This exploration of feminist games studies is a continuation—begin with part one here.
Alisha: I think if we want to talk about the need for feminist games studies, we also have to take a minute to consider—briefly—the history of games studies, and maybe also the points at which feminist research methods entered other similar forms of scholarship. As a field, games studies is relatively young, particularly if we look at video games scholarship; we don’t have a long history, but we do have an explosive audience and a lot of upheaval packed into this short history.
Briefly, we can separate this into pre-video games and post-video games eras; in the pre- era, games studies was centered in areas like anthropology and history, and the work was primarily concerned with motivations for play and play’s effects. In the post-video games era, however, digital games studies split between the humanities, social sciences, and the industry itself, systems, and the like. There is some interdisciplinary work inherent even within these divisions, but many academics and non see a hard line between social sciences and humanities. Or, as noted researcher Dmitri Williams put it, in his 2005 piece “Bridging the Methodological Divide in Game Research,” social scientists study the impacts and effects of games on users while humanities scholars study the meaning and context around games. Williams argued then, much as we are now, that we need both approaches. We need wider cultural lenses with which to study games. Back then, Williams wrote, “So, do games cause ‘effects,’ leading players to become aggressive, or do they represent a vibrant and contested space over meaning?”. Today, like Williams, I think we are arguing for both. For overlaps. For approaches that consider multiple angles.
Bianca: I think that the trajectory that Alisha maps here regarding game studies mirrors that of feminist thought as well–this idea of having roots in anthropology and history and branching out into other fields and areas of praxis. And just as there is tension in game studies through the humanities/sciences divide, so too is there similar tension in the various modes of feminist inquiry, modes that range from feminist science and empiricism to feminist standpoint theory, from intersectional feminism to postmodern feminism, from qualitative approaches to quantitative approaches and everything in between. But I think this tension is the result of the fact that feminist thought can and should be applied in interdisciplinary ways, and I think this interdisciplinarity speaks to the multiple angles and approaches—the wider cultural lens—that Alisha highlights as necessary for the field of game studies today; indeed, feminist thought not only impacts the various fields to which it is applied but is, then, impacted by these various fields as well.
This discussion is making me think about Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in which Haraway works to destabilize positivist constructions of objectivity by arguing that knowledge is always embodied and partial and that feminist epistemologies (epistemologies based on positionality, situatedness, complexity, and contradiction) allow us to make knowledge claims through the acknowledgment of this partiality. And I think this acknowledgment of partial, situated knowledges allows us to conceptualize feminist thought as a sort of web, a network, of (situated) feminist knowledges.
Alisha: A web, a network, an entangled set of concerns. Because we can’t look at one side or one lens or one piece; we have to look at the connections. Karen Barad, among others, has said that we cannot, for instance, only rely on critique; critique is easy and safe and does not lead to the provocation of new thoughts and pathways. Similarly, I think, we cannot only look at systems, at code, at data; we have to consider where those systems come from, who makes them, and for whom, because it is all always already entangled. Nothing can be separated. None of this exists in a vacuum. Barad says separating the disciplines, and drawing these hard lines, makes the patterns and connections difficult to see. I’ll say that I think it often leads us to seeing more of what we expect and less of what we can discover. When this is extended to game studies, in particular, when we separate for instance narratology and ludology, we are restricting so much of what there is to see. When we draw hard lines about game worlds and what is and isn’t “real” without considering the players and the spaces they embody, we miss so much possibility. When we dictate what is and isn’t a game while restricting things that others already call games, we are always already separate… and cordoned off, closed, self-restricted from discovery.
Bianca: And such separation, such cordoning off, limits our ability to discover because it limits our ability to establish feminist coalitions, which is something that Chandra Mohanty discusses in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. I’ve talked about Mohanty before, but I think that her framework for feminist solidarity and coalition-building bears repeating because feminist solidarity works not to homogenize feminist thought through the erasure of difference but rather acknowledges such differences as central to building alliances based on a complex multiplicity of perspectives and positionalities. And as a result, feminist solidarity allows us to, as Mohanty puts it, address the “cross-cultural commonality of struggles, identifying survival, rather than shared oppression, as the ground for coalition.”
When Alisha and I first started working together through the stakes and approach of feminist game studies last week, I mentioned survival as a key component, and I think that Mohanty’s identification of survival as the goal of feminist solidarity highlights how high the stakes really are for feminist thought in any form.
Alisha: I want to talk a little bit about difference in terms of games studies… or rather, why difference matters. Though it should be obvious why difference matters. It should be obvious when we compare games to every other possible medium of comparison. Games continue to be made primarily by men, for me; we see it in the top-down design, in discussions of audience, in every aspect of games studies… and largely it’s men who study them, too, and who write about games in mainstream contexts. And not just men. Often it’s white, cis, heterosexual men. But this isn’t just about SJWs and identity politics. This bears discussing because we cannot talk about the experience, the gameness of a game, if you will, without talking about all the bodies attached to it. All the entanglements. So we need to take those numbers, the data about designers, about who is interested in studying games, about when women drop off as gamers and designers, and we need to match that up with the contexts in which games are both played and created. These lenses need to be brought into focus if we want to understand this medium.
Bianca: And in order to understand the medium in the ways that Alisha maps here, we need (to return to Mohanty’s arguments) to establish a coalition of feminist thought within the field of game studies. That is, we need feminist game studies. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa talks about claiming space, making ourselves a home when home is denied us, as a means of disrupting borders and boundaries, and she stresses the use of a “feminist architecture” as the framework for doing so. So, while we may not know exactly where to go from here, we do know that we need to work to claim such a space, to make ourselves a home in game studies, and to do so through the feminist architecture of a feminist game studies coalition.
Alisha: We don’t have to know exactly where to go. In fact, if we did, where would the discovery come in? We will build on feminist methods, but also discover the paths unique to games studies, to drawing on the interconnected work of scholars in multiple fields, and we will change as games themselves change, as the industry changes, as the audience changes. This is how we build. This is where we go.
