Video Games and Gender Assemblages - (Emerging Insights Into Esports) by Sian Tomkinson (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book examines why women are often treated with vitriol in the video game industry and communities of play. Using a Deleuzoguattarian lens, it considers the content and production of video games; the affects they amplify and how they impact gender identity; and how affects flow throughout communities of play.

Book Synopsis

In this book, Sian Tomkinson examines why, despite around half of gamers being female, highly-gendered stereotypical assumptions pervade the video game industry and communities of play, leading to toxic attitudes and events such as Gamergate and beyond. Tomkinson utilizes a Deleuzoguattarian lens through critique of categories to encourage a shift away from the binary oppositions that often lie at the root of this tension. Through the use of concepts including the assemblage, faciality, and the refrain, the book argues that the increased diversity of games, producers, and players have challenged traditional gamer identities. Gamers faced with this challenge, Tomkinson posits, can either embrace new experiences and affects - deterritorialising this identity - or become destructively reactionary by reterritorializing and refusing to meaningfully engage with difference. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how video game cultures and communities have a unique assemblage of influences while also functioning as a microcosm of broader social, cultural, and political tensions. Scholars of media studies, video game studies, women's and gender studies, philosophy, and sociology will find this book of particular interest.

Review Quotes

"Tomkinson's work is a rich exploration of how gender has structured the culture around video games. Applying the concept of performativity and diving deep into the history and context of Gamergate and how we may just be on the verge of something different, something more equitable for all. Tomkinson makes a persuasive case that Gamergate and similar cultural movements are a reactionary backlash that are an indicator of just how much things have already changed for the better." --Christopher A. Paul, Professor of Communication, Seattle University, USA

"Sian Tomkinson's Video Games and Gender Assemblages: Understanding #Gamergate and Beyond is an accessible and impressively rigorous look at the ways in which gender permeates communities of play. Providing vital context to the way in which we understand games themselves, the industry that produces them, and the culture they work to shape, this book will be of great use to researches and teachers alike." --Megan Condis, Professor of Game Studies, Texas Tech University, USA

About the Author

Sian Tomkinson is a media, culture, and philosophy scholar based in Perth, Western Australia.