Discourse and Action: Female Players Resistance Against Gender Inequality in Games Through Social Media

Abstract

In patriarchal gaming culture, female gamers have limited space for discourse. The establishment of the Female Gamers Association provides a new channel for female gamers to resist male hegemony in both games and reality through game sharing and discourse criticism. Therefore, this paper tries to explore how female gamers confront male discourses and build their identities through a series of discursive practices around games and gender on social media. This paper analyzes the posts from the Female Gamers Association group on the social media platform Douban and uses online ethnography for further observation. The study finds that although female gamers have formed a new discursive space and resisted the mainstream gaming environment by creating their own communities, there are still limitations to this resistance, and the active resistance of female gamers also contains elements of passive submission. The study of the Female Gamers Association provides a clearer understanding of the complexities of female gamers in a male-dominated virtual space and their agency in the face of pressure.