Women and videogames

Part 1: Background reading on Gamer gate

Read this Guardian article on Gamer gate 10 years on:

1) What was Gamer gate? 

Ten years ago, a game developer’s aggrieved ex-boyfriend published a vindictive screed accusing her of trading sex for favourable reviews of her indie game. This was leapt upon by the least savoury corner of the 2014 internet, 4chan, and kicked off a harassment campaign that broadened to include all women working in video game development or the gaming press, as well as the industry’s LGBTQ+ community. Sensing blood in the water, “alt-right” agitators on YouTube and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart jumped on the bandwagon, and soon began to steer it – and Gamer gate, as this manufactured outrage became known, mutated into one of the first fronts of the modern culture wars, driven by social media, misogyny and the weaponised disaffection of young men. Many of its tactics became part of the Trump election playbook.

2) What is the recent controversy surrounding narrative design studio Sweet Baby Inc? 

A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere.

3) What does the article conclude regarding diversity in video games?

Nobody is forcing diversity into video games. It is happening naturally, as players and developers themselves diversify. Gamer gate didn’t intimidate women out of video games 10 years ago, and we won’t be intimidated now. The games industry knows that a greater breadth of content, featuring a greater breadth of characters, made with the contributions of a greater breadth of people, is good for creativity and for business, no matter what some aggrieved gamers may think. This time, it must make its support perfectly and unequivocally clear.

Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet

Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Fact sheets) or here using your Greenford Google login. Find Media Factsheet #169 Further Feminist Theory:

1) What definitions are offered by the fact sheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?

Feminism is a movement which aims for equality for women – to be treated as equal to men socially, economically, and politically. It is a movement that is focused not on ‘hating’ men, or suggesting that women are superior. Instead, feminism is focused on highlighting the power and suppressive nature of the patriarchy (male dominance in society). Feminists see the patriarchy as a limitation to women receiving the same treatment and benefits as their male counterparts.

2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?

In 1984, hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

She had identified a lack of diversity within the feminist movement,

and argued that these diverse voices had been marginalised, being

put outside the main body of feminism.

3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?

“Women in lower class and poor groups, particularly those that are non- white, would not have defined women’s liberation as women gaining social equality with men since they are continually reminded in their everyday lives that all women do not share a common social status.” Here hooks argues that feminism’s goal to make all women equal to men is flawed; not all men are equal to men as a result of oppression, sexuality, ethnicity. hooks used her work to offer a more inclusive feminists theory that advocated for women within a sisterhood to acknowledging and accepting their differences.

4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?

The term intersectionality is used to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. Its meaning is that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from separate component identities. These individual identities can include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, physical illness. These various aspects of identity are not mutually exclusive, instead they are working together to construct a new identity. Intersectionality theory proposes that individuals think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all the other elements – you cannot separate the various overlapping identities of an individual or group.

5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?

Her work puts her as a key figure in third wave feminism. Van Zoonen concludes that there is a strong relationship between gender (stereotypes, pornography and ideology) and communication, but it is also the mass media that leads to much of the observable gender identity structures in advertising, film and TV.

6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?

socially constructed and grounded in the social experiences of its practitioners. Scientific feminist research always includes 3 perspectives: the individual, the social and the cultural influences in order to understand the different meanings of media content. For van Zoonen, culture is seen as “ways of life” or, as she quotes theorist John Corner, “the conditions and the forms in which meaning and value are structured and articulated within a society” (Corner, 1991). Feminist media studies focus on how gender is communicated within the media. For van Zoonen “gender is a, if not the, crucial component of culture”, in particular when investigating the production of mass mediated meanings.

7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?

For many years, feminists have criticised women’s magazines as commercial sites of exaggerated femininity which serve to pull women into a consumer culture on the promise that the products they buy will alleviate their own bodily insecurities and low self-esteem. But it is difficult, when applying a feminist perspective, to reconcile the pleasure women get from consuming women’s magazines, and the political correctness surrounding hegemonic constructions of gender identities. Van Zoonen argues that women’s magazines mediate images that tell women “how to be a perfect mother, lover, wife, homemaker, glamorous accessory, secretary – whatever suits the needs of the system”. Feminists of the 1970s saw the ‘media-created woman’ – the wife, mother, housekeeper, sex object – as a person only trying to be beautiful for men.

8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?

Gauntlett also suggests things change over time. I think that gender roles are changing as many more women/mother are working and have a career than they used to and there are many fathers who are stay at home dads and work from home and also look after the house and pick their kids from school. There is also much more gender fluidity in the present day with the rise of LGBTQ+.

9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?

• Whether the institution is commercial or public.
• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)
• Genre (drama versus news)
• Target audiences 
• The place the media text holds within the audiences' daily lives

10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?

Staurt Hall's encoding and decoding model/reception theory.

11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?

This could be linked to bell hooks for oppression and also to W. E. B. Du Bois double consciousness as they are being viewed differently to what they usually are.

12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?

This links to bell hooks as it links to intersectionality that power and feminism has to be looked at not only gender, but your class, age, sex and ethnicity, which gives an overall representation.