Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games 2019033852, 2019033853, 9780367228187, 9780429276996

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Feminist War Games?

Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence. Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-​top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilising questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealisations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment. Feminist War Games? is a timely volume that questions the often toxic nature of online and gaming cultures. As such, the book will appeal to a broad variety of disciplinary interests, including sociology, education, psychology, literature, history, politics, game studies, digital humanities, media and cultural studies, and gender studies, as well as those interested in playing, or designing, socially engaged games. Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His interest in the ways that William Blake’s composite art illuminates the relationship between words and images on the printed page has inspired current research into alternative platforms for open social scholarship, as well as larger correlations between media forms and cultural perceptions. In addition to experimenting with virtual environments and games as tools for academic research, communication, and pedagogy, Jon’s other research interests include virtuality and environmental storytelling in Disney theme parks, research creation experiments, and the relationship between networks and narratives in video games.

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Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, Canada. Through this role she serves as the Project Manager of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Arbuckle is also an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholarship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities, new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores open access, digital publishing, and how we communicate scholarship generally. To this end, Arbuckle’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among other publications. She has also recently co-​edited a print and online collection called Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities. Jon Bath is an associate professor of Art and Art History at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where he teaches electronic art, design, and the book arts, and researches the connection between the form and content of communication technologies.

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Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities Series Editors: Marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes, Andrew Prescott, Harold Short and Ray Siemens

Digital technologies are increasingly important to arts and humanities research, expanding the horizons of research methods in all aspects of data capture, investigation, analysis, modelling, presentation, and dissemination. This important series covers a wide range of disciplines with each volume focusing on a particular area, identifying the ways in which technology impacts on specific subjects. The aim is to provide an authoritative reflection of the ‘state of the art’ in technology enhanced research methods. The series is critical reading for those already engaged in the digital humanities, and of wider interest to all arts and humanities scholars. A History of Place in the Digital Age Stuart Dunn The Historical Web and Digital Humanities The Case of National Web Domains Edited by Niels Brügger and Ditte Laursen Postdigital Storytelling Poetics, Praxis, Research Spencer Jordan Humans at Work in the Digital Age Forms of Digital Textual Labor Edited by Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath To learn more about this series please visit:  www.routledge.com/​Digital-​ Research-​in-​the-​Arts-​and-​Humanities/​book-​series/​DRAH.

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Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games Edited by Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath

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First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Saklofske, Jon, editor. | Arbuckle, Alyssa, editor. | Bath, Jon, editor. Title: Feminist war games? : mechanisms of war, feminist values, and interventional games / edited by Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath. Identifiers: LCCN 2019033852 (print) | LCCN 2019033853 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367228187 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429276996 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Video games–Social aspects. | War games–Social aspects. | Violence in video games–Social aspects. | Feminism. Classification: LCC GV1469.34.S52 F46 2020 (print) | LCC GV1469.34.S52 (ebook) | DDC 794.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033852 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033853 ISBN: 978-0-367-22818-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27699-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

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This collection is dedicated to Dr. Rachel Brickner, whose original question as to whether a feminist war game could be possible was the provocative spark that ignited these inquiries.

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Contents

List of contributors  Acknowledgements 

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PART I

Introduction  Feminist war games? Mechanisms of war, feminist values, and interventional games 

1 3

ALYSSA ARBUC K LE, JO N SA K LO FSK E, JO N BATH, AN D T H E I MPLEMEN TI N G N EW K N OWLED G E ENVIRONMENT S PART N E RS H I P

PART II

Play as inquiry 

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1 Are there (can there be/​should there be) feminist war games? 

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J ON S AK LOF SK E, EMI LY C A N N, DA N I ELLE RODRIGUE -​T ODD, AN D D E RE K S I EMEN S

2 Gendered authorship in war gaming: whose fantasy is it anyway? 

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ANAS TAS I A  S A LTER

3 An overview of the history and design of tabletop wargames in relation to gender: from tactics to strategy  MAT T SH OE MA K ER

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x Contents

4 Reframing the domestic experience of war in This War of Mine: life on the battlefield 

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RYAN   H OU SE

PART III

Feminism as war  5 Gamified suburban violence and the feminist pleasure of destructive play: rezoning warzones 

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ADAN J E RR EAT-​P O O LE

6 Because we are always warring: feminism, games, and war 

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SU Z AN N E DE C A STELL A N D JEN N I FER  JENS ON

7 Exploring agency and female player–​character relationships in Life Is Strange: what choice do I have? 

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AN D RE A  LUC

8 ‘What is a feminist war game?’ A game jam reflection 

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SARAH   S TAN G

PART IV

Challenging the industry  9 Feminism and the forever wars: prototyping games in the time of ‘America First’ 

119 121

E L I Z AB E T H  LO SH

10 Seven dimensions of a feminist war game: what we can learn from This War of Mine 

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C H RI S T OP HER  K A MPE

11 Failed feminist interventions in Wolfenstein II:  The New Colossus 

150

MARK K AETH LER

12 Subversive game mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal franchises: having your cake and eating it too  G AB I K I RI LLO FF

167

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Contents xi

13 Toxic pacifism: the problems with and potential of non-​violent playthroughs 

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J ON BAT H AN D ELLY C O C K RO FT

PART V

Afterword  Taking binaries off the table 

193 195

MARY F L ANAG A N

Index 

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Contributors

Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria. Through this role she serves as the Project Manager of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Arbuckle is also an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholarship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities, new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores open access, digital publishing, and how we communicate scholarship generally. To this end, Arbuckle’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among other publications. She has also recently co-​edited a print and online collection called Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities. Jon Bath is an associate professor of art and art history at the University of Saskatchewan where he teaches electronic art, design, and the book arts, and researches the connection between the form and content of communication technologies. Emily Cann is a Master’s of Science candidate at Columbia University in New  York City. She recently graduated with her MA in English literature from the University of Guelph after earning her BA from Acadia University. Her interests include the intersection of literature with medicine and health sciences, and the utility of narratives in understanding and treating illness. In particular, her focus is on mental health issues and how they are represented and understood in both scientific and creative depictions. She is very grateful for the opportunity to work on this project, especially in exploring the role of narrative in gaming. Suzanne de Castell is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Her work with Jennifer Jensen focuses on gender and digital games research.

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List of contributors xiii Elly Cockcroft is an interdisciplinary studies MA student at the University of Saskatchewan. Her SSHRC-​funded project examines the potential for video games to promote death positivity. Mary Flanagan is the artist, game designer, and theorist who holds the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor Chair at Dartmouth College. www.maryflanagan.com. Ryan House is a PhD student in media, cinema, and digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-​Milwaukee. Jennifer Jenson is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy at the University of British Columbia. Her work with Suzanne de Castell focuses on gender and digital games research. Adan Jerreat-​Poole is a PhD candidate at McMaster University working in Mad/​crip feminisms, autobiography, and digital media. Their academic work has appeared in a/​b: Auto/​Biography Studies and First Person Scholar. Their creative work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Qwerty Magazine, and Soliloquies. Mark Kaethler teaches early English literature at Medicine Hat College and serves as the assistant project director of Mayoral Shows for the Map of Early Modern London, hosted at the University of Victoria. He is a co-​ editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (2018), and his work has appeared in several journals and collections of essays. Christopher Kampe is a PhD candidate of the communication, rhetoric and digital media program at North Carolina State University. His research interests include game design in the classroom, procedural generation, critical approaches to design/​play, software development, and user-​experience. He is a collaborator at the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, researching interdisciplinary teamwork and holistic approaches to prototype evaluation. He is affiliated with ReFiG, where he worked to develop resources for educators (analytic frameworks, assignment scaffolding, online resources). Gabi Kirilloff is an assistant professor of English at Texas Christian University, where she specialises in digital humanities and new media studies. She has worked on several large-​scale digital projects including the Willa Cather Archive, the Nebraska Literary Lab, and the Novel TM grant. Much of Gabi’s research uses digital tools and computational methods to explore the portrayal of gender in fiction. Elizabeth Losh is an associate professor of English and American studies at William and Mary with a specialisation in new media ecologies. Before coming to William and Mary, she directed the culture, art, and technology program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik:  An Electronic History of Government Media-​ Making

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xiv  List of contributors in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009), The War on Learning:  Gaining Ground in the Digital University (2014), and Hashtag (2019). She is the co-​author with Jonathan Alexander of Understanding Rhetoric:  A Graphic Guide to Writing (2013; second edition, 2017). She published the edited collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives:  Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education (2017), and she is co-​editor of Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018). Andrea Luc holds an MA in communications and culture from York University, Toronto. Her research focused on gender and the role of play in young learners. She currently works at a non-​profit media organisation in Ontario, producing and managing math games for kids across the province. Danielle Rodrigue-​Todd is a PhD student in the political science program at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her current research focuses on the relationship between policy narratives and public perception as they relate to forced migration issues in Canada. This work specifically aims to explore and problematise the discursive construction and mobilisation of ‘crisis’ as a mechanism for shifting public sentiment towards particular objectives in the area refugee policy and immigration more broadly. In addition to public affairs and forced migration issues, Danielle’s other areas of interest include international relations and post-​modern theory. Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His interest in the ways that William Blake’s composite art illuminates the relationship between words and images on the printed page has inspired current research into alternative platforms for open social scholarship as well as larger correlations between media forms and cultural perceptions. In addition to experimenting with virtual environments and games as tools for academic research, communication, and pedagogy, Jon’s other research interests include virtuality and environmental storytelling in Disney theme parks, research creation experiments, and the relationship between networks and narratives in video games. Anastasia Salter is an associate professor of games and interactive media at the University of Central Florida, and the author of several books including Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (with Bridget Blodgett, 2017); Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (2017); and What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (2014). Matt Shoemaker is the librarian and coordinator for digital scholarship service development at Temple University where he co-​directs the university’s Digital Scholarship Center. He holds an MLIS with a concentration in archives and an MA in history earned studying the history of women and resistance in Algeria during the French occupation. He works with faculty and students in areas of game design and games in education. He

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List of contributors xv also participates in projects researching and documenting the history of Dungeons & Dragons and the Gen Con game convention. He is part of the Philadelphia Game Maker’s Guild and his first publicly released board game, Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer, will be available in 2019. Derek Siemens is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria studying computer science and software engineering. He has always had an interest in video games, especially games involving strategy and problem solving. These interests have guided him into his studies in computer science, and continue to be one of many favourite aspects of his discipline. Sarah Stang is a PhD candidate in the communication and culture program at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She approaches the study of digital games and other media from an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist perspective. Her published work has focused on interactivity, game adaptations, gender representation, fatherhood and familial bonds, representations of madness, and the monstrous-​feminine in digital games. Her current research explores the symbolic representation of marginalised bodies as hybrid monsters in digital games, tabletop roleplaying games, and science fiction and fantasy media.

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newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all those who helped to bring this book to light. Most specifically to Dr.  Ray Siemens with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, Dr.  Dene Grigar with the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), the excellent editorial team at Routledge, Hannah McGregor, and all of the talented authors who contributed to this volume.

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Part I

Introduction

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Feminist war games? Mechanisms of war, feminist values, and interventional games Alyssa Arbuckle, Jon Saklofske, Jon Bath, and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership Can there be a feminist war game? Yes. No. Obviously! Absolutely not. Possibly …? Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games revolves around this critical question. This collection arose out of a panel by the same name that served as a conjoint keynote for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Electronic Literature Organization, and Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership in June 2016. Moderated by Dene Grigar (Washington State University, Vancouver), the panel featured a paper-​length provocation by Jon Saklofske (Acadia University) and shorter responses from Diane Jakacki (Bucknell University), Elizabeth Losh (University of California San Diego), and Anastasia Salter (University of Central Florida). As that panel and the chapters that make up this collection indicate, there is no straightforward answer to the question of whether there can be a feminist war game; or rather, the volume provides a multitude of answers. In some ways, this is fitting for a collection that engages feminism. Not by definition, per se, but perhaps by concept, feminism has always been plural, intersectional, evolving, and contested. The notion of a feminist war game brings many contradictions to the fore, and has led the authors whose work is included here to do significant thinking on how a war game might be considered feminist, as well as how feminist perspectives can impact a collective understanding of how war is represented in procedural spaces like playable games. Each author articulates what feminism is to them in slightly different ways; for the purposes of this introduction, we will clarify how we are framing the question by drawing from contemporary accounts of feminism. Deliberately frank, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (2014) considers feminism as the seemingly simple belief that men

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4  Alyssa Arbuckle et al. and women should be treated equally. Vivek Shraya complicates such a conception when she expresses her desire ‘not only to reimagine masculinity, but to blur gender boundaries altogether and celebrate gender creativity’ (2018, p. 87). Further, she writes It’s not enough to let go of the misplaced hope for a good or a better man. It’s not enough to honour femininity. Both of these options might offer a momentary respite from the dangers of masculinity, but in the end they only perpetuate a binary and the pressure that bears down when we live at different ends of the spectrum. In doing so, Shraya gestures toward expanding definitions like Gay’s to include non-​binary, two spirit, and all other gender identities and expressions beyond the limiting categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’. Foundationally, though, both Gay and Shraya pursue notions of equality, and moreover equity, in defiance of a toxic masculinity focused on preserving privilege. On a similar note, for Erin Wunker a feminist is one who recognizes that the material conditions of contemporary life are built on inequities of gender, race, and class. One who recognizes that patriarchal culture is inherently coercive and stifling for women and other Others. One who works to make those inequities visible and one who works to tear them down. (2017, pp. 25–​26) We consider such perspectives—​ in turns straightforward, fluid, and intersectional—​ as collectively identifying a necessary framework for the chapters that follow. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed calls our world ‘not-​feminist and antifeminist’ (2017, p. 1). As Ahmed herself and the writers cited below demonstrate, there are numerous proofs for this claim. Women are frequently disadvantaged in ways that lead to stymied careers and lowered pay.1 Sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, home, and on the street is rampant (Wunker 2017). Men are disproportionately violent, and women are disproportionately the target of this violence (Solnit 2014). In I’m Afraid of Men (2018), Shraya writes of her experience as a trans woman in Canada:  ‘My fear of men is a fuel that both protects my body, as a survival instinct, and erodes it, from overuse’ (p.  9). As Rebecca Solnit acknowledges in Men Explain Things to Me (2014) in the context of the United States, ‘About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-​spouses in this country. It’s one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States’ (p. 6). Moreover, she claims that ‘So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year [in the United States]’ (Solnit 2014, p.  23). Speaking on sexualised violence in particular, Solnit argues in The Mother of All Questions (2016):

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Feminist war games? 5 Rape is so common in our culture it’s fair to call it an epidemic. After all, what else could you call something that impacts nearly one in five women (and one in 71 men) directly and, as a threat, virtually all women, that is so pervasive it modifies how we live and think and move through the world for most of our lives? (p. 91)2 Such a statistical rendering of the violence that women face—​in Solnit’s account, in the United States—​underlines Ahmed’s depiction of the world. Mainstream videogames have been criticised, culturally, as promoting, reinforcing, and proliferating the very traits of violent and oppressive masculinity that are key factors in Ahmed’s nonfeminist and antifeminist world, or in the rape culture Solnit writes of. The toxic masculinity of many videogames is not surprising, given that these games are the direct descendants of the table-​top war games developed to simulate military experience and command, and, as discussed by many of the authors in this volume, militarism is often depicted as inextricably masculine. Whether one considers the chess-​based kriegsspiel of Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig in the late eighteenth century as the first war game, as Christopher Kampe and Mark Kaethler do in this volume, or if one agrees with Matt Shoemaker that Georg Leopold von Reisswitz’s entirely new Kriesgs-​Spiel of the early nineteenth century was the first true war game, the connection between gaming and militarised masculinity is undeniable.3 Some authors in this volume have chosen to define war games as strictly games about ‘war’, while others have used the term more loosely to encompass games that engage with the themes of violence and control, or the gameplay mechanics, of games based on war without actually being set in a scenario of armed conflict between nation states. In the popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series, for instance, crime and violence are main goals. The consequences of such acts are not fatal, nor do in-​game consequences dissuade such behaviour. Trying to escape from the police is ‘fun’ and chaotic, death is not permanent, and both capture and death result in only a small loss of the player’s virtual money. The broader problem with games like GTA (and there are many games like this) is that consequences for player actions are usually not proportional to the moral weight or implications of behaviour, and thus accountability, thoughtfulness, and compassionate action are discouraged or even neglected entirely in the name of fun. This is compounded by the fact that the player-​characters in GTA are all male, a design choice that centralises, enables, and rewards masculine perspectives and associates pleasurable play with hypermasculine violence. Many gamers have considered those who point out these kinds of nonfeminist /​antifeminist elements in videogames to be killjoys, to be people who get in the way of fun. The reactive toxicity by misogynistic gamers towards such ‘killjoys’ too often manifests as real violence. For example, Anita Sarkeesian has been harassed, threatened, and doxed by fellow gamers for her feminist criticisms of videogames. As Solnit writes, in reference to Sarkeesian,

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6  Alyssa Arbuckle et al. ‘[Online gamers] are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate’ (2014, pp.  30–​31)—​for being killjoys. Ahmed reclaimed and popularised the (positive) conception of the ‘feminist killjoy’ on her blog of the same name and in Living a Feminist Life; Wunker picks it up in Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (2017). The figure has become a useful referent for people who ‘[name] the lack and [speak] the open secrets’ (Wunker 2017, p. 24) of patriarchy; that is, the lack of female representation and participation in public and private spaces, and the open secrets of harm done to those who identify as women. In this collection, Adan Jerreat-​Poole also identifies and engages with the figure of the feminist killjoy. The feminist killjoy can be an important counterpoint to the closed-​ loop of dominant videogame culture, where game world behaviours reflect and reinforce the misogynistic perspectives that shape a dominant culture that consumes and pays for such media products. Oft-​ cited mid-​ twentieth-​ century game theorisers posited games as establishing an alternative reality magic circle (Huizinga 1949) or as being make-​believe by definition (Caillois 1961). More contemporary game theorists tend in the opposite direction. Ian Bogost argues in Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) that videogames are highly influential on players and their real-​world perspectives; in How to Do Things with Videogames (2010) he makes a claim for the broad reach and impact of videogames that goes far beyond more simplistic notions of leisure. Like any mediated representations, the mechanics and narratives of games can normalise, reinforce, and strengthen perceptual habits outside of the ‘magic circle’, including misogynistic ways of understanding. In a 2006 collection Alexander R. Galloway suggests that games are a much more active cultural pastime than passive activities like watching television. By distinguishing the performative, participatory, and interactive aspects of games, Galloway points to a different kind of potential influence on players’ understandings. Jane McGonigal sees this potential as progressive, going so far as to assert that reality is broken and that designing and engaging with videogames are some of the ways we can build a better world (2011). Similarly, Mary Flanagan (2009) and Miguel Sicart (2013) advocate for values-​based game design that can instigate critical-​ collaborative forms of play, extending the more constructive and thoughtful forms of design that McGonigal promotes in her work. Many of the authors included in this collection also push against the notion that games are somehow separate from reality, or that they exist in or create an unreal, make-​believe magic circle. In ‘Exploring Agency and Female Player-​Character Relationships in Life Is Strange: What Choice do I Have?’, Andrea Luc discusses how playing Life Is Strange allowed her to reflect on how she deals with gender-​based conflict outside of videogames. Games are not separate universes; what happens online or on-​board bleeds into meatspace and has ramifications for how players view and interact with the world around them. Based on this concept alone, it would be easy to disparage the very existence of war games—​predicated as they often are on violence and

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Feminist war games? 7 death—​and to discount any argument that they might be feminist. If the boundary between life inside and outside of games is really so porous, then the degree of violence in games could only be considered as unethical. But games—​and perhaps videogames in particular—​are more complex than such a superficial reading. And so is feminism. There are two issues with the claims in the paragraph above; first, the assumption that all games reflect and possibly even incite violence, and second, the idea that feminism is equated with non-​violence. Yes, war games have war as their subject, and so an element of violence is present. But games like This War of Mine acknowledge the violence of war without glamorising it; quite the opposite, as Ryan House and Kampe articulate in their chapters in this collection. In her chapter ‘Feminism and the Forever Wars: Prototyping Games in the Time of “America First” ’, Elizabeth Losh also explores how games about war like Darfur Is Dying, Hush, Syrian Journey, and Endgame Syria do not shy away from the reality of a warzone, but focus on the lived reality for civilians. Of course, many games outside the war game genre also do not prioritise the violence associated with war. The existence of violent feminism is another topic of debate. For many, like notable feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde, feminism should be fundamentally anti-​oppressive (1984). It is not a far stretch from anti-​oppressive to anti-​violence, since violence—​or the threat thereof—​is so frequently the tool of oppression. Abolition activist and scholar Angela Davis has been outspoken in her condemnation of violence. When asked in an interview about earlier resistance to the validity or role of violence, Davis responds: I was attempting to point out that questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military … At the time I was in jail, having been falsely charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy and turned into a target of institutional violence, I was the one being asked whether I agreed with violence. Very bizarre. (2016, p. 7) Ahmed also warns against invoking righteous anger as a feminist. Admittedly, righteous anger is different than violence, but they are adjacent. On the risks of anger, she writes:  ‘Our anger, when generalized against the injustices of the world, can become directed toward those who happen to be nearest, often those who are dearest’ (2017, p. 172). In this collection, Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson suggest that even the idea of a feminist war game is offensive because of the violence intrinsic to war, and especially since much war-​ based violence is enacted on female bodies. Other feminists may experience anger and violence as redemptive, desirable, or powerful. Think of Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot, refusing to let their anger about oppression be silenced. Consider Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power, where teenagers and then women learn how to harness

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8  Alyssa Arbuckle et al. their own bodies to electrocute men and systematically turn the world into a violent matriarchy. Look to Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), Soraya Chemaly’s recent book on embracing female anger as a tool for social change, or Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018), where Brittney Cooper extols the potential productivity of anger. Many of the authors featured in this collection align themselves with the potential of feminist aggression. Jerreat-​Poole’s chapter ‘Gamified Suburban Violence and the Feminist Pleasure of Destructive Play: Rezoning Warzones’ explores the satisfaction derived from violent destruction in playing games like Life Is Strange and Night in the Woods. As they articulate, Playing games may have an emotionally cathartic function for some players, but pleasurable fantasies of feminist violence do more than this. They validate our anger. They tell us that we should be angry. They tell us to hold on to our anger, to nurture it, and to use it. They show us that anger can be world-​making. (Jerreat-​Poole, p. 79) In ‘Gendered Authorship in War Gaming:  Whose Fantasy Is It Anyway?’ Anastasia Salter riffs on her own experience as a child gamer playing the first-​person shooter games of her youth. Kaethler explores the videogame inclusion of empowered, violent women in ‘Failed Feminist Interventions in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’. Denying women the ability to be violent is also problematic, as Gabi Kirilloff argues in her chapter ‘Subversive Game Mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal Franchises: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too’. As she astutely suggests, ‘Fatal Frame presents non-​violence, or rather, constrained violence, as an intrinsic aspect of desirable femininity, rather than as an ethical choice’ (Kirilloff p. 171). Violence, for these authors, is not necessarily anti-​feminist. Throughout this collection the reader will also find recommendations for game designers to make more games that incorporate a variety of feminist values. For instance, in the context of Dungeons and Dragons, Salter throws her hat in with creating ‘space[s]‌more open to subversion of war norms and hypermasculine strategies and value judgements’ (p. 36). Similarly, Bath and Cockcroft challenge designers to create real alternatives to violent gameplay rather than just making not-​killing yet another achievement for the expert gamer. Sarah Stang reflects on the kinds of decisions that go into creating a feminist war game at a 2017 game jam. Building on his historical recounting of the gendered nature of war game design and play, Shoemaker closes his chapter with a section titled ‘Deliberate Choice in Game Design’—​a roadmap for more inclusive design decisions. We have grouped the chapters of this collection into three main parts: I. Play as Inquiry II. Feminism as War III. Challenging the Industry

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Feminist war games? 9 Part I, ‘Play as Inquiry’, examines how engaging with war games can be an explorative foray into questions of gender, femininity, masculinity, and violence. Part II, ‘Feminism as War’, showcases contributions that engage with the common experience of gender-​based violence, and how such an experience interplays with games and gaming. Part III, ‘Challenging the Industry’, contains pointed looks at game mechanics and the larger game industry, and includes selections that both challenge the industry and suggest steps for proactive change. The tripartite framework encourages those who engage this collection to read across the varied content types included. Contributions range from personal reflections to more objective essays, and each section includes a curated mix of these forms. In presenting the material in this way we hope to emphasise the multiplicity of the notion of a feminist war game itself—​this topic does not reside in a purely personal or purely objective realm, but rather brings to the fore questions of experience, agency, ethics, and intellectual engagement. The collection closes with a summative afterword by Flanagan, ‘Taking Binaries Off the Table’. So can there be a feminist war game? Such a provocation is the guiding inquiry of this collection, tackled most directly by Jon Saklofske, Emily Cann, Danielle Rodrigue-​Todd, and Derek Siemens in the opening chapter, which builds on the initial provocation of the 2016 panel that inspired this collection. Why does it matter if there can or cannot be feminist war games? Currently, many games and the cultures that they give rise to reinforce creative, kinetic, and non-​critical habits that reproduce and reinforce stereotypical hypermasculinities when it comes to violence and war. This collection hopes to at least disrupt uncritical immersion in such problematic perspectives and invoke a necessary destabilisation that resists both an easy retreat into exclusive habits of conventional perception as well as facile acceptance of unconventional challenges to such habits. To this end, we hope that the questions raised by the various authors in this volume will provoke thoughtful and progressive discussion and action between designers, publishers, and players regarding the ways that war is represented, practised, and perceived in the participatory, interactive medium of games. Perhaps the reader will come to a more solid conclusion to the question of whether there can be a feminist war game. For us, as co-​editors of this volume, the answer still remains: Yes. No. Obviously! Absolutely not. Possibly …?

Notes 1 According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, on average fully employed Canadian women make 75 cents for every dollar that fully employed Canadian men

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10  Alyssa Arbuckle et al. make. Moreover, they claim, ‘Canada is ranked as having the 8th highest gender pay gap out of a list of 43 countries examined by the OECD, based on 2016 data’ (Canadian Women’s Foundation 2018). 2 It is important to acknowledge that the statistics Solnit quotes here represent reported rapes in the United States. Given the tendency to not report rape (and other forms of sexualised violence), it is assumed that there are many more rape victims than 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men. 3 For a history of the development of war games see Peterson 2016.

References Ahmed, S 2017, Living a feminist life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Alderman, N 2016, The power, Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. Bogost, I 2007, Persuasive games:  the expressive power of videogames, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bogost, I 2011, How to do things with videogames, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Caillois, R (1961) 2001, Man, play, and games, M Barash (trans), Free Press of Glencoe, New York, NY. Reprint, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL. Canadian Women’s Foundation 2018, The facts about the gender wage gap in Canada, www.canadianwomen.org/​the-​facts/​the-​wage-​gap/​. Chemaly, S 2018, Rage becomes her:  the power of women’s anger, Atria Books, New York, NY. Cooper, B 2018, Eloquent rage: a Black feminist discovers her superpower, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY. Davis, AY 2016, Freedom is a constant struggle, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL. Flanagan, M 2009, Critical play: radical game design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Galloway, AR 2006, Gaming: essays on algorithmic culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Gay, R 2014, Bad feminist, Harper Perennial, New York, NY. Huizinga, J 1949, Homo ludens: a study of the play-​element in culture, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, UK. Lorde, A (1984) 2007, Sister outsider, Ten Speed Press, New York, NY. McGonigal, J 2011, Reality is broken:  why games make us better and how they can change the world, Penguin, New York, NY. Peterson, J 2016, ‘A game out of all proportions: how a hobby miniaturized war’, in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.) Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3–​31. Shraya, V 2018, I’m afraid of men, Penguin, Toronto, ON. Sicart, M 2013, Beyond choices: the design of ethical gameplay, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Solnit, R 2014, Men explain things to me, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL. Solnit, R 2017, The mother of all questions, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL. Wunker, E 2017, Notes from a feminist killjoy:  essays on everyday life, BookThug, Toronto, ON.

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Part II

Play as inquiry

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1  Are there (can there be/​should there be) feminist war games? Jon Saklofske, Emily Cann, Danielle Rodrigue-​Todd, and Derek Siemens

A few years ago, Jon Saklofske gave an art gallery talk on unconventional representations of war in video games, and focused on games which eroded the standard tropes of heroic and ideologically driven soldiers, glorified violence, normative Western perspectives, and good vs. evil binaries. His overall argument was that while many commercial digital games model systems and narratives that reductively reinforce and essentialize idealistic cultural paradigms and perceptions about war, game environments can also function as a test chamber, a lab in which conditions, parameters and perspectives can be imaginatively experimented with. In the Q&A session after the talk, Dr. Rachel Brickner, a professor from Acadia University’s Politics Department asked a simple but profound question. She recognized that unconventional or not, most of the games that were cited in the presentation as exceptions were still operating within the frame of masculine power fantasies, even as they questioned the locations of power at the heart of more traditional representations of armed conflict. She asked: ‘Is there a feminist war game?’ Jon was at an absolute loss and had no answer for her at the time, but her question has subsequently generated a fair amount of research, thinking and experimentation, and continues to reveal the problematic ways that war and violence are perceived, represented, idealized and interpreted through various media forms. Identifying the need to confront and challenge traditional habits of head, hand, heart and media representation when it comes to game-​based perceptions of war (which can reflect and shape attitudes towards war in general) is not unique to this chapter. Mary Flanagan (2016, p. 706), in ‘Practicing a New Wargame’, discusses the perceptual limitations reproduced by conventional tabletop wargames and calls for alternative ways of imagining conflict resolution: We must look to transcend old conflict models, or we risk perpetuating the damaging myth that there are limited ways of resolving conflicts … What will wargames look like with different kinds of rules, with new expectations, with radical strategies and consensus built in? What if their simulation of conflict isn’t so much about war as it is about critical

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14  Jon Saklofske et al. thinking and critique from an outsider status? … It is vital that game scholars, makers and players see these familiar models on a continuum of change, so new play forms that model new solutions to our problems can be invented. Our games are constantly evolving, and this means we all have an opportunity, even a responsibility, to evolve with them and push ourselves to model the world we wish to create. Flanagan’s call is important to games in general (and is an important acknowledgement of game design and gamespace as an opportunity to imagine new models), but ultimately abstract in that it doesn’t specifically identify the militarized masculinity and hypermasculinity that defines the nature of armed conflict and most of its representations in gaming environments. And so this provocation extends Flanagan’s, calling for the use of feminist values to critically influence alternative ways of modelling conflict and conflict resolution in interactive representations of war. To this end, games and the ways that they implicate and involve the player can be used as critical interventions which challenge conventional expectations and which ask crucial questions about the relationship between masculinity, power and war.

War: what is it (good for)? It would be easy to simply equate war with conflict. Conflict is inherent in all stories and narratives. However, given the subject matter of the popular games that inspired this project, we would like to define war as armed conflict between large groups of people. Another useful definition which calls attention to an additional layer of consideration and highlights the procedural economies of most game experiences is that war is a violent form of resource management and acquisition. Is peace the ultimate aim of armed conflict? Is that the goal of most war scenarios? No. Peace is the aim of diplomacy, not war, because participants in armed conflict do not entertain victory, defeat and compromise as equally desirable pathways to war’s end. War is what happens when peaceful intentions fail, when diplomacy breaks down. A persistent narrative in relation to war is the notion of a ‘just war’. A just warrior is one who ‘takes up arms reluctantly and only if he must to prevent a greater wrong or to protect the innocent from certain harm’ (Elshtain 1987, p.  127). Kimberly Hutchings (2011, p.  28) argues that this idea of the just warrior privileges masculine authority—​those who do not epitomize control and civilization cannot be just warriors. Also, this politics of rescue infers that those who are protected or helped do not share or possess the capacity of responsibility of the helpers. More often than not, in these situations, men are rescuing or protecting less capable ‘others’.

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 15

La? guerre Women have participated historically in war in diverse ways. There are particular legends, anecdotes and histories of women who have been involved in combat roles: Joan of Arc; women who dressed as men to fight in the US Civil War; and Russian female soldiers in the First World War who were allowed into combat out of necessity, and while some were recognized for bravery and excellence, many were terrorized by men during their service. In the world wars, many women supported the war effort at home by working in factory jobs normally reserved for their male counterparts. However, many of these stories are often-​repeated exceptions, as traditionally women have been perceived as part of the helpless population (along with children and the elderly) that need to be saved or protected through armed conflict. In this sense, they often function as motivators for male soldiers, as supportive spectators, as rewards for a job well done. Ironically, populations that supposedly require protection have historically been the victims of wartime sexual violence and mass rape during war. In popular stories and movies, such victimization practices are not often showcased, but it is interesting to note that a number of literary and cinematic narratives have not shied away from examining and interrogating the ways that women have been sexually instrumentalized in times and situations of war (which mirrors the ways that men are similarly exploited as instruments of violence in wartime economies). A memorable and uncomfortable example is Brian de Palma’s film Casualties of War (1989), where wartime rape is featured to provoke questions about military cultures, hierarchies and gender performance. The film universally critiques the destructive and dehumanizing tendencies of warfare for all involved while also exposing the ways that such situations implicitly favour male privilege. Casualties of War also highlights the ways in which film viewers often desire provocative, troublesome, tension-​filled and often horrific storylines, events and scenes. This isn’t a fetishized form of pleasure, but results from a desire to safely experience and engage with difficult issues and behaviours. Why are game players so comparatively limited in their desires for various forms of experience, and why are depictions of rape or sexual violence not present in and interrogated by war simulations and game-​based representations of armed conflict? Early wargames were more concerned with strategic simulations and resource management challenges than personal and traumatic consequences of war on individual participants, and most current wargames continue to avoid asking or focusing on such difficult questions. Interactive simulations, especially contemporary digital games and virtual reality experiences, are less ‘safe’ than the spectatorial nature of film viewing. Such participatory involvement has produced tireless debate about the effects of game-​based violence on perception and behaviour. This, along with the fact that the commercial video game industry’s products have generally been marketed to younger

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16  Jon Saklofske et al. audiences and have been perceived as a largely escapist medium, has likely skewed developer motivations toward encouraging fun rather than provoking critical thought. The competition, acquisition and exploration motivations at the heart of most games also frame them as fantasies of empowerment rather than positioning them as a stage upon which compassion and equity are favoured. The latter part of the twentieth century saw a shift towards the inclusion of women in actual military combat roles. However, this change has introduced additional concerns that confirm the ubiquity of insensitivity and intolerance in contemporary military cultures. Anthony King’s ‘The Female Combat Soldier’ (2015) and ‘The Female Soldier’ (2013) articles discuss the ways that female soldiers are subjected to discrimination, harassment and abuse. While some are subjected to an institutional cultural code that identifies them as sluts and bitches, a few have become recognized as attaining a narrow and exclusive group termed ‘honorary men’ (an equally troubling category). King’s accusations are confirmed and extended by a 119-​page Human Rights Watch report (2015), which reveals that 18,900 US service members (women and men) were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2014, but that of the 3,261 sexual assault cases in the Defense Department’s jurisdiction investigated in 2014, just 5 per cent (175) led to a sex offence conviction. More often, victims were assailed with obscenities and insults, threatened with death by ‘friendly fire’ during deployment, demeaned, demoted, disciplined and discharged for misconduct following the assault. More recently, a report completed in September 2018 and tabled to the Canadian parliament in November 2018 regarding inappropriate sexual behaviour in the Canadian Armed Forces recommended that victim support be improved and that better education and training of personnel on the causes and effects of such inappropriate behaviour is necessary (Auditor General of Canada 2018). In section 5.84, this report cited a Statistics Canada Survey on Sexual Misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces in which 960 members reported experiencing a sexual assault between April–​ June 2015 and April–​June 2016 and ‘most members (79%, or 44,390) reported that they saw, heard, or were personally targeted by sexualized behaviour’ during that same period. It seems that military cultures which are often glorified in war game environments and narratives as enabling heroic participants in just war scenarios systematically allow instances of dehumanization, discrimination, objectification and sexual violence towards internal and external populations. Then there are critics such as Martin Van Creveld, who writes scholarly papers (published in credible, high-​profile, high-​ranking journals) that communicate the following perspectives: ‘The more women in any armed force, the less likely it is to engage in serious military operations. Yet no society can survive without either the use of violence or the threat of it’ (2000a, p. 825). He continues:

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 17 [Violence] is the method par excellence by which men seek to … justify their own existence both in their own eyes and … in those of women … As Nietzsche … put it … ‘man was born to war, women to breed warriors; all the rest is nonsense’. (2000a, pp. 843–​844) A further example: Prevented from fighting their equals, and shrinking year by year, the military machines designed for such wars no longer have a vital role to play; so why not fill them with women who, so long as it does not come to combat, can do the job equally well? Whether in or out of the military, feminism is and always has been a peacetime luxury. (2000b, pp. 14–​15) He concludes: ‘When Freud wrote to his bride that the best thing a woman can do for herself is to shelter in the house of a man, perhaps he was not so wrong after all’ (2000b, p. 16). Creveld’s work demonstrates that the misogyny inherent in military cultures can easily become internalized and perpetuated through scholarly voices as well. His critical positions oppose feminism to war by implying that it, and women, have no place in ‘serious’ military culture and operations, save for corrupting and weakening a force’s strength. Such a perspective embodies the anachronistic, sexist motivations and inherent anxieties that feed hypermasculine military culture, Gamergate proponents, and alt-​right and populist perspectives: privileged voices loudly and threateningly asserting such privilege to sustain their own power rather than to enable, empower or make room for conventionally disempowered others. Creveld’s statements, buttressed by misogynist statements from Freud and Nietzsche, are not well-​ supported arguments. They are assertions that uncritically rehearse status quo perspectives via a rhetorical position of moral certainty, assertions that value violence and war as instruments of a social stability that favours male dominance. However, to simply oppose Creveld’s position and argue for equal opportunity participation in military forces ignores the conceptual dangers of automatically accepting that a nation’s military force is an essential social institution and that the threat of armed conflict is perpetual and inevitable. Women gaining access to all branches of military service to fulfil hopes and aspirations is an affirmation of military institutions and ideologies. If women derive empowerment from combat roles, this empowerment is gained at the cost of giving up their individual power and becoming instruments of the state, becoming well-​trained and well-​armed expendables. Giving women and men equal opportunity to subscribe to a military culture that is known to support toxic versions of militarized masculinity which value violence, othering, hierarchy and domination is certainly problematic. Is it better to march in step with or work to eradicate the old boy’s network? Perhaps Creveld correctly

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18  Jon Saklofske et al. opposes feminism to war and its institutions, but instead of using this opposition to argue for the exclusion of women from a strong and capable military, such a premise should become the foundation for a broader critique of the function and continuing necessity of the military ‘machine’.

War never changes? The potential of feminist values At the beginning of every Fallout (1997, 1998, 2008) video game, the statement ‘war never changes’ is used to begin the narrative. By asking questions such as ‘Does the female warrior always need to be a masculine figure? Is violence a necessarily masculine course of action?’ as well as raising the possibilities of feminist war games and of feminist anti-​war games, we’re hoping to turn Fallout’s opening statement into a question, and remind people that war not only changes and impacts every aspect of existence that it touches, but that habits of perceiving and performing armed conflict can be changed via game-​ based narrative, simulation and modelling. We need new models, diverse approaches and different narratives to expose war’s patriarchal morphology, to provoke a rethinking of militarized masculinity and the persistence of hypermasculinity in idealistic representations of war. Feminism’s scope is broad. To avoid alienating different perspectives on the spectrum of feminist discourse and to retain the integrated complexity of feminist iterations, we think the most effective way of challenging masculinist ideals of war is through feminist values. We’ve been inspired by the work of Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, whose book Values at Play in Digital Games (2014) focuses on value-​centric game design and argues that game designers have the power to shape players’ engagement with social and political values systems through technologically enabled stories. What are feminist values? Given that ‘feminism’ describes and consolidates a collection of related movements, it would be unproductively reductive and essentialist to search for a common denominator ‘value’ or set of values shared between the varieties of feminist perspective. However, feminist theorists commonly critique gender-​ based inequality, discrimination, violence representation, privilege and habits of perception and practice, and it is this essential questioning of inequality and the violence that often accompanies the maintenance of such inequality that matters most to the current topic. What kind of feminism does war provoke (Cockburn 2012) and what kinds of war does feminism provoke? A potential answer comes from a quotation frequently attributed to Dale Spender:  ‘Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties’. The violence that is essential to war and which appears inextricably braided into so many warlike cultural and social practices has provoked significant feminist critical interventions (Solnit 2017, Davis 2016). While many feminist voices are opposed to violence, to assert that violence is unavailable as a mode of feminist empowerment would be

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 19 problematic. The ‘right to fight’ is in keeping with feminist values, because feminism is not necessarily a pacifist ideology. Feminism arises in conflict with reductive and restrictive systems, searching for solutions to binary and hierarchical considerations of the sexes and the social and cultural applications and reinforcements of such a binary. However, while feminist critique might itself be a form of conflict, arising in opposition to inequality, it is conflict in search of an equitable resolution. Competition and competitive attempts at differentiation, and the zero-​sum economies that remain a foundation of war and war games thus appear counterintuitive to the goals of feminist critical motivations. Perhaps feminist approaches, economies and values can change/​ alter/​skew/​distort/​reimagine our habitual perceptions of armed conflict.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play Testing the compatibility between feminist critiques of inequality and systems of war through video games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions and approaches, and to prototype alternative narratives. We’re advocating for the application of feminist values as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with/​within arenas of war. Merritt Kopas, from a keynote talk for the 2014 Queerness and Games Conference published in First Person Scholar, suggests that ‘Games are cultural fantasies of the way things work. Through play—​ not just through representations or images—​we tell stories about how we believe or want to believe the world works’ (2014, emphasis added). In addition to affirming that game-​based representations—​including those of war—​are idealized, Kopas importantly affirms that games are more than representations. They are playable fantasies, participatory interactive opportunities in which the player actively realizes the systematic potential of the constructed situation. Further: All games are abstractions, and all abstractions involve human, and thus, political decisions about what to include or emphasize. In the context of digital games where the rules can be selectively concealed from the player, these decisions are invisibilized and naturalized. (2014, emphasis added) The values and politics of designers thus subtly shape games into possibility fields which are ultimately realized by the player. But these biases become the invisible infrastructures underlying the world of the game, and players, to an extent, must accept or adapt to them while playing. Representations of and interactions with war situations in games are shaped by these naturalized biases, and such biases tend to favour violent antagonism as a means to power. Finally, Kopas quotes Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria), who ‘points out [that] most videogames place the player in a relatively straightforward scenario with clear goals. The overwhelming focus on goals, efficiency, and accomplishment

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20  Jon Saklofske et al. in videogames has led Pedercini to describe the medium as the “aesthetic form of rationalization” ’ (Kopas & Clark 2014, emphasis added). In other words, games—​including those that simulate war—​use abstraction, quantifiable goals, and other forms of procedural refocusing to justify and idealize a player’s allowed-​for actions. Within a war game context, this normalizes and encourages actions such as simulated mass murder, objectification and excess violence while obscuring the ethical and critical complexities associated with such actions. Beyond the justifications that could be offered to circumvent such considerations due to the particular contextual framework or ‘rules’ of war, games encourage players to achieve more nuanced or greater numbers of kills. For example, while it is neither pleasurable nor practical to shoot someone in the head, players are often motivated to aspire to successful simulated headshots in war games due to the goals, achievements and economies encouraged by game narratives and systems (Totilo 2010). While many games are essentially training arenas which demand that we conform to and master prescribed algorithms or rulesets of action and achievement, some also allow opportunities for flexible play or a range of responses. Some, such as The Stanley Parable (2013), Spec Ops:  The Line (2012), Bioshock (2007) and Undertale (2015) even creatively antagonize player expectations or work to alienate a player’s innate trust in reliable narration. Ian Bogost recognizes the potential of games to stage persuasive arguments: a game’s ‘arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models’ (Bogost 2010, p.  125). Games can thus function as models and as prototypes, as demonstrative conceptualizations, and as early functional iterations of ideas. These functions can be employed towards argumentative ends. Since games rely on systems, rulesets and economies to configure player experiences, the value-​determined design of these aspects can be used to challenge habits and assumptions and the ubiquity of traditionally masculine power fantasies relating to armed conflict. As well, games—​specifically digital iterations of games—​ involve a complexity of features including systems, mechanics, controls, sound, visuals, narrativity and interfaces. Each of these elements of games offers an opportunity for feminist intervention. For example, what would a feminist game mechanic look like and how could it be applied to a war game? Finally, games require player participation to determine outcomes, motivate the narrative and fuel the game’s systems. The game can tailor these interactions to reinforce traditional stereotypes, or condition new or unexpected responses, expose players to situations in which critical thought is necessitated, and offer choices without clear right/​wrong alignment.

War ≠ fun There are many types of war games but most feed similar expectations/​habits through repetitive design assumptions and stereotypical narratives. Most war

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 21 games feed narratives of just war, conflict, heroism, duty and the destruction of an antagonistic ‘other’. But actual war is not fun. It empowers a few through the destruction of many others. Some games, such as Far Cry 2 (2008), Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (2001), the God of War series (2005–​2018) and Red Dead Redemption (2010), to name just a few, try to show this, but go on to justify their excesses of interactive violence by offering alternative masculine power fantasies of revenge, retribution, justice, duty, heroism, perseverance and survival. In many video games (not just war games), violence is the only form of interaction that characters are allowed to perform—​this generates an incredibly over-​simplified construction of a society in which those who cause the most harm have the most power. This limited medium of interaction makes it difficult to create complicated dynamics between characters or construct critical interrogations of war. In a February 2015 Escapist article entitled ‘Forget Realism, We Need Truth’, Robert Rath offered an interesting criticism of war games, writing ‘I’m not sure there’s another medium that’s dealt with [war] so much while saying so little about it’. As well, Darius Kazemi (2012) and Robert Yang (2011) have pointed out that war games are less accurate descriptions of the conduct of contemporary warfare and more a projection of ideas and cultural fantasies about war and masculine heroism. Exploring the possibility of feminist war games essentially asks whether war itself is a masculine practice, concept, strategy, or response to difference. And this is an important question to ask. It could be argued that imagining feminist war game alternatives would violate the ‘fun’ inherent in such games. However, the suggestion that digital games are fun or are supposed to be fun is not quite true. Most early games were not inherently fun. They trained us to become proficient in assembly line tasks. For example, Pac-​Man isn’t fun. It’s work, inconsequential work that is encouraged and rendered pleasurable by competitive quantification. Perhaps the fun comes from inconsequence and competition, which sounds like the habits that perpetuate the war-​based games which reinforce performative realizations of militarized masculinity. But people play games for more than immediate gratification delivered through the proficient accomplishment of tasks. Horror genre games, Bioshock’s philosophical critique of objectivism (2007), undermining heroic assumptions related to your actions in Spec Ops: The Line (2012), the difficult interpersonal situations and choices of Life Is Strange (2015)—​these are games that tell engaging stories, games that act in a literary way, exposing us to unique circumstances and human drama, asking us to consider the consequences and implications of our actions. Like De Palma’s Casualties of War film, many of these games aren’t fun—​they are disempowerment fantasies that are engaging, stressful, intense and ultimately provocative, leaving us with questions, uncertainties and emotional impact as sources of pleasure. Can there be feminist war games? Not only can there be feminist war games, but such experiences need to be made available to explore alternatives

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22  Jon Saklofske et al. to violence, objectification and inequality, to confront masculinist tropes, and to trigger more thoughtful and complex responses in players. Games can be more than simulators which encourage action and experimentation without consequence. However, games, designed with alternative value sets (to distinguish them from traditionally masculine power fantasies) might help to challenge and realign the values that players become reflexively used to perceiving and employing within scenarios of militarization and armed conflict. Feminism is a necessary perspective and approach because inequity and oppressive patriarchal habits persist and are horrifically amplified in situations of war. Feminist efforts can effectively deconstruct naturalized patriarchal landscapes and gendered binaries, and thus have the power to challenge normative myths about war and to transform perspectives.

Feminist war games While applying feminist values to game design doesn’t always necessitate a focus on female characters, female characters in most mainstream war games are perceived and represented as damsels in distress, decoration, prostitutes and trophies. However, some female characters are also (and this crosses over between films and games) presented as feminine alternatives to a dominant male default player-​character, as militarized, but often sexualized female warriors which are designed to aesthetically appeal to straight male players rather than giving women more agency. Some examples of games which feature sexualized ‘warrior women’ characters (akin to the ‘Full Metal Bitch’ character in the film Edge of Tomorrow (2014), which resembles a game-​like structure in its ‘try, die, restart’ time-​loop narrative) include Resident Evil (1996), Bayonetta (2010), Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (2015), Remember Me (2013), Tomb Raider (1996) and Wet (2009). Even though there was no video-​game released as a movie-​tie-​in (which is a curious omission), one might even associate Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film Wonder Woman with the above list. While the warrior Diana fights for peace in this film and supposedly models female empowerment, she is also dressed in much more revealing clothing than her male counterparts. Jenkins defended this portrayal by stating that ‘I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman to be hot as hell, fight badass and look great at the same time’ (Sperling 2016). While this over-​sexualization of female characters should not simply be accepted as the norm, should it be balanced with other representations, or eliminated completely in game designs? Should the option to have hyper-​ feminine female characters be retained? To offer alternative but equally limited and limiting representations of women and men in digital war games is likely not an effective interventionist strategy. More choice and broader options for gendered appearances and related power and empowerment fantasies would be ideal, but in doing so, game designers need to make sure that these power fantasies aren’t solely constructed through the male gaze. As well, while such representational variety might not be in keeping with well-​groomed

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 23 and non-​decorative appearance standards pragmatically mandated for both men and women by actual military forces, adherence to realism in most game experiences is often exchanged for elements that increase the entertainment potential of the experience. Imagining diverse forms of femininity and masculinity in military contexts is something that creative game design can prototype and explore much more rapidly and effectively than hoping for a sudden sea-​change in real-​world military perspectives and practices. However, a larger uncertainty regarding the overall compatibility between feminist values and those of the military industrial complex might render their potential synthesis impossible, in games or otherwise. Is war antithetical to feminist values or can it be a vehicle for feminist values? Is a feminist war game more than an anti-​war game? Is feminism (ironically) a war against war? A feminist war game initiative can both make room for a variety of feminist power fantasies and work to highlight and defamiliarize disempowerment fantasies. While it is impossible to avoid power fantasies altogether in a war game context, ideas relating to a feminist war are likely to be quite divergent from the ways that traditional war is understood. Conflict is an essential part of stories. Without conflict, most stories aren’t worth telling. We need to engage with war, but how? While non-​sexist representations of women in strong combative roles is an important step towards challenging skewed representations of women in war games and games in general, if war games could be designed to subject female video game characters to violence in the name of equal opportunity representation, this would not be an ideal manifestation of feminist equality. More pointedly, is social equality desirable in a society whose values revolve around war, violence, economies of objectification and instrumentalization, and resource acquisition and management? Angela Night (2015) asks ‘If violence against women in video games is unacceptable, then how can games have more female protagonists since they’ll invariably face violence?’ We’re conscious that our sceptical perspective (why would women want equality in hyperviolent, combative environments when we can problematize those environments through feminist values?) might be limited and limiting. But the promise of treating people equally even if you are treating them as equally disposable instruments doesn’t sit right. Does the pursuit of a greater presence of ‘warrior women’ in game-​based representations of war counter or ultimately support militarized masculinities through the affirmation of feminist militarism? Could female protagonists undermine the dominance of genre/​gender in war-​related narratives? Some examples of prototype feminist war games that could promote an egalitarian access to militaristic traditions include:

•

A game which allows players to participate in a feminist movement or cause, such as the suffragette movement. Player-​characters would be working for suffrage and, in keeping with historical events, violence would play an essential part in this path to equality.

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24  Jon Saklofske et al.

• •

•

A chess game variant in which the queen is still the most powerful piece on the board but is also the one that needs to be checked to win. This shifts the game’s foundation to a feudal matriarchy and would necessitate new approaches and strategies overall. A multiplayer game that depends on female player-​character co-​operation to achieve combat objectives in a war scenario. A multiplayer video game entitled Overwatch (2016) is a step towards realizing this possibility, as the game necessitates co-​operative combat and features 14 out of 30 playable heroes as women as of April 2019. A game that models warfare via the activity of bees. Queen bees produce up to 25,000 worker bees (all female) who go to war over nests that belong to other queens. Stinger-​less male drones wait on the margins until the conflict is over.

Feminist anti-​war games Just as equal opportunity sexual objectification isn’t the answer to sexual objectification, equal opportunity warfare might not be the solution to warfare’s constitution of women. Alternatively and more broadly, feminist values could be used to generate anti-​war game experiences, to undermine the conventions of war, and to undermine war itself as a way of negotiating difference. As Margery Hourihan suggests, the ‘tale of the hero and his quest … has always glorified the patriarchy … [and] if women are to achieve real equality … we must change our entrenched perceptions, and that involves changing the story which articulates and reinforces them’ (1997, p. 233). This would not just involve telling different stories in different ways, but engaging the player in participatory narratives that offer alternatives to expectations with the goal of challenging and overcoming militarized hypermasculinity as this model of masculinity is a toxic one and is a learned, social construction of gender that can be resisted, unlearned and redefined. To effect a critique of current models and idealizations of war, feminist war game prototypes need to explore methods of empowerment other than violence or weapons. Perhaps violence needs to be offered as a problematic, consequential, affective choice rather than a programmed necessity, and war needs to be presented as not a winning condition (or a gameplay condition), but as a losing condition. If war means game over not game on, the goals of games which feature armed conflict would change. Some alternatives to ‘winning the battle’ might include:

• • •

Advancement of political/​ social power for women and/​ or other disenfranchised groups. Undermining the ‘fun’ of war (exposing the discrepancy between what war promises and what it is). To expose and denaturalize the stories we tell ourselves about violence, identity and modern subjectivity.

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 25

• • • • • • • • • •

Questioning the necessity of war. Questioning economies of war that fundamentally objectify women and everything else. Character progression from object to subject in a war context. Diplomacy. Contradicting the ‘othering’ that war requires; rehumanizing soldiers and victims. Re-​confronting killing as murder rather than reinforcing mechanical distancing, rationalization and abstraction via politics and technology. Working to discover tangential escapes from and alternatives to cyclical violence. Finding ways to de-​mechanize/​re-​humanize conflict. Questioning why war is a habitual response to conflict and difference. Prototyping feminist economies of war (to counter or balance the conventional modes of violent resource management and acquisition). What would such feminist economies look like?

Some examples of prototype feminist war games that could promote a critique of militaristic traditions include:

•

• •

• •

Featuring a loading screen with detailed biographies of combatants you’ve killed (constructing victims with detailed identities in an effort to reconnect abstracted violent action with human relationships). The more kills a player gets, the longer the wait or loading time between levels as these victims are remembered. Giving the player a choice to opt out of combat or to achieve empowerment through something other than violence (Undertale (2015) is an adventure game that effectively achieves this). A choice-​based scenario where ‘I don’t know’ is an option and where decisions have profound and far-​reaching consequences (like the non-​ military video game Life Is Strange). This would challenge the objectification of victims, the sanitized relation to consequences of violence, and the ‘just violence’ scenarios of many war games. An imperative to end war with a peacekeeping scenario (rather than a victory). This would involve not trying to stop war from happening, but trying to end an unjust war with a just peace. An alternative to this would be to simply equate all potential war victories with tragedy. In a conventional card game like War, changing the endgame so that whoever loses all of their cards wins. The winner thus escapes from this system and the ‘loser’ is doomed to keep playing with an excess of resources in an economy of combative competition. Additionally, in the conventional rules of this game, ‘war’ is triggered by a tie, by equality (in a system that favours high-​card dominance). Could this tie instead be redefined as ‘peace’, be reimagined as a mutually desirable endgame or goal?

-

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26  Jon Saklofske et al.

• •

•

•

• •

Altering the conventional game of Risk so that players begin in an unequal scenario. Does it feel good to win if players don’t start out on equal ground? A game in which a player plays as a bullet or bomb and has a limited amount of time to hit or destroy something. However, every object that the player selects as a potential target has a pop-​up story defining its importance, the long-​term consequences of destroying it, and its undesirability as a target. This necessitating of a full personal knowledge of the target before they could be fired, counteracts the ease with which conventional weapons anonymize, distance and destroy targets. Alternatively, after the bullets contact a hollow, iconic target, the player has to endure and absorb a flood of humanity, detail, personal information and story related to the target. Such a humanizing encounter with the destroyed other that can only be accessed through violent acts creates an ironic tension, a too-​late sympathy potential. A war game you can’t win: every triumph shuts off the player’s ability to communicate and receive key information from other characters in the game (isolating the player) and pushing the player deeper into impossible scenarios and dead ends. The player only figures this out as they play, as they lose. A situation that overlays war on existing, non-​combative game scenarios or local maps to render the experience uncanny. A war game that plays backwards: whomever you kill, you become, and play their past.

In addition to alternative scenarios and goals, the application of feminist values to war games could occur at the level of the interface, pre-​game options screens, or lucid narrative choices. For example, the potential symbolism of keyboard keys (space, escape, control, alt, enter/​return, delete, backspace, etc.) could be mapped to particular actions, either literally or ironically. As well, a game could offer randomly generated genders and sexes for players that force players to possibly inhabit a player-​character position that they would not conventionally choose. The PC game Rust (2013) has already experimented with this. A final example would be to give the player an opportunity to defiantly engage with lucid narrative interruptions into the game world. For example, in the same way that the disembodied narrative voice of The Stanley Parable (2013) confronts the player at crucial, decision-​making moments, a narrative voice could ask the player at various times what they are doing and why they are choosing a violent course of action.

Let’s play? Could any of the above feminist gaming models be introduced into conventional war games without a backlash from habitual consumers? Films that necessitate a critical confrontation with complexity are being made and are profitable, so why

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 27 can’t the same expectations be generated for the players of games? Currently, the habits of gaming culture are fed by the power fantasies that are promoted by games which feature war as entertainment. Perhaps the answer to this comes from Mattie Brice’s ‘Queer as in Fuck Me—​a Design Manifesto’: Games themselves aren’t teaching values, rather teaching players to have capacities for certain kind of values through discipline, so we need to design games as prompts for reaction and creation instead of teaching specific parables and lessons. (2014) Similarly, Paolo Pedercini asserts: Computer games need to learn from their non-​ digital counterparts to be loose interfaces between people. A  new game aesthetic has to be explored:  one that revels in problem-​ making over problem-​ solving, that celebrates paradoxes and ruptures, that doesn’t eschew broken and dysfunctional systems because the broken and dysfunctional systems governing our lives need to be unpacked and not idealized. Strategies are to be discovered: poetic wrenches have to be thrown in the works; gears and valves have to grow hair, start pulsing and breathing; algorithms must learn to tell stories and scream in pain. (2014) This chapter is meant to be a provocation, to generate discussion about the kinds of values and economies that inform our work and to remain optimistic about the ways that media technologies can be used as interventions to challenge, critique and re-​ humanize systems, ideologies and habitual narrativities, to pluralize perspectives, confront complexity and facilitate multiple models of perception and practice. Armed conflict uses technology to extend violent economies and to disconnect values from practice through mediated actions. However, the computer is a flexible tool that creative artists and critical scholars make use of in diverse ways to broaden our understanding of human culture and to generate inclusive, inhabitable and thought-​provoking stories. Collectively, we need to make use of this technology to pursue alternative horizons and innovative interrogations, consciously employing this mechanical extension of perception and action in connective, integrative and expansive ways to avoid replicating and reinforcing the distancing, dehumanizing and objectifying functions of our military machines.

References Auditor General of Canada 2018, ‘Report 5—​ inappropriate sexual behaviour—​ Canadian Armed Forces’, 2018 Fall reports of the Auditor General of Canada to the Parliament of Canada, Government of Canada, www.oag-​bvg.gc.ca/​internet/​ English/​parl_​oag_​201811_​05_​e_​43203.html#hd2d.

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28  Jon Saklofske et al. Bayonetta 2010, Sega, PS3. Bioshock 2007, 2K Games, PC. Bogost, I 2010, Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Brice, M 2014, ‘Queer as in fuck me—​a design manifesto’, 18 November, viewed 11 April 2019, www.mattiebrice.com/​queer-​as-​in-​fuck-​me-​a-​design-​manifesto/​. Casualties of war 2006, Columbia Pictures, Culver City, CA. Produced by Art Linson; Directed by Brian DePalma. Cockburn, C 2012, ‘What kind of feminism does war provoke?’ Opendemocracy.net. 2 December, viewed 11 April 2019, www.opendemocracy.net/​5050/​cynthia-​cockburn/​ what-​kind-​of-​feminism-​does-​war-​provoke. Davis, AY 2016, Freedom is a constant struggle, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL. Edge of tomorrow 2014, Warner Bros., USA, Canada. Directed by Doug Liman. Elshtain, J 1987, Women and war, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL. Fallout 1997, Interplay Productions, PC. Fallout 2 1998, Interplay Productions, PC. Fallout 3 2008, Bethesda, PC. Far Cry 2 2008, Ubisoft, XB360. Flanagan, M 2016, ‘Practicing a new wargame’, in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.), Zones of control:  perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 703–​708. Flanagan, M & Nissenbaum, H 2014, Values at play in digital games, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. God of War 2005, Sony Computer Entertainment, PS2. God of War II 2007, Sony Computer Entertainment, PS2. God of War III 2010 Sony Computer Entertainment, PS3. God of War 2018, Sony Interactive Entertainment, PS4. Hourihan, M 1997, Deconstructing the hero:  literary theory and children’s literature, Psychology Press, Hove, UK. Human Rights Watch 2015, Embattled: retaliation against sexual assault survivors in the US military, 18 May, viewed 11 April 2019, www.hrw.org/​report/​2015/​05/​18/​ embattled/​retaliation-​against-​sexual-​assault-​survivors-​us-​military. Hutchings, K 2011, ‘Gendered humanitarianism: reconsidering the ethics of war’ in C Sylvester (ed.), Experiencing war, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 28–​41. Kazemi, D 2012, ‘Some thoughts on war in games’, Tiny Subversions, web log post, 16 April, viewed 11 April 2019, http://​tinysubversions.com/​2012/​04/​some-​thoughts-​ on-​war-​in-​games/​. King, A 2013, ‘The female soldier’, Parameters, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 13–​25. King, A 2015, ‘The female combat soldier’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 122–​143. Kopas, M & Clark, N 2014, ‘Queering human–​ game relations:  exploring queer mechanics and play. Keynote at the 2014 Queerness and Games Conference’, First Person Scholar, 18 February 2015, viewed 11 April 2019, www.firstpersonscholar. com/​queering-​human-​game-​relations/​. Life is Strange 2015, Square Enix, XB1. Lollipop Chainsaw 2012, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, PS3. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain 2015, Konami, PS4. Night, A 2015, ‘Thoughts of a feminist gamer, female protagonists and violence in video games, an alternative perspective’, web log post, 23 January, viewed 11 April

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Can/should there be feminist war games? 29 2019, https://​angelwitchpaganheart.wordpress.com/​2015/​01/​23/​thoughts-​of-​a-​ feminist-​gamer-​female-​protagonists-​and-​violence-​in-​video-​games-​an-​alternative-​ perspective/​. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis 2001, Bohemia Interactive, PC. Overwatch 2016, Blizzard Entertainment, PC. Pedercini, P 2014, ‘Videogames and the spirit of capitalism’, Mollendustria.org Blog, web log post, 14 February, viewed 11 April 2019, www.molleindustria.org/​blog/​ videogames-​and-​the-​spirit-​of-​capitalism/​. Rath, R 2015, ‘Forget realism, we need truth’, The Escapist, 19 February, viewed 11 April 2019, www.escapistmagazine.com/​articles/​view/​video-​games/​columns/​ criticalintel/​12999-​Few-​Military-​Games-​Say-​Anything-​Interesting-​About-​War. Red Dead Redemption 2010, Rockstar Games, XB360. Remember Me 2013, Capcom, XB360. Resident Evil 1996, Capcom, PS1. Rust 2013, Facepunch Studios, PC. Solnit, R 2017, The mother of all questions, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL. Spec Ops: The Line 2012, 2K Games, XB360. Sperling, N 2016, ‘Wonder woman: Gal Gadot, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen first look’, Entertainment Weekly Online, 24 March, viewed 11 April 2019, http://​ ew.com/​article/​2016/​03/​24/​wonder-​woman-​first-​look-​gal-​gadot-​robin-​wright-​ connie-​nielsen/​. The Stanley Parable 2013, developed by Davey Wreden, PC. Tomb Raider 1996, Eidos Interactive, PS1. Totilo, S 2010. ‘The history of headshots, gaming’s favorite act of unreal violence’, Kotaku, 30 August, viewed 11 April 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​the-​historyof-​headshots-​gamings-​favorite-​act-​of-​unrea-​5625054. Undertale 2015, developed by Toby Fox, PC. Van Creveld, M 2000a, ‘A woman’s place: reflections on the origins of violence’, Social Research, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 825–​847. Van Creveld, M 2000b, ‘Less than we can be: men, women and the modern military’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 1–​20. Wet 2009, Bethesda, XB360. Wonder woman 2017, Warner Bros, USA, China, Hong Kong. Directed by Patty Jenkins. Yang, R 2011, ‘On the first person military manshooter and the shape of modern warfare’, Radiator design blog, web log post, 18 November, viewed 11 April 2019, www. blog.radiator.debacle.us/​2011/​11/​on-​first-​person-​military-​manshooter-​and.html.

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2  Gendered authorship in war gaming Whose fantasy is it anyway? Anastasia Salter

Whose fantasy is it anyway? I played a man on a mission to kill for many, many hours of my youth. The disembodied hand that usually represented me on screen may not have served as the most gendered of avatars, but in many of my childhood favorite games such as Doom (1993) and Duke Nukem 3D (1996) the hypermasculine avatars were reflected back to me in cover images, cinematic cut scenes, and even in health bars designed to showcase the bloodiness of the avatar’s face as a way to convey both toughness and relative injury. I  don’t remember seeing markers of femininity anywhere within these games: the near-​nude bodies of the captive women strippers in Duke Nukem 3D left some impression of their victimhood, but otherwise, the only bodies that mattered in the game were those of the macho hero Duke and the aliens he pursued. It wasn’t until much later (thanks in part to the rise of 3D graphics and with it the increased ability to represent overtly gendered bodies) that I played as a woman in games such as Tomb Raider (1996), with the improbably dressed Lara Croft as shorts-​ wearing heroine, and No One Lives Forever (2000), featuring a spy garbed in gravity-​defying outfits straight out of an Austin Powers movie. These bodies were not much more recognizable or relatable than the grim-​faced buzzcut heads of the previous games. However, returning to these games now, I find myself wondering at their feminist potential: was the act of playing and participating in that discourse inherently subversive, given the marketing of these games did not imply myself as a player or even as a viewer? Was my presence—​and insistence on playing in cooperative mode, eschewing the competitive toxicity of deathmatch—​at all subversive? Or was participating in those games instead an act of accepting their presented binaries and roles? First-​person shooters were my introduction to games representing war: as an avid physical and digital gamer, I would quickly find over the years that most of my play would center on militarized conflict, broadly defined, although few of those games bear the explicit genre label of ‘wargame’. These were the war games of my childhood: not wargames as traditionally defined, which wouldn’t enter my life until much later. The distinction between games representing war and games dedicated to the art and mechanisms of war is

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Gendered authorship in war gaming 31 crucial, but even the existence of so many genres represented to the representation of war from every possible lens (soldier to general to nation-​state leader to sniper, to even civilian in serious and news games) is a testament to our obsession with playing at conflict. These varied genres and mechanisms for playing at war are often conflated in the discussions of violence and machismo that inevitably surround games with a cloud of suspicion. Pat Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum address the association of wargaming with masculinity in the introduction to their edited collection on the genre: Our relationship to wargames, let alone war, is gendered: it is also marked by our privileges of race, class, sexuality and nationhood. We are mindful of William Broyles Jr.’s observation in his widely read essay ‘Why Men Love War’ (1984) that men’s fascination, indeed their capacity to love (his word) the brutality of war is rooted in an early and commonplace indoctrination into the fantasy of war as a game … wargames such as we treat here are often undeniably part of a progression of such masculine fantasies. (Harrigan & Kirschenbaum 2016, p. xxii). The wargames at the center of Harrigan and Kirschenbaum’s collection are primarily the board wargames which ‘use (mostly) two-​dimensional paper components to replicate a particular historical battle, campaign, or conflict’ while requiring players to ‘apply principles of real-​world military strategy to create the most favorable conditions they can for success’ (Kirschenbaum 2009, pp. 358–​359). Board wargames don’t have the same graphical systems at work as video games, and thus are less likely to offer polygonal interpretations of hypersexualized gendered bodies in the manner for which video games are infamous (Behm-​Morawitz & Mastro 2009). However, the hypermasculine viewpoint embedded in these games is not a matter of superficial appearances. Meghana Nayak defines hypermasculinity in the context of national identity as ‘the sensationalistic endorsement of elements of masculinity, such as rigid gender roles, vengeful and militarized reactions, and obsession with order, power, and control’ (Nayak 2006, p. 43). Board wargames don’t often engage with gender roles (and thus comment through absence), but they always include militarized reactions and invite the player to engage in fantasies of power and control.

A feminist wargame? 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

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32  Anastasia Salter 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 wargames. 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 believe that this question must begin with authorship. The games industry is notoriously hypermasculine: the Gamasutra Salary Survey conducted in 2014 notes that women make up only 13% of game designers, 9% of artists and animators, and 5% of programmers and engineers. Numbers are similarly grim for other groups traditionally marginalized within the games industry, and the recent culture war of Gamergate emphasized the resistance of that same group to inclusivity (Chess & Shaw 2015). While it is not necessarily impossible for feminist work to emerge in this context, it is rather like expecting reasonable birth control legislation from a mostly white cisgendered male legislative body: possible, but exceedingly unlikely (Cosslett 2017). Authorship in wargames, on the other hand, has historically been tied to the same structures and institutions of the military itself: in the US, this means a troubled history of gender equity and exclusions. Within traditional wargames, women are increasingly visible as authors but far from a majority. Linda Mosca’s Battle of the Wilderness, released in 1975, is a Civil War module for Blue & Gray II that is the first wargame credited to a woman designer. The game features a battle between the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of the Northern Virginia and is set in 1864. The game is certainly not recognizable as a feminist work, as its mechanics are traditional, but its existence itself is significant. Linda Mosca addressed women players in an interview: I would like to remind women wargamers that while they are fewer in numbers, they make equally effective generals. That war is a man’s domain is disproven by the fact that its wellsprings are societal and outcome affects all, regardless of gender. That history belongs to men is disproven by the few accounts of great women that filtered down, even as recorded by male historians. Remember, of the three persons most feared by Rome, two were women (Cleopatra & Zenobia). (Mosca 1975/​2009) Writing in 1975, Linda Mosca expresses optimism of a feminist future for wargames, and particularly for greater gender diversity among players:  the comments on the forum thread following the article (transcribed and posted in 2009) tell a far less optimistic story and include many heteronormative, binary claims regarding the difference between men and women making women less suitable for military play. Designers following in Linda Mosca’s footsteps have faced similar challenges in approaching wargame design. Elizabeth Losh’s analysis of authorship in wargame and simulation design emphasizes the importance of women authors who foster ‘potentially subversive forms of

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Gendered authorship in war gaming 33 exploration and engagement’ even while working in what ‘is often imagined as the monolithic expression of an organizational culture of masculine command and control’ (Losh 2016, p. 355). This type of subversion within these historically defined institutions potentially reflects the discourse of feminist strategic theorizing, which brings a feminist lens to critique war and strategy: Feminist strategic theorizing puts gender analysis into the (sometimes uncomfortable) discussion of how and why states make (normally masculinized) choices between military strategies. While some feminisms critique all war violence and others suggest that the current operation of the making and fighting of war is gendered, engaging the question of whether gender influences what strategy is and how states strategize can bring about important realizations both for feminisms and for strategic thought. (Sjoberg 2013, p. 215) Likewise, bringing this lens of strategy and gendered choice (particularly as far as ‘intentional civilian victimization’) to games is valuable because it is a reminder of what most wargames erase:  cost, consequence, and alternative strategic choices that could be equally valid to those favored by the game’s mechanics. A truly feminist wargame, then, might be twofold: it would engage with and allow for ‘feminist’ strategy while making visible and coherent the cost and casualties. However, within the realm of history-​bound, board-​game-​ as-​computer wargames, this type of representation is more difficult: casualties and civilians are typically abstractions by necessity.

Simulating fantasy Perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by designers seeking to create opportunities for feminist representation and strategy within board wargames is their reliance upon history:  the history of the military industrial complex does not lend itself to bringing in such opportunities while honoring the genre’s prevailing interest in historical accuracy and fidelity. Likewise, the scale of board wargames does not lend itself to representing war’s cost with the same empathy that is possible in games that use a more focused first-​person or second-​person lens, which is more common in video games than in simulations. However, this is where the intersection of wargames with other genres yields profitable space for feminist intervention and subversion. The space of fantasy is particularly retelling:  I remember the first shooter game I truly loved, Heretic (1994). Heretic is a re-​skinning of Doom (1993): engine-​wise, very little is different except the weaponry. In Heretic, the player is invited to use spells, mana and health potions, and even the ‘Morph Ovum’, an egg that once launched turns enemies temporarily into chickens. The ‘Morph Ovum’ resonated with me as a child player on many levels, and

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34  Anastasia Salter not just because of the metaphor of egg as weapon: it also opened up new avenues of strategy and play, allowing me to choose sections of a level to disengage with, passing through before my opponents were restored to their fighting selves. Obviously, the addition of such a mechanic into the world of the historical boardgame would be fairly ludicrous. However, the genre of fantasy simulations has no such limitations, and while arguments over ‘realism’ still inevitably haunt them, there is inherently more freedom for subversive design. In 1974, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Tactical Studies Rules, later Wizards of the Coast) was released by Gary Gygax. The game had many of the trappings of a traditional wargame re-​imagined in a fantasy setting, and carried with it the deeply entrenched misogyny of both those games and its designer. One of the most notable features of this first edition was a table of Harlot encounters, described as with brazen strumpets or haughty courtesans, thus making it difficult for the party to distinguish each encounter for what it is … in addition to the offering of the usual fare, the harlot is 30% likely to know valuable information, 15% likely to make something up in order to gain a reward, and 20% likely to be, or work with, a thief. (Gygax 1979, p. 191) A roll of the dice decided whether the player would encounter an ‘expensive doxy’, ‘aged madam’, or ‘slavenly trull’, among other similarly descriptive options (p. 191). Likewise, early versions of the game included stat limitations for women: the ‘maximum strength possible for a female gnome character’, for instance, was 15, while a male gnome was allowed 18 (Gygax 1978, p. 9). These disparities in potential strength were detailed for every race and binary gender combination in an abilities table. This was despite text in the introduction that stressed the game wasn’t limited by an adherence to realism: ‘You will find no pretentious dictums herein, no baseless limits arbitrarily placed on female strength or male charisma, no ponderous combat systems for greater “realism” ’ (p. 6). In spite of this deeply embedded hypermasculinity and commitment to reinforcing a misogyny embedded in a gendered binary of sexuality and perceived promiscuity, the game attracted a wider player base. This is perhaps in part thanks to how easily these rulings from Gygax could be subverted or ignored: unlike in the restricted procedural world of a video game, edicts from the Player’s Handbook could be disregarded without altering the underlying system. Jon Peterson notes that rapid pace of women authors in joining the Dungeons & Dragons adventure scene when contrasted with wargames: One of the earliest Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, Palace of the Vampire Queen, was co-​authored by Judy Kerestan back in 1976. Consider that from the publication of Charles S.  Roberts’s Tactics

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Gendered authorship in war gaming 35 in 1954, it took over twenty years for Linda Mosca to receive the first credit as a female wargame designer; it took only a bit more than twenty months after the release of Dungeons & Dragons for Judy Kerestan to get a billing for fantasy role-​playing game design. (Peterson 2014) Of course, the rise of visible women authorship in both areas was contemporaneous: the 1970s gaming scene brought with it an increased visibility of women as gamers, though it would be a long time before those players would be acknowledged in the main game’s books and modules. In an analysis of gender representation over 30  years of Dungeons & Dragons, Vanessa Rose Phin observed: [T]‌he first PHB was almost entirely populated with males of comic book buffness … in [the] fourth, the first ambiguously gendered characters began to appear, and women shot up in representation. By [the] fifth edition, there were more pictures of women than ever before, and definitely more characters who didn’t have large breasts, heavy brows, or overly broad shoulders. (Phin 2016) However, the more notable contribution of the fifth edition is in rejecting a binary approach to gender representation: nearly one-​fifth of the characters represented were ‘portrayals of characters whose genders weren’t easily determined by appearance—​a big change, considering how second edition went out of its way to gender everything’ (Phin 2016). This new emphasis has been remarked upon: The new Player’s Handbook explicitly talks about the gender binary and gender fluidity. ‘Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior’, it reads. ‘You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender … You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female’s body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male’. D&D players are being pushed to think critically about gender as a historical construct at the same time they’re deciding whether to be ‘Quarion the elvaan druid’ or ‘Havilar the dragonborn sorcerer’. Dungeons & Dragons is a game that hinges on the collective process of imagination, and now we’re being asked to summon a world that doesn’t share in our dominant heteronormative paradigms. (D’Anastasio 2014) While representation alone does not make the revised Dungeons & Dragons a feminist wargame, it does provide scaffolding for more imaginative, nonbinary

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36  Anastasia Salter play with gender identity through the game’s system. Previous versions of the game (particularly in the early editions) reinforced highly toxic binaries, which, while open to subversion, could be so off-​putting that a player might never get further than the pulp hypersexualized imagery of the covers and interior imagery. By making more inclusive gender a part of the rules system, Dungeons & Dragons is, as D’Anastasio put it, ‘summoning’ a world outside of dominant paradigms—​including hypermasculine war fantasies.

Playing feminist fantasies The fantastical worlds of Dungeons & Dragons have, through the years, certainly reconstructed more than their share of patriarchal, heteronormative, and racist assumptions. Wargames (from the traditionally defined genre of board games to playable representations of war more broadly construed) have played a similar cultural role, often under the pretext of realism and fidelity, which makes subversion difficult. However, the distancing of the fantasy world from the inescapably pressing concerns of normative gender expectations in the context of the US military makes it a space more open to subversion of war norms and hypermasculine strategies and value judgements. Play within these systems of representation enables engagement with the discourse of feminist strategy (including civilian victimhood and strategic priorities), but such games do not guarantee it. Ultimately, a feminist module to Dungeons & Dragons might undermine the very foundation of the game world’s reliance on combat as a means of knowing and exploring the world (while not necessarily rejecting combat altogether). However, such play would stretch the expectations of the genre, and be nearly impossible within the more structured world of the traditional board wargame. If that tradition—​ and, indeed, the preferred strategies and values of the ‘military entertainment complex’ (Lenoir 2000)—​is to be challenged, the mechanisms are more likely to be found in fantasy than in so-​called reality.

References Behm-​Morawitz, E & Mastro, D 2009, ‘The effects of the sexualization of female video game characters on gender stereotyping and female self-​concept’, Sex Roles, vol. 61, no. 11–​12, pp. 808–​823. Chess, S & Shaw, A 2015, ‘A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 208–​220. Cosslett, RL 2017, ‘This photo sums up Trump’s assault on women’s rights’, The Guardian, 24 January, viewed 25 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​jan/​24/​ photo-​trump-​womens-​rights-​protest-​reproductive-​abortion-​developing-​contries. D’Anastasio, C 2014, ‘Dungeons & Dragons has caught up with third-​wave feminism’, Vice.com, 27 August, viewed 19 April 2017, www.vice.com/​en_​ca/​article/​exmqg7/​ dungeons-​and-​dragons-​has-​caught-​up-​with-​third-​wave-​feminism-​827. Doom 1993, id Software, PC.

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Gendered authorship in war gaming 37 Duke Nukem 3D 1996, 3D Realms, PC. Gygax, G 1978, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons player’s handbook, 2nd edition, TSR, Lake Geneva, WI. Gygax, G 1979, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master’s guide, TSR, Lake Geneva, WI. Harrigan, P & Kirschenbaum, MG 2016, Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Heretic 1994, id Software, PC. Kirschenbaum, M 2009, ‘War stories:  board wargames and (vast) procedural narratives’, in P Harrigan and N Wardrip-​Fruin (eds.), Third person: authoring and exploring vast narratives, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 357–​372. Lenoir, T 2000, ‘All but war is simulation:  the military-​ entertainment complex’, Configurations, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 289–​335. Losh, E 2016, ‘Playing defense: gender, just war, and game design’, in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.), Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 355–​370. Mosca, L 1975/​2009, ‘Women in wargaming’ posted in ‘Women in wargaming 35 years hence’, discussion list message, 17 March, Boardgamegeek.com, viewed 2 May 2017, https://​boardgamegeek.com/​thread/​390307/​women-​wargaming-​35-​years-​hence. Nayak, M 2006, ‘Orientalism and “saving” US state identity after 9/​11’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 42–​61. No One Lives Forever 2000, Fox Interactive, PC. Peterson, J 2014, ‘The first female gamers’, Medium.com, 15 October, viewed 12 April 2017, https://​medium.com/​@increment/​the-​first-​female-​gamers-​c784fbe3ff37. Phin, VR 2016, ‘Representation in the D&D player’s handbook’, web log post, 11 May, viewed 12 May 2017, http://​wordfey.blogspot.com/​2016/​02/​representation-​in-​ d-​players-​handbook.html. Sjoberg, L 2013, Gendering global conflict: toward a feminist theory of war, Columbia University Press, New York, NY. Tomb Raider 1996, Eidos, PC.

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3  An overview of the history and design of tabletop wargames in relation to gender From tactics to strategy Matt Shoemaker Wargames, as we know them today, began their development in the early nineteenth century. Though they have branched into a wide variety of mediums, scales, and mechanics over the past 200 years, their focus on physical violence as a means of conflict resolution between two or more parties has remained untouched as the genre’s core theme. While this defining characteristic of wargames has remained unchanged, how that theme is expressed and explored has shifted in the past four decades. Wargames have traditionally been made by men for men and feature characters and strategies represented in gendered ways, but relatively recent changes to gaming communities have expanded the player base and the available flavors of these types of games. These changes have pushed the definition of what is a wargame from its original purpose, and now provides opportunity to explore topics and themes within this genre that have previously seldom been broached. By increasing the variety of wargame designers, both in their background and gender, this genre can continue to expand and engage new audiences beyond those traditionally targeted, an example of which can be seen in the following observations by an anonymous woman: I have heard him pounding on the table, yelling ‘BLOOD MUST FLOW!!’. He is, at that moment, separated from me by a gulf that I don’t even WANT to bridge. It’s no wonder to me that so few women are wargamers. I think that tendency to lose touch with one’s humanity is a trait generally shared by far more men than women, with wargaming as a prime example. (Greene 1975, p. 81)

A brief history of wargames The modern wargame can trace its roots to the Reiswitz game. Developed in Prussia by Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, this wargame was presented to the two Prussian princes in 1811. The princes were delighted with the game and their enthusiasm was shared by their father, King Frederick William III, who desired his own demonstration. Reiswitz reworked the presentation of

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Wargames in relation to gender 39 his game before presenting it to the king the following year. His 1812 demonstration consisted of a large open table with an area of at least 6 square feet, in which 3 to 4-​inch square plaster pieces of modular terrain were placed to create the battlefield. Porcelain pieces were used to represent units of troops (Peterson 2012, pp. 221–​224). Reiswitz’s game was improved upon by his son who released Kriegspiel in 1824. Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reiswitz was an accomplished soldier in the Prussian military and wanted to enhance the realism of his father’s game. He increased the scale of the game to 1:8,000, so 1 inch would represent 400 paces. Every turn in the game represented two minutes of real time on the battlefield. More importantly for modern scholars, he added dice in order to resolve the probability of outcomes and uncertainty in combat, and an umpire who provides a scenario and acts as intermediary for all actions through written orders and allows for mechanics such as hidden movement (this also made Kriegspiel a three-​player game). This attention to detail and approximation of realism made Kriegspiel a favorite among several military men and ensured the integration of the game with Prussian military education for 40 years (Peterson 2012, pp. 227–​231, 240). In the 1870s, translations of German wargaming systems based on or expanded from Kriegspiel began to spread through Europe and the United States. The audience for these games was primarily those with a keen military interest who wanted a ‘realistic’ experience. However, the spread of these games outside of Germany allowed them to begin to reach into the civilian world. H.G. Wells published the first widely available set of wargame rules commercialized for entertainment with Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books in 1913. This publication was important not only for its target audience, but also for focusing on conflict in an anachronistic theme. Selling the game to civilians untethered wargames from their roots as an instructional tool in the military, and distanced players from the fears of modern warfare by removing them from a real-​world setting (Peterson 2012, pp.  244, 265, 268, 269). These shifts were the divestment needed to free wargame designers from the constraints of realism in their rules and separated the player(s) from those impacted by violent conflict by performing ‘as a release or catharsis of the war spirit’ (Pratt 1943, p. 3). In the two decades following the publication of Little Wars, wargames struggled to expand beyond a childhood pastime for most civilians in the United States. However, there were a scant few adult groups that regularly hosted civilian wargame campaigns. One such game was held monthly in the 1930s by Fletcher Pratt. Hosted in an 18-​by-​18-​foot hall in New York, this naval wargame regularly saw 40 or 50 players in attendance (Peterson 2012, p. 279). Though its attendance numbers are impressive, Pratt’s game is notable here for being the first to accept and acknowledge women wargamers. As noted in the 1943 publication of Pratt’s rules, ‘the sweethearts-​and-​wives

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40  Matt Shoemaker influence became manifest’ and ‘[t]‌oday there are nearly as many players of one sex as the other’ (Pratt 1943, p. 2). Following the Second World War, civilian wargaming continued to grow, spurred on by publications and newsletters where fans and club members could share rules and find opponents. This period also saw the birth of the commercial board wargame industry with the publication of Tactics (1954) by The Avalon Game Company, which was incorporated as Avalon Hill in 1958. This increase in accessibility, as sparse as it may have been, came with debate. Primarily between whether wargames should be realistic at all cost or if flexibility should be allowed to create a more entertaining experience. Additionally, the role of the umpire that had existed in most post-​Kriegspiel games fell to the wayside during this period (Peterson 2012, pp. 300, 303). In 1971, with the publication of Chainmail by Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax, wargames were set on a path of change that reverberates through games and other media to this day. Influenced by the popularity of fantasy works in the 1960s and ’70s wrought by The Lord of the Rings, Chainmail contained the first published set of fantasy wargame rules in a supplement. Innocuous today, the inclusion of rules for fantasy scenarios in a wargame were controversial for the time. These rules influenced Dave Arneson, who combined the fantasy elements of Chainmail with the freedom of individual player agency, which he experienced in a game called Braunstein run by David Wesely, into the setting of Blackmoor. The extent of the Blackmoor setting became known to Chainmail co-​author Gygax during the Gen Con V game convention in 1972, which led to a collaboration between Arneson and Gygax that resulted in the publication of Dungeons & Dragons:  Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures in 1974 (Peterson 2012, pp. 62, 65, 70, 72). A wargame at heart, Dungeons & Dragons allowed players to experience battle as individual combatants. Wargames up to this period typically fell into one of three categories: tactical, which focus on one or more squads of five to a dozen soldiers and their actions; operational, which rely on the application or movement of military resources within a specific area to achieve strategic goals; or strategic, which focus on large-​scale troop movements along with political, social, and economic influences and strategies. By creating a wargame that gives a player full agency over a single character in an ongoing campaign, Arneson and Gygax opened up the possibility for the investigation and interpretation of character actions beyond combat resolution. D&D, however, did not start on such a path with intention from its creators. Examination of how Dungeons & Dragons, a nearly 45-​year-​old wargame, has evolved towards inclusion and acceptance mechanically and through the tone of its rules serves as an example for how wargames can challenge gender norms at the tactical level. The original version of Dungeons & Dragons, published in 1974, was far from inclusive as written. The boxed game came with three booklets. The primary book for players was titled ‘Men & Magic’. All of the player pronouns

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Wargames in relation to gender 41 are masculine, as are all of the level titles for the various classes (swordsman, warlock, patriarch, etc.). One of the game’s three main classes is even named ‘fighting-​man’. The only two identifiably feminine illustrations within the book are of a ‘beautiful witch’ and a topless ‘amazon’ (Gygax and Arneson 1974a, pp. 6, 16, 27). Additionally, the majority of rules within this version of the game focused on the acquisition of wealth and power by taking it from others, enforcing concepts of selfishness and apathy within D&D.1 The one check on greed written into the rules was the Angry Villager Rule included in ‘The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures’ booklet. This rule allows the referee (which you may recognize as the umpire from Kriegspiel) to use non-​player-​characters such as the thieves guild, city guard, or local militia to bring a player-​character back into line after they have committed some unforgivable outrage (Gygax and Arneson 1974b, p. 24). It should be noted that while combat and acquisition of wealth through force was a feature of early D&D, players often benefited more by choosing routes of exploration and the avoidance of violence. A vanquished character, after all, could no longer advance in the game. While the initial rules for Dungeons & Dragons were not forward thinking in terms of gender and inclusion they did not remain that way. The relatively spartan set of instructions for a wargame where a player could attempt anything were ripe for interpretation and imaginative augmentation. Players and referees were even encouraged to alter the game, ‘for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way’ (Gygax and Arneson 1974b, p. 36)! Various amateur press associations (APA) began distributing play records, character sheets, and wording changes to make the game more inclusive for women. Though there were several bumps along the way, some such alterations did work their way into the official rules with the introduction of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1977. All of this was made possible by the fact that women were more interested in Dungeons & Dragons than were previously involved in wargaming. As Jon Peterson notes in his examination of this topic, Dungeons & Dragons intersected wargaming, which was estimated to be 0.05 percent female in 1971, with the science-​fiction and fantasy community, which was estimated at 20 percent female in 1960. The inclusion of so many more women into this male-​dominated hobby undoubtedly influenced the direction these games would take (Peterson 2014). Gender-sensitive phrasing within the rules of Dungeons & Dragons may seem like a minor victory by today’s standards, but this small step echoes into the largest gameplay feature in D&D for exploring various themes in a game setting of violent conflict. Dungeons & Dragons was the first published wargame in which a player has complete freedom over an individual character within a game world. No longer were the player’s actions abstracted through an officer’s command to their soldiers in a mission solely to achieve victory in a battle. Players were now free to question how they would grow in wealth and power and if strength of arms is indeed the best route to this

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42  Matt Shoemaker end. Additionally, players collaboratively constructed a narrative around their actions and the world in which they took place. This naturally includes how the players affect the world they are in and how the conditions within that world create the situations they find themselves in. By accepting the inclusion of women both within the game’s community and the game’s rules, Dungeons & Dragons was opened up to more viewpoints around how the narratives within games were created, who created them, and how characters were gendered. This narrative element is the key factor in how tactical-​level wargames can expand beyond concepts rooted primarily in violence. By giving players freedom within the narrative to be whatever race (in fantasy game terms), gender, or profession they desire it allows them to explore how those choices are reflected within their gameworld. Similarly, the players are able to construct how the world itself reacts both to the player’s choices about their character and the actions taken with that character. For some, it is easy to simply focus on the combat aspects of D&D and ignore the social implications within the gameworld. For many, however, the relative fun of D&D comes from not just the individual actions taken by a character, but how that character interacts with and changes the gameworld. Questions of how a character’s fantasy race, gender, and actions are perceived and accepted, or rejected, with the gameworld are collaboratively crafted by the players and referee. This requires those participating in the game to collectively decide what is and is not acceptable within their gameworld and why. It also provides a safe space for the exploration of topics that echo in the real world. Dungeons & Dragons has evolved considerably since it was first published in 1974. Its fifth edition, released in 2014, embraces inclusivity in its rules and presentation. The Player’s Handbook, for example, includes illustrations of men and women of various ethnicities, body types, and in a state of reasonable dress. The book also explicitly invites players to challenge gender and sexuality structures: You can play a male or female character without gaining any special benefits or hindrances. Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior. For example, a male drow cleric defies the traditional gender divisions of drow society, which could be a reason for your character to leave that society and come to the surface. You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. The elf god Corellon Larenthian is often seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic, for example, and some elves in the multiverse are made in Corellon’s image. You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for male. Likewise, your character’s sexual orientation is for you to decide. (Crawford et al. 2014, p. 121)

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Wargames in relation to gender 43 Additionally, the 2016 publication Volo’s Guide to Monsters provides options for players to choose monster fantasy races for their characters (Mearls et al. 2016). These fantasy races (orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc.) were typically reserved as antagonists within the game. Their inclusion as possible character choices provides additional opportunity to explore social perceptions of, and challenges to, inclusion and intersectionality. While one can argue that Dungeons & Dragons is a role-​playing game and not a wargame, it is presented here due to its wargaming roots and the impact the game has had on gaming and media over the past four-​and-​a-​half decades. D&D was created through the medium of wargames, which was all that was familiar to its creators at the time. Though physical confrontation is not the only form of resolution and advancement in D&D, it continues to be the set of mechanics most utilized for encounters presented within officially published campaigns and officially sanctioned third-​party adventures produced for Dungeons & Dragons’ organized play arm, the Adventurers’ League.2 D&D has evolved through its relatively long life to become more accepting of modes of play that allow for, and in some cases encourage, the exploration of concepts that interest its current diverse player base beyond those its male creators envisioned.

Scale of games The success of Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons proved there was a demand for tabletop wargames outside of the historicals market. Games Workshop, a London-​ based company founded in 1975, produced their first in-​house fantasy wargame, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, in 1983. In 1995, Games Workshop produced the skirmish wargame Necromunda. This tactical-​scale science-​fiction wargame focuses on the conflict between the six houses of the planet Necromunda as battled between players through gangs in the lower levels of large hive cities. Players of Necromunda choose which house they wish their gang to represent and then individually customize the weapons, skills, appearance, and other attributes of their gang’s members (gangers) and background of the gang itself. As a miniature-​based wargame, this preparation can take considerable time as players not only assign the mechanical attributes of their gangers, but also paint and modify the miniature representations of these individual characters. Once ready, players are encouraged to participate in a campaign with their gang.3 Players compete against each other using a squad assembled from a number of their gangers equal to a predetermined point limit. Injuries, deaths, and other consequences that occur within one game are resolved during various out-​ of-​game phases that build the narrative of a player’s gang and their relation to other gangs participating in the campaign. This cycle continues until the campaign concludes after a set number of campaign turns, a specific gang has gained control over a certain size of territory, or other victory conditions as set by the participants.

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44  Matt Shoemaker The above system is not unique to Necromunda. Other tactical-​ level wargames have either officially supported or homebrewed campaign systems. The background setting for Necromunda’s narrative, however, offers an opportunity for exploration. For one, the Warhammer 40,000 universe, in which the planet Necromunda exists, is so violent and dystopian that it spawned the descriptor ‘grimdark’. The gangers that players control exist in the lowest levels of the hive cities, the underhive, and are some of the poorest citizens on the planet. The characters depicted within the novelized fiction for Necromunda are either high-​born citizens who have rejected their heritage and are running from their past, or were born in the underhive and have turned to violence and a gang in an attempt to elevate their quality of life. Apart from the somber setting, Necromunda features two juxtaposed houses. House Escher, which specializes in the manufacture and distribution of various chemicals and drugs, has damaged its Y chromosome so severely that any male offspring they produce is withered and imbecilic. To deal with such a conundrum, the Escher have turned to a parthenogenetic means of reproduction and ‘look down upon and pity all males’. The Escher’s counterpart house is the overly masculine Goliath. As their name suggests, House Goliath consists of huge brutes who value strength above all other attributes. Genetically altered to be as strong as possible, the Goliaths value their members according to their size and physical prowess. Paradoxically, the Goliath are reliant on chemicals and drugs supplied by their Escher opponents in order to achieve the levels of size and strength they desire. Might makes right within the Goliath house where the strongest and often most violent rule (Necromunda:  Underhive Rulebook 2017, pp. 25, 26). Though Necromunda does not attempt to directly explore gender mechanically,4 the parody and grand carnage it contains explores the connection between hypermasculinity and violence thematically. It also explores the connection between femininity and violence through the Escher, by challenging the often held assumption that women are not violent. There are several people in the Necromunda community playerbase that enjoy having such diametrically opposed options available to them. The Facebook Group, ‘Feminist 40k’, regularly discusses gender issues in both game lore and art direction within the Warhammer 40,000 universe (including Necromunda) and uses the group as a safe space for such topics.5 One of this group’s members even wrote the most recent novella about Necromunda featuring the Escher (Brooks 2018). Seeking such a refuge is understandable, particularly when one sees how contentious the topic of gender is with the player base within the 40,000 universe. For example, a 2017 Reddit post entitled ‘Why has the idea of female space marines6 become such a contentious topic as of late?’ hit 227 comments in less than 15 hours of open discussion before being locked by a moderator for a lack of civility (Inquisition 2017). People clearly enjoy playing wargames that call attention to gender stereotypes, and they have strong opinions when those stereotypes are challenged.

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Wargames in relation to gender 45 One final tabletop wargame to examine at the tactical level is 2017’s This War of Mine: The Board Game. Focused more on survival than combat, in this game, one to six players take on the role of a group of up to four survivors in a war-​torn city. There are 12 possible characters, each one chosen at random as indicated during in-​game events. Of these 12, five of the characters are women. Game play in This War of Mine is divided between the daylight hours where players improve their shelter and the nighttime where players may search other locations for supplies and contacts and must protect their shelter from intruders and looters. As players attempt certain tasks, they are directed to read various narrative entries from ‘The Book of Scripts’, which presents decision paths and results for the characters’ actions. The game ends if the characters are able to survive until the cessation of hostilities. Players work collaboratively in this game and take turns at various, changing, points in the game. No player specifically controls an individual character. Like Dungeons & Dragons and Necromunda, This War of Mine generates introspection primarily through narrative means. However, this game also adds mechanical elements to force players to confront various issues. As the game progresses, the situation for the characters tends to grow grimmer. Food, water, and medicine are often in short supply, and the players must decide if they will steal from or even kill non-​player-​characters so their characters can survive. This game also features the mechanic of an empathy score, ranging from 2 to 9, that serves as an indicator for each character’s ability to negatively affect fellow humans without incurring a hit to their misery value. Any character that receives 4 marks in either hunger, illness, wounds, or misery, dies, bringing the player(s) that much closer to losing the game. Unlike the above-​mentioned games, This War of Mine provides all of the narrative needed to make in game decisions. The empathy score, in particular, can drive this fact home, especially when a character with a low empathy seemingly has no qualms in taking goods or even life from others in the game. The methods of decision making in the game are quite effective when it comes to making players consider the circumstances in which survival forces them to turn violent. This is different from both Dungeons & Dragons and Necromunda which focus on violence not for survival but the acquisition of power and dominance. The game designers have made certain gender-​based assumptions by prescribing gender-​based roles to some of the non-​player-​characters encountered in certain scenarios,7 and by assigning the player-​characters pre-​war professions and empathy scores. For example, even though there are more male characters than female, both genders have a total empathy value of 33. The males’ empathy scores range from 2 to 7, where the females’ range from 3 to 9. Wargames at the operational level that deal with issues of gender are more difficult to come by, though they do exist. Games at this level focus primarily on the movement of military resources such as troops and supplies. The level of abstraction in these games distances the players from the individual combatants highlighted in tactical-​level games, and also keeps them from the

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46  Matt Shoemaker overall policy and social issues that games at the strategic level allow players and designers to explore. Where operational games allow for exploration is campaigns that view non-​combatants or other civilian resources as important aspects for military decisions within the game. One such operational-​level game is 2005’s The Battle of the Little Bighorn. In this game, one or two players participate in different events of the Plains Wars between the United States Army and the Plains Indian Tribes. This game features Villager units, which ‘represent large numbers of non-​combatants such as old men, women, and children’. This is notable for the game because how the US Army player handles these units impacts their victory score. For one, US Army units may capture villager units which then make that US Army unit immune to attack from Plains Indian units. The US Army player also receives points on the Village Casualty Track for engaging Villager units in combat. At the end of the game, a six-​sided die is rolled to determine whether or not the Press and US Public perceive the Villager unit casualties as a positive or negative thing. Results of a 1–​3 give the US Army player positive points, with a result of 4–​6 providing negative points. The Plains Indian player receives no points, negative or positive, for protecting or failing to protect Villager units from becoming casualties By making the Villager units a risk to victory, the US Army player must consider if it is worth inflicting casualties to them in order to achieve other objectives within the game. Handling Villager units in this way abstracts any emotional decision that would have been made by real-​world commanders in a similar situation, and frames it in a way that makes winning militarily all that matters. It also calls into question the role of soldiers on both sides when it comes to the treatment of non-​ combatants during an armed conflict. Strategic-​level wargames focus on the full picture of warfare as specified by the time period and theater(s) dictated by the game. Strategic-​level wargames need to examine the scenario from the large-​scale military, diplomatic, and social levels. Taking stock of the situation from such a vantage allows for the examination of issues that are often overlooked as contributing causes of conflict. For example, near the beginning of the Afghanistan War, an argument was made that the war on terror was justified because of the oppression of women within Afghanistan. This argument was made in large part to promote the notion that the United States valued gender equality and provided an additional rationale to the country’s involvement (Sjoberg 2013, p. 139). The gendered values held by a state, the role masculinity plays in the selection of a state’s leaders, and gender equality within a state all play to a state’s willingness to wage and remain in war. Strategic-​level wargames provide opportunity to probe this. The Counter Insurgency (COIN) series published by GMT Games provide the best example for examining how strategic-​level wargames facilitate the exploration of gender issues related to war at a large scale. The first volume in the COIN series, Andean Abyss, was created by Volko Ruhnke in 2012. The games in this series, currently at 11 published or near published

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Wargames in relation to gender 47 volumes, are somewhat unusual in the wargame world in that they focus on asymmetrical warfare. Guerrilla conflicts and insurgencies are the staple of this line. Though the volumes that feature distant historical conflicts, such as COIN Series Game #6, Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt against Caesar, are less useful for this examination, games featuring the Vietnam War (2014’s Fire in the Lake:  Insurgency in Vietnam), the French–​Algerian War (2017’s Colonial Twilight: The French–​Algerian War, 1954–​62) and the Afghanistan War (2013’s A Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan) are suitable. Games within the COIN series to date allow for between one and four players. In these games, players focus primarily on area control, dice rolling, and card-​driven mechanics in order to advance military, political, and cultural goals that allow for victory. As the game progresses, event cards are revealed that dictate the order in which players choose what their actions will be (based on the faction they are playing) as well as resources and other effects. These event cards represent individuals, units, and events from the real-​world conflict focused on by the game. Play progresses until a propaganda card is revealed in the event deck. When one of these propaganda cards emerges, players check victory conditions and then, assuming no one has won the game, perform some reset functions before proceeding to play. This continues until someone wins on a propaganda card or the fourth propaganda card is revealed. The main application from the COIN series for feminist inquiry is the event cards. Though they are not all culturally focused, several of them are. When revealed, these cards provide the acting players with options that may or may not benefit them depending on their faction. These highlight certain values of a culture that, when exercised or suppressed, can enhance or limit the culture’s general enthusiasm for the conflict at hand. Though this may seem like a minor effect, one must consider the scale at which strategic games are played. If a culture’s/​faction’s/​nation’s will is suddenly sapped from a conflict due to ongoing or new issues it can decimate their ability to continue. Strategic-​level wargames designed with such influential events or cultural norms can drive home the role that gendered values and assumptions play between different entities involved in a military conflict. This highlights how the construction of feminism can be used to frame and justify war, which exemplifies the broader phenomenon of women as a symbolic source of the nation, therefore integral to warfare.

Deliberate choice in game design The above games provide examples of how narrative and mechanics in tactical, operational, and strategic-​level tabletop wargames can allow for the exploration of gender and its relation to violent conflict through play. Most of the cases above, however, either grew organically as tabletop game platforms have matured or can coincidentally be used to explore these topics while meeting other, primary, game functions. Game designers who wish to

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48  Matt Shoemaker avoid mistakes of the past related to gender or include such introspection within their creations can do so more directly without making them appear shoehorned into the game. Several options to do just this are discussed below. Inclusion is the first design choice that should be cemented in the game from the beginning. Building in inclusive elements is typically a narrative choice set into any game that designers tend to overlook or underutilize. This can be as simple as using gender neutral language in the game rules and adding a statement to the beginning of the game, similar to the gender statement from the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons listed above, letting players know that these narrative and thematic elements are welcome within the structure of the game. The goal is to help set the narrative framework for the players and, as the designer, not make assumptions that the players will do this on their own. Raising awareness among players that inclusion is both intended and desired within the game can go a long way. Creating inclusion within a historical or modern-​based game requires a little more attention. The main thing to remember is that, at best, a game designer is creating an authentic, but not accurate, representation of events through any game or simulation. As such, there is no harm in adding women and minorities into settings in greater numbers than they were historically present for in the name of inclusion. The rationale used for excluding women characters and factions from historical wargames is often ‘historical accuracy’. Historical accuracy would include recognizing, at the very least, the role of women in war, from nurses to victims of rape and pillage. To erase them from the story would be more historically inaccurate from some vantage points. Furthermore, the stage for the conflict at hand can be set as accurately as one likes, but once play begins events will unfold in ways that have nothing to do with history. Games are a sandbox of experimentation for history as laboratory and computer simulations are for the sciences. Arguments regarding accuracy vs. playability are nearly as old as wargaming itself. While technology and additional rules can attempt to bridge the accuracy gap for game elements tied to the physical world, there is currently no sufficient equivalent for the social world. With that in mind, it is best to avoid making the narrative elements of your games exclusive under the pretense it makes them more historically accurate. Another area of inclusivity that ties into the narrative is art direction. If historical accuracy was an actual concern of wargame designers than they would at least visually represent the women included in their games in realistic proportions, body types, and dress. If a game features illustrations or miniatures of people the art direction should present them in different genders and ethnicities, with multiple body types, and in reasonable dress. Poses requested from an artist should be dynamic, while not sexualized. The miniatures for the Escher in Necromunda only partly meet these goals. The women that compose the gang are all dynamic, well-​muscled, and fit the punk aesthetic set for them. However, these models feature breasts that are larger than the head of the miniature and are, for some reason, all wearing heels.

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Wargames in relation to gender 49 For a better example of miniatures designed with inclusivity in mind please see Bad Squiddo Games,8 who designs and sells miniatures specifically for this purpose. The next focus point for designers is to increase the awareness of those affected by war beyond direct combatants through gameplay. This can be achieved narratively or mechanically within a game’s design. The most important thing to remember when tackling difficult topics like this is to approach them head on. A game designer creates an experience. What types of emotions should the players experience through gameplay? Focus on that experience, mechanically if possible so players cannot avoid it, and build it into the game’s system. If this type of topic is to be featured in gameplay, but not the focus of the game, one must be careful of abstraction. All games are abstractions of systems, but if an aspect is abstracted too much it can quickly appear as an afterthought or, worse, an attempt to avoid the topic. Abstract as much as needed to make the theme fit while not bogging down the system, but make sure it isn’t diluted so much that the topic is trivialized. Another approach is to build mechanics into the game that force players to consider their implications beyond the decision’s role in end-​game victory conditions. In order to achieve this, a designer should consider the emotional impact that goes into making a decision. This can occur partly by tying the mechanic closely to the game’s theme. It is also beneficial to humanize some of the components within the game. For example, in The Battle of the Little Bighorn example from above, it would have been beneficial to tie Villager units to a morale mechanic that would negatively affect the US Army units and positively affect the Plains Indian units. This makes it clear that a commander’s decision to kill or capture non-​combatants can impact the combatants’ will to fight. Modern wargames have come a long way in their more-​than-​200-​year history. From their roots in military enthusiasm and military education these tabletop games have grown to a civilian pastime and multi-​million dollar industry.9 The future of these games and their players can, and will, improve with more awareness, inclusion, and diversity within game development. As Rex Brynen, co-​editor of paxsims.org, estimates, the tabletop wargaming hobby is currently 95  percent, or more, male (Brynen 2016). Women who do enter the tabletop wargaming hobby face severe harassment, as wargame reviewer and game industry professional Katie Aidley has (Aidley 2018). Making the wargaming hobby more welcoming through its participants’ behavior and more conscious design decisions can only help open up a market that has thus far been largely ignored by this genre.

Notes 1 Though selfishness and apathy are not strictly feminist or anti-​feminist, they do make it more difficult to explore feminist concepts in a game environment. One cannot consider the plight of those affected by violence and war if they are not empathetic of first-​and third-​party victims.

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50  Matt Shoemaker 2 Organized play for these games is a format sanctioned by the publisher with a specific set of additional rules for playing ongoing campaigns with different players and characters. Organized play is singled out because it often has a plethora of gameplay scenarios created specifically for it that is sanctioned by the game’s publisher, and therefore promotes the vision of the game’s narrative as the publisher wishes it to be. 3 Though campaign play is the focus here, it is not the only way to play Necromunda. Campaign play is best suited for most game clubs and groups that meet on a regular basis to play. For those who have less reliable options for opponents, or who simply want to fit in more games, they can opt for tournament or exhibition play which utilize one-​off battles that hold no long-​term implications for a player’s gang. 4 Games Workshop, generally, does not have the best track record when it comes to inclusion and feminist principles. Their original intellectual properties are notoriously male centric, with few women characters or factions. The head of Forge World (a division of Games Workshop), Tony Cottrell, even said during the February 3, 2018 ‘Horus Heresy and Necromunda Weekender’ event that ‘Escher are exotic and vindictive because they’re women’ (TonyNeedsToGo 2018). Forge World issued an apology for this statement two days later (Neverdeadned 22 2018). 5 Of additional interest is the sub-​group ‘Feminist 40k for venting’ where members of the Feminist 40k group complain about online and in-​person experiences they have with other gamers related to intolerance. 6 Space Marines are a faction of super warriors within the 40,000 universe that consists of only male members within the 40,000 official lore. 7 For example, one potential encounter in the game has the players coming across a group of women and children trying to protect themselves in a school. The players may steal supplies from these women and children if they wish, but the involved characters’ empathy values impact whether or not their misery score increases if they do steal from the group. 8 ‘The number one aim for Bad Squiddo Games is to create and supply the miniatures that would have made the hobby far far better for my 10 year old self. To welcome more young girls and women into wargaming and miniature painting, as well as providing diverse options to the entire gaming community. And yeah –​cool toys’ (Norman 2018)! 9 Games Workshop, currently the largest publicly traded tabletop wargame company, reported £222.6m in total sales for their 2017–​ 2018 fiscal year (Games Workshop 2018).

References A Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan 2013, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series, GMT Games. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1977, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) Inc. Aidley, K 2018, ‘The truth about sexual harassment and boardgaming’, Katie’s Game Corner Blog, viewed 5 March 2019, https://​katiesgamecorner.com/​2018/​06/​20/​the-​ truth-​about-​sexual-​harrassment-​and-​boardgaming/​. Andean Abyss 2012, by V Ruhnke, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series, GMT Games. Brooks, M 2018, Wanted: dead, Black Library, Nottingham.

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Wargames in relation to gender 51 Brynen, R 2016, ‘Women and wargaming: the good, the bad, and the ugly’, PAXsims Blog, viewed 5 March 2019, https://​paxsims.wordpress.com/​2016/​03/​09/​women-​ and-​wargaming-​the-​good-​the-​bad-​and-​the-​ugly/​. Chainmail 1971, by J Perren and G Gygax, Guidon Games. Colonial Twilight: The French–​Algerian War, 1954–​62 2017, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series, GMT Games. Crawford, J, Mearls, M, Wyatt, J, Schwalb, R & Cordell, B 2014, Dungeons & dragons: player’s handbook, 5th edition, Wizards of the Coast, Renton, WA. Dungeons & Dragons 1974, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) Inc. Feminist 40k 2019, discussion list, Facebook, viewed 5 March 2019, www.facebook. com/​groups/​491243794550692/​. Feminist 40k for Venting 2019, discussion list, Facebook, viewed 5 March 2019, www. facebook.com/​groups/​2032328477033855/​. Fire in the Lake:  Insurgency in Vietnam 2014, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series, GMT Games. Games Workshop 2018, Games Workshop Group PLC annual report July 2018, viewed 27 November 2018, https://​investor.games-​workshop.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​ 2018/​07/​2017-​18-​Press-​statement-​final-​v.pdf. Greene, J 1975, ‘Wargamer as elitist’, Europa, 6–​8, pp. 79–​81. Gygax, G & Arneson, D 1974a, ‘Men and magic’, in Dungeons & dragons: rules for fantastic medieval wargame campaigns playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures, Tactical Studies Rules, Lake Geneva, WI. Gygax, G & Arneson, D 1974b, ‘The underworld and wilderness adventures’, in Dungeons & dragons: rules for fantastic medieval wargame campaigns playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures, Tactical Studies Rules, Lake Geneva, WI. Gygax, G & Perren, J 1971, Chainmail: rules for medieval miniatures, Guidon Games, Evansville, IN. Inquisition 2017, ‘Why has the idea of female space marines become such a contentious topic as of late?’, Reddit thread, 1 May, viewed 5 March, 2019, www.reddit. com/​r/​40kLore/​comments/​68kpbv/​why_​has_​the_​idea_​of_​female_​space_​marines_​ become/​. Mearls, M, Crawford, J, Lee, A, Mohan, K, Perkins, C, Reynolds, S, Sernett, M, Sims, C, Winter, S & Greenwood, E 2016, Dungeons & dragons: Volo’s guide to monsters, Wizards of the Coast LLC, Renton, WA. Necromunda 1995, Games Workshop. Necromunda: underhive rulebook 2017, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham. Neverdeadned22 2018, ‘Apologie [sic] from Forge World about comments made this past weekend’, Reddit thread, 5 February, viewed 6 December, 2018, www. reddit.com/​r/​Warhammer/​comments/​7vfue5/​apologie_​from_​forge_​world_​about_​ comments_​made/​. Norman, A 2018, Bad Squiddo Games, viewed 27 November 2018, https://​badsquiddo games.com/​. Oracaz, M & Wiśniewski, J 2017, This war of mine: the board game, Galakta, Krakow. Peterson, J 2012, Playing at the world: a history of simulating wars, people and fantastic adventures, from chess to role-​playing games, Unreason Press, San Diego, CA. Peterson, J 2014, ‘The first female gamers  –​Jon Peterson  –​Medium’, Medium. com, 5 October, viewed 15 November 2018, https://​medium.com/​@increment/​ the-​first-​female-​gamers-​c784fbe3ff37. Pratt, F 1943, Fletcher Pratt’s naval war game, Harrison-​Hilton Books, New York, NY.

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52  Matt Shoemaker Sjoberg, L 2013, Gendering global conflict: toward a feminist theory of war, Columbia University Press, New York, NY. Tactics 1954, The Avalon Game Company. Taylor, M 2005, The battle of the Little Bighorn, Khyber Pass Games, Miami, FL. This War of Mine: The Board Game 2017, Ares Games. TonyNeedsToGo 2018, ‘ “Escher are exotic and vindictive because they’re women”. Thanks, Tony Cottrell, head of Forge World’, Reddit thread, 3 February, viewed 6 December 2018, www.reddit.com/​r/​Warhammer/​comments/​7v0mcy/​escher_​are_​ exotic_​and_​vindictive_​because_​theyre/​. Wells, HG 1913, Little wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books, Frank Palmer, London, UK.

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4  Reframing the domestic experience of war in This War of Mine Life on the battlefield Ryan House

Writing in the 1980s amid debates concerning the admittance of women into combat positions within the armed forces, Genevieve Lloyd challenges the conventional notions of the inherent masculinity of war—​rhetoric adopted even by some feminist peace groups at the time—​by explicating the conceptual relationship between war and citizenship in Western philosophical thought (Lloyd 2013). She posits that war as it is conceived allows men to transcend self-​interest and fear of death in order to attain a higher, sublime form of selfhood that must be, as this line of reasoning goes, intrinsically masculine: The masculinity of war is what it is precisely by leaving the feminine behind. It consists in the capacity to rise above what femaleness symbolically represents: attachment to private concerns, to ‘mere life’. In leaving all that behind, the soldier becomes a real man, but he also emerges into the glories of selfhood, citizenship and truly ethical, universal concerns. (2013, p. 75) Throughout the roughly 30-​year interim between Lloyd’s chapter and this one, there is ample evidence of these ideas continuing to shape the social construction of gender through representations of war in media. Narratives of war in video games, for instance, typically focus on the hypermasculine experiences of war, presenting the player with a power fantasy in which they assume either the role of the hero single-​handedly combatting an onslaught of enemy forces or that of a master tactician strategically deploying troops from the perspective of the general-​god, all in the pursuit of an ideologically righteous goal. These depictions of war frame life as existing in one of two ways: either as a subject who exists to inflict death upon others or as objects to be killed. This War of Mine (TWoM), a 2014 game inspired by real events such as the siege of Sarajevo, breaks from this tradition of heroic individualism. In it, players assume the collective role of a group of civilians trapped within a fictionalized war-​torn, besieged city who must work together to survive their precarious situation. To create as authentic an experience as possible, 11 Bit Studios, the game’s developer and publisher, researched survivors’ accounts of armed conflicts such as the Bosnian War (1992–​1996), the First Chechen

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54  Ryan House War (1994–​1996), the Kosovo War (1998–​1999), the Syrian Civil War (2011–​ ongoing), and others (Kwiatkowski 2016, p. 693). These accounts emphasized the extent to which people relied upon closely knit groups to survive living within war zones, and the developers chose to underscore this communal aspect in the gameplay (2016, p. 694). Players control a group of characters with unique backstories, personalities, and skills, such as being a good cook, a skilled trader, or a fast runner, who must work together to survive for a randomly determined amount of time until a ‘cease fire’ is declared. Because they represent the often-​unseen ramifications of war, these characters epitomize what Judith Butler (2010, p. 31) calls ‘ungrievable lives’, or ‘populations [that] can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited’, and the game’s ‘perma-​death’ mechanic underlines the precariousness of their lives. Once a character dies, they are gone for the remainder of the game, and their absence makes survival for the group that much harder. Through its narrative and representation of domestic responsibility, TWoM reframes the experience of war from a hypermasculine glorification of violence and death to a meditation on communal survival and the challenges of non-​violence in the face of violence. Frames are a particularly useful metaphor for discussing this game’s depiction of war, as its environments are presented in the style of a dollhouse-​like cutaway. Characters are often literally framed within their domestic roles as the player deploys them to cook food, construct beds and tools, or scan radio frequencies for news from the outside world. The destabilization of life in a war-​zone disrupts traditional gendered notions of the division of domestic labor and social order. Likewise, characters are framed within their individual narratives, beginning with a backstory of their lives before the war and developing throughout the game as players navigate the difficult decisions they’re presented with and contend with the consequences of those choices. In this reframing of war from the battlefield to the realm of ‘mere life’, TWoM enables players to consider the human subjects that are often excised from the frames imposed by traditional portrayals of armed conflict.

[Image]ining war War, in the popular imagination, is a quintessential rite of passage into manhood, and this idea is reinforced through most depictions of war and the military in popular culture. Images of the stoic commander boldly and decisively leading his men to battle and of brave, loyal soldiers dutifully holding the line are for many the perfect ideal of masculinity. Although many portrayals attempt to depict the horrors of combat, war remains a privileged space for boys to be tested and for men to achieve glory.1 Participating in a war, or at least the fantasy of participating in a war, takes on a meaning that is somewhat divorced from its geopolitical causes. It becomes not unlike a team sport in which one seeks to best the other team through steadfast teamwork and individual heroics. In their book Reel Men

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Reframing the domestic experience of war 55 at War:  Masculinity and the American War Film, Donald and MacDonald describe the significance of sports and war on the construction of masculinity through a discussion of the shared code of behaviors between both activities. Both privilege teamwork, of course, and emphasize trusting others to do their job as well as sacrificing oneself for the good of the collective, or ‘taking one for the team’. Similarly, maintaining a dispassionate and professional temperament while undertaking one’s duty is not only imperative to success, but to being a real man as well. Emotion taints rational thinking, as this line of reasoning goes, and in order to win, one must act as boldly and decisively as a man. Winning is characteristic of masculinity while ‘male norms classify losing as lacking sufficient male hormones … and it is classed as equal only to the female’ (Donald & MacDonald 2011, pp. 31–​32). Thus, to maintain one’s maleness, it is imperative to win at all costs. Emotions, then, are an obstacle to be overcome on the path to manliness and victory. In a chapter on the history of maps in wargames, Anders Engberg-​Pedersen writes that such games can be thought of as emotional technologies, or ‘a means to manage and train the emotions for the actual experience on the battlefield’ (2018, p. 60). To illustrate this process, he begins with an account of the presentation to the Prussian army of Kriegs-​Spiel, a wargame played upon a topographical map on which players ‘could practice the complex skill of moving their corps across an actual terrain at both a tactical and strategic scale’ (2018, p. 60). Surprised by its evident utility, one general reportedly proclaimed, ‘That is no ordinary game, that is a war school’ (2018, p. 59). Engberg-​Pedersen posits that by inviting players to project themselves into the representation, the map … constructs a simulation that transforms passive spectators into active agents and allows them to live vicariously a life of passions and emotions across the flatness of its surface. (2018, p. 60) It allows the player to experience the emotions of the battlefield through simulations of randomness and danger that must be overcome through measured reasoning. Military tactics, maneuvers, and contingencies can be premeditated, taught, and trained for in advance, ‘thereby transform[ing] warfare into a rational endeavor subject to simulation, planning, testing, and control’ (2018, p. 65). As Engberg-​Pedersen explains, ‘the wargame is a technology for keeping violent emotions flat and reducing their intensity: fear is tempered, emotional heat reduced to coolness’ (2018, p. 70). Engberg-​Pedersen ends the chapter with a discussion of two contemporary projects:  STRIVE (Stress Resilience in Virtual Environments) and VRET (Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy). These projects immerse ‘users in a virtual combat zone and expos[e]‌them … to a traumatic incident such as the death of a child or the loss of a comrade … to offer an emotional inoculation … to gradually lower the emotional response’ (2018, p. 72). The potential of digital

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56  Ryan House games as emotional technology is unprecedented because they render immediate the violence and stress of war that prior media have only been able to present indirectly through the user’s imagination. Although much has been said on the ability of the affective power of games to strengthen interpersonal relationships,2 Engberg-​Pedersen warns that the effectiveness of these new wargames at eliminating our innate fears of war may one day ‘remove a dimension of human experience that is fundamental to preventing that war becomes anything other than the action of last resort’ (2018, p. 73). Indeed, most video games about war glorify the battlefield by offering players the opportunity to embody the hero in a militaristic power fantasy. The Call of Duty franchise, for instance, allows players to virtually take part in the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and fictionalized versions of modern wars through the point-​of-​view of an army-​of-​one, blasting through enemy troops to secure a checkpoint or rescue someone. These types of games reinforce the hypermasculine values traditionally associated with war by allowing players to enact them. When teammates are present, they are typically relegated to little more than decoration—​the AIs are designed to appear to be fighting alongside the player, but usually just fire wildly in the general direction of the enemies. The glory is reserved for the player who must move from behind cover to brazenly advance on the enemy and to accomplish the objective against seemingly great odds. Ironically, the immediacy of these images of war may actually undermine our ability to form lasting, meaningful readings of them. Jan Mieszkowski (2018) argues that our contemporary mediascape, in which anyone from a drone pilot to a bystander can capture and upload images of conflict that can then be viewed by virtually everyone on Earth, is double-​edged. While its democratization circumvents authoritative discourses of the ‘theater of war’, its proliferation also potentially separates images from their original context. Cell-​phone footage of IEDs exploding may be recontextualized as a viral internet video, for instance, that one sees repeated on morning news shows. Mieszkowski posits that through this contextually isolated method of spectatorship: a curiously self-​reflexive public discourse has emerged in which the stories being told about warfare focus as much on the unique ways in which its audiences process—​or fail to process—​it as on the violent events themselves. Whereas previous generations worried about the dangers of aestheticizing warfare and treating mass destruction as a beautiful phenomenon, today we are more at risk of aestheticizing the technical prowess of our communicative media. (2018, p. 194) Mieszkowski contends that our ability to view war directly has not resulted in any greater understanding of war, but rather has caused an increasingly sophisticated scrutiny for what looks (and thereby is) real in our war media. Furthermore, any ‘experience’ of war derived from games like Call of Duty

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Reframing the domestic experience of war 57 is yet another step removed from this process of what Mieszkowski calls ‘the spectacle of the spectacle’ because these games are representations based on prior representations that are themselves based upon those first-​hand, subjective viewpoints of a phenomenon that is practically unrepresentable (2018, p. 194). Yet when presented with a verisimilitudinous virtual representation of the storming of Normandy’s beaches on D-​Day, it is tempting to bestow upon the experience a level of gravitas equivalent to that of the actual events in the minds of players. With the potential to change how we perceive the experience of war that these emotional technologies present, perhaps more effort should be made to portray a wider range of discourses than might and glory.

Reframing the image Images of war are framed not only within their context, but by the subjects that capture them. These embedded perspectives can easily be mistaken as a sense of objective immediacy, or an unconstructed reality. In her book Frames of War, Judith Butler discusses how these representations establish norms for the ‘recognizability’ of life, that is, how those norms enable us to recognize a being as a life or as not-​a-​life. Butler claims that, in this way, all life is precarious because of the dependency on others to recognize one’s life as life and, furthermore, the conditions for that recognition are constantly shifting. Yet, rather than finding common ground in this shared condition of precariousness, ‘each body finds itself potentially threatened by others who are, by definition, precarious as well’ (Butler 2010, p. 31). This inevitably leads to: a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’. Such populations are ‘lose-​ able’ or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics. Consequently, when such lives are lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living’. To illustrate these embedded frames, Butler writes of the use of ‘embedded reporting’ during the 2003 US-​led invasion of Iraq as an example. During this time, journalists were allowed to accompany military units under the condition that the military could dictate what was to be reported. Thus, the military created its own narrative of the war by establishing the frames around which US civilians understood the actions undertaken by the military and the deaths on both sides that resulted from those actions (2010, p. 64). Just as the abstraction of the rules of war in a wargame function to temper the emotions of one in the midst of battle, these established parameters of representation propagandize emotional responses to the acts of war for those back home.

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58  Ryan House This formulated, yet fragmented perception of war correlates with Angela Davis’s claim of the ‘unrepresentability of war in the United States’ which has not seen a war within its own borders since the mid-​1800s (2008, p. 19). To live as a civilian in modern America, then, is to have only a mediated knowledge of war that is always situated elsewhere—​a knowledge framed through distance and entertainment and news media. Davis argues that in order to redress this often incomplete knowledge, we need to emphasize ‘certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination’ (2008, p. 26) that empower us to ‘remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants’ (2008, p. 20) into a world without war. One small step on the road to this utopian idea may be to rethink our use of the emotional technology of the wargame.

‘In war, not everyone is a soldier’ TWoM is unique to the wargame genre because it reframes the experience of war by moving away from the soldiers fighting in battle to focus on noncombatants’ struggle for survival. The title alone suggests a personalization of global conflicts—​it removes the experience of war from geopolitical affairs and places it squarely in the realm of everyday life. Initially released in November 2014 by 11 Bit Studios, the game has garnered a reputation for its ability to put players in uncomfortable situations that ask them to endure the precariousness of living within a battle zone.3 It does this through the genre of a survival strategy game, where players take on the role of a group of civilians as they attempt to survive in a war-​torn city by scavenging for food, medical supplies, and materials to improve their shelter. Players must often make decisions that affect not only the player-​characters but also the various non-​player-​characters (NPCs) that they encounter, such as stealing food from neighbors to feed themselves. As one reviewer said of the game, it’s not much fun to actually play. It’ll make you feel terrible about your actions at almost every turn. But in spite of all that, there is something so essential about this gaming experience that I  urge you to give this game a try. (Lange 2016) This turn away from the goal of producing ‘fun’ entertainment to instead edifying players through perspectives other than their own perhaps situates TWoM closer to didactic wargames such as Kriegs-​Spiel than to Call of Duty. Interestingly, where the map of the Kriegs-​Spiel provides an overview of its game space to teach aspiring generals to control their emotions, the close-​up and intimate play space of TWoM, situated as it is within the domestic realm, enhances its potential for emotional realism. Although the gameplay strongly resembles real-​time strategy (RTS) games,4 the change of the player’s point of view from a bird’s-​eye-​view to ground level reframes their perception of

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Reframing the domestic experience of war 59 their actions from the general on the battlefield to the denizen of the domestic space—​they cease deploying units to secure resources and begin to enact a collective in its pursuit of shared goals. The game’s space, presented from a side-​view angle, allows a close proximity of the characters and the shelter they share. The designers modeled the characters on real people, using photo-​ realistic images on the character tabs and animating their movements with motion-​capture. These design choices demonstrate the impetus to humanize the experience of war. Players’ resources were named our things instead of the typical inventory found in other war games. Also, the character’s health status was displayed with the terms of affect (i.e., sad, depressed) instead of a numerical indication. (de Smale et al. 2017, p. 14) Ideally, the ‘realisticness’5 of the game decreases the instrumental, strategic model of gameplay for players. So, while players may still call on a character to complete a task much like one would deploy a squadron in a RTS game, they may be less likely to reduce her worth to a utility in the playspace. Players remain narratively associated with the point of view of the collective that itself depends on the interpersonal relationships within it. This group coherence is reinforced through the game’s systems, such as when sadness affects a character’s ability to perform various responsibilities, and its semiotic domain,6 as described in the quote above. Despite this resistance to the player’s abstraction of game rules, the designers still very much privilege emergent stories created through the player’s interaction with the game’s systems over a plot-​driven narrative. Gameplay is divided into two phases, day and night. During the day, players are confined to the house by sniper fire and must use this time to attend to characters’ basic needs, such as eating, resting, and treating wounds. Kacper Kwiatkowski, a writer and story designer on the development team, explains that the limited ‘choice of activities available for the player during this phase reflects how the lives of people during such events [are] frequently reduced to minimal, primitive forms, where even satisfying basic human needs becomes a challenge’ (2016, p. 696). From these challenges arise narrative details that slowly start to form a story. For instance, if a player’s group is running short on food, decisions must be made as to who will be fed and who will have to wait for more food to be found. As characters go without food, their behavior (and playable actions) may begin to change; they may start moving more slowly, or it may take them longer to complete tasks. Hunger may be compounded by fatigue and/​or sadness, which will exacerbate the effects. In this phase, players must attend to the characters’ physical and psychological needs, and both success and failure at these tasks will result in narrative moments. During the ‘night’ phase, players may choose to send characters out of the safety of the shelter to scavenge for supplies, assign them to guard the shelter, or allow

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60  Ryan House them to rest. Kwiatkowski (2016, p.  697) highlights the importance of the emergent narrative to the player’s experience: A freedom to make one’s own decisions is an essential part of the game experience and affects most of its aspects. The player decides whose needs come first among the group. They choose the places to visit for supplies and the way in which they acquire them. It is possible to approach other characters in a variety of ways, including trading, violence, scaring them off, helping them, or just ignoring them. The game does not prompt the player to do one thing instead of another. This ambivalence of the game’s system to the decisions of the player underscores its usefulness as an emotional technology. Rather than presenting the player with the arbitrary ‘sliding scale of morality’, the game acknowledges the impossible situation that the characters find themselves in—​there rarely are right answers in this world, and that is very much the point. Players must make whatever decision is available and live with the consequences, weighing the morality of their actions for themselves. An example of this occurred in a recent playthrough of mine. The well-​ being of my group was quickly deteriorating after having not been able to find food for several days. I decided it was worth the risk to send Katia, a reporter before the war who is skilled in trading, to a military-​controlled supermarket to scavenge for supplies. She was sure to find some food, and with everyone nearing starvation, what choice did I have? During the excursion, Katia was shot by an armed soldier and severely wounded. Although she made it home, she was unable to return with food, so the trip had been in vain. Lacking the necessary medical supplies to treat her, I chose to send Bruno, a former professional cook and my only other survivor, to the home of an elderly couple I had encountered earlier in the game. On the first trip, I had decided to leave the couple alone, leaving their food and medicine behind. This time, however, I could not afford this kindness. As the elderly man begs for me to leave his wife’s medicine, Bruno quickly snatches what he can and returns home to Katia. As Bruno walks through the door, I learn that we are too late; Katia had died while Bruno was away. Bruno, now alone, is distraught at the death of his comrade and haunted by the memories of the elderly couple pleading for their lives. His status changes to ‘Broken’, and after two more days, he hangs himself. Game over. This vignette is an example of the sort of hard questions this game asks of its players. When in an impossible situation, what would you choose to do? In this playthrough, the precariousness of my characters’ lives reframed the lives of the elderly couple as forfeit, despite the earlier decision to treat them as fellow survivors who should be left alone. Rather than prescribing this morality lesson to me, the procedurality of the game’s mechanics allowed me to come into the situation myself that would lead to my undertaking of this impossible problem. The game functioned counter to typical wargames

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Reframing the domestic experience of war 61 like the Kriegs-​Spiel—​instead of flattening the emotional responses to war, it expands them, causing the player to reflect on decisions made in terms of their human impact.

From the ashes of war In her book Tactical Media, Rita Raley (2009, p.  98) discusses the efficacy of games and digital media to disrupt nationalistic, networked accounts of war through their ability to depict ‘the experience of atrocity “over there” ’. She argues that these virtual experiences ‘have acquired a representational authority, and the cultural knowledge they produce has the authority of the real’ (2009, p. 70). This representational authority can be particularly problematic when ascribed to masculine power fantasies of war, such as if a player’s political ideology becomes informed primarily through their experience of playing a Call of Duty game. The framing of these super-​soldier simulations, often encased within a first-​person perspective, crop any emotions that do not fit into the fantasy, such as fear, guilt, or doubt. Moreover, they prohibit consideration for lives or experiences on the periphery. These games present themselves as objective perspectives while simultaneously projecting their own interpretation onto the depicted images. TWoM represents a break from these traditional representations of war by shifting the focus away from the hypermasculinized glory of the battlefield to the mundane realm of ‘mere-​life’. This reframing confronts the objective immediacy that often goes unquestioned in popular portrayals of war by offering alternative narratives of wartime experience. The game achieves this reframing in large part through a reconfiguration of the wargame’s play space—​by substituting an area of domestic cooperation for the arena of armed conflict. In this space, the actions of the characters are framed within the context of precarity, not heroics, and players must adopt a playstyle that matches this situation. Unlike other strategy war games, TWoM resists the player’s abstraction of the game’s rules and systems. It accomplishes this through design choices that encourage players to empathize with the characters rather than viewing them as deployable units. Finally, players are afforded the ability to make meaningful choices through their interaction with the game’s systems, and these choices and their consequences build the narrative of the game and strengthen the player’s emotional connection to the characters. By situating its play space within the domestic realm while society at large collapses outside, TWoM allows its mechanics to disrupt preconceived notions of the structures of power. Players assign tasks to characters based not on traditional gendered divisions of labor, but by the aptitude of the characters to carry out the task or by simple necessity whether that be caring for children, engineering a filter for rainwater, or the manual labor of removing rubble. This act of communal survival, of simply continuing to exist, interrupts the inevitability of patriarchy as the de facto social structure as an inherently political

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62  Ryan House act. This experience is one that only a feminist wargame could provide—​a reframing of the experience of war through a disruption of the masculine and feminine spaces of life to lead us to consider new ways of living.

Notes 1 Jessica Meyer calls war ‘a sphere of masculine attainment and suffering’ (2009, p. 1); Stefan Dudink et al. describe it as the ‘seemingly “natural” homelands of masculinity’ (2004, p. xii); and Leo Braudy notes that ‘war enforces an extreme version of male behavior as the ideal model for all such behavior’ (2003, p. xvi). 2 See works by Katherine Isbister (2016), Aubrey Anable (2018), and Rosalind W. Picard (2000). 3 See reviews by Dennis Scimeca (2014), Evan Narcisse (2014), and Harry Slater (2015). 4 A genre that typically simulates military campaigns from a top-​down, god-​like perspective as seen in games like Warcraft, Civilization, and Command & Conquer. 5 Alexander Galloway’s term for having the property of ‘mimetic reconstruction of real life’ (2006, p. 72). 6 Miguel Sicart’s term for ‘the metaphors, contexts, and cultural practices that wrap around a game’s procedural core’ (2013, p. 45).

References Anable, A 2018, Playing with feelings: video games and affect, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Braudy, L 2003, From chivalry to terrorism: war and the changing nature of masculinity, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. Butler, J 2010, Frames of war:  when is life grievable? Paperback edition, Verso, New York, NY. Call of Duty: Ghosts 2013, Activision, PC. Command and Conquer 1995, Virgin Interactive Entertainment, PC. Davis, AY 2008, ‘A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique’, in RL Riley, CT Mohanty & MB Pratt (eds.), Feminism and war: confronting U.S. imperialism, Zed Books, London, UK, pp. 19–​26. de Smale, S, Kors MJL, & Sandovar AM 2017, ‘The case of This War of Mine:  a production studies perspective on moral game design’, Games and culture, August 2017, pp. 1–​23, viewed 8 March 2019, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1555412017725996. Donald, R & Macdonald, K 2011, Reel men at war: masculinity and the American war film. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD. Dudink, S, Hagemann, K, & Tosh J 2004, ‘Editors’ preface’, in S Dudink, K Hagerman, & J Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in politics and war: gendering modern history, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, pp. xii–​xv. Engberg-​Pedersen, A 2018, ‘Flat emotions:  maps and wargames as emotional technologies’, in A Engberg-​Pedersen & K Maurer (eds.), Visualizing war:  emotions, technologies, communities, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 59–​77. Galloway, AR 2006, Gaming: essays on algorithmic culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Isbister, K 2016, How games move us: emotions by design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Reframing the domestic experience of war 63 Kwiatkowski, K 2016, ‘Civilian casualties: shifting perspective in This War of Mine’, in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.) Zones of control:  perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 691–​702. Lange, S 2016. ‘This war of mine [The little ones] (Xbox One) review’, 411Mania, viewed 15 October 2018, www.411mania.com/​games/​this-​war-​of-​mine-​xbox-​one-​review/​. Lloyd, G 2013, ‘Selfhood, war, and masculinity’, in C Pateman & E Gross (eds.), Feminist challenges: social and political theory, Routledge, London, UK, pp. 63–​76. Meyer, J 2009, Men of war: masculinity and the First World War in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK. Mieszkowski, J 2018, ‘World in the age of anti-​social media’, in A Engberg-​Pedersen & K Maurer (eds.), Visualizing war: emotions, technologies, communities, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 182–​196. Narcisse, E 2014, ‘This war of mine:  the Kotaku review’, Kotaku, viewed 8 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​this-​war-​of-​mine-​the-​kotaku-​review-​1660267338/​. Picard, RS 2000, Affective computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Raley, R 2009, Tactical media, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Scimeca, D 2014, ‘The horrifying truth of This war of mine is that war isn’t a game’, The Daily Dot, viewed 8 March 2019, www.dailydot.com/​parsec/​this-​war-​of-​mine-​ review/​. Sicart, M 2013, Beyond choices:  the design of ethical gameplay, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sid Meier’s Civilization V 2010, Firaxis Games, PC. Slater, H 2015, ‘This war of mine: let it completely destroy you’, Pocketgamer, viewed 8 March 2019, www.pocketgamer.com/​articles/​066489/​this-​war-​of-​mine-​let-​it-​ completely-​destroy-​you/​. This War of Mine 2014, 11 Bit Studios, PC. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans 1994, Blizzard Entertainment, PC.

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Part III

Feminism as war

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5  Gamified suburban violence and the feminist pleasure of destructive play Rezoning warzones Adan Jerreat-​Poole

Child’s play In those hot July nights, we played at war: Cops and Robbers, Risk, GoldenEye. We played to the backdrop of the Kingston Penitentiary, the Royal Military College, the army base, the police station. I was young, safe in my whiteness, in those early years before gender reared its ugly head, and I played at war without understanding that the suburb was already a war zone, that the structures that propped up my polite Canadian city were used to police and terrorize people of colour (POC), particularly trans-​and cis-​women, and queer bodies of all kinds (Ahmed 2017; Browne 2015; Davis 2013). Last night I was followed down the street by a man catcalling. Fear settled into my bones and I recognized the shape—​it has been living in my body for years. Always, there are men. Sometimes these men have uniforms. Always, they are permitted to follow us. For a few moments I fantasized about turning around and screaming, wielding my ragged fingernails like talons. I wanted to gift him my fear. Games have the potential to disturb the white middle-​class suburb by uncovering the violence of the police city. Games can also allow players to explore fear, anger, power, agency, and resistance through feminist fantasies of violence. In this chapter I first explore the representation of the suburb and the gendered and racialized concept of ‘safety’ in Life Is Strange (2015) (and briefly, its prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)), and Night in the Woods (2017) before moving on to discuss the messy and ambivalent performance of feminist violence as a form of pleasure. I  make the uncomfortable claim that role-​played and imagined acts of feminist violence are modes of ‘critical play’ (Flanagan 2009) that allow for complicated feminist identity performances that acknowledge and celebrate the bad feelings of hurt, fear, and anger that marginalized bodies experience under settler colonialism.1 This mode of affective play honours Rebecca Traister’s call to ‘recognize our own rage as valid’ (2018, xxviii). As the tagline for her Feminist Killjoys blog suggests, Sara Ahmed envisions ‘killing joy as a world-​making project’ (2013); in these games, suburban digital spaces become reclaimed through destruction-​as-​feminist-​creation.

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68  Adan Jerreat-Poole

Welcome to the ’burbs Mailboxes and tennis shoes, manicured lawns and blonde couples with 2.5 kids:  welcome to the suburbs, the American Dream, the safest and most boring place in the world. In pop culture the suburbs are used as shorthand for the white middle-​class experience, designed for white middle-​class viewers and players. The Burb family in The Sims 2 (2004) epitomizes this representation: they are a white, heterosexual, nuclear family living in Pleasantview. ‘Pleasant’ may be the best way to describe the representation of suburbia in pop media: suburban neighbourhoods are used to provide a safe and boring setting to teenage romance and drama, or, in television shows like Santa Clarita Diet or Desperate Housewives, this pleasantness is used to provide a playful juxtaposition to the outrageous over-​the-​top murder and intrigue. What rarely gets represented on screen is the suburban legacy of racial segregation, from the ‘white flight’ of the 1950s and 1960s following the desegregation of education, to present-​day policies and practices (Avila 2004; Boustan 2010). Eric Avila writes that ‘Postwar suburbanization sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography’ as ‘federally sponsored suburbanization removed an expanding category of ‘white’ Americans from what deteriorated into inner-​city … racialized poverty’ (2004, p. 4). In Canada, the increase in visible minorities and immigrants in urban centres has been cited as one impetus for white Canadians moving out of urban centres as early as the 1920s but particularly after the Second World War (Belshaw 2016). The racialization of the city and suburb in North America continues today, from gated and policed communities to gentrification, which displaces lower-​ income and working-​class families (often along racial and ethnic lines) (Arel 2017; Hwang 2015; Kirkland 2008). High school suburbia The suburbs in French developer Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange (LIS) feel familiar:  wide garage doors, sidewalks, fenced lawns. They feel familiar partly because I had a white middle-​class childhood in a suburb in the west end of Kingston, Ontario, and partly because I’ve seen these garage doors and lawns in hundreds of films, TV shows, and video games. But while the game takes us into the suburban home and drives us through the wide paved streets of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, like all good teenage dramas it primarily exists in the school. Blackwell Academy is a middle-​/​upper-​class educational institution similar to the wealthy high schools that have become ubiquitous in teen dramas like One Tree Hill and Riverdale (while inner-​city schools and rural schools continue to be under-​represented on screen). Framing the narrative through the school signals to the player that LIS falls in the Young Adult (YA) genre of high school narrative:  I can expect crushes and heartbreak, bullying and tests, brushes with drugs and alcohol.

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Gamified suburban violence 69 I am introduced to the narrative and world through the classroom, and then a hallway filled with lockers, teenagers, and anti-​bullying posters. I look for the cookie-​cutter characters: the love interest (Warren), the sidekick/​best friend (Chloe), the villain (the parent who doesn’t understand us: Chloe’s stepdad), the mentor (the nice teacher who does: Mr. Jefferson). These archetypal figures are helpfully offered to the player early on in the game. The school is a liminal space in YA stories: a place to enter as children and leave as adults; the chrysalis for the transformation into full citizens; the perfect setting for a bildungsroman. LIS, however, uses the setting of the school to deconstruct this genre and to reveal the artificiality of divisions of age and life-​stage that are tied to myths of security and safety. LIS is less a coming-​ of-​age narrative than it is an unravelling of the false binaries of child/​adult, innocence/​experience, and ignorance/​knowledge. This unravelling is enacted through the time-​rewind mechanic, an ability the young female protagonist Max gains at the beginning of the game. Ahmed writes that our society/​culture orients us along a path, and ‘a path gives life a certain shape, a direction, a sequence (birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death)’ (2017, p. 45). Moving backward and forward in time, the game disorients the player, queering timelines and heteronormative pathways. Through this disorientation, the game makes visible the harm of these binaries that refuse to accept the knowledge that young people experience violence, and that young women are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and violence under settler colonialism. Small town cuteness Made by the Canadian studio Infinite Fall, Night in the Woods (NITW) is set in the picturesque small town of Possum Springs. The narrative plays out against a backdrop of beautiful autumn foliage and frolicking squirrels. The art style is cartoonish, with a bright colour palette, round faces, big eyes, and a cast of adorable animals: Mae is an anthropomorphized cat, and her friends are a fox, a blue crocodile, and a bear that looks like a teddy. The houses are all similar in appearance: multi-​storied with windows, complete with mailboxes and picket-​fences. The cartoon suburbs in this video game embody the aesthetic of cuteness. Cuteness is an aesthetic for girls: it’s sweet and sugary and adorable, pink and yellow and baby blue. Cuteness is associated with baby animals and stuffed animals, which NITW clearly imitates. Cuteness has a relationship with innocence which in turn has a relationship with childhood. Cute things are to be protected, to be kept safe. Cute things are incapable of being harmed because they transform all potential villains—​think Despicable Me—​into heroes and saviours. The adorable vulnerability of cute objects and bodies is used to signal what and who is worth protecting, and what kinds of vulnerability invoke protection rather than violence.

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70  Adan Jerreat-Poole The aesthetic of cuteness is also ‘a historically-​specific category shaped by and deeply invested in hegemonic formulations of race, gender, and consumption’ (Schlesselman-​Tarango 2017, p. 2). Cuteness is a cultural construct that reflects dominant discourses of race, gender, and class (Ahmed 2010, 2017; Lury 2010; Schlesselman-​Tarango 2017). As these writers remind us, ‘cuteness’ is ideologically used to mark the child worthy of protection (white girlhood) from the child on the margins (Black girlhood) through associating white femininity with ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’. Sara Ahmed, speaking of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, explains that the novel describes ‘the conflation of whiteness with beauty and virtue: the happy ones are blue-​eyed, the blue-​eyed ones are beautiful, the beautiful ones are the good ones, the good ones are the happy ones’ (Ahmed 2010, p.  80). When confronted with the blonde, blue-​ eyed, able-​bodied toddler, viewers are prompted to protect. When confronted with a Black body, or a disabled body, these taught codes of response are not initiated. Instead, more troubling reactions emerge: Tobin Siebers writes that ‘observers of the disabled body often feel compelled to fly into action, to cure or kill the ungainly sight before their eyes’ (2010, p. 62). These socialized affective responses to different bodies function toward the same goal:  the reproduction of the white heteronormative able-​bodied middle-​class. So maybe we should all stand with Mae on this one: ‘I hate cute people! Cute is the worst!’

Feminist snap I’m in a junkyard smashing shit with a baseball bat. I’m playing Life Is Strange:  Before the Storm. It’s the day Brett Kavanaugh is elected to the Supreme Court.2 It feels good to break something, even virtually. Bottle? Smash. Toolbox? Smash. Car? Fuck yes. Smash. Smash. Smash. Ahmed calls these moments ‘snap’: ‘Snap is quite a sensation. Your snap can be to make a sharp sound. As a feminist killjoy, I have been giving my ear to those who sound sharp’ (2017, p. 188). Snap can be a refusal, a rejection: ‘By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne’ (p. 199). Moments of snap appear across these games, where things are irrevocably broken: silences, buildings, family ties. I can see that anger carrying Max and Mae towards the destruction of their charming little abusive sexist colonial towns. I wonder where it’s going to take me. These breaks are not the trauma of a bone snapping on pavement but the healing re-​break of a bone that needs setting. By snapping, they are broken again, making visible the original wound and site of trauma. Broken bottles, promises, and bodies: the undercurrent of violence that winds its way through these stories and virtual suburbs oscillates between dominance and resistance, the brutal status quo and the painful burns that allow new growth. Chloe: ‘Glass looks way prettier when it’s broken. Wonder what else that’s true for?’ (Before the Storm).

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Breaking (into) the school Graffiti on the wall reads ‘121 M to Misbehave’, and soon I’m the one misbehaving, queering the heteronormative pool scene with the deep (end) affect of women who love women splashing, playing, and revelling in bad behaviour. This scene in LIS is the finale to a sequence that starts with Max and Chloe breaking into the school and includes searching the principal’s office. There is a thrill in this rule-​breaking, breaking and entering; an endorphin rush in entering this symbolic space of patriarchal authority. Chloe sits in his wing-​ backed chair, symbolically dethroning the straight man. Here, queer girls assert agency through law breaking and occupying and transforming straight spaces with queer feminism. When we break in, we are also breaking out of the heteronormative construct that has shaped our family life and our life narrative. When we break the rules, we are following in a tradition of queer feminist rulebreakers and lawbreakers. It feels good to be this kind of bad. This badness takes us on a dangerous journey through the public secrets of prominent townsfolk as we search to uncover the mystery of Rachel Amber’s disappearance. The popular town narrative is that she ran away to Los Angeles; however, the benevolent mentor-​figure, Max’s celebrity photography teacher Mr. Jefferson, is revealed to be a predator, assaulting and murdering his female students. The real mentee is not aspiring photographer Max, but a young white man raised into privilege, power, and violence. Nathan is teased for being geeky, weird, and slight of frame, but reclaims hegemonic masculinity in two ways:  (1) through the capitalist value of accumulating financial wealth, and (2)  by following in his charismatic teacher’s footprints and asserting physical power over the bodies of young women. Nathan is, as so many young wealthy white man are, untouchable. The female characters we play as and with—​Max, Chloe, and Rachel Amber—​are  not. In the cat-​and-​mouse game that follows, the only thing keeping fear at bay—​and keeping the game from slipping into the horror genre, also littered with the bodies of dead teenage girls—​is the intense rage that burns in feminist killjoy Chloe. She is sick of being told what to do by domineering men. She is sick of not being believed. She has learned to not trust authority figures: teachers, cops, fathers. And she passes on this hard-​earned knowledge to us, the protagonist/​player, and our avatar in the game, Max. This peeling back the layers of politeness to the violence at the centre of the school and the town reaches a climax at another staple of the teen drama genre: the party. The End of the World Party. Teenagers everywhere are mocked for thinking everything is the end of the world—​a pimple or a low grade on a quiz—​and in true pop culture teen fashion, the popular kids at Blackwell Academy throw a wild party to celebrate the apocalypse.

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72  Adan Jerreat-Poole One of the background frames to the game is global warming and environmental degradation. Climate change has decimated the fishing industry in the fictional (but all too real) town of Arcadia Bay, and poverty is pervasive when you leave the sheltered grounds of the academy. While ‘kids’ are made fun of for thinking that an unrequited crush is the height of horror, this high school drama is explicitly set in an uncertain world that echoes our own, where sea levels are rising, the ozone layer is being depleted, and the economy is crashing. Within the wealthy suburban school, the Blackwell students are nowhere near safe. From pregnancy to bullying, from suicide to sexual assault and drug addiction, these teens deal with real-​world trauma and harm in a violent colonial heteropatriarchy that has never spared the young. The End of the World Party concludes with photography teacher Mr. Jefferson himself taking the stage and the attention of the crowd. At the centre of the revelry is a white male adult who signifies one of the harshest realities of life in our culture: the man you know, the man who masquerades as a mentor or caregiver. The man who abuses. The white man who wields social, political, and physical power over the body of these young women. Are we still laughing at the teens who think the end of the world is coming? The celebration of apocalypse has distinctly queer undertones. In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that time is focalized around ‘the pervasive trope of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity’ (2004, p.  19). Here, the party seems to implicate the player in jettisoning futurity as a means of reclaiming queer time. We celebrate the bodies that are framed as having no future (because there is no future imagined possible for them under the heteropatriarchy). Somewhere in the booze-​drenched YOLO of an apocalypse party is the rejection of heteronormative futurity that marks not only the conventional generational break (only to be later mended as youths become adults and turn into their parents) but a queer uncertainty that spirals out (of control) across the time-​jumping, time-​bending, time-​bent narrative. In this scene we are ultimately confronted with both the violent reality of the world, and a generation of young people who are celebrating the end of that world.

The end of the world The end comes, in full environmental feminist fury, in the form of a tornado that will decimate Arcadia Bay. LIS has rightfully been criticized for perpetuating the ‘bury your gays’ trope, a trend in popular media where queer characters (particularly women) are killed, like Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Riley in The Last of Us (Chan 2017). Chloe is murdered in the beginning of the game, which commences the turn-​back-​time narrative and ludic elements of the game. The player saves Chloe, only to have her die over and over again throughout the story, as her

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Gamified suburban violence 73 body continues to be resurrected merely to be punished once again for her queerness. Chloe is shot three times in the game, and the player has the option of euthanizing her in another timeline. Including the finale, Chloe can die up to five times, and has to die at least twice. The finale of the game hinges on an absurd decision between saving Chloe or saving the town from a tornado. Rather than taking this final decision literally, I  read it as a metaphorical choice. Does the player as Max choose to save Chloe and therefore turn away from her heterosexist middle-​class white community in place of an unknown radical queer feminist future? Or, nudged by the narrative, do we agree to be straightened out in the arms of the male love interest, Warren, and let the dissenting voice of queer feminism die? Do we sacrifice Chloe for the facade of stability and safety, trading her life for the double garage doors and security cameras? Do we allow ourselves to become complicit in a town that is willing to let young women suffer harm in order to protect the reputation of men? I snapped. ‘Snap: when she can’t take it anymore; when she just can’t take it anymore’ (Ahmed 2017, p. 190). I let the town burn. I drove away with Chloe through the rubble of the town that had been tying me to a life I  didn’t want. A  life that permitted and concealed violence against women, bodies of colour, fat bodies, and queer bodies. A heteronormative life that had already been mapped out again and again in the homes and families of the town. A blueprint that I was being asked to accept and reproduce. ‘Sometimes we have to struggle to snap bonds, including familial bonds, those that are damaging or at least compromising of a possibility that you are not ready to give up’ (Ahmed 2017, p. 188). We don’t look back.

Wrecking the mine While LIS revolves around the disposability of young women in our culture, it still allows us to mourn the female characters because of their whiteness (if you choose the town over Chloe, there is an extended funeral scene of mourning). NITW, however, is more critical of the racialized and classed nature of state-​sanctioned violence. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler poses the question ‘What makes for a grievable life?’ (2004, p. 20). This question is deeply embedded in the racialized discourses of cuteness and childhood: the dead ‘angel’ of the white child versus the ‘criminal’ body of a Black child murdered by police. Who is mourned as a tragic loss, and whose death is accepted as collateral damage, understood as the price ‘we’ pay for keeping the city ‘safe’? (Paid by whom? And safe for whom? These questions fall

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74  Adan Jerreat-Poole along racialized lines.) Jasbir Puar critiques the dominant framing of these murders as The police were merely ‘doing their job’, a dangerous, life-​threatening one. This calculation of risk is the founding rationalization for the impunity of ‘the right to kill’ wielded by U.S. law enforcement. (2017, p. x) I would extend the ‘calculation of risk’ that puts the risk onto racialized and vulnerable bodies beyond American borders and into Canada. Police officers have been granted the right to kill by the state, but only some bodies are calculated as an acceptable loss, if they are figured as a loss at all. Imogen Tyler uses the term ‘social abjection’ to describe the visceral and affective process in which ‘figurative scapegoats’ (2013, p. 9) are used by governments when capitalism fails to live up to its promises, and as rallying points for nationalism and community-​ building. Some vulnerable bodies require saving, while other ‘lives are deemed worthless or expendable’ (p. 10). And while all bodies are vulnerable, vulnerability shifts and transforms through different bodies and sociocultural positions. Puar reminds us that ‘National recognition and inclusion … is contingent upon the segregation and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary’ (2007, p. 2). We (white bodies) accept the violence committed against bodies of colour as necessary, as the price we pay to retain our white privilege. The Black child is recast as criminal, as a threat to white civilization. We do not grieve the death of the Black or brown child.3 Mae is black, working class, queer, and mentally ill. Her best friend, Gregg the fox, identifies as queer and is in an interspecies relationship with a bear named Angus. As many authors have discussed, Mae embodies a careful and nuanced representation of mental illness, as do her friends: Gregg lives with bipolar, Angus lives with trauma, and Bea lives with grief (Saas 2017; Spencer 2017; Wald 2018). The cuteness of Possum Springs is quickly juxtaposed with the reality of a former mining town that is struggling with poverty and unemployment, and a town council that is pushing for gentrification (and pushing many of the residents out). There is a homeless character that the council refuses to shelter, and a cast of underpaid and overworked minimum-​ wage employees. And Mae, the first person in her family to attend higher education, is a college dropout. Welcome to Possum Springs (‘Awesome Springs!’), where people sift through garbage to make a living, friends go missing, and storefronts close overnight. Oh, and that severed-​arm-​on-​the sidewalk thing. The story follows Mae’s adventures with her friends, conversations with locals, and culminates in a ghost hunt. The climax reveals that the ghosts are not, in fact, mental illness-​inspired hallucinations, but a ‘murder cult of dads’ (Mae) who have been sacrificing homeless youth in an attempt to save the town, including Mae’s former friend and bandmate, Casey. The revelation of the existence of a ‘Death Cult of Conservative Uncles’ (Mae) is where

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Gamified suburban violence 75 the game is at its most absurd and most real, as the older figures that have haunted Mae throughout the game turn out to be angry white-​coded men who blame the economic decline of their town on ‘lazy people ’n’ immigrants’ who they describe as ‘trash’ and ‘dirtbag kid[s]‌’. Imogen Tyler reminds us that discourses of waste are used in the creation of ‘national abjects’ (2013, p. 192), and NITW shows us the extent to which metaphor enables violence against racialized bodies. The depiction of failed white masculinity that is embodied by the cult is reminiscent of Trainspotting or Fight Club. Jack Halberstam, on Trainspotting, writes: The novel collapses into the angry and seething language of the male punk from whom a legacy of patriarchal and racial privilege has been withheld. In this example of unqueer failure, failure is the rage of the excluded white male, a rage that promises and delivers punishments for women and people of color. (2011, p. 92) This ‘unqueer’ anger emerges in Possum Springs quite literally from the ruins of the closed mine, bubbling up from under the surface of white rural camaraderie and small-​town friendliness. Here, angry white bodies seek to reclaim the privileges of hegemonic masculinity and whiteness through violence. They accept ‘the symbolic and material scapegoats’ (Tyler 2013, p. 192) that neoliberal colonialism offers to them. They blame the failed promises of capitalism on a ‘them’ that encompasses immigrants, queer, mentally ill, and disabled bodies, and in so doing, reinforce the social cohesion of ‘us’ as white, heteronormative, and able-​bodied. The cult therefore reproduces the violent colonial binary of ‘civilization versus barbarianism’ (Puar 2007, p. 20). The cuteness of Possum Springs and NITW is revealed to be a deliberate candy-​coated facade, a cover for the violence of capitalism that destroys unions, towns, and homes, and to obscure the violence of white supremacy that threatens bodies at the margins, especially feminized and queer bodies of colour. Like in LIS, the dominant town narrative is that Casey ran away, and just as the gameplay in LIS is punctuated by missing persons posters, the town notice board in Possum Springs contains a missing persons poster for Casey that clashes with the ‘Firewood 4 Sale’ sign and a full-​colour Possum Springs advert. It’s worth noting that Casey is described as last seen in a ‘black hooded sweatshirt’, a visual cue that echoes the racialized and classed UK term ‘hoodie’ to describe criminalized youth. This stereotyping of a particular kind of youth (who are not cute but rather contaminating) foreshadows the discovery of the murder cult later in the game. The irony in both games, of course, is that most of the people in the town know or have guessed that Casey and Rachel Amber aren’t missing, making everyone complicit in the violence. Bea tells Mae that one of her dad’s

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76  Adan Jerreat-Poole employees offered to teach her to drive, and her father ‘said No, and then told me not to be alone with him. He still works for us’, says Bea. The cult knows Mae by name. These are not strangers in the woods, but neighbours, friends, small business owners. They are someone’s dads. They could even be ours. By explicitly using the words ‘Dad’ and ‘Uncle’ to describe the cult, NITW makes you feel the crumbling safety net of family and community. The safety of the peaceful small town is a myth, and the game doesn’t shy away from the important step of questioning and snapping the ties of family. The ending of the game isn’t so much a shocking twist as a gradual revelation of the truth that Mae—​and myself, the player—​have been trying to avoid, as we are constantly turning away from the reality that predators live among us, are known, and are continually protected by the community they live in.

Nuke Possum Springs A vandal has spray-​painted over the historic Possum Springs mural of miners, a mural that commemorates and celebrates the heyday of the town’s economic prosperity and the strength of its unions. The vandal turns out to be our friend Lori M., an introverted teenager living in poverty who spends most of her days hanging out on the tops of buildings or out by the railway tracks. ‘The dudes are sacred!’ Mae has the option of exclaiming, and to the town, and the murder cult, they are, and that’s the problem—​and the point. Lori: ‘This entire place is royally messed up! And nobody cares! I  wanted someone to notice things aren’t OK’. ‘Nuke Possum Springs’ foreshadows the climax of the game, in which Mae and her friends trigger a cave-​in at the old mine, an act carrying legacies of classed danger, vulnerable bodies, and the violence of capitalism that demands sacrifices in blood. This contemporary cave-​in, however, while echoing that original wounding, is a new break, a final snap. It’s an act of violence that ultimately kills and ends the cult. The player comes to understand that Possum Springs has already died—​the prosperous mining town no longer exists, and never existed as an ideal—​and it’s necessary to kill the idea of what it was, to get rid of the ghost that is haunting the town and hunting marginalized bodies. And it’s significant that a group of queer and racialized bodies make this second break. Both LIS and NITW explore vulnerability; what kinds are valued, what kinds are radical, and what kinds are manufactured, and challenge the assumption that our culture values the young. The ‘sheltered’ teens and young adults in these stories, predominantly young women, are vulnerable in many ways, and are not kept safe. Their lives are sacrificed by towns and the people that make up those towns who aren’t willing to face the brutal reality of life under settler colonialism, or who are willing to sacrifice marginalized bodies in order to maintain the status quo. In each narrative, the economic and emotional survival of the community—​and community cohesion—​is literally

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Gamified suburban violence 77 built on the bones of the young, and it’s the young, without help from their parents, working around and against the cops, teachers, and city councillors, who uncover the bones.

Feminist violence, pleasure, and love I will shout down the throats of men who only understand the language of violence. (Janice Jo Lee, ‘Hard Femme High Power’, 2016)

I saw Janice Jo Lee perform the brilliant spoken-​word piece ‘Hard Femme High Power’ in Kitchener, Ontario, in the summer of 2017 as part of a queer cabaret. The room was filled with queer bodies and laughter and wine as we cheered for Lee’s performance of a bad-​ass femme who would kick down any man who got in her way. Words of violence and declarations of aggression were met with recognition and delight by a room full of people sharing space, air, music, experiences, love. This articulation and celebration of anger and aggression appears again and again in feminist media, from widely favorited and retweeted tweets to memes and gifs shared across social media platforms. In September 2018, a tweet by author Madeleine L’Engle (a quote from her novel A Wrinkle in Time), ‘ “Stay angry, little Meg”, Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now” ’ garnered over 26,000 likes on Twitter. Around the same time, a meme of a woman walking through a fiery explosion with the caption ‘BURN IT ALL DOWN’ circulated through my networks on Twitter and Facebook. In October 2018, Bitch Media published a weeklong series entitled ‘The Future is Furious’ and announced that ‘It’s Time to Embrace Feminism’s Anger’ (Zeisler 2018). In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed reflects on anger as a form of ‘Feminist Attachment’ (2004, p.  168). Describing ‘the role of emotions in the politicisation of subjects’ (p. 171), Ahmed discusses the early feelings of anger that brought her into contact with feminism, and writes that ‘Such emotional journeys are bound up with politicisation, in a way that reanimates the relation between the subject and a collective’ (p. 171). Relationships are built through shared anger and collective action—​from the furious shared joy of rule-​breaking in LIS to the companionship and community that ends in healing violence in NITW. On and off-​screen, communal anger invigorates feminist action and enables queer community-​building. Games are affective, assemblages of digital and physical bodies, feelings, and code (Anable 2018; Shaw 2014; Sundén, and Sveningsson 2012). Games move us, touch us, are touched by us. The revolting video game avatar becomes my revolting Twitter avatar becomes my revolting body off screen. Bodies resisting in digital and physical spaces. As Mae, I run through a dream sequence with a baseball bat, smashing cars, garbage cans, lampposts, and neon signs. The sound of breaking glass is beautiful. As Max, I drive through

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78  Adan Jerreat-Poole the damaged site that was once a town, tires crunching over demolished buildings. Chloe’s journal in Before the Storm reads ‘Death to Fascists’ with a knife drawn through the centre, while Mae’s therapy-​prescribed journal reads ‘Nuke Possum Springs’ in a mushroom cloud. I imagine the kinds of creative violent journaling practices feminists are doing off screen. There is a fierce joy and a guilty pleasure in this kind of play; in this particular kind of feminist identity performance that validates my experiences, feelings, body. Guilty because we are taught that anger is a masculine emotion, that anger can only ever harm, and never heal. But I think we were taught wrong. There is power in this critical play and identity performance that claims a right to anger. Feminist anger, like feminist snap, is not needless, reckless, apocalyptic, unqueer. Feminist anger is a complex affect that starts in the bones of a body that has known and witnessed harm; it works its way from our skeleton and into our muscles, tendons, and ligaments, stretching across space to touch other bodies and draw us together. Some days it holds me together. Some days it holds us together as people, as feminists: ‘It is a communicative tool’ (Traister 2018, p.  xxvii). We like each other’s posts on Facebook; we share our friends’ mad memes; we emotionally connect with our angry avatars in-​game. Revelling in feminist violence on screen rejects myths of forgiveness and gendered narratives of standing by your man, of passivity and silence and suffering as holy. Feminist anger, importantly, is never just anger. Traister writes that ‘We must come to recognize … that anger is often an exuberant expression’ (2018, p. xxvii). Anger can be joy. Anger can be love; the way we express love for ourselves and for each other. Claiming our anger can be pleasurable. Coming together as angry feminists can be pleasurable. Destroying violent structures and systems can be pleasurable, and an act of love. Audre Lorde wrote that ‘everything can be used/​except what is wasteful /​(you will need/​to remember this when you are accused of destruction)’ (1973, lines 20–​ 23). Feminist destruction-​as-​creation uses our anger, our hurt, our pain, and our love; it uses the materials of our city and our bodies to make something new. We are ripping apart old sheets and dresses to make patches for a quilt. Our needles are sharp.

Anger is world-​making I live with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, and when I’m overwhelmed by the violence that is allowed and allowable in our society, when I’m exhausted from reading testimonies and headlines and vitriolic abuse online, it isn’t hope that drags me out of bed.4 It’s anger. Sadness makes me small and quiet, shrinking into corners and edges, but anger makes me expansive and loud. And while smashing street lights with a baseball bat in-​game doesn’t drive me to smash street lights outside my apartment building, it just might drive me to bang pots and pans together

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Gamified suburban violence 79 outside City Hall. It might take us to walk-​outs and sit-​ins, and to embodying refusals of all kind. This is anger channelled toward change. This is targeted, strategic destruction. We want to dismantle the system of policing, the ‘justice’ system that has never been just, prisons, and violent and corrupt governments. We want to remake the education system. Playing games may have an emotionally cathartic function for some players, but pleasurable fantasies of feminist violence do more than this. They validate our anger. They tell us that we should be angry. They tell us to hold on to our anger, to nurture it, and to use it. They show us that anger can be world-​making. Women are routinely accused by Gamergate, meninists, and alt-​ right groups of ‘ruining’ video games by making them diverse, accessible, and feminist. Millennials have allegedly ‘killed’ golf, the diamond industry, and breakfast cereal (the values we hold most dear in the suburbs!) (Bryan 2017; Taylor 2017). We’re not finished with the games industry. We’re not finished with the suburbs. We’re not finished with breaking and re-​making our communities. We’re just getting started. LIS and NITW are part of what Ahmed calls my ‘killjoy survival kit’ (2017, p.  235). They remind me of the creative possibilities in feminist destruction. That while love between two women does not have to destroy a heterosexist town, maybe it could—​maybe it should. Identifying with cute anthropomorphized animals reminds me of my own queerness, and the queer communities I’ve been a part of that enable connections across bodies that are not and need not be cis-​female. These games remind me that some things need to be destroyed. They move me and keep me moving forward. These ‘companion texts’ (p. 17) keep me company through the often lonely experience of being a feminist killjoy, especially as a Mad/​crip/​queer body. They insist that I don’t have to get over my anger or temper it into a more consumable friendly passive tentative question. Ahmed: ‘When it is not over, it is not time to get over it’ (2017, p. 262).

Notes 1 My (still developing) understanding of settler colonialism comes primarily from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), as well as from the works of other Indigenous scholars, and will be discussed in the chapter as (binary) gendered, patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist. 2 In the summer of 2018 Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States amidst accusations of sexual violence. Despite the testimony of Dr. Ford, a series of hearings, and the outspoken outrage of feminists and women across the United States and Canada (this story dominated our news cycle in Canada), Kavanaugh’s nomination was confirmed on 6 October, and he was sworn in later that day. 3 Challenging the white nationalist archives of memory that deny Black suffering, #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName have been used as a method of witnessing

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80  Adan Jerreat-Poole and mourning the deaths of Black bodies murdered by the police (Fischer and Mohrman 2016). 4 Many people with these conditions are not able to drag themselves out of bed. My white and middle-​class privilege also make it significantly easier to manage my disabilities.

References Ahmed, S 2004, The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Ahmed, S 2010, The promise of happiness, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Ahmed, S 2013, Feminist killjoys blog, viewed 5 November 2018, https://​feministkilljoys. com/​. Ahmed, S 2017, Living a feminist life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Anable, A 2018, Playing with feelings: video games and affect, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Arel, D 2017, ‘How gentrification is killing US cities and Black lives’, Truthout, 19 April, viewed 5 November 2018, https://​truthout.org/​articles/​how-​gentrification-​is-​ killing-​us-​cities-​and-​black-​lives/​. Avila, E 2004, Popular culture in the age of white flight, University of California Press, Oakland, CA. Belshaw, JD 2016, ‘Cold War societies: cities and suburbs’, in Canadian history: post-​ confederation, BC Open Textbooks, Victoria, BC, viewed 5 November 2018, https://​ opentextbc.ca/​postconfederation/​chapter/​10-​6-​cities-​and-​suburbs/​. Boustan, LP 2010, ‘Was postwar suburbanization “white flight”? Evidence from the Black migration’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, pp. 417–​443, viewed 5 November 2018, https://​doi.org/​10.1162/​qjec.2010.125.1.417. Browne, S 2015, Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Bryan, C 2017, ‘RIP:  here are 70 things millennials have killed’, Mashable, 31 July, viewed 20 November 2018, https://​mashable.com/​2017/​07/​31/​things-​millennials-​ have-​killed/​#medPgLPqhZqn. Butler, J 2004, Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, Verso, London, UK. Chan, KH 2017, ‘Why I’m afraid video games will continue to “bury it’s gays” ’, Polygon, 4 August, viewed 20 November 2018, www.polygon.com/​2017/​8/​4/​ 16090980/​life-​is-​strange-​death-​lgbtq-​characters. Davis, AY 2013, ‘Prison reform or prison abolition?’, in Are prisons obsolete?, Seven Stories Press, New York, NY, pp. 9–​21. Edelman, L 2004, No future: queer theory and the death drive, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Fischer, M & Mohrman, K 2016, ‘Black deaths matter? Sousveillance and the invisibility of black life’, Ada, vol. 10, viewed 4 November 2018, https://​adanewmedia. org/​2016/​10/​issue10-​fischer-​mohrman/​. Flanagan, M 2009, Critical play, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Halberstam, J 2011, The queer art of failure, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Holowka, A, Benson, S, Hockenberry, B, Manning, J, Buttfield-​Addison, P, Huettner, C, McGladdery, G & Halberstadt, E 2017, Night in the woods, video game, Infinite Fall and Secret Lab, Winnipeg, MB and Pittsburgh PA. Hwang, J 2015, ‘Gentrification, race, and immigration in the changing American city’, PhD thesis, Harvard University DASH database, viewed 5 November 2018.

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Gamified suburban violence 81 Kirkland, E 2008, ‘What’s race got to do with it? Looking for the racial dimensions of gentrification’, Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 18–​30. L’Engle, M 2018, ‘Stay angry, little Meg …’, Twitter post, 27 September, viewed 25 April 2019, https://​twitter.com/​madeleinelengle/​status/​1045289803506 438144? lang=en. Lee, JJ 2016, ‘Hard femme high power’, online video, 15 May, viewed 4 November 2018, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=yUIiP8y1RzQ&t=106s. Life is Strange 2015, Square Enix, PC. Life is Strange: Before the Storm 2017, Square Enix, PC. Lorde, A 1973, ‘For each of you’, From a land where other people live, Broadside Press, Detroit, MI. Lury, K 2010, The child in film: tears, fears and fairytales, I.B. Tauris, London. Night in the Woods 2017, Alec Holowka, PC. Puar, J 2007, Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Puar, J 2017, The right to maim, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Saas, D 2017, ‘Night in the woods is soulful, empathetic, and too real’, Waypoint, 2 March, viewed 15 November 2018, https://​waypoint.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​ nz5vzm/​night-​in-​the-​woods-​is-​soulful-​empathetic-​and-​too-​real. Schlesselman-​Tarango, G 2017, ‘How cute! race, gender, and neutrality in libraries’, The Canadian Journal of Library Information Practice and Research, vol. 12, no. 1, viewed 15 November 2018, https://​doi.org/​10.21083/​partnership.v12i1.3850. Shaw, A 2014, Gaming at the edge: sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Siebers, T 2010, Disability aesthetics, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Simpson, L 2017, As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. The Sims 2 2004, video game, Maxis and Electronic Arts, Walnut Creek, CA. Spencer, C 2017, ‘Night in the woods treats depression like a part of life’, Kotaku, 1 August, viewed 15 November 2018, https://​kotaku.com/​night-​in-​the-​woodstreats-​depression-​like-​a-​part-​of-​lif-​1797400607. Sundén, J & Sveningsson, M 2012, Passionate play: gender and sexuality in online game culture, Routledge, New York, NY. Taylor, K 2017, ‘“Psychologically scarred” millennials are killing countless industries from napkins to Applebee’s:  here are the businesses they like the least’, Business Insider, 31 October, viewed 20 November 2018, www.businessinsider.com/​ millennials-​are-​killing-​list-​2017–​8. Traister, R 2018, Good and mad: the revolutionary power of women’s anger, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. Tyler, I 2013, Revolting subjects:  social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain, Zed Books, London, UK. Wald, H 2018, ‘Night in the woods portrayal of mental health reminded me it’s okay to not be okay’, Games Radar, 20 April, viewed 5 November 2018, www.gamesradar. com/​night-​in-​the-​woods-​portrayal-​of-​mental-​health-​reminded-​me-​that-​its-​okay-​ to-​not-​be-​okay/​. Zeisler, A 2018, ‘It’s time to embrace feminism’s anger’, Bitch Media, 22 October, viewed 1 December 2018, www.bitchmedia.org/​article/​its-​time-​embrace-​feminisms-​anger.

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6  Because we are always warring Feminism, games, and war Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson

It’s a planet of resistance It’s a whirling flame of choice Are you my comrades in persistence I swear they’ll know us by our voice Though we lay down in dusty corners We are ragged as a scar And when we rest our eyes stay open We are always off to war (‘Misty Mountain’ ©1980 Ferron; ℗1980 Nemesis Publishing)

‘Feminist war games?’

Questions about ‘feminist war games’—​whether there can be such a thing, what such games might do, be, and look like—​well illustrate what Wittgenstein characterized as ‘language gone on a holiday’. The words can be assembled as lexical items in grammatical sentences, but as conjoined concepts, they are conceptually incoherent and discursively contradictory. They simply make no sense. Questions about ‘feminist war games’ can’t be answered, because, unable to coalesce into an intelligible construct, such a line of inquiry is outflanked, so to speak, and undermined by its own terms of engagement:  these are questions that cannot be meaningfully posed. Consider its grammatically constitutive parts. ‘Feminist’ is that which is allied to and aligned with ‘Feminism’, a social movement that places women at the center of concern, with the aim of advancing the interests and wellbeing of women, as a generic class. How, then, does that concept align with the concept (or concepts) of ‘war’? how does or could war support those interests? ‘War’ is a sustained campaign of antagonism aimed at subjugating a defined enemy through coercion. How then might women be a ‘center of concern’ in such a campaign? How can women’s wellbeing be advanced through war?1 Wars have never placed women’s wellbeing at the center of concern, nor, indeed, have women ever been a ‘defined enemy’. In fact, the opposite has been and is ubiquitous.

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Because we are always warring 83 In particular women, with their children, are chattel, rewards or else ‘spoils’ of victory in an engagement over which they have no choice, and no place. They have no right of consent, and they have at many times and places been disqualified from military service.2 Women do not determine military action, nor are they agents of their own defense or protection. An intrinsic disregard of individual sovereignty characterizes war as against, for instance, fights, feuds, disagreements, and other kinds of agonistic relationships between and among sovereign individuals. As a class, women are only ever victims of war, they do not ‘make’ it. So in war, as in language, ‘woman’ is the disenfranchised other. In what sense, then, could war ever be ‘feminist’? ‘Game’ is of course the dodgiest term. At minimum, ‘game’ is something actually or potentially ludic (both voluntary and playful), and rule-​guided. Digital games in particular constitute a techno-​cultural environment in which women are already very explicitly embattled (Jenson & de Castell 2017; Cross 2017; Sarkeesian & Hudson 2016). By ‘war games’ we understand actual and possible games modelled upon activities whose aim is to conquer, through strategic violence, a defined group, regarded collectively, thus not as consenting subjects in a conflict but as dominated objects. Obviously, feminists can play war games so understood, but this is not feminist play.3 They say they have the strength of the lion the hatred of the tiger the cunning of the fox the patience of the cat the perseverance of the horse the tenacity of the jackal. They say, I will be universal vengeance. They say, I shall be the Attila of those ferocious despots, causes of our tears and our sufferings. They say, and when, fortunately, all will want to rally to me, each will be Nero, and will set fire to Rome. They say, war, mine. They say, war, forward. They say that once they have guns in their hands they will not abandon them. They say they will shake the world like lightning and thunder. (Wittig 1969, p. 172) The closest thing we have to a feminist war game, this paper argues, is to be found in the experimental literature and critical essays of Monique Wittig, one of feminism’s most radical writers and thinkers, whose work enacts, through its ‘terrorist’ mobilization of language, an explicit call to arms against a deeply patriarchal language whose ‘rules are no game’ (Wilden 1987) for women. As far as men are concerned, though, the situation is very different. In Cannibals and Kings (1977) American anthropologist Marvin Harris identified, among four theories of war’s origins, the theory of war as ‘play’ noting that, ‘especially men … are frequently brought up to believe that warfare is a zestful or ennobling activity’ (p. 52). Four decades and several wars later, this zestful and ennobling activity of warfare has become a paradigmatic narrative and design structure for generation after generation of videogames.

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84  Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson Not insignificantly, and deserving of more extensive discussion than can happen here, the defense of those mechanics, and the ‘war’ narratives accompanying them, have composed a persistent theme at the heart of the vehemently misogynist rhetoric of #Gamergate. Wargames share with war the core ‘mechanics’ of domination through dehumanization and destruction. For this reason, it won’t make a wargame ‘feminist’ to re-​position women from ‘chattel’ to leading role—​an update of the ‘add women and stir’ approach to feminist strategy. Nor are those rare, aspirationally ethical wargames, like This War of Mine (2014), ‘feminist’ because they focus on the roles of non-​combatants and evoke empathy for the position of women and others trying to survive, because feminism is an activist movement, it’s ‘more than a feeling’, and limiting feminist aspirations to feelings of empathy is a fundamentally conservative stance. It’s worth mentioning that This War of Mine is less a ‘wargame’ than a ‘war-​themed survival game’:  its goal is simply to endure, not to put an end to war. Other games, like Portal (2007), acclaimed by many reviewers as a ‘feminist game’, involve combat, even violence, but it is not a war game—​nor is there anything antithetical about feminism and aggression or feminism and violence But war is a very particular form of violence. Paradigmatic designs and mechanics of wargames (indiscriminate destruction, for instance) make no sense, as sociologist Dorothy Smith characterizes it, ‘from the standpoint of women’ (1987). From the standpoint of women, war is unaffordable and insupportable, its ‘terms of engagement’ antagonistic towards them. War calls always and everywhere for evasive manoeuvers on their part. But, from, another perspective …

We are always off to war … Three cats are caught by the tail in a trap. They each go their own way miaowing. The heavy trap jerks forward slowly behind them. They scream, they lash out, scratching the ground with their claws. Their hair is on end. One of them stands still and begins to arch its back grinding its teeth and shrieking. The two other cats strive to shake him off by tugging at the trap. But they only succeed in making him turn a somersault in the iron collar. Then all three fight each other, they fling themselves against each other scratching and biting, they wound each other’s eyes, their muzzles, they tear the hair from their necks, they can no longer stop fighting and the trap which gets between their legs only adds to their fury. (Wittig 1985, p. 21) Described by Monique Wittig in Les Guerilleres, as ‘a game the women play’, this description offers us a useful way to consider what language and its ‘games’ are like for women ‘from the standpoint of women’ (1985, p. 21). What kind of game is it that traps and infuriates to the point of ‘catastrophe’? This, ‘the game that is not one’, is neither freely engaged nor playful, and its

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Because we are always warring 85 rules work systematically and inescapably against its players. They play, not because they choose to, but because there is no other choice; they play because they must: ‘Better for you to see your guts in the sun and utter the death rattle than to live a life that anyone can appropriate’ (Wittig 1985, p. 71). What could women hope to gain from this coerced play with/​in an inescapably antagonistic battlefield whose brute reality cannot be defeated or escaped? Because, as Wittig’s story imagines and enacts, its rule and laws and operations, its grammars and its lexicons, can be refused, disarmed, prodded, and taunted and driven to madness; indeed, it is only in those arts of war that the wargames of language can be overwhelmed. Indeed, the extensive use in this paper of quotations directly from Wittig’s bellicose triumph, Les Guerilleres, with neither prosaic elucidation nor didactic explication, is very much in deference to her argument that such a literary ‘assault’ is not at all about arguing the rightness of a particular position, but is everything about working the play of language so as to instantiate the confrontation itself in and through that play: that work is itself the enactment of battle, and a realization (or not!), of its purpose, rendering ‘translation’ a treachery. As such, we contend this extensive quotation is in Wittig’s own terms, an incontrovertibly necessary deployment. Wittig’s warriors recount: [M]‌en have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have given you names, they have called you slave … They write, of their authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the origin of language itself may be considered an act of authority emanating from those who dominate … to reduce you to silence. The women say the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. (Wittig 1985, p. 65)4 In such a poisoned language, how are women’s voices to be heard? The warriors’ narrative continues: Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-​eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak. This is apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse. (Wittig 1985, p. 69) This radical refusal, this embrace of lacunae as key to remaking the language games of patriarchy, is not, however, the making of a ‘new feminist order’, a replacement of men as masters by women—​for whom language doesn’t even admit of a counter-​term, in its treacherous asymmetry of master and

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86  Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson ‘mistress’. Not a war of their own choosing, these warriors’ victory is the end of war, not mastery, not possession, not subordination. The women say, I  refuse henceforth to speak this language … I  refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-​possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world. (Wittig 1985, p. 66)

Core mechanics: the Trojan Horse Any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory. (Wittig 1992, p. 69) The Trojan Horse, as explained by Wittig above in her essay of the same name, is a particularly apt technology for women’s warring in always-​hostile territories. Wittig’s is a full-​on feminist assault upon language games—​which of course are not really games for those pre-​programmed to disadvantage. Her parable of the Trojan Horse is about literature’s power to unseat a language of domination, diminution, and silencing. For Wittig this IS war, this is the war all other wars are built with and built upon, and the weapon of choice is language itself. Explains Wittig, ‘A writer must take every word and despoil it of its everyday meaning in order to be able to work with words, on words’ (1992, p. 72). Literature affords a protective cloak for subversive designs to weaponize meaning in enemy territory:  this is the core mechanic of the Trojan Horse. Once infiltrated, its stratagems effect a violent, shocking breakthrough, like the ‘ice-​axe’ Kafka urged that literature has to be (Kafka 1924/​2016). But this kind of persuasion is not about arguing a position, an ideology, a particular point of view, all of which can be ‘gamified’ easily enough. As Wittig continues, What I am saying is that the shock of words in literature does not come out of the ideas they are supposed to promote, since what a writer deals with first is a solid body that must be manipulated in one way or another. And to come back to our horse, if one wants to build a perfect war machine, one must spare oneself the delusion that facts, actions, ideas can dictate directly to words their form. There is a detour, and the shock of words is produced by their association, their disposition, their arrangement, and also by each one of them as used separately. The detour is work, working words as anyone works a material to turn it into something else, a product. There is no way to save this detour in literature, and the detour is what literature is all about. (1992, p. 72)

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Because we are always warring 87 Wittig is very much speaking about language games when she writes that ‘Literary work cannot be influenced directly by history, politics, and ideology because these two fields belong to parallel systems of signs which function differently in the social corpus and use language in a different way’ (1992, p. 69). And this is why we say, if there is any way we can intelligibly speak of a feminist war game, Les Guerilleres is paradigmatic in a way that no number of female commanders leading charges in Call of Duty could ever, ever be.

Storyline: writing feminism beyond the feminine It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine. (Wittig 1992, p. 75)

In her critical essay ‘The Trojan Horse of Universalism’ Linda Zerilli (1990) has particularly focused on explaining the universalism implicit in Wittig’s presumptions about language’s overthrow and transformation, remarking that, unlike French theorists of difference to whose work most critical attention has been paid, (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous) who used the feminine to deconstruct the universal, Wittig employs the universal to deconstruct the feminine: ‘it is her radical and unflinching critique of a heterosexual episteme that allows Wittig to deploy the universal in ways that suggest challenging directions for feminist theory’ (Zerilli 1990, p.  149). Such a deconstructive turn has surely particular interest in times like our own where grammar, itself a kind of repository of cultural ways, an ‘anthropological grammar’ (Havelock 1989) is profoundly challenged by the refusal of speaking subjects to accept the confinements and mis-​castings of so-​called ordinary language, the game-​that-​is-​not-​one. In Les Guerilleres, the masculine pronoun is expurgated, and its systematic replacement with Elle and Elles, results, in its original French, in a complete overthrow of the male subject and all his dominions. In its compositional form, the narrative is cleft in two, pages alternating between story and a strident, insistent ‘naming of parts’—​in Les Guerilleres, naming the women warriors; in The Lesbian Body (1986) naming nerves and muscles and tendons and fluids. Patriarchy, heterosexism, The Straight Mind (1992) make of language a poison unspeakable by women, so, better the ‘death rattle’ than to live a life ‘anyone can appropriate’. The violence elicited by refusal to speak a ‘poisoned tongue’ is considerable, and should be sobering in its persistence to the present day. Wittig’s literary project, surely ironically enough, seeks only to universalize a right which defenders of the patriarchy claim for themselves. ‘I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest’,5 pronounces University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, secure in the presumption of the rights of the dominant to define the rules of language.

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88  Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson The claims of those harmed by that language are overturned with that self-​ righteous hostility6 turned against anyone who chooses their way outside normative grammars, a stance that has been enthusiastically received by a public hungry enough for a ‘Gospel of Masculinity’ (Sanneh 2018) that his proverbially seminal publication, 12 Rules for Life (Peterson 2018), hit Amazon’s top sales figures and was the top-​selling book in Canada in its year of publication. Peterson’s 12-​step primer of patriarchy has been repeatedly and very publicly endorsed by an explicitly populist brand of censorial journalism dedicated to upholding traditional gender orders (Blatchford 2016). But as Wittig’s corpus, both critical and literary, has been dedicated to making clear, the gender order entrenches gendered violence. Gender remains a battlefield, and, like it or not, we are always off to war. Forced to speak in a linguistic war game both bitter and bloody, unwilling participants are like the cats trapped by their tails whose struggles only intensify their suffering. Driven to madness as much as to fury, Les Guerilleres are warring to expunge their enemies, utterly and finally.

Win condition: the last of all wars What makes possible this war as the last? That a new language can be created, natures and histories remade, the world named anew by free people—​not just the ‘victors’—​free people who choose their way beyond languages of domination and oppression including, as one of the women sings ‘men who open their mouths to speak/​a thousand thanks to those who have understood our language/​and not having found it excessive/​have joined with us to transform the world’ (Wittig 1985, p. 80). When the war is finally won, Wittig urges, ‘take your time, consider this new species that seeks a new language’ (Wittig 1985, p.  81) one in which ‘everything has to be remade starting from basic principles … the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down … every word must be screened’ (Wittig 1985, p. 83). For that to become possible, language must be ‘played’ to and beyond its limits:  inverted, stretched, upended, in order to give voice to a ‘universal, ungendered subject’ (Zerilli 1990, p. 2). As the story goes, The women address the young men in these terms, now you understand that we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves. In this war, which is also yours, you have taken part. Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all traces of violence must disappear from this earth. … Then the men bring their weapons, the women add their own and all are buried. Far from being celebrated, the history of this violence must disappear: ‘… let here be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known, the last possible war in history’. (Wittig 1985, p. 79)

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Because we are always warring 89 For Wittig’s warriors, there is no ‘winning’ this war, there is only ending war altogether and for all time. And where there is no war, there can be no war games, feminist or otherwise.

Notes 1 This small point matters very much when an American president declares that ‘all options are on the table’ and that his is the ‘largest button’. 2 In the Canadian forces, for example, those few women who achieve officer status are concentrated in personnel and nursing, not leading an operational unit. https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Gender_​discrimination_​in_​the_​Canadian_​ Military. 3 This is certainly not to suggest that playing wargames so understood will erode or undermine the feminism of its players, a kind of ‘monkey see/​monkey do’ theory judging games by their presumed impacts or ‘effects’ on players. Deeper questions are being asked about the paradoxical pleasures of 3D videogame play, grappling more critically with the psychology and politics of ‘violent play’. 4 As Zerilli explains, for post-​structural feminism, ‘a critical strategy that would seek fuller or equal representation for women in the dialogical structures of language and politics must founder on the very phallogo-​centrism of representation itself ’ (1990, p.  147). This critique, however, in striking universalism from the feminist agenda, has thereby abandoned its best politics, its most powerful enunciations, its most fruitful trajectories towards a universalism that refuses to suppress, to silence or to (dis)possess. Zerilli further argues that feminist refutations of ‘the enforcement of sex in language’ that takes from women the authority to speak has beaten an inadvertent retreat into a mimetic gender order that celebrates a ‘feminine’ which never has, and never will, do the political work that needs doing (1990, p.  148). Gender, femininity, ‘womanhood’ has never worked in women’s favor, and it has impeded feminism from working in anyone else’s, either. Argues Zerilli, such ‘feminist theories of difference pose difficult questions for feminist theory as a political theory, as a theory of citizenship, and as a theory of counterpublics organized around collective speaking subjects’ (1990, p. 148). 5 Jordan Peterson, Public Lecture, University of Toronto, ‘Free Speech, Political Correctness, and Bill C-​16’, 19 November 2016. 6 Peterson’s strident public opposition to Canada’s Bill C-​16, prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity or expression, is based on ‘freedom of speech’, where freedom to maintain the patriarchal language game Trumps the rights of those harmed by it.

References Blatchford, C 2016, ‘Embattled professor a warrior for common sense and plain speech’, National Post, 21 October, https://​nationalpost.com/​opinion/​ christie-​blatchford-​embattled-​u-​of-​t-​professor-​a-​warrior-​for-​common-​sense. Cross, K 2017, ‘Press F to revolt’, in YB Kafai, GT Richard, & BM Tynes (eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat:  intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming, ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 23–​34.

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90  Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson Ferron, ‘Misty Mountain’ (1980), on Testimony, Lucy Records, Manufactured and distributed by Redwood Records, Oakland, CA, Written and performed by Ferron. Harris, M, 1977/​1991, Cannibals and kings, Vintage Books, New York, NY. Havelock, E 1989, ‘Instruction of preliterate cultures’, in S de Castell, A Luke, & C Luke (eds.), Language, authority and criticism, Falmer Press, London, UK, pp. 223–​232. Jenson, J & de Castell S 2017, ‘Gamer-​hate and the “problem” of women’, in YB Kafai, GT Richard, & BM Tynes (eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat:  intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming, ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 186–​199. Kafka, F 1924/​2016, Letters to friends, family and editors, trans. R Winston, Schocken Books, New York, NY. Peterson, J 2016, ‘Free speech, political correctness and Bill C-​16’, lecture, viewed 4 October 2019. Peterson, J 2018, 12 rules for life:  an antidote to chaos, Penguin Random House, New York, NY. Portal 2007, Valve Corporation, PC. Sanneh, K 2018, ‘Jordan Peterson’s gospel of masculinity’, New Yorker, 5 March, www. newyorker.com/​magazine/​2018/​03/​05/​jordan-​petersons-​gospel-​of-​masculinity. Sarkeesian, A & Hudson L 2016, ‘The phenomenon of Gamergate’, in JB Hepler (ed.), Women in game development: breaking the glass level-​cap. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, pp. 207–​212. Smith, D 1987, The everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology, Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA. This War of Mine 2014, 11 Bit Studios, PC. Wilden, A 1987, Man and woman, war and peace, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, UK. Wittig, M 1969/​1985, Les guerilleres, trans. D Le Vay, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Wittig, M 1975/​1986, The lesbian body, trans. D Le Vey, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Wittig, M 1992, The straight mind and other essays, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Zerilli, L 1990, ‘The Trojan Horse of universalism: language as a “war machine” in the writings of Monique Wittig’, Social Text, no. 25/​26, pp. 146–​170.

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7  Exploring agency and female player–​character relationships in Life Is Strange What choice do I have? Andrea Luc Life Is Strange in feminist war The same thought runs through my mind every time a male co-​worker speaks over top of me or dismisses my comment; every time I feel unwelcome eyes on my body; every time I apologize for something completely benign—​‘What was your fault in this? Why can’t you stand up for yourself ? You are weak’. The only retreat I’ve found from these noxious mantras I tell myself is when I’m given a space to redeem my inaction through meaningful choices: when I  game. A  game that has provided me this space for a few playthroughs is Dontnod Entertainment’s 2015 title, Life Is Strange (LIS) and I had to make impossible choices as Max Caulfield—​a teenage girl who can manipulate time at will. By engaging with a medium where I was forced to act decisively within the game’s world, I felt as if I were somehow redeeming myself from times when I  didn’t stand up for myself, or for others. When playing LIS, every battle and every victory felt monumental because of the choices I made, creating an experience that was deeply personal and cathartic. This experience is important in developing a reflexive and reactive space to make consequential choices in a ‘feminist war’. I think of feminist wars as the everyday onslaught of living in a culture that seeks to undermine and violate cis-​women, trans, and non-​binary identities. Its battleground can manifest in our workplaces, our schools, our homes, the media we consume—​any space, physical or virtual, where we have to fight for our voices to be heard and our presence to be treated as the default. I often fight with myself over my frequent (non)reaction in situations that I feel reflect a feminist war. I’m hesitant to engage in combat, afraid that I will be emotionally annihilated by a barrage of misogyny or racial slurs. My only respite comes when I pick up my controller and enter a beautifully rendered space that offers mental triage—​a time to assess, reflect, and react. Videogames comprise the sum of their parts—​level design, sound design, writing, graphics, mechanics, and so much more—​that are interpreted through the positionality of each player. I recognize that because of this, I can only offer my own experience as a cis-​Asian Canadian woman, while playing LIS in exploring what I  interpret ‘feminist war games’ to mean. In writing this chapter, I’m offering insight into how my personal narrative can impact how

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92  Andrea Luc and why I play—​I will not provide a unifying definition of what ‘feminist war games’ may be. This chapter will not attempt to define what constitutes a ‘feminist war’ game, as I am wary of reducing an entire experience into a singular genre. Naomi Clark writes that ‘reducing a game to its formal elements, whatever the rationale … seems akin to insisting that invertebrates, as a class, must primarily be understood by examining and evaluating their internal bone structure’ (2017, p.  8). Inspired by participating in the Feminist War game jam—​a jam which took place over a weekend in mid-​March at OCAD University—​this chapter will instead serve as a reflection on how playing games can be an active operation of self-​reconnaissance—​they are a space to act self-​reflexively and reconcile personal battle scars inflicted on us and by us because of our identities. Specifically, this chapter will examine the choices offered to players in LIS and how player positionality can influence the relationship between self and a player’s avatar. Using Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s concept of recurrent attractors (2015), I argue that my relationship to the game’s protagonist provided a space to enact and reclaim agency that is essential to fighting feminist wars. By offering a reflection of my LIS playthrough, this chapter will focus on one major narrative choice presented to the player and my reaction to this scenario:  to act as a bystander or intervene when Max witnesses a female classmate being harassed by a campus security guard. In analyzing this choice, my hope is that we will gain a better understanding of how we often bring our own histories into what we play and how play can be both empowering and reflexive.

A conversation on player–​avatar relationships While at times fantastical, our agency in these polygonal environments allow us to emotionally and cognitively feel as if what we are subjected to in-​game is also what our experiences would be in the flesh. There is no distinction between real and virtual. We react to the narratives, spaces, and characters based on our own subjectivities. In doing so, play becomes intensely personal. Of interest is how as players, we are inherently negotiating our relationship to the player-​character—​is the avatar I’m playing a reflection of myself ? Or is the avatar enacting her own agency through me? Some quantitative methodologies have been used by game scholars to explore this further, specifically to examine player motivation and player representation to their on-​screen avatar (Banks & Bowman 2016; Vandenbosch et al. 2017; Yee et al. 2009). Underlying this area of research is the notion that the avatar is an external projection of ourselves—​that the avatar is a representative vehicle to explore our physicality or sociality. It’s impossible to divorce the player from their avatar—​they exist together symbiotically. However, in order to understand the nuances of how player–​avatar relationships are experienced and interpreted, this chapter will focus on a framework that relies on qualitative methodologies which are further supported by personal writings on this topic.

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Agency and female player–character relations 93 Play is inevitably shaped by our intersectional identities, and nowhere is this more evident than within independent game development. Goldberg and Larsson note: Recently, a new generation of independent video game designers have begun to explore how games can be used for social and political activism and commentary. Topics such as sexism, race, politics, and class injustice are today being grappled with to an extent that has previous been absent from the form. (2015, p. 9) While it’s significant that game designers and developers are striving to make the medium more inclusive—​a departure from the normative hegemonic masculinities that aim to gatekeep game development and play (Gray 2014)—​ ciswomen, women of color, trans, and non-​binary identities continue to face misogyny, bigotry, transphobia, and homophobia in these spaces (Quinn 2017; Massanari 2015; Vossen 2018). Gaming culture has always been a warzone for all women involved in its development and in its participation. Despite this, we continue to fight by playing, creating, and occupying virtual and physical gaming spaces. When we game, the act is in itself a form of resistance to the normative narrative of who is a ‘gamer’. Play becomes intensely meaningful then in this context, particularly when interacting with a game that is focused around diverse and inclusive perspectives. Indie game developer Merritt Kopas touches on this idea and offers a personal reflection into their experience playing Gone Home (2013)—​a game ‘about space and absence and leaving and most obviously it’s about a love relationship between girls’ (Kopas 2017, p. 145). Kopas writes: I know I’m bringing a lot of my own stuff to this game. I  know my experience of it is being shaped by my history, even more because the player character is a kind of cipher with no real spatial storytelling to indicate much of the substance about her relationships to any of the other characters in the game. I know all that, and honestly? I don’t really fucking care, because this is a game that feels like it was made for me, and that’s rare … especially in a medium that caters overwhelmingly to straight boys. (2017, p. 147) It’s inevitable that the player will always bring their personal histories into how they experience a game—​and it’s significant that more non-​heteronormative stories are now told through this medium. At a time when marginalized voices are creating personal narratives through videogames, feminist wars are being fought by invading this space. What Kopas is so powerfully articulating is the oscillation between the player-​character and the player—​the ability to not only (re)experience your subjectivities and identity with the avatar, but also

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94  Andrea Luc the avatar’s ability to become a part of those very things. This is essential to how videogames offer players—​specifically women and non-​binary players—​ a space to reflect on our own positional agency and the choices we make.

Attracted to ourselves: framing the reflection through recurrent attractors I’d like to offer a personal reflection on my affective relationship with this oscillation, however, before I begin, it’s important that I frame this chapter through Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s work on recurrent attractors (2015). Employing a microethnography, Taylor, Kampe, and Bell identified four attractors—​ ‘a force that explains the tendencies on observed processes to move toward predictable states’ existing to ‘empower or constrain a way of interpreting a situation’ (2015, p.  8)—​when analyzing two participants’ play through Telltale Game’s The Walking Dead (TWD) (2012). TWD is a choice-​driven game where players make branching dialogue and narrative decisions to drive the game forward (which is a very similar mechanic to that in LIS, as will be discussed further). By observing participants process their choices and navigate which option would lead to their desired outcome, Taylor, Kampe, and Bell (2015) found that four consistent forces that attracted participants to their decisions were: simulated, lived, conventional, and situated attractors. Due to the scope of this chapter, I will only focus on simulated and lived attractors. A simulated attractor occurs when ‘players act in response to or justify actions with reference to diegetic elements of the game world’ (Taylor et al. 2015, p. 9). A simulated attractor could be ‘the argument made by a character for a specific course of action, or visual cues taken to indicate weakness in a monster’—​its defining trait being that it is an event caused by the game’s systems such as mechanics, user interface, text, or visual and audible cues (2015, p.  9). The authors recognize that simulated attractors are often intertwined with lived attractors—​‘understandings of life outside of the diegetic gameworld … this force comes from behaviors that have been observed or are believed to exist in players’ everyday (and/​or) past experiences’ (2015, p. 9). In short, lived attractors are decisions made based on what the player feels would be the ‘right’ thing to do in real life. This is influenced by their own lived experiences, comparing choices made in their past or present and knowledge gleaned from making them. It’s significant to note that Taylor, Kampe, and Bell acknowledge that these factors do not act in isolation. These attractors are fluid and often interact with each other. I’m interested in exploring these two attractors in the context of my playthrough of LIS to reflect on how my positionality and personal history influenced the choices I made. This framework provides the language needed to better understand how games can give us a space to practice and reflect on our decisiveness through a resonant player-​character. It’s a way for me to take a step back and understand how I choose to react in feminist war, within a medium where non-​reaction is not a choice—​a way for me to both distance

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Agency and female player–character relations 95 and observe an ongoing internal conflict I have with navigating my identity. This chapter is a mission of self-​reconnaissance: who am I when I play? And how does this help shape who I am when I stop?

A personal minefield Feminist wars are fought in any space we occupy—​they are at times, inescapable, at least for me. I stand only at 5′5″, 120-​something pounds. I worry that my body couldn’t shield me from unwanted confrontations, something I’ve been made aware of my entire life. And so, when something does inevitably happen—​while walking alone in the evening or waiting at the bus stop on my own—​I freeze. I say nothing. I run through every possible consequence of me standing up for myself and often realize it’s not worth it. Sometimes I wish I’d find courage and do something. It was autumn when I took the subway from my basement apartment to the university’s campus. Autumn in southern Ontario is much milder than what I  was used to in Muskoka—​a municipality two hours north from Toronto—​and I made the choice not to wear a jacket over my polka-​dotted, long-​sleeved blouse. Maybe if I had worn a jacket that day, I’d feel a bit safer traversing this city now. When I stepped onto the subway, I shuffled towards the middle of the train to stand between two poles. I’ve never liked sitting on the train. I like knowing that if anything were to ever happen, I could run or relocate myself. In hindsight, this was a thoughtful decision. Once I settled in my spot and the train lurched forward, I heard a man yell in my direction. ‘Hey, polka dots!’ I turned to look around and saw a man staring right at me. ‘It’s true what they say about Asian women: you’ve got a flat ass!’ I froze and desperately hoped that someone would help me call him out. But everyone remained silent, eyes fixed on the subway ads. Feeling unsafe, alone, and angry I started to walk in the opposite direction towards the next connected train. I paused for a moment to weigh my options, playing out each branching path in what felt like a few minutes: I could hit the safety strip to call an officer though that would require me wading through everyone standing near one; or I could walk away. I chose the latter and exited the train at the next stop. Non-​reactive. I think about what would’ve happened if I had stood my ground and said something. I think about the unthinkable—​what if he had physically attacked me? I forgive myself for reacting the way I did: the situation could’ve escalated quickly and I  removed myself from something potentially dangerous. But then I feel angry at how it turned out—​shouldn’t I feel empowered to speak up for myself ? How has this man normalized his bigotry and misogyny? I  cycle through these thoughts endlessly, accepting that this harassment is nothing new and is a part of living as a visible woman. This experience and countless others like it invade my thoughts more than I’d like. A large part of my turmoil is within my agency or lack thereof. There are contexts that impose constraints on my person—​a crowded subway, the presence of a male

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96  Andrea Luc authority—​and as a result, I often choose not to act. It seems odd then, that I’d find comfort in enacting my agency in another constrained space, a space arguably dictated by systems and pre-​determined rules—​videogames.

Playing Life Is Strange Games provide players a space that encourages trial and error—​a space to fail and start over, to rewind and begin again. It’s through this process that I find relief from stressors I face in my everyday and is what attracted me most to LIS. The game centers around player-​character Max Caulfield:  a teenager attending Blackwell Academy, a prestigious arts high school in the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. Max is passionate about photography, taking polaroid pictures as she explores the town. Arcadia Bay is a sentimental place for Max. She spent a few years of her childhood living in Arcadia Bay and befriending Chloe, a close friend who she lost touch with after moving away. Max is thoughtful but unsure of herself. Intelligent, empathetic, and deeply self deprecating. And Max has an ability that most people desperately wish for: the ability to rewind time at will. Max discovers this ability when witnessing one of her classmates, Nathan Prescott—​who comes from a wealthy and privileged family—​shoot Chloe in the stomach after arguing about a drug deal. Upon observing this, Max ‘reached out for some dumb reason, as if [she] could stop the bullet’ (2015). Max then experiences a dream-​like prophecy of a tornado destroying Arcadia Bay, and subsequently wakes up in the photography class she attended only moments earlier. Max and the player are afforded the ability to rewind and restart events from the mundane to something life altering, like someone’s death. With the looming threat of Arcadia Bay’s destruction, the player is asked to make impossible choices. LIS ultimately forces the player to choose if Max should sacrifice Arcadia Bay or Chloe, whose death would restore order to the natural state of things.

Making choices in Life Is Strange Where do you begin deciding whether to save your best friend or your town? The choices we’re asked to make through Max are designed to evoke moral and affective responses from us, the players. For the purposes of this section, I’ll focus on my process making one specific choice in LIS—​to intervene in a situation where a depressed female classmate, Kate Marsh, is harassed by the school’s security guard and ex-​war veteran, David Madsen. In weighing the consequences of the choices presented to me, I cycled through two recurrent attractors: the living and the simulated. Drawing from my own experiences and identity, I’ll explore how I landed on the choice I made—​the choice to intervene and stand up for Kate despite facing off against an authoritative

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Agency and female player–character relations 97 male figure. My affective response to this specific scenario was a way for me to experience what it’s like to fight, not flee, in a safe and exploratory medium. After wandering the grounds of Blackwell Academy—​a few moments after Max discovered her time-​ traveling abilities—​ the game gave me an objective:  head back to Max’s dorm and grab a flash drive for her friend. When I  retrieved the USB and exited the dorm, I  came across an incident that prompted me to act. I witnessed David Madsen harassing Kate Marsh, someone Max considers a close friend. The scene plays out like this: David Madsen dressed in his security uniform, walks towards Kate as she’s trying to back away. He says, ‘so don’t think I’m blind. I  see everything here at Blackwell. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ as he reaches out to shove Kate on the shoulder. Kate, voice quavering, responds with ‘no and leave me alone’ (2015). Then the game pauses, and two choices appear on screen: ‘Take a Photo’ and ‘Intervene’. My first reaction was to walk through the consequences of both choices. My thinking went something like this—​if I  take a photo, at least the incident will be documented. And maybe I’ll be able to use the photographic proof somewhere else in the game. But if I act as a bystander, what message does that send to Kate? Kate, who just got bullied in class for a viral slut-​ shaming video? Kate, who started drawing nooses on her notepad in class and seems visibly depressed? If I intervene, at least she’ll know she has someone who’s supporting her. If I intervene however, I also run the risk of physically endangering us both. These were familiar thoughts to me. Weighing the cost of all the choices presented to me, paralyzed for a moment while I played out the worst of both possibilities. My lived experience told me to take the photo. My instinct told me it’s better for us both to be safe. I  wouldn’t personally wish to face off with a male security guard, someone who is much larger than I am. I chose to remove myself when I was harassed on the subway because I was afraid of what physical consequences might transpire—​isn’t this a similar situation? We just saw him physically shove Kate, who knows how this might escalate? I acted on the first option: ‘Take a Photo’, based solely on my subjectivities, my positioning—​the ‘lived’ attractor. After making my choice a cutscene played out where David, still encroaching on Kate’s space says to her ‘you can’t fool me. I know everything about this school. I cover the waterfront, so you better decide what side you’re on’. Kate continues to plead, ‘Please leave me alone’ and David leaves. Kate turns around to see Max and she says, ‘hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks for nothing Max’ (2015). Kate’s dialogue cut into me. In a feminist war, where Kate was literally facing off a returned war veteran, I chose to do nothing. She made it clear that my inaction let her down, that it made her feel even more alienated. Kate’s disappointment and anger towards Max, and by extension me, were akin to the self-​loathing I  inflict upon myself. Moments that I’ve

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98  Andrea Luc mulled over in my mind, the times I’ve let myself down by not standing up for myself more assertively—​it was far too familiar. Regretting my indecision, Max reminded me that she ‘could rewind and try something different’ (2015) after Kate expressed her frustration with me: a simulated attractor. Based on Max’s in-​game monologue, it was then that I didn’t hesitate to act—​I fervently took advantage of the rewind mechanic. I  pulled the controller trigger to rewind, now knowing the consequences of my first choice. This time, I’d take a stand. I’d put up a fight alongside Kate. We’d face whatever consequences came from intervening, but at least she wouldn’t feel alone. When you make the choice to intervene, Max shouts, ‘Hey why don’t you leave her alone?’ Defensive, David responds with ‘Excuse us, this is official campus business’ and Max retorts, ‘Excuse me, you shouldn’t be yelling at students. Or bullying them’. As the exchange continues, David says to Max that ‘you’re part of the problem, missy. I  will remember this conversation’, which seems threatening in tone. Despite this, Kate expresses her gratitude at having us step in, ‘Oh Max, that was great. I  think you scared him for once. I  have to go but thank you. It means a lot’ (2015). This moment left a lasting affective impression on me—​I was able to go back to a time where I made a mistake, where I wish things had gone differently, and with conviction, committed to intervening. On a personal level, it resonated with times where I’ve played the role of bystander and also as a casualty of feminist warfare. The few unfortunate, memorable moments where I’d been cornered by a cis-​male figure; where I was harassed simply for being who I am in a public space; where I was touched when I didn’t want to be. This narrative event left me feeling empowered and reminded me of my agency in situations where I feel unsure and helpless—​ that there’s always something I can do. It gave me a space to enact and explore my agency as not only Max, but also for myself. This game mechanic forces players to reflect on their own personal histories and provides a safe space to deliberate decisions that we make. Though we might not be able to rewind time in our ‘real’ lives, being able to do so in a simulated environment was a cathartic and reflexive experience.

Conclusions on recurrent attractors and implications on play When I chose to act as a bystander in the incident with Kate, my choice left me feeling deeply unsettled. This gameplay moment became a self-​reflexive exercise—​ it empowered me to make choices that are within my agency, it reminded me that I  have agency. By examining how lived and simulated attractors influenced my choice-​making process, it’s clear that my personal history became naturally entangled with my player-​character, Max. I weaved my own lived experiences into reasoning which decision to make and unmake. My experiences aligned with Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s findings on recurrent attractors (2015)—​I found my thoughts oscillating between my experiences

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Agency and female player–character relations 99 and the experiences of the characters in game, a force between the lived and the simulated. In exploring how I  committed to a decision that left me at peace, it’s evident that I could never have disregarded my lived experience as a woman. Playing through LIS was, for me, a mission of self-​reconnaissance—​a mission that reminded me of who I am and the choices I’m capable of making when fighting the everyday feminist war. My agency within these systems is defined by how I choose to interact with its affordances, and those decisions are constantly being negotiated with myself, my own values, my own beliefs. Finding solace and reflection in a medium that continues to be a hostile space for all women is especially empowering—​when I  game, this experience is my experience. When I  game, everything that has made me who I  am—​my trauma, my regrets, my sociality, and so much—​is presented in the choices I make. In reclaiming and actively practicing my agency, I’m arming myself for the next violation of my identity. Videogames can give us a chance to resist, redeem, and reclaim who we are as historically marginalized players. Though we will continue to fight feminist wars in our everyday, games can provide us respite from daily assaults—​a place to make mistakes and undo them; a place to unapologetically react and interact; and a place to make meaningful and personal choices.

References Banks, J & Bowman, ND 2016, ‘Avatars are (sometimes) people too:  linguistic indicators of parasocial and social ties in player–​avatar relationships’, New Media & Society, doi.org/​10.1177/​1461444814554898. Clark, N 2017, ‘What is queerness in games, anyway?’, in B Ruberg & A Shaw (eds.), Queer game studies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 3–​14. Goldberg, D & Larsson, L 2015, The state of play: creators and critics on video game culture, Penguin Random House, New York, NY. Gone Home 2013, The Fullbright Company, PC. Gray, K 2014, Race, gender, and deviance in Xbox Live, Anderson Publishing, Waltham, MA. Kopas, M 2017, ‘On Gone Home’, in B Ruberg & A Shaw (eds.), Queer game studies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 145–​150. Life is Strange 2015, Square Enix, PS4. Massanari, A 2015, ‘Gamergate and the fappening: how Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’, New Media & Society, doi:10.1177/​ 1461444815608807. Quinn, Z 2017, Crash override, Hachette, New York, NY. Taylor, N, Kampe, C, & Bell, K 2015, ‘Me and Lee:  identification and the play of attraction in The Walking Dead’, The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 15, no. 1, https://​gamestudies.org/​1501/​articles/​taylor. Vandenbosch, L, Driesmans, K, Trekels, J, & Eggermont, S 2017, ‘Sexualized video game avatars and self-​objectification in adolescents:  the role of gender congruency and activation frequency’, Media Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, doi.org/​10.1080/​ 15213269.2016.1142380.

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100  Andrea Luc Vossen, E 2018, ‘On the cultural inaccessibility of gaming:  invading, creating, and reclaiming the cultural clubhouse’, PhD dissertation, UWSpace, Waterloo’s Institutional Repository, viewed 25 April 2019, https://​uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/​bitstream/​handle/​10012/​13649/​Vossen_​Emma.pdf. The Walking Dead 2012, Telltale Games, PS3. Yee, N, Bailenson, JN, & Ducheneaut, N 2009, ‘The Proteus effect:  implications of transformed digital self-​ representation on online and offline behavior’, Communications Research, doi.org/​10.1177/​0093650208330254.

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8  ‘What is a feminist war game?’ A game jam reflection Sarah Stang

In 2017 I was invited to participate in a game jam held at OCAD University in Toronto and organized by Jon Saklofske, Emma Westecott, and Emily Flynn-​ Jones in affiliation with ReFiguring Innovation in Games (ReFiG), a feminist game studies collaborative research project. The jam’s theme was ‘feminist war games?’ The question mark at the end is an important focal point, as the question which introduced this proposed game jam was ‘can a feminist war game exist?’ The following question was, naturally, ‘if so, what would it look like?’ This query helped us as game makers, or ‘jammers’, to think through the kind of game we wanted to make and within what context we wanted it to fit. The aim of the game jam was to use the practice of game-​making as a tool to facilitate productive conversations about the connections between feminism and war. Importantly, the jam was also conducted in a feminist space with feminist principles in mind, prioritizing self-​care, collaboration, kindness, and generosity. In this chapter, which is part game jam post-​mortem and part academic reflection, I  discuss what a feminist approach to war might look like, the game we made to explore the topic, and why it is important to provide feminist spaces, not just feminist themes. I  begin by looking at the historical connections between gaming and warfare, and elaborating on my search for inspiration in both the mainstream entertainment industry and real-​world history. Next, I discuss the theoretical basis of the game we ended up making, particularly regarding its critique of mainstream media’s tendency to ‘other’ certain groups of people and foster an ‘us-​versus-​them’ mentality. The chapter moves into a look at the game itself and a reflection on my own experience during the game jam. Finally, I end with a discussion of the importance of feminist spaces and themes in game production given that, in many ways, feminist players, scholars, critics, and developers are already fighting a ‘war’ over the diversification of the medium and its culture.

War games The topic of feminism and war is especially interesting for the field of game studies, as video games, and computers in general, trace their technological

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102  Sarah Stang roots back to military research (Huntemann & Payne 2009). Perhaps because of this connection, or perhaps simply due to the centrality of war and war narratives in human society, countless video games have been made about war and conquest. In these games, such as the Call of Duty series (2003–​2017), the Gears of War series (2006–​2016), the Medal of Honor series (1999–​2007), the Wolfenstein series (1992–​2015), the Battlefield series (2002–​2009), or the Brothers in Arms series (2005–​2010), to name only a few, the player is generally invited into the role of soldier, pilot, or god-​like commander. Whether realistically-​rendered or more abstractly portrayed, gameplay is almost always extremely violent and the protagonist is almost always male. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that war has historically been considered a masculine pastime (Hartsock 1989). There are, of course, many role-​playing games (RPGs) which involve war, yet would not necessarily be called ‘war games’, and in many of these the players can choose the gender of their character. Some popular examples include Skyrim (2011), which involves a civil war; the Mass Effect trilogy (2007–​2012), which features a spaceship commander waging war against hostile synthetic alien beings; or the Massively Multiplayer Online RPG World of Warcraft (2004–​ongoing), which centralizes an ongoing conflict between the forces of the Horde and those of the Alliance. However, regardless of the potential to play as a female character, these games still glorify warfare and centralize violent gameplay. As I will discuss, this is a common problem when trying to find examples of ‘feminist’ approaches to war in mainstream media.

What is a feminist war? In thinking about what a feminist war game could look like, I  envisioned empowered cinematic women soldiers, like Meg Ryan’s Army Captain Karen Emma Walden in Courage Under Fire (1996), Demi Moore’s Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil from G.I. Jane (1997), or Emily Blunt’s Sergeant Rita Rose Vrataski from Edge of Tomorrow (2014). I also thought of women warriors from more fictional cinematic universes, such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from Alien (1979), Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill (2003), Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow from The Avengers (2012), or Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). However, every single one of these films was directed by a man, and each woman soldier or warrior is either working within or molded by patriarchal ideals of conflict, including oppression, conquest, and vengeance. Furiosa might have come the closest to a feminist woman warrior, and Wonder Woman (2017) may have provided an even better example, though the film was unfortunately released after the jam was over. Ultimately, while these characters are progressive in some ways, the films they star in still glorify violence as a spectacle for entertainment. In this sense, simply presenting a ‘strong female protagonist’ is not really a feminist act if that protagonist and her story reinforce hegemonic patriarchal ideology (for more on the ‘strong female protagonist’ trope in media, see Chocano 2011). Indeed, simply replacing male soldiers and warriors with female ones

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‘What is a feminist war game?’ 103 without questioning or challenging the extreme violence these characters enact or the patriarchal power structures that facilitate their agency will only continue to serve those power structures. As Luce Irigaray (1985, p. 81) has argued, if feminists ‘aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order’. That phallocratic order requires ‘a definition of power of the masculine type’, which we must reject if we are to subvert patriarchal ideology (1985, p. 81). Disappointed with what Hollywood could offer me, I  turned to history for inspiration. I  researched real examples of women revolutionaries, guerilla soldiers, and usurpers, but I was still not satisfied. Women like Joan of Arc and Hua Mulan are certainly inspiring, though donning men’s armor and working within the patriarchal norms of violent warfare is not what I would call ‘feminist’. Again, as Irigaray pointed out, if we are continuing to work within existing patriarchal power structures, rather than challenging the system itself, then our project is not feminist (or, perhaps, not feminist enough). I also thought of renowned women monarchs, like Catherine the Great, who revitalized Russia and presided over its Enlightenment. However, as reformist and progressive as she was, becoming the dictatorial leader of a patriarchal governing system was, again, not very ‘feminist’. In the end, it became clear that a feminist stance on war must be a critical one that challenges patriarchal structures and ideology rather than just replacing male soldiers and leaders with female ones. A feminist war game therefore cannot glorify war, no matter how righteous the cause seems to be. I  was inspired by organized feminist anti-​war movements that waged ‘war’ against war itself, especially during the anti-​Vietnam War efforts of the 1960s and 1970s (Frazier 2017). Although there was hardly a unified feminist anti-​war front, much of the rhetoric espoused by these movements focused on women, children, and minoritized groups (sexual, racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and so on) as those most often victimized, displaced, and marginalized by war. There are also many examples of anti-​war films which dramatize the horrors of war by centralizing the perspectives of its victims or by highlighting the trauma experienced by soldiers, such as Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), or Full Metal Jacket (1987). However, there are very few games which do so—​Darfur Is Dying (2006) is one example, and This War of Mine (2014) is another. In Darfur Is Dying, the player-​character is a member of a Darfuri family that has been displaced by the ongoing conflict. In the first part of the game, the player must gather water from a nearby well to bring back to their camp while dodging, hiding from, and avoiding patrolling soldiers of the Janjaweed militia. If the player is unsuccessful at avoiding capture, the game informs them of their character’s fate and they have to select another member of the family to play as and try again. If the player successfully carries water back to their camp, the game switches into a management mode in which the player must grow crops using the water gathered in the first part of the game. Every

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104  Sarah Stang time the water runs out, the player must return to the water fetching part, and the overall goal is to keep the camp running for seven days. This War of Mine, based on the 1992–​1996 Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, also focuses on the civilian experience during wartime. The game is about survival, as the player must strategically manage a group of survivors in a makeshift shelter, keeping them alive until a ceasefire is declared. Both games have been applauded for their alternative take on war-​inspired gaming and their serious and respectful treatment of the topic. Compared to the war-​based games mentioned earlier, which glorify the strategy and violence of war and battle, these games present heavy critiques of war by centralizing the perspectives of its civilian victims and survivors.

Our game’s theoretical underpinnings Both Darfur Is Dying and This War of Mine provided some meaningful inspiration for our game, but since I  am a privileged middle-​class white woman living in Canada, I did not feel that I should make a game about the experiences of those who have been victimized and displaced by war. This awareness of my own positionality spurred me to instead make a game set in a democratic country whose leaders have declared war. In this way, I could tell a story about war that addresses complicity, responsibility, and the dangers of both apathy and patriotism. It would also underscore the dangers of ‘othering’, a dehumanizing or devaluing logic which shapes Western thought and identity construction by presenting an ‘us-​versus-​them’ mentality usually tied to differences of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, religion, and economics, among other things (Said 1978, 1994; de Beauvoir 1949). Mass media like film, television, and games are particularly effective at disseminating messages that reinforce this oppositional mentality because, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1997, p. 3) has observed: [W]‌e give things [and people] meaning by how we represent them—​the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place upon them. Representation is therefore an ‘essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture’ (Hall 1997, p. 15). The meaning transmitted through mediated representation gives individuals a sense of their own identities, the groups with whom they belong, and, consequently, how they should relate to others. Hall has noted that those meanings also regulate and organize our conduct and practices—​they help to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social life is ordered and governed. They are also, therefore, what those who wish to control and influence a society’s conduct seek to structure and shape—​hence the history of

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‘What is a feminist war game?’ 105 government-​led propaganda campaigns that used entertainment media to promote wartime patriotism and glorify the idea of waging war against a perceived Other (Cull et al. 2003). Philosopher Michel Foucault (1976) argued that the process of othering involves the creation and maintenance of knowledge of the Other through imaginary representations of that Other. Those representations, which include discourse, images, texts, and so on, exist in service to structures of power and domination. While Foucault’s work was not focused on ‘representations’ in the way Hall and other media scholars use the term (see Hall 1997, p. 42), his concern for discourses and discursive formations, knowledge and power, and the formulation of the subject is shared by media scholars interested in uncovering the ways in which media relates to all three of those topics. Indeed, a representation is a kind of discourse—​a way to produce and frame meaning and knowledge about a particular topic (Hall 1997, p. 44). The way in which knowledge about a certain topic is produced and framed is intrinsically tied to power and control over that topic and the meanings related to it. The way we frame, discuss, and imagine (or represent) a specific group in our discourses—​in other words, the way we attempt to produce and claim knowledge over that group—​shapes how that group is perceived and treated. Our discourses around and representations of a group of people—​which constitute our claims of ‘knowledge’ of that group—​therefore give us a kind of power over that group and its place in society. Media representation can therefore be understood as a tool of discursive power and although the representation or the meaning behind it might be symbolic, it has real repercussions. The power of mediated representation is therefore an important consideration when discussing how media glorify war against a perceived enemy Other and brainstorming ideas about how that process might be subverted by an overtly feminist war game.

Invasion! The game With the power of discourse and media representation in mind, I pitched this idea to my team members on the first day of the game jam: a game in which the player can control various ‘ordinary’ people in a patriotic country which has recently declared war on another country. The game would consist of a series of vignettes that exemplify the ways in which people in various positions can influence global conflict. Happily, my team members liked my idea, though they decided to wage war against aliens, instead of a real country, to avoid any kind of potentially offensive description of ‘the enemy’. To make it topical, we also agreed that our president was a Trump doppelgänger, though he never makes an actual appearance in the game. While writing the dialogue for the game, we agreed that it was important to offer the player choices: if they want to foster fear and hostility towards the alien Others, then they were free to do so. In fact, we designed the game so that war was inevitable by default, since

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106  Sarah Stang the gameworld was a mirror of our own current global political situation, in which populism, racism, and xenophobia seem to be the norm. If the player works hard enough, however, war can be avoided and the ending can be a happy—​or at least peaceful—​one. The emphasis on player choice highlights the power that individuals have when it comes to influencing cultural discourses. To demonstrate this, we offered the player various scenarios to enact, which were all full of choices and consequences (Fig.  1). For example, the player could become a parent talking to their child, answering questions about the war (Fig. 2). Depending on how the player chooses to answer these questions, the child can be influenced into a pro-​or anti-​war position (Fig. 3). Another example could be a member of the government or military conversing with others in influential positions (Fig. 4); again, depending on player choices, the mood could sway from pro-​to anti-​war (Fig. 5). A third example sees the player as the host of a televised discussion in which panelists give their opinions on the war (Fig. 6). Depending on who the player allows to speak, their words will influence public opinion (Figs. 7–​8). Though we only got as far as three scenarios, we imagined that the player could become a teacher who chooses to teach

Figure 8.1  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.2  Screenshot.

Figure 8.3  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.4  Screenshot.

Figure 8.5  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.6  Screenshot.

Figure 8.7  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.8  Screenshot.

tolerance rather than hatred, or a priest who preaches love instead of glorious sacrifice, or a university student who chooses to join anti-​war protests instead of going to class. Each choice would lead to an eventual outcome: either the war would continue into a long and bloody conflict if more ‘war’ points were earned (Fig. 9), or the country would call for the president’s resignation and an immediate armistice if the player earned more ‘peaceful resolution’ points (Fig. 10). Through dialogue, the game also shows that some people are heavily influenced by cultural discourses, which are often informed by entertainment media (Figs. 11–​12), some people will automatically hate anyone who looks different (Fig.  13), while others argue against waging war against the alien Other (Fig. 14).

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Figure 8.9  Screenshot.

Figure 8.10  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.11  Screenshot.

Figure 8.12  Screenshot.

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Figure 8.13  Screenshot.

Figure 8.14  Screenshot.

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Why a feminist game jam? Although we never completed our game, the process of thinking through what a feminist war game might look like and brainstorming ideas for ludic experiences that could provide a feminist, or at least alternative, take on war was valuable for me as a game scholar. Not only did this allow me to put into practice some of the theories and skills I had learned as an academic, by designing a feminist game in a feminist space, this experience demonstrated that game production itself can be a feminist process. This is important because, as many developers have revealed, video game production can be a harmful, toxic experience, especially during ‘crunch’ time—​a period when developers are forced to work for extremely long hours to finish a game on time for release (for one example, see Schreier 2016). Scholars and developers have also long noted that the culture surrounding game production and consumption is often exclusionary and sexist (Consalvo 2008, 2012; Shaw 2010, 2011; Prescott & Bogg 2011). By now, these issues are public knowledge, as they were brought to media attention during 2014’s Gamergate controversy, in which feminist game developers and critics were victims of harassment campaigns carried out by self-​declared gamers (for more on Gamergate and its aftermath, see Chess & Shaw 2015; Jenson & de Castell 2016). Gamergate exposed the widespread assumption in gamer culture that women do not belong in the industry, that games should not be made for women, and that women do not seriously play games (or play ‘real’ games). Although women have always been involved in game development, many women hesitate to join the industry after hearing these horror stories and reading the disheartening statistics. According to the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) workplace survey, in 2014 only 11  percent of game designers and 3 percent of programmers in the video game industry were women and these women made on average $10,000–​$12,000 less per year than their male counterparts (Burrows 2013; Makuch 2014). Many game developers have discussed the industry as a toxic environment for women; game developer Marleigh Norton, for example, claimed that ‘[i]‌f you are a woman in the industry, there are all these little signals that you are not part of the club, that this is not your tribe’ (as quoted in Burrows 2013). Feminist game jams, or at least jams which have a feminist topic and engage with feminist principles, can provide opportunities for those who might not ever otherwise attempt to design a game. Given the commonly unpleasant context of game development, fostering supportive spaces for experimentation and feminist engagement is vital. This was my first game jam, and making a game over a weekend is an intense and unforgettable experience. Game jams can be incredibly stressful, yet although we were working hard, there was never a moment where I felt pressured, or felt like I was struggling to keep up. This was at least partially due to the emphasis on jamming in a supportive, inclusive, and safe space—​a feminist space.

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‘What is a feminist war game?’ 115

Conclusion: our feminist war The feminist struggle against widespread misogyny and toxicity in the game industry and within gamer culture reveals that video game players, scholars, and developers are already, in many ways, fighting a feminist ‘war’ over the diversification of the medium and its culture. In this sense, it is rather fitting that we worked within a feminist space to create a feminist critique of war itself. While a critique of war suggests that we would like it to stop, feminist scholars, creators, players, and critics will not be able to stop until the ‘culture war’ is won; that is, until games are a safe and enjoyable medium for everybody. The war is widespread—​even game studies itself has been critiqued for its toxic and exclusionary aspects (Wilcox 2013; Moberly 2013; Vist 2015; Batti & Karabinus 2017; Vossen 2017). Perhaps a future game could be about a team of feminist game scholars, critics, players, and developers fighting to make the game industry, gamer culture, and academia itself more inclusive, accessible, and fair. Indeed, perhaps inspiration for fighting a feminist war ought to come from real-​world activists. Clearly, as I discussed, Hollywood offers few positive examples of feminist warriors and is instead a bastion of hegemonic ideology. Historical examples are similarly hard to find, as only passive anti-​ war movements struck me as ‘feminist’ enough. Although finding inspiration was tricky, I  feel that the game we made does serve as a feminist critique of war, specifically in how it demonstrates the ease with which people can be complicit in violence and cruelty—​the banality of evil, in other words, fostered through the process of ‘othering’ (Arendt 1963). As a feminist game scholar, this jam allowed me to blend theory and practice, and I believe that, with more experience, I can use this blending as ammunition in the ongoing feminist ‘war’ against exclusion and misogyny in game content, the game industry, gamer culture, and game studies.

References Arendt, H 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Viking Press, New York, NY. Batti, B & Karabinus, A 2017, ‘A dream of embodied experience: on Ian Bogost, epistemological gatekeeping, and the Holodeck’, Not Your Mama’s Gamer, web log post, 1 May, viewed 20 July 2017, www.nymgamer.com/​?p=16363. Burrows, L 2013, ‘Women remain outsiders in video game industry’, The Boston Globe, 27 January, viewed 20 July 2017, www.bostonglobe.com/​business/​2013/​01/​ 27/​women-​remain-​outsiders-​video-​game-​industry/​275JKqy3rFylT7TxgPmO3K/​ story.html. Chess, S & Shaw, A 2015, ‘A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 208–​220. Chocano, C 2011, ‘Tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to not saying goodbye when they hang up the phone’, The New  York Times Magazine, 1 July, viewed

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116  Sarah Stang 26 February 2019, www.nytimes.com/​2011/​07/​03/​magazine/​a-​plague-​of-​strong-​ female-​characters.html. Consalvo, M 2008, ‘Crunched by passion:  women game developers and workplace challenges’, in YB Kafai, C Heeter, J Denner, & JY Sun (eds.), Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat:  new perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 177–​192. Consalvo, M 2012, ‘Confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game studies scholars’, Ada:  A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, vol. 11, no. 1. Cull, NJ, Culbert, DH, & Welch, D 2003, Propaganda and mass persuasion: a historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present. ABC-​CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA. Darfur is Dying 2006, interFUEL, LLC, browser-​based. de Beauvoir, S 2011/​1949 The second sex, trans. C Borde & S Malovany-​Chevallier, Vintage, New York, NY. Foucault, M 1990/​1976, The history of sexuality, trans. RJ Hurley, Vintage, New York. Frazier, JM 2017, Women’s antiwar diplomacy during the Vietnam War, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC. Hall, S 1997, Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, Sage in association with the Open University, London, UK. Hartsock, N 1989, ‘Masculinity, heroism, and the making of war’, in A Harris & Y King (eds.), Rocking the ship of state: towards a feminist peace politics, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, pp. 133–​152. Huntemann, NB & Payne MT 2009, Joystick soldiers: the politics of play in military video games, Routledge, New York, NY. Irigaray, I 1985, This sex which is not one, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Jenson, J & de Castell, S 2016, ‘Gamer-​hate and the “problem” of women’, in YB Kafai, GT Richard, & BM Tynes (eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat:  intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming, ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 186–​199. Makuch, E 2014, ‘Percentage of female gamers has more than doubled since 2009’, Gamespot, 24 June, viewed on 20 July 2017, www.gamespot.com/​articles/​percentage-​ of-​female-​developers has-​more-​than-​doubled-​since-​2009/​1100-​6420680/​. Moberly, K 2013, ‘Preemptive strikes: ludology narratology, and deterrence in computer game studies’, in JC Thompson & MA Ouellette (eds.), The game culture reader, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, pp. 162–​174. Prescott, J & Bogg, J 2011, ‘Career attitudes of men and women working in the computer games industry’, Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, vol. 5, no.1, pp.  7–​28. Said, EW 1978, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, NY. Said, EW 1994, Culture and imperialism, Vintage Books, New York, NY. Schreier, J 2016, ‘The horrible world of video game crunch’, Kotaku, 26 September, viewed on 20 July 2017, http://​kotaku.com/​crunch-​time-​why-​game-​developers-​work​such-​insane-​hours-​1704744577. Shaw, A 2010, ‘What is video game culture? Cultural studies and game studies’, Games and Culture, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 403–​424. Shaw, A 2011, ‘Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity’, New Media & Society, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 28–​44. This War of Mine 2014, 11 Bit Studios, Windows PC.

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‘What is a feminist war game?’ 117 Vist, E 2015, ‘Actually, it’s about aca-​fandom in games studies’, First Person Scholar, web log post, 20 May, viewed 20 July 2017, www.firstpersonscholar.com/​actually-​ its-​about-​aca-​fandom/​. Vossen, E 2017, ‘The cultural inaccessibility of game studies’, paper presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference at Congress 2017 in Toronto, Ontario. Wilcox, S 2013, ‘Feed-​forward scholarship:  why games studies needs middle-​state publishing’, First Person Scholar, web log post, 12 June, viewed on 20 July 2017, www.firstpersonscholar.com/​feed-​forward-​scholarship/​.

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Part IV

Challenging the industry

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9  Feminism and the forever wars Prototyping games in the time of ‘America First’ Elizabeth Losh

Less than a year after the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center, the video game America’s Army (2002) became widely available as a free download. Although designed to be rather conventional as a first-​person shooter, America’s Army was uniquely conceived to represent the interests of its developer—​the United States Army. The game was promoted with fanfare at industry events like E3, but its goals were clearly different from the titles distributed by triple-​A entertainment corporations, given that it was intended to encourage young people to enlist in the armed forces. Video game journalists and scholars have used America’s Army as an object of analysis to understand how a game might operate as a tool for recruiting in which two sides are reduced to one (Wagner 2002), as a rhetorical exemplar of the obfuscated rules of ideological systems (Bogost 2010, pp.  75–​80), and as a means for articulating ‘realism’ as a desire for political advantage (Galloway 2010, pp. 71–​83). As the first-​person shooter format became associated with the so-​called ‘War on Terror’, digital artists and activists deployed game engines and platforms as sites of political protest and critique. For example, on 27 February 2009, I sat on a panel organized by the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association about war, representation, and new media interactivity with Wafaa Bilal and Joseph DeLappe. DeLappe was the creator of dead-​in-​iraq (2006–​2011) a performance piece played in America’s Army in which the artist entered the name and death information for every casualty of the war. Bilal used game-​like interfaces for two significant participatory art installations that were critical of the war in Iraq: Domestic Tension (2007) and Virtual Jihadi (2008). In Domestic Tension, members of the public were encouraged to ‘Shoot an Iraqi Online’ by using their home computers to remotely fire a paintball gun, which bombarded the artist in his studio 24 hours a day for a grueling month. Night of Bush Capturing:  Virtual Jihadi was a modified version of the anti-​American game Quest for Bush (2006), itself a modded version of the pro-​US video game Quest for Saddam (2003). In Virtual Jihadi the player views digital content projected in the gallery space as he or she explores the role of a suicide bomber using components of Bilal’s

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122  Elizabeth Losh own personal history as a brother of a victim of a US missile strike and as a refugee from warfare in the region. In the 2013 documentary Joystick Warriors, I  asserted ‘the relationship between videogames and violence might be weaker than the relationship between videogames and militarism’. Filmmaker Sut Jhally similarly claimed that ‘one of the functions of popular culture is to bridge the divide between the public and the military, to provide a kind of fantasy that connects the two’. When the movie was released, I was pleased to see that Nina Huntemann also appeared in the film, since she is a fellow feminist who has also written extensively about military games from a nuanced perspective. While conceding that wargames are ‘sanitized fantasies’ lacking ‘any alternative viewpoint about military action’ that ‘glamorize the use of force’, Huntemann still allows for the possibility of ‘critical engagement’ (Huntemann 2010, p. 232). Now, almost two decades after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it is worth asking what game interfaces and digital simulations can contribute to the public’s understanding of the ramifications of American military presence at a time of planned troop withdrawals, de-​escalations of force, disinvestment in strategic coalitions, and militarization of the border rather than territories farther abroad. Many feminists might welcome troops coming home from theaters of occupation, but there are costs to isolationism that exacerbate existing situations of precarity around the globe. The Trump doctrine can make the lives of women, children, the disabled, dissidents, and refugees much worse, and procedural systems can show how these deteriorating conditions operate. In other words, to encourage critical thinking about the current ‘America First’ policy of President Donald J. Trump, how might it be useful to prototype digital games that help audiences evaluate how simulated involvement in military culture functions in the political imaginary of the present moment? Of course, Trump himself has been famously critical of the use of digital media as a pedagogical tool (Trump 2011, p.  75). Yet game-​playing fans of the president might be open to exploring playable systems capable of fostering doubt about current administration policies.

Turning the tables The availability of tabular data about armed combat has unquestionably been an important component of the history of military simulation. As Jon Peterson has noted in his research on wargaming, beginning in the early modern era, commanders tried to formulate a more rigorously scientific version of military science ‘reduced to systems with the clarity and constancy of Newtonian mathematics’ and infused with ‘sufficient data’ to make logical predictions. If everything could be ‘measured and quantified’, the reasoning went, then war could be ‘modeled, predicted, regulated, and controlled’ (Peterson 2016, pp. 3–​4). As Jacqueline Wernimont (2019) has pointed out, this emphasis on quantification as a manifestation of supposed Western rationality has produced a number of different genres for tabular data,

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Feminism and the forever wars 123 including the accounting ledger, the ship’s register, the inventory, the population table, and the mortality schedule. These precursors of the contemporary digital spreadsheet  also informed the planning of military campaigns, and such tabular data could be also used for information visualizations, such as charts, graphs, and graphics that use color and geometric figures to represent numeric values. The back-​end of the vivid and interactive displays of many of today’s video games can be similarly reduced to sequences of numbers that feed data to the machine. Numerical lists that give specific values to different choices about deployment have been a mainstay in military simulation, planning, and training for centuries—​whether it be calculating the balance of archers and cavalry in a medieval siege or the balance of cruise missiles and ICBMs in a twenty-​ first-​century nuclear strike. A  battle in a fantasy card game like Magic the Gathering (1993) similarly uses mathematical calculations of power to predict outcomes and plan challenges. Hobbyists and reenactors have often used real military data from historical engagements to replay famous scenes of conflict as playable simulations that might generate different outcomes if the inputs or operations of chance would be different. According to French theorist Roger Caillois, the aleatory possibilities of randomness offer rewards (or punishments) in cases where work or merit alone might not exclusively dictate results (Caillois & Barash 2001, p. 66). Because many of these numerical tables for combat merely generate probabilities, luck always plays a role on the virtual battlefield. During the Trump administration, however, key data points are often absent. For over a decade, quarterly reports on troop deployments have been available online with spreadsheets showing how many members of the armed forces are stationed in particular states or countries, separated into columns for active duty and reserve troops in each of the five branches of military service (Defense Manpower Data Center n.d.). But now the entries for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are blank. There are no zeros in these cells; the numerical values are completely absent. A  small asterisk informs the reader that with ‘ongoing operations, any questions concerning DoD personnel strength numbers are deferred to OSD Public Affairs/​Joint Chiefs of Staff’. National Public Radio has lambasted this ‘information blackout’ and has complained about the inconsistency of the administration’s commitment to ‘transparency’ (Welna 2018), but relatively little public discussion of this gap in the data has resulted from their coverage. Perhaps a wargame that uses tabular data could incorporate this discontinuous numerical hole. What if an alien spaceship landed just outside Erbil, and only the US military had the key solution to neutralize the invader? As a player, you would know that you have 1,761 military personnel in Turkey, that you have none in Iran, and that you can count those in Armenia on one hand. But how many troops are in Iraq near the landing site or in Syria a Humvee ride away? Prototyping this game might raise a key issue worthy of a policy debate, since if the numbers are unknown in these war zones the president could increase deployments

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124  Elizabeth Losh dramatically without any citizen oversight. And since a number of troop withdrawals have been announced on Twitter, it also might be important to hold the administration accountable for its progress in achieving its goals.

Failed states Vacuums in power can contribute to failed states in which civilians are terrorized, starved, or subjected to human rights abuses. For example, civil wars and ethnic conflicts led to a catastrophic genocide in Darfur and produced 2.5 million refugees. Susana Ruiz’s Darfur Is Dying (2006) begins with the player’s avatar foraging for water. Running away from the armed men in jeeps is impossible in the Flash-​based digital game, but there are few bushes in the barren landscape under which one’s character can take cover and potentially survive to the next round. Similarly Jamie Antonisse’s Hush (2008) encourages empathy for a Tutsi woman seeking to calm her baby and thus avoid alerting Hutu vigilantes armed with machetes to the young family’s presence. The region’s conflicts spun out of control after the 1994 downing of a plane with Hutu political leaders aboard from Rwanda and Burundi. In both these cases games can show the consequences of the absence of civil society and the rule of law in countries where political infrastructure has broken down. Since the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, US troops have been much less likely to intervene despite widespread human rights abuses, and averting genocide has become an even lower priority during the Trump administration. Certainly there have been a number of games about the dilemmas facing Syrian refugees in recent years. The hypertext choice architecture of Twine as an authoring platform for composing serious games has been extremely accessible to those who might lack the technical skills or publishing bandwidth for 3D game engines (Stewart 2016). For example, Syrian Journey (2015), which was published on the BBC website, begins with the player choosing between playing as female or playing as male and then traveling to either Egypt or Turkey as a first destination. The trajectory of vulnerability past waypoints on the journey always ends with the player stranded, impoverished, separated from family members, completely demoralized, or dead. Swindlers and the travails of other victims keep taking the player off course. Endgame Syria (2012) shows the dynamics of a rebel coalition being advised by the player to move strategically through political and military phases of a conflict with the ruling regime. It uses numerical values, like other strategy games to gauge success, and different cards can be slotted into place to form a matrix. Game play can include making choices about alliances with governments like Russia or Iran, fortifying units engaged in conventional warfare, or trying unconventional tactics like assassination. For instance, an opening move in the political phase might be to mobilize exiles and to gain a statement of support from a senior French official. Although the game’s developers were promoted by the same Games for Change initiative that

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Feminism and the forever wars 125 launched the award-​winning Darfur Is Dying (2006), the mobile version of the Endgame Syria game was rejected three times by the Apple store (Lien 2013). Apparently the game’s design violated a policy against messaging that solely targets ‘a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity’ (Crecente 2013). Ultimately designers chose to release a completely generic product, Endgame Eurasia that featured made-​up countries like ‘Aquilonia’, ‘Elysia’, and ‘Zothique’ and made-​up non-​state actors as well. Those in the know could consult a translation key to keep track of the real-​world entities (Endgame Eurasia n.d.), but this was certainly cumbersome and extraneous to game play. Obviously this prohibition on naming specific entities undermines the ability of games such as Endgame Syria to engage with real-​world issues or pose substantive critiques. As Ian Bogost (Bogost et al. 2012) has pointed out newsgames can perform many functions familiar to consumers of conventional news content, by extending the possibilities of traditional newspaper offerings like puzzles, editorial cartoons, or infographics. By modeling the interactions of multiple rules at work in complex procedural systems like diplomacy and warfare, Bogost argues that newsgames can also deliver sophisticated journalism backed by in-​depth research. However, if the references of a game are fictionalized, the benefits of this fact-​finding process are reduced. While the Endgame Syria game was at one time available on Facebook as a way to reach a mass audience via social media with its proper names intact, it is no longer supported on the site. When refugees and asylum seekers are dehumanized in presidential rhetoric, it is important that games humanize them. Neither of these Syria games use human avatars. Furthermore, the model for action presented emphasizes tropes of rational choice that are likely to be rejected by feminists who have considered how technology and gender are interrelated.

Hostile allies As the United States abdicates its position as a superpower and gives more territorial control to Russia and Saudi Arabia, there are also new opportunities for feminist designers to prototype games that highlight the homophobia and sexism that have become officially endorsed policies in those nations. Clickable and consumable digital media interfaces have also promoted patriarchal control and or complicity with the persecution of sexual minorities. For example, human rights groups have called upon Apple and Google to stop offering a mobile application designed to help Saudi men track female relatives. According to the New York Times, Absher, which was launched in 2015 by the Saudi government, is an e-​government portal that allows men to manage the women under their guardianship by giving or revoking their right to travel through airports, tracking them by their national identity cards or passports. The men can turn on notifications

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126  Elizabeth Losh that alert them with a text message any time a woman under their guardianship passes through an airport. (Hubbard 2019) In Russia a homophobic website named after the horror movie Saw marketed itself as a ‘game’ that encouraged ‘people to upload photos of people they accuse of being gay with personal information and how to find them’ (Power 2018). The site was associated with several gay-​bashing incidents, and many in the database were extorted by developers of the ‘game’ into paying a hefty fee to have their content removed. Dating apps for gay men in Russia, such as Hunters, have had their landing messages hacked, accounts have been deleted en masse, and users have been ambushed or threatened (Power 2018, Love 2015, Staples 2018). At the same time, video game companies have certainly been complicit in Russian and Saudi Arabian image marketing that supports celebratory national narratives. For example, the production of Mario and Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games (2013) showed the Black Sea city as a magical snowy wonderland, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 (2013) featured the kingdom’s King Fahd International Stadium. Story lines that address the more nefarious aspects of these regional military powers tend to rely on trite plots about espionage or terrorist networks rather than everyday human rights abuses and sexual politics. US military alliances with authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia and Russia present opportunities for feminist and queer game designers to create playable simulations that create empathy for political subjects experiencing state-​sanctioned oppression. For example, users of the Steam platform might be familiar with the critically acclaimed game Life Is Strange (2015), which addresses same-​sex attraction and heterosexual exploitation of young women in telling the story of Maxine ‘Max’ Caufield, a lesbian teenager able to rewind time. How might the game be different if set in Russia or Saudi Arabia? What would it mean to have all her in-​game actions vulnerable to exposure or subject to control? Of course, feminists in the Global South have rightly been critical of neoliberal and neocolonial empowerment narratives that claim to solve the complex problems involving gender or sexual oppression with techno-​solutionism. Thus, it would be critical to have local activists be lead members of any design team, perhaps starting with community-​based paper prototyping or fabricating board or card games that model these systems of persecution.

Base instincts The persecution of sexual minorities within the US military itself is also a phenomenon that game designers should not ignore. As troops withdraw to their bases, which may claim separate governance under military law, issues of discrimination, harassment, predation, and sexual violence can more easily

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Feminism and the forever wars 127 be covered up, particularly without journalists and filmmakers with access to create the primary sources that newsgame designers draw upon. The brutal killing of Jennifer Laude, a transgender woman from the Philippines, by a US marine has been made into the compelling documentary Call Her Ganda (2018). Overall, however, Americans tend to be exposed to relatively little media coverage about sexual misconduct by US military personnel and the ways that the dehumanization of racialized others, which is far too common in the armed forces, can contribute to acts of violence. Game designers under contract with the military itself have used virtual reality technologies, 3D game engines, and virtual worlds to address persistent power inequities reinforced by a macho hierarchical institutional culture. Jacquelyn Ford Morie, a member of the famed feminist game design collective Ludica who worked on several military-​funded training games, authored an influential white paper on ‘Enhancing Sexual Harassment Training for the 21st Century Military’ that advocated for using game technologies in basic training to counteract blame-​ the-​ victim scenarios that otherwise become default sets of assumptions (Losh 2016, p. 366). Morie and Nonny de la Peña (2011) had previously worked on how gender swapping in the virtual world Second Life might impact understanding of unwanted sexual advances and promote empathy. The USC Institute of Creative Technologies has used virtual humans with the Unity game engine to develop ELITE SHARP CTT, the Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment Sexual Harassment/​ Assault Response and Prevention Command Team Trainer. SHARP is a laptop training application that is supposed to feature photorealistic 3D avatars, although promotional videos for the program still show demos with 2D cartoon animation as stand-​in footage. The 3D virtual humans modeled by the design team only appear in stills with dialogue bubbles. The training simulation uses a rule-​based feedback system to reinforce the procedural norms of a sexual assault investigation. For example, the user might be asked to respond to the statement ‘I got hurt fooling around with a few guys in the barracks. They were being stupid and all, that’s it’ (ELITE SHARP CTT n.d.). The Institute for Creative Technologies is also launching the Digital Survivor of Sexual Assault (DS2A) system, which emphasizes the potentially transformative force of a first-​person story told by a virtual human (DSA2 n.d.). Much as new media theorist Janet Murray (2017) sees traditional oral narrative as integral to the cultural value of cyberspace, the DS2A design team asserts that storytelling is ‘one of the most powerful ways people share information, connect with, and learn from each other’. Promotional materials show a male survivor of assault dressed in camouflage sitting in a red chair. He bears witness from within a vertical screen in the demo. Text explains that assault survivors have been recorded using one of the institute’s signature proprietary inventions, the ‘Light Stage’, which consists of a dome of strobe lights that captures the data from a person’s appearance from every angle and lighting

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128  Elizabeth Losh condition, thus rendering color, shading, texture, shine, and translucency of the actor’s skin in highly precise photorealistic detail (The Light Stages n.d.). To offer interactivity as well as vividness for the audience (Steuer 1992), DS2A also incorporates ‘natural language dialogue technology to enable conversational engagement with survivors’. D2SA is billed as part of the institute’s partnership with the Shoah Foundation in the New Dimensions of Testimony initiative. Given the looming mortality of the last remaining survivors of Nazi genocide, developers promise that the use of virtual humans in museums and classrooms of the future ‘can provide a path to enable young people to listen to a survivor and ask their own questions directly, encouraging them, each in their own way, to reflect on the deep and meaningful consequences of the Holocaust’. From the standpoint of feminist thinking, Lisa Nakamura (2018) has questioned how well virtual reality technologies designed by white men in the tech industry actually work to effect social justice. Although Chris Milk’s 2015 TED talk about VR as an ‘empathy machine’ has been viewed over a million times, Nakamura demands more proof from his ilk that affective engagement alone is sufficient to make change, particularly when such ‘empathy machines’ reward the moral satisfaction of the user and exploit the pain of the victim for the user’s edification. The culture of the armed forces is likely to only become more toxic to sexual minorities with the recent ban on transgender troops serving in the military and top commanders publicly expressing wishes to roll back policies to earlier norms that excluded gay men, segregated units by sex, and prohibited women in combat. Without the kind of systemic transformation, commitment to coalition building, and infrastructure for deliberative processes that Nakamura describes, how will a single session with a virtual human disrupt patriarchy?

The inhuman peace In the time since the 11 September attacks, the military might of the United States has expanded dramatically with digital technologies to make asymmetrical combat with anti-​American radicals seemingly even more asymmetrical. The use of aerial vision technologies implanted in drones, the arming of autonomous vehicles and robots, and the development of machine learning algorithms that make massive surveillance of data networks much more efficient appear to put fewer American bodies at any real risk of battlefield harm. All of these twenty-​first century technologies have begun to appear in video games that represent the cyborg military practices of today’s armed forces. Yet these alliances with non-​human agents do come at the cost of a superior moral position in the world, particularly when the United States is seen by other countries as averse to a fair fight. In Homo Ludens, Dutch cultural critic Johan Huizinga lamented the fact that modern warfare had become completely divorced from play, as a

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Feminism and the forever wars 129 power-​hungry superpower abandoned the egalitarian social ceremonies of just combat and mutual risk. ‘States of the highest cultural pretensions withdraw from the comity of nations’, Huizinga wrote. ‘The code of honor is flouted, the rules of the game are set aside, international law is broken, and all the ancient associations of war with ritual and religion are gone’ (2014, p. 210). At the time, Huizinga was a noted anti-​Nazi critic who understood the political stakes of both games and military action. The spectacle of multiple generals in the White House and of troop visits converted into one-​sided political rallies has raised concerns among today’s cultural critics about America’s own slide into authoritarianism. Now that we are putting down our weapons from the first-​person shooters of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, we need to think about the militarism that has become domesticated and about the gender wars that have become more divisive with the election of Donald J.  Trump. If we consider the potential cultural products of what Tim Lenoir (Lenoir and Caldwell 2018) has called ‘the military-​entertainment complex’, it might be difficult to imagine how to gamify the current administration’s ‘America first’ policy, much less imagine how those playable simulations might model a usable path to social justice. Nonetheless, principles of feminist and queer game design could be an important way to prototype political resistance. Arguments that critical play is rooted in feminized role-​playing practices of playing house or dressing up (Flanagan 2009) and that videogames ‘have always been queer’ (Ruberg 2019) seem to offer new possibilities for feminist wargaming. To move from theory to practice, however, it will require much more diverse development and playtesting teams and much more independence in independent games as they exist today, because distribution channels are still controlled by corporations averse to controversy.

References America’s Army 2002, United States Army, PC. Bilal, W 2007, ‘Domestic tension’, art installation, http://​wafaabilal.com/​domestic-​ tension/​. Bilal, W 2008, ‘Virtual jihadi’, art installation, http://​wafaabilal.com/​virtual-​jihadi/​. Bogost, I 2010, Persuasive games, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bogost, I, Ferrari, S, & Schweizer, B 2012, Newsgames: journalism at play, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Caillois, R & Barash, M 2001, Man, play and games, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL. Call her Granda 2018, Breaking Glass Pictures, Philippines & USA. Directed by PJ Raval. Crecente, B 2013. ‘Apple rejects iOS game about war in Syria’, Polygon, web log post, 7 January, viewed 17 February 2019, www.polygon.com/​2013/​1/​7/​3848336/​ apple-​rejects-​ios-​game-​about-​war-​in-​syria.

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130  Elizabeth Losh Darfur is dying 2006, Games for change, online game, viewed 16 February 2019, www. gamesforchange.org/​game/​darfur-​is-​dying/​. Defense Manpower Data Center n.d., DoD personnel, workforce reports and publications, viewed 16 February 2019, www.dmdc.osd.mil/​appj/​dwp/​dwp_​reports. jsp. DeLappe, J 2006–​2011, ‘dead-​in-​iraq’, game based performance intervention, www. delappe.net/​project/​dead-​in-​iraq/​. DS2A n.d., USC Institute for Creative Technologies, viewed 17 February 2019, http://​ ict.usc.edu/​prototypes/​ds2a/​. ELITE SHARP CTT n.d., USC Institute for creative technologies, viewed 16 February 2019, http://​ict.usc.edu/​prototypes/​elite_​sharp_​ctt/​. Endgame:  Eurasia n.d., GameTheNews, Auroch Digital Ltd., viewed 21 April 2019. http://​gamethenews.net/​index.php/​endgame-​eurasia/​. Endgame:  Syria 2012, GameTheNews, Auroch Digital Ltd., viewed 21 April 2019, http://​gamethenews.net/​index.php/​endgame-​syria/​. Flanagan, M 2009, Critical play: radical game design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Galloway, AR 2010, Gaming: essays on algorithmic culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Hubbard, B 2019, ‘Apple and Google pressured to dump Saudi app where men track women relatives’, The New York Times, 13 February, viewed 21 April 2019, www. nytimes.com/​2019/​02/​13/​world/​middleeast/​saudi-​arabia-​app-​women.html. Huizinga, J 2014, Homo ludens:  a study of the play-​ element in culture, Martino Publishing, Eastfort, CT. Huntemann, NB 2010, ‘Playing with fear: catharsis and resistance in military-​themed video games’, in MT Payne & NB Huntemann (eds.), Joystick soldiers: the politics of play in military video games, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 223–​236. Hush 2008, Jamie Antonisse, PC. Joystick warriors:  video games, violence & militarism, 2013, DVD, Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA, Directed by Roger Sorkin, Executive Producer Sut Jhally. Lenoir, T & Caldwell, L 2018, The military-​entertainment complex, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lien, T 2013, ‘Apple removes Sweatshop from App Store; rejects Endgame: Syria a third time’, Polygon, 21 March, viewed 17 February 2019, www.polygon.com/​2013/​3/​21/​ 4131882/​apple-​removes-​sweatshop-​from-​app-​store-​rejects-​endgame-​syria-​a-​third. Life is Strange 2015, Square Enix, PC. Losh, E 2016, ‘Playing defense: gender, just war, and game design’, in P Harrigan, MG Kirschenbaum, & JF Dunnigan (eds.), Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 355–​370. Love, D 2015, ‘A year later, what’s happening with gay Russian dating apps?’, The Daily Dot, 28 January, viewed 17 February 2019, www.dailydot.com/​irl/​hunters-​ gay-​russian-​dating-​app/​. Magic: The Gathering 1993, Wizards of the Coast, trading card game. Mario and Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games 2013, Nintendo, WiiU. Milk, C 2015, ‘How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine’, online video, TED, viewed 17 February 2019, www.ted.com/​talks/​chris_​milk_​how_​virtual_​reality_​can_​create_​the_​ultimate_​empathy_​machine. Morie, J & de la Pena, N 2011, ‘Sexual harassment, gender and gender-​swapping in SL’, A decade in internet time:  symposium on the dynamics of the internet and

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Feminism and the forever wars 131 society, Oxford, UK, 20 September, viewed 13 February 2019, http://​ict.usc.edu/​ events/​jacki-​morie-​nonny-​de-​la-​pena-​sexual-​harassment-​gender-​gender-​swapping-​ in-​sl/​. Murray, JH 2017, Hamlet on the holodeck the future of narrative in cyberspace, updated edition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Nakamura, L 2018, The future of the public university in the age of big data, Plenary talk, Humanities and the arts in the age of big data conference, 4–​5 October, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Peterson, J 2016, ‘A game out of all proportions’, in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.), Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.  3–​32. Power, S 2018, ‘Russia website wants users to hunt gays in Saw-​inspired horror “game”’, Gay Star News, 26 April, viewed 17 February 2019, www.gaystarnews.com/​article/​ russia-​website-​wants-​users-​to-​hunt-​gays-​in-​saw-​inspired-​horror-​game/​. Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 2013, Konami, PS3. Quest for Bush 2006, Global Islamic Media Front, PC. Quest for Saddam 2003, Petrilla Entertainment, PC. Ruberg, B 2019, Video games have always been queer, New  York University Press, New York, NY. Staples, L 2018, ‘Russia website challenges users to hunt and torture gay men’, indy100, The Independent, 28 April, viewed 1 February 2019. www.indy100.com/​ article/​russia-​website-​gay-​chechnyach-​8327151. Steuer, J 1992, ‘Defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence’, Journal of Communication, no. 42, pp. 73–​93, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1460–​2466.1992. tb00812.x. Stewart, J 2016, ‘Twine and serious gaming’, John Stewart, web log post, 7 June, viewed 21 April 2019, www.johnastewart.org/​tools/​twine-​serious-​gaming/​. Syrian journey: choose your own escape route 2015, interactive web game, BBC.com, viewed 21 April 2019, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​middle-​east-​32057601. The light stages at UC Berkeley and USC ICT n.d., viewed 17 February 2019, http://​ gl.ict.usc.edu/​lightstages/​. Trump, D 2011, Time to get tough: making America #1 again, Regenery Publishing, Washington, D.C. Wagner, JA 2002, ‘Weapons of mass distraction’, Salon, 5 October, viewed 21 April 2019, www.salon.com/​2002/​10/​04/​why_​we_​fight/​. Welna, D 2018, ‘Pentagon questioned over blackout on war zone troop numbers’, NPR.org, 3 July, viewed 16 February 2019, www.npr.org/​2018/​07/​03/​625544265/​ pentagon-​questioned-​over-​war-​zone-​numbers-​blackout. Wernimont, J 2019, Numbered lives:  life and death in quantum media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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10  Seven dimensions of a feminist war game What we can learn from This War of Mine Christopher Kampe Introduction While it is commonly accepted that war is driven by economic, political, religious, and ethnicity/​racial factors, feminist scholars have argued that historically constructed notions of masculinity have facilitated the recruitment of young men and incentivized violent action—​in this light, gender is seen as an important aspect of war (Cockburn 2010; Moser & Clark 2001). Throughout the modern era, feminist groups have organized against war. Part of fighting against war is fighting against the dominant narratives that come with war, exposing and revealing the perspectives of civilian women who have been terrorized by war (Cockburn 2010). The majority of wargames position the player as either an elite warrior or a commander supervising/​ directing combat engagements—​ the player occupies a role that is empowered by the conditions of war and violence, with minimal access to the social consequences of war or the experiences of those marginalized by it (Huntemann & Payne 2009). I argue that gameplay purposed towards combat is inherently at odds with the idea of ‘feminist wargames’ because it tends to validate violence as desirable, and position the player as someone who both benefits from and thrives in a violent world. Drawing from Feminist Standpoint Theory (Harding 2004) I contend that a feminist wargame must—​through in-​game goals, available actions, and subject representation—​allow the player to explore the social realities of war through the perspective of one who has become marginalized by it. As an example of a feminist wargame, I examine This War of Mine (2014), in which the player controls a group of civilians as they attempt to survive in an active warzone: players occupy the perspectives of marginalized/​ disempowered scavengers, who form an ad hoc community and must manage the risks and traumas of collateral damage. Using This War of Mine (TWoM) as a case study, I  analyze characteristics of the game itself and also the interactions between the developers and communities of players. Following from this analysis, I delineate seven dimensions through which a wargame may adopt critical, feminist values:  (1) Characterizations, (2)  Setting, (3)  Goals/​ Objectives, (4) Gameplay Dynamics, (5) Access/​Accessibility, (6) Reciprocity,

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 133 and (7)  Modifiability. Overall, this method will offer a critical framework through which war video games may be analyzed and a set of considerations for future designers of feminist wargames.

On wargames A clarification of terms: ‘war games’ refers to military field exercises involving troops and equipment, but without actual combat. I make no argument as to the possibility of feminist ‘war games’. A nearly identical term ‘wargames’ refers to model-​driven simulations of battlefield engagements. This latter term will be the focus of this chapter. Historically wargames have been ‘played’ by both hobbyists and military actors. Although there is a tradition of abstract battle games (e.g. Latrunculi) dating back to 110 BCE, these games are not classified as wargames, while some of these games (e.g. Chess) are acknowledged as precursors (Lewin 2012). Unlike abstract games, which favor simple, elegant rules, wargames are often characterized by complicated rules surrounding terrain, units, and various interactions between them (Lewin 2012). As a military technology, wargames serve as a tool for exploring human decisions (within a theater of combat), investigating hypothetical scenarios, stimulating insights, and providing players with experiences from which they can learn. The wargame affords a virtual situation in which practitioners can explore tactical decisions without the constraints of ‘safety, rules of engagement, real-​ world territorial boundaries, or training objectives’. In these contexts wargames provide problem-​solving activities that encourage experimental thought and cultivate skills/​ideas that could have purchase in future military engagements (Burns et al. 2015, pp. 1–​6). While these activities serve a practical purposes for the development of military strategy or the training of soldiers, for the hobbyists these games offer many opportunities for pleasure. In the European tradition, we have records of the first wargames (or rather, the published handbooks dictating their rules) in 1770 (Schuurman 2017). These handbooks referenced actual military units and their abilities, while also detailing historical scenarios. However, the purpose of these handbooks varied; some were designed to help military personnel as training or simulation tools, others were clearly marketed at hobbyists interested in accurately recreating historical battles (Schuurman 2017). This overlap has always existed, and continues to exist in the modern era. While some wargames have been classified (e.g. Sigma), the designers of these games often produce commercially available wargames that can be ‘played’ by hobbyists (Sabin 2012). As modern examples of this practice, Bohemia Interactive and Slitherine Software each produce wargames for both commercial (e.g. ARMA, Warhammer 40K) and military (e.g. Virtual Battplace, Command) consumption. While not universal, there exists a longstanding overlap between military/​recreational wargaming. Structurally, all wargames are predicated upon model-​ based systems. Practitioners can use these models in order to simulate the various perspectives

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134  Christopher Kampe in a combat scenario—​be it, historical, hypothetical, or fantastic (Schuurman 2017). Simulations work with simplified models, wherein some aspects of reality (i.e. those deemed insignificant) will be excluded, while other aspects of reality (i.e. those deemed significant) will be emphasized. In this way, scholars have argued that simulations possess an implicit rhetorical leaning that will communicate a set of values to their users (Brummet 2003) even if this communication is unintentional (Bogost 2007). Recreation games (as opposed to training simulators) tend to be purposed towards a particular form of player engagement (often enjoyment); thus, when simulating real-​world systems, they tend to abstract away elements that would be disruptive to the form of engagement that the designers wish to cultivate (Susi et al. 2007). The models that drive historical wargames, focus on the combat and movement abilities of various units; they allow the exploration of combat (totally) removed from the social consequences of warfare. There is a great deal more that can be said about wargames and the history of their usage. Philip Sabin’s Simulating War (2012) contextualizes the modern practice and the theories of analysis that accompany it. The more recent anthology, Zones of Control (Harrgin & Kirschenbaum 2016) offers an assortment of perspectives on a variety of wargames, the cultures surrounding them, and the rule systems that drive them. Let us now return to the notion of a feminist wargame. If it is indeed a wargame, it should be predicated upon a model, and said model should facilitate the simulation of events. This simulation will simplify reality and present reality from a particular vantage. We now approach a question of rhetorical priority:  what aspects of war do we want to see? What sorts of actions would this game permit? I  argue that this comes down to an issue of standpoint: from what perspective are we (the players) perceiving this war, and through what set of affordances are we able to interact with this conflict. The traditional wargame houses us in the perspective of those who are (ultimately) empowered by war, rendering those displaced by war (i.e. civilians) as scenery or scoring factors, if these marginalized figures are acknowledged at all. To this end, a feminist wargame, as I am conceptualizing it, should operate from the perspective of non-​combatants, exploring war as an impediment, a site of disruption and trauma.

War from a different perspective: standpoint theory Building off a Marxist, feminist perspective, Nancy Hartsock worked to reconceptualize the notion of working-​class consciousness in such a way that attended to the collective, yet highly situational experiences of marginalized women. She asserts that the oppressed, because of the position they occupy relative to extant power structures, possess a different view of the world (e.g. of social structures, necessities, freedoms, etc.) than what is held by individuals occupying positions of privilege. She argues that women, who have been historically obligated to various forms of unpaid (e.g. domestic, reproductive)

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 135 or underpaid labor, possess a ‘standpoint’. She argues that these standpoints represent collective perspectives that differ from contemporary hegemonic views (Hartsock 1983; Cockburn 2010). As a term, a standpoint refers to something greater than a perspective: it has been ‘earned through the experience of collective political struggle’ (Bowell 2011). One does not speak of a unifying ‘feminist standpoint’, but as plural ‘standpoints’ derived from different, particular experiences of oppression, marginalization, and resistance. The practice of identifying a standpoint is ethnographic:  driven by talking to a population and identifying certain commonalities of experience among members despite disparate aspects of their background. From an activist perspective, standpoints have epistemic value because they are able to identify structural problems and inequalities that would be invisible from prevailing/​acknowledged points of view (Harding 2004). So, particular standpoints can be useful either as a means of expanding awareness (i.e. recognizing problems), or as a means of cultivating empathy. Cynthia Cockburn argues that the civilian experience of war (especially female) in its various forms (e.g. militarization, active conflict, ‘so-​called peace’, etc.) have the capacity to give rise to one such standpoint. She offers this standpoint as an antidote to the ‘glorification of war and warriors’ (2010, p. 145) or the sanitized discourses that present war as ‘political, institutional, calculated, and organized … [while] downplay[ing] the messy cultural detail of armed conflict’. She contends that, in order to access this standpoint, we need to utilize the tools of the ‘culturally attuned sociologist or anthropologist’ (p. 146), examining the perspectives of the civilians who lived through war. From this standpoint, there is a great deal of observed trauma, but there are also more mundane accounts of people figuring out how to survive and stay sane during periods of upheaval. While the idea of approximating the standpoint of a civilian war survivor may seem daunting, it isn’t inaccessible. Cockburn’s writing, both her essays and books (especially From Where We Stand:  War, Woman’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis, 2007), detail a number of organizations which are dedicated to helping war survivors and recording their narratives. Similar efforts are taken up by journalists and ethnographers. Regarding the Siege of Sarajevo (the inspiration for TWoM) journalist Barbara Demick chose to examine the conflict by examining the changes a specific neighborhood went through in Logavina Street (2012); Ivana Maček performed a more scholarly analysis in her book Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (2009). Similar texts exist for many contemporary conflicts.

Framework for a feminist wargame A feminist wargame, as I  am conceptualizing it, must embrace standpoint theory relative to the experiences of war. It must operate from the perspective of actors that have been marginalized or displaced by war. The dynamics of the game (i.e. actions, strategies) should be capable of expressing activities of

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136  Christopher Kampe historical survivors, albeit imperfectly. The gameplay should not be combat oriented, though it need not exclude combat. The game should not operate from the perspective of a warrior; rather, it should operate from the perspective of a civilian in war time. The mechanics and aesthetics of the game should be grounded, to some degree, in the actual human experience of these civilians. Finally, historically feminized activities, such as preparing food, caring for children, maintaining the house, insofar as they are essential to human life, must be included in the game’s model. The purpose here is not complete fidelity (which is definitionally unattainable in a simulation) but verisimilitude. Absent this, the player will be unable to experience the game as ‘Social Realism’ (Galloway 2006) and their experience will be more of a mediation on abstract strategy than empathy-​building visit to another’s perspective. A feminist wargame cannot exist within a vacuum. It will be designed, distributed, and put in the hands of an audience who will play the game. I view the act of play as a potentially expansive activity, one that is historically imbricated in other historical practices ranging from simple discussion (e.g. forums) to the development of mods with which other players interact (Consalvo 2009; Mehlenbacher & Kampe 2017). To this extent, the game must be deployed in a manner that adheres to the principles of socially responsible design: it must involve the community it represents, remain accessible to the community it represents, give (some degree of internal) control over to the community it represents, and ultimately serve to empower the community it represents (Melles et al. 2011). In practical terms, designers need to consider how language, cost, and hardware requirements might impact access to the game. Furthermore, the game should be ‘open’ to the extent that members of the represented group could modify it or tell their own stories through the game’s engine/​model. In the table below, I articulate seven dimensions through which a wargame can advance feminist and/​or socially responsible design. I provide a definition for each dimension, and advance a criteria that it can be evaluated against or considered beside. Some dimensions exist within the game itself, while others refer to the manner in which it is distributed and the engagement strategies following its release. I do not advance this criteria as some objective standard. Just as there are numerous feminisms, there exists the capacity for wargames to espouse feminist ideals without satisfying these criteria. Furthermore, I do not mean to advance this criteria as prescriptive; its origins are descriptive: principles taken from the critically praised anti-​wargame TWoM. I derived these dimensions by playing TWoM and noting the behaviors of the developers (11 Bit Studios) in the years following the game’s release. I do not mean to suggest that TWoM is a perfect realization of these principles. It is merely a successful exemplar of these principles. In the section that follows, I will provide a brief description of the game; I will then examine the game, and actions taken after its release, through the lens of the framework I have provided.

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Table 10.1 Seven dimensions for the feminist and/​or socially responsible design of wargames Dimension

Definition

Criteria

Characterization The appearance, Does the player operate from background and qualities the perspective of a character of the playable characters who has been marginalized or and the non-​playable displaced by war? Were details characters that will be relating to representation encountered. of player and non-​player-​ characters adapted from first/​ second-​hand accounts of civilian war survivors (CWS)? How accurate and nuanced are representations of gender, race, ability, etc.? Setting The spatial/​temporal Does the setting take inspiration qualities of the virtual from specific historical incidence? environment in terms of Does the locale take direct audio/​visual appearance, inspiration from places that were as well as denotative and historically accessible by CWS connotative in-​game during times of war? references. Dynamics1 The complex/​multi-​step Are the dynamics of play (i.e. actions that the player multi-​step actions) congruent is able to perform with the prevailing activities when utilizing the basic of CWS (as reported through mechanical affordances first-​and second-​hand sources)? of the game. Do the dynamics of play include historically feminized actions? Objectives Specific or general goals Are the micro/​macro goals imposed that the player will by the game, congruent with the recognize and (attempt stated goals of CWS? Are these to) accomplish via goals (generally) predicated upon dynamics. Said goals can non-​violent forms of (inter-​) be mandatory, optional, action? How does the game or impossible. This only explore consequences of violence/​ refers to ‘formal’ goals war? that are in some way recognized by the game. Localized Requirements to run the Does the game require expensive Accessibility2 game (e.g. hardware, hardware to run? If the game OS, and platform), cost is not free, how will cost to access and run the impact player exposure? What game, as well as language linguistic barriers might prevent options for the game. populations from playing this game? (continued)

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138  Christopher Kampe Table 10.1 (Cont.) Dimension

Definition

Reciprocity

Benefits the game provides for the communities it represents or drew from.

Modifiability

Criteria

Does the game provide any social benefit to the populations it took inspiration from? Does the game provide financial benefit to CWS in some way? The public availability of Have the developers provided tools developer or community-​ that could be used by CWS built tools that allow (or their allies) in order to tell for the creation of new their own stories or otherwise scenarios that run using add content relevant to their the game’s engine. own experiences? What level of technical knowledge/​equipment is required to use these tools?

Notes 1 Dynamics refer to the more complex actions/​maneuvers that can be accomplished through the game’s mechanics (Hunicke et al. 2004). For example, the ‘dynamic’ of methodical scavenging is predicated on a number of mechanics:  limited inventory, variable good utility and value, map areas for exploration, basic movement, the ability to search through rubble and pick items up, etc. 2 Regarding general accessibility and approaches for game design that accommodate varying forms/​degrees of disability see Yuan et al. (2011) for a more general discussion of how disability can productively inform design see Pullin (2009). While I acknowledge the need for game design that respects different user abilities; however, discussion of these principles and techniques is beyond the scope of this paper.

Case study of a feminist wargame: This War of Mine (2014) In March of 2014, 11 Bit Studios released an eerie trailer:1 the screen starts from black; somber, arpeggiated chords play in the background; from the darkness, the camera tracks right, and we see a world in slow motion. Armed soldiers sprint forward. Most look forward, one hesitates, looking back. We hear the first notes of an electric guitar, floating in and out. A soldier passes a personnel carrier; the camera tracks through a nascent explosion, as a soldier beside it falls; the music comes to crescendo. The camera speeds up, tracking though soldiers shooting and being shot. Then the camera tracks into darkness; the guitars and orchestral support recede, leaving only the piano chords. The long tracking shot finishes, settling on several individuals huddled in a ruined house. A man braces against a wall holding his face. A woman holds onto a bleeding man barely kneeling upright, while a child looks at the scene. A caption appears: ‘In war not everyone is a soldier’. TWoM, taking inspiration from the 1992–​1996 siege of Sarajevo,2 explores war from the perspective of a group of survivors who scavenge for food and supplies. The goal is simple: do not die; survive, however you can, until the

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 139 end. The political message of the game is rather unambiguous: just outside the survivors’ shelter, graffitied on the remnants of a brick wall, are the words ‘Fuck the War!’ As is always the case, it is easier to understand the game by playing it or watching a ‘playthrough’ (many of which are accessible online). As a game, TWoM consists of several scenarios which are based on a common underlying model. Before we can analyze the game, we must describe its pertinent elements:

• • • •

• • • • • • • • •

The player controls a group of civilians, each has a backstory, a set of skills, and drawbacks. Civilians have mental and physical states. Player actions and inactions can affect these states. In order to stay alive, civilians need to eat, drink, rest, and stay warm. If these needs aren’t addressed, the civilian will get weaker and die. Mental well-​being is variable:  different activities (e.g. reading, singing) benefit civilians according to their dispositions; in the same way activities (e.g. stealing, witnessing violence) have different effects on their mental well-​being. If mental needs are not addressed, the civilian will leave or commit suicide. Play is divided into two stages: a day stage, in which the civilians collectively attend to their domestic needs, and a night stage, in which a single civilian goes out to scavenge for resources. Time is a resource: the day is 14 hours long, the night is 8 hours long. The game ends if all the civilians die/​leave; the player wins if the civilians endure until a ceasefire is declared (20–​40 days depending on the scenario). Survival requires resources; resources can be scavenged, constructed/​ cultivated, and traded. All domestic tasks (e.g. growing crops, cooking food, resting, reading, making tools, etc.) require labor; some tasks consume resources (e.g. fermenting alcohol requires sugar and water); a civilian must work at a task for a set amount of time—​thus labor hours are a finite resource. When scavenging, carrying capacity is limited, and (depending on the location) it is possible for the civilian to get injured or killed; by extension, the civilian may also injure, kill, or steal from non-​player-​characters (NPCs). When scavenging, there are two modes: scavenge and combat; the default mode is scavenge, here the interface facilitates hiding, searching for items, and using tools; the combat mode allows the character to use whatever weapon they have equipped on an NPC, hostile or otherwise. The game autosaves at the end of every day or night session; this makes actions more-​or-​less permanent, meaning combat is very risky. If a character dies, there is no replacement; fewer resources will be consumed, but fewer labor hours will be available.

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140  Christopher Kampe

Applying the dimensions Because the dimensions I lay out are not and could never be completely discrete units of evaluation, it is difficult to divide a game’s characteristics neatly into sections; in many places, dimensions bleed together. For example, Setting and Characterization both draw from interviews with war survivors. The company’s decision to release keys on a popular torrenting website Pirate Bay because they knew some people couldn’t afford the game3 could relate to both Reciprocity and Accessibility. The context-​specificity that this mode of analysis offers dictates that dimensions should remain discrete for the purpose of analysis but discretion is ultimately relegated to the researcher employing this framework. This ethic is in line with extant feminist thought; as Haraway states: ‘only partial perspective promises objective vision … Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see’ (1988, p.  583). Therefore, although a single dimension’s contents may also fit under another dimension, the thoughtful and purposeful placement of a quality (and its requisite justification) is what ultimately matters. Characterization and setting The developers of TWoM, wanted to create a game ‘about war … about ordinary people who face extremely difficult moral choices’ (Kowalczyk 2015). Exploring this premise, they realized that they knew the most about conflict close to them (i.e. ‘the Warsaw Uprising, Kosovo, Monrovia, Sarajevo’), and chose to loosely base the game around these events. When researching the details to be included in the game, they interviewed family members and acquaintances who had first-​hand accounts of these experiences, while also making use of interview recordings provided by Amnesty International. To their surprise, it turned out ‘people did not remember they were attacking Germany, or attacking Russians, or Croats, or anyone … [they recalled aspects of] everyday life: they lacked tea, but they exchanged eggs with a neighbor … [their concerns were to] survive and take care of their families’ (Kowalczyk 2015). As one anthropologist put it, The experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans’ struggle to recreate normality during the siege, as well as their constant oscillation between knowing and not-​knowing, was a typical limit situation … in this ‘grey zone’, any action and view is potentially acceptable. Norms and normativity itself are eradicated. (Maček 2009, p. 35) The game itself, through art, events, and naming conventions, gives the impression that it is happening in the Balkans; however, because it doesn’t ascribe religion or specific ethnic identity to its characters or provide concrete

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 141 locations for events, its decontextualization arguably ‘opens space for a more universal message … [while refraining] from taking [nationalistic] political stances’ (Sterczewski 2016). The characters (six male, four female) represent a variety of ages and backgrounds, though all present a sense of uniform ethnicity. Their backgrounds range from academics, lawyers, and laborers to thieves—​reinforcing the idea that war has uprooted all of their lives. Play begins in a large, half-​destroyed shelter, impressing the idea that none of them has a ‘whole’ home to return to. To a certain extent, their pasts are irrelevant; they are all now survivors. While some may be more efficient at a task or might have a different response to an event, all characters are fundamentally capable of performing all of the actions permitted by the game (e.g. cook, rest, dig, shoot). Thus the game facilitates a degree of character differentiation without limiting their fundamental capacities. Dynamics and objectives The player’s goal is to keep at least one member of the group alive until the siege relents. As indicated above, characters can die from direct injury (e.g. they are shot while looting) or neglect (e.g. they starve or catch fever). Though the outside world is dangerous, the player is motivated to scavenge because she will need external resources in order to ensure that her group does not succumb to neglect. At the start of the game, the characters are able to scavenge from low-​risk locations. As these locations are stripped of resources, characters will be forced to venture into more dangerous (i.e. high-​risk/​reward) locations. In order to explore the dynamics of this game, I will describe an emergent narrative from my own playthrough. This game is hard. If you do not play it well, your group will die. Here is the story of my first failure.

• • •

• •

My group consisted of four people:  Pavele, Arica, Bruno, and Katia. Pavele was my scavenger; he could always carry the heaviest loads, which meant more resources for the house, but he moved slowly. For weeks, I sent Pavele to scavenge in safe places, and that worked for a while, but eventually, those locations were picked clean. So, I sent him to scavenge in a dangerous place. An armed man saw him looting and shot him. Pavele was badly wounded, but he made it home. I  used the medical supplies I had and gave him constant bedrest. I did not have the money to purchase sterile bandages; I needed that money for food. I sent out other scavengers, to less dangerous places, but these sites had been picked clean by others. When Pavele came down with a fever, I knew I had to get medicine. This meant that I would need to rob a warehouse. I sent a young girl, Arica, into a dangerous place, thinking she could slip by the guards. I was mistaken. She was shot and died. Pavele died from his fever. On the following night, Bruno stole the last of our food supplies and left. Katia killed herself. The game was over.

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142  Christopher Kampe I did not adequately appreciate risk. I did not realize how quickly a character could die, nor did I comprehend how the loss of a character could trigger a cascading failure that would destroy the entire group in a matter of days. I had spent hours building up the compound; now it was gone. The failure felt personal as did the emergent narrative surrounding it. But I  learned. In my third playthrough, I found myself in a similar situation: Pavele had been shot. I  sent Arica into an old apartment building where snipers had been active. This time, I was more cautious. I understood how quickly death could take her. Carefully, quietly, nimble Arica snuck from room to room, eluding the dangerous men. She could not carry much, but she brought back electronic parts and medicines, a haul worth more than anything we had. Because of her limited strength, I thought of her as expendable and never much cared for her. But in that particular playthrough, my bravest hero was a little girl. While I  cannot speak to all the lessons one could learn from playing This War of Mine, I  can speak to the lessons I  learned. In order to win, I needed to cast aside some notions of who is the hero, who is the worker. In fact, I needed to get over the idea of the singular hero. Inasmuch as Arica saved the day, the survival of the group was predicated on every character working to the fullest of their abilities. During the day, so much work needs to be done:  the front door reinforced, plants tended, tools built up from scrap, rainwater gathered, meals cooked, dinner served and eaten. When it came to scavenging, Pavele was best suited for safe places where much could be taken, but he was ill-​suited for the stealth that dangerous places required. When merchants came to the door, or when we needed goods from the market, the house relied on Katia. She knew how to haggle and always got the best deals. By the late game, I didn’t need to scavenge. Bruno handled the cooking and much of the crafting. Sveta worked constantly, tending to the plants, rolling cigarettes (our currency at the markets), and keeping the group sane. At a macro-​level, the player’s objective is simple:  survive until the war ends. At a micro-​level, the player is overwhelmed by a fleet of possible objectives, some of which involve the carrying out of daily routines that facilitate survival, some are wholly reactive (e.g. our food was stolen, a character is sick, etc.), while others are more strategic (e.g. what should I  be trading in winter). In this way, long-​term objectives are impossible to attain without ritualized attendance to domestic obligations (i.e. recurrent micro-​ objectives). These domestic obligations require the simultaneous management of many individuals, rewarding players who are able to get more done within the shelter. Furthermore, the dynamics are such that if one is highly productive at the shelter (where there is little risk of injury), there is less of a need to venture into locations where harm/​injury are probable. Work that has been traditionally feminized, though often slow, tedious, and mundane, remains as essential actions that the player must perform religiously if their group is to survive.

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 143 Localized accessibility In an effort to overcome language barriers the developers worked with the community to create new (albeit imperfect) translations of the game.4 Abstractly, developers have to perform a cost-​benefit analysis when it comes to translation:  will more potential customers justify the costs of translation? However, the developers are not the only stakeholders in this instance. When the constellations are just right, a game’s community will generate what would otherwise be expensive labor for free. It began in the forums; potential players were interested in the game, but lamented that it wasn’t in their native language. The developers were sympathetic, as was the game’s community. Almost as soon as non-​English-​speaking players made translation requests, multilingual players volunteered to help.5 The developers immediately recognized that the community itself was a powerful resource for free translation so, they developed a web page6 where volunteers could coordinate their efforts. Just as language posed a barrier to some players, so did cost. Shortly after the game’s release, torrents for cracked versions of the game appeared on Pirate Bay. The developers responded ‘if because of some reasons you can’t buy the game, its [sic] ok. We know life, and we know that sometimes it’s just not possible’. Following this, they posted a number of Steam keys that could be redeemed for legal copies of the game.7 This may have been a very clever move. There is something of a common ethos among individuals who pirate games/​software. They are stealing from the ‘haves’ and giving to the ‘have nots’. They believe information should be free and shared (Yu et al. 2015). Among developers, there is a common perception that piracy will only harm them. The reality is inherently more complex:  ‘In certain circumstances, limited piracy can benefit a copyright holder’ by speeding up the ‘digital diffusion’ of their product (Hill 2007, p. 14). There are more nuanced ways to deter piracy than attempting to shut down torrents or rely on third-​party DRM software. Short of a fully permissive stance, experts argue that some of the best ways to counter piracy include giving pirates easier ways to legally acquire the game (e.g. free samples or keys), lowering the price of the product, and performing positive actions which would increase a moral resistance to piracy. In this style, the developers made several canny decisions. Rather than voicing outrage at piracy they said, ‘if you cannot afford the game, take it for free’. Within six months of release they heavily discounted the game ($5 or less) during Steam, GoG, and Humble Bundle sales. Through these actions, they demonstrated empathy while (probably) dissuading piracy. Reciprocity The developers of TWoM expressed ‘concerns about monetizing from war’ (de Smale et al. 2017, p. 11) and through purposeful efforts took steps towards

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144  Christopher Kampe direct and indirect reciprocity. It must be noted that the developers recouped costs for this game very quickly; the commercial success of the game presented them with opportunities for reciprocity that would have been financially difficult for a struggling company. The most noteworthy action the developers took was partnering with a number of street artists to develop the ‘War Child’ DLC expansion. Following the commercial success of the game, the developers went through a semi-​standard cycle of patches before producing an expansion for the game. The ‘War Child’ expansion added two elements to the game: children, who require resources but cannot produce or scavenge; and street art, which appears both in game and as a digital collection. The art itself was developed by various street artists who either lived through times of war or created art lamenting war. Although this content enriched the world of the game, it also provided a platform for lesser-​known artists. Furthermore, all monies from the DLC went directly to the War Child charity. Though the quantity of money raised is unknown, Polygon reported enough money was raised to assist 350 refugee children (Hall 2015);8 donations have continued since the time of publication, but the studio has not since published new milestones.9 Modifiability After the game’s release, members of its community were motivated to create their own stories, based on first-​or second-​hand experience or entirely fictional. The developers responded by creating modding tools that allow for the construction of new characters and scenarios.10 While these scenarios are limited by the underlying engine and the technical proficiencies of their users, they are an expressive tool. If an individual was so inclined, they could gather new anthropological data from war survivors of a particular region, develop their own characters, set a new sequence of events, and use this software to tell another survivor’s story. I do not claim that the TWoM engine can possibly express all of civilian experience during times of war; however, I contend that the openness of the engine is worthy of replication. Just as the first wargames were handbooks that presented models upon which scenarios have been run, I assert that future feminist wargames need to be in the business of building new models which can be used convey different standpoints on war.

Conclusions I recognize that there are many ‘war themed’ games that could adopt a feminist standpoint; however, I wish to make a distinction between these games and ‘wargames’, which constitute a historical genre of battle simulation. With that distinction established, I can summarize the internal qualities of a ‘feminist wargame’ as I am conceptualizing it:

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 145

• • •

•

•

Model-​based: simulating basic human needs, interactions, finite resources, and environmental obstacles/​variables. Scenario-​driven:  a ‘game’ as will consist of one or more scenarios that utilize a common model. These scenarios will determine player start state, desired end state (i.e. goal), available resources, and present obstacles. Historically informed: while complete verisimilitude is not necessarily the goal, elements of the game, such as model characteristics (i.e. variables, interactions, etc.), scenario parameters/​objectives, protagonist abilities, etc. should leverage historical/​ethnographic data—​even if the scenario itself is fantastic. Standpoint-​ oriented:  play focuses on the behavior/​ survival of non-​ combatants during a time of war. By extension, play should abstractly represent essential behaviors/​activities that civilians would perform. Said activities must be inclusive of essential, but historically feminized, activities (e.g. getting food, cooking, offering emotional support, supervising children, etc.). Difficult: the scenarios should be, in a non-​trivial sense, difficult to complete but not impossible; such that initial players are likely to fail in a manner that will hurt. Sadistic as it may sound, pain is a goal.

Up until this point I  have spoken of gamic difficulty indirectly; however, I contend that difficulty and complexity serve a rhetorical purpose in feminist wargames. Designers of wargames have historically had to grapple with an ambivalence: the more complex the system the better it can simulate reality; however, the simpler system is more approachable to players (Schuurman 2017). If one were designing a training simulation to teach civilian wartime survival, a higher degree of fidelity would be warranted, but if one’s goal is to create a (recreational) serious game, then extreme fidelity is undesirable. At the same time, difficulty itself can serve a rhetorical purpose. As a player, if you tell me I’m playing a survival scenario and I manage to traverse that scenario without losing, I may well infer that survival, in this scenario, is relatively easy. On the other hand, if the scenario you gave me was difficult—​if I lost several times before succeeding—​I might infer that survival, in said scenario, is difficult. A  classroom study found similar results when it examined the effect that playing a poverty simulation, Spent (2011) had on students’ perceptions of poverty. Spent did not lead students to increased empathy or positive views of people living with poverty, whereas observing a classmate playing Spent, and struggling with it, did. Players able to traverse the game successfully, a task taking roughly ten minutes, were more disposed to report that poverty is an individually controllable phenomenon—​after all, they won (Roussos & Dovidio 2016). As simulations are predicated on player operation, the difficulty of the game may impact the values/​meanings that players infer from it. In The Art of Failure, the author describes two experiences of gamic failure: ‘fictional failure’ which befalls a character in a game, and ‘real failure’

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146  Christopher Kampe which a player can experience after they have invested energy/​emotion into a game and lost (Juul 2013, pp. 24–​29). A TWoM scenario takes approximately ten hours to complete. The autosave system prevents players from undoing mistakes (clever cheaters not-​withstanding). A  critical mistake will have a cascading effect, such that the full gravity of the loss may take time to set in. These mechanical decisions not only make the game difficult, but they facilitate player investment, which in turn makes failures ‘real’ rather than ‘fictional’. I argue that games that elicit experiences of ‘real failure’ are better tools for cultivating empathy, than games where failure is inconsequential (in terms of lost time/​effort). If it is your goal to build a feminist wargame, do so with the community in mind. Critically minded developers should adopt socially responsive design practices ‘building sociotechnical structures that are explicitly designed in collaboration with, and toward the continual growth of, individuals and those communities in which they are nested’ (Barab et al. 2005, p. 88). In the context of feminist wargames, this practice will include:

•

• • •

Developing connections to organizations devoted to helping war survivors. Through these organizations, you will gain access to first-​and second-​hand accounts of civilian war survivors. Cynthia Cockburn has written about this extensively; her books and essays name many of these organizations. Establishing forums where players (current and potential) can voice interests and concerns. An engaged community, if they are able, will assist in translation. Building tools that will allow users to build their own scenarios, add their own characters, and tell their own stories. Finding ways to help the populations that have inspired your game, whether through active charity or promotion.

If you are an educator who is interested in bringing such a game into your classroom, think about how you might contextualize it for your students. Nursing programs have used poverty simulations to help students better understand the difficulties impoverished households faced, and the experience was perceived by students to be effective as a means of teaching and correlated with a reduction in stigmatic views of individuals in poverty. However, these students did not simply play a game; rather, they examined a body of literature and a number of case studies while interacting with a simulation (Patterson & Hulton 2012). As other scholars have cautioned before, educational games are not a ‘silver bullet’, insofar as they are not intrinsically superior to other forms of educational media (Young et al. 2012). However, when a game/​simulation is brought into a classroom thoughtfully, when students are asked to reflect on its simulation beside other accounts of fact, then it can be a powerful tool.

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank my colleague Sarah Evans who helped me develop this idea and gave me insightful feedback. Without her support, this chapter would not have been written.

Notes 1 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Hxf1seOpijE. 2 See Developer Trailer (www.youtube.com/​watch?v=gotK5DLdVvI). 3 https://​segmentnext.com/​2014/​11/​17/​war-​mine-​developer-​handing-​free-​steam-​ codes/​. 4 See Developer Update 1.4 (www.youtube.com/​watch?v=dKxg6of03BE). 5 Anecdotally, some of these translators were teachers living outside the US. A handful of these records can be found in the Steam Forums dedicated to TWoM. For one such example, see: https://​steamcommunity.com/​app/​282070/​discussions/​ 0/​357286119110895220/​. 6 http://​babel.thiswarofmine.com/​. 7 https://​segmentnext.com/​2014/​11/​17/​war-​mine-​developer-​handing-​free-​steam-​ codes/​. 8 www.polygon.com/​2015/​4/​2/​8331411/​this-​war-​of-​mine-​charity-​dlc. 9 https://​store.steampowered.com/​app/​348040/​This_​War_​of_​Mine_​_​War_​Child_​ Charity_​DLC/​. 10 See Developer Update 2.0 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=tkPSM4k5qmY.

References Barab, S, Thomas, M, Dodge, T, Carteaux, R, & Tuzun, H 2005, ‘Making learning fun:  Quest Atlantis, a game without guns’, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 86–​107. Bogost, I 2007, Persuasive games:  the expressive power of videogames, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bowell, T 2011, ‘Feminist standpoint theory’, Internet encyclopedia of philosophy, viewed 14 November 2018, wwwsw.iep.utm.edu/​fem-​stan/​. Brummett, B 2003, The world and how we describe it: rhetorics of reality, representation, simulation, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CN. Burns, S, Della Volpe, D, Babb, R, Miller, N, & Muir, G 2015, War gamer’s handbook: a guide for professional war gamers, Naval War College, Newport, CN. Cockburn, C 2007, From where we stand: war, woman’s activism, and feminist analysis, Zed Books, London, UK. Cockburn, C 2010, ‘Gender relations as causal in militarization and war:  a feminist standpoint’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 139–​157. Consalvo, M 2009, Cheating: gaining advantage in videogames, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. de Smale, S, Kors MJL, & Sandovar AM 2017, ‘The case of This War of Mine: a production studies perspective on moral game design’, Games and Culture, August 2017, pp. 1–​23, viewed 10 October 2019, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1555412017725996.

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148  Christopher Kampe Demick, B 2012, Logavina Street: life and death in a Sarajevo neighbourhood, Penguin Random House, New York, NY. Galloway, AR 2006, Gaming: essays on algorithmic culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Hall, C 2015, ‘This War of Mine’s DLC has helped 350 refugees from Syria, all of them children’, Polygon, viewed 3 October 2019. www.polygon.com/​2015/​4/​2/​8331411/​ this-​war-​of-​mine-​charity-​dlc. Haraway, D 1988, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14 no. 3, pp. 575–​599. Harding, S 2004, ‘Introduction’, in S Harding (ed.), Standpoint theory as a site of political, philosophic, and scientific debate, Routledge, London, UK, pp. 1–​15. Harrigan, P & Kirschenbaum, M (eds.) 2016, Zones of control, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hartsock, NC 1983, Money, sex, and power: toward a feminist historical materialism, Longman, New York, NY. Hill, CW 2007, ‘Digital piracy:  causes, consequences, and strategic responses’, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 9–​25. Hunicke, R, LeBlanc, M, & Zubek, R 2004, ‘MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research’, Proceedings of the AAAI workshop on challenges in game AI, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 1722–​1726. Huntemann, NB & Payne MT (eds.) 2009, Joystick soldiers: the politics of play in military video games, Taylor and Francis, Abingdon, UK. Juul, J 2013, The art of failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Kowalczyk, T 2015, ‘“Robimy gry dla graczy”:  Wywiad z Pawłem Miechowskim z 11bit Studios’ [‘We make games for gamers’: the interview with Paweł Miechowski of 11 Bit Studios], Gamezilla, 15 July, viewed 14 November 2018, www. gamezilla.pl/​publicystyka/​2015/​07/​robimy-​gry-​dla-​graczy-​wywiad-​z-​pawlem​miechowskim-​z-​11bit-​studios. Lewin, CG 2012, War games and their history, Fonthill Media, Stroud, UK. Maček, I 2009, Sarajevo under siege:  anthropology in wartime, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. Mehlenbacher, B & Kampe, C 2017, ‘Expansive genres of play: getting serious about game genres for the design of future learning environments’, in Miller, CR & Kelly, AR (eds.), Emerging genres in new media environments, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK, pp. 117–​133. Melles, G, de Vere, I, & Misic, V 2011, ‘Socially responsible design: thinking beyond the triple bottom line to socially responsive and sustainable product design’, CoDesign, vol. 7, no. 3–​4, pp. 143–​154. Moser, CN & Clark, F (eds.) 2001, Victims, perpetrators or actors? Gender, armed conflict and political violence, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK. Patterson, N & Hulton, LJ 2012, ‘Enhancing nursing students’ understanding of poverty through simulation’, Public Health Nursing, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 143–​151. Pullin, G 2009, Design meets disability, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Roussos, G & Dovidio, JF 2016, ‘Playing below the poverty line: investigating an online game as a way to reduce prejudice toward the poor’, Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, vol. 10, no. 2, viewed 18 November 2018, http://​dx.doi.org/​10.5817/​CP2016-​2-​3.

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Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 149 Sabin, P 2012, Simulating war: studying conflict through simulation games, A&C Black, London, UK. Schuurman, P 2017, ‘Models of war 1770–​1830: the birth of wargames and the trade-​ off between realism and simplicity’, History of European Ideas, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 442–​455. Spent 2011, McKinney agency for Urban ministries of Durham, Online game. Sterczewski, P 2016, ‘This uprising of mine: game conventions, cultural memory and civilian experience of war in Polish games’, Game Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, viewed 18 November 2018, http://​gamestudies.org/​1602/​articles/​sterczewski. Susi, T, Johannesson, M & Backlund, P 2007, ‘Serious games:  an overview’, 25 February, viewed 18 November 2018, www.diva-​portal.org/​smash/​get/​diva2:2416/​ FULLTEXT01.pdf. This War of Mine 2014, 11 Bit Studios, PC. Young, MF, Slota, S, Cutter, AB, Jalette, G, Mullin, G, Lai, B, & Yukhymenko, M 2012, ‘Our princess is in another castle: a review of trends in serious gaming for education’, Review of Educational Research, vol. 82, no. 1, pp. 61–​89. Yu, CP, Young, ML, & Ju, BC 2015, ‘Consumer software piracy in virtual communities:  an integrative model of heroism and social exchange’, Internet Research, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 317–​334. Yuan, B, Folmer, E, & Harris, FC 2011, ‘Game accessibility:  a survey’, Universal Access in the Information Society, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 81–​100.

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11  Failed feminist interventions in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Mark Kaethler

Introduction: make America Nazi-​free again … through obscene acts of violence? When Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017) was released, the advertisement’s slogan read ‘Make America Nazi-​Free Again’, an overt reference to the events in Charlottesville and the presidency of Donald Trump. Creator Tommy Bjork wrote the script and plot long before these events occurred, but he has recounted in an interview with VICE News how his own experience of Nazism in his home country of Sweden was influential (VICE News 2017). The game franchise has always been about killing Nazis and was one of the pioneering series in the first-​person shooter genre. As Souvik Mukherjee notes, developments in graphics and gaming have allowed the original spy narrative of the game to become enhanced over the course of the various iterations of the storyline, thereby ‘growing interest in exploring narrative possibilities’ (2015, p.  60).1 Wolfenstein II is no different in its evolutionary approach to what was a basic plotline and imbues newfound interest in feminist values as well as an effort to implicate the series in contemporary politics.2 In this manner, the most recent game picks up where the last one left off. A cut-​scene from Wolfenstein: The New Order’s (2014) conclusion presents the protagonist of the series, B.J. Blazkowicz, as ready to die; his voice narrates a scene in which his pregnant partner, Anya, holds a light, ushering survivors from Nazi captivity to safety while he quotes Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’. Highlighting the Statue of Liberty via Lazarus’s poem as a feminized symbol of freedom who will bring hope and safety to those suffering while ostensibly preparing for his death, Blazkowicz seems to be passing the torch to his female counterparts who we see departing at the conclusion of Wolfenstein: The New Order for what will be a mission in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus to liberate the United States.3 On the surface then, the latest game in the series appeals to challenges to hegemonic systems of power through utilizing feminine icons as emblems of recalcitrance to fascism. This challenge to oppressive ideologies and impositions of normalcy is rooted in feminist discourse. Drawing upon the work of Drucilla Cornell, Elizabeth Grosz reasserts that at its core feminism

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Failed feminist interventions 151 entails a challenge to oppression (2005, p. 75). By conceiving of proper military combat as that which is opposed to hegemony, Wolfenstein II clearly fits the bill by demolishing fascism and Nazism, but it makes more unique efforts to question this hegemony, thereby distinguishing it from other Second World War videogames. Through establishing empowered women in military combat, Wolfenstein II offers a clear challenge to patriarchy specifically, and it questions the self-​sufficient and able-​bodied ideal of the male soldier that reflects the embodiment of this fascist regime. As Michael Kimmel has elucidated, this toxic model of selfhood is aligned with an oppressive masculinity of ‘self-​reliance’ (1996, p.  16). The game’s intervention to envision alternative masculinities resists this domineering patriarchal norm, thereby maintaining a feminist ethos. Although these interventions also challenge conventional first-​person shooter war games, there are significant flaws with the game’s implementation of these clear goals. Even the counterpoint to Nazism begs the question of whether or not violence constitutes a valid feminist response to this fascism. Memes and gifs that were created after Richard Spencer was punched in the face by someone protesting white supremacy led to such questions. Wolfenstein II offers players a hypothetical world where Nazism has become the dominant worldview and militaristic resistance is the only option. As a fictional, alternative timeline in which the Nazis won and took over the United States, the narrative does not have direct bearing on current political affairs, but its dystopian imaginary world still mirrors present-​day anxieties and politics in the United States. Despite the fact that the violence it depicts is against Nazis, the onslaught of nameless figures who are obliterated by the player should nevertheless still be questioned. Although Jinee Lokaneeta has identified that ‘resistance’ characterizes feminism and may take the shape of ‘political violence’ (2015, p. 1021), it is important to keep in mind that the member of the resistance that the player operates in order to enact this political violence is a man, not allowing for a non-​cis-​ white-​man person to see someone representative of themselves as the enactor of justice.4 That male character also inhabits the masculine genre of the first-​ person shooter, which C.  Thi Nguyen labels as a ‘destruction game’ (2018, p.  184).5 Although oppositional games typically entail a degree of violence or dominance,6 the killing of thousands of faceless Nazi soldiers in varying, gory ways makes it destructive. From this standpoint, Wolfenstein II is feminist in its use of violence to combat fascism, but the gory details risk allowing its users to indulge excessively in these acts. Nevertheless, the game offers an intervention of the genre by interrogating the conventions of the first-​person shooter and supplying an improvement upon previous games in the series as well as militaristic games as a whole. With respect to genre, the ability to codify Wolfenstein II or Wolfenstein as a game series into any distinct category becomes a problem as well. As Nathan McKenzie identifies, where the original Wolfenstein game ‘came from … is … difficult to trace despite its massive impact on the first-​person shooter’ (2012, p.  53). For McKenzie, this problem distinguishes Wolfenstein from

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152  Mark Kaethler other militaristic games like the Soldier of Fortune series. B.J. Blazkowicz is the protagonist in the main storylines of all iterations of the franchise thus far, and he is regularly presented as a spy infiltrating the Nazi regime in order to assassinate key leaders and obliterate any officers who stand in his way.7 Although this narrative has clear ties to the Second World War, the supernatural elements of the franchise as well as the historical revisioning of the recent two reboots, in which the Nazis have won the Second World War, are likely the reasons why critics are hesitant to discuss it as a war game. The oppositional context of the war combined with tactical strategies, however, allow for it to be defined as a war game. While Huntemann and Payne define military games as part of ‘the military-​entertainment complex … [that] blurs the line between entertainment and militarism’ (2009, p.  4),8 Wolfenstein II’s hypothetical history abstracts it from military conflict and positions it in relation to Johann Christian Ludgwig’s eighteenth-​century invention, Kriegsspiel. As Sebastian Deterding notes, Ludgwig’s concept means ‘war game’; it follows the oppositional nature of chess, but transmutes the parameters of the game to involve tactics and rules based upon terrain, much as Wolfenstein II’s spatio-​temporal contours allow for spy, combat, and escape narratives to take shape (2009, p. 23). In this manner, Wolfenstein II does not serve the military-​ entertainment complex in advancing the interests of the military and entertainment industries, especially as its direct implications concern conflict at home; hence, the war game becomes about the player’s own experience rather than the benefits of industry. For the purposes of this chapter, the genre of war game thus provides an apt way to examine the ways in which the game’s world and mechanics manifest feminist values while still undermining these efforts by not marking a full departure from the first-​person shooter genre. Therefore, while the origins of the narrative echo other spy adventures, ‘first-​ person shooter war game’ best describes Wolfenstein II. This chapter examines the ways in which Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus revises the traditional masculinist framework of this genre,9 but still contains persisting issues. It first accomplishes this by elucidating the game’s novel approach to disability through gameplay at the beginning of its narrative; this work examines this depiction of disability as aligning with feminist goals in an intersectional manner that challenges the aforementioned ‘self-​reliant’ masculinity that Kimmel espouses.10 Indeed, as Judith Butler identifies, ‘the critique of gender normativity, able-​ism, and racist perception have made clear there is no singular human form’, namely the ideal classical male body is a fiction that must be dismantled (2016, p. 52). However, the study critiques the narrative’s presentation of disability over the course of the game, elucidating that Wolfenstein II ultimately falls back on an ableist and classical masculine model of the body despite having initially made progressive changes to gameplay mechanics. The women in the game are approached in a similar way, namely that they are improvements upon the typical representations of women in first-​person shooters, but the player’s alignment with Blazkowicz, a white man,11 at times compromises these attempts at integrating feminist

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Failed feminist interventions 153 empowerment. The expansion Agent Silent Death (in which the user plays as a woman) is explored as a potential alternative to this ongoing problem. Overall, the chapter argues that Wolfenstein II makes slight interventions into the parochial militaristic videogame narrative, both through cut-​scenes and gameplay, but fails to realize or consistently retain this feminist potential throughout its narrative.

Disability as feminist intervention, but then as obstacle Although Kishonna L.  Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen identify the emerging intersectional communities that have been marginalized as a result of the hegemony of white, cis masculinity in gaming culture (2018, pp. 2, 9), they do not touch upon how disability factors into this conversation. If the white cis male is consistently allocated a privileged position at the centre of gaming, then the embodiment of that group is likewise portrayed as able-​ bodied. As this section illuminates, Wolfenstein II begins with a narrative that defies this normative framework by having the player navigate the first level with Blazkowicz having a disability, but it gradually presents his disability as a foil to his masculine prowess in not thinking himself able to have sex with Anya and believing that he is dying. The narrative ‘resolves’ the issue through Blazkowicz being born again after Frau Engel decapitates him. His head is then surreptitiously captured by his fellow resistance fighters and attached to a bioengineered Nazi superhuman body they have acquired. What begins as a feminist intervention that celebrates disability thus reverts to a disregard for that same disability. The first level casts disability as able to enact warfare, contrary to popular military belief in gaming.12 But the narrative thereafter frames the body as tragic until its execution, wherein the classical head is preserved and what is portrayed as the grotesque body is abandoned. The narrative therefore frames the death of this former body as a necessity. By adopting Butler’s theories on bodies that are and are not valued in relation to the violence committed against them in warfare, we can identify the shift that occurs in the game, for the violence committed against the body labelled as disabled by the game is ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’, given that Blazkowicz’s body is ‘already lost or forfeited’ (2016, p. 31). The body is literally abandoned as the camera in the cut-​scene focuses only on the head’s descent. The game therefore begins by making an intervention through challenging the able-​bodied masculine soldier as the only valid combatant, but it gradually undermines these efforts by transmuting this narrative into a tragedy and eventually justifying the violence done against this body, as it leads to Blazkowicz’s rebirth as the able-​bodied stereotype once again. Despite these ends, it is rare to find a mainstream videogame, let  alone a first-​person shooter, that features a character with a disability. The first level of Wolfenstein II thus offers a departure from this norm by narrating Blazkowicz as a character in a wheelchair rather than having him miraculously recovered from the ending of Wolfenstein: The New Order, wherein he

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154  Mark Kaethler was ostensibly dying. First-​person shooter series like Call of Duty replicate these militaristic ideologies by offering no suggestion that the protagonist has a disability. Wolfenstein II provides an alternative to this narrative that allows players with disabilities a chance to play out the narrative as someone who approximates their own lived experience. This is at least the encounter Michael Matlock had while playing the game. In his ‘Disability Game Review’ of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Matlock first identifies the common way in which disability is used as a narrative gimmick before assessing the difference in Wolfenstein II, namely that one ‘can be a badass in a wheelchair!’ (2018). As per the aforementioned destructive nature of the first-​person shooter, this evaluation can neglect the fact that being a ‘badass’ still involves slaughtering hundreds of faceless soldiers, even if they are Nazis, and committing senseless acts of violence. One of the trophies a player collects, for instance, is entitled ‘Crippled but Able’, which the user achieves through performing a silent takedown on a Nazi soldier.13 Aside from the offensive use of language,14 the trophy encourages excessive violence; however, in doing so it simultaneously identifies that Blazkowicz is still perfectly capable of performing his military actions in a wheelchair, which has the capacity to empower a player with a disability. In this way, Wolfenstein II nevertheless reshapes the traditional ableist narrative of military-​based games. While still destructive in nature, then, this game manages to subvert the ideologically destructive narrative of a soldier needing to be able-​bodied in favour of plural masculinities that steer the player away from conformity and make for an open playing field. Matlock’s identification that the gameplay actually integrates the disability is likewise crucial for achieving the subversion of ableist military games. Tamer Thabet’s study of videogames using narrative criticism allows us to conceive the complexity and multivalent nature of a videogame’s narrative, namely that it combines experiential gameplay with cinematic cut-​scenes. As Thabet points out, videogames ‘are closer to films than they are to written texts’, and the cut scenes operate much like a cinematic that positions the player as an audience participant who aligns themselves with the protagonist (2015, p. 9). By allowing the narration in which a player can act through a protagonist with a disability during gameplay, Wolfenstein II transitions representation into active narration wherein the player is able to play out the storyline as Blazkowicz with a disability. This choice on the developers’ part provides players with a disability an avatar they can possibly identify with, as Matlock has, and/​or a character who makes them more aware of the normative framework first-​person shooter war games have conditioned them to expect. As Matlock points out, though, the illusion of identifying with a protagonist who has a disability vanishes as soon as chapter one concludes. The gameplay then resumes an ableist narrative that effectively ‘cures’ the disability, rendering it a foil rather than a celebrated lived experience. When reverting back to a typical first-​person shooter war game, however, the user is aware from the cut-​scene that they are using a different prosthetic technology in order to accomplish this feat. After the leader of the opposition, Caroline,

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Failed feminist interventions 155 is executed by Frau Engel, the Nazi leader and antagonist of the game’s storyline, her mechanical suit that allows her to navigate as though she does not have a disability is passed on to Blazkowicz, who uses it for the remainder of the game. There is no clear indication or reminder during gameplay from this point onward that Blazkowicz relies upon this technology in order to progress in the narrative. Cut-​scenes at times draw attention to it, but the suit is often concealed by the clothing he wears over the top of it, rendering it invisible. One cut-​scene in particular undermines the positive narrative the game establishes with disability. Up until this point, Blazkowicz’s disability is not perceived as a hindrance and any offensive language or negative depictions are provided by the Nazis, thereby vilifying these labels and outlooks. When Anya, Blazkowicz’s pregnant partner, approaches him because he has been avoiding her, he calls himself ‘the tin man’ (in reference to the suit he wears) and asks her, ‘how am I gonna get close to you?’15 The common presumption and falsehood that disability precludes sexual intercourse is foregrounded here, and Blazkowicz’s masculine identity seems to hinge on this ability.16 Although it is possible to view this interaction as hubris on Blazkowicz’s part, given that Anya repeatedly points out that he is being pessimistic and deterministic without any evidence, the narrative does not make any efforts to portray Blazkowicz in a sexual manner while he has the disability or as having come to terms with his uninformed conclusions about his future and condition.17 The game instead offers a post-​human answer to the matter that ends up occluding disability entirely. This narrative device is foreshadowed when the scientific brains of the opposition group, Set, introduces Blazkowicz to his monkey-​cat which has been created by taking the head of his cat that was dying and attaching it to the body of a monkey. After Blazkowicz has been captured and then publicly executed by Engel, his head is caught by a flying robotic instrument and brought back to the opposition’s submarine base, where it is attached to the biogenetic superhuman torso they have stolen from the Nazis. When he wakes up, after the procedure of attaching him to this ‘new body’ is completed, Blazkowicz states, ‘I feel powerful’, indicating that he did not feel this way previously. The body is a biological technology, which could lead one to the conclusion that Blazkowicz utilizes it like he did the wheelchair or mechanical suit, and Set does indicate that something can still go wrong with the wiring between his head and the body, but from this point onward we are no longer reminded of the fact that Blazkowicz depends upon this new body, and the narrative simply allows the user to ‘feel powerful’ through possessing an able body that seamlessly connects for the duration of the game with Blazkowicz’s mind and the conventional gameplay the user is familiar with from other first-​person shooters. The biogenetically engineered body can be said to maintain the feminist narrative that debunks the self-​efficiency and perfection of the masculine body through illuminating that Blazkowicz is no longer himself, but this chapter contends that it instead simply enables this gendered ideology to perpetuate.

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156  Mark Kaethler Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini have identified that underlying disability is a gendered narrative, namely that if a male body cannot perform as society expects it to, whether that be physically, sexually, mentally, or otherwise, then ‘the disabled male body is used to illuminate a deviant and abnormally gendered performance: a defective masculinity’ (2017, p. xxx). The playful manner by which the videogame aligns Blazkowicz with the monkey-​ cat repeatedly does present human tissue as no more superior than any other creature’s and identifies the limited and fallible nature of the protagonist. This view is in keeping with Rosi Braidotti’s view that posthuman feminism should establish ‘cross-​species alliances with … zoe or life in its nonhuman aspects’, but the use of the description of the torso as a ‘new body’ rather than a prosthetic causes it to be presented as remedy to disability rather than a new way of experiencing disability, signalling an ‘ethical and political’ conundrum that is not in keeping with Braidotti’s theory (2015, p. 690). This structuring of the storyline reflects what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call ‘narrative prosthesis’, wherein disability is used either to develop character or as a metaphor to shape the plot (2013, p. 222). Although Wolfenstein II commences with a positive reinvention of first-​person shooters that disrupts the conventional ableist framework, providing what Mitchell and Snyder refer to as a ‘fleshly example of the body’s unruly resistance to the cultural desire to “enforce normalcy” ’ (2013, p. 223), the game’s narrative gradually devolves into depicting the disability as tragedy that must be overcome by means of a new classical male body,18 regardless of whether or not it is originally his. The treatment of prostheses in the videogame beyond those of Blazkowicz is troubling in more overt ways from the feminist angle this chapter is applying. The general approach of the game’s narrative and game mechanics is Hegelian insofar as Nazi technology is stolen and rewired as prostheses or other weaponry in order to combat Nazis.19 Like Blazkowicz’s ‘new body’, Fergus’s mechanical arm, which he is fitted with after Engel dismembers him at the end of the first chapter, is a Nazi invention repurposed for the opposition’s use. The long-​standing Hegelian notion of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house readily equates with this motif, but Fergus’s use of the tool should give us pause to reflect upon Audre Lorde’s reminder that the master’s tools will only ‘allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game’ (1979, p. 2). Unable to control his arm, as it attacks him unexpectedly during the adjustment period, he seeks counsel from Blazkowicz who tells him, ‘Maybe it’s like training a game dog? You show weakness, it’ll pounce. What you gotta do is show that thing who’s in charge’.20 Fergus then attempts to wrestle with the arm, but the notion of masculine control and domination over the prosthesis is augmented by the language Fergus uses: first referring to it as a ‘good girl’, then, after it turns on him, calling it a ‘deceitful bitch’, and once he has trapped and overpowered it, reverting back to calling it a ‘good girl’. The dialogue between the two men, who both have disabilities, is therefore based in recovering a masculine ideology of dominance and control over their new bodies and technologies.21 Although the game accomplishes a landmark shift

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Failed feminist interventions 157 in its first level, then, the rest of the game’s narrative replicates the masculine narratives of ableism. The game thus illustrates Lorde’s point that using the master’s tools will never fully dismantle the master’s house, for the men continue to mirror the hegemony of their oppressor.

Feminist cut-​scenes as empowering, but also ‘gazy’ Fergus’s misogynist language towards his gendered prosthetic arm reinforces stereotypical narratives of male dominance by positioning women as good when they are submissive and bad when they are aggressive. This cut-​scene should immediately illustrate that Wolfenstein II’s rhetoric is not purely feminist; however, as a first-​person shooter war game, it nevertheless makes significant strides in representing empowered and recalcitrant women in militaristic roles. Blog posts dedicated to the subject, like William Galani’s ‘The Feminine Influence of Wolfenstein 2’, likewise perceive Blazkowicz in this iteration of the franchise as a direct response to historic events like Gamergate and the general misogynist climate in videogames, but ‘[w]‌ithout sacrificing the masculinity of B.J. Blazkowicz’ (2017). These reactions identify the progressive nature of Wolfenstein II in the greater scope of videogames, particular first-​ person shooters, but also indicate the ways in which it remains comfortably nested within the franchise by allowing men to retain their masculinity and still exercise intense violence as a white man. Part of the issue is reading the videogame as a narrative surface rather than attending to the complexities that result from a clash of media in a dynamic fictional world. As Christopher Paul points out, the rhetoric of videogames is often misconstrued because ‘elements of media like games … can be foreign to critics, often resulting in an incomplete analysis’ (2012, p. 11). Although videogames are not foreign to players like Galani, Wolfenstein II’s reinforcement of conventions, mechanics, and cinematic nature can obscure perception because anything that differs from the typical masculine fantasy is automatically radical. As this chapter explores the feminist representations of the women in the game, then, it retains a cautious attention to the imperfections of the game’s narrative and the ways in which its generic conventions and conflicting media disrupt these progressive aims. The game certainly displays powerful women, especially the resistance leader Grace. After interrogating Blazkowicz to ensure that it is safe to allow him entry into their resistance’s headquarters, Grace sits down to speak with him, breastfeeding her newborn as she does. When Blazkowicz states that monsters let the bombs drop on the United States, Grace clarifies that it was ‘men’, and when they discuss Caroline, former leader of Blazkowicz’s troop, and he says that she had balls, Grace again challenges him, asking, ‘Now why is it that balls are always used to some fucking default definition of bad-​ assery? Small little delicate things, resting all snug and warm and cozy and comfortable in their little wrinkly wrapper of fucking skin’. Near the end of their dialogue before they are interrupted with news of an impending attack,

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158  Mark Kaethler Blazkowicz says her child is a ‘cute little guy’, to which Grace clarifies it is a girl and he apologizes, leading Grace to ask, ‘sorry for what?’22 The cut-​ scene establishes Grace as an icon of female empowerment who challenges the dominant phallocentric discourse around strength, and the designers’ decision to have her breastfeed openly in front of someone who is a complete stranger clearly draws upon the scrutiny women continue to face concerning such action. The comment feed on this video, however, shows the variety of reactions to her character, wherein ‘the most annoying character ever’ is one of the kinder reactions and the fact that she ‘triggers all these little Trump Nazis’ reveals the lingering political dimensions of the game. It is clear from this online banter that Grace defies the conventional expectations of these fans of first-​person shooters and the Wolfenstein franchise, especially with how she poses a challenge to Blazkowicz and masculinity more broadly. Debra Wilson, the actress who played Grace, opines in an interview with VICE News that the game ought to serve as an intervention to white America, stating ‘I think gameplay should make you uncomfortable … because you don’t learn from comfort levels’, while still acknowledging that its contours allow players to disregard these lessons (VICE News 2017). No artform can flawlessly communicate a political agenda, but Wolfenstein II does provide a revisioning of traditional design and representation. The powerful representation of Grace, however, is compromised somewhat by the fact that the gamer never actually plays as Grace. She is therefore relegated to the cut-​scene dimension of the narrative rather than the gameplay portion. A player can thus only ever navigate the narrative as Blazkowicz and perceive themselves as this character during gameplay, despite possibly having the ability to see a powerful character in the narrative that reflects their lived experience of the world.23 Grace becomes an exception to this rule in some ways, though, as Blazkowicz follows her orders and plans during the game’s narrative and throughout the sub-​missions after the main plot’s conclusion. During gameplay, the user is continually reminded that Grace is the commander leading the resistance, issuing orders, offering guidance, and instructing Blazkowicz. Although the player cannot be Grace during gameplay, this narrative structuring helps Wolfenstein II avoid what would otherwise be a white-​saviour narrative in which the white male protagonist enacts justice for the various minorities he encounters along the way. There are nevertheless times at which female empowerment is fragmented through the game’s rhetorical alignment of the player with Blazkowicz during cut-​scenes, given that he is the only character they can play as. This interpretive dynamic disrupts efforts to champion women other than Grace. In what at first appears to be an empowering scene, Anya pushes Blazkowicz out of harm’s way, launches a grenade at the enemies, and ducks for cover as it explodes. This segment reveals a development in Anya’s character that shows a shift from the stereotypically timid pregnant wife figure to an active warrior woman who saves her male counterpart, indicating the potential for an active female presence in the game. The segment turns absurd, however, when the

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Failed feminist interventions 159 mechanical enemy has not died, prompting Anya to first rip off her clothes and then dual-​wield machine guns to assault the mechanical beast until it explodes, at which point the camera turns back to Blazkowicz’s face as he says ‘wow’. The powerful image concocted of Anya on the one hand displays a woman in combat, which one commentator in the YouTube discussion forum notes is similar to a Tarantino aesthetic; however, the irony akin to Tarantino is problematic, as the scene clearly sexualizes her, given the perverse comment from another viewer, ‘perfect pregnant, topless, action, gunshots, blood amazing scene’.24 The objectification of Anya and the violence she enacts thus plays into the desires of the male viewer. The framing of the scene suggests as much given that Anya straddles Blazkowicz as she performs this bizarre action. This choice on the creators’ part signals a sexualization of the body despite placing the woman on top of him and in a position of power. The double gun barrels being positioned where they are correlate them with the breasts, sexualizing the violence. In this instance, empowerment shifts from an active female character to a figure who demonstrates action in a sexualized manner for the viewer’s pleasure. The game does not eschew the narcissism and objectification inherent in the male gaze of cinematic art, pace Laura Mulvey, that the videogame player is led to encounter in a voyeuristic manner from their private engagement with the filmic cut-​scene that depicts a character they do not play as and is therefore passive as far as the gameplay narrative is concerned (2016, pp. 623–​626).25 However, this approach presumes that a player views the scene in the same manner as YouTube commentators.26 Anya, like Grace, provides an alternative to Nick Dyer-​Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s view of ‘new mainstream game “sheroes” ’ who ‘are corporate-​military professionals, death-​dealing, punishment-​absorbing exemplars of what Camilla Griggers … terms “becoming-​women who kill” ’, thereby creating ‘an imperial feminism compatible with militarized capitalism’ (Dyer-​Witheford and de Peuter 2009, p.  22). By serving as part of the resistance against such patriarchal forces, the women’s actions, regardless of the quagmire that results from Anya’s portrayal, do challenge this dominant norm in videogame culture; however, it remains important to perceive the sexist medial rhetoric of the game’s mechanics and the sexist conventions of film that it integrates. One of the expansion packs to the game, Agent Silent Death, offers the player the opportunity to play as a woman, Jessica Valiant, which shows the potential to compensate for this masculine narcissism, but the experience differs significantly from that of the male protagonist. Before addressing the flaws in this game, it is first worth considering what the expansion manages to accomplish. The soundtrack, particularly to the third volume, clearly pays homage to the James Bond franchise, but is mimicking its structure with a woman. This framing device helps to compensate for or explain the plot wherein Jessica pursues alcoholism and sex as means to deal with the death of her husband and fellow agent Jack Valiant, making her a female James Bond rather than merely some male fantasy. Information sent to her on the whereabouts of the three men who were responsible for Jack’s death then leads her

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160  Mark Kaethler to pursue vengeance instead. By the end of the game, Jessica has recognized that Jack was not her sole purpose for living, but rather the political cause of battling the Nazi regime is. In this manner, Agent Silent Death showcases a woman who is able to perform the same actions as James Bond, offering a satirical commentary on this ‘conventional’ agent whose actions to do not actually fit the bill, and who comes to realize that her purpose in life can be more than just a man, as she has her militaristic duty to combat oppression as well. While the narrative offers these alternatives to traditional gender roles and first-​person shooter war games, the gameplay leaves something feminist to be desired. This schism is apparent when Jessica from Agent Silent Death is compared with Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein II, Joseph Stallion from The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe expansion, and Captain Wilkins from The Deeds of Captain Wilkins expansion. These three men can dual-​wield all the guns, carry explosives, charge enemies, use technologies, and have copious amounts of ammunition available to them. Jessica must operate by stealth in order to complete her objectives and is limited by the number and kind of weapons she can carry, as well as the amount of ammunition that is available to her. She also cannot carry as much armour with her. Although the game explains that this feature is because of her need to move faster and quieter as a spy, like James Bond, the inability to hold even 50 per cent of the armour that the men are able to carry (Valiant can only hold 40 by comparison to the 100 of Blazkowicz, Joe, and Captain Wilkins) leads the player to see her as weaker than these characters. The men are able to barge into battle wielding multiple weapons without having to sneak around the battlefield unless a more formidable opponent than usual is present. Jessica’s inability to do the same can be likened to the James Bond narrative of secrecy, but the choice to provide this particular storyline to a woman communicates that a woman’s gameplay in arenas of war or military conflict is different from a man’s.27 While the stealth gameplay offers a different experience for the player, its alignment specifically with a female character nevertheless carries the implication that she is weaker than her male counterpart.28

Conclusion: the Bethesda wars or capitalism? After the wake of Wolfenstein II’s advertising campaign, attention to the franchise subsided for a time; that is until DOOM Eternal’s (not yet released) gameplay, graphics, and narrative were previewed at Bethesda’s showcase at the E3 Expo in 2018. Similar to how neo-​Nazis criticized Bethesda’s decision to advertise Wolfenstein II with a slogan that mocked them, players with leftist politics lambasted DOOM Eternal for phrasing like ‘mortally challenged’ and describing Earth as the ‘melting pot’ of the universe. The DOOM franchise has always been a second option to Wolfenstein players, as it is created by the same software companies, but made and devised by different developers. The premise of the forthcoming game in the DOOM franchise is that demons are

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Failed feminist interventions 161 now coming to Earth and the DOOM soldier must vanquish them all and put an end to humanity’s foolish decision to allow them to inhabit Earth. Framing this agenda as an immigration matter and mocking politically correct terminology therefore aggravated players with leftist politics while ostensibly reassuring conservative and racist consumers that not all Bethesda games would follow suit with Wolfenstein. The videogame wars seem to polarize players much as politics have already, but ultimately this seems to be more about capitalism and ensuring that everyone purchases Bethesda products than about shifting the political leaning. By having different developers, writers, and creators for different series or even games within a series, Bethesda is able to remain apolitical and capitalist. This backdrop elucidates that Wolfenstein II only presents itself as feminist (unsuccessfully) in order to serve a consumer market, which explains why its script contains feminist perspectives that are not fully realized. The reaction to the Bethesda wars likewise reinforces the ways in which Wolfenstein II is an outlier in the first-​person shooter genre and could in fact be making some positive changes in spite of the tired conventions it rehashes. Take for instance the meme Virgin vs. Chad that a DOOM Eternal fan created that compares the protagonists of the two games (‘Virgin vs. Chad’ 2018).29 The credulity of the image is immediately discredited when one sees the illogical disconnect between ‘The Virgin Blazkowicz’ having an ‘expecting girlfriend’; however, this JPEG is worthy of examination not for its authority or validity, but for what it says about the expectations male videogame players have regarding first-​person shooter war games. Masculinity is clearly defined by the number of weapons one can carry, which supports the chapter’s previous analysis of Jessica Valiant’s limitations; ableism (‘entire body is crippled’ compared with ‘his running speed IS his walking speed’); and egotism (‘people give him no credit whatsoever’ versus ‘people worship and bow to him’). Like the commentators on the YouTube videos of the cut-​scenes discussed above, the creator of the image misconstrues challenges to masculine dominance or the value of collaboration rather than egocentrism as disrespect to masculine authority, given that all of Blazkowicz’s ‘friends are assholes’ (‘Virgin vs. Chad’ 2018). The image therefore provides a means to identify the varying levels of destruction or ethics embedded within first-​person shooter war games. Although they are all systemically violent, some are more ideologically violent than others, which may be a way to envision resistance. As this chapter has shown, Wolfenstein II remains entrenched in the toxic conventions of first-​ person shooter games that celebrate the oppositional, gory violence of militaristic combat, but the game has improved upon these dangerous elements, making it a less corrosive member of the first-​person shooter swamp. The next game in the series, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, promises to rectify the genre further by providing collaborative gameplay, wherein Anya and Blazkowicz’s twin daughters depart on a mission to save their father from Nazi captivity in France. Hopefully the narrative’s gameplay and cinematics will provide an improvement upon this iteration’s failed feminism.

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Notes 1 This chapter addresses the multivalent nature of what constitutes a videogame ‘narrative’, for Astrid Ensslin defines narrative in videogames as ‘fictional environments which are explored spatio-​temporally by players in the shape of their avatars’ (2012, p. 24). While this is true, cinematic and other media encapsulated by the product of a videogame complicate a unified understanding of narrative, and this chapter attends to those complicated mechanics while also exploring what videogames as a medium offer that is novel to narrative framework. 2 Despite Bethesda Studios’ efforts to clarify that aligning the game with current politics was not the original intention of the game, indicating that the series has always been about killing Nazis, there are Easter eggs in the game that clearly allude to topical subject matter. Take for instance the collectible newspaper clipping found in the New Mexico street that describes a ‘dapper’ white supremacist leader, clearly referring to an actual newspaper article on Richard Spencer following Donald Trump’s election (Gach 2017). 3 Lazarus’s poem is for the Statue of Liberty, hence the connection between the series. 4 The implication here is not that cis white men cannot enact feminism or be feminists, but that the videogame does not challenge the first-​person shooter mould. 5 First-​person shooters have had a long history with violent behaviour. Criticism of violence in videogames was magnified by the Columbine shootings in 1999, especially with respect to the game DOOM (1993), another franchise by the id team that created the Wolfenstein series (Lukas 2010, pp. 75–​76). As Steven Poole has identified, although videogames do not essentially create violent individuals (as they can also elicit catharsis), the US military’s history of not only creating their own games but also using franchises like the first-​person shooter DOOM or the military game Battlefield as a means to train their soldiers should give us pause (2000, pp. 207–​209). 6 C. Thi Nguyen points out that oppositional, competitive games usually entail some degree of violence (chess would be a very minimal example of this, with the taking of pieces), but almost all involve an exercise of dominance and superiority over the other player, as one is inevitably the winner or victor, whether or not they wish to acknowledge it (2018, p. 184). 7 Before id’s franchise, though, there were two earlier games that inspired the new franchise, Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), both of which only feature a player rather than Blazkowicz. 8 The military-​entertainment complex entails the intermingling of the interests of militarism and entertainment industries which align with one another, as with say G.I. Joe cartoons, which celebrate and condone capitalist endeavours through upholding the American army and profiting from action figures and cartoons consumed by children potentially indoctrinated into militaristic ideology. 9 Although the videogame still casts Blazkowicz as the avatar, it nevertheless still attempts ‘to decenter men and masculinity’ from the game by representing empowered and leading women in its narrative (Gray et al. 2018, p. 7). The gameplay likewise challenges oppressive and toxic masculinity’s tendency to advance a self-​sufficient and dominant character as a norm and necessity in society as a whole, but specifically in its military campaign (Kimmel 1996, p. 16). 10 This intersectional approach that couples the challenge to ‘normalizing tendencies’ and the need for ‘visibility’ in both disability studies and feminism mirrors Bonnie

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Failed feminist interventions 163 Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw’s call for a queer approach to game studies that comprehensively addresses a range of minorities disregarded in a realm dominated by white, cis, able-​bodied men (2018, pp. xviii, xx). 11 It is worth noting that Wolfenstein II nevertheless elaborates upon Blazkowicz’s Jewish-​American and Polish-​American heritage more so than any other game in the series, framing his father as a bigoted, hypermasculine foil to his character and portraying his mother as hidden away in the house. While Blazkowicz continually disassociates from his father, he never reflects upon or clearly self-​identifies as Jewish in the game at any point. 12 As John Derby states, America’s Army (2002) (a game free to the general public and developed by the military for recruitment purposes) is used ‘to promote an ableist military culture that contrasts the disabling effects of military service’, whether those be physical disabilities or PTSD (2016). 13 The author has offered links to YouTube clips in lieu of images to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the video game’s narrative. It should be noted that the liveness and individualized experience of gameplay have been rendered cinematic as a result, but it is nevertheless a more accurate representation than still images. As a warning, many of these clips entail graphic violence and unsettling content. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=DiTVDjexs4U. 14 This is not uncommon for first-​person shooters. A companion named Piper in the 2016 video game Fallout 4, another Bethesda production, regularly requests to assist the protagonist in carrying items, as otherwise they will ‘cripple’ themselves. 15 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=vkQgz32FN_​o. 16 Surveying Sweden and Denmark specifically, but acknowledging the matter as a global issue, Don Kulick and Jens Rydström observe that while there is some literature on sex for those who develop disabilities later in life, particularly from spinal injuries, ‘the sexuality of people with congenital disabilities is’ wrongly treated ‘like a sleeping bear best left unperturbed’ (2015, pp. 82, 84). 17 In the previous game there were multiple cut-​scenes either directly or indirectly depicting Anya and Blazkowicz having sex, so it is clearly not the eroticism or nudity that deterred the developers from including such a scene. 18 Blazkowicz’s previous and new body both fit this concept that Maria Wyke identifies is established in Greek sculptures from antiquity and introduced into magazine culture of the 1950s in the United States (1997, p. 366). 19 All of the weapons that Blazkowicz uses in the game are collected, meaning that they are originally engineered by Nazis and then used to kill them. 20 https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=VcxeBh45lVo. 21 Lokaneeta identifies this issue with language and masculinity in relation to military warfare: ‘discourses pertaining to nuclear weapons are both masculinized and sexualized’ (2015, p. 1021). 22 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=_​OwyN-​TmeCg. 23 Wolfenstein II is quite impressive for a first-​person shooter when it comes to representation, providing a cast of characters from various genders as well as racial and cultural backgrounds, and who have varying disabilities. The exception to this statement are LGBTQIA2+ persons, who are notably absent. For a first-​ person shooter videogame this degree of diversity is still remarkable, despite these limitations. 24 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=ePgcBBTbgT0.

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164  Mark Kaethler 25 The issue is widespread and repeats conventions rather than challenging them. Derek A.  Burrill uses Mulvey to discuss the way in which the cinematics of videogames, especially first-​person shooters, cater to a male player (2008, p. 56). 26 It is important not to occlude female gameplay, regardless of how the dynamics at work in this cut-​scene render the character into a cinematic rather than a playable avatar. It is still worthwhile identifying that women or non-​gender conforming players could see an image of power here, much as Esther MacCallum-​Stewart has aptly reconsidered criticism of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series wherein scholars automatically view ‘her positioning as solely a tool for the male gaze’ (2014). The gaze can likewise be complicated in videogame play, as Helen W. Kennedy regards Lara Croft establishing ‘a feminine coded “desire to know” ’ that disrupts the male gaze (2002). Even if the scene remains problematic in its potential to objectify Anya, its pornographic nature does not automatically render Anya powerless for a female player. As Mari Mikkola states in her study of pornography and videogames, the absurdism of such scenes do not render them morally reprehensible like RapeLay (2006), an incorrigible game as its title suggests, and in the case of Anya the degree of active heroism allows for a feeling of empowerment regardless of the problematic rhetoric of the cut-​scene (2018, p.  218). All this to say, I do not wish to preclude the possibility that a woman or non-​gender conforming player could feel empowered in this moment. 27 This is a significant issue, as women are proven to be more likely to see themselves as having more ‘self-​efficacy (that is, belief that one could achieve a goal)’ if they are able to play as a woman, specifically one who is not sexualized (Patridge 2018, p. 167). 28 This is not the first time Bethesda studios has done this in a game franchise. The expansions to The Evil Within (2014) likewise offer the player an opportunity to play as a female character, but she too must rely on stealth and less effective weaponry in order to survive the challenges posed to her. 29 Although the meme is crucial to comprehending the ways in which Wolfenstein II does represent a real challenge to masculine war games, the author has opted not to include the image itself in order to avoid permissions sanctioning and promoting the work further.

References America’s Army 2002, United States Army, PC. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein 1984, Muse, Apple II. Braidotti, R 2015, ‘Posthuman feminist theory’, in L Disch & M. Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 673–​698. Burrill, DA 2008, Die tryin’: videogames, masculinity, culture, Peter Lang, New York,  NY. Butler, J 2016, Frames of war: when is life grievable? Verso, London, UK. Castle Wolfenstein 1981, Muse, Apple II. Derby, J 2016, ‘Virtual realities:  the use of violent video games in U.S.  military recruitment and treatment of mental disability caused by war’, Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, viewed 1 March 2019, http://​dsq-​sds.org/​article/​view/​4704/​ 4209. Deterding, S 2009, ‘Living room wars: remediation, boardgames, and the early history of video wargaming’, in NB Huntemann & MT Payne (eds.), Joystick soldiers: the

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Failed feminist interventions 165 politics of play in military video games, Taylor and Francis, Abingdon, UK, pp.  21–​38. DOOM 1993, id Software, PC. Dyer-​Witheford, N & de Peuter, G 2009, Games of empire: global capitalism and video games, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Ensslin, A 2012, The language of gaming, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. Fallout 4 2016, Bethesda, PS4. Gach, E 2017, ‘Wolfenstein 2 collectible mocks progressive magazine over its coverage of white nationalists’, Kotaku, 29 October, viewed 1 March 2019, https://​kotaku. com/​wolfenstein-​2-​collectible-​mocks-​progressive-​magazine-​ov-​1819952709. Galani, W 2017, ‘The feminine influence of Wolfenstein 2’, William Galani, web log post, 1 November, viewed 25 September 2018, http://​williamgalaini.com/​writing/​ feminine-​influence-​wolfenstein-​2/​. Gray, KL, Voorhees, G, & Vossen, E 2018, ‘Introduction:  reframing hegemonic conceptions of women and feminism in gaming culture’, in KL Gray, G Voorhees, & E Vossen (eds.), Feminism in play, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, pp. 1–​17. Grosz, E 2005, Time travels:  feminism, nature, power, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Huntemann, NB & Payne, MT (eds.) 2009, Joystick soldiers: the politics of play in military video games, Taylor and Francis, Abingdon, UK. Kennedy, HW 2002, ‘Lara Croft: feminist icon or cyberbimbo? On the limits of textual analysis’, Game Studies:  The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 2, no. 2, viewed 1 March 2019, www.gamestudies.org/​0202/​kennedy/​. Kimmel, M 1996, Manhood in America:  a cultural history, The Free Press, New York, NY. Kulick, D & Rydström, J 2015, Loneliness and its opposite: sex, disability, and the ethics of engagement, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Loeser, C, Crowley, V, & Pini, B 2017, ‘Introductory essay: disability and masculinities: corporeality, pedagogy and the critique of otherness’, in C Loeser, V Crowley, & B Pini (eds.), Disability and masculinities: corporeality, pedagogy, and the critique of otherness, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, pp. xxv–​lxxiv. Lokaneeta, J 2015, ‘Violence’, in L Disch & M Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 1010–​1030. Lorde, A 1979, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ in American misogyny, Middlebury College, viewed 1 March 2019, http://​s18.middlebury.edu/​ AMST0325A/​Lorde_​The_​Masters_​Tools.pdf. Lukas, SA 2010, ‘Behind the barrel: reading the video game gun’, in NB Huntemann & MT Payne (eds.), Joystick soldiers:  the politics of play in military video games, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 75–​90. MacCallum-​Stewart, E 2014, ‘“Take that, bitches!” Refiguring Lara Croft in feminist game narratives’, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 14, no. 2, viewed 1 March 2019, http://​gamestudies.org/​1402/​articles/​ maccallumstewart. Matlock, M 2018, ‘Disability game review: Wolfenstein II: the new colossus’, DAGERS, 6 June, viewed 1 March 2019, https://​dagersystem.com/​disability-​game-​review-​ wolfenstein-​ii-​the-​new-​colossus/​. McKenzie, N 2012, ‘Nurturing lateral leaps in game design’, in C Steinkuehler, K Squire & S Barab (eds.), Games, learning, and society: learning and meaning in the digital age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 49–​74.

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166  Mark Kaethler Mikkola, M 2018, ‘Pornographic videogames: a feminist examination’, in J Robson & G Tavinor (eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 212–​227. Mitchell, D & Snyder, S 2013, ‘Narrative prosthesis’, in LJ Davis (ed.), The disability studies reader, 4th edition, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 222–​235. Mukherjee, S 2015, Video games and storytelling:  reading games and playing books, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. Mulvey, L 2016, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in L Braudy & M Cohen, Film theory and criticism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 620–​631. Nguyen, CT 2018, ‘Games and the moral transformation of violence’, in J Robson & G Tavinor (eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 181–​197. Patridge, S 2018, ‘Videogames and gendered invisibility’, in J Robson & G Tavinor (eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 161–​180. Paul, C 2012, Wordplay and the discourse of video games, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Poole, S 2000, Trigger happy:  videogames and the entertainment revolution, Arcade Publishing, New York, NY. RapeLay 2006, Illusion Software, PC. Ruberg, B & Shaw, A 2018, ‘Introduction: imagining queer game studies’, in B Ruberg & A Shaw (eds.), Queer game studies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. ix–​xxxiii. Thabet, T 2015, Video game narrative and criticism:  playing the story, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY. The Evil Within 2014, Bethesda, PC. VICE News 2017, ‘Wolfenstein II is the video game that’s pissing off the alt-​right (HBO)’, online video, 27 October, viewed 1 March 2019, www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=wb-​tF7WilP8. ‘Virgin vs. Chad  –​The virgin Blazkowicz vs. THE ETERNAL CHAD’ 2018, Know your meme, viewed 1 March 2019, https://​knowyourmeme.com/​photos/​ 1402049-​virgin-​vs-​chad. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 2017, Bethesda, PS4. Wolfenstein: The New Order 2014, Bethesda, PS4. Wyke, M 1997, ‘Herculean muscle! The classicizing rhetoric of bodybuilding’, in JL Porter (ed.), Constructions of the classical body, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 355–​380.

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12  Subversive game mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal franchises Having your cake and eating it too Gabi Kirilloff

Critical conversations about feminism and video games often focus on game culture and the thematic treatment of gender within the game world (Dietz 1998; Dill et  al. 2005). The representation of violence is a key part of these discussions, as games have a history of portraying violence against women and of perpetuating images of toxic masculinity. These conversations are important because game culture and in-​game tropes impact real-​world emotions, attitudes, and behaviors (Bègue et al. 2017). However, the seemingly minute design choices behind game mechanics also impact player attitudes and emotions. Typically, game mechanics are defined as the actions available to the player-​character (PC): what players are ‘able to do in the game-​world, how they do it, and how that leads to a compelling game experience’ (Rouse 2005, p. 131).1 In Tetris, one of the core mechanics is the ability to rotate blocks, while in Super Mario Galaxy jumping is a core mechanic. In what follows, I utilize Miguel Sicart’s conception of game mechanics as ‘action[s]‌invoked by an agent to interact with the game world, as constrained by the game rules’ (2008). This definition is oriented toward granular analysis. For example, in Uncharted 4 it is possible to separate the cover mechanic (the action of taking cover), from its context (the player takes cover when there is an object to take cover behind), and from the rules governing cover (the player remains ‘hidden’ if behind cover). All of these are separate from the representational level of the game: the visual portrayal of the PC, the visual portrayal of the objects the PC can hide behind, etc. These various aspects of gameplay work together to foster specific forms of engagement. Mechanics are often obscured in ways that characterization and narrative are not. In many role-​playing games (RPGs), players are conditioned to pay close attention to characters and plot in order to make complex choices and judgements. What character will you add to your party? Whose faction will you join? While successful characters and plot lines are visible and memorable, successful mechanics are often not visible as such; if a player views the rules of the game as rules, then the player is no longer immersed in the fictional world.2 Many players and scholars see mechanics only as they are filtered through the representational, or semiotic, layer of the game world

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168  Gabi Kirilloff (Sicart 2013). This is analogous to the way in which level designers will often disguise the boundaries of playable space with non-​traversable terrain, such as mountains, in order to encourage immersion. Game mechanics are relevant to a discussion of gender and violence precisely because they often go unnoticed and are presented as natural and intrinsic elements of the game world. While developers have proven that it is possible to imagine and execute a Tomb Raider game with a less sexualized, more physically realistic Lara Croft, it is difficult to imagine a Call of Duty game in which there are no combat mechanics. Though mechanics, and the contexts and rules that govern them, can be used to further a wide array of emotions (such as excitement, fear, anxiety, and frustration) in combat scenarios, they are often designed to make violent behaviors desirable, engaging, and satisfying for players. For example, in the Destiny series, when players shoot with specific in-​game weapons, the camera shakes, conveying the gun’s power. This design choice, as much as the game’s themes, characters, and narrative, is intended to make combat gratifying. Such elements are intertwined with representation, yet, the act of shooting, and the rules that govern this act, exist beyond the visual appearance of the gun (or the fact that the gun is presented as a lethal weapon, rather than as a paint gun). When mechanics and representation merge in certain configurations, players understand that in-​game violence is occurring. Just because players do not always notice mechanics, does not mean that they do not function rhetorically. Ian Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric, ‘the art of persuasion through rule-​based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures’, helps to clarify the way in which games make claims about the world through their mechanics (2010, Preface, para 6). Sicart expands on the notion of procedural rhetoric to consider not only the way in which player agency is responsible for shaping game rhetoric, but also the ways in which games can create ethical play, or play that encourages players to reflect on their morality in and outside of the game world (2013). Mechanics have also been associated with specific critical lenses and world views: recent work in queer game studies has argued that mechanics can foster a form of queer play, or play that rejects dominant systems of logic (Ruberg 2017). The rhetorical and ideological power of mechanics raises an interesting question: what might feminist mechanics look like, particularly in games that feature combat or combat inspired elements? Further, how might such mechanics interact with the representational and thematic level of the game world? In this chapter, I  examine two games that, through their combat mechanics, present different views of the relationship between gender and violence. I argue that games in the Fatal Frame and Portal franchises, noted for their thematic attention to gender and inclusion of female heroines (Warren 2016; Perron 2018), play with the link between first-​person-​shooter (FPS) mechanics, violent combat, and masculine identity, a link that pervades the FPS genre (including games such as Call of Duty, Doom, and Halo). At

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Subversive game mechanics 169 the level of representation, both games appear fairly progressive, providing players with non-​sexualized, playable female agency. In Fatal Frame (2001), Portal (2007), and Portal 2 (2011) ‘shooting’ is divorced from its typical representational context (in Fatal Frame the player shoots pictures with a camera, in Portal the player’s gun produces doorways). Female protagonists ‘shoot’, but not to kill (ghosts and robots are the shootable antagonists). Despite these similarities, Fatal Frame and Portal further different attitudes about women and violence, partially through their use of distinct combat mechanics. In Fatal Frame the player’s ability to commit violence is constrained. However, power ups and ‘damage boosts’ encourage the player to view violence as desirable. The game links a ‘limited’ form of violence with the protagonist’s, Miku’s, gender, reinforcing the stereotypical notion that women are less capable of violence than men.3 Conversely, Portal’s representational and thematic focus on gender equality (the game features a racially ambiguous female PC who is characterized by her physical and intellectual prowess) is supported by unconventional mechanics. Despite the centrality of the Portal ‘gun’, the game does not encourage the player to view violence as desirable. Rather than emphasize speed or precision Portal divorces the act of ‘shooting’ from immediate feedback and gratification. In examining these games, I do not mean to suggest a strict binary between regressive and progressive depictions of gender. Rather, I seek to show how representation is complicated (and at times complimented) by other aspects of game design.

Fatal Frame Set in 1986, Fatal Frame, released in Japan as Zero, follows 17-​year-​old Miku as she attempts to rescue her older brother Mafuyu from a haunted mansion on the outskirts of Tokyo. Though I focus on the first game, the Fatal Frame franchise has produced five main games in total, each revolving around similar themes.4 Fatal Frame has been critically lauded for the way in which the mechanics and setting work together to evoke fear and for the inclusion of an unconventional weapon:  Miku’s only line of defense is a magical camera that damages the hostile ghosts she encounters. Like many survival horror titles from this period, Fatal Frame takes place primarily from a third-​person point of view. However, when player-​characters encounter a ghost, they may access a first-​person point of view in which they see the ghost through the lens of Miku’s camera. This view is reminiscent of the way players may look down a gun scope in games like Counter-​ Strike and Borderlands 2. The fact that Miku carries a seemingly non-​violent object, a camera, and yet, uses this object to ‘damage’ hostile non-​player-​ characters (NPCs), hints at the way in which the game’s representational level is complicated by the game’s mechanics. The camera simultaneously evokes non-​violence and violence. While the inclusion of a capable female playable character would suggest that the game subverts conventional gender stereotypes, in reality, Fatal

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170  Gabi Kirilloff Frame’s depiction of gender and violence is complicated. Thematically, the game both adheres to and departs from gender tropes. Throughout Fatal Frame, Miku encounters descriptions of violence against women: every ten years at the Himuro Mansion, a series of rituals take place in order to prevent the gates of hell from opening. A female child is ritualistically blinded, while another female child is selected to become the rope maiden. As part of a ceremony called the strangling ritual, the rope maiden is torn apart by a rope fastened around her neck and each of her limbs. The game’s main antagonist is the ghost of Kirie, a rope maiden who did not participate willingly in the sacrifice. Because of Kirie’s romantic (and arguably sexual) desire for a young man who visits her village, the gates of hell open and Kirie’s spirit is corrupted by the evil that is unleashed. As Laurie Taylor notes, the fact that the ghosts in Fatal Frame have complex backstories and human motivations, makes them more sympathetic than many of the non-​player antagonists that players encounter in FPS games (2006). In addition, the player-​character Miku becomes cursed and it is implied that unless the gate to hell is closed, she will join the sacrificed women. For Taylor, this ‘confuses questions of good and evil and human and monstrous’ (2006, p.  39). At the same time, however, in making the ghosts more ‘human’, Fatal Frame further accentuates the way in which the camera is a weapon and photography is a form of violent combat. Miku is not ‘taking pictures’ of objects, she is fighting against active, human-​like agents. In addition, the game insinuates that the camera ‘releases’ these spirits from their tortured existence, but does not specify the fate of the spirits after they are seemingly destroyed. Though not all of the spirits are women, this is reminiscent of Sarkeesian’s comments on mercy killings; acts of violence toward an NPC for the NPCs ‘own good’ (2013). This trope allows the player to feel a sense of accomplishment, or relief, upon killing an otherwise sympathetic human NPC. The notion of unavoidable mercy killing is echoed in the game’s conclusion. The ending adheres to conventional, and stereotypical, depiction of morality. Fatal Frame ends with the ghost of Kirie, now cleansed of evil, willingly accepting her ‘duty’—​living in perpetual torment as the rope maiden sacrifice. Once Kirie’s background is revealed, it becomes the player’s job to not only rescue Mafuyu, but to help Kirie transcend her earthly attachments and accept her role as a sacrificial heroine (Dumas 2018, p. 146). If Kirie had accepted this duty from the onset, the events that befell Himuro Mansion would have never occurred. These violent female sacrifices are intended to contribute to the game’s frightening atmosphere. However, rather than challenge this violence, the depiction of Kirie’s willingness to sacrifice herself equates positive female behavior with an obedient adherence to oppressive systems. Much like Miku’s ‘pacification’ of the ghosts she encounters, Kirie’s ‘necessary’ sacrifice allows the systemic violence against women to continue, unchallenged and unchecked. Kirie’s character brings to mind a variety of gendered tropes, including elements of the sinister seductress—​Kirie’s evil

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Subversive game mechanics 171 form is a direct result of her unwillingness to remain a ‘pure’ virgin sacrifice (Sarkeesian 2016). In featuring a female heroine who rescues a male character, Fatal Frame departs from one of the most prominent gender stereotypes in games, the damsel in distress (Sarkeesian 2013). Though rare in games overall, the inclusion of a playable female heroine is a feature of the survival horror genre. As Irene Chien notes, ‘[survival horror] protagonists are typically not brawny commandos, but rather ordinary people, often women … The games involve endurance and cunning as much as military style marksmanship or physical strength’ (2008, p. 64). Chien’s observation is particularly helpful because it connects the representation of gender with the mechanics of in-​game violence. In this sense, female PCs in survival horror games function much like the ‘final girl’ trope in television and film. This trope has sparked mixed critical reactions, with some scholars claiming that the inclusion of capable female protagonists within the horror genre is at least partially subversive (Clover, 1992). However, this interpretation is complicated by the way in which Fatal Frame presents non-​violence, or rather, constrained violence, as an intrinsic aspect of desirable femininity, rather than as an ethical choice. When asked in a 2005 interview for GameSpy why Fatal Frame games always feature ‘a cute female character’, the game’s co-​creator Makoto Shibata answered, ‘This is a game that is not violent. You can’t muscle your way through. To portray that concept, obviously a female main character is better. We all know that females are a bit more spiritual than men’ (Christian 2005). Shibata insinuates that men are naturally more capable of violent, physical behavior than women, suggesting that a non-​violent male character would be less believable in the game world. It seems likely that the representation of the weapon as a camera, an object with artistic, non-​violent, generative connotations, is tied to Shibata’s understanding of ‘non-​violence’ and ‘spirituality’. The representation of the camera as a weapon mirrors the representation of a woman as a hero. In this sense, the inclusion of a female player-​character does not challenge cultural expectations so much as support essentialist notions about women. This attitude is reflected in the design of the game’s mechanics and in the way these mechanics interact with the thematic level of the game. At the level of representation, the game employs unconventional characters (young girl instead of brawny man) and objects (camera instead of gun). Yet, at the level of core mechanics Fatal Frame slips into familiar patterns. Though the player does not shoot a gun, the mechanics of using the camera replicate common FPS mechanics: it is necessary to balance precision and speed in order to successfully ‘hit’ and damage threatening, moving targets. As in many FPS titles, the amount of damage inflicted varies and is based not only on the demonstration of these skills, but on the use of power ups and ammo. In Fatal Frame players must strategically ration and use different types of film, each of which inflicts different amounts of damage. Further power ups are dispensed when a player inflicts damage on a ghost.

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172  Gabi Kirilloff These design choices encourage a particular play style and consequently, foster a specific set of emotional responses:  shooting in Fatal Frame is stressful but necessary. The scarcity of ghost encounters, which punctuate slow dungeon crawling and jump scares, creates a feeling of dread interrupted by intense fear.5 Entering the first-​person mode increases the player-​character’s perceived proximity to hostile, attacking ghosts. This view also cuts off the player’s peripheral vision and greatly limits the player’s mobility; in the first-​person mode, it is almost impossible to flee. As Chien notes, ‘[in] Fatal Frame vision is fearful not commanding’ (2008, p.  64). Scarce ammo and the recharge rate of the camera (comparable to the conventional ‘cool down’ period for many in-​game guns) mean that aim and timing (rather than rapid, blind fire) are necessary.6 It is possible to read the affect produced by this style of combat as subversive in its own right:  while many FPS games encourage players to delight in feelings of competency and mastery (which in turn can foster a hypermasculine ethos), shooting in Fatal Frame produces feelings of vulnerability and anxiety. It is important to note, however, that while Fatal Frame’s mechanics are distinct from those of FPS titles like Doom, this does not mean that the game is, as Shabata claims, ‘not violent’. In fact, the assumption that the game is not violent indicates the degree to which players and critics often make such determinations based solely on the semiotic, or representational, level of a game. However, in Fatal Frame the player is bombarded with descriptions of violence against female NPCs and by the constant threat of violence to the female player-​character. Stressful, sporadic combat with limited motion controls is common for weapon-​based combat in popular titles such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Even though a camera is not a real world weapon, the game renders it capable of performing violence. This transformation is accomplished through importing mechanics that are typically markers of gun-​based combat. Fatal Frame’s mechanics constrain the player-​ character’s opportunities to use violence, rather than eliminate violence. In so doing, the game teaches players that the inability to inflict violence in a violent world is terrifying. Unlike combat-​based genres, survival horror games often feature physical disempowerment in violent situations. However, in Fatal Frame and other survival horror titles, this physical disempowerment does not encourage us to question the validity of violence. Instead, the terror evoked by constrained mechanics renders violence all the more desirable: given the stressful nature of combat, the player is intended to desire the ability to inflict more violence (to obtain film that does more damage, to be able to power up one’s camera so that it can perform critical hits, etc.). In pointing this out, I do not mean to suggest that there is something inherently harmful about the game’s use of constrained violent combat mechanics. The problem is neither the inclusion of combat mechanics nor the inclusion of a female protagonist. Nor do I intend to suggest that Fatal Frame cannot produce ethical gameplay. Rather, I wish to highlight a link between the game’s mechanics and underlying assumptions about the player-​character’s female

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Subversive game mechanics 173 gender. Miku is neither a completely passive nor disempowered figure (she does, after all, emerge triumphant). She is also not configured as a non-​violent figure, but rather as a figure who yields a lesser violence. James Malazita points toward a similar move in Burial at Sea (an expansion for Bioshock Infinite), in which the player-​character Elizabeth relies on gun-​based combat, but has access to a limited supply of ammo. As a result, hiding and running away become viable tactics (2018). As Malazita notes these mechanics do not represent a radical shift in ‘problem-​solving or exploratory game design’ but rather position Elizabeth, and characters like her, as ‘weakened men, leading to the material and performative propagation of misogynist media tropes’ (2018, p. 38). Though Miku is given a camera instead of a gun, she is also bound by a conventional style of combat mechanics that neither question dominant modes of play nor create alternative modes of play.

Portal The problem posed by Fatal Frame’s coupling of a female protagonist and conventional combat mechanics is not easy to overcome: how can an unconventionally violent, or less violent, game include a female protagonist without furthering the idea that women are ‘naturally’ less capable of violence? Valve’s Portal, a game which borrows from both FPS games and puzzle platformers, highlights some of the ways in which novel mechanics can be used to circumvent player expectations and empower the player-​character without defaulting to stereotypically violent interactions. Portal, like Fatal Frame, focuses on a female protagonist fighting against a powerful female antagonist, a dynamic that is quite rare in games. Released as part of Valve’s The Orange Box game compilation, Portal follows the player-​character Chell as she attempts to escape Aperture Science Lab, an abandoned research facility that is run by a threatening female AI, GlaDOS. In both Portal and Portal 2 Chell must complete a series of tests, or puzzles, using the Aperture Science portal gun in order to progress through the game. The gun produces two portal ends, an orange and a blue end. These portals create a link between two different locations in three-​dimensional space that the player-​character can travel through. Chell, like Miku, uses an unconventional object (a gateway producing portal gun) to ‘shoot’ her way out of dangerous environments. Scholars, reviewers, and players have pointed out the ways in which Portal thematically questions conventional gender stereotypes; Jamin Warren from PBS’s Game/​Show refers to Portal as a ‘feminist masterpiece’ (2016) while Joe McNeilly from gamesrader+ describes Portal 2 as ‘the most subversive game ever’ (2011). Through dialogue Portal and Portal 2 focus on the way in which patriarchal oppression can cause violence against and among women. This is particularly true of Portal 2, in which the player comes to realize that the antagonist GlaDOS has been transformed into a violent and dangerous entity in part because she was mistreated and manipulated by Aperture’s founder, Cave Johnson. As Christopher Williams notes, Johnson’s character functions

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174  Gabi Kirilloff as an example of retrograde sexism and serves to provide a sympathetic backstory for GlaDOS’s threatening behavior (2011). Portal 2 ends with Chell and GlaDOS working together to defeat Wheatley, a male AI who becomes controlling and demeaning once he is corrupted by his position of power. Wheatley repeatedly makes incorrect assumptions about the player-​character based on her gender. For example, even though Chell defeated GlaDOS in the first game, Wheatley assumes that a male character was responsible, ‘do you know who ended up taking her down in the end? … A human … Apparently this human escaped and nobody’s seen him since’. Wheatley’s comment alludes to the way Chell’s gender is presented in the first game. Because Portal positions the player as a silent first-​person character, there are no clues about Chell’s identity at the start of the game. The only way that the player can discover Chell’s gender is to catch a glimpse of her through one of the portals. Because of the lack of female playable characters in the FPS genre, many players are surprised when they realize that the player-​character is a woman. The assumption that the player-​character is male is furthered by the fact that none of the other player-​characters in The Orange Box release were female.7 Players may not realize Chell’s gender until they are partially through the play experience (or may not notice her gender at all).8 If the player has assumed that the character is a man, the reveal implies that the gender of Chell’s character has no bearing on her environment or actions. The rules of the game do not change once the player’s understanding of Chell’s gender has changed. This experience, created by a disjuncture between the game world and player expectations, adheres to Sicart’s notion of ethical play (2013). However, Portal’s presentation of gender suggests an aspect of ethical play that is at times overlooked. Underlying many examples of ethical play is the notion that the player’s ethical stance must be challenged by the game. For example, in describing ethical play, Sicart uses a scene from Unmanned, in which the player-​character, a drone pilot, plays FPS games with his son. The assumptions the player brings to the game, along with the familiar mechanics, are at odds with the thematic context of the scene, which creates an ‘ethical tension’. As Sicart notes ‘the dissonance between players’ actions and the context in which they are placed cue the possible ethical experience of the game’ (2013, p.  51). Many players who are not concerned with the disparity of representation in games likely experienced a moment of dissonance when playing Portal. For such players, Chell’s gender opens a self-​reflexive space: why was I surprised that I am playing as a woman? However, for players aware of and invested in issues of representation, the reveal of Chell’s gender offers a slightly different affectual experience, one that is both validating and empowering. It is important to note that gameplay experiences can positively reinforce (not just problematize) players’ preexisting ethical commitments.9 To focus primarily on the ways in which games challenge dominant assumptions about identity, runs the risk of ignoring members of the gaming community who participate in marginalized identity categories.

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Subversive game mechanics 175 It is important to note that these complex affectual responses are not purely a result of representation. They are enabled by the game’s unique mechanics—​the way in which the player-​ character is revealed and made visible through portals. By revealing Chell’s gender in this way, the game normalizes the notion that an FPS protagonist can be a woman. The first person point of view prevents the sexualization of Chell’s body, encouraging the player to see from her perspective, rather than to view her as an object in the game world. Examining oneself becomes a conscious, intentional choice rather than a passive experience. The portal gun, like the camera obscura, does not function in the same way as a typical gun—​both tools provide perspective, allowing players to ‘see’ and navigate their environments. Both objects connote creation, producing images rather than simply destroying the environment.10 However, whereas the camera obscura capture, correct, and in a sense ‘cleanse’ the environment, the portal gun disrupts the environment, allowing the player to bend the laws of physics, move objects in impossible ways, and transgress the boundaries of seemingly ‘playable’ space. The ability to create mirrors is not the only unconventional property of the portal gun. While in Fatal Frame the camera’s mechanics enforce the notion that the camera is a weapon, in Portal the gun is detached from combat. The game foregrounds this distinction; at the beginning of Portal 2 Wheatley informs the player that ‘you’re looking for a gun that makes holes. Not bullet holes, but—​well, you’ll figure it out’. What makes the portal gun unique, however, is not simply its lack of ‘bullets’, but rather the lack of mechanics typical of gun-​based combat. Players can shoot portals an unlimited number of times, no ammo of any sort is required. The gun cannot be changed, upgraded, or modified. There is no sense that a more powerful gun would alleviate the stresses of the game. One might expect a game with no enemies and no rapid fire to emphasize aim and precision. However, in the Portal games the hitboxes are large and typically stationary. When the player has to open a portal in a particular part of a wall or floor, this section is often raised from the surrounding area, making it easier to target. One of the effects of these design decisions is that all thinking and strategy occur before the act of shooting.11 In delaying the time between the act of shooting (which if playing on a PC is executed through right and left mouse clicks) and any positive or negative feedback, Portal disrupts the typical emotions created by the act of firing a gun. Shooting is neither particularly stressful nor rewarding in and of itself. While strategy is an important aspect of almost all combat-​based games, Portal reconfigures aspects of shooting such as speed and timing. None of the levels in Portal (with the exception of the final level) are timed. In Portal the player rarely has to shoot a moving target, which lessons the emphasis on players’ reflexes. Timing is important in Portal since players often have to figure out when, and in what order, they need to create portals in order to solve a puzzle. However, the consequences for mistiming an action are unusual. In most combat scenarios, the player is penalized for mistiming a

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176  Gabi Kirilloff shot. In Fatal Frame for example, if the player waits too long to shoot (in an attempt to get a critical hit) they run the risk of receiving heavy damage. In most of Portal’s puzzles, nothing happens to the player if they mistime their actions, they simply try again. Ruberg’s notion of queer play helps articulate why these unexpected mechanics constitute an interesting rhetorical move in and of themselves:  ‘queerness means both desiring differently and simply being differently (or, in this case, playing differently): a longing to live life otherwise, a resistance to social structures, and an embrace of the strange’ (2017, p. 200). Portal encourages players to play differently, and to play outside of the particular rules and parameters typically associated with games in which a first-​ person protagonist clears levels with a gun. In creating novel play mechanics that are not simply a twist on combat mechanics, but are rather a radical rethinking of what players can do with guns, Portal is also able to avoid the ‘weakened men’ trope and the association between women and ‘lesser’ forms of violence. Though Chell does not kill, the game does not present this as a function of her gender, but rather, as a function of the parameters of the game world.12

Conclusions In discussing the representation of women writers, Linda Abbandonato observes that the ‘problem’ of representation cannot be easily resolved: ‘Put bluntly, how can a woman define herself differently, disengage herself from the cultural scripts of sexuality and gender that produce her as feminine subject?’ (1991, p.  1107). This problem exists across genres and media. Fatal Frame demonstrates the fact that in games, defining female subjectivity differently, is not simply a matter of better representation. Miku is a non-​ sexualized female PC—​a woman with agency who ultimately triumphs over evil. However, in examining the ways in which this agency functions, the rules of the game, it becomes clear that Miku’s abilities in part stem from an assumption that women are less physically violent, and perhaps less physically capable, then men. There is a seeming dichotomy between the games’ depiction of violence and non-​violence:  Fatal Frame engages with ‘non-​ violence’ through representation—​the spiritual, mystical camera is a tool ‘appropriate’ for the young female protagonist. Yet, at the level of mechanics, the game offers the player violent combat rather than alternative modes of play. Rather than create ethical tension, this disparity works to reinforce the notion that Miku is only capable of lesser violence. By associating Miku’s power with the mystical camera obscura, the game implies that Miku’s power is ‘feminine’ in a potentially essentializing way. By linking the camera obscura with constrained, conventional combat mechanics, the game implies that this ‘feminine’ power is a lesser form of masculine agency. Violence is desirable, fulfilling, and engaging in the game. The fact that it is constrained,

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Subversive game mechanics 177 does not encourage players to question its validity. Instead, it encourages players to perceive the inability to perpetuate violence as weakness and links this weakness with Miku’s gender. Conversely, Portal and Portal 2 manage to create a non-​violent female protagonist without suggesting that women are essentially non-​violent or less violent than men. In both Portal games, this is in part achieved through design choices, such as the first-​person point of view, which normalize the PC’s gender. Just because Portal does not emphasize Chell’s gendered body, does not mean the game is not about gender. By highlighting the way in which Wheatley essentializes both Chell and GlaDOS, Portal 2 thematically tackles sexism. Both Portal games employ unconventional mechanics that reinforce and complement the thematic attention to female agency. Unlike Fatal Frame’s inclusion of power ups and weapon modification, Portal’s minimalist approach to combat mechanics divorces shooting from its typical positive feedback system. This is not simply a product of the fact that Portal is a puzzle game—​it stems from the fact that the player’s puzzle-​solving abilities can not be augmented by in-​game rewards. There is simply no way to shoot ‘better’ or to be rewarded for doing so. To some extent, the differences that I have described between Fatal Frame and Portal are not intuitive:  through its third-​person point of view Fatal Frame foregrounds female representation in a way that Portal does not.13 Similarly, one might guess that Fatal Frame’s camera would make for less violent gameplay than Portal’s space-​bending gun. The differences between these games highlight the ways in which mechanics and representation merge to perpetuate cultural values. Focusing on mechanics underscores the way that games with non-​sexualized female characters still further gender stereotypes. However, as Portal suggests, focusing on mechanics can also offer insight into how games go about subverting and productively challenging stereotypes. In juxtaposing Fatal Frame and Portal, I have attempted to highlight the fact that though representation is significant, it cannot alone account for the complex ways that players experience a game’s rhetorical portrayal of gender and violence. Despite the fact that both games eschew certain markers of gun-​based FPS combat, such as waves of enemies and weapon variety, they produce dramatically different effects and further different attitudes about the strengths and abilities of their female characters. This offers a reminder that it is not only important to critically examine representation and mechanics, but also to consider the ways these two levels of game design intersect with the cultural values players bring to the table. Looking at game mechanics, or the rules of a game, allows scholars and players to better understand the way that ‘cultural scripts’ underlie design choices and further player attitudes and assumptions. Unfortunately, many of the real-​world ‘rules’ that constrain, limit, and define appropriate or natural behavior, are often reflected in the rules of the game world.

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Notes 1 As Sicart notes, the meaning of the term ‘mechanics’ is slippery, particularly in terms of the division between game actions and the rules governing game actions (2008). 2 This is clearly not true of all games or all players. In competitive gaming circles (for example, the competitive StarCraft community), players are often extremely aware of mechanics as mechanics. 3 It is important to note that while Fatal Frame and Portal were created within different cultural contexts, both games resonated with US audiences. Fatal Frame draws on Japanese folk culture and Shinto in a way that other Japanese horror games (including Resident Evil and Silent Hill) do not. However, the depiction of gender and violence that I discuss here can be seen in other games developed in the US, such as Burial at Sea (which I discuss later). Still, the depiction of ghosts in the game can be linked specifically with the Japanese horror tradition. Koji Suzuki (as cited in Balmain 2008, p. ix) notes that ‘the Japanese don’t regard spirits only as enemies, but as beings that co-​exist with this world of ours’. This relates to the fact that Fatal Frame includes ‘helpful’ NPC ghosts. However, this furthers the connection between Miko’s photography and violent combat by associating the ghosts with people, rather than objects, animals, or monsters. 4 Fatal Frame (2001), Fatal Frame II:  Crimson Butterfly (2003), Fatal Frame III: The Tormented (2005), Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008), Fatal Frame:  Maiden of Black Water (2014). All release dates are the original release dates for Japan. While I do not discuss the other games here, other fans and critics have noted that the representation of female characters in the series becomes increasingly sexualized in several of the later games. For example, later games feature unlockable ‘sexy’ outfits for the PC. In later games the camera can also be used for voyeuristic purposes. See Brian Ashcraft’s post ‘Gamers Wonder When Fatal Frame Got This “Erotic” ’ on Kotaku (2014). 5 This is fairly characteristic within the horror genre, though less typical in the FPS genre overall. Some combat-​based FPS games, like F.E.A.R. and Prey (2017) do rely on this emotional response. Stealth missions in FPS games may elicit similar responses in which the player’s dread is punctuated by moments of stress and anxiety: e.g. Dishonored and Metal Gear Solid 2. 6 For example, many of the guns in Borderlands 2 and Mass Effect feature a cool down period that constricts the shooting mechanic. 7 The other games released as part of The Orange Box were: Half-​Life 2, Half-​Life 2: Episode One, Half-​Life 2: Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2. Portal takes place in the same universe as Half-​Life, though the characters are distinct. 8 This is evidenced by blog posts and online comments by players. As a starting point, Becky Chambers’s essay ‘Looking for a Few Good Chells:  Why Player Character Gender Matters’ does a nice job of describing the emotions some female gamers experienced when realizing, with surprise, that they were playing Portal as a female character (2011). 9 It is also important to note that fans and players have observed (and appreciated) the fact that Chell’s race is ambiguous. 10 Some fans and critics have argued that the portal gun symbolically represents a specifically ‘feminine’ agency. They contrast the ‘yonic’ portal gun with the ‘phallic’ imagery connected to conventional weaponry (Boluk and LeMieux 2017). This argument has been criticized by some fans. It would be possible to extend a

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Subversive game mechanics 179 similar reading to the camera obscura. However, I choose to focus primarily on a more literal reading of the ways the rules governing these objects influence player attitudes about violence. 11 It is important to note that for most players, these design choices do not make the game ‘easy’, inaccessible, or boring (in part evidenced by the fact that Portal 2 was voted game of the year in 2011). In fact, these designs decision arguable make Portal particularly accessible for players unfamiliar with the FPS genre. 12 Portal repeatedly calls attention to the strangeness of its own design, and consequently, encourages players to reflect on their play experience. Seb Franklin sees Portal as a game that ‘simultaneously exposes and undermines informatic control at the intertwined levels of narrative and play … by implementing [the portal gun] as the sole “weapon”, the game is highlighting the arbitrary way in which its world functions, walls becoming nothing but code’ (2009, p. 178). 13 Some players have criticized feminist analyses of Portal because Chell’s gender is not foregrounded in the game. Bonnie Ruberg’s analysis of lesbianism in Portal received similar critiques, with commenters and trolls criticizing them for ‘making it up’, since the game does not overtly represent lesbian characters. As Ruberg notes, analyzing beyond representation allows scholars to articulate the ways in which play creates meaning outside of the overt identity characteristics of individual characters (2017).

References Abbandonato, L 1991, ‘“A view from elsewhere”: subversive sexuality and the rewriting of the heroine’s story in The color purple’, PMLA, vol. 106, no. 5. pp. 1106–​1115. Ashcraft, B 2014, ‘Gamers wonder when Fatal Frame got this “erotic”’, Kotaku East, 1 October, viewed 6 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​gamers-​wonder-​when-​fatal-​ frame-​got-​this-​erotic-​1641111438. Balmain, C 2008, Introduction to Japanese horror film, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK. Bègue, L, Sarda, E, Gentile, D, Bry, C, & Roché, S 2017, ‘Video games exposure and sexism in a representative sample of adolescents’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 466–​472. Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea 2013, Irrational Games, PS3. Bogost, I 2010, Persuasive games:  the expressive power of videogames, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Boluk, S & LeMieux, P 2017, Metagaming: playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Borderlands 2 2012, Gearbox, PS3. Call of Duty 2003, Infinity Ward, PC. Chambers, B 2011, ‘Looking for a few good Chells: why player gender matters’, The Mary Sue, 24 June, viewed 6 March 2019, www.themarysue.com/​looking-​for-​a-​ few-​good-​chells/​. Chien, I 2008, ‘Playing undead’, Film Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2 pp. 64–​65. Christian, N 2005, ‘Interview with Makoto Shibata’, Gamespy, 22 August, viewed 6 March 2019, http://​ps2.gamespy.com/​playstation-​2/​fatal-​frame-​3/​644109p1.html. Clover, C 1992, Men, women, and chain saws:  gender in the modern horror film, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

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180  Gabi Kirilloff Counter-​strike 2000, Valve, PC. Destiny 2 2017, Bungie, PS4. Dietz, T 1998, ‘An examination of violence and gender role portrayals in video games: implications for gender socialization and aggressive behavior’, Sex Roles, vol. 38, no. 5/​6, pp. 425–​442. Dill, K, Brown, B, & Collins, M 2005, ‘Effects of exposure to sex-​stereotyped video game characters on tolerance of sexual harassment’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 1402–​1408. Dishonored 2012, Arkane Studios, PS3. Doom 2017, id Software, PS4. Dumas, R 2018, The monstrous-​feminine in contemporary Japanese popular culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK. Fatal Frame 2001, Tecmo Koei, Playstation 2. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly 2003, Tecmo, PS2. Fatal Frame III: The Tormented 2005, Tecmo, PS2. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water 2014, Tecmo, WiiU. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse 2008, Tecmo, Wii. Franklin, S 2009, ‘We need radical gameplay, not just radical graphics’, Symplokē, vol. 17, no. 1–​2, pp. 163–​180. Half-​life 2 2004, Valve, PC. Half-​life 2: Episode One 2006, Valve, PC. Half-​life 2: Episode Two 2007, Valve, PC. Halo 2001, Bungie, Xbox. Malazita, J 2018, ‘The material undermining of magical feminism in Bioshock infinite: burial at sea’, in K Gray, G Voorhees, & E Vossen (eds.), Feminism in play, Springer, New York, NY, pp. 37–​50. Mass Effect 2007, BioWare, PS3. McNeilly, J 2011, ‘Portal is the most subversive game ever’, games radar +, 21 March, viewed 6 March 2019, www.gamesradar.com/​classicradar-​portal-​is-​the-​most-​ subversive-​game-​ever/​. Metal Gear Solid 2001, Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, PS2. Perron, B 2018, The world of scary video games, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY. Portal 2007, Valve Corporation, PC. Portal 2 2011, Valve Corporation, PC. Resident Evil 1996, Capcom, PS. Rouse, R 2005, Game design: theory and practice, Wordware Publishing, Sudbury, MA. Ruberg, B 2017, ‘Playing to lose: the queer art of failing at video games’, in J Malkowski & T Russworm (eds.), Gaming representation:  race, gender, and sexuality in video games, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, pp. 197–​211. Sarkeesian, A 2013, ‘Damsel in distress (part  3):  tropes vs women in video games’, online video, 1 August, viewed 6 March 2019, https://​feministfrequency.com/​2013/​ 08/​01/​damsel-​in-​distress-​part-​3-​tropes-​vs-​women/​. Sarkeesian, A 2016, ‘Sinister seductress:  tropes vs women in video games’, online video, 28 September, viewed 6 March 2019, https://​feministfrequency.com/​video/​ sinister-​seductress/​. Sicart, M 2008, ‘Defining game mechanics’, Game Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, n.p. Sicart, M 2013, Beyond choices:  the design of ethical gameplay, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Silent Hill 1999, Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, PS.

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Subversive game mechanics 181 Super Mario Galaxy 2007, Nintendo, Wii. Taylor, L 2006, ‘Not of woman born: monstrous interfaces and monstrosity in video games’, PhD thesis, viewed 6 March 2019, Research Gate. Team Fortress 2 2007, Valve, PC. Tetris 1985, Tetris Holding, PC. Tomb Raider 1996, Core Design, PS. Uncharted 4 2016, Naughty Dog, PS4. Unmanned 2012, Molleindustria, PC. Warren, J 2016, ‘Portal is a feminist masterpiece’, online video, 5 January, viewed 6 March 2019, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=JgnublE4dxU. Williams, C 2011, ‘Her name is Caroline; identifying the misbehaving women in Portal 2’, popMatters, 3 May, viewed 6 March 2019, www.popmatters.com/​140585-​her-​ name-​is-​caroline-​naming-​the-​misbehaving-​woman-​in-​portal-​2-​2496037876.html.

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13  Toxic pacifism The problems with and potential of non-​violent playthroughs Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft

In early 2012 the Wall Street Journal profiled Daniel Mullins, a Skyrim player who had undertaken to complete the fantasy role-​playing game without killing anything. The title of the article, ‘Videogamers embark on non-​killing spree’, was a play on the common sensationalist titles linking video games to real-​world violence, and the article highlighted players that were seemingly subverting the violent imperatives built into many games (Dougherty 2012, p.  A1). The story was picked up by online games forums such as Kotaku, and the comments on those stories made it clear that this was not a unique occurrence and that players had been finding ways to complete many otherwise violent games without killing anything (Totilo 2012). Some developers have even embraced the notion of non-​violent play strategies for games that otherwise require the players to commit violent actions. For instance, Fallout 4 director Tom Howard has noted that they consciously tried to appeal to different game styles by providing non-​violent resolution options for some scenarios, and players have managed to complete the entire game without directly killing anything (Stuart 2015). These designers, and their players, seem to have embraced Mary Flanagan’s ‘Critical Play’ game design model which includes consciously designing for diverse play styles and subversion of the culturally accepted norms for such games. She notes that such actions are ‘powerful sites of empowerment for giving voice to marginal groups’ and that ‘Feminist criticism and practice has played an important role in informing such disruptions’ (Flanagan 2013, p. 256). By removing the violence from these games and celebrating alternative play styles, the non-​violent game movement appears to be challenging the hegemonic masculinity of games based upon war and violent acts, and their players. As will be discussed, forum posts and YouTube comments related to non-​violent playthroughs are remarkably free from explicitly gendered comments, which is astounding given the typical content of these arenas. However, the acceptance of these ‘subversive’ gameplay strategies is understandable when one realizes that the non-​violent play is generally complicit with traditional violent and competitive means for completing the games. Often the playthroughs focus on non-​lethality, rather than non-​violence: like Batman, the player can be as violent as they want as long as the games do

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Toxic pacifism 183 not actually register them as being responsible for the final killing blow. The player may need to rely upon other forms of violence, such as mental control or theft, to gain experience to progress the game, or they may coerce or goad potential enemies into killing each other. Reading the discussion around non-​violent playthroughs it becomes clear that the motivation behind most of these attempts is not a refusal of the violence inherent in so many games, but a competitive drive to make the games more challenging. Players discuss optimizing character builds and, like another competitive gaming playstyle, speedrunning, taking advantage of game glitches to avoid scenarios that require killing. Game developers have even begun rewarding the challenge of these playstyles by creating in-​game achievements for not killing. Rather than subverting the gender norms of the violent game genre, these players and developers have instead made non-​violence just another means for exclusionary play tactics that reinforce hegemonic masculinity. In this chapter we begin with an examination of pacifism and the gender dynamics surrounding non-​violence.1 Rather than relying upon a binary of masculinity = war, femininity = peace, we instead focus on the ways that the various means of non-​violent playthroughs can be seen as performances of either hegemonic or alternative masculinities. We examine two of the most common game franchises for non-​violent playthroughs, Skyrim and Fallout, and look at the various ways players are complicit with the practices of hegemonic masculinity despite their non-​lethal gameplay.2 Finally, we will look at Dontnod’s 2018 Vampyr as an example of a game that requires the player to more explicitly confront the moral implications of their violence. We believe that by designing games that reward multiple playstyles, including non-​ violence, developers can help to diminish the use of games for the performance and perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity. Militarism, violence, and masculinity are so inextricably linked that, as Jeff Hearn states, when embarking on a discussion of them ‘it is hard to know where to start; indeed it might seem gratuitous to labour the point’ (2011, p. 48). We start at the same point as many contemporary examinations of the subject, with Raewyn Connell’s work, subsequently re-​formulated with James Messerschmidt, on multiple masculinities and hegemonic masculinity. Rather than there being a single ‘masculinity’, Connell proposes that there are a plurality of masculinities produced by the intersection of race, class, ability, sexuality, culture, and other influences (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 848). These masculinities exist in a hierarchy, with hegemonic masculinity as the dominant form. Hegemonic masculinity was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it. But it was certainly normative. It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men. (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 832)

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184  Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft In ‘Army men:  military masculinity in Call of Duty’, Gregory Blackburn discusses the strong connections between military service and the conception of the ideal hegemonic male (2019, pp.  38ff). Suzanne Hatty similarly sees warfare and other forms of shared violence as crucial for socializing young men into hegemonic masculinity, and argues that one of the principal means through which hegemonic masculinity retains and reconstitutes its hegemony is through mass media:  ‘In film, or any public performance … masculinity becomes a corporeal display; it unfolds, as action, as violence, as omniscience, in a cascade of arresting images’ (2000, p. 176). Violent video games are undoubtedly part of this media, especially as opportunities for performativity increase through multi-​player play and streaming. In choosing not to kill, players appear to be challenging the norms of hegemonic masculinity. It would be a mistake, however, to label these so-​called ‘pacifist’ playthroughs feminist, for although there are strong connections between feminism and pacifism, the two should not be considered synonymous. Jean Elshtain, in Women and War, explores how the stereotypes of men as ‘Just Warriors’ and women as ‘Beautiful Souls’ serves to keep men in a position of power and to obfuscate possibilities for both more aggressive women and pacifist, emotional men (1987). Undoubtedly between pacifist movements in the early part of the twentieth century and the suffrage movement there are parallels; for example, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) was founded in 1915 based around the premise that there was a strong connection between women being denied the vote and the use of war for solving international conflicts (Kuhlman 2017, p. 34). And as feminist movements developed they tended to be more aligned with peace rather than war. As Christine Sylvester states, Feminism was outside war, above it, and in a position of belligerence to it. By implication, women warriors must be captives of delusion or false consciousness. They could not actually choose violence as a politics, perhaps even a feminist politics. (2011, p. 7) This emphasis on peace has not been unproblematic, or uncontroversial, and some feminists have advocated for a more aggressive approach. Pam McAllister, editor of Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, argues that ‘we must rage against the patriarchy without adopting its ways’ (McAllister & Halper 1983, p.  20). Kronsell and Svedberg go even further, and believe ‘there has to be space for feminism and feminists to ask the question whether there are times when violence might actually be necessary’ (2011, p. 26). The binary of masculinity = war, femininity = peace has similarly limited opportunities for expressions of non-​violent masculinities. For example, in England during the First World War young men who refused to serve were publicly shamed by women who handed them white feathers, petticoats, and

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Toxic pacifism 185 other ‘soft’ items indicative of femininity, ‘implying that because they were not man enough to conform to masculine gender norms, they should wear feminine clothing instead’ (Kuhlman 2017, p. 32). Gender, as defined by Judith Butler, ‘is a performance with clearly punitive consequences’ (2006, p. 190). By failing to comply with the traditional norms of masculine militarism, these men were mocked for their femininity, a practice that continues through language such as using ‘man up’ and ‘big balls’ for being brave or bold, and the pejoratives ‘pussy’ and ‘little girl’ for instances of hesitation or caution. Like militarism, violent videogames are also so inextricably linked to masculinity that it is gratuitous to labour the point. One would expect that players who choose to undertake ‘pacifist’ playthroughs of otherwise violent video games, and especially those who choose to publish their performances on video platforms such as YouTube, with their often toxic anonymous comments sections, would be subject to ridicule. However, this is not the case. At worst, these players are criticized for playing the game in a manner that ‘is not fun’. More frequently pacifist players are lauded for their actions and other players relate their own experiences with similar playstyles. To understand various reasons why this might be so, we will look at two game franchises commonly used for non-​violent playthroughs: Skyrim and Fallout. Bethesda Game Studios’ 2011 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an open-​world single-​player fantasy role-​playing game (RPG) with plenty of freedom to choose how you play the game, including the ability to select character class, race, with both human and non-​human options, and gender. This provides some allowance for players to interact with their environment on their own terms rather than just completing the game through standard hack and slash violence. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, players have used this flexibility to complete quests, or the entire main plotline, without killing anything. In video playthroughs, Daniel Mullins, outlines his strategies for playing the game as ‘Felix the Peaceful Monk’ (2011). These include using illusion magic such as charm and fear to render enemies non-​threatening, sneaking by enemies, and healing himself so that he can simply run through combat situations. Randy Yasenchak managed to complete the main quest and various sidequests (as long as they did not require killing) using a strategy that combines illusion magic with high levels of persuasion and pick-​pocketing (2012). For the required dragon battles he relies upon various non-​player-​ characters (NPCs) to kill the dragons for him. And in the final battle he was required to land the ultimate killing blow for the game to finish. In his guide to ‘Playing a “pacifist” ’, James Lapham outlines three character builds: the Manipulator, who gets others to do the killing for them, the Chillpill, who uses sneak and calm to avoid combat, and the Heal/​Shield, which requires the use of a special shield that causes bleeding damage and takes advantage of a game glitch where creatures that bleed to death are not counted as a ‘kill’ on a player’s statistics (2016). Even without looking at the community’s response to such gameplay, these techniques are obviously problematic in their reliance

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186  Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft on traditionally masculine strategies of control and coercion, and a definition of pacifism as simply not being registered as killing by the system. There is no evidence that the makers of Skyrim intended it to be played in a non-​violent manner; the main quest actually requires the character to kill the last dragon themselves. For another of their games, however, Bethesda intentionally considered non-​violent play possibilities. The Fallout series is a single-​player RPG set in a post-​apocalyptic world. In discussing Fallout 4, Todd Howard, vice-​president of development at Bethesda noted, You can avoid [killing] a lot … I can’t tell you that you can play the whole game without violence—​that’s not necessarily a goal of ours—​but we want to support different play styles as much as we can. (Stuart 2015) Fallout and Fallout 2, which were developed by Interplay, a different game studio, allowed the player to complete many missions using charisma and intelligence-​based skills rather than violence (Cheong 2015). And even in the beta testing stage of Fallout 3 someone managed to complete the game killing only a single creature at the beginning (Howson 2008). Thus it should not be surprising that Kyle Hinkley completed Fallout 4 without killing a single creature. In order to do so he used the standard ‘pacifist’ strategies of either calming enemies or using them to kill each other, and depended upon the ability to reload saved games multiple times until the correct random events happened to allow him to proceed (Hernandez 2015). The game narrative itself was unable to support Hinkley’s non-​violent resolution of some events, and the game grew increasingly glitchy as he progressed. Although the game can be completed this way, it was not intended to be. Examining the reasons why players attempt pacifist playthroughs of Skyrim and Fallout, as well as the community’s reaction to such playthroughs, reveal that such activities are not the challenges to the hegemonic masculinity inherent in violent video games that they might first appear to be. As has been already discussed, this playstyle is heavily dependent upon getting others to commit the violent acts for you and/​or using theft, coercion, and other forms of psychological control. It is not that violence is wrong—​just that you cannot be the one registered as actually committing lethal acts. And most players are aware that they are not actually pacifists; Ember Jones describes her Skyrim character as ‘inspiring strife or discord to manipulate the odds in her favor while not actual being the one with blood on her hands’ and acknowledges that it is odd that using others to kill for her did not count ‘as a kill in my statistics which allowed me to technically still be a pacifist’ (Totilo 2011b). Thus, they are not undertaking these non-​lethal games on moral grounds; they are undertaken after having already completed the game through more standard violent approaches. What seems to be most appealing about playing the games without directly killing anything is to play a familiar game in a more challenging mode. Jones undertook her pacifist playthrough on her third

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Toxic pacifism 187 time through the game and describes her playstyle as ‘contrived’, ‘frustrating’, and an exercise in ‘theorycrafting’ (Totilo 2011b). Theorycrafting is ‘is the mathematical analysis of game mechanics, usually in video games, to discover optimal strategies and tactics’ (‘Theorycraft’ n.d.). Yasenchak called upon his experience of ‘years of playing Elder Scrolls games’, which allowed him to optimize his character’s abilities and as a result his playthrough was ‘surprisingly easier’ than he thought it would be, but even for him some battles were ‘harder than hell’ (2012). Hinckley’s efforts to complete Fallout 4 required both a great deal of theorycraft (like using the pickpocket skill in reverse to actually give NPCs better weapons) and a tremendous amount of patience, including one 75-​hour playthrough that had to be discarded when he inadvertently killed, but he felt the effort was worthwhile: ‘If we can do that, that’s a pretty crazy achievement. That’s something that most people have already dismissed as being impossible’ (Hernandez 2015). For all of these players the motivating factor is the difficulty of a non-​lethal playthrough, not its moral ‘rightness’. Nicholas A. Hanford outlines the deep connections between the ‘gamer’ identity and masculine notions of mastery and work in ‘At the Intersection of Difficulty and Masculinity: Crafting the Play Ethic’: ‘The effort that gamers put into their play becomes a badge of commitment and their abilities merit their use of the term [gamer]’ (2019, p. 150). Players who choose to, or are forced to, play on lower difficulty settings because of their lack of skill are often subjected to some form of ‘gender offense punishment’ (2019, pp. 155ff). Much like the conscientious objectors of the First World War presented with feathers and petticoats, games use various methods, including forcing their characters to wear feminine clothing, to diminish the masculinity of easier settings and celebrate the more difficult. With this in mind, it is easy to see how the ‘pacifist’ playthroughs previously discussed are actually entirely complicit within standard performances of hegemonic masculinity in games. As we have seen, players adopt this playstyle because of the challenge, and it is evident from the community reaction that these performances are seen as exemplary, and worthy of imitation, rather than as a threat to the masculine gamer identity. For example, the Reddit post ‘I just completed a Fallout 3 Pacifist Run, AMA’ by AsimovsBrokenRules has 189 comments and an upvote rating of 89 per cent (2013). Most of the comments are questions about details of the playthrough or strategies for overcoming certain areas (i.e. ‘How’d you do it, exactly?’) and the most negative comment is ‘Sounds like a nightmare. I don’t think I have the skill or patience to do that’. Even this comment fits within the masculine gamer as it is a backhanded compliment of the original poster’s skill and patience. The notion that such playthroughs, while requiring skill, are boring is not an uncommon comment—​Lapham even feels the need to address this in his community guide to pacifist Skyrim in a section entitled ‘Boring playstyle?’ (2016). The Reddit post has two comments that use explicitly gendered language. The first is by the original poster in response to a comment and signals that they personally are not sexist: ‘Of course man! Or

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188  Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft woman. I  mean this is the 21st century’ (AsimovsBrokenRules 2013). And the second is an explicit comment on the ‘manliness’ of the difficulty of this playthrough, and thus of the original poster: ‘Do your balls have their own bra?’ (AsimovsBrokenRules 2013). From this comment it is clear that playing games like this in a pacifist fashion might challenge the player, but most definitely not the patriarchy. Dontnod Entertainment’s 2018 Vampyr begins to more meaningfully address pacifism in otherwise violent game genres. The main character is a First World War London doctor named Jonathan Reid, who wakes up after being made a vampire in the middle of an outbreak of the Spanish Flu. The game is designed in such a way that you are in a constant battle with Dr. Reid’s dual nature: the desire as a doctor to do no harm, and the need for blood, which you can acquire by feeding on any of the residents of London. The combat you encounter during the game is tedious, but the characters help to create a compelling narrative. In his review of the game Charlie Hall states, And the truth is that I’d be happy to go on a killing spree. It’s just that everyone is so damned interesting that I can’t bring myself to do the deed. If they’re dead then I can’t talk to them anymore, and their part in the overall narrative of the game is lost. (2018) By refusing the standard trope of making the NPCs dispensable, Vampyr encourages the player to interact with them rather than just seeing them as an easy pathway to experience points and increased power. In this regard it is not unlike Tiltfactor’s Layoff, a casual matching-​style game where you are made aware of the backstories of all ‘employees’ before you eliminate them as part of the gameplay (2009). This has a real effect on players; one commenter on Hall’s article notes, ‘The only character I’ve killed so far was the kid in the docks (joe’s kid I think?) I haven’t slept to see the consequences yet, but I already feel bad about it’ (2018). Furthermore, as a doctor players can heal the NPCs. This leads to the ‘quality’ of that person’s blood improving, meaning if you do decide to kill that person, you will gain more experience, but you also gain a lesser amount of experience just by healing them. If the player does decide to kill a NPC, the developers have tried to make that decision meaningful in other ways as well. The game emphasizes the seriousness of the choice you are about to make with chanting and heavy string accompaniments. As the victim dies you are made aware of their last thoughts. Finally, the more NPCs you kill the faster the Spanish Flu spreads. The game as it was first released, however, still required you to kill or else experience extremely difficult gameplay, awarding a corresponding ‘achievement’ for completing the game in this fashion, thereby placing this form of pacifist play in the category of the competitive pacifism seen in Skyrim and Fallout. But a later patch released ‘story mode’, in which players are allowed more freedom in playstyle and, if they so choose, to complete the game without killing. This same patch also

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Toxic pacifism 189 made it even more difficult to complete the hardest difficulty level so that players were more dependent upon killing NPCs. In both cases the developer appears to be responding to a situation where, by making players think about the ramifications of their actions, players were actively choosing not to kill. Thus the developer both had to make not-​killing more viable, and to actually encourage players to kill. It turns out that gamers will not automatically kill everything if other ways to emotionally involve them in the game are found. Maleeha Aslam, in Gender-​based Explosions, examines the linkages between hegemonic masculinity and jihadist terrorist movements: wartime roles are manifestations by which existing cultural and psychological understandings of gender roles are further authenticated and made relevant to current political contexts … programmed by societies to conceptualize their own masculinity in a peculiar fashion, men indulge in flamboyant displays of physical force to either assert or regain their (lost) ‘honour’. (2012, p. 2) Relying upon Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and Connell’s theories of hegemonic masculinity, she sees one appeal of joining a jihadist movement as a way for disempowered men to be able to perform their masculinity. However, exactly because this is a performance, there is the possibility for these men to perform a different masculinity should a satisfactory alternative be made available (Aslam 2012, 89). Similarly, Taylor and Voorhees believe that ‘while gaming certainly reflects the ideologies and aims of hegemonic masculinity, it is also agential in transforming how hegemonic masculinity operates’ (2019, p.  7). As players continue to demand games that provide them flexibility in how to play, it is essential that both players and developers continue to critique what Jim Sterling has called the ‘dead dog strategy’, the over-​reliance on using death and killing to communicate emotion (2016). Rather than the pacifist playstyle being the domain of only the hyper-​skilled ‘gamer’, game developers, and game communities, need to embrace truly non-​violent alternative players; as one commenter on a pacifist playthrough noted, ‘It’s not Bethesda’s fault a gamer isn’t playing a game the way Bethesda intended, but it is their fault they’re not giving him freedom, for better or worse’ (Totilo 2011a). This will take active effort from both parties, but, as Duane Cady so eloquently phrases it, one should never mistake pacifism for passivism (2014).

Notes 1 The authors should note that they both come from families with traditions of religious pacifism, and that they both have grandfathers who were required, as conscientious objectors, to work in labour camps during the Second World War. Both authors also really like shooting things in video games.

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190  Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft 2 It is probably not surprising that options for pacifist play in games based more closely on war, such as Call of Duty, are limited to passively spectating the actions of your computer-​controlled squadmates (see Plunkett 2016), or to playing a non-​ combat role such as a medic or a mechanic. In the first case the lack of player agency removes this playstyle from our discussion; in the second, these personnel are an important part of the military and thus cannot be classified as pacifist.

References AsimovsBrokenRules 2013, ‘I just completed a Fallout 3 pacifist run, AMA’, Reddit, 1 January, viewed 18 March 2019, www.reddit.com/​r/​Fallout/​comments/​15rzhb/​i_​ just_​completed_​a_​fallout_​3_​pacifist_​run_​ama/​. Aslam, M 2012, Gender-​based explosions:  the nexus between Muslim masculinities, jihadist Islamism and terrorism, United Nations University Press, New York, NY. Blackburn, G 2019, ‘Army men:  military masculinity in Call of duty’, in N Taylor & G Voorhees (eds.), Masculinities in play, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK, pp.  37–​54. Butler, J 2006, Gender trouble:  feminism and the subversion of identity, new edition, Routledge, London, UK. Cady, D 2014, ‘Pacifism is not passivism’, Philosophy Now, no. 105, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​philosophynow.org/​issues/​105/​Pacifism_​Is_​Not_​Passivism. Cheong, IM 2015, ‘Fallout 4 non-​violent playthrough details revealed’, Gameranx, 29 July, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​gameranx.com/​updates/​id/​29495/​article/​ fallout-​4-​non-​violent-​playthrough-​details-​revealed/​. Connell, RW & Messerschmidt, JW 2005, ‘Hegemonic masculinity:  rethinking the concept’, Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 829–​859. Dougherty, C 2012, ‘Videogamers embark on nonkilling spree  –​‘pacifist run’ wins bragging rights; spells, not swords’, Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition, 31 January, p. A1. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 2011, Bethesda Game Studios, Various platforms. Elshtain, J 1987, Women and war, Basic Books, New York, NY. Fallout 1997, Interplay, Various platforms. Fallout 2 1998, Interplay, Various platforms. Fallout 3 2008, Bethesda Game Studios, Various platforms. Fallout 4 2015, Bethesda Game Studios, Various platforms. Flanagan, M 2013, Critical play: radical game design, Paperback edition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hall, C 2018, ‘Vampyr is a game about saving souls, not sacrificing them’, Polygon, 4 June, viewed 18 March 2019, www.polygon.com/​2018/​6/​4/​17425760/​ vampyr-​review-​pc-​ps4-​xbox-​one. Hanford, NA 2019, ‘At the intersection of difficulty and masculinity: crafting the play ethic’, in N Taylor & G Voorhees (eds.) Masculinities in play, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK, pp. 149–​163. Hatty, S 2000, Masculinities, violence, and culture, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Hearn, J 2011, ‘Men/​ masculinities:  war/​ militarism  –​searching (for) the obvious connections’, in A Kronsell & E Svedberg (eds.), Making gender, making war: violence, military and peacekeeping practices, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 47–​64. Hernandez, P 2015, ‘Guy beats Fallout 4 without killing anyone, nearly breaks the game’, Kotaku, 28 December, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​ guy-​beats-​fallout-​4-​without-​killing-​anyone-​nearly-​brea-​1749882569.

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Toxic pacifism 191 Howson, G 2008, ‘Pacifism and your other Fallout 3 questions answered’, The Guardian, 11 August, viewed 18 March 2019, www.theguardian.com/​technology/​ gamesblog/​2008/​aug/​11/​pacifismandyourotherfallou. Kronsell, A & Svedberg, E (eds.) 2011, Making gender, making war: violence, military and peacekeeping practices, Routledge, New York, NY. Kuhlman, E 2017, ‘Gender and resistance’, in S Grayzel & T Proctor (eds.), Gender and the great war, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 27–​45. Lapham, J 2016, Playing a ‘pacifist’, 7 December, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​ steamcommunity.com/​sharedfiles/​filedetails/​?id=813403434. McAllister P & Halper L 1983, ‘Interview: reweaving the web of life: feminism and nonviolence’, Off Our Backs, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 20–​21. Mullins, D (WestSideLuigi) 2011, ‘Felix the peaceful monk #1  –​good guy Felix’, online video, 5 December, viewed 18 March 2019, www.youtube.com/​watch?v= y2d2KRIUYCM. Plunkett, L 2016, ‘Pacifist Call of duty player refuses to shoot the bad guys’, Kotaku, 19 January, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​pacifist-​call-​of-​duty-​player​refuses-​to-​shoot-​the-​bad-​g-​1753873311. Sterling, J 2016, ‘Being slightly critical of violence in one particular way’, online video, 20 June, viewed 18 March 2019, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=cKFafPSddGw. Stuart, T 2015, ‘Fallout 4: Todd Howard on loss in the post-​apocalypse world’, The Guardian, 28 July, viewed 30 March 2019, www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2015/​ jul/​28/​fallout-​4-​todd-​howard-​post-​apocalypse-​peter-​hines. Sylvester, C 2011, ‘Those difficult war questions in feminism’, in A Kronsell & E Svedberg (eds.), Making gender, making war:  violence, military and peacekeeping practices, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 6–​8. Taylor, N & Voorhees G (eds.) 2019, Masculinities in play, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK. ‘Theorycraft’ n.d., Wikipedia, wiki article, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​en.wikipedia. org/​wiki/​Theorycraft. Tiltfactor 2009, Layoff, online, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​tiltfactor.org/​game/​ layoff/​. Totilo, S 2011a, ‘He’s level 9 in Skyrim. He hasn’t killed anything’, Kotaku, 6 December, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​hes-​level-​9-​in-​skyrim-​he-​hasnt-​killed-​ anything-​5865615. Totilo, S 2011b, ‘She’s level 35. She makes villagers kill her dragons’, Kotaku, 12 December, viewed 18 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​shes-​level-​35-​in-​skyrim​she-​makes-​villagers-​kill-​her-​d-​5867385. Totilo, S 2012, ‘I guess not killing things in video games is rebellious’, Kotaku, 31 January, viewed 30 March 2019, https://​kotaku.com/​i-​guess-​not-​killing-​in-​videogames-​is​rebellious-​5880870. Vampyr 2018, Dontnod Entertainment, Various platforms. Yasenchak, R 2012, ‘Non-​violent Skyrim playthrough results’, Eldergeek, 7 February, viewed 18 March 2019, http://​elder-​geek.com/​2012/​02/​non-​violent-​skyrim-​ playthrough-​results/​.

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Part V

Afterword

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Taking binaries off the table Mary Flanagan

Violent catharsis Jerreat-​Poole’s chapter in this volume describes moments of redemption, of catharsis, where players enjoy the power of destruction and subversion, the messy and ambivalent performance of feminist violence as a form of pleasure. I can identify. There are few games that change the power dynamics of the existing social order. Jerreat-​Poole’s subversive in-​game actions, admitting pleasure at smashing up a virtual school, reminds me of the cathartic experimental fiction film Born in Flames (1983) by filmmaker Lizzie Borden. In the film, feminists battle racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism, crossing difference in an intersectional union that transforms into an extremist group. The characters took direct action against the patriarchy and specifically the media systems that represented and promoted inequities. I remember watching this film not long after it came out, cheering on the women as they raged against injustice. Sometimes, you just need that catharsis. And one needs to comprehend how power operates, especially in games, for games are an artform of power and choice. Speaking the truth to power in ways that undermine and challenge that power can often best be done as an insider … Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly. (Patricia Hill Collins 2000, xiii) About a decade ago, my student Suyin Lui learned these languages and crafted a game called Hey Baby, where you can shoot men on the street who catcall you. She used the derogatory, real-​life abuses hurled at her during her typical days as a student in New  York City and had friends record the voice overs. Her game shocked. It turned the tables, and did so bluntly. It was radical. But most games are not concerned with underrepresented women finding catharsis—​just the opposite. War games in particular seem on the surface as

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196  Mary Flanagan far away from a liberating social theme as you can get. Yet in this volume, the authors have explored a range of war games from the seemingly obvious choices of triple-​A battlefield games to smaller game examples which offer different interpretations of what war might mean, and how players might perform outside expectations. In this book, then, the definition a war game has expanded beyond Call of Duty-​style battle-​specific settings to include games where violence is the raison d’être for play, where game goals are structured around binary winning, aggression, or annihilation. Such a reworked definition recasts a huge variety of games reliant on violence and aggression as war games.

Feminist violence Can one be a feminist and still play such problematic games? This remains a good question to negotiate, just as feminists examining other media forms have asked. Can I be a feminist and enjoy heterosexist romantic comedy films or romance novels? Foucault’s notion of the power fantasy can remind us that games of violence, in particular those that feature armed conflict to foster ‘violent economies’ and ‘disconnect values from practice’ (as noted by Saklofske, Cann, Rodrigue and Siemens), maintain the conditions of the violence in the first place. Foucault assumes this position when discussing power: ‘if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others’ (Foucault 1983, p. 217). Make no doubt about it:  however they may appear, however their moral conflicts are posed and the multiple endings offered to give the illusion of true choice, we can categorize the majority of war games as games where persons exercise power over others, where violence is a means to, if not the end goal for, victory. In this volume, Kampe draws upon Feminist Standpoint Theory (Harding 2004) to set looser boundaries for war games. He argues that a ‘feminist war game must—​ through in-​ game goals, available actions, and subject representation—​allow the player to explore the social realities of war, through the perspective of one who has become marginalized by it’. But what exactly counts as ‘war’ is expanded in nuanced ways. Two chapters, one by Kampe and the other by House, explore This War of Mine (2014), a game in which players control a group of survivors during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, which highlights basic human needs and cooperation in the midst of moral choices over engagement in the violent conflict. The focus not on the battlefield, but instead on civilian survival, disrupts the genre. Taking a broader look at what ‘war’ means and looking at social realities in conflict seems to both take into consideration the options available to ‘feminist’ makers as well as shed light on feminist aims themselves. After all, some feminists would argue that merely being ‘woman’ means that one is engaged in a violent power struggle by default. In this volume, Luc examines the aggression and power dynamics inherent in everyday life that undermine any kind of female identity. To this end, Jenson and de Castell

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Taking binaries off the table 197 call upon French feminist theory to question the very possibility of a ‘feminist war game’, examining the history of women’s rights as in and of itself an ongoing war, and the social movement of Feminism that places the very existence of woman at the center of concern. Arguing that digital games are already an embattled site for women in terms of unbalanced representation in the making process, sexist representation in the games themselves, and vitriolic culture surrounding games and their culture, the authors argue against the possibility of a feminist war games using the work of philosopher Moniq Wittig, arguing that ‘Gender remains a battlefield, and, like it or not, we are always off to war’. This war moves beyond trends in politics to much deeper questions of language, hierarchy, and authority. In other words, if women must continue to fight for simple autonomy, safety, and fundamental human rights, then playing out ideas about war under other guises would just be an activity that distracts from the root of the problem.

Binary boundaries One of the biggest challenges with war games is not merely the number of games out there that celebrate hypermasculinity and unquestioning re-​ representation of patriarchal order. It is their very reliance on binary conflict, their refusal to uproot the fundamental structures of inequity that lead to conflict in the first place. While writing in a particular time and political climate, the observations of Karl Marx and conflict theory still hold water: in a state of perpetual conflict over limited resources, in a competition-​based world that therefore favors power and social hierarchies, those with power and wealth will work to suppress others, and create further conflicts through war, both covert and overt. Many game designers situate players in this conflict without attempting to imagine alternatives. Take for example the analysis of Life Is Strange (2015), and its prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017) by Jerreat-​Poole, a game serial set in a high school narrative dystopia. The repressive environments of suburban life and its racial and gendered segregation is queered by the player while the dark underbelly of the town is revealed: young women are framed, abused, and even killed. The game’s key feminist character Chloe dies multiple times, but the player-​character Max has the power to rewind time, so it is possible to save her, albeit with other consequences. Chloe’s rage is a familiar theme to players who are victims of inequities and violence, players who are ignored, unseen, targeted, or abused in the surrounding heteropatriarchy. Ending with an environmental catastrophe, the player faces a choice: save Chloe, or save the town, a town that conceals violence against women, bodies of color, queer bodies. The choice is meaningful because it recognizes a new kind of lens in game play:  the hero who might save the day might be saving something that desperately needs changing or destroying anyway. The game builds on other moral dilemma games, such as Shadow of the Colossus (2006), where we realize that in playing out Wander’s mission to resurrect his true love, we

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198  Mary Flanagan are in fact massacring to extinction beautiful ancient massive beings and empowering an evil magician. Overriding themes in popular war games—​winning conflict, making great sacrifices, facing difficult moral questions with tradeoffs, and becoming the hero, where the individual triumphs evil and often, but not always, prevents global harm—​ celebrate binary solutions that, if they are ‘solved’, by hypermasculinity instead of negotiation, reinventing the values system, changing rewards or game elements themselves (upgrades, levels, points, inventories, and other markers of status), valorize might and intimidation over persuasion. Most games themselves are typically created in hypermasculine environments and in a culture currently toxic for diverse workers and players alike. Fans of big war games such as the Call of Duty series extoll the virtues of these games based on their involvement of moral dilemmas, and the game reward systems reflect an attention to player moral choices. The sheer number of war games that have been released is indeed astounding, but most of them factor in some moments of moral choice-​making, such as gunning down already wounded soldiers or civilians. War games allow players to make violent decisions in the midst of moral dilemmas given in singular, consumable moments. After all, in a real-​life situation, with hunger, the sides taken by neighbors, the protection of children, homelands, beliefs, ideologies—​with these all involved, the dilemmas are multiplied on top of each other in a huge confounding mess. Call of Duty: World at War (2008) was advertised with the intertitles ‘No rules. No fear. Only chaos’, which flies in the face of consideration of a global conflict that left over 70 million people dead and makes the Geneva Convention seem like a practical joke. These moral dilemmas extend into fictionalized wars, even zombie apocalypses: Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015). There are, as typical with a large game, multiple ways to experience the ending. In one ending, one of the player-​characters, Barry, refuses to execute a child, even one possessed by the mind of a zombie Nazi overlord. He lets her free, and we know she will crush humanity on earth. To avoid this resolution, one would have had to get the character who had accidentally shot her sister to use a gun. This character is a teenager, someone who refuses to shoot. In the end game, if the player finally directs her to take the gun, something against her fundamental character, and shoot, the outcome is far more heroic. But at what cost? Save the planet and lose your values seems to be the ongoing theme, which I read as a dystopian design choice, a hopeless moment that transcends the particulars of narrative and rather reflects the ‘deer in the headlights’ inability to act given the despairing choices afforded by hypercapitalist systems in the face of a globe on the brink of catastrophe. Players are given a choice structure where they have no good choices at all, especially those who are playing the game critically or subversively. As bell hooks said, ‘Being oppressed means the absence of choices’ (1984, p. 5). We seem to have fewer and fewer choices that have any real power to change the systems we encounter.

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Taking binaries off the table 199

Beyond binaries Games are games because they simplify systems, and this includes simplifying conflict and the logic behind it. Games are in some ways always a set of abstractions, some with powerful narratives alongside them, others with mere tokens on a game board. Unfortunately, game design has not caught up to the difficult, challenging-​to-​design-​for situations of conflict we face in the twenty-​ first century. It means experimenting. It means less profit as game industries try something new. Capitalistic concerns therefore remain unquestioned. Perhaps this has always been the case:  perhaps the world has always been a very messy place, with the mass simplification of politicians and warmongers boiling complexity down to two clear sides and one definitive notion of victory to simplify the truth, to funnel energy. But in doing so in our play systems, our games therefore teach a kind of one-​sidedness, a binary sickness, an ‘us vs them’ mentality, a position that engages the mind’s deepest primordial biases and whose distillation continues to be useful to the status quo, to capitalism, to greed, and war-​mongering; it fosters virulent gender-​ based discrimination, racism, and behaviors such as interpersonal violence, hate speech, and more. There are never two sides to any story, but there is a gravitation to that type of logic to distill the complexity, to reduce, to reject contradictions and tradeoffs in order to divide and conquer. Ultimately war-​type binaries act to renounce the personhood of all involved, each participant worldwide with their own complex story. Human life is messy. It’s complicated. But the rhetoric of war, of binary oppositions, reduces it all into neat packages. Good vs evil. Right vs wrong. It is this phenomenon which makes the continuing fantasy about playing out war all the more unsettling.

Subversions and solutions I started this short essay with an anecdote about empowerment through imagined violent retaliation in games and films. But I  have developed new perspectives through the years as a media maker and designer. I  no longer stand behind the notion that catharsis changes anything—​just the opposite. My questions have forced me to see that the systems contain the resistance. Instead, I  am pushed to make new systems instead of reacting to the old. Foucault writes, ‘The strategic adversary is fascism … the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (1983, p. xiii). What are games in which you don’t feel the urge for power? Are they even games at all? New theories for game studies must emerge with this question front and center to address the questions of oppression, choice, and play. Indeed, there are too many games that give us too few good choices. Perhaps a positive result in the search for feminist war game is to take ‘binarism’ off the table. Perhaps the solution is to create a feminist utopia.

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200  Mary Flanagan Women have long been writing feminist utopias, as early as Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 in which three women, Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice, advise on how to create a city for women so they may live as educated equals, free from harassment. More recently, the 1970s through the 1990s saw a number of writers inspired by the women’s movement pen novels about utopian worlds designed by women. Curiously, war is not absent from this set of feminist utopias, but where there is war, it is because women have been attacked and must defend themselves. In A Door into Ocean (Joan Slonczewski 1986), a nation of advanced, pacifist women living on an oceanic planet face invasion by neighboring patriarchal planets. Their struggle plays out while they negotiate danger while attempting to maintain their culture of non-​violence. Or take The Wanderground (Sally Miller Gearhart 1979) where women take to the countryside and form their own feminist communities away from the violent patriarchy that controls the cities. Or He, She and It (Marge Piercy 1991), in which the lead character returns to her autonomous childhood town under cyberattack by multinational corporations who have gained control of most of the planet’s regions. These are just a few of the many examples of feminist fiction that propose alternatives to the way things are and the way conflict can be negotiated. The great many novels that explore feminist utopias demonstrate that other creative media forms have the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities to the conditions of heteronormative, hypermasculine scenarios. We’ve had enough of games based on Tom Clancy or Joseph Conrad, for game genres to tempt players to become enamored with power. Now is the time for something else. We need new game genres to build feminist utopias.

The future of conflict in the Anthropocene The good news is that there are some emerging games that tackle alternatives to rehearsing war. This volume has explored a few of these burgeoning alternatives, from player’s actions and their participation in war games that avoid killing to games that bring the conflict into one of team building and survival. But as of yet these examples do not rework the fundamental ways conflict happens in the first place, and that is where we must look in the next generation of war games. As Patricia Hill Collins so astutely observed, To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of ‘commonsense’ ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify. (2000, p. 284) As far as scholars can tell, games emerged in Neolithic times after the last Ice Age. Writing, cities, and organized larger-​scale societies seem to have been

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Taking binaries off the table 201 necessary ingredients for game systems to emerge as a thought process. Thus, games have long served as a means for people to understand and model conflict, and work through strategies to find solutions. But they have done so mostly through the given order of the day, from the accepted norms of the societies in which they developed. Given the state of the planet today, we are poised for an unprecedented era of global conflict: human, animal, vegetal extinction; a lack of clean and bountiful resources; territory grabs, exploitation, and die-​off. Our time may be one of those turning points, such as when Mancala developed to help explain the harvest and fate in neolithic times, or war games like chess emerged in the dark and middle ages to help articulate conflict at that time. We have games available as an imaginative resource to rework consequence-laden global human conflicts, the celebration of intersectional, queer interests and the dire need for planetary equity. In an age when the limited earth’s resources have reached a turbulent yet undeniable state of instability, we could look to games to find creative ways to problem solve by altering their reward systems, understanding there are multiple stakeholders, coming to equilibria instead of winner-​take-​all solutions. We desperately need new models for power, to build new notions of survival in the anthropocene. It is up to the game development community to lead the way in such thinking, to design new kinds of games for an entirely new epoch of human history. There are tiny moments in time where humanity—​groups, individuals, societies—​is given the opportunity to try something different, to change the way things have always been done, to refuse to attend to the structural inequities producing race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, discipline, expertise, and capital as systems of power. It’s time to reinforce values that hold precious the rights of everyone and everything around us. This is our opportunity, our moment with games at this very instant: to imagine new kinds of war games—​even utopias—​in order to imagine new kinds of futures.

References de Pizan, C 1405/​1999, The book of the city of ladies, reprint, trans. R Brown-​Grant, Penguin, London. Foucault, M 1983, ‘Preface’, in G Deleuze and F Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Gearhart, SM 1979, The wanderground, Persephone Press, Watertown, MA. Harding, S (ed.) 2004, The feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies. Routledge, London. Hill Collins, P 2000, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, Routledge, New York, NY. hooks, b 1984, Feminist theory: from margin to center, South End Press, Cambridge,  MA. Piercy, M 1991, He, she and it, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. Slonczewski, J 1986, A door into ocean, Arbor House, New York, NY.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate information in tables, those in italics in figures. vs. indicates a comparison 9/​11 attacks 121, 128 12 Rules for Life (Peterson) 88 Abbandonato, Linda 176 Absher (2015) 125–​126 accessibility, localized see localized accessibility adults, tabletop war games 39–​40 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D): feminist representation 34–​36; non-​binary gender representation 35; see also Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Afghanistan: US military deployment 123; see also Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan, A (2013) Agent Silent Death expansion, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 159–​160 Ahmed, Sara 4, 6, 67, 70, 77 Aidley, Katie 49 Alderman, Naomi 7–​8 Alien (1979) 102 allies, hostile 125–​126 America’s Army (2002) 121 Andean Abyss (2012) 46–​47 anger 78–​79 Antonisse, Jamie 124 Apocalypse Now (1979) 103 ARMA 133 Arneson, Dave 40 art direction, gender inclusion 48–​49 Art of Failure, The (Juul) 145–​146 Aslam, Maleena 189 asylum seekers, dehumanization of 125

attractors: recurrent see recurrent attractors; simulated 94 authoritarianism, United States and 129 authorship, war games 32–​33 Avalon Hill 40 Avengers, The (2012) 102 avoidance, violence in games 184 awareness, game design 49 Bad Feminist (Gay) 3–​4 barriers, emotions as 55 base instincts 126–​128 battlefield, gender as 88 Battlefield series (2002–​9) 102 Battle of the Little Bighorn, The (2005) 49; gender issues 46 Battle of the Wilderness (1975) 32–​33 Bayonetta (2010), female characters 22 bees, as feminist war game basis 24 Bell, K 94 Bilal, Wafaa 121 binaries: beyond 199; boundaries 197–​198 Bioshock (2007) 20, 21 Bjork, Tommy 150 Blackburn, Gregory 184 Blackmoor 40 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) 70 board war games: feminist representation 33–​36; masculinity and 31 Bogost, Ian 6, 20, 168 Book of the City of Ladies, The (de Pisan) 200 Borden, Lizzie 195

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Index 203 Born in Flames (1983) 195 Bosnian War (1992–​96) see This War of Mine (TWoM)(2014) Braidotti, Rosi 156 Braunstein 40 Brice, Mattie 27 Brickner, Rachel 13 Brothers in Arms series (2005–​10) 102 Burial at Sea expansion 173 Butler, Judith 54, 57, 73–​74, 152, 185 Cady, Duane 189 Caillois, Roger 123 Call Her Ganda (2018) 127 Call of Duty series (2003–​17) 102, 198; gender and violence 168; masculinity in 168–​169, 184; playing the hero 56; political ideology 61 Call of Duty: World at War (2008) 198 Cannibals and Kings (Harris) 83–​84 Casualties of War (1989) 15, 21 Catherine the Great 103 Chainmail (1971) 40 character gender 30–​31; feminist war games 22; first-​person shooters 30–​31; Portal 174; see also female characters characterization: feminist war game dimensions 137; This War of Mine 140–​141 Chemaly, Soraya 8 chess, as feminist war game basis 24 cinema see films/​cinema civilian experience, of war 135 Cixous, Hélène 87 Clancy, Tom 200 Clark, Naomi 92 Cockburn, Cynthia 135 Colonial Twilight: The French–​Algerian War (1954–​62)  47 combat roles, female empowerment 17 Command 133 community, feminist war games and 146 conflict see war Connel, Raewyn 183–​184 Conrad, Joseph 200 Cooper, Brittney 8 Cornell, Drucilla 150 Counter Insurgency (COIN) game series 46–​47; feminist inquiry 47 Courage under Fire (1996) 102 critical confrontations, films 26–​27 critical thought, fun vs. in games 15 Crowley, Vicki 156

Cultural Politics of Emotion, the (Ahmed) 77 cuteness, girl aesthetic as 69 D&D see Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Darfur is Dying (2006) 7, 103–​104, 124, 125 Davis, Angela 7, 58 dead-​dog strategy  189 dead-​in-​iraq (2006–​11)  121 Deer Hunter, The (1978) 103 Defense Manpower Data Center 123–​124 dehumanization, asylum seekers and refugees 125 DeLappe, Joseph 121 Demick, Barbara 135 de Palma, Brian 15 de Pisan, Christine 200 destruction game, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus as 151 Deterding, Sebastian 152 difficulty, feminist war game design 145 digital simulations, American military presence, understanding of 122 Digital Survivor of Sexual Assault (DS2A) system 127–​128 disability, feminist intervention as 153–​157 Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan, A (2013) 47 domestic play space, This War of Mine 61–​62 Domestic Tension (2007) 121 dominance, presumption of rights 87–​88 Donald, R 54–​55 Dontonod Entertainment 68; see also Life Is Strange (LIS) (2015) Doom (1993): character gender 30; masculinist game mechanics 168–​169 DOOM Eternal 160–​161 Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski) 200 drivers, of war 132 Dr Strangelove (1961) 103 DS2A (Digital Survivor of Sexual Assault) system 127–​128 Duke Nukem3D (1996), character gender 30 Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 40–​43; feminist modules and 36; feminist values in 8; fifth edition characteristics (2014) 42–​43; gender sensitive phrasing 41–​42; narrative element 42;

204

204 Index role-​playing game vs. war game 43; structure and play 40–​41; violence avoidance 41; women authors in 34–​35; see also Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D) dynamics: feminist war game dimensions 137; This War of Mine 141–​142 economics, war driven by 132 Edge of Tomorrow (2014) 102; female characters 22 Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The (2011) 102, 183, 185–​186; criticism of 187–​188; non-​player characters 185; story 185 ELITE SHARP CTT (Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment Sexual Harassment/​Assault Response and Prevention Command Team Trainer) 127 Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (Cooper) 8 Elshtain, Jean 184 embedded reporting 57 Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment Sexual Harassment/​ Assault Response and Prevention Command Team Trainer (ELITE SHARP CTT) 127 emotions 78–​79; barriers as 55; rational thinking vs. 55; technology in This War of Mine 60; training in Kriegspiel 55 Endgame Eurasia (2013) 125 Endgame Syria (2012) 7, 124–​125 end of the world, Life is Strange (LIS) (2015) 72–​73 Engberg-​Pedersen, Anders  55–​56 “Enhancing Sexual Harassment Training for the 21st Centuary Military” (Ford Morie) 127 ethical play aspects, Portal (2007) 174 expectations, war games 20–​21 failure of masculinity 75 Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt against Caesar 47 Fallout 183, 186 Fallout 2 186 Fallout 3 186 Fallout 4 182 Far Cry 2 (2008) 21 Fatal Frame 8, 169–​173, 176–​177; feminist game mechanics 168,

172–​173; gameplay 171–​172; gender stereotypes 169–​170, 171; non-​ violence claims 172; story 169; unavoidable mercy killing 170–​171; violence in 171 female characters 22–​23; Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 34–​36; board war games 33–​36; disability as representation 153–​157; disposability in Life is Strange 73; empowerment in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 158–​159; over-​sexualization of 22–​23; representation difficulties 176, 177; underrepresentation in games 195–​196; Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in 152–​153, 157–​158, 161 Female Combat Soldier, the (King) 16 females: authors of Dungeons and Dragons 34–​35; honorary men as 16; non-​participant population in war as 15; participation in war 15, 16; “spoils of war” as 83 Female Solder, The (King) 16 feminism: definitions 3–​4, 82; inquiry in Counter Insurgency game series 47; monarch association 103; posthuman 156; scope of 18; value potential 18–​19; violence, opposition to 18–​19; war vs. 23 feminist anti-​war games 24–​26; outcomes opposed to winning 24–​25; prototypes 25–​29 feminist game jams 114 Feminist Killjoys (Ahmed) 67 feminist modules, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 36 feminist snap 70 Feminist Standpoint Theory 132, 196 feminist utopia writing 200 feminist violence 77–​78, 196–​197; joy/​ pleasure in 78 feminist war: definitions of 102–​104; films/​cinema 102–​103; historical representations of 103 feminist war games 3–​4, 22–​24, 31–​33, 82–​84; character gender 22; community and 146; definitions 101–​117; design qualities 144–​145; Fatal Frame as 168, 172–​173; framework for 135–​138; fun violation 21; Life is Strange as 91–​92; mechanics 168–​169; non-​glorification of 103; Portal as 168; possibility of 32;

 205

Index 205 prototypes of 23–​24; seven dimensions of 137–​138; socially responsible design 136; testing for 136 fictionalized wars 198 Fight Club 75 films/​cinema: critical confrontations and 26–​27; feminist war 102–​103 Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam (2014) 47 First Chechen War (1994–​96) see This War of Mine (TWoM)(2014) first-​person shooter (FPS) games 121–​122; character gender 30–​31; masculinist game mechanics 168–​169 Flanagan, Mary 6, 13–​14, 18 Ford Morie, Jacqueline 127 Foucault, Michel 105, 199 frames, This War of Mine and 54 Frames of War (Butler) 57 frameworks, feminist war games 135–​138 French–​Algerian War see Colonial Twilight: The French–​Algerian War (1954–​62) French feminist theory 197 Freud, Sigmund, misogyny 17 From Where We Stand: War, Woman's Activism and Feminist Analysis (Cockburn) 135 Full Metal Jacket (1987) 103 fun, critical thought vs. in games 15 Galani, William 157 Galloway, Alexander R 6 Gamasutra Salary Survey 32 game(s): definitions 83; effects of 77–​78; female underrepresentation 195–​196; fun vs. critical thought 15; history of 200–​201; hypermasculinity 31; ideology of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 150–​151; inclusive design 93; language as barrier 143; language in 88–​89; as models 20; as possibility fields 19; as prototypes 20; reality vs. 6–​7; subversive designs 86; Syrian refugees 124–​125; theoretical underpinning 104–​105; see also war games game design: awareness of non-​ combatants 49; deliberate choice in 47–​49; feminist war games 144–​145; inclusion 48; military contracts 127 game industry, hypermasculinity in 32

game interfaces, American military presence, understanding of 122 game mechanics 167–​168; feminist mechanics 168–​169; gender 168; Invasion 105–​106; player-​character definition of 167; role-​playing games 167–​168; violence 168 game piracy 143 gameplay: Fatal Frame 171–​172; Kriegspiel (1824) 58–​59; This War of Mine 138–​139 Gamergate controversy 114 Games Workshop 43; see also Necromunda (1995);Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) gay-​bashing, Russian website encouragement 126 Gay, Roxanne 3–​4 Gears of War series (2006–​16) 102 gender: as battlefield 88; Battle of the Little Bighorn, The 46; definition 185; game characters see character gender; game mechanics 168; mechanics in Necromunda 44; performativity of 189; sensitive phrasing in Dungeons and Dragons 41–​42; tabletop war games 39–​40; war games 45–​46 Gender-​based Explosions (Aslam) 189 gendered authorship 30–​37 gender stereotypes: Fatal Frame 169–​170, 171; questioning in Portal 173 G. I. Jane (1997) 102 girl aesthetic, cuteness as 69 God of War series (2005–​2018) 21 Goldberg, D 93 Gone Home 93–​94 Grand Theft Auto series 5 Gray, Kishonna L 153 Grosz, Elizabeth 150–​151 groups of people, representations 105 Gygax, Gary 34–​36, 40 Halberstam, Jack 75 Hall, Charlie 188 Hall, Stuart 105 Halo, masculinist game mechanics 168–​169 handbooks, war game records 133 Hanford, Nicholas A 187 Harlot encounters, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 34 Harrigan, Pat 31 Harris, Marvin 83–​84

206

206 Index Hartsock, Nancy 134–​135 hatred, tolerance vs. 110 Hatty, Suzanne 184 Hearn, Jeff 183 hegemonic masculinity: jihadist terrorism and 189; non-​violent games challenging 182–​183 Hellweg, Johann Christian Ludwig 5 Heretic (1994), feminist representation 33–​34 hero, playing of, in games 56 He, She and It (Piercy) 200 heterosexual exploitation, Life is Strange 126 Hey Baby 195 high school suburbia, Life is Strange 68–​69 Hill Collins, Patricia 200 historical accuracy, gender inclusion in historical games 48 historically informed design, feminist war games 145 history, feminist war 103 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 6, 128–​129 honorary men, women as 16 hostile allies 125–​126 Hourihan, Margaret 24 Howard, Tom 182 How to Do Things with Videogames (Bogost) 6 Huizinga, John 6, 128–​129 Human Rights Watch report (2015) 16 Hush (2008) 7, 124 Hutchings, Kimberly 14 hypermasculinity: definition 31; diminishment in This War of Mine 61; game industry and 32; gaming 31; see also masculinity identities, intersectional 93 IGDA (International Game Developers Association) 114 I'm Afraid of Men (Shraya) 4 image reframing, war 57–​58 inclusion: art direction 48–​49; game design 48, 93; historical games and accuracy 48; role-​playing games 48 Infinite Fall 69 inhuman peace 128–​129 Institute for Creative Technologies 127–​128

International Game Developers Association (IGDA) 114 International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) 184 intersectional identities 93 Invasion 105–​113; game mechanics 105–​106; player choice 106; screenshots 106–​110, 111–​113; tolerance vs. hatred 110 Iraq, US military deployment 123 Irigaray, Luce 87, 103 IWSA (International Woman Suffrage Alliance) 184 Jhally, Sut 122 jihadist terrorism, hegemonic masculinity and 189 Joan of Arc 15, 103 Jones, Ember 186 joy, feminist violence in 78 Joystick Warriors (2013) 122 just war, definitions 14 Kampe, Christopher 94 Kazemi, Darius 21 Kill Bill (2003) 102 killjoy survival kits 79 Kimmel, Michael 151 King, Anthony 16 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 31 Kopas, Merritt 19, 93 Kosovo War (1998–​9) see This War of Mine (TWoM)(2014) Kriegspiel (1824) 39, 152; emotional training 55; gameplay 58–​59 Kristeva, Julia 87 Kwiatkowski, Kacper 59 language: game-​playing barrier 143; playing with 88–​89 Lapham, James 185, 187–​188 Larsson, L 93 Laude, Jennifer 127 L'Engle, Madeleine 77 Lenoir, Tim 129 Lesbian Body, The (Wittig) 87 Les Guerilleres (Wittig) 84–​85, 87 Life is Strange (LIS) (2015) 6–​7, 21, 67, 91–​100, 197–​198; choices 96–​98; criticism of 72–​73; end of the world 72–​73; female character disposability 73; as feminist anti-war game 25; feminist war 91–​92; heterosexual

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Index 207 exploitation 126; high school suburbia 68–​69; as killjoy survival kit 79; non-​violence 8; personal history influences 94–​96; play of 96; same-​sex attraction 126; storyline 71–​72, 74–​77; vulnerability 76–​77 Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017) 67, 70, 197 Little Wars (Wells) 39 Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed) 4, 6 localized accessibility: feminist war game dimensions 137; This War of Mine 143 Loesser, Cassandra 156 Logavina Street (Demick) 135 Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), female characters 22 Lorde, Audre 7 Losh, Elizabeth 32–​33 Ludwig. Johann Christian 152 Lui, Suyin 195 MacAllister, Pam 184 MacDonald, K 54–​55 McKenzie, Nathan 151–​152 McNeilly, Joe 173 Maček, Ivana 135 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) 102 Magic the Gathering (1993) 123 Malazita, James 173 Mario and Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games (2013) 126 Marx, Karl 197 masculinist game mechanics 168–​169 masculinity: board war games and 31; Call of Duty 184; failure of 75; framework in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 152–​153, 161; historical construction of 132; mastery linkage and 187; oppressive 5; violence and militarism 183–​184; violence in games 185; violent and oppressive 5; war-​ gaming and 31; see also hegemonic masculinity; hypermasculinity Mass Effect trilogy (2007–​12) 102 mastery linkage, masculinity and 187 Matlock, Michael 154–​155 Medal of Honour series (1999–​2007) 102 media, depiction of war/​conflict 56–​57 Men Explain Things to Me (Solnit) 4 mercy killing, Fatal Frame 170–​171 Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (2015), female characters 22 Mieszkowski, Jan 56–​57

militarism: misogyny 17; violence/​ masculinity and 183–​184 military alliances, United States 126 military contracts, game design 127 military deployment, numerical lists and 123 military force, social institution as 17 military simulations, history of 122–​123 military technologies, war games 133 Milk, Chris 128 Miller Gearhart, Sally 200 misogyny 5–​6; fight against 115; military culture 17 Mitchell, David 156 model-​based design, feminist war games 145 modifiability: feminist war game dimensions 138; This War of Mine 144 monarchs, feminism 103 Morrison, Toni 70 Mosca, Linda 32–​33, 34–​35 Mother of All Questions, The (Solnit) 4–​5 Mukherjee, Souvik 150 Mullins, Daniel 182 Murray, Janet 128 Nakamura, Lisa 128 narrative elements, Dungeons and Dragons 42 narrative prosthesis 156 Nayak, Meghana 31 Necromunda (1995) 43–​44 new feminist order 85–​86 Nguyen, C Thi 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17 Night, Angela 23 Night in the Woods (NITW) (2017) 67, 69–​70; cuteness of 75; as killjoy survival kit 79; non-​violence 8; vulnerability 76–​77 Nissenbaum, Helen 18 non-​binary gender representation, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 35 non-​glorification, feminist war games of 103 non-​player characters, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The 185 non-​violent games 182–​191; criticism of 182, 187–​188; Fatal Frame 172; hegemonic masculinity challenging 182–​183; Life Is Strange 8; pacifist playthroughs, reasons for 186–​187;

208

208 Index see also Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The (2011); Fallout; Vampyr No One Lives Forever (2000), character gender 30 Norton, Marleigh 114 Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (Wunker) 6 objectives: feminist war game dimensions 137; This War of Mine 141–​142 Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (2001) 21 opposition to violence, feminism 18–​19 oppressive masculinity 5 organizational connections, feminist war game design 146 origin identification, war 83 othering, process of 105 outcomes opposed to winning, feminist anti-​war games  24–​25 over-​sexualization of female characters 22–​23 Overwatch (2016), as feminist war game 24 pacifist playthroughs, non-​violent games 186–​187 Pac-​Man  21 patriarchy: challenge in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 151; control of 125–​126 Paul, Christopher 157 Pedercini, Paolo 19–​20, 27 Perren, Jeff 40 persecution, sexual minorities of 126–​127 personal histories 93–​94; Life is Strange 94–​96 Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Bogost) 6 Peterson, Jon 34–​35, 41, 122 Peterson, Jordan 87–​88 Phin, Vanessa Rose 35 Piercy, Marge 200 Pini, Barbara 156 play: war as 83–​84; war, separation from 128–​129 player-​characters, definition of 167 player choices: Invasion 106; This War of Mine 60–​61 players: avatar relationships 92–​94; forums in feminist war game design

146; hero role 56; role in This War of Mine 132–​133; warrior/​ commander as 132 pleasure, feminist violence in 78 plot-​driven narrative, This War of Mine 59–​60 politics: Call of Duty 61; war driven by 132 Portal (2007) 173–​176, 177; character gender representation 174; ethical play aspects 174; feminist game mechanics 168; as feminist war game 84; gameplay 175; gender stereotype questioning 173; story 173; strategy 175–​176; timing 175–​176 Portal 2 177 possibility fields, games as 19 Power, The (Alderman) 7–​8 Pratt, Fletcher 39 Precarious Life (Butler) 73–​74 presumption of rights 87–​88 procedural rhetoric 168 process of othering 105 Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 (2013) 126 prosthesis, game treatments 156–​157 prototypes, feminist anti-​war games 25–​29 Pussy Riot 7 Queerness and Games Conference (2014) 19–​20 Quest for Bush (2006) 121 Quest for Saddam (2003) 121 racial segregation, suburban violence games 68 Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Chemaly) 8 Raley, Rita 61 rape, in war 15 Rath, Robert 21 rational thinking, emotions vs. 55 reactive space 91 reality, games vs. 6–​7 real-​time strategy (RTS), Kriegspiel 58–​59 reciprocity: feminist war game dimensions 138; This War of Mine 143–​144 recreation games 134 recurrent attractors 92, 94–​95; play implications 98–​99 Red Dead Redemption (2010) 21

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Index 209 Reel Men at War: Masculinity and the American War Film (Donald & MacDonald) 54–​55 reflexive space 91 refugees, dehumanization of 125 Reiswitz game 38–​39 religions, war driven by 132 Remember Me (2013), female characters 22 representations 104–​105; of females, difficulties 176, 177; groups of people 105; of violence 167 Resident Evil (1996): female characters 22; violence in 172 Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015) 198 Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (ed. McAllister) 184 rhetoric, procedural rhetoric 168 rights, presumption of 87–​88 role-​playing games (RPGs): game mechanics 167–​168; inclusion 48; wars in 102 Ruhnke, Volko 46–​47 Ruiz, Susana 124 Russia, gay-​bashing encouragement website 126 Rust (2013), as feminist anti-war game 26 Sabin, Philip 134 same-​sex attraction, Life is Strange 126 Sarajevo siege 135; see also This War of Mine (TWoM) (2014) Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (Maček) 135 scenario-​driven design, feminist war games 145 scope of feminism 18 screenshots, Invasion 106–​110, 111–​113 setting: feminist war game dimensions 137; This War of Mine 140–​141 sexualized violence 4–​5 sexual minorities, persecution of 126–​127 Shadow of the Colossus (2006) 197–​198 Shibata, Makoto 171, 172 Shoah Foundation 128 Shraya, Vivek 4 Sicart, Miguel 6, 168 Silent Hill, violence in 172 Sims 2, The (2004) 68 simulated attractors 94 Simulating War (Sabin) 134

simulations 134 Slonczewski, Joan 200 small town cuteness, suburban violence games 69–​70 Smith, Dorothy 84 snap 70 Snyder, Sharon 156 social abjection 74 social institution, military force as 17 socially responsible design, feminist war games 136 Solnit, Rebecca 4–​5 Spec Ops: The Line (2012) 20, 21 Spencer, Richard 151 Spender, Dale 18 Spent (2011) 145 “spoils of war,” women as 83 standpoint theory 135–​136; feminist war game design 145; war 134–​135 Stanley Parable, The (2013) 20; feminist anti-​war game as 26 Sterling, Jim 189 stories, conflict in 23 storylines 87–​88; Life is Strange 71–​72, 74–​77 Straight Mind, The (Wittig) 87 strategic-​level war games 46 strategy, Portal 175–​176 Stress Response in Virtual Environments (STRIVE) project 55–​56 STRIVE (Stress Response in Virtual Environments) project 55–​56 suburban violence games 67–​81; breaking into school 71–​72; feminist snap 70; high schools 68–​69; racial segregation 68; small town cuteness 69–​70 subversion 199–​200; design in games 86; war games 33 Super Mario Galaxy 167 Sylvester, Christine 184 Syria: Civil War (2011-​present) see This War of Mine (TWoM)(2014); refugees, games based on 124–​125; US military deployment 123 Syrian Journey (2015) 7, 124 tabletop war games 38–​52; for adults 39–​40; genders 39–​40; history 38–​43; perceptual limitations of 13–​14; post Second World War 40 see also Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D); Chainmail (1971); Dungeons

210

210 Index and Dragons (D&D); Necromunda (1995); Tactics (1954); This War of Mine: The Board Game (2017); Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) Tactical Media (Raley) 61 Tactics (1954) 40 Taylor, Laurie 170 Taylor, N 94 team sports, war vs. 54–​55 Telltale Games 94 testing, feminist war games 136 Tetris 167 Thabet, Tamer 154 themes, war games 198 theoretical underpinning, games 104–​105 This War of Mine (TWoM) (2014) 7, 53–​63, 104, 132–​149, 196; background of 53–​54; case study 138–​139; domestic play space 61–​62; elements of 139; emotional technology 60; example of play 60; as feminist war game 84; frames and 54; game play 138–​139; game structure and play 58; hypermasculinity diminishment 61; player choices 60–​61; player role 132–​133; plot-​driven narrative 59–​60; reality of 59; war game dimensions of 140–​144 This War of Mine: The Board Game (2017) 45–​46 timing, Portal 175–​176 tolerance, hatred vs. 110 Tomb Raider (1996): character gender 22, 30; gender and violence 168 toxic pacifism 182–​191 Trainspotting 75 Traister, Rebecca 67 transgender individuals 127 “Trojan Horse of Universalism, The” (Zerilli) 87 Trojan Horse, The 86–​87 Trump, Donald J 122, 129, 150; military deployment 123–​124 Tyler, Imogen 74 unavoidable mercy killing, Fatal Frame 170–​171 Uncharted 4 167 unconventional representations of war 13 Undertale (2015) 20 ungrievable lives 54

United States: authoritarianism and 129; military alliances 126; military deployment 123; war unrepresentability in 58 user-​built games, feminist war game design 146 us-​versus-​them mentality  104 Values at Play in Digital Games (Flanagan & Nissenbaum) 18 Vampyr 183; gameplay 188–​189 Van Creveld, Martin 16–​18 videogames: criticism of 5; production as toxic experience 114; structure 91–​92; violence relationship 122 Vietnam War see Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam (2014) violence: avoidance in Dungeons and Dragons 41; avoidance in games 184; catharsis 195–​201; in Fatal Frame 171; feminist opposition to 18–​19; game mechanics 168; masculinity in games 185; militarism/​masculinity and 183–​184; representation of 167; videogame relationship 122 violent feminism 7–​8 violent masculinity 5 Virtual Battleplace 133 Virtual Jihadi (2008) 121–​122 Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) project 55–​56 virtual representations of war 57 von Reisswitz, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann 39 von Reisswitz, Georg Leopold 5, 38–​39 Voorhees, Gerald 153 Vossen, Emma 153 VRET (Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy) project 55–​56 vulnerability 76–​77 Walking Dead, The (TWD) (2012) 94 Wanderground, The (Miller Gearhart) 200 war: civilian experience of 135; definitions 14, 82–​83, 196–​197; drivers of 132; feminism vs. 23; future of 200–​201; glorification in games 56; image reframing 57–​58; images and imagining 54–​57; media depiction of 56–​57; origin identification 83; participation by women 15, 16; as play

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Index 211 83–​84; play, separation from 128–​129; rape in 15; standpoint theory 134–​135; stories in 23; team sports vs. 54–​55; unconventional representations of 13; unrepresentability in US 58; virtual representations of 57; win conditions 88–​89 War, as feminist anti-war game 25 War Child charity 144 war games 101–​102, 133–​134; authorship of 32–​33; criticism of 21; definition 133; expectations 20–​21; gender issues 45–​46; handbooks as records 133; history of 133–​134; masculinity and 31; military technologies 133; overriding themes 198; structure 133–​134; subversion of 33 Warhammer 40K 133 Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) 43 War on Terror (Bush) 129 Warren, James 173 warrior women 23 Wells, H G 39 Wernimont, Jacqueline 122–​123 Wesely, David 40 Wet (2009), female characters 22 Williams, Christopher 173–​174 win conditions, wars 88–​89 Wittig, Monique 83, 84–​85 Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 8, 150–​166; Agent Silent Death

expansion 159–​160; challenge to patriarchy 151; as destruction game 151; disability as feminist intervention 153–​157; female characters 152–​153, 157–​158, 161; female empowerment 158–​159; female play 159–​160; feminist cut scenes 157–​160; game ideology 150–​151; game structure 153–​154; genre of 151–​152; masculinist framework 152–​153, 161; non-​female play 158; storyline 152, 156 Wolfenstein series (1992–​2015) 102 Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) 150 Wolfenstein Youngblood 161 women see females Women and War (Elshtain) 184 Wonder Woman (2017) 102; female characters 22 World of Warcraft (2004-​present)  102 Wrinkle in Time, A (L'Engle) 77 Wunker, Erin 4, 6 Yang, Robert 21 Yasenchak, Randy 187 Young Adult (YA) genre, Life is Strange 68–​69 Zerilli, Linda 87 Zones of Control (Harrigan & Kirschenbaum) 134

212