Women and videogames: blog tasks

Work through the following blog tasks to complete our work on women in videogames and further feminist theory.

Part 1: Background reading on Gamergate

Read this Guardian article on Gamergate 10 years on. Answer the following questions:

1) What was Gamergate? 

Some guy was mad at his ex, called her a prostitute and it gained traction.

2) What is the recent controversy surrounding narrative design studio Sweet Baby Inc? 

A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out.

3) What does the article conclude regarding diversity in videogames?

Nobody is forcing diversity into video games. It is happening naturally, as players and developers themselves diversify. Gamergate didn’t intimidate women out of video games 10 years ago, and we won’t be intimidated now. The games industry knows that a greater breadth of content, featuring a greater breadth of characters, made with the contributions of a greater breadth of people, is good for creativity and for business, no matter what some aggrieved gamers may think. This time, it must make its support perfectly and unequivocally clear.

Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet

Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets) or here using your Greenford Google login. Find Media Factsheet #169 Further Feminist Theory, read the whole of the Factsheet and answer the following questions:

1) What definitions are offered by the factsheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?

Feminism is a movement which aims for equality for women – to be

treated as equal to men socially, economically, and politically.

Patriarchy- male dominance in society.

2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?

She had identified a lack of diversity within the feminist movement, and argued that these diverse voices had been marginalised, being put outside the main body of feminism.

3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?

Intersectionality

4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?

The term intersectionality is used to describe overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. Its meaning is that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from separate component identities.

5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?

Feminist media studies focus on how gender is communicated within the media. For van Zoonen “gender is a, if not the, crucial component of culture”, in particular when investigating the production of mass mediated meanings.

6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?

Gender is something the society puts onto us. Judith Butler.

7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?

Feminists have criticised women’s magazines as commercial sites of exaggerated femininity which serve to pull women into a consumer culture on the promise that the products they buy will alleviate their own bodily insecurities and low self-esteem.

8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?

David hesmondhalgh. I disagree. Gender roles have been same since dawn of time. We live in an era of the longest peace in human history and that peace has led to people thing that they can change how things Only now have things changed slight. Look at Ukraine, woman and children have been evacuated while men have to stay behind and fight for their country. Not one feminist is arguing that woman should be on the front lines and that's how it always was and how it should always be. 

9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?

Whether the institution is commercial or public

• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)

• Genre (drama versus news)

• Target audiences

• The place the media text holds within the audiences’ daily lives

10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?

Stuart Hall

11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?

Stuart Hall. Hall suggests that media messages are encoded by producers with a certain set of meanings and then decoded by audiences. However, the decoding process can be influenced by the audience's own cultural and social context, leading to different interpretations.

12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?

Van Zoonen's idea that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects a "multiplicity of relations of subordination" links to bell hooks' feminist theory of the concept of intersectionality. hooks argues that oppression is shaped by multiple factors like race, class, and sexuality, not just gender. Both of them emphasise that power dynamics cannot be understood through a simple male/female lens.