“I don’t ever feel represented by popular media. And that… I don’t want to say that’s fine. It’s just as someone who also studies games, I’m like, “This is a fight that I realize is important, and I’m going to fight it, but on my own turf.” But like, not seeing myself in media? I just kind of ignore, because I know it’s not going to be relevant or wholly representative of what is truly the gamer demographic.”
Nat, 30, female, bisexual/queer, American, white, disabled
“I won a gold medal playing e-sports. I’ve had multiple death threats. I’ve had countless people telling me to take my own life, telling me to uninstall, telling me that I don’t belong here. Pretty much anything toxic you can think of has been aimed towards me in the last month. But every month you get the same sort of crap. Being a woman—and a trans woman at that—and playing a sports game, which is predominantly male-dominated, you’re told every day that you’re playing it wrong, you’re not welcome here, this isn’t for you, to go away, to get off our game. It’s not enjoyable, but here we are. We’re trying to change that.”
Saige, 35, transfemale, lesbian, Scottish, white, able-bodied
I have a fascination with console controllers and believe they are far more important to how we understand gamer identity than has been researched.
Since the Electronic Software Association (ESA) began reporting data for the video game industry in 2002, women have represented nearly half of the game playing population. However, despite this stable statistic, the industry’s ideal “Gamer” is consistently depicted as a young, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied male, and the games industry frequently targets this idealized identity through advertising and game design. This has resulted in a culture that is notably toxic towards women and marginalized players, built on an assumption of meritocracy within games—or the expectation that every player begins each game with the same advantages, disadvantages, and skills as every other player. While the construction of gamer identity has received extensive scholarly attention, gaming peripherals—such as video game controllers—are either minimized or left entirely out of the conversation.
This dissertation, informed by feminist methodologies in technical communication and game studies, uses a mixed-methods approach involving archival research, visual analysis, surveys, and interviews to understand the intersections of video game controllers and gamer identity. Using Microsoft’s Xbox as a case study, the findings demonstrate how a dominant narrative has controlled controller design decisions through iterative processes. This has resulted in controllers that are more uncomfortable, more unusable, and more frustrating for and viewed more negatively by women and marginalized players. For each controller iteration, women and marginalized participants rated controllers significantly lower. Though the total improvement score (TIS) from first iteration to current iteration were similar between women and marginalized participants and cismale participants, the lower starting point for women and marginalized participants resulted in a lower ending point. Design decisions across controller iterations privilege cismale experiences, reifying gamer identity through controller design and resulting in not just an ideal gamer identity, but an ideal gamer body.
This project foregrounds women’s voices and perspectives when discussing the process of designing and advertising controllers. By focusing on the design and advertisement processes through a narrative inquiry lens, this project makes a case for a feminist approach to interaction design in games and studying how hardware design—not just games themselves—have impacted gaming culture and understandings of gamer identity. It is action-oriented and grounded within the games community: by conducting research on and within the gaming community, I have an obligation to give back.
My project is, ultimately, an act of love. I believe gaming culture can be better, but part of getting better is elevating stories that go against the dominant narrative and conducting an in-depth analysis of the designs and processes that have silenced—inadvertently or not—women’s voices.
My dissertation is currently open access and can be downloaded here.