 | |
| Author | Megan Condis |
|---|---|
| Published | May 1 2018 |
| Publisher | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 160 |
| ISBN | 9781609385651 |
| OCLC | 1007044262 |
Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture is a non-fiction book by Megan Condis. Published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press, the book discusses misogyny, Gamergate, and the impact of the alt-right in online gaming communities.
At the time of the book's publication, Megan Condis was an assistant professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University. She based Gaming Masculinity off of her dissertation. [1]
Reception to the book was widely positive, [2] [1] with reviewers pointing to the book's broad overview and Condis's writing style as positives. [3] [4] A Critical Studies in Media Communication review described it as a good introductory text, while saying that more specialized books such as Ready Player Two (2017) by Shira Chess, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (2017) by Anastasia Salter, and This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (2015) by Whitney Phillips went more into detail. As an example of Condis's writing, the reviewer pointed to her use of "Game Breaks" (case studies), and stated that although they felt some were disjointed, they had allowed the author to go more into detail on certain topics than would have otherwise been permissible. [3]
Several reviewers specifically noted that they felt Condis had done a good job in her book at avoiding generalizations, [3] [2] with The Times Literary Supplement , specifically saying that Condis was "careful to ensure that not all gamers are lumped together". [2] CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries disagreed, claiming that in attempting to tackle a subject so large, Condis had "perpetuate[d] the very binaries that she criticizes". [4] Broadcaster Aleks Krotoski, whose work deals with online communities, felt that the book and the stories in it mirrored her own experiences covering the gaming industry. She also said that Gaming Masclulinity forsook covering "familiar territory of hyper-sexualized characters and plots" in favour of describing the "pervasive prejudices that create a hostile environment for anyone other than white, straight and relatively privileged men". [2]
Flaming, also known as roasting, is the act of posting insults, often including profanity or other offensive language, on the internet. Flaming is distinct from trolling, which is the act of someone causing discord online or in person. Flaming emerges from the anonymity that Internet forums provide for users which allows them to act more aggressively. Anonymity can lead to disinhibition, which results in the swearing, offensive, and hostile language characteristic of flaming. Lack of social cues, less accountability of face-to-face communications, textual mediation, and deindividualization are also likely factors. Deliberate flaming is carried out by individuals known as flamers, which are specifically motivated to incite flaming. These users specialize in flaming and target specific aspects of a controversial conversation.
In slang, a troll is a person who posts deliberately offensive or provocative messages online or who performs similar behaviors in real life. The methods and motivations of trolls can range from benign to sadistic. These messages can be inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic, and may have the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur. The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people. Trolling behaviors involve tactical aggression to incite emotional responses, which can adversely affect the target's well-being.
Misandry is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys.
A fan or fanatic, sometimes also termed an aficionado, stan or enthusiast, is a person who exhibits strong interest or admiration for something or somebody, such as a celebrity, a sport, a sports team, a genre, a politician, a book, a movie, a video game or an entertainer. Collectively, the fans of a particular object or person constitute its fanbase or fandom. They may show their enthusiasm in a variety of ways, such as by promoting the object of their interest, being members of a related fan club, holding or participating in fan conventions or writing fan mail. They may also engage in creative activities such as creating fanzines, writing fan fiction, making memes, drawing fan art, or developing fan games.
Masculinity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some behaviors considered masculine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. To what extent masculinity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is distinct from the definition of the biological male sex, as anyone can exhibit masculine traits. Standards of masculinity vary across different cultures and historical periods. In Western cultures, its meaning is traditionally drawn from being contrasted with femininity.
Aleksandra Krystyna Theresa Krotoski is a broadcaster, journalist and social psychologist based in the United States who writes and broadcasts about social aspects of technology and interactivity. She currently presents the BBC Radio 4 series The Digital Human.
A healer is a type of character class in video gaming. When a game includes a health game mechanic and multiple classes, often one of the classes will be designed around the restoration of allies' health, known as healing, in order to delay or prevent their defeat. Such a class can be referred to as a healer. In addition to healing, healer classes are sometimes associated with buffs to assist allies in other ways, and nukes to contribute to the offense when healing is unnecessary.
Jennifer Kaye Ringley is an Internet personality and former lifecaster. She is widely regarded as the first camgirl. She is known for creating the popular website JenniCam. Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities. She was the first web-based "lifecaster". She retired from lifecasting at the end of 2003.
"Geek girl" is a 20th-century term, signifying a gendered subgenre within the modern geek subculture.
Anita Sarkeesian is a Canadian-American feminist media critic. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. Her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, examines tropes in the depiction of female video game characters. Media scholar Soraya Murray calls Sarkeesian emblematic of "a burgeoning organized feminist critique" of stereotyped and objectified portrayals of women in video games.
Vaas Montenegro is a character from Ubisoft's Far Cry video game franchise. He first appears as the secondary antagonist of the 2012 title Far Cry 3, and was extensively featured in promotional material for the game. Vaas is depicted as a capricious and mentally unstable character who antagonizes Far Cry 3's main character Jason Brody, and also serves as his dark psychological mirror. Vaas is later revealed to be a drug-addicted wayward member of the local community of the Rook Islands, the setting of Far Cry 3, who betrayed his people and aligned himself with the crime boss Hoyt Volker. Outside of Far Cry 3, Vaas' appearances include a live-action web series prequel called The Far Cry Experience, the virtual reality title Far Cry VR, and as the player character in Vaas: Insanity, a downloadable content (DLC) expansion for the 2021 title, Far Cry 6.
Sexism in video gaming is prejudiced behavior or discrimination based on sex or gender as experienced by people who play and create video games, primarily women. This may manifest as sexual harassment or in the way genders are represented in games, such as when characters are presented according to gender-related tropes and stereotypes.
"Brogrammer" or "tech bro" are slang terms for stereotypically masculine programmers. Brogrammer is a portmanteau of bro and programmer. It is often used pejoratively to describe toxic masculinity and sexism in the technology industry, but some programmers self-describe themselves as a brogrammer positively as a word for "sociable or outgoing programmer", and it also tends to represent a subculture within the greater tech industry. An example sometimes cited of targeted advertising toward "brogrammers" is an early Klout hiring advert posted at a Stanford University career fair as "Want to bro down and crush some code? Klout is hiring." The company later described it as a joke and as an unfortunate misstep.
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity, and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".
Alpha male and beta male are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designations of alpha and beta animals in ethology. They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet. The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists.
Adrienne Shaw is an American game studies scholar and Associate Professor at Temple University in the Klein College of Media and Communication. She is known for her work on queer theory and LGBTQ representation in video games. She is the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, the co-editor of Queer Game Studies, and the founder of the LGBTQ Video Games Archive.
Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
Hande Eslen-Ziya is a Turkish-born, Norway-based sociologist and psychologist. She is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Populism, Anti-Gender and Democracy Research Group at the University of Stavanger in Norway. She has an established interest in gender and social inequalities, transnational organizations and social activism, and has a substantial portfolio of research in this field. Her research has been published in Gender, Work and Organisation, Emotion, Space and Society, Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Culture, Health and Sexuality, Leadership, Men and Masculinities, and Social Politics, as well as in other internationally recognized journals. She is known for her work on the concept of "troll science," that she describes as an alternative discourse created by right-wing populist ideologies such as the anti-gender movement in opposition to established scholarly discourse.
Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race is a book by Rukmini Pande. Published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press, the book discusses the roles of race and racism within 21st century fandoms.