The Empire’s New Bros: Gaming, Masculinity, Power
What is our responsibility as scholars of masculinity and games in the contemporary moment—which is to say, a time when the most pernicious, reactionary, and destructive expressions of straight white masculinity stalk the highest political office in the United States, and where the path to a mythic greatness is to double down on patriarchy’s deep-seated investments in environmental, military, economic, and racial subjugation?
It is tempting to say games—and game studies—seem trivial in such a time of crisis and upheaval. But to do so would ignore the inextricable and numerous ways in which games have historically served (and continue to serve) neo-colonial white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2003). The games industry is international and powerful, capable of enriching and/or impoverishing whole regions of production through its cutting-edge experiments in highly mobile (e.g., volatile) development studios and precarious pools of globalized labor (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). Its connections to the military -industrial complex are multiple and complex, and predate the advent of digital technologies by centuries, according to histories linking both tabletop and digital games to the development of military training simulations (Deterding 2009), not to mention the ideological support that “militainment” has traditionally provided Empire (see Stahl 2010, as well as Gregory Blackburn’s chapter in this volume). And in the last few years, particularly misogynist elements of geek culture—a culture which itself bears legacies of gender- and race-based exclusion (Kendall 1998; Turkle 1997), not to mention shared origins with gaming in the military -industrial complex (Miller 2012)—have found potent political agency first in the form of the gamergate hate campaign and, more broadly, in an adulation (and energetic online advocacy) for President Trump and his overtly sexist, racist agenda.
Around the same time we began putting together this volume, a rash of “think pieces” came out linking (and then unlinking) the rise of Trump to gamergate. Some did so in overt fashion, arguing that the online communities, media platforms, and communicative strategies involved in the hate campaign against feminist game designers, critics, and scholars were redirected toward promoting Trump , and seeing lawmakers’, politicians’, and industry leaders’ responses (or lack thereof) to gamergate as emboldening the alt-right (Lagomarsino 2017).
We do not seek to draw a straight line of causality between any one gamic representation of masculinity and the current crisis in American culture and politics; exaggerating the social impacts of games is arguably as detrimental as an approach that views them simply as leisure technologies , as artifacts of (a now indefinitely prolonged) boyhood. Rather, it is important to recognize that the relationships between games and their broader cultural milieus are characterized by “overdetermination,” Louis Althusser’s (1969) term describing how most social formations are animated by multiple, contradictory forces that both affect and are affected by one another (p. 101). And so it is with games and game cultures; while it does little good to simply label the alt-right “gamergate on a national scale” (Marcotte 2016), there are numerous technological, ideological, and sociocultural relations between gaming’s recent hate offensives and the 2016 US election that bear noting. In this vein, commentators position gamergate as one early reaction against so-called political correctness, part of a broad panoply of nativist, chauvinist currents which were then capitalized on by the Trump campaign (Maiberg 2017). Still others see his governing style as an extension of “trolling culture,” characterized by informational misdirection and open hostility towards experts and Others alike (Cross 2017).
It is beyond the scope of this introduction to offer a comprehensive map of these associations, and the multiple and sometime competing causalities they engender; we make note of them here to demonstrate that gaming constitutes one, key site in a broader apparatus of contemporary governmentality reconstituting and reconfiguring our (ever-precarious) understandings of masculinity and manliness. In her examination of player identity at the margins of games culture, Adrienne Shaw (2014) builds from Judith Butler’s theorization of performativity to argue that “performances [of identity] must draw on a broader system of meaning that helps render those utterances, those performances, intelligible. Media representations and connections with them via identification are deeply connected with this process” (67). Indeed, this echoes Butler’s (1993) own claim that the performance of gender (and other aspects of self) is a “citational practice” that must constantly reiterate its adherence to conventions in order to maintain “cultural intelligibility,” much less aspire to be valued (2; 16). As a communication technology that employs both representation and performance, games and the cultural practices that have emerged around them, in the main, help to maintain existing power relations and reroute them to adapt to historical circumstances.
To wit, one of the key aims of this volume, the first of its kind on the topic, is to organize and advance our nascent understandings of the co-constitutive relations between gaming, masculinities, and the wider cultural and political landscapes in which games and their players move. We believe that it is only through such a programmatic and rigorous approach that we can begin the challenging work of imagining how games might envision and enact ways of doing masculinities differently—that is, providing male-identified subjects with modes of expression and experience not rooted in domination. In what follows, we survey the current work in this area, provide two crucial theoretical interventions for continued research, and offer our own conceptualization of how we might productively frame masculinity and gaming in a time of ubiquitous mediatization. We then turn to an overview of the volume’s chapter organization.
Boys’ Toys?
Video games have historically been the domain of men and boys; decades of research on gender and digital gameplay have established this as an epistemic foundation for research examining, and at times intervening into, the marginalized status of girls (Jenson and de Castell 2011; Kafai et al. 2009), women (Kennedy 2006; Taylor 2006), and other gender identities that trouble heteronormativity (Shaw 2014; Lauteria 2012) in video game texts, practices, and cultures. As a result, we have robust accounts of how patriarchal hierarchies of gender and sexuality continue to be represented in, and reproduced through, the production, marketing, consumption, and critique of digital games.
The conditions of girls’ and women’s participation in, and exclusions from, gaming cultures have been a consistent lightning rod for game scholars, designers, journalists, cultural critics, and activists for at least the past two decades, if we take the first Barbie to Mortal Kombat volume as one starting point—not for the problematization of girls’ fraught relation to games and gaming contexts, which predates that volume, but for efforts to programmatically address the exclusionary gender politics of games. Perhaps best epitomized by Fron et al. (2007), this work generally proceeds from the position that game play and production are male-dominated domains, into or against which interventions must be made in order to create more equitable conditions for female participation. Another volume in this series, Women in Games, Feminism in Play, continues forward on this path, as well as marking out potential futures for feminist game criticism and women-centered gameplay.
The study of masculinity in relation to games is, by comparison, underdeveloped and fairly ad hoc. Existing work in this area can be categorized into two broad trajectories. The first aims to understand how patriarchal ideologies are embedded in gaming media: that is, how games and their attendant texts and artifacts communicate and mediate masculinities. The second, arguably less clearly defined trajectory explores how masculine subjects are recruited via games (alongside other media industries), to support the neol...