Adrienne Shaw and Video Game Culture

Initially skeptical, in the end I enjoyed reading Adrienne Shaw's 2009 article, "Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games."

While I am not an enthusiast in that kind of game culture, I thought that she did a thorough job of examining the issue of having LGBT characters in video games, and did it in a way that acknowledged the complexity of the problem and the difficulty in defining it.

I found it particularly interesting that Shaw wrote another article about a year later titled "What is Video Game Culture? Cultural studies and game studies" that was the most downloaded article from Sage Journals in 2009 and 2010. From the abstract:

What is video game culture, however? What does it mean to have a culture defined by the consumption of a particular medium? Moreover, what are the implications of defining this culture in a particular way? While there has been a great deal of ink split on video game culture, the actual definition of the term is often treated as common sense. Unpacking the discourses surrounding ‘‘video game culture’’ allows us to see the power dynamics involved in attributing certain characteristics to it, as well as naming it ‘‘video game culture’’ as such. This has implications for how video games are studied and is connected with how culture is studied more broadly. By critically examining how video game culture has been defined in both press and academic articles, this paper illuminates how this definition has limited the study of video games and where it can move.

In this examination, Shaw opens up the whole concept of a gaming culture to scrutiny. Rather than focusing on the inclusion of LGBT characters in games, she articulates a reality for real life LGBT gamers, and others who play, as falling outside what we have traditionally stereotyped as "gamers."  In her critique of the approaches that have gone before, Shaw identified two separate and intertwined perspectives in the reporting of video game culture.

Video game scholars, however, tend to write about the culture from the
inside, as many of them identify as gamers. Journalists, however, tend to write about video gaming from this outside. Game studies academics often try to describe video game culture against the mainstream discourse. Likewise, journalists often quote, or misquote, game scholars. To get a sense of what is meant by games culture, we must take account of how it has been described in the popular press as well as the academe.

So, as we continue, in this class, to look at the many ways that digital identities are forged and "lived," I think that it will be interesting to remember that there are perceptual differences in defining of these identities.