ABSTRACT
Can a feminist war game exist? War, traditionally the sole purview of men, is an essential site for asking critical questions about masculinist systems and mediated representations, especially since subjects, objects and agents are all instruments within the ideological narratives that frame the brutal history of armed conflict. Simply including female ‘warrior’ characters in a war game, for example, continues to normalize the mechanism of war while extending its ‘inclusiveness’ to groups that have traditionally been marginalized and victimized by it. However, prototyping complex intersections between mechanisms of war, digital game narrativities, and inclusive feminist values suggests that feminist discourses can be used to denaturalize and reframe narratives of war in spaces of programmed play.
