Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In 2012 Nina Huntemann wrote, “It isn't difficult to find feminist game studies, or feminist gamers.”1 This is no less true eight years later. It isn't difficult to find feminist game studies. Academics—like me and the contributors to this special issue—produce articles, monographs, special issues, and edited collections with steady regularity, and the broader community of game critics digs in with video essays, podcasts, and op-eds. Those working in industry participate in this discourse as well, as evidenced for instance by panels and events at the Game Developers Conference. Feminist thinkers have been tackling the tangled knot of games culture for at least twenty years. The now-classic From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1998) launched multiple follow-up anthologies.2 Game developers like Brenda Laurel, Sheri Graner Ray, and Megan Gaiser helped spearhead a movement to take girls seriously as players in the mid-1990s and have continued to write and speak extensively about games and gender.3 Depictions of women in games have driven inquiry into a number of games, including notably the Tomb Raider series.4 Feminist scholars have long researched complexities of gamer culture, including competitive gaming, arcade culture, fandom, and player identity.5 An energetic flurry of feminist thought about video games helped define game studies in the early part of this decade. Alex Layne and Samantha Blackmon first launched Not Your Mama's Gamer as a feminist game studies blog in 2011.6 The first issue of Ada New Media in 2012 included Mia Consalvo's call to action for game scholars, arguing that feminist scholars must address what she termed “toxic gamer culture,” and Lisa Nakamura's “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital.”7 The entirety of the journal's second issue, edited by Huntemann, focused on …