​This book examines gender attitudes in Reddit’s popular video gaming community subreddit, r/gaming. Video gaming has long been understood as a masculinised social space and, while increasing numbers of girls and women now engage in the pastime, boys and men remain the predominant social actors. Furthermore, the gaming community has been widely identified as a prime case study in broader concerns around ‘toxic’ masculinity and gendered online harassment. However, there is also underexamined evidence of a growing movement in the community coming forward to voice its collective opposition. Utilising an innovative combination of computational and qualitative methods, the research undertaken here exposes this fuller picture, revealing significant contestation and a spectrum of attitudes that mark out this popular gaming community as a battleground for gender (in)equality. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, games studies and computer sciences, will find this book of interest.

In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture. Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election. Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.

A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.

Interviews with female gamers about structural sexism across the gaming landscape When the Nintendo Wii was released in 2006, it ushered forward a new era of casual gaming in which video games appealed to not just the stereotypical hardcore male gamer, but also to a much broader, more diverse audience. However, the GamerGate controversy six years later, and other similar public incidents since, laid bare the internalized misogyny and gender stereotypes in the gaming community. Today, even as women make up nearly half of all gamers, sexist assumptions about the what and how of women’s gaming are more actively enforced. In Gaming Sexism, Amanda C. Cote explores the video game industry and its players to explain this contradiction, how it affects female gamers, and what it means in terms of power and gender equality. Across in-depth interviews with women-identified gamers, Cote delves into the conflict between diversification and resistance to understand their impact on gaming, both casual and “core” alike. From video game magazines to male reactions to female opponents, she explores the shifting expectations about who gamers are, perceived changes in gaming spaces, and the experiences of female gamers amidst this gendered turmoil. While Cote reveals extensive, persistent problems in gaming spaces, she also emphasizes the power of this motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces can be overcome. Gaming Sexism is a well-timed investigation of equality, power, and control over the future of technology.

This volume addresses the persistent and frequently toxic associations between masculinity and games. It explores many of the critical issues in contemporary studies of masculinity—including issues of fatherhood, homoeroticism, eSports, fan cultures, and militarism—and their intersections with digital games, the contexts of their play, and the social futures associated with sustained involvement in gaming cultures. Unlike much of the research and public discourse that put the onus of “fixing” games and gaming cultures on those at its margins—women, LGBTQ, and people of color—this volume turns attention to men and masculinities, offering vital and productive avenues for both practical and theoretical intervention.

Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by - and produces - a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.

Cultural stereotypes to the contrary, approximately half of all video game players are now women. A subculture once dominated by men, video games have become a form of entertainment composed of gender binaries. Supported by games such as Diner Dash, Mystery Case Files, Wii Fit, and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood—which are all specifically marketed toward women—the gamer industry is now a major part of imagining what femininity should look like. In Ready Player Two, media critic Shira Chess uses the concept of “Player Two”—the industry idealization of the female gamer—to examine the assumptions implicit in video games designed for women and how they have impacted gaming culture and the larger society. With Player Two, the video game industry has designed specifically for the feminine ideal: she is white, middle class, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. Drawing on categories from time management and caregiving to social networking, consumption, and bodies, Chess examines how games have been engineered to shape normative ideas about women and leisure. Ready Player Two presents important arguments about how gamers and game developers must change their thinking about both women and games to produce better games, better audiences, and better industry practices. Ultimately, this book offers vital prescriptions for how one of our most powerful entertainment industries must evolve its ideas of women.