Abstract for 2006 University of Idaho Video Gaming Symposium
"Virtual Bodies: Game Gender as Style and Structure"
Gender-based stereotypes shape representations of gender in games, and games in turn recapitulate those stereotypes. The creation of gendered characters, the stories in which they exist, the media that depicts them, and the method of game-play interact together to portray of gender in gaming. Each of the parts feeds into many existing stereotypes. Rey Chow's concept of "coercive mimeticism" explains how games, game styles, and game characters are gendered. Chow explains coercive mimeticism as the method by which ethnic subjects are expected to both wear and perform the mark of their difference. Player-character gendering is created by making the female characters both appear and act feminine. In doing so, the games coerce players into playing the game within the confines of the character's limits for the performance of gender. For instance, women characters in most video games both look and act within stereotypical gender bounds; women characters are much more likely to be skilled at running or healing than the male characters who are presumed to be more skilled at fighting. Because gaming is in an inherently interconnected form, studies of game representations require an interconnected approach. Video gaming as a media form also follows coercive mimeticism by marketing and labeling certain games as feminine and others as masculine. Different gaming platforms have been similarly labeled and depicted in marketing campaigns and in the media, and game designers are also represented as male.
This presentation will cover how coercive mimeticism affects representations of gender in games and gender in relation to gaming more largely. From that, I argue for methods to correct this trend through correctives to the history of video games that gloss important female characters and designers, and through analysis and exploration of new games that disrupt this tendency and gaming's gendered borders.