Panel Statement

Keywords: Games, representation, signification, Gamergate, identity, social identity, race, gender, sexuality, feminism, cultural studies

Digital games are so pervasive that they increasingly shape how people ascribe meaning to their world; in short, games are now culture. Similarly to music, literature, television, fashion and film, games as culture constitute “networks of meaningness which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another” (Hall). Games expand the ways that we image our own possibilities, create empathetic connection, and seed ethical engagement with lived-world challenges and problems. Recent games ‘culture wars’, notably, Gamergate definitively confirmed that games traffic in the politics of representation, just as any other form of mass media. This panel examines the social functions of playable media as powerful forms of visual culture and ideological world making, especially as they relate to notions of difference. This panel includes contributions in critical games research that model intersectional approaches foregrounding the politics of representation, and signifying practices of video games as new media and visual culture. Brought together are three important voices, who—each in their own field—utilize intersectional approaches foregrounding more nuanced or inclusive forms of representation, and therefore more sophisticated signifying practices of video games as electronic media and visual culture. Each panelist (Everett, Harrell, Jenson) presented their work for twenty minutes, with an informal question and answer session that included the audience, speakers and moderator (Murray).

Presentation intros:

1. Anna Everett – Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs                                                A paradigm shift of sorts has occurred in the procedural rhetorics and gameplay structures of videogames over the last two decades where race and gender in games intersect, though the changes are not nearly enough. Gamers now negotiate and amplify the joy and pain of their videogame fandom quite publicly and enthusiastically as game characters of color are gaining some new visibility as optional play (OP) and must play characters (MPC). As powerful narrative agents in action-adventure, open-world and firstand third-person-shooter genres in mainstream, casual and online gaming spaces (including networked games on Xbox Live), black women as MPCs in successful mainstream gaming franchises and action-adventure game brands are redefining the gaming experience in terms of 21st -century multicultural, multiracial heroic/sheroic character ideals
2. D. Fox Harrell – Modeling and Expressing Social Identity in Games                                        Avatars and player characters in games offer us new ways to see ourselves. They also impact us in the “real” physical world. Studies show that avatars can have a range of effects on users such as performance and engagement (Kao and Harrell 2015b, a). Avatars can have other impacts on user behaviors, it has been shown that users conform to expected behaviors and attitudes associated with an avatar’s appearance (Yee and Bailenson 2007). Avatars can also trigger stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson 1995), the phenomenon of being at risk of confirming a stereotype about one’s group, and even impact future aspirations (Good, Rattan, and Dweck 2012). Since avatars can impact physical world experiences even including oppression and violence, it is important to look closely at the effects of avatars on users. This section argues for the importance of analyzing identities and how computational modeling can be used to better design expressive identity representations in videogames.
3. Jennifer Jenson – Fighting Gamehate: A Feminist Project                                                                In mid-August 2014, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming websites and 4chan exploded with allegations of “corruption” in games journalism, naming the phenomenon “Gamergate”. Since that time, nearly every major English news outlet and gamerelated journalistic website has reported on Gamergate. Women (critics, game players, game makers and journalists) are at the center of the controversy, and many have received threats that, as games journalist David Auerbach put it, are “so egregious” that a prominent female journalist (Jenn Frank) publically announced that she would no longer be writing on games. This situation further escalated into a public threat of a “massacre,” forcing games critic Anita Sarkeesian (Executive Director, Feminist Frequency) to cancel a public address at the University of Utah, and even the author of this notation has been targeted.

• Professor Anna Everett, of Film & Media Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, works in the fields of film and TV history/theory, African-American film and culture, and Digital Media Technologies. She holds a PhD. From the School of Cinema-TV and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. Her former administrative positions include: Interim/Acting Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and
  Academic Policy; Chair of the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies, Director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies. Dr. Everett is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (2005/2007). Her many publications include: Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (For the MacArthur Foundation’s series on Digital Media, Youth, and Learning) ; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, Afrogeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide; Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s. Everett is finishing a new book on President Obama, social media culture and the Where U@ Generation.
• D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, Cambridge, USA. His research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. His research involves developing new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social media, and related digital media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. The National Science Foundation has recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” Harrell holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. His other degrees include a Master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunication from New York University, and a B.F.A. in Art, B.S. in Logic and Computation (each with highest honors), and minor in Computer Science at Carnegie
  Mellon University. He has worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer. His book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression was published by The MIT Press (2013).
• Jennifer Jenson, Ph.D. is Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Institute for Research on Learning Technologies at York University, Canada. She is currently co-editor of Loading: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association and past president of the Canadian Game Studies Association. With Professor Suzanne de Castell (Dean, University of Ontario Institute of Technology), Dr. Nicholas Taylor (NC State University) and a team of students in her CFI-funded Play:CES (Play in Computer Environments) lab, she designed educational games including: “Contagion”, “Epidemic: Self-Care for Crisis”, a Baroque music game, and an iPad game for early readers, Compareware (free in the app store). She completed 2 longitudinal studies of gender and digital gameplay, and holds a Partnership Development Grant that intervenes and supports women and girls in the game industry, “Feminist in Games”. She also completed a 3-year, mixed methods study of massively multiplayer online games and their players in partnership with SRI International, Simon Fraser University and Nottingham University, UK. She publishes widely on education, technology, gender, design and development of digital games, and technology policies and practices in K-12 schooling. She is co-editor of Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Game Research (Peter Lang Press, 2007) with Suzanne de Castell and lead author of Policy Unplugged (McGill-Queens U. Press, 2007) with Chloe Brushwood Rose and Brian Lewis.
• Professor Soraya Murray, holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from Cornell University, USA, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. An Assistant Professor in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is also principal faculty in the Digital Arts & New Media MFA Program, and affiliated with the History of Art & Visual Culture Department, as well as the Center for Games and Playable Media. Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in contemporary art, cultural studies and games. Her writings are published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, CTheory, Public Art Review, Third Text, Gamesbeat and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Full text (PDF) p.  1014-1021