ABSTRACT
Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence.
Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealizations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment.
Feminist War Games? is a timely volume that questions the often-toxic nature of online and gaming cultures. As such, the book will appeal to a broad variety of disciplinary interests, including sociology, education, psychology, literature, history, politics, game studies, digital humanities, media and cultural studies, and gender studies, as well as those interested in playing, or designing, socially engaged games.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|2 pages
Introduction
part II|2 pages
Play as inquiry
chapter 3|15 pages
An overview of the history and design of tabletop wargames in relation to gender
chapter 4|11 pages
Reframing the domestic experience of war in This War of Mine
part III|2 pages
Feminism as war
chapter 5|15 pages
Gamified suburban violence and the feminist pleasure of destructive play
chapter 7|10 pages
Exploring agency and female player–character relationships in Life Is Strange
part IV|2 pages
Challenging the industry
chapter 12|15 pages
Subversive game mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal franchises
part V|2 pages
Afterword