Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games

by Jennifer Malkowski (Editor), Anna Everett (Contributor), Braxton Soderman (Contributor)

Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity and representation in video games, including journalists and bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Genres: Video Games, Nonfiction, Games, School

276 pages, Paperback

Published July 3, 2017

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

there were some interesting and thought provoking essays in here, for example i really liked the essay politicising cosplay as feminised labour within gaming communities, but overall i felt the volume was overly academic in tone and didn't really look at issues of race, gender and sexuality in games from enough of a materialist point of view, for example i don't particularly like the approach of arguing that queerness in games "beyond representation" is queerness as essentially "subverting" game structures, i think this is too broad a definition of queer which separates it too much from the material realities of queer people, and i often wonder how useful it is

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scholarly writing isn't really my thing, but overall it was still a very interesting read. It provided some very interesting perspectives that I didn't use to consider due to my positions of privilege.

[Kelli Rushek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have been much more beneficial for someone a little more in this field.