Gaming at the Edge

Abstract

New and heated debates abound over how women, people of color, LGBT people, and other marginalized groups are represented in video games. Debate stakeholders almost always assume the homogeneity of the video games industry and its audience. Most research on the current debates starts from the assumption that representation matters. In contrast, Playing at the Edge directly interrogates how and why the representation of marginalized groups matters in games. By starting with members of marginalized groups who play games (particularly LGBT players), this book offers an audience-centered analysis of the politics of representation. Playing at the Edge builds upon feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws upon ethnographic audience research methods in order to make sense of how representation comes to matter. It argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality together, and as such they must be analyzed together by scholars and addressed together by game producers. By unpacking how representation comes to matter to audiences, Playing at the Edge offers a new understanding of the stakes in politics of representation debates. It offers a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis. It asks: what new things can we learn about media consumption when we start at the edges?

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