Book to read: Gaming at The Edge, A. Shaw

Dr. Adrienne Shaw is a communication and game studies scholar at Temple University. She is well-known in the research community for her work on queer theory and LGBTQ representation in video games and pop culture. Shaw is interested in what people who are seen as on the edges of a gaming community (members identifying as LGBTQ, women, people of colors, etc.) think about representation and identification in video games and how their media use looks like.

She argues that the assumption that members of marginalized groups are by default concerned with representation of a group in which they might be classified is wrong, and identity, identification, and representation are much more complicated. She also calls for shifting the argument from the positive or the negative quality of a given representation to a focus on authenticity and the producers’ rights to represent a given identity [p. 38]. As an example, she says that game design companies assume that members of marginalized groups will represent that group best and that the representation of a marginal group requires the presence of members of that group in the media industry [p. 34]. Marginalized groups tend to be used in game character design only when it’s profitable for the company or when it is desirable to attract people of “their kind”. She also argues that the meaning itself of what it means to be a part of a marginalized group is fluid and ever-changing, because blackness, womanhood, and queerness are fluid and ever-changing too.

Shaw, contrary to the traditional approach, doesn’t look primarily at texts. Instead, she situated them in a broader context of gamers’ lives, habits, and practices, making them a part of a bigger picture that she studies. She argues that the game text is not as stable as other media texts, as a great deal depends on how one plays the game. I had a little bit of difficulties understanding her position but then I figured out that compared to reading a book or watching a movie, the main difference is in the option of how gamers navigate the potentials of the virtual world. That’s an option that is missing in other texts, unless it is an interactive one like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix, but even there are limitations of the text. A gamer can choose how they look, with whom and how they interact, what their character is after, if they want to follow the storyline or, especially in the open world games, if they plan to do their own shenanigans, which some game designs even support. For example, in The Witcher 3, a game mechanic referred to as the Bovine Defence Force sends your way a giant monster as a punishment when you kill too many cows (in order to exploit another game mechanic which gives you loot as a reward for killing a cow). What it means in terms of identification with a character or representation is however hard to tell without asking the players themselves.

A pondering about what and if Lara Croft represents anything particular and how players might identify with her or as her, is an opening example of the second chapter of Shaw’s book, and it shows how complicated the identification and representation in video games can be. She makes a point that the way a character of Lara Croft has been portrayed in video games and movies (not a damsel in distress but a sexualized symbol in short-shorts with strong and adventurous traits and overly big pixelated breasts) does not necessarily mean that’s the way how gamers of both gender identify with or as her, and how they perceive her. Not even the marketing strategy of the latest games origin stories where Lara Croft wears cargo pants and clothes appropriate to scavenge tombs (finally!) can be perceived as an improvement in terms of a representation of a woman character that is less sexist and sexualized. In this example, Shaw explains that gamers sometimes don’t see eye to eye with what the game designers or marketers of a particular game wanted to convey in a character.

Going back to Stuart Hall, whom Shaw cites in her book, this is another example of how the encoding and decoding process doesn’t often work in favor of the producers of texts, in this case a game and its design. The preferred reading of the audiences is different because its background is so multifaceted. Some of her interviewees mentioned to Shaw they identify with a character (not just Lara Croft) because they see the same personality traits in the characters as they see in themselves, or they wish to be like them, and they see it’s possible. Others identified with a situation a character happens to be in, but at the same time, they don’t identify with it completely. Shaw explains there is a difference between identifying as a character and identifying with a character which is an important part of understanding the audience’s reception of games, characters and other parts of the virtual worlds respectively. Recalling Ang’s study about the soap opera Dallas, this is an interesting layer of how audiences relate to what they see on the TV/computer screen. I assume that Ang’s emotional realism can be just one of the contributing factors to build an identification with and an identification as.

What I liked about Shaw’s work is how approachable she makes this area for researchers who are not as familiar with what it means to be queer and/or a gamer. She has written a great sociological probe into what it means to be a marginalized community in a community that tends to be somewhat (and sometimes even purposefully, at least from the inside) secluded from the world. I am not that familiar with the game studies’ literature, but as Shaw pointed out I feel like her big contributions are also in mapping single-player and offline games. I can imagine that researchers tend to analyze more collaborative and online video games for the richness of texts, audiovisual materials, social connections, and other, mostly social aspects, of gaming. Instead, Shaw looks at singular players and how through playing video games they perceive identity, identification and representation of the marginalized communities they belong to or don’t.

Reading Shaw, I could relate to my own research interests in multiple ways. First, I liked her methodological approach. Specifically, I got inspired by the underlying reasoning and careful ways she thought about both her field of study, though she said she didn’t have a “traditional” ethnographic field to enter, and her interviewees. I got inspired by her stating that for the study to accurately portrait what is happening, it must understand how players actually interact with games. When choosing her respondents, Shaw identified categories that are based on both popular and academic discourse traditionally presented as marginalized groups in the gaming community. But knowing they are of a marginalized community is only a starting point, and she left their labels there. She doesn’t use them as the lens through which she interpreted her results. In short, being queer or black is not a driving lens how she approaches her interviewees.

Regarding the methodology of interviewing, I noticed the approach of two interviews with one person (one a traditional one, the other one in the domestic environment of the interviewee), and wondered how to effectively employ this approach in studying how people perceive algorithms on Netflix from their living rooms. An intriguing methodologically remark is also when she had to take in account the particularities of video games when they discuss the representations of marginalized groups in these texts. She showcased that on the example of Mario Bros, who might be perceived as insulting against Italian American population. But when looking at the development of the game and the gaming industry lore, it shows a much more accidental history of the character. In short, this means that in order to understand the subjects’ reception of texts, it is beneficial to have domain knowledge to the extent that researchers doing an ethnography research are informed enough to not pollute their research work with vague assumptions on the topic or phenomenon studied.

References

Shaw, A. (2015). Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. U of Minnesota Press. Chicago

Lara Croft image: https://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/lara-croft-tomb-raider-1/81415116/

Cite as

KRSOVA, Lenka. Book to read: Gaming At The Edge, A. Shaw. Https://lenikrsova.github.io/ [online]. 2020-11-13.