console.

4 Context of journal

Digital Creativity's scope extends to theoretical concepts and the theory that is offered in these papers can be positioned as feminist game studies. This special issue presents revised and original academic papers that have arisen from the Women in Games conference series and represent a wide selection of contemporary work. The work in this journal is cross-disciplinary and orients around qualitative methods of research and a broadly humanities-led approach to the field. Topics range from in-game behaviour to pro-gaming cultural settings; from power politics to feminine game écriture; from progressive play practice to the practice of making machinima. All the articles are interested in games address to the feminine. At the same time most of the work is concerned with how women are taking creative and playful control of their own digital gaming experience.

The article by Fantone uses theory from Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that female players must play with and against the roles explicitly on offer for them in existing games and virtual worlds. In her address to gender-specific design tropes circulating in games culture Fantone offers a strategy to counter a wider cultural categorisation of consumer. Originating from a study of MMORPG gaming, MacCallum-Stewart provides a more optimistic view of progressive play practice pointing to the ways in which players already re-appropriate the female in games in a playful way. MacCallum-Stewart argues that the growing sociality of games enables a feedback loop between designer and player that allows for adjustment of design flaws tuning the game to actual player preference. Moving beyond in-game behaviour Taylor, Jenson and de Castell focus on the North America professional gaming industry to look at the ways in which women participate in the organisation, promotion and performance of competitive gaming. The work from Vandagriff and Nitsche is interested in the creative practice of machinima (the use of game engines to create films) and presents the results of interviews with 13 female machinima makers to investigate the appeal of machinima for women. Thomas is concerned with feminine practice in game-making and drawing on her own experience calls for a gamic ‘écriture feminine’ thereby suggesting that different fundamental approaches to the development and design of games by women for women might be productive.

Needless to say much work remains. This WiG special issue represents a largely Western view of feminist game practice and given space limitations does not venture into the growing body of work looking at game culture worldwide. Gaming is a global phenomenon and it is of interest to unite feminist games studies around the world. Digital gaming is now mainstream, a central part of modern life and as we mark the rise and significance of the form it is important that as many voices as possible are included in the ongoing investigation. The work contained in this issue is an important jumping-off point to wider work in its function as a call to arms for active engagement with the writing of the digital.

The digital offers a possibility for us all to take control of how we engage with our culture; as a creative tool it enables us to express ourselves across time and place. In this time of flux in which the analogue power structures of the past are unbalanced by the threat of the new, we live with the possibility of using the potential of the digital for more equitable ends.