ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the hybrid roles of nonhuman elements such as software, environment, and social norms in game design among beginner designers in a formal education setting. I cultivate and use a novel, interdisciplinary feminist research method that combines ethnographic methods with close reading of the nonlinear narrative-building software, Twine. This method can be understood as a mode of feminist software analysis. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how feminist efforts might be articulated through interactions among and between one type of game design tool, a particular educational context, people, and the larger ideological structures present in an institution of higher education. Here, hybrid applies to the objects of study, video games designed through the partnership between human and software; the methods, a joining of divergent methodological traditions; and my overall approach, an amalgam of activism and scholarship. Through this lens, I move closer to understanding and alleviating the various discriminations and oppressions that both human and nonhuman apparatuses may pose for those trying to break into game design.
