Abstract
After over a decade of scholarly research and well-documented harassment, sexism, and other forms of exclusion and marginalization, digital games culture is currently the object of heightened attention and discourse related to diversity and inclusion. This paper considers the context of this shift with a particular focus on the relationship between gender-focused inclusivity-based action in the form of women-in-games incubators, post-feminist discourse, and the neoliberal context of digital games production. As opposed to rife anti-feminism and similar “backlash” sentiments, articulations of post-feminism within the digital game industry provide insights into the tensions inherent in introducing action for change within a conservative culture of production, particularly for women in the industry. At the same time, the contradictions and tensions of the post-feminist ethos allow for actions that function through this logic while subverting it. Through a brief consideration of three exemplary post-feminist articulations by visible female figures in the North American digital games community, this article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gaps and contradictions of post-feminism in games culture and production. It concludes with equal measures of caution and optimism, indicating future directions for study and activism.
Highlights
From Women in Games to Feminist Action in Games Culture For over a decade, the term “Women in Games” (WIG) has referred to an array of projects and initiatives that share a common goal: getting more women into the digital games industry
What does the tone and tenor of gender-based interventions and discussions in the game industry indicate about the contradictions, challenges, and clashes that arise around the notion of increasing the number of women in games as a mission, and about feminist action in capitalist spaces of production generally? Through an examination of this question, we argue that postfeminist articulations on this topic serve a neoliberal agenda and its attendant set of practices and visions of intelligible subject-positions in media culture and production
The above three moments and their implications indicate the accuracy of Gill’s suggestion that neoliberalism is gendered and that women are its ideal subject. These moments further demonstrate that even the project of women in games, as it was articulated in the Difference Engine Initiative (DEI), could be a perfect moment of crystallization of the gendered nature of neoliberalism, where it is women who are asked to engage in unpaid labour in order to pay lip service to this project only to have their work dismissed as special treatment, with interventionist action deemed ineffectual (Stephanie Fisher and Alison Harvey 2013)
Summary
From Women in Games to Feminist Action in Games Culture For over a decade, the term “Women in Games” (WIG) has referred to an array of projects and initiatives that share a common goal: getting more women into the digital games industry. For many years these diverse initiatives represented the most visible form of organizing women working in digital games culture, largely those employed within the mainstream, commercial industry These professional groupings have been supplemented with small scale, locally run incubator projects, which are short-term and delimited. Despite the explicit focus on gender in both WIG associations and incubators for women, the reluctance to identify many of these projects as ‘feminist’ prompts consideration of the particular ethos informing diversity and inclusivity measures related to digital games production This discourse of egalitarianism can provoke antifeminist and sexist responses as well as serve as a rallying cry, but when rhetoric is translated into action, as in the case with incubator projects, tensions related to the systemic and structural nature of exclusion can arise. Through a consideration of these entangled logics, this paper will indicate some of the key discursive challenges facing feminist organizing in games culture today, and the ways in which discursive gaps can springboard powerful interventions within the context of digital game production and digital labour processes more broadly
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