This week, I was very much immersed in the joy of teaching games by considering video game content and communities through the lens of Black feminist media studies. The week began with a lecture on the history of American games and the major debates in video game studies involving race, gender, and identity. This talk reveals the important role that representations and stereotypes play not only in game narratives but also in our understanding of normative gamers. Using video games as an example of a space that brings together fans, technical design, community practices, and cultural beliefs. By analyzing the construction of virtual gaming spaces and how the video game industry is coded as white, male, and heteronormative, I ask students to consider the role intersectionality plays in our understanding of video game content and communities. Using examples from arcades, YouTube, Twitch, XBox Live, and other console games and gaming guilds, we examine how games not only generate culture but also facilitate specific types of social interactions. on another research methods workshop, which walked through the article "Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought". In this article, TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Samantha Blackmon constructed a mixtape which replayed the traditional form of the article as a In this article, TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Samantha Blackmon constructed a mixtape which replayed the traditional form of the article as a "discursive cultural remediation" (94). This mixtape combines musical tracks with a collection of lived experiences to reimagine videogame history through a collection of ethnographies from The mixtape model was incredibly interesting to me as not only a method but as a The mixtape model was incredibly interesting to me as not only a method but as a pedagogical tool, which centered listening to Black women as an important learning experience. The mixtape tracks serve as an autoethnography of video games to invite students to consider their personal relationship to game culture by listening to my experiences.
TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Samantha Blackmon; Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought. Feminist Media Histories 1 January 2020; 6 (1): 93–118.
Hi Yanru,
ReplyDeleteI think you did a really great job on your blog post this week and ask some very good questions. I also chose to write my post on the article by Russworm and Blackmon for similar reasons. The mixtape layout of the reading was something I had never seen before in writing but was proven to be very effective. It is interesting how they incorporated lyrics from various songs along with the testimonials of the women to bring it all together. While everyone listens to their chosen kinds of music, there is a parallel to listening to music like we should listen to the stories of these women. In addition, you talk about the importance of representation and stereotypes in the video game world. This is a topic I touched on as well after reading about the one woman who was worried about entering into a space which was dominated by white males and the challenges she would face as a black woman. If the people behind the creation of video games and the features incorporated in them are all mainly from one demographic or background, there is almost always going to be a lack of proper representation. Diversity of creators and the workforce is beneficial in so many ways, in this scenario being that the creation of games can be more inclusive for its players. Overall, I thought it was a really interesting topic to read about. Do you think that video game companies have made a shift towards expanding the diversity of their employees or do you think it is still dominated by white males?