Let’s Talk About (Feminist) Game Scholarship

Here’s a question I’ve seen time and again, asked of more mainstream individuals like Anita Sarkeesian, or whenever a new article, study, or book crops up: why are so many feminist academics interested in video games all of a sudden? Unpacking this question means separating the threads and assumptions: first, that feminist academics are new to video games, or have gravitated there from something else, and thus the assumed pursuit of an agenda. Nowhere in this question is there room for women who are gamers, feminists, and academics at the same time, who perhaps played games long before entering the academy, or even entered the academy to pursue such a path.

Perhaps I’m biased on this one, because that’s precisely why I am here: to study video games, and players, and the discussions in and around games. I have other interests as well, but prior to entering my PhD program, I was a game enthusiast first. Until a few years ago, I had no idea of the depth of games studies, in fact; when I met NYMG co-founder Samantha Blackmon, I was awed when she told me that’s what she did. “That’s a thing?” I asked her, but it took me a few years to make the choice to follow in her footsteps — not because I don’t love games, but because the academy is demanding, because I give everything over to my work and study, and the notion of balancing family, fun, and yes, play for fun (unlike play for research) was daunting. I’m here anyway, because I love games, I love study, I love learning and discovery.

But I don’t think I am particularly biased, because I’m not alone. Everyone I know in games studies is here because they love games, full stop, no matter their field; if the disciplines are overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, at the middle is a love of games. A good thing, too, because for those of us in the humanities, even a great appointment might not be so great, after travel and research costs from year to year, and if you factor in the actual hours we spend working? Well. Might as well do just about anything else. It’s just that we don’t want to.

Being an academic is often about discovery, change, and creation, as in creation of solutions or theories that link discovery and change. Academics seek the new, or ways to explain and understand the old. There’s a joy in that, a joy that sustains through long hours, days, years of work. Conversely, there’s little joy in being attacked, belittled, harassed, in facing attempts at being discredited, at having your work pored over from minute angles, often by people who don’t necessarily have a strong background in the theory you’re leaning on (or creating), but that’s the reality for feminist academics working in games. Sure, everyone’s work is scrutinized, taken apart, explored, and examined — that’s the name of the game — but no one’s out there saying theorists like Miguel Sicart and Jesper Juul are coming to take away the video games, despite a long history in games theory of drawing lines of demarcation that at times exclude all sorts of games.

The very nature of feminist theory and methodology may lead to this kind of misunderstanding. Feminist theory may often specifically center on issues of bodies and representation, of characterization, placement, development, of world creation and the bodies that touch the worlds as they are created. But scholars utilizing feminist theoretical frameworks aren’t the only scholars doing work on representation, on bodies, on worlds; much of the work on avatars, virtual worlds, and game communities overlaps with work conducted in feminist frameworks. The research works together in this way. Often, when I begin digging into a particular topic, one of the first scholars I run into is Nick Yee, who has done such extensive work on representation and community. He’s everywhere I go (and I’m always grateful for his work).

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone accusing Nick Yee of trying to ruin video games or gamers. He’s not called an ideologue.

The fear and vitriol inspired by feminist scholarship is a strange thing. Feminist scholars, like any other scholars, seek to uncover; we chase exploration and examination, discovery and creation. We name things, like other scholars, and in naming we bring them into focus, perhaps into the world. It’s just that we are also a buzzword, though as Alison Jagger says in the Introduction of Just Methods, feminism’s social commitment – that oft-decried activist arm – is hardly unique across disciplines. Certainly feminism’s challenge to the status quo isn’t unusual; that often is the academy, in a nutshell: once we thought this, but you know what, maybe it’s really this.

It’s also intimate, however. We are all bodies tangled up with other bodies, and those relationships are fraught and terrible and wonderful and dominate so much of what we do. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to be, and who, and here come the feminists, asking if maybe we should consider that thing we had decided was true. That can be unsettling. But so is all discovery. So too with all change.

Feminist scholars are not bulldozers come to knock down video games; we’re here to adjust the lights, to squint and say, “how about this? What if we tried that?” We want to explore boundaries. To redefine and recenter. To find the stone that has not yet been turned. And if we’re in games? It’s because we want to be, because sometimes we can’t turn off the game, because we mutter “just fifteen more minutes,” when really we mean we’ll be playing until sunrise, because we grit our teeth and play until our thumbs hurt just to get that one last meaningless achievement, because we have games on our phones and a handheld in our bags, because we’re there on release day, because we’re counting down to the sequel, because we’re playing, playing all sorts of games, or maybe just a few (and playing those few so hard), but it’s because we love this weird, wild, ever-changing medium, because we see the potential, because we know how important it all is.

You know, just like everyone else.