The association of casual and core games with different audiences serves to maintain an unequal hierarchy of power, first by ghettoizing women to the casual margins of game culture and then by dismissing these games as frivolous and unimportant. “Together, sectors of
commercial culture and core gaming culture work to position casual games as first feminine and then, tacitly if not vocally, as inferior and lacking when compared to masculinized hardcore video games” (Vanderhoef, 2013). Although new types of games target and introduce new audiences to gaming, they do not validate these players as real gamers or their games as significant. This identity remains masculinized and connected to specific types of games and audiences. This both ignores existing female gamers’ longstanding presence in and contribution
20 Platform games or “platformers” require the player to maneuver a character through an environment by jumping across suspended platforms, over obstacles, or both. The famous and extremely popular Super Mario Bros. series is an example of a platform-style franchise.
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to gaming and prevents their future access to gaming communities and the identity of a gamer. Because of this, “core” and “casual” need to be seen as strategic rather than natural; they are used as a tool for valorizing certain types of games, and certain types of players, while dismissing others.
Within gaming, “core” serves as a marker of centrality, an ideological means for
determining boundaries regarding what qualifies as a game (or a “good” game), who qualifies as a gamer, and what gaming culture should look like. “Core” performs labor in gaming culture, working to elevate specific play styles, types of gamers, genres, and more, while relegating others to the margins of game culture, defining them as less important. “Core” also deeply connects to relations of power, in that members of an area’s margins generally lack access to socio-cultural power in the center. When marked as tangential or less important, non-core gamers have little ability to control or affect the behavioral, linguistic, or content trends of gaming culture. Given the rise of sexism and misogyny that has permeated the post-casual era, power to redefine what gaming means or how it is developing matters, as does the inability to change it. If discourses of “core” effectively police the boundaries of gaming and maintain its alleged superiority, they will likely also maintain its misogynistic norms.
At the same time, the fact that “core” and “casual” are not nearly as simplistic as they appear on the surface offers up a new way of thinking about games, gamers, and gaming. Specifically, an analysis of “core” quickly demonstrates that it is a flexible and paradoxical concept. For each possible indicator of what “core” is, there is an example of a game or player that undermines that definition. If “core” is marked out by time investment, the many players who spend hundreds of hours on social media games like Farmville would seem to indicate that this game should count as core and they should count as core players. If “core” is decided by
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platform, with PC games and console games as the locus of “core”, then Solitaire and Wii Sports would both be included, while detailed, complex mobile games like Injustice: Gods Among Us
Mobile21 or Horn22 would not. If “core” is determined by player gender, the many experienced, skillful women interviewed for this study would be ignored or left out, while any male player would be included regardless of play style, game preferences, or skill. “Core” and “casual” are extremely complicated terms that encompass many different elements at once.
Because of this inherent flexibility, we can see that “core” is a key force working to maintain hegemony in gaming. As Gramsci argues, hegemony is a process, a continual struggle between the ruling class, which works to make its culture appear to be common sense, and subordinate classes, who sometimes consent to and sometimes resist this construction (1971). “Core” is one of the areas in which this process takes place. Specifically, hegemonic gamers and developers use notions of “core” to bound and police a hierarchy that prioritizes them. They expand or retract the perimeters of “core” as needed to deliminate what matters to game culture, their game culture, and what does not. At the same time, the flexibility of these boundaries allows subordinated gamers to take on some core characteristics while ignoring or deliberately avoiding others. This is a necessary step in breaking down and altering the gaming’s current gender hierarchy by denaturalizing it and showing how it can be constructed in different, more inclusive ways.
Drawing out the characteristics of “core”, what it means, and how it is constructed and maintained can demonstrate how relations of power are similarly maintained or challenged. This
21 Injustice: Gods Among Us Mobile was released in 2013. It is a trading-card based fighting game, where players collect cards showing different DC Comics characters and use these to battle other players or computer opponents. The game draws from the conventions of analog trading card games and therefore relies on a high degree of player knowledge and experience.
22 Horn is a mobile action-adventure game (RPG) released in 2012. It draws on fantasy themes and English
mythology to offer an immersive environment, hours-long quests for players to complete, and many other trappings traditionally associated with core rather than casual games.
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dissertation, therefore, offers an analysis of how women who play games encounter the boundaries of “core”— that is, which forces work to uphold gaming’s existing masculinized nature— as well as how their entry into gaming as skilled, experienced players subverts those same boundaries. Understanding how and when essentializing forces are deployed, undermined, or changed in gaming offers a means first for analyzing relations of power in similar ways, and second for understanding other masculinized or exclusionary spaces in greater detail.
This conceptualization responds to Shaw’s (2010) call to approach game culture from a critical cultural perspective; that is, as a process through which different contributors affect and navigate norms, expectations, and relations of power. Shaw points out that even as popular discourses around video games and gaming might change to recognize new audiences, “New definitions of game culture are never used to question the constructed past of video game culture’s insularity, maleness, and youthfulness” (p. 408). This project aims to alter this
limitation by addressing gaming culture, games, and gamers from the perceived margins of these spaces and by demonstrating how those margins can be seen as integral to the “core” of gaming.