title: The Evolution of What is Possible: How Gendered Norms of the Shooter Videogame Genre Have Been Contested Over Time
Creators: name: Maclean, Erin M
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Gendered Norms
subject: hegemonic games culture
subject: cultural shifts
subject: gender diversity

description: For years, it was widely accepted that videogames were somehow innately masculine and male. This misconception has its roots in “hegemonic games culture” (Dovey &amp; Kennedy, 2007): an exclusionary and US-centric cultural field that emerged through and around the medium in the 1990s, which privileged an idealised geek masculinity and constructed the gamer archetype as straight, white, cis-gendered and male. Hegemonic games culture also placed value on certain genres over others, favouring supposedly hardcore videogames—like first- and thirdperson shooters—that reflected this construction of the gamer through an emphasis on white male heroes. Thus, as many scholarly analyses have shown, women and other marginalised identities were commonly excluded in characterisation and through cultural association from the field’s most valued videogames (e.g. Beasley &amp; Collins Standley, 2002; Dietz, 1998; Dunlop, 2007; Shaw et al., 2019). More recently, however, the videogame industry has tried to shift away from the oft-policed norms and values of hegemonic games culture to more inclusive understandings of videogames and players. The rise of so-called casual videogames, for example, is demonstrative of attempts to diversify in terms of both content and audience. But the very boundary policing that occurs in discursively segregating “casual” from “hardcore” suggests that videogames in general continue to be caught up in an exclusionary cultural field. The past decade has seen that position reinforced, with hostility frequently surrounding conversations about gender and especially the role of women—as characters, players and developers. This thesis investigates that process of diversification in the narrower context of shooter videogames to understand the impact of these industrial shifts and debates about gender on what I suggest is this cultural field’s final frontier of hegemonic masculinity. This thesis explores how videogames canonised by hegemonic games culture are responding to the identified cultural shifts and what that potential diversification looks like in the traditionally gendered shooter genre. To do so, it examines the evolution of the Call of Duty franchise—in terms of videogame texts, marketing materials and media coverage—as a case study for the ways in which this long-running and touchstone shooter has contested or maintained gendered norms. Specifically, I conduct a textual analysis on all major Call of Duty titles (2003–2017) and a paratextual analysis of their cover art and trailers to reveal moments of gendered change, which I complement with a framing analysis of 283 media articles to interrogate the discursive barriers that arise on the franchise’s gendered trajectory. With this multi-layered approach, the thesis highlights three notable ways the Call of Duty franchise has, indeed, evolved to be more inclusive and conscious of gender: by exploring multiple masculinities and subtly critiquing normative ideas; by incorporating women in gradually more substantial and varied roles; and, finally, by reconsidering its generic formula to briefly enable different kinds of storytelling and thus representational possibilities that deviate from the genre’s often rigid conceptualisations of gender. These approaches to diversification are consistent with many other shooter videogames, as illustrated through comparisons to useful counterpoints like Gears of War and Overwatch. Yet, Call of Duty’s trajectory is far from linear; more so than its peers, the franchise has struggled to escape the ghosts of the past and its genre’s gendered baggage. Though the thesis acknowledges an overarching shift to a more inclusive and broader range of representational possibilities, it nevertheless documents problematic trends, pretences and periods of exclusion in Call of Duty’s history—often while engaging with ideas of realism and erasure as productive lenses. From the persistence of these anachronisms, I conclude it is possible to push, prod and resist the status quo of genre and hegemonic games culture in ways that are arguably meaningful while the underlying gender order remains relatively intact. Ultimately, this research suggests that even traditionally masculine videogames can and already are allowing gender diversity to come into play, without becoming unrecognisable. While ideas of “feminist killjoys” seem to persist in hegemonic games culture and beyond, evidence in this thesis indicates that diversifying a videogame’s representational possibilities is not antithetical to playfulness. Rather, this understanding of inclusivity is entirely consistent with the types of fun, play and fantasy that have long underpinned the shooter genre. In debunking such concerns and mapping moments of contestation, this research matters; it speaks to the heart of debates about gender, media representation, inclusivity and social change by shining a light on a genre often held in this exclusionary cultural field’s canon. Importantly, the research continues the task of key feminist scholars in game studies by calling attention to diversity and inequality.