From Custer’s Revenge and Mario to Fable and Fallout: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Digital Games - Adrienne Shaw
In her introduction, Adrienne Shaw outlines the need for study based on three main problems: For one, digital game studies has remained mostly industry-oriented with little focus on game play, culture, textual analysis, and representation of marginalized groups. Research that has been done on the representation of marginalized groups in game culture, however, have largely been concerned with gender, race, and sexuality as separate objects of study rather than groups that oftentimes intersect-- and even fluctuate in terms of sexuality. Finally, Shaw underscores researchers’ tendency to presume that representation is the ultimate goal for marginalized groups and often lead into such questioning or research without letting members of the audience guide the conversation based on their own experience, gameplay, relationships, and concerns. In her book, Shaw’s goal is therefore to focus on how the discourse on representation from both and industrial and academic point of view needs to be transformed. It is less focused on transformation within the game texts themselves and more interested in methods and understanding to get a better grasp on representation in ways that may currently escape our grasp from such a targeted scope.
Methodologically, she intends to do this by keeping both a microscopic and telescopic view on players, culture, and representation to pinpoint alternative issues and perspectives. For one, she looks predominantly at solo play where most studies have focused on online play. She is interested in how culture and social mechanisms necessarily interact with gameplay that has been deemed non-social. She is likewise interested in players who do not identify as gamers, stating the “gamer” label has a specific connotation and meaning to those who do identify as such, yet her interviewees all invested significant time and money into gaming. Finally, she takes the individual players as the branching off point for analysis on representation. She lets her interviewees be forthcoming on when and how representation becomes significant, which she admittedly states poses some issues in the context of a study but often becomes more forthright upon a second meeting or demonstrating her own “in-group” knowledge. She takes this stance despite its limitations to prioritize a study that does not guide interviewees to see what this method might add to the current discourses.
She finds that by contextualizing her research through interviews instead of dividing up players into distinct categories, we can avoid some of the essentialism perpetuated by neoliberal segmentation. The obvious problem, here, is that “groups are representable only insofar as they are marketable” (18). Contextualization instead of segmentation similarly allows her to account for the fact that representation is always distortive. As marginalized groups come into view, their characters are carefully regulated. She also avoids addressing “stereotypes” that are often only problematic as a part of a “bad” value judgment for those in the out-groups; whereas, marginalized groups will often recognize accuracy in those depictions and use them to talk about larger, systematic issues. For these reasons, Shaw focuses on interviews with marginalized communities, mostly open dialogue, and contextualization with larger discourses to come to her analysis and conclusions.