ABSTRACT
A woman playing a game, and thus fulfilling fantasies of power and control within the defined play space of the wargame, might engage in subversive or feminist actions through play. However, the presence of a woman at the table is not enough to make a game’s power fantasies feminist any more than my presence as a Duke Nukem player could change the on-screen toxicity of binary gender roles. It is also important to note in this context that the lens of feminism on games and play must be intersectional, and the dominance of power fantasies centered on cisgendered, heterosexual, white male able-bodied leaders and soldiers is in and of itself a hindrance to feminist play within most war games. The question of feminist war games inevitably starts with an existence proof: can a war game be feminist? Given the very nature of war (and the military industrial complex that surrounds it), what does a feminist war game imply? I argue that the answer lies in its authorship, not in the presence of women on screen or at the table.
