ABSTRACT
Can there be a feminist war game? Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games revolves around this critical question. Mainstream videogames have been criticised as promoting, reinforcing, and proliferating the traits of violent and oppressive masculinity. The notion of a feminist war game brings many contradictions to the fore, and has led the authors whose work is included here to do significant thinking on how a war game might be considered feminist, as well as how feminist perspectives can impact a collective understanding of how war and violence is represented in procedural spaces like playable games. The collection is broken into three parts. Part I, ‘Play as Inquiry’, examines how engaging with war games can be an explorative foray into questions of gender, femininity, masculinity, and violence. Part II, ‘Feminism as War’, showcases contributions that engage with the common experience of gender-based violence, and how such an experience interplays with games and gaming. Part III, ‘Challenging the Industry’, contains pointed looks at game mechanics and the larger game industry, and includes selections that both challenge the industry and suggest steps for proactive change.
