At the same time, industrial changes have not simply been able to redefine games and gamers without resistance, and the rise of alternatives to traditional games and studios has seen many challenges. Although new games are critical hits and economically successful, players and critics often treat them as less serious, less significant, and less important than older styles of games. Furthermore, new games are heavily feminized, while older game styles maintain their traditional masculine associations. For example, although Gone Home is one of the games Druckmann specifically praised for its inventive storyline and although it won game site
Polygon’s 2013 Game of the Year award (Grant, 2014), critics, particularly “core” gamers, often claim that it does not actually qualify as a game24 (Kohler, 2013; Gaynor, 2014; Sheffield, 2014).
24 Games journalists and developers have largely reacted positively to Gone Home; this critique primarily comes from game players. Their arguments as to why Gone Home is not a game can be widely found on Twitter and online games forums, but generally include the fact that it doesn’t have a way for the player to fail, that it is not long
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Many are quite negative about Gone Home because of this, arguing that is it overrated, too expensive, or simply distracting players, developers, and journalists from “real” games.
What is important here is that even when players do speak positively about their
experience playing Gone Home, insisting that it is not a game is an attempt to maintain gaming’s status quo, as a medium for a specific “core” audience and specific “core” games, in the face of industrial changes that broaden or redefine that core. It is an attempt to maintain exclusivity and to continue to define gaming boundaries in the way they have always already been defined. And although it is a more positive way of defining boundaries than the sexism and misogyny
described in the introduction to this dissertation, it is still a mechanism for maintaining gendered hierarchies among games.
More interestingly, players seem to deploy the “not a game” argument at games that do not target “core” gamers or that tell different stories; for example, although popular sandbox game Minecraft, like Gone Home, doesn’t necessarily have a way for the player to fail, or combat or puzzles for a player to face, its gameness is rarely or never questioned the way Gone
Home’s has been. This could simply be because Minecraft does offer options for elements like
combat if players seek them out, but evidence suggests that the negative reaction to Gone Home (and Journey, Flower, Her Story, or other recent offerings that face the not-a-game argument) is at least partially due to its focus on new audiences and storylines (Gray, 2015). In the face of changing industry standards, some players, especially players who are part of gaming’s longstanding straight, white, male audience, are working to deploy ideas of quality and what constitutes a game as a way to continue valorizing games that target them, and that have always
enough to qualify as a game, that is has no combat or puzzle challenges for the player to engage with, and that the storyline doesn’t branch (Gaynor, 2014. Because of this, player critics argue that Gone Home is an interactive story rather than an actual game.
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targeted them, as more important than newer offerings.
Although researchers have not fully explored men’s, or “gamers”, experiences in the post-casual era, there is some evidence that this reaction, and some of the rampant misogyny that has arisen in gaming, is due to traditional players’ fears that the gaming industry may be a zero- sum game. In fact, “some players are explicit in their complaints that growth in some areas — such as casual and social games, which are often targeted to women — means that fewer budgets and development teams will be focused on traditional titles and genres such as First Person Shooters and Action games” (Consalvo, 2012). “Gamers” see casual games’ normalization of gaming (Juul, 2010) and the ensuing increase in non-“gamer” players as a potential threat to the kinds of games they enjoy or prefer.25 Because of this, they are deploying many forces in an attempt to maintain gaming’s “core” as exclusive and exclusionary in terms of both content and broader culture. Defining the quality of games in specific ways is one attempt at this. The rise of greater misogyny in gaming is likely another, especially as participants for this study,
particularly those with long histories as gamers, argue that gaming’s blatant sexism is a relatively new development.
Conclusions
Although it may seem obvious to conclude this section by stating that changes in the video gaming industry have resulted in a medium in flux, such a realization is a necessary foundation for the rest of this project. As Shaw (2010) reminds us, the masculinized nature of gaming culture often goes unquestioned. Other than small, relatively unsuccessful attempts like
25 As Consalvo (2012) points out, little research has analyzed why “gamers” believe gaming is a zero-sum industry or whether these concerns have a basis in the actual economics of gaming. However, even if these are unfounded fears, the fact that they are deeply felt by at least some members of the gaming community, who are then working to defend their space using forces like sexism and misogyny, matters to the questions of this project and the trends we are seeing in gaming culture.
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the girls’ games movement of the 1990s, little has been done in the past to change or undermine the idea that gaming is a hobby for boys and men, not for women and girls. The aforementioned industrial changes, although aimed simply at increasing revenues for companies or improving work-life balances for individuals who move to indie studios, have provided a foundation upon which a real attempt to undermine games’ masculinized history can take place, a basis from which “core” can be questioned and redefined.
The maintenance of power is a continual process of negotiation. Gramsci argued that the ruling class works to create a cultural hegemony, whereby they draw from the aspirations of non- elites and/or manipulate the values and beliefs of society in order to create a “common-sense”, self-justifying worldview that supports their continued power (Gramsci and Hoare, 1971). However, this hegemony requires constant attention, as members of both the ruling and subordinate classes at times realize the constructed nature of their positions. When they make this realization, either through personal experience or group education, subjected groups push for more power, obligating the ruling groups to deploy greater force in order to maintain divisions. At times, the dominant group will engage in what Gramsci calls “passive revolution”, making small concessions to the oppressed in order to maintain overall control and convincing them that change is possible while limiting the extent of it. At other times, moments Gramsci referred to as “crises of authority”, real power shifts can occur. In these moments, extensive pushes for change can redefine the dominant order, although the previously hegemonic group will deploy all the forces at their power in order to try to prevent this.
Specifically, Gramsci argued that the “crisis of authority” was the time when the veneer of common sense would slip away and the established order would no longer be taken for granted. At this moment, the ruling group would resort to pure force in order to maintain power.
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In the case of gaming, we can see the post-casual era as a “crisis of authority”, in that numerous forces have drawn attention to the constructed nature of “core” and games’ exclusivity,
undermining the common sense notion that gaming is a hobby specifically for men and boys26. This has led to a moment where “the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 556). The hegemonic class’s loss of common sense ideologies, and subsequent reliance on coercion, means that the current crisis of authority has the potential to shift power in gaming from a small contingent of “gamers” and AAA studios to a much broader and more inclusive base, but only if resistance to change can be overcome.
The post-casual era is also defined by the ways in which previously marginal players, game types, and producers are striving to be taken seriously and to redefine the cultural hegemony of gaming in their favor. But they are doing so in the face of force; sexism and misogyny, specifically in the forms of harassment and threats, are blatant attempts to drive out new types of players and maintain the status quo of “core”. More subtle forces, like the not-a- game argument, are also doing this work. In these ways, Gramsci’s predictions are playing out as expected. And while we have yet to see the results of the current struggle, a crisis of authority has two outcomes— the exertion of enough force for the subjected class to resume their position of powerlessness or the success of the alternate hegemony.
The industrial changes occurring in gaming, although simply based in game companies’ attempts to increase revenue through the introduction of broader audiences and new content, can
26 Gramsci discussed hegemony and developed the idea of a crisis of authority in reference to major socio-political shifts, such as the rise of fascism in Italy. Because this project is focused on gaming, and shifts in a segment of the entertainment industry, its stakes are clearly much lower than those Gramsci was working with. However, his analysis and theoretical framework map strongly onto gaming’s current issues with sexism, providing a useful structure despite the differences in scope and significance.
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be seen as the motivating force behind the post-casual crisis of authority in gaming, where “core” ideals are being questioned in new ways, sometimes for the first time. At this moment, therefore, the interventions female gamers make into gaming’s gender exclusivity potentially matter more than ever, while the future of gaming power is being decided. It is therefore from this foundation, this understanding that gaming is in a crisis of authority around the idea of “core”, that the
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