![]() ![]() Reflecting on a variety of sources, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, feminist writings of Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Janet Murray, and including contemporary game writers such as Lizbeth Klastrup, Mary Flanagan, Maia Engeli, and T.L. We argue for a more egalitarian virtual playground that acknowledges and embraces a wider range of spatial and cognitive models, referencing literature, philosophy, fine art and non-digital games for inspiration. In this paper, we argue for a new gendered, regendered and perhaps degendered poetics of game space, rethinking ways in which space is conceptualized and represented as a domain for play. Massively multiplayer games offer the opportunity for non-linear exploration, but emphasize linear achievement within a combat-based narrative. Real-time strategy games conceive of space as a domain to be conquered first-person shooters create labyrinthine battlefields in which space becomes a context for combat. The techno-fetishism of computer game culture has lead to a predominately male sensibility towards the construction of space in digital entertainment. The Sims 2 skinning offers an example of a productive practice that does not go beyond what we understand as gameplay, but demands revisiting the very notion of gameplay itself. Consecutively, the approach in this thesis questions the straightforwardly embracing undertone of the current Web 2.0 `buzz' that claims democratisation of media production. Such practice therefore appears different from the `high' forms of subversive user-participation that are typically cherished in the studies of media use. While skinners seem to have a possibility to change a game that results from a male-dominated game development culture, their skinning is fundamentally facilitated and invited by the game they play. This work's original contribution to knowledge is in offering a nuanced view of female game playing which resists easy assimilation to some of the dominant concepts recently in play within the field of study, such as political resistance in the form of game content appropriation and female empowerment through video game play. Furthermore, a group of women players whose engagement with the game is characterised by creation and sharing of new and altered game content, the skinning of it, appears interesting since the women skinners resist traditional gender roles by taking active, productive positions towards the game. ![]() The Sims 2 (2004) computer game sets out a unique case for a study of women's player identities because it is both exceptionally popular among women and individuated by a theme and a structure that are understood as `feminine'. Small-scale ethnography tied together with an analysis of concurrent cultural discourses and the game system's characteristics allows a deep analysis of the construction of identities that conflict with the naturalised idea of a player. Engagement in such a culture, this work suggests, is characterised by confusion and incoherence for women players who are simultaneously taking part in male dominated leisure which marginalises them and a society which assumes gender equality as an acquired right. Despite some remarkable shifts in gender demographics of game players during the last decade, computer games remain male-gendered media.
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