THE POLITICS OF GAMERS: IDENTITY AND MASCULINITY IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL MEDIA BY MEGAN AMBER CONDIS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with minors in Cinema Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Stephanie Foote, Co-Chair Professor Lisa Nakamura, Co-Chair, University of Michigan Associate Professor Jose Capino Associate Professor Spencer Schaffner ABSTRACT Contrary to the popular belief that the Internet is a bodiless utopian space, I argue that gender is actually the most important tool of social organization in video game culture. I gather an archive that includes games, novels and films about gamers, press releases made by game developers, and blog and forum posts made by players to reveal how the gaming subculture rewards masculine presentations that emphasize control over the self, the environment, technology, and the effeminate “other.” On the other hand, women and queer gamers often find themselves occupying unexpected positions and forming strategic alliances with game producers to carve out spaces of their own on the masculinized virtual frontier. As gaming becomes embedded within in mainstream culture, the gendered system of self-representation enacted by gamers will shape popular ideas about what kinds of bodies are thought to be competent, legitimate actors. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are so many people who supported me as I went through the process of writing this dissertation that I hardly know where to begin. Of course I must extend my most sincere thanks to my dissertation committee: Professors Stephanie Foote, Lisa Nakamura, Spencer Schaffner, and JB Capino. I cannot express how important their insightful critiques and pointed questions were to me. I would also like to thank Professors Andrea Stevens, Justine Murison, Renée Trilling, and Sarah Projansky for helping me to position this project (and myself) on the academic job market. Professors Robert Barrett, Gordon Hutner, Melissa Littlefield, Lauri Newcomb, Robert Dale Parker, Curtis Perry, Anthony Pollock, Siobhan Sommerville, Robert Warrior, Charles Wright, Karen Flynn, Chantal Nadeau, Mimi Nguyen, Fiona Ngô, Dianne Harris, Rob Rushing, Sandy Camargo, Lilya Kaganovsky, Cris Mayo, and Isabel Molina-Guzmán provided guidance and encouragement in seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels. High school teachers like Barb Katz, Elizabeth Rebmann, and Brian Deters inspired me and nurtured my no-doubt annoying inquisitiveness. I must thank the participants in the 2013-2014 IPRH Fellowship Seminar for their diverse and brilliant insights. I would also like to thank Donald and Barbara Smalley for supporting a fellowship in Gender and Women’s Studies that supported me at a crucial time while I was writing this dissertation. My fellow graduate students were indispensible as intellectual partners and emotional allies. Thank you to Karo Engstrom, T. J. Tallie, Franklin Ridgeway, Derek Attig, Kaitlin Marks-Dubbs, Ben Bascom, Melissa Kaye Forbes, Marthea Webber, Elaine Wood, Amber Buck, Sarah Sahn, Erin Heath, Sarah Alexander Tsai, Amanda Zink, Ashley Hetrick, Shantal Martinez, iii Stephanie Brown, Mel Stanfil, Lisa Oliverio, Jill Hamilton Clements, Erin Schroyer McQuiston, Alicia Kozma, Ezra Claverie, and Melissa Girard. Without the council of Jennifer Daly, Lauri Harden, Jennifer Price, Amy Rumsey, Stephanie Shockey, Deborah Stauffer, and Jacquelyn Kahn, I would have floundered in the university bureaucracy. Thank you for your patience and your assistance in all matters great and small. My coaches and teammates at CrossFit Trilogy and Central Illinois Combat Club kept me healthy and sane. Thank you to Bob Long, Jeremy Pasley, Ryan Smith, Kelly Madden, Gavin Vansaghi, Wade Choate, Mike Taylor, and Jason Stramberg for teaching me to believe in myself, in the strength of my body and my mind. Special thanks to the women of Trilogy: Brook McCreary, Sarah Morris, April Lovell, Jamie Cates, Kelly Davenport, Alli McClanahan, Kristi Bennett, Megan Taylor, Jill LaCost, Jesi Sciortino, Sarah Beal, Brandi Bailey, Stephanie Larson, Morgan Lynn, Liz Dill, Jani Davis, Krista Bontemps, Diana Schmitt, Kambell Bennett, Darcey Drockelman, Jenna Schultz, Angie Fangmeier, and Liz Lewis for being the best friends anyone could ever ask for. I am especially grateful to my Sparkle Motion partners Missy Rummel and Kelly Girardo. I can’t imagine better partners in competition and in life. Thank you to Sylvia Armitstead for talking me down when my anxiety was looming and for always being there with a cup of coffee and an episode of Doctor Who. Thank you to my parents, Amy and Bill Davis, my brother Zack Davis, and my grandparents, Sally and Ron Ferko and Henrietta Davis. Everything I’ve ever done that was any good was only possible because of you. iv And most of all, thank you to my husband Jake Condis for your patience and your love. I can’t wait for us to take the next step on our journey together. Thank you. I love you. Thank you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE GAMIFICATION OF GENDER…………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1: WHO IS THE ULTIMATE GAMER?: READY PLAYER ONE AND THE GEEKY “CANON”……………………………………………………………………………...16 CHAPTER 2: “GET RAPED, FAGGOT”: TROLLING AS A GENDERED META- GAME…………………………………………………………………..………………………..61 CHAPTER 3: SEXY SIDEKICKS, FILTHY CASUALS, AND FAKE GEEK GIRLS: MEME- IFYING GENDER IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY.………………………………….…….95 CHAPTER 4: NO HOMOSEXUALS IN STAR WARS?: BIOWARE, “GAMER” IDENTITY, AND THE POLITICS OF PRIVILEGE IN A CONVERGENCE CULTURE.…………….…142 CONCLUSION: THE DATING GAME: GENDER PERFORMANCE AND GAMIFICATION IN THE REAL WORLD…...…………………………………………………………………..162 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….172 vi INTRODUCTION: THE GAMIFICATION OF GENDER This dissertation project examines the practices and rhetorics of hardcore online gamers. I am especially interested in their complex and contradictory views regarding the politics of the body. By mapping the various contours and contradictions therein, we can create a model of how concepts like gender, sexuality, and race can be stretched and reshaped to fit various subcultural contexts. These partially new versions of embodied ideologies mostly function to import familiar power dynamics into these subcultural spaces. However, occasionally these models become so warped as they are stretched over the contours of that space that they become vulnerable. It is in these corners of stress and flexibility, where hierarchy meets anarchy on the virtual playfields of online gaming culture, that this dissertation was born. Scholars have long studied how gendered ideologies are filtered through and produced by the logics of certain cultural institutions like the law, the education system, and scientific discourse. I, in turn, study how gender politics are being filtered through/produced by the logic of video games as it is explicated and enacted by participants in gamer culture. In doing so, I will illustrate some of the game-like principles that operate in all gender performances. This insight could not come at a better time, as the video game industry is currently “one of the fastest growing sectors in the U. S. economy” (Entertainment Software Association); it is currently “more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts” (“All the World’s a Game”). Furthermore many other industries are looking to digital “gamification” to create new tools for interacting with customers, driving research and development, and training employees. For example, David Edery and Ethan Mollick describe how video games are used to market new products, gather data about potential 1 customers, and commodify the labor of loyal fans while Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Reed write about how businesses can use games to improve their hiring practices, facilitate cooperation, and drive worker productivity. Meanwhile, James Paul Gee and Kurt Squire advocate for the use of video games and virtual worlds in the classroom, and Mary Flanagan and Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games) describe how games can be used by activists and politicians to persuade audiences and motivate them to take action for a particular cause. Jane McGonigal and Daren C. Brabham imagine a future when the collective intelligence of gamers might be used to solve complex problems, as when, for example, players of the online game Foldit, which has been described as being “like Tetris on steroids,” were able to figure out “the structure of an enzyme that AIDS-like viruses use for reproduction,” a puzzle that “has baffled scientists for more than a decade” (Husted).1 In a culture that is increasingly saturated in the language and the logics of gaming, a culture that is beginning to put the power of gaming to work on a diverse set of problems, we might ask ourselves: what new insight might be gained by imagining gender itself as a kind of Massively-Multiplayer On (and Off)line Role Playing Game, one featuring both cooperative and competitive modes, one that is constantly updated and patched to remain popular and relevant? What kinds of gendered expectations are built into the games that we are using across such a diverse set of contexts? And how might the gamified logics of gender be “hacked” or “exploited” by those players who are frustrated with the status quo? 1 For more on gamification as a tool used by corporations for marketing and employee training, see: Werbach, Bogost, How to Do Things with Video Games, Burke, and Stanfil and Condis. For gamification in education, see Gee, Kapp, Squire, Sheldon, and Steinkuehler, Squire, and Barab. For gamification in politics and activism, see Galloway. For the gamification of the labor of fans, see Stanfill and Condis. 2 Gender, Performativity, and Play In 1990 Judith Butler used an exploration of the subcultural practices of drag performers to illustrate an important truth about how gender works in the broader culture.