Gender identities at play : children's digital gaming in two settings in Cape Town.

This thesis investigates children’s gaming relationships with peers in out-of-school settings, and explores their interpretation of digital games as gendered media texts. As an interdisciplinary study, it combines insights from Childhood Studies, Cultural Studies, Game Studies, domestication and performance theory. The concept ludic gendering is developed in order to explain how gender ‘works’ in games, as designed semiotic and ludic artefacts. Ludic gendering also helps to explain the appropriation of games through gameplay, and the interpretation of gendered rules and representations. The study expands on audience reception research to account for children’s ‘readings’ of digital games. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to study gaming relationships. Combining SNA with broadly ethnographic methods provided a systematic way of investigating children’s peer relationships and gendered play. The study finds that children responded to ludic gendering, performed gender and other identities for peers, and navigated meanings of games in contextual ways. Children preferred less-strongly-gendered games for cross-sex play in both fieldsites. They transgressed hegemonic styles of gaming associated with boys and girls during borderwork with peers, where they performed gender identities in response to the activation of gender differences during cross-sex play. Children’s gaming was also marked by their playground practices, suggesting that the domestication of games in after-school settings involves drawing on these practices while appropriating digital games for peer play. Familiar playground practices such as dramatic role-play, playground sexualities and heterosexual games were all salient in children’s gameplay. Children negotiated meanings of game rules to orchestrate their own social scripts in service of performing peer relationships and gender identities. They also learned to amuse their peers or to send up authority through ‘remix’ strategies. In some cases, children’s digital gameplay involved transgression and parody of adult discourses about childhood innocence, age and gender norms. The prevalence of meta-gaming illustrates how games were domesticated in ways unique to the fieldsites, where specific spatial arrangements, turn-taking and time constraints informed varieties of play. These kinds of ‘learning’ and domestication tactics form part of children’s peer pedagogy. (333 words) Un ive rsi ty of Ca pe To wn 10 Chapter 1: Introduction It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. –Erving Goffman quoting Robert Ezra Park (1990, p. 30) . what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. What can be played? –Michael Foucault (1997, p. 139-140) The gender and games nexus has been a popular topic in contemporary Game Studies research, and Feminist Game Studies in particular. Scholarship in this emerging field has come a long way since Cassell and Jenkins’s From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (1999), one of the first collections of research on gender and games. According to a more recent definition, “Feminist Game Studies examines how gender – and its intersections with race, class, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, nation and other axes of power – is produced, represented, consumed and practiced in and through digital games” (Huntemann, 2012). Differential power relations between children and adults can be considered an additional dynamic. This thesis introduces the concept ludic gendering to describe the social process whereby games are interpreted as gendered based on their ludic and representational dimensions. This gameplay study explores the interplay between children’s responses to ludic gendering in games, and their gaming relationships to provide a nuanced understanding of how children appropriate digital games and play to signify gender and other identities. The study investigates small groups of South African middleclass children’s play practices in after-school settings, and analyses their identity performances from a Cultural Studies and Childhood Studies perspective. 1 I acknowledge the politics of naming and will refer to my research participants as ‘children’ rather than ‘learners’ (which assumes that children are always learning in educational contexts, even after-school), tweens (marketing discourse where the role of girls as consumers is foregrounded), ‘players’ or ‘kids’. I have chosen the word ‘children’ because it suggests particular power relationships with adult society, in addition to being an age-defined category. Un ive rsi ty of Ca pe To wn 11 This study contributes to research on digital games in the Global South – an underresearched area – and considers children’s appropriations of games. Children’s gaming has a particular kind of relationship between design and domestication. Children mark gameplay through gender tactics in their play with peers and transform these technological objects in the process, giving rise to contextual meanings. Childhood Studies (Corsaro, 2009) helps to explore digital games within children’s peer cultures, and in their relationships with adult society. This study builds on domestication theory (Silverstone, 1994) by paying closer attention to children’s peer groups, an important feature of children’s everyday lives, often excluded from notions of ‘domestic’ settings. It also makes a contribution to Game Studies where children’s voices are largely absent: adultcentric interpretations of digital (often individual) play continue to define how gameplay is theorised and investigated by researchers. This study builds on earlier insights on children’s technology use. Claims for universal ‘multiliteracies’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), ‘digital literacies’ (Buckingham, 2000; Burn, 2009; Rowsell & Prinsloo, 2012; Sefton-Green, 2006) and ‘game literacy’ (Buckingham & Burn, 2007; Burn, 2009) normalise northern models of childhood and youth, and make ideological claims about literacy. Preoccupations with literacy as an assumed form of appropriation are foregrounded. Notions of ‘good games’ for learning (Gee, 2003) perpetuate progress rhetorics of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997). If we acknowledge the diversity of children’s gaming practices, we notice that children’s main preoccupation is sociality (i.e. playing games with friends). This study calls for a broader definition of games, gaming and play to understand children’s mediatised play and their appropriation of digital games for peer play and identity work. By encouraging an alternative frame for investigating children’s digital gaming, researchers can gain a nuanced understanding of how children use games to signify gender identities and peer relationships. Ethnographic research entails a particular epistemological view of text and context: ‘context is not something we can just add to text – it is text, it defines its meanings and 2 I have chosen ‘Global South’ rather than ‘developing countries’ to acknowledge the global North-South divide, which is both socio-economic and political. The nations of Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia are collectively known as the Global South. These countries are considered to be less developed than the Global North (North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan) and are characterised by severely limited resources, such as access to safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, electrification, Internet access, and so forth. Un ive rsi ty of Ca pe To wn 12 conditions of use’ (Blommaert, 2005, p. 45). While ethnographies of children’s playground practices and gendered play patterns are common in Childhood Studies, this method is the ‘road less-travelled’ in games research with children. Childhood Studies research (much like Cultural Studies) is more likely to adopt an ethnographic perspective and its theories of culture and inquiry practices are derived from Sociology (Green & Bloome, 1997) which guides the research. Game Studies, on the other hand, has only just started to examine the relevance of social theories (Crawford, 2012). Until recently, Game Studies research has been dominated by two perspectives. Early debates revolved around whether emphasis should be placed upon play (ludic) or representational (such as narrative) elements (Crawford, 2012). While narratologists treat games as texts, and use frameworks derived from literature and film, ludologists study games as rule-driven play, using classic theories of play and games. Scholars from both sides of this debate ignore the importance of the play context. Crawford (2012) notes that most contemporary scholars recognise that analysis of both ludic and representational dimensions of games, along with a consideration of the role of the social, are important. Children appropriate digital games in contextual ways, and scholars need to attend to gaming as part of children’s play practices in di ferent settings. Often, researchers (such as Lucas & Sherry, 2004; Taylor et al., 2007; Walkerdine, 2006) claim to be studying children’s gaming, but they are in fact studying children’s gaming in specific research settings, where children create particular play contexts in their relations with others. I have chosen to use research orientations shared by Childhood Studies and Cultural Studies, which account for children’s agency as media users, and for power relationships, including gendered relationships with peers, and between childhood and adult society. This gameplay study combines ethnographic methods with Social Network Analysis to provide a visualisation showing the scale of my study and gendered play patterns in the two settings. Research Questions This study focuses on two after-school play settings in suburban Cape Town, where groups of middle-class childr