Does Anyone Really Identify with FemShep?

This chapter argues that we should understand identity in video games as a way to value incommensurable difference rather than organized diversity. It focuses on FemShep, the female version of the Mass Effect trilogy’s Commander Shepard, who became an icon of diversity and inclusion in conversations about video games. FemShep is not a fully realized woman in her own right, but a character designed as a man and minimally altered to become a “woman.” The chapter explores the ways that Mass Effect betrays these origins through improbable animations and relationship choices, comparing it to similar oversights in Lionhead Studios’ Fable 2, and then suggests that it is the fact that FemShep is not a fully realized character that makes her a useful rallying point for political gamers. The chapter closes by drawing from Black feminists Kara Keeling and Audre Lorde to propose that “unity in difference” is the future (and past) of identity politics, and that the individualist war hero so popular in video games is no way to implement a politics of coalition and justice.

Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze

This chapter argues that the interpretation of games like Bayonetta, Portal, and Tomb Raider rests on an implementation of the theory of the male gaze that isolates visuality from a greater context of computation, procedure, race, and history. It challenges the prevailing interpretations of Chell as “good” and Bayonetta as “bad” representations of women in video games. First, it situates the struggle between Chell and GLaDOS as an antifeminist one in which the player uses the power of the gaze, located in Chell’s voiceless brown body, to subdue the powerful bodiless voice of GLaDOS. This reduces Chell, a brown woman who is the test subject of a scientific experiment, to an instrument of patriarchy. On the other hand, Bayonetta, who is widely criticized as a hypersexual fantasy figure, performs what micha cárdenas calls queer femme disturbance, an excessive performance of femininity that disrupts heteronormative and patriarchal power. These two women offer more context to the case of Lara Croft, who has become more violent and less sexy over the years, and who has ascended to the position of brutal white colonizer while courting a feminist audience.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion argues that we should also understand trouble as a positive force for change. It begins by making a case for reclaiming the agon, one of the game archetypes described by Roger Caillois and used by game studies theorists to understand competitive forms of gaming like sports, and, by extension, capitalism. However, reducing the agon to modes of contest that eradicate the opponent misreads Caillois’ original understanding of agon as a field of competition that must be balanced in order to be fair and satisfying. Anything less is something else entirely. Reading through theories of agonistic politics, and finally through Audre Lorde, the conclusion suggests that conflict is crucial for justice, and if we reject all forms of competition and contest, we settle into a political norm of superficial peacefulness that silences the marginalized. The chapter closes by encouraging readers to cultivate gamer trouble and struggle to level the playing field for as many as possible, in order to make way for progress toward justice.

Making a Face

This chapter argues that centuries-old techniques of racial and gender prejudice underwrite contemporary animation and customization technologies. Focusing on the face, the chapter starts by situating animation practices within techniques of imitation and masking for the sake of “realism,” reading Quantic Dream’s demo “KARA” as an example of the many layers of imitation that occur in motion capture narrative animations. It then gives a brief history of physiognomy, the practice of quantizing faces into numbers, and how its essentialist philosophy provides the basis for the animation techniques of today. Finally, it discusses various techniques of “making faces,” guided by Gloria Anzaldúa’s political practice of haciendo caras, including playful interactions with facial customization software, modding, and other strategies that seek to understand and alter the racial and gender politics embedded in avatar customization systems, using Bethesda Softwork’s Fallout 3 as an example.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s central concept, gamer trouble, as a way to understand video games, among the most important entertainment media in the 21st century, in all of their internal and external complexities. It does so primarily by tracing “trouble” to its origins in queer and feminist theory, where it operates as a noun and a verb that encourages us to struggle with rather than eliminate complexity and difference; and secondarily, by tracing the troubled short history of academic game studies, including the infamous narratology vs. ludology debate, to make a case that queer and women of color feminist theoretical approaches are necessary to understand video games in turbulent political times.

Of Dickwolves and Killjoys

This chapter argues that gamers, including academic gamers, use the angry feminist as an abject figure to reinforce gamer identity and impose politically-motivated limitations on what constitutes an “expert” of video games. It historicizes the conversation about harassment in video game culture most recently initiated by the #GamerGate campaign of 2014 by analysing the earlier Fat Princess (2008) and Dickwolves (2010) incidents to show that these encounters rely on hypocritical standards of affective performance and an emphasis on the “right” kinds of knowledge about video games. It then goes on to demonstrate that the conflicts accompanying the formation of game studies as a discipline shares structural similarities with these fan fights. The chapter ends with an analysis of early work on the Grand Theft Auto video games to show that the exclusion of feminist and critical race perspectives in game studies resulted in racist and sexist scholarship. The similarities in fan and academic conflicts about video games demonstrate that feminist epistemology continues to exist at the fringes of acceptable discourse – no more poignantly demonstrated than when #GamerGate discovered the Digital Games Research Association and separated its members into “academic” (legitimate) and “feminist” (illegitimate) experts on video games.