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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Enacting change in player attitudes and behaviors is incredibly difficult to achieve. But not impossible. Using specific feminist and queer gaming processes, due to the precarity of content in gaming, is of particular use to combat the rampant marginalization and toxicity of today’s gaming experience. I use Gerald Farca’s video game narrative analysis (VGN) to look at the digital games Life is Strange 2, Outer Wilds, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Hue to explore feminist and queer game procedures and mechanics. I examine how play, game procedures and mechanics, and players can connect and impact both play spaces and empirical spaces through the use of feminist and queer procedures and mechanics as evidence to the relationships among these game and player characteristics. I will be bridging a gap between conversations being had on the “outside” and “inside” of digital games regarding feminist and queer gaming. I map how game processes within these case studies point to how digital games, in a bigger sense, are reflective of contemporary societal and cultural issues that become part of the narratives and game worlds gamers engage with. Digital games contain a potential call to action for the player who is willing to see the argument within them. Examining these procedures and mechanics provides a space to push back on toxic gaming culture as well as misogynist patriarchal culture within the empirical world.
"Sean? Am I a Monster?": Examining Feminist and Queer Procedures and Mechanics as Calls to Action
Enacting change in player attitudes and behaviors is incredibly difficult to achieve. But not impossible. Using specific feminist and queer gaming processes, due to the precarity of content in gaming, is of particular use to combat the rampant marginalization and toxicity of today’s gaming experience. I use Gerald Farca’s video game narrative analysis (VGN) to look at the digital games Life is Strange 2, Outer Wilds, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Hue to explore feminist and queer game procedures and mechanics. I examine how play, game procedures and mechanics, and players can connect and impact both play spaces and empirical spaces through the use of feminist and queer procedures and mechanics as evidence to the relationships among these game and player characteristics. I will be bridging a gap between conversations being had on the “outside” and “inside” of digital games regarding feminist and queer gaming. I map how game processes within these case studies point to how digital games, in a bigger sense, are reflective of contemporary societal and cultural issues that become part of the narratives and game worlds gamers engage with. Digital games contain a potential call to action for the player who is willing to see the argument within them. Examining these procedures and mechanics provides a space to push back on toxic gaming culture as well as misogynist patriarchal culture within the empirical world.
Bio
Dr. Ashley P. Jones is an assistant professor of communication and emerging media at Georgia Southwestern State University. Her research focuses on feminist theory and the intersection of digital games including publications on the nostalgia of the Lara Croft character in Tomb Raider and the hauntological aspects of the missing crew in Tacoma. She is currently working on research involving feminist and queer game procedures and the role of psycho-social questions in the game Psychonauts 2.