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Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture

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Complicating perspectives on diversity in video games

Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems.

By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.

ISBN-13: 9781479834921

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 04-21-2020

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Amanda Phillips is Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Introduction 1

1 Of Dickwolves and Killjoys: Feminism and Interpretative Violence in Gaming Communities 27

2 Making a Face: Quantizing Reality in Character Animation and Customization 66

3 Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze: Re-viewing Portal and Bayonetta 99

4 Does Anyone Really Identify with FemShep? Troubling Identity (and) Politics in Mass Effect 137

Conclusion: Playing the Long Game 171

Acknowledgments 185

Notes 189

Bibliography 209

Index 229

About the Author 237