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Rhetorics of Gender
By now it should be clear: when framed as cultural rhetoric, games are systems of representation imbued with cultural beliefs and values. Designers must recognize how cultural rhetorics operate within their games and design accordingly. What ideologies are you reflecting, replicating, and promoting in your game? Do you want your game to faithfully depict a particular set of beliefs? Or would you rather question, reverse, or undermine them? Can you incorporate cultural rhetoric into the very experience of your game, encouraging your players to actually play with cultural codes? The challenge of designing with cultural rhetorics in mind is the sheer complexity by which culture operates. We can artificially isolate cultural rhetoric in a game, such as the way that Vampire: The Masquerade reflects and informs Goth subculture, but the subculture itself and its interaction with the game are tremendously subtle. To highlight the challenges of using rhetorics within games, we focus for the next few pages on an important debate involving the cultural rhetoric of gender. Our goal is not to draw definitive conclusions about how gender operates in games, but instead to demonstrate the complexity of the issues raised when we frame games as expressions of cultural rhetoric.
Investigating the cultural rhetorics of gender means examining the ways that games reflect, reinforce, question, or subvert cultural ideas about the categories of masculine and feminine, male and female, transgender and other concepts related to gendered identity. Saying that games can interact with ideologies of gender presupposes that gendered cultural codes exist within society at large. This is indeed the case. There is a long history of thinkers, from Virginia Woolf to Judith Butler, who have commented on the ways gender is socially constructed and performed in culture, including the role that media representations play in this construction. More recently, writers like Brenda Laurel, Justine Cassell, Henry Jenkins, and other scholars have examined the representation of gender within digital games. A concern for games and gender extends to game designers as well. A game design movement (loosely called Girl Games) was spawned in the early 1990s by designers and scholars interested in questioning and reinventing assumptions about gender and games. Rather than summarize these theoretical and ethnographic investigations, material that is well covered elsewhere (see Further Reading), we instead explore a few ways that game design intersects with cultural rhetorics of gender. Our intention is to demonstrate the complexities by which any particular cultural rhetoric operates in games. We selected the rhetoric of gender because of the history of the debate within gaming. There are certainly innumerable other cultural rhetorics we could have chosen as well, from the representation of race and ethnicity to narratives of colonialism and imperialism.
