Paper Abstract - Helen Kennedy

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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS
IN COMPUTER GAMING

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ABSTRACT

Gender, Technicity and Play: Girl Gamers and Online Methodologies

This paper is presented as part of a work in progress interrogation of how girls gamers narrative a particular gaming identity and technical competence within a culture which is heavily coded as masculine. The study is premised on the assertion that new media forms enable a relationship between text and consumer which is best understood as a form of play. Analyses of games and gaming therefore provide good material for examining the relationship between technological competence and playfulness. Technological competence and playfulness tend to underpin the transition from a mode of consumption to a mode pf production. What is therefore of interest is how this technicity is carried forward from the act of gaming into the act of producing other media forms such as web-pages, websites, animations and art but also occasionally leads on to the development of their own games that are then shared with others. Rather than seeing a separation between consumers and producers, what is present here is a continuum that is marked by degrees of technicity and playfulness.

Here I am focussing on online material by girl gamers specifically. This forms part of a larger study based on using online interview material alongside the analysis of web pages, web rings and web sites produced by self-professed girl gamers. It is clear that technological competence is a key marker for gender differentiation in a culture which increasingly privileges this playful relationship with technology. I use a feminist perspective developed from the critique of gender and technology to analyse the relationship the "girls" articulate between themselves and the practice of gaming. The analysis so far has uncovered a particularly strong sense of playfulness and invention in the articulation of this identity. Through a small sample of this online discourse I address some of the key methodological issues raised by such a study. Whilst offering some tentative conclusions from the work undertaken so far, this paper will investigate the efficacy of textual analysis alongside a more ethnographic approach. Here I am developing some of the insights offered by Christine Hine in Virtual Ethnographer, particularly around the issues of authenticity and identity in relation to online presentations of self. Hine asserts that there is a link between these online identities and that offline. "The offline world is rendered as present within the online spaces of interaction,"¹ here the online girl gaming identity which is articulated through these websites is both a reflection of their liminality within the dominant gaming culture and an active attempt to carve out space for a specific female gaming subjectivity within the apparently hostile and excluding context.

Reference

1 Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnographer, Sage, 2002, p.144

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