Shaw, Adrienne (2014). Gaming at the Edge; sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pages 147-199.
Adrienne Shaw has written about the importance of representation in games, and she starts with talking about recognition and identity politics. She underlines that representation in popular media does not correct lived experience, and it will not reorganise lived experience. Her example of this is from the game Diner Dash, which has black and asian characters in independent roles, but where the only character with real agency and ability to act is white. She also points out that the conventional approach to media representation is an assumption that all girls/women or all boys/men will have similar approaches to a medium under similar conditions.
Further, shaw points out that representation and identity does not live in texts alone, but is performance and action. Gamer identity is mutable, and has shifted over time. It has a complex relationship with media representation, consumption and identification. People playing and enjoying games may not self-identify as gamers in all contexts, and so will be missed by research on self-identified gamers. Media consumption also ebbs and flows, and the gamer identity may be more fitting in some periods than in others.
Two examples from Shaw's research: Rusty, while, plays to escape his boring self and does not wish for self-like characters. Gregory, black, sees himself as visible, acknowledge and present when he sees self-like representations. Straight Kat is troubled by the lack of represented diversity, queer and black Julia is not. Julia is troubled by the limitations in the assumed representations of people like her.
What this shows is how designers shape the potential for identification. This is a potential often cropped by marketing logic. In marketing there are no pluralist versions, as it is important to reduce large segments to their most general markers, in order to appeal to as many as possible without being offensive. And so representations is important for social reasons, not individualistic market logic.
A common argument in representations is realism vs fantasy. Recognition requires a reference to reality, but many assume that fiction is immune to recognition requirements. Also, games are systems of virtual representations, so the question of "real" becomes very complex indeed. But in such systems it is increasingly clear that the choice of which "real" the designers choose to follow and represent is a choice, often presented as aesthetic, but inherently politic.
At some points the subjects of Shaw's research also pointed out that representation did not matter. Among these were the lack of a strong sense of being ”different”: Ex. black queer women do not miss women in general, as their sense of being marginalised is so overwhelming, they do not think of themselves in large categories like black, queer or woman.
Ex. south asians grown up in Asia do not consider themselves marginalised, and think of whiteness as American, not something that excludes them.
Other topics was how the market logic of targeting through clichés is not representation - offering girls pink games does not represent women in games. This reveals a significant difference in ways to think about representation: the consumer as a set of selected data points from market studies, or the player as individual sets of experiences, knowledge, desire and circumstances, the information that creates our identities.
This also adresses tokenism, how some particular characters are added in for representation rather than for any particular function, much like when boards add one single woman in order to meet accusations of discrimination.
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