From “Margin to Center” to Marginalizing

The dominant discourse in gaming culture sustains the identity of gamer and game designer/producer as white, male, and “geek”. Gaming industries are complicit in normalizing this framing by producing and marketing content towards this community, in large part because the industry is composed of folks who identify with said community. Jonathan Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy in their 2007 chapter “From Margin to Center: Biographies of Technicity and the Construction of Hegemonic Games Culture” suggest the characteristic homogeneity in gaming culture, dictated by an exclusive set of tastes and sensibilities, exercises hegemonic influence on the games that are created and how they are received. The ensuing vicious cycle within gaming culture marginalizes and “others” those who do not identify as white men – women, people of color, queer, and differently abled folks. Fascinatingly, what Dovey and Kennedy reveal is the early adopters and “founding fathers” of gaming culture were once, or at least perceived themselves as, on the margins themselves.

Figure 1. The Hacker (Pixabay)

Dovey and Kennedy identify the idealized subject within gaming culture through conceptualizing “technicity,” defined as the interconnection of technological competence and identity (133). They frame technicity through two dominant tropes doubling as subjectivities in game culture development – the hacker and the cyborg. The hacker is characterized by technological “edge,” the combination of possessing cutting-edge tech and sophisticated ability in adapting technologies to perform functions outside of their normative purpose. In our collective imagination hackers can either be heroes or villains but are branded by their skills and relative anonymity and loner status (see Figure 1). However, the hacker identity is reliant on access to computers, a resource which is attainable to some, but inaccessible to others on the basis of class, race, and gender. A cursory analysis easily reveals the hacker as the white male idealized subject. Though hackers with identities outside of white and masculine exist, they are not included in the prevailing mythos of gaming culture (Dovey and Kennedy 2007, 136).                          

Figure 2. The Cyborg (Pixabay)

The origin of the cyborg figure was developed as a response to the novel integration between humans and machines (see Figure 2). The ensuing connection held promise of a conglomerate identity which would encourage the marginalized to embrace their connection with technology and form a radical subjectivity, aligning with feminist thought. Though a noble notion, the concept of the cyborg was ultimately co-opted by “…militarized masculinity in Terminator form…” (Dovey and Kennedy 2007, 137). Cyborgs were immortalized in popular culture by their inhumanness and machine-like qualities and not for their potential to generate experimental subjectivities that would challenge the corporate domination over technology.Dovey and Kennedy suggest the hacker and cyborg mythos are integral to understanding the development of gaming culture, since they are the preferred subjectivities apparent in the biographies of the “founding fathers” who maintain a specific form of dominant technicity. Their interrogation reveals those who are placed as the founders of gaming culture in the prevailing imagination of the industry are an extraordinarily homogeneous group, with the following characteristics and backgrounds:

• Early access and engagement with technology and computer games
• Early engagement with tabletop games
• Interest in mathematics and engineering
• Masculine identity
• Perhaps predispositions with obsessive and asocial behavior (cyborgian & hacker qualities)
• Disapproval or rebelliousness against authority

Their experiences in playing and programming from an early stage may have been a method to “stick it to the man,” i.e. corporate systems, but in so doing they received the technical skills which became commercially valuable and mainstream. The resultant emergence of a dominant technicity and version of gaming culture repositioned the programmer/designer/hacker from margin to center.

The outcome of this transposition had consequences for folks who did not fit into the homogenous mold, who subsequently (and likely were already) excluded from the dominant culture. As are most social and cultural artifacts and systems, technology is highly racialized and gendered. The techno-artifact of the computer itself is associated with power and thus masculinity (Dovey and Kennedy 2007, 146). Cyberculture does offer opportunities through which identities of the “othered” can both be expressed in a radical way, where their stories can be rendered visible through disruption and counternarratives to the dominant culture. But this is often done within the confines of platforms and systems that fully intend to preserve their cultural capital and maintain the hegemonic power structures by circulating existing norms, (re)marginalizing the “othered.” It is essential to interrogate what is normalized within the dominant gaming culture to understand the asymmetrical power structures at play and identify ways in which to challenge those norms. Dovey and Kennedy offer a look into the socio-history of the construction of the dominant gaming culture, in which those who considered themselves on the margins gained the cultural capital to convert to the center, (re)marginalizing those who did not fit the mold.

Sarah

Sources: 

Dovey, J., & Kennedy, H. W. (2007). From margin to center: Biographies of technicity and the construction of hegemonic games culture. The players’ realm: Studies on the culture of video games and gaming, 131-153.