Girls@Play: Feminist Media Studies

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Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

Girls@Play
An ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay

Jennifer Jenson & Suzanne de Castell

To cite this article: Jennifer Jenson & Suzanne de Castell (2011) Girls@Play, Feminist Media
Studies, 11:2, 167-179, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.521625

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2010.521625

Published online: 23 Feb 2011.

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GIRLS@PLAY

An ethnographic study of gender and digital


gameplay

Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell

This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project
entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and
boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and
assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular
context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodologies help to
shape what we have thus far taken as “evidence” or “facts” about gender and illustrate how some
of those presumptions might not necessarily hold over time or given different contexts.

KEYWORDS gender; gameplay; girls; videogames; ethnography

Introduction
Over a remarkably short span of time, digital games have come to command an
increasingly important role in social communications. Education, skill development, job
training, ideology-formation, artistic endeavors and more have all come under the spell of
the so-called “stealth-learning” possibilities that digital games afford. So seen, digital games
are a significant new medium, and gameplay, on this view, both depends upon and
develops a kind of new literacy (Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel 2009). Alongside such
work is that which is looking at the playing of massively multi-player online games (MMOs)
as the formation of complex “communities of practice” in which not only learning takes
place but important social and cultural bonds are established and developed
(Nicholas Taylor 2008; T. L. Taylor 2006, 2008). What we need at this point, however, is a
more specific analysis both of the particular kinds of “new literacies” that gameplay
purportedly develops, and no less importantly, a rich data set which allows us to look in
depth and detail at the particulars of this widely endorsed general claim.
Within the current very much gendered context of the development of digital games
for instructional and educational practices, specific questions to pursue are: who plays, and
what and how do they play, and what practices (social, cultural; insider, outsider; shared,
individual) are being developed by boys and by girls as they play digital games? This paper
examines the results of a three-year after school gameplaying club for boys and girls aged
12 – 13 which looked at game choice, play discourse, in-game and beyond-game activities,

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2011


ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/11/020167-179
q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.521625
168 JENNIFER JENSON AND SUZANNE DE CASTELL

prior game familiarity and (broadly) notions of “competition” as participants played in same
sex and in mixed sex groups.
We are here seeking to move the discussion about games and gender beyond the
generalities to which they have thus far been very largely confined, and we begin with a brief
overview of the work to date on gender and digital games that has relied on short-term
ethnographic accounts of difference/s between girls’ and boys’ gameplay as well as
quantitative data sets that do not consistently “account” for gender. Following that review,
we draw on the broad and diverse data set we have accumulated in our own study to enable
us to see in a more specific and nuanced way, what and how girls play games, and how these
opportunities have been and remain gender-stratified in ways which, notwithstanding clichés
about girls’ superior “literacy,” continue to disadvantage them in a culture that is relying more
and more on the concepts, practices and “literacies” acquired through digital gameplay.

Girls in Play: Passing Through


Girls have had an uneasy relation to digital games, whether marginalized prima facie
by the men/guns/toys themes and titles such as God of War, Manhunt or Stalker or targeted
directly by pink box titles like Rockett’s New School, Barbie: Horseshow or Mary Kate and
Ashley: Sweet 16 that, although packaged “pink” and “cute,” are not necessarily “fun.” This is
not to say that girls have not played and do not play digital games, but their market-defined
relation to those games, the access that they have to the technology to play them, and the
kinds of games that they choose to play once they gain access are all highly contextually
dependent and not necessarily supported by a larger cultural engagement with that new
media form (Diane Carr 2005; Justine Cassell & Henry Jenkins 1998; Jill Denner 2007; Carrie
Heeter & Brian Winn 2008; Yasmin B. Kafai 2008; Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner &
Jennifer Y. Sun 2008; Nick Yee 2008). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (Cassell & Jenkins 1998)
focused on some of the more pertinent issues at that time, including the development of
the “girls game” movement, spurred on by the financial success of Barbie Fashion Designer.
Here also was a discussion of “player preferences” (1998), that is what sorts of games girls
“liked” and “did not like” as well as a more nuanced discussion of the gendered nature of
play (Suzanne de Castell & Mary Bryson 1998). Its follow up collection, Beyond Barbie and
Mortal Kombat (Kafai et al. 2008), is still concerned with a field that remains relatively
unchanged for women and girls, as Jenkins and Cassell argue, what has remained the same
over the past ten years is: “(1) the debate about whether girls do and can and should play
video games; and (2) the concern that women are still vastly underrepresented in the fields
that design digital technology” (Jenkins & Cassell 2008, p. 5).
In part, these issues have been answered through the wide use of Sheri Graner Ray’s
work, Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market (2004), which attempts to tackle
the question of design of video games for a “non traditional market” (e.g., women and girls),
through an essentialized and highly stereotyped account of differences and preferences
between male and female players, which unproblematically reinstates the presumption
that women and girls have gender-specific “playstyles” and “preferences.” This is further
exacerbated by the prevalence of highly stereotypical representations of males and females
in games, such that both are hyper masculinized and feminized, and the fact that female
characters are consistently underrepresented in commercially available games (Berrin
Beasley & Tracy Collins Standley 2002; Tracy L. Dietz 1998; James D. Ivory 2006; Jeroen Jansz
GENDER AND DIGITAL GAMEPLAY 169

& Raynel G. Martis 2007; Nicole Martins, Dmitri C. Williams, Kristen Harrison & Rabindra A.
Ratan 2009).
Looking to playstyles, preferences, and availability of female avatars to play with as
answers to when, where, how and under what conditions women typically play games is,
we argue, a methodologically retrograde move which cannot help but obscure rather than
illuminate what and how girls and women play. This includes whatever advantages may be
had from understanding and addressing girls’ relative under-involvement in digital games,
whether playing, designing, producing or using for “serious” ends such as promoting
technological interest and ability.
While girls certainly have been and still are less visible as gamers, that is not to say
they are not playing (Jo Bryce & Jason Rutter 2003; Carr 2005; Jennifer Jenson & Suzanne de
Castell 2005, 2010; Kafai et al. 2009; Alex Krotoski 2004; Helen Thornham 2008; Valerie
Walkerdine 2006, 2007; Valerie Walkerdine & Thomas A. Studart n.d.; Yee 2008). Unless and
until the kind of detailed and nuanced analytical study of gender and gameplay overtakes
the essentializing and evasion of gender that continues to characterize the most widely
read and cited work in this field, we are consigned to working within the very same
categories of concern problematized more than two decades ago. Repetition may be
instructive, but it does not get us very far ahead.

Background
Informed by more than two decades of work which seems invariably to slip back into
by now almost canonical assumptions that end by locating differences within a black-
boxed and therefore essentialist conception of gender, we have in our own research efforts
sought only to remove constraints and to support girls’ own enjoyment in learning and
playing digital games. We have wanted simply to give them access to the pleasures of such
play, and, as much as we possibly could, to simply watch what would happen when we
demanded nothing from them and gave them every opportunity we could muster to find
as much fun in such play as their male counterparts have so easily managed to do.
From this standpoint, we carried out a three-year, Canadian federally funded research
project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming.” This study of gender and digital game-
playing was driven by two significant factors previously noted: first, the by-now
commonplace recognition that far more boys than girls play computer/video games, and
the hypothesis that boys’ early and sustained exposure to and experience with gaming
might place them at an advantage with respect to computer competence and confidence
when they enter and as they continue their schooling. Second, our project was driven by an
equally commonplace acknowledgement that, not only are computer-based media
increasingly central tools for learning and work, but in fact games and simulations are
increasingly being recruited as educational and instructional genres (Marc Prensky 2006).
This eager uptake for educational deployment of game-based learning, it is frequently
suggested, threatens to compound and intensify girls’ computer disadvantage, as women
continue to shy away from computer-related fields (AAUW 2000, 2004, 2010; Joanna Goode,
Rachel Estrella & Jane Margolis 2006; Maria Klawe 2005). It appears therefore even more
urgent that educationally-based research reinvestigates stereotypical presumptions about
masculinity and femininity as they relate to digital gameplaying for children in order to
better understand the gendered patterns of technology access, interest, and competence
and thereby make it possible for girls to participate more fully and equally in
170 JENNIFER JENSON AND SUZANNE DE CASTELL

technology-related engagements. Moreover, the relatively new push to design “serious”


games for educational purposes might better be informed by as full an understanding as
possible of girls’ perspectives on and participation in gaming, and about the kinds of games,
characters, and overall approaches to “play” that might better engage and involve them.
From this viewpoint, we initiated after school gaming clubs for girls and boys at
several public schools in the greater Toronto area, which we ran over a three-year period
from 2003 –2005. The first year, the clubs ran separately in same-sex groups; the second
year, a “mixed” sex group was established but participants, with one exception, self-divided
into same-sex groups.
In the first year these clubs were developed to provide an opportunity for girls and
boys in the intermediate division to interact with different technologies and play age-
appropriate computer games in a supervised environment. Our main goal was to develop
areas of play for students in which a group of girls and a group of boys could play whatever
games they chose to play independent of one another. In the second year, our intention
was to observe girls and boys playing together; however, they self-selected away from one
another and indicated clearly that they were not willing to “play together.” There was one
exception to this division: one young man chose to play consistently with two girls and
never chose to play with the boys. We speculated, in part, that he preferred this
arrangement because he was the only boy of Chinese descent in the club, one of the girls
he was playing with was also Chinese, and, perhaps most importantly, he was the only boy
who reported that he did not have a game console at home and was not allowed to play
computer games other than the ones freely available. In other words, this young man’s
experience level was more equivalent to that of girls with whom he had chosen to play.
The rationale for developing the game clubs was to build an environment that would
support research intended to help us gain a better understanding of how boys and girls
respond to and interact with popular technologies within a supported same-sex peer group,
building on earlier work on single sex groupings and new technologies (Cher Hill 2002;
Jenson 1999). In considering the discourse on using videogames as literacy and learning
tools (James Paul Gee 2003) our plan was to use these clubs to: (1) study how boys and girls
interact with popular game-based technologies; (2) gauge the role gender plays in how
boys and girls approach gameplay; and (3) observe and document the kinds of multimodal,
multi-literate practices that boys and girls used to interact with and play videogames.

Methods
This study combined qualitative and quantitative methods to generate a more richly
detailed understanding of gendered attitudes and play styles in console-based gaming
environments, as well as to provide a solid empirical grounding to our interpretations of
what we saw in participants’ play and play-oriented interaction. We have examined the play
styles and interactions while gaming of boys and girls in six single sex and one “mixed” sex
after school console-based gaming clubs. Each play session was both audio and video
taped, as well as being documented through researcher field notes. Over ninety-five hours
of video were then coded for interaction between and among participants and the video
game/s. Codes were generated “dynamically” from viewing the footage and were cross-
checked for reliability among the four researchers doing the coding. In total, raw video
footage was broken down into over one thousand smaller clips of no more than two
minutes, which show significant interaction between participants and the games they are
GENDER AND DIGITAL GAMEPLAY 171

playing and/or participants and one another. Each clip has been coded, and a database
constructed which allows both for searching for particular clips and recoding dynamically
“on the fly” if a clip has been judged to be coded improperly, or if different coders genuinely
“see” different things in the same clip, an important consequence of the analytical
medium’s affordances to which we will return. Additionally, all participants were
interviewed individually and in small groups about their play at home, and were also asked
to complete a questionnaire on the same topic. In total, forty-four boys and sixty girls (aged
12 – 14) were interviewed and completed a questionnaire, and fifty-four young adults aged
22 – 24 also completed the same questionnaire.

Who Plays and How?


In our interviews, in their answers to our questionnaires, and as we observed them
playing, it became clear that nearly all of the young women we were observing had not
spent much time playing console games; in fact, even when they did claim to have played,
upon further questioning, many would say that they played by “watching” their brothers, or
uncles or fathers or male cousins play. In an “on the fly” gaming session, for example, one
young women requested that her group play Need for Speed (a driving game) because she
had “played it before.” When the game was changed and her group began playing, she
called over the research assistant, saying, “what do I do? I don’t get it?” The research
assistant replied, “I thought you said you have played this before?” To which the young
woman responded, “Well, my brother plays and I actually watch.”
In our questionnaires and interviews, it was clear that girls had little or no consistent
access to console games (despite every one of them having some version of a console at
home), and this was made evident as we watched girls negotiate gameplay on their own,
without assistance. Many did not, for example, know how to navigate through the more
and less complex beginnings to games, they sought and opened manuals to figure out
what buttons to press, and there was a further level of frustration early on as the girls
grappled with their own novice abilities in navigating the games. A fieldnote from the
second day of playing shows this well:
There seemed to be a lot more interaction between the girls today. There was a lot of
helping between partners when one did not understand the game or the controls. I find
that some girls are somewhat impatient with the games as they are learning them. Some
girls clearly have more patience and actually take out the manual to read. Others seem to
give up much more quickly.

While negotiating the games occupied many of these early weeks for the girls, it was also a
time when the researchers were attempting many different approaches to running the
clubs, and because of time constraints, it took five weeks before we noticed that we were
always setting up the gaming machines. Finally, one day when we arrived late, we found all
sixteen girls waiting for us. We asked why they had not started playing yet, and they said,
“we didn’t know how to set up the machines.” When we asked if they had any consoles at
home, all said that they did, but that they never “turned it on” or “set it up,” so we showed
them how and from that time on they were responsible for setting up and putting away
machines. This might seem like a small point, but it reminded us that girls/women are often
very much distanced from technological know-how and/or expertise. It did not turn out to
be the case, for example, that we had to show the boys how to plug in the machines: they
172 JENNIFER JENSON AND SUZANNE DE CASTELL

either knew how, or they “learned by doing,” but either way, none of the boys ever
admitted to not knowing how to set up one of the consoles.
While the kinds of games that the girls played varied somewhat in the first months of
the club, by the third month, they were principally playing multiplayer games which
allowed either for them to play together on split screens, or, in the case of the run-away
favorite game, Super Monkey Ball, to take turns playing. Because Super Monkey Ball (SMB)
figured so prominently in our observations of the girls, it merits a brief description for those
readers who might not be familiar with it. SMB was packaged originally with the Game
Cube. Like Duck Hunt, which was packaged with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES),
it is a highly playable, novice player friendly game. In it, players can choose among a
number of different “play styles”—a fight sequence, a flight, landing pad sequence, a
platform sequence in which the challenge is for players to keep their monkey (who rotates
in a sphere/ball) within bounds and through an end point within the time allowed. In
multiplayer mode/s players can play, taking turns, head-to-head, and it is the platform level,
multiplayer mode that the girl game group categorically liked and excelled in. SMB is a
perfect example of a console game that is designed to be both easily and highly “playable”
and exceedingly pleasurable.

“Benevolent Competition”
Over the course of our nearly three full school years of observations, we came to see
interactions between and among the girls playing at all times in relation to two very
different kinds of exchanges: (1) helping and/or competitive, and (2) self-effacing. When
female players helped one another, it would be either in the form of advice giving or by
taking the controller and helping the player “level up.” In SMB, this was easily achieved as
players rotated through each level and “life,” so if one person was not advancing as quickly,
she was usually helped along by her peers. Competition, then, was directed at the person
who was excelling, and took the form of friendly banter: “Look out” or “You are going to
fall” or “You’re going to die.” We came to see these sorts of interactions as a kind of
benevolent competition: never too direct, always somewhat supportive and rarely (in only
one case in all the hours of video) meant to undermine the player who was ahead. Even
when the girls reached a definite and observable level of proficiency with a game, in any
given interaction, we would hear them undermining their own abilities. When they did
compete directly with one another, they would most often not comment on whether or not
their competitor was a “good” or “poor” gamer, but would instead be more directly related
to what was happening in the game at any given time. An example of the kind of frequent
self-effacing commentary that we saw from a handful of girls in each group (and by only
one boy) is recorded in this field note:
Chandra and Sherry were playing “NBA Basketball 2004” on the X-Box today. Sherry has
some experience on this game console, while Chandra has none. While I was observing
them play, I noticed the amount of time Chandra spends complaining and putting herself
down. Sherry is very patient with her while she helps her learn the game and the controls;
she both encourages and gives her recognition when she accomplishes something.

Chandra, however, keeps saying things, like “I don’t know what I’m doing half of the time,”
“I stole it (the basketball) from you . . . sorry,” “But it’s (Pac-Man) a beginners game, and I
need that,” “I’m getting very lazy right now,” and “Oh my gosh! Why didn’t I score? What’s
GENDER AND DIGITAL GAMEPLAY 173

wrong with me?!” I have a feeling that, because of the positive attention she gets from the
other girls who have to “take care of her,” she continues this behaviour. Her behaviour
seems fairly exaggerated. Sherry stated that she thinks that Chandra is better than she
thinks she is because, at one point during their gaming, Chandra was winning.

The boys we observed arrived at the gaming club with varying levels of console-
based play, but all had prior experience playing and indeed there were eight who
self-reported playing more than twenty hours a week. In the game clubs, boys’ preferences
for play were mostly the head-to-head multiplayer games like Mario Kart and Mario
Superstrikers (in the second year). In the first year, when there were no girls present, they
also opted, occasionally, to play SMB, although rarely in its turn-based form, but instead in
the head-to-head “all play” mini-games that were available. In the second year, in the
presence of the girls, the boys never chose to play SMB; significantly that was very much
seen to be a “girl’s game” and not something that they would be seen playing.
The interactions among the boys, then, partly because of the games they chose to
play on a regular basis, but also because of their different prior relations with gameplaying
were different than that of the girls. Most typically, boys’ interactions while playing were
limited to: (1) seeking help questions like “what do I press again?” and (2) direct
competition—“I beat you,” “I scored!” There was far less “out of game” chatter: while the
girls would move in and out of the game, the boys would almost always focus on the screen
in front of them, and all of their conversations were related to their play.
In contrast to the girls, the boys actively undermined one another, referred to each
other as good or poor gamers and established and maintained a hierarchy of more and less
proficient players on any given game. For the boys, much more so than the girls, their
gameplay was connected to their identity: they were good or bad, skilled or not skilled,
and/or a winner or loser. Because their very identity as a gameplayer was at stake when they
played, their comments to one another, their banter, was often biting and cruel. As one
researcher noted:
Not only do the boys like their video game feats to be acknowledged (like finding a cool
shortcut or secret move, or simply being the best), their put downs are of a biting personal
nature. I found that what people like to term their “competitive spirit” sometimes gets out
of hand in that they refuse to be fair and give up their controller in a big group which
often leads to put downs and direct cruelty. This behavior is especially prevalent when the
boys were playing a large group (6 – 8 players).

The idea of boys’ ability being intricately linked to their identity can further be seen in the
boys’ reaction to the game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). DDR, like SMB, has a reputation
as an “easy girls’ game.” One male commented, “Hitting little squares with your feet?
Anybody can do that! What’s the point in that?” DDR is a somewhat unorthodox video
game that has the gamer step on an arrow-marked pad at the appropriate moment to
replicate dancing to background music. During the mixed club, girls, with one exception,
always played DDR. One day when DDR was not occupied, a male club member decided to
try it, seeing how nothing else was available. He danced nervously and awkwardly, fully
aware that the research assistant was watching him. When asked if he would play again he
embarrassingly uttered “no.” It was obvious that he was uncomfortable at being watched
while playing DDR because he provided a poor performance in a game that is deemed
simple, and within eyesight of his friends. As an experienced gamer, his pride (a) prevented
174 JENNIFER JENSON AND SUZANNE DE CASTELL

regular exposure to such a game, and (b) was clearly wounded when he failed to master the
game instantly.

“Talk,” Gameplay and “Literate” Practices


What longitudinal studies of this kind allow for is a more nuanced, better-developed
articulation of the complexities of identity in relation to gameplay. Over the course of this
study, for example, player preferences (e.g., what girls and boys chose in any given session
to play) changed incrementally but significantly. In year one, the girls’ game clubs were
overseen by a female research assistant (Master’s student, Becky) who had never taught her
own class, but was a licensed teacher, and the boys’ game club was conducted by a male
research assistant (Master’s student, Jason) who had taught in a public school for six years.
The female researcher had never played console or PC games prior to the project, but took
home each of the consoles to try out the games; the male researcher had played games in
the past and began a re-familiarization process with gameplaying by buying and playing
Neverwinter Nights but had not played and did not play console-based games. For the girls’
clubs, this meant that Becky was able to provide little in the way of help as the girls
navigated (many for the first time) set-up screens, learned how to start games and browse
menu options, etc. They eventually did learn these things through practice and trial and
error, but they limited themselves to the “easier” more “novice friendly” game, SMB, for
their primary play. For the boys, it meant that they did not have an adult audience or
sounding board who was able to speak to them using the in game “jargon,” nor did they
perceive Jason as potential competition as they played. Instead, they turned towards one
another to talk about the game, competed head-to-head on games like Mario Kart and
Need for Speed, and waited to play SMB with the same patience the girls exhibited.
In year two, when the girls still had not migrated from SMB and the boys (with a single
exception) would not go near it, the research assistant was a fourth-year undergraduate
female who considered herself a “gamer.” Her interactions with the participants were
therefore qualitatively different: with the girls, she was able to help them through the menus
they had found off-putting, explain purposes and rules of games, and most importantly,
instruct them on the general control mechanisms when playing a game for the first time. The
result was that the girls did not just play SMB—they branched out to play, and played
(somewhat) consistently, Mario Kart, Need for Speed, Paper Mario and Wario Ware. When
interacting with the boys, she had often played well beyond their abilities in their two favorite
games Mario Kart and Mario Superstrikers and was early on in the club called on to occasionally
play alongside them (Jason reported he was never invited to play with participants).
What we saw over time was, first, a demonstrative shift in play practices and game
choices by both boys and girls; and second, a very different account of girls and play than
has been articulated in the girls and gaming literature, from its initial through its
contemporary incarnations. The shift was noted in moving from a girls- and boys-only play
spaces from year one to year two. This resulted in a heightened, overt competition
displayed on the part of the boys, and on the part of the girls we witnessed an experimental
enactment of “play”—they gave each other high fives, pushed at each other and enacted a
kind of physicality that was very much absent in their male counterparts. In part, this
demonstrative, more overt play “performance” (around the actual playing of the game) was
opened up, we surmise, in the shift from a teacher-ly and non-gamer adult presence to an
adult peer, gamer presence and (arguably) by the presence of opposite sex peers who were
GENDER AND DIGITAL GAMEPLAY 175

potential (though not often actual) spectators to gameplay. Second, and over the period of
two years, we observed, time and again, girls who were actively, though with self-derision,
competing. What was not at stake for them in their competition, however, was their identity
(unlike the boys) as a particular kind of game player (good). They explicitly disavowed, often
through self-derision, any identity as a “good gamer,” they teased each other a lot, laughed
a lot, grabbed the controller from each other, talked about things outside the game, walked
around the play space rather than being “fixed” to the game screen and controls, and in
general saw the game clubs as an opportunity to “hang out” with their friends and play,
something that they did not have access to at home or in their lives outside the club.

Conclusion(s)
In our surveys and interviews only four boys report playing with girls: all reported
playing with other boys, and yet all of the girls reported playing with boys and only
infrequently with other girls. When girls and young women reported playing games that
were decidedly not gender appropriate (like Halo/Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Grand
Theft Auto San Andreas, or the like), they always reported playing with a male player. In our
“mixed” sex club (as we’ve indicated earlier), only one boy chose to play with two other girls,
but none of the other eight boys ever approached any of the other girls to play with them. As
we have reported elsewhere (Jenson & de Castell 2008), we think these findings might be
highly significant in terms of whether and how for most women, transgressing gender
“norms” in relation to playing games, occurs most frequently when it is legitimated by male
relations (boyfriends, cousins, brothers and fathers) and therefore does not transgress
gender stereotypes nor jeopardize a normalized, stereotypical feminine identity which is
clearly outside of the masculine culture of video gameplaying. One young woman we
interviewed, for example, talked extensively about her experiences playing games, which
she said she either did with her brother or alone. She stated that she and her brother have
different games that they are interested in playing, and if she is playing one of her games
that he does not like, he will still interrupt her game and grab the controller if she is having
trouble. She says that this does not bother her, and that she welcomes the help; she would
prefer to have him finish a level for her, rather than play it on her own and struggle with it.
In the third year of same-sex play groups, the girls insistently requested a full year
“game tournament,” an explicitly competitive approach to their play, and to that end they
began in earnest to keep and compare game scores, something that we had only seen
among the boys. This obviously challenged received assumptions that girls are “naturally”
uninterested in and even averse to competitive play. Both the boys’ and girls’ groups asked
to play together for their last session, and when “teams” were put together, we saw for the
first time boys asking girls to join their teams. We had, for the first time ever, freely chosen
mixed sex groups, but because these were groups in which girls really played, and didn’t
just watch or “help,” this, too, ran counter to everything we had seen before the extensive
same-sex play groups began. It is important to be tentative in drawing conclusions here,
but what we think we see is a “leveling up” of girls with boys in relation to gameplay, game
choices, peer selection, levels and kinds of participation, competition and skill. The “gender
differences” so consistently “found” in gender and gameplay studies, and no less “found” in
our own initial work with these young people, were far less evident and some of these were
no longer present at all, once the girls had been afforded genuine access, support, a “girls-
gamer” model, and the right to choose what, when and with whom they would play.
176 JENNIFER JENSON AND SUZANNE DE CASTELL

In earlier work (Bryson & de Castell 1998) concerned with developing girls’ competence and
confidence with new technologies, we found girls-only groups to be highly effective;
however, we suggested at that time that such a “step up” needn’t be seen as a threat to the
normative gender order of the school, which in fact at that time required mixed sex
grouping for instruction. We argued, but did not in that limited project determine, that it
wouldn’t be long before mixed sex groupings for technology-focused learning would be
possible without sidelining, discouraging and intimidating the girls, as we saw to be the
case in mixed sex groupings initially. Yet, this study does offer support to that supposition:
that an “affirmative action” pedagogy of girls-only groups for activities and engagements in
which boys traditionally appear to dominate in terms of both interest and skill can be
effective in “leveling the playing field.” Our longitudinal study offers confidence to that
supposition to recognize that few of the indices (with the exception of self-ascribed identity
as a “good gamer”) which we had used at the start of the project to initially determine these
girls’ play preferences, styles, activities, and identities could be used, three years later, to
identify gender-based differences with respect to digital gameplay.
Dominant cultural presumptions of progressive gender equality would impose upon
those who discern persisting differences, the obligation to seek explanations. That and how
these differences are contrived, produced, that they continue to be actively and continually
constructed, is not a popular story, and, given that the stories we tell are co-produced by
the audiences we address, we should be less than surprised that accounts of gender and
gameplay, and the theoretical and methodological props that support and enable these,
should have shifted only fractionally since the earliest beginnings of research into this field.
What is so difficult about gender-based work of this kind is to challenge the category of
“gender” in order to resist its re-inscription in the very categories that we seek to dismantle—
e.g., preferences and play styles. The central problem, then, is to show how and why different
girls under different conditions are induced to play different games in different ways—that
they chose SMB, in this context, for example, for us held no real significance. Our task is more to
find out how to identify differences in gameplay without naturalizing them into an underlying
truth of gender. This means refusing question about ”preference” in an effort to attend more
particularly to how and under what conditions girls and women play the way they do, without
attributing to that way of playing in and of itself any enduring or fixed significance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (http://www.ssshrc.ca) and the Simulation and Advance
Gaming Environments for Learning Network (http://www.sageforlearning.ca/). We
also would like to recognize the labor and thoughtful work of the graduate assistants
who worked on this project—Dana Boyd, Stephanie Fisher, Nicholas Taylor, and
Sheryl Vasser—as well as the support and ongoing help from the lead teacher at the
research site, Natasa Vujanovic.

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GENDER AND DIGITAL GAMEPLAY 179

Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology at York University in


Toronto, Canada. She has published on gender, gameplay, education, digital games,
and educational games. She is co-editor of Loading . . . : A Journal of the Canadian
Game Studies Association. E-mail: jjenson@edu.yorku.ca
Suzanne de Castell is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She
edited Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Games Research (Peter Lang,
2007) and has published on new media and education, gender and technology,
educational philosophy and literacies. E-mail: decaste@sfu.ca

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