Pelletier, C; (2008) Gaming in Context: How Young People Construct Their Gendered Identities in Playing and Making Games. In: Kafai, YB and Heeter, C and Denner, J and Sun, JY and Kafai, YB and Sun, JY, (eds.) Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. (pp. 145-159). MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

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Abstract

Gender is a fundamental aspect of identity, one which people wish to assert and protect by emphasizing difference. Discussions about gender and computer games have tended to focus on preferences in game play and content. This chapter aims to open this discussion up by examining how players use game play and game design to construct their own identities, including their gendered identities. The primary goal is to show that the ways in which young people make sense of games, the ways in which they interpret them and the way they make their own games is related to how they construct a sense of their own self in a social and cultural context. This is important for two reasons. First, it highlights the role games have in processes of socialization; how they are used by young people to establish relations with others. Second, it indicates how games become meaningful. The meaning of a game is not contained within the game itself. The social context within which games are played, interpreted and produced strongly shapes how players make sense of them. Context refers to the characteristics of the social situation in which people find themselves at any one time; this situation is however always framed by broad trends and relationships, which can be referred to in terms of ‘culture’ or ‘society’. This chapter is based on two sources of evidence collected at a coeducational school in the UK: a focus group of students talking about the games they play at home and two games made at an after-school club. A brief comparison is made at the end of the chapter with similar data collected in a girls’ school. The analysis indicates that in contexts where gender can be purposefully invoked to mark difference from some and create social bonds with others, young people construct games as gendered in order to construct themselves as gendered, as divided or united by gender. In contexts where gender differences assume less significance, games are interpreted and produced according to different criteria. A number of papers in this volume examine how the meaning which games have to players relates to the context in which they are played – see chapters by Lin, Taylor and Ito. This paper similarly emphasizes that the relationship between gender and gaming is a function of context, precisely because different contexts offer different resources with which to construct an identity.

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