Session Proposal: Gender and Video Games

This is a joint proposal with Maria Sachiko Cecire (@mscecire). The majority of video games are geared towards socialized forms of masculinity (for example, aggression and dominance in order to ‘level up’ in first person shooter games). While there are increasing numbers of games which are geared towards women and girls as a target market (such as The Sims and many games on the Wii platform), video gaming is still considered a male-dominated preserve.

Some questions we would like to discuss: how does gender affect game studies/game pedagogy? How is gameplay gendered? What sorts of games attract women players, and why? How do we engage more women to take classes where games are being taught/are a focus of the class? How do we discuss the gender divide in games-focused classrooms? Are there areas of game studies/pedagogy where the gender divide is less prominent? The idea for this session proposal came out of a discussion of the role of gender and games in Friday’s games and teaching bootcamp run by Edmond Chang (@edmondchang) and Sarah Kremen-Hicks (@rhetoricaltrope).