Academic literature on the topic 'Masculinized gazes'

This chapter elaborates on the theoretical framework that serves as a through line for the book in its entirety. Specifically, it draws on discourses about “core” and “casual” games to show how “core” describes a hegemonic set of ideologies that work to frame games in specific, masculinized ways. The chapter also argues, however, that recent industrial changes, from the rise of casual games to the diversification of funding and distribution platforms, serve as counterhegemonic forces, challenging many “core” assumptions about games and audiences. Using a critical analysis of gaming news, the chapter lays out these changes and addresses both their real impact on the games industry and their felt impact on audiences and power structures. Through this, it shows that gaming is in the midst of a crisis of authority, where previously powerful members of the community fear losing control of it. As a result, they are exerting extra force to maintain their privileged position, accounting for the divergent narratives about games that dominate the casualized era.

Where chapter 2 focused on overt sexism, this chapter explores the subtler, but equally damaging, impacts of inferential sexism, or factors that appear to be nondiscriminatory but rest on limiting assumptions about gender and gender relations. The chapter finds that participants feel misunderstood by the gaming industry, which offers women infantilizing or stereotypical “girly games” rather than crafting interesting games for adult women. It also finds that women often face surprised reactions to their presence in gaming spaces or assumptions that they game to meet men. Like overt harassment, this makes female gamers feel abnormal or out of place and serves to preserve gaming’s existing hegemony, limiting women’s ability to affect game culture. Furthermore, this chapter reveals that the rise of casual games has complicated this situation rather than improved it. In this way, this chapter both addresses new aspects of women’s experiences in masculinized spaces and provides insight into the casualized era’s ongoing trials.

Video games in the early twenty-first century face a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the spread of casual, social, and mobile games has led researchers, journalists, and players to believe that video gaming is opening up to previously marginalized audiences, especially women. At the same time, game culture has seen significant incidents of sexism and misogyny. The introduction outlines this contradiction and lays out the book’s key questions. First, how and why do these contradictory narratives coexist? Second, what impact does this have on marginalized game audiences, specifically women, as they try to enter game culture and spaces? And finally, what are the impacts of this struggle, and what can be learned from women’s strategies for managing their presence in a masculinized, often exclusionary space? The chapter also addresses the main theoretical concepts that undergird the book’s argument, including gender, hegemony, and feminism/postfeminism.

Chapters 2 and 3 collectively focus on the forces female gamers encounter that work to maintain “core” as a definable, masculine sphere. This chapter explores the many instances of overt sexism, where the sexist nature of a behavior or trend is obvious, present in gaming. Drawing on interviews with female gamers, the chapter argues that women’s experiences rarely reflect the diversification narrative—that games are becoming more welcoming. Rather, women continue to struggle with hypersexualized female characters, games that lack playable female characters or offer only underdeveloped “token” women, and, of course, interpersonal harassment from other players. These behaviors and themes work to relegate women to the margins of gaming rather than allowing them to enter the cultural “core.” Further, the fact that games’ masculinized hegemony has been normalized over time often encourages female gamers to buy into and accept their own exclusion. At the same time, the obvious nature of overt sexism perhaps offers more opportunities for intervention than the less obvious moments of implicit sexism addressed in chapter 3.