Stephanie Orme

Today’s esports scene, with its arena-sellouts and corporate sponsorships, is a stark contrast from the LAN tournaments hosted at the local Blockbuster in the 1990s. Naturally, esports’ rise to prominence has captured the attention of many, from game studies scholars to investors. This chapter provides an overview of esports, from its humble origins of one-on-one competitions to the multi-million-dollar spectacle that it has become today. I begin by defining esports – namely, what differentiates it from traditional sport, as well as regular gaming. Next, I will describe the global landscape of esports, including how esports is organized into various teams, leagues, and tournaments. Then, I will discuss some of the existing scholarship on the social and health-based effects that esports has on its participants, audiences, and society at large.

This study investigates how video games culture addresses mental health and illness. Through a discourse analysis of eighty-three articles from four popular video games news websites, this paper describes the primary conceptions of mental health and illness as created in games culture. The study also targets how the news articles address the notions of burnout and crunch time in the games industry and how they relate to mental health and illness. The findings reveal seven thematic categories for how games journalism discourses address mental health and illness, with over half of the articles showcasing issues of game character portrayals. Only seven of the articles described burnout and crunch time as being related to issues of mental health and illness. An analysis of the findings suggests an overemphasis on both celebrating and critiquing video game portrayals of mental illness and an under-emphasis on advocacy and work-related issues in the games industry.

This study explores the phenomenon of video game spectatorship from the perspective of a population I refer to as "just watchers." Previous studies have tended to focus on game spectatorship from turn-taking "non-players" or live-streaming audiences, specifically. "Just watchers" are individuals who express no desire to play video games themselves, yet are avid spectators of others' video game play, both virtually and in-person. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 27 participants, this study explores their motivations for gaming spectatorship, as well as their aversion to playing games themselves. Findings suggest the "work" of playing games, lack of skill, access to games, and toxic online communities are deterrents to playing games. Participants expressed that games spectatorship offers them narrative engagement that is distinct from traditional media, and that despite "just watching," they tend to consider themselves as part of gaming culture.

The past five years have seen an explosion of school curricula, scholarships, summer camps, and workshops designed to encourage females and people of color to learn to code and program their own games. Thus, this student underscored a mantra rather than a new idea in suggesting that “everyone can make games.” Desperate to refute the narratives of a toxic gaming culture perpetuated by Gamergate, many in the industry are taking action to boost diversity – interventions I call the “Everyone Can Make Games Movement." Although such initiatives are beneficial in many ways (ie: bringing attention to the industry’s lack of diversity, sparking interest in game design), I wish to challenge the use of the “Everyone Can Make Games Movement” as a viable “solution” to the game industry’s concerns regarding diversity. While more diversity in game development promises to bring fresh perspectives to a community saturated with narratives of white, cisgender men, ECMGM may also obscure systemic forms of oppression that female game makers and game makers of color experience.

In this chapter, I argue that the discourse of ECMGM is built on a post-feminist/post-racial understanding of the video game industry, one that fails to acknowledge institutionalized sexism and racism. Drawing on published reports and experiences of industry workers, I discuss the promise and peril of “Everyone can make games,” highlighting the ways in which the culture of sexism and racism is built into the work culture of much of the game industry. In order to eschew racism and sexism in gaming, however, the industry is in need of widespread, systematic change. I suggest beginning by restructuring work cultures so that they stop privileging white, cisgender male employees and disempowering members of marginalized communities that the industry claims to embrace. This type of social justice and feminist project is necessary to making the vision of ECMGM a reality.

Media portrayals of comic book fandom routinely depict the comics community as a masculine space, one in which the female fan is an anomaly. Yet, women reportedly represent a growing number of comic book purchasers and convention attendees. If women are, in fact, such a large contingent of the comic book fan community, then why do these gendered stereotypes of female fans persist? Moreover, why do we continually see narratives about the ‘exotic’ female comics fan if women are such a large population within comics culture? I theorise that many female comic book fans render themselves invisible in the comics community out of fear of stigmatisation, from both non-comics fans as well as male members of comics fandom. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, I use semi-structured interviews to explore how female comics fans in the United States experience fandom as members of a culture that is coded as masculine.

Released in October 2013, Papers, Please is an independently-produced game in which players are an immigration officer working at the border checkpoint in the fictional, Soviet-esque country Arstotzka in the year 1989. Gameplay is centered on checking and verifying immigration documents of the NPCs who wish to enter Arstotzka. With only each traveler's documents and the options to inspect their papers, search their body for concealed contraband or weapons, or fingerprint them at your disposal, the player decides who will gain entry into the country and who will be denied. In addition to the dozens of immigrants vying for admission, there are also smugglers, spies, and terrorists attempting to cross the border. As relations between Arstotzka and its neighboring countries become more tense over the course of the game – even resulting in terrorist attacks at the border checkpoint – players are continuously confronted with additional challenges and regulations they are expected to perform, with limited time and resources – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the bureaucratic issues that continue to plague immigration policy and practice.

In this paper, I analyze the ways in which Papers, Please functions as a critique of migratory policy and enforcement. Specifically, I examine the game's take on notions such as immigration, nationalism, and the gendered and racialized migrant subject. Drawing on literature from the disciplines of game studies and feminist geography – the latter specifically in relation to migration politics – I conduct a feminist analysis of Papers, Please's constructed narrative of global migration. As I hope to illustrate, migration is an inherently gendered and racialized experience.

This dissertation explores possible explanations and complexities surrounding women’s relationship with leisure and video games. One of my objectives with this study is to understand how women players view their relationship with gaming: how they become involved with video games, how gaming fits into their adult lives (specifically, as wives, mothers, etc.), and the reasons they play games. Primarily, I am interested in how women’s reported experiences with games affirm or challenge dominant narratives about their experiences. After surveying more than 3,000 women players and conducting 21 follow-up interviews, I discuss trends in women’s video game play, including their genre and play style preferences, motivations for playing games, the extent that they consider themselves “gamers,” and how their relationships with gaming have evolved over the course of the lives. Specifically, I investigate how gendered constraints on women’s access to and enjoyment of leisure time influence the reported trends in women’s gaming experience. I argue that such trends, which are often framed as “natural” gender-based affinities for certain types of games or ways of experiencing games, might be influenced by broader social contexts such as gender socialization, the nature of women’s leisure time, constraints placed upon their play such as physical and virtual spaces that restrict access based on gender, and the ambivalent relationship many women players have with the games industry. Scholars interested in gender-based motivations and preferences in digital games should continue to explore the various constraints that are imposed on players of different gender identities. I believe the key to understanding the complexities of how gaming decisions are made relies on researchers’ ability to examine the interplay of multiple, sometimes competing constraints.