Feminist War Games - Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games-Routledge (2020)

i
Feminist War Games?
Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between
feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can
be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of
games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence.
Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function
as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume
demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions,
ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values
and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilising
questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and
to challenge current idealisations and assumptions. Positing that feminist
values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design
influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact
with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and bru-
tality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering
the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment.
Feminist War Games? is a timely volume that questions the often toxic
nature of online and gaming cultures. As such, the book will appeal to a
broad variety of disciplinary interests, including sociology, education, psych-
ology, literature, history, politics, game studies, digital humanities, media and
cultural studies, and gender studies, as well as those interested in playing, or
designing, socially engaged games.
Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia,

Canada. His interest in the ways that William Blake’s composite art illuminates
the relationship between words and images on the printed page has inspired
current research into alternative platforms for open social scholarship, as
well as larger correlations between media forms and cultural perceptions.
In addition to experimenting with virtual environments and games as tools
for academic research, communication, and pedagogy, Jon’s other research
interests include virtuality and environmental storytelling in Disney theme
parks, research creation experiments, and the relationship between networks
and narratives in video games.
ii
Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab

(ETCL) at the University of Victoria, Canada. Through this role she serves
as the Project Manager of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments
(INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital
Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Arbuckle is also an interdisciplinary
PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholar-
ship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the
University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University
of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities,
new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores
open access, digital publishing, and how we communicate scholarship gen-
erally. To this end, Arbuckle’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital
Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among
other publications. She has also recently co-edited a print and online collection
called Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities.
Jon Bath is an associate professor of Art and Art History at the University of
Saskatchewan, Canada, where he teaches electronic art, design, and the book
arts, and researches the connection between the form and content of commu-
nication technologies.
iii
Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities

Series Editors: Marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes,
Andrew Prescott, Harold Short and Ray Siemens
Digital technologies are increasingly important to arts and humanities

research, expanding the horizons of research methods in all aspects of data
capture, investigation, analysis, modelling, presentation, and dissemination.
This important series covers a wide range of disciplines with each volume
focusing on a particular area, identifying the ways in which technology
impacts on specific subjects. The aim is to provide an authoritative reflection
of the ‘state of the art’ in technology enhanced research methods. The series
is critical reading for those already engaged in the digital humanities, and of
wider interest to all arts and humanities scholars.
A History of Place in the Digital Age

Stuart Dunn
The Historical Web and Digital Humanities

The Case of National Web Domains
Edited by Niels Brügger and Ditte Laursen
Postdigital Storytelling
Poetics, Praxis, Research
Spencer Jordan
Humans at Work in the Digital Age

Forms of Digital Textual Labor
Edited by Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch
Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games
Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath
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iv
v
Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values,
and Interventional Games
Edited by Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle,

and Jon Bath
vi
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and
Jon Bath; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Saklofske, Jon, editor. | Arbuckle, Alyssa, editor. | Bath, Jon, editor.
Title: Feminist war games? : mechanisms of war, feminist values, and
interventional games / edited by Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Jon Bath.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033852 (print) | LCCN 2019033853 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367228187 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429276996 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Video games–Social aspects. | War games–Social aspects. |
Violence in video games–Social aspects. | Feminism.
Classification: LCC GV1469.34.S52 F46 2020 (print) |
LCC GV1469.34.S52 (ebook) | DDC 794.8–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033852
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033853
ISBN: 978-0-367-22818-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27699-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
vii
This collection is dedicated to Dr. Rachel Brickner, whose original

question as to whether a feminist war game could be possible was
the provocative spark that ignited these inquiries.
viii
ix
Contents
List of contributors xii

Acknowledgements xvi
PART I
Introduction 1
Feminist war games? Mechanisms of war, feminist values,

and interventional games 3
ALYSSA ARBUC K LE, JO N SA K LO FSK E, JO N BATH,
AN D T H E I MPLEMEN TI N G N EW K N OWLED G E ENVIRONMENT S
PART N E RS H I P
PART II
Play as inquiry 11
1 Are there (can there be/should there be) feminist

war games? 13
J ON S AK LOF SK E, EMI LY C A N N, DA N I ELLE RODRIGUE -T ODD,
AN D D E RE K S I EMEN S
2 Gendered authorship in war gaming: whose fantasy

is it anyway? 30
ANAS TAS I A  S A LTER
3 An overview of the history and design of tabletop wargames

in relation to gender: from tactics to strategy 38
MAT T SH OE MA K ER
x
x Contents
4 Reframing the domestic experience of war in This War of
Mine: life on the battlefield 53
RYAN   H OU SE
PART III
Feminism as war 65
5 Gamified suburban violence and the feminist pleasure of

destructive play: rezoning warzones 67
ADAN J E RR EAT-P O O LE
6 Because we are always warring: feminism, games, and war 82

SU Z AN N E DE C A STELL A N D JEN N I FER  JENS ON
7 Exploring agency and female player–character

relationships in Life Is Strange: what choice do I have? 91
AN D RE A  LUC
8 ‘What is a feminist war game?’ A game jam reflection 101

SARAH   S TAN G
PART IV
Challenging the industry 119
9 Feminism and the forever wars: prototyping games

in the time of ‘America First’ 121
E L I Z AB E T H  LO SH
10 Seven dimensions of a feminist war game: what we can

learn from This War of Mine 132
C H RI S T OP HER  K A MPE
11 Failed feminist interventions in Wolfenstein II:

The New Colossus 150
MARK K AETH LER
12 Subversive game mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal

franchises: having your cake and eating it too 167
G AB I K I RI LLO FF
xi
Contents xi
13 Toxic pacifism: the problems with and potential of
non-violent playthroughs 182
J ON BAT H AN D ELLY C O C K RO FT
PART V
Afterword 193
Taking binaries off the table 195

MARY F L ANAG A N
Index 202
xii
Contributors
Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab

(ETCL) at the University of Victoria. Through this role she serves as the
Project Manager of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments
(INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital
Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Arbuckle is also an interdisciplinary
PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholar-
ship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the
University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University
of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities,
new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores
open access, digital publishing, and how we communicate scholarship gen-
erally. To this end, Arbuckle’s work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital
Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among
other publications. She has also recently co-edited a print and online
collection called Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities.
Jon Bath is an associate professor of art and art history at the University of
Saskatchewan where he teaches electronic art, design, and the book arts,
and researches the connection between the form and content of communi-
cation technologies.
Emily Cann is a Master’s of Science candidate at Columbia University in

New York City. She recently graduated with her MA in English litera-
ture from the University of Guelph after earning her BA from Acadia
University. Her interests include the intersection of literature with medi-
cine and health sciences, and the utility of narratives in understanding
and treating illness. In particular, her focus is on mental health issues and
how they are represented and understood in both scientific and creative
depictions. She is very grateful for the opportunity to work on this project,
especially in exploring the role of narrative in gaming.
Suzanne de Castell is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University

of Ontario Institute of Technology. Her work with Jennifer Jensen focuses
on gender and digital games research.
xiii
List of contributors xiii
Elly Cockcroft is an interdisciplinary studies MA student at the University
of Saskatchewan. Her SSHRC-funded project examines the potential for
video games to promote death positivity.
Mary Flanagan is the artist, game designer, and theorist who holds the
Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor Chair at Dartmouth College.
www.maryflanagan.com.
Ryan House is a PhD student in media, cinema, and digital studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jennifer Jenson is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy
at the University of British Columbia. Her work with Suzanne de Castell
focuses on gender and digital games research.
Adan Jerreat-Poole is a PhD candidate at McMaster University working in
Mad/crip feminisms, autobiography, and digital media. Their academic
work has appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and First Person Scholar.
Their creative work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Qwerty Magazine,
and Soliloquies.
Mark Kaethler teaches early English literature at Medicine Hat College and
serves as the assistant project director of Mayoral Shows for the Map of
Early Modern London, hosted at the University of Victoria. He is a co-
editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools
(2018), and his work has appeared in several journals and collections of
essays.
Christopher Kampe is a PhD candidate of the communication, rhetoric and
digital media program at North Carolina State University. His research
interests include game design in the classroom, procedural generation, crit-
ical approaches to design/play, software development, and user-experience.
He is a collaborator at the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, researching
interdisciplinary teamwork and holistic approaches to prototype evalu-
ation. He is affiliated with ReFiG, where he worked to develop resources for
educators (analytic frameworks, assignment scaffolding, online resources).
Gabi Kirilloff is an assistant professor of English at Texas Christian University,
where she specialises in digital humanities and new media studies. She has
worked on several large-scale digital projects including the Willa Cather
Archive, the Nebraska Literary Lab, and the Novel TM grant. Much of
Gabi’s research uses digital tools and computational methods to explore
the portrayal of gender in fiction.
Elizabeth Losh is an associate professor of English and American studies at
William and Mary with a specialisation in new media ecologies. Before
coming to William and Mary, she directed the culture, art, and technology
program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author
of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media- Making
xiv
xiv List of contributors

in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes
(2009), The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University
(2014), and Hashtag (2019). She is the co-author with Jonathan Alexander
of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (2013; second
edition, 2017). She published the edited collection MOOCs and Their
Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education (2017),
and she is co-editor of Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and
Digital Humanities (2018).
Andrea Luc holds an MA in communications and culture from York
University, Toronto. Her research focused on gender and the role of play in
young learners. She currently works at a non-profit media organisation in
Ontario, producing and managing math games for kids across the province.
Danielle Rodrigue-Todd is a PhD student in the political science program at
Carleton University in Ottawa. Her current research focuses on the rela-
tionship between policy narratives and public perception as they relate to
forced migration issues in Canada. This work specifically aims to explore
and problematise the discursive construction and mobilisation of ‘crisis’
as a mechanism for shifting public sentiment towards particular objectives
in the area refugee policy and immigration more broadly. In addition to
public affairs and forced migration issues, Danielle’s other areas of interest
include international relations and post-modern theory.
Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia,
Canada. His interest in the ways that William Blake’s composite art
illuminates the relationship between words and images on the printed page
has inspired current research into alternative platforms for open social
scholarship as well as larger correlations between media forms and cultural
perceptions. In addition to experimenting with virtual environments and
games as tools for academic research, communication, and pedagogy, Jon’s
other research interests include virtuality and environmental storytelling
in Disney theme parks, research creation experiments, and the relationship
between networks and narratives in video games.
Anastasia Salter is an associate professor of games and interactive media
at the University of Central Florida, and the author of several books
including Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (with Bridget Blodgett, 2017);
Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (2017); and
What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (2014).
Matt Shoemaker is the librarian and coordinator for digital scholarship ser-
vice development at Temple University where he co-directs the university’s
Digital Scholarship Center. He holds an MLIS with a concentration in
archives and an MA in history earned studying the history of women and
resistance in Algeria during the French occupation. He works with fac-
ulty and students in areas of game design and games in education. He
xv
List of contributors xv
also participates in projects researching and documenting the history of
Dungeons & Dragons and the Gen Con game convention. He is part of
the Philadelphia Game Maker’s Guild and his first publicly released board
game, Bee Lives: We Will Only Know Summer, will be available in 2019.
Derek Siemens is currently an undergraduate student at the University of
Victoria studying computer science and software engineering. He has
always had an interest in video games, especially games involving strategy
and problem solving. These interests have guided him into his studies in
computer science, and continue to be one of many favourite aspects of his
discipline.
Sarah Stang is a PhD candidate in the communication and culture program
at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She approaches the study of
digital games and other media from an interdisciplinary, intersectional
feminist perspective. Her published work has focused on interactivity,
game adaptations, gender representation, fatherhood and familial bonds,
representations of madness, and the monstrous-feminine in digital games.
Her current research explores the symbolic representation of marginalised
bodies as hybrid monsters in digital games, tabletop roleplaying games,
and science fiction and fantasy media.
xvi
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all those who helped to bring this book to light. Most spe-
cifically to Dr. Ray Siemens with the Implementing New Knowledge
Environments (INKE) Partnership, Dr. Dene Grigar with the Electronic
Literature Organization (ELO), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute
(DHSI), the excellent editorial team at Routledge, Hannah McGregor, and all
of the talented authors who contributed to this volume.
1
Part I
Introduction
2
3
Feminist war games?
Mechanisms of war, feminist values, and
interventional games
Alyssa Arbuckle, Jon Saklofske, Jon Bath,
and the Implementing New Knowledge
Environments Partnership
Can there be a feminist war game?

Yes.
No.
Obviously!
Absolutely not.
Possibly …?
Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional

Games revolves around this critical question. This collection arose out of a
panel by the same name that served as a conjoint keynote for the Digital
Humanities Summer Institute, Electronic Literature Organization, and
Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership in June 2016.
Moderated by Dene Grigar (Washington State University, Vancouver),
the panel featured a paper-length provocation by Jon Saklofske (Acadia
University) and shorter responses from Diane Jakacki (Bucknell University),
Elizabeth Losh (University of California San Diego), and Anastasia Salter
(University of Central Florida). As that panel and the chapters that make up
this collection indicate, there is no straightforward answer to the question of
whether there can be a feminist war game; or rather, the volume provides a
multitude of answers. In some ways, this is fitting for a collection that engages
feminism. Not by definition, per se, but perhaps by concept, feminism has
always been plural, intersectional, evolving, and contested.
The notion of a feminist war game brings many contradictions to the
fore, and has led the authors whose work is included here to do significant
thinking on how a war game might be considered feminist, as well as how
feminist perspectives can impact a collective understanding of how war is
represented in procedural spaces like playable games. Each author articulates
what feminism is to them in slightly different ways; for the purposes of this
introduction, we will clarify how we are framing the question by drawing from
contemporary accounts of feminism. Deliberately frank, Roxane Gay’s Bad
Feminist (2014) considers feminism as the seemingly simple belief that men
4
4 Alyssa Arbuckle et al.

and women should be treated equally. Vivek Shraya complicates such a con-
ception when she expresses her desire ‘not only to reimagine masculinity, but
to blur gender boundaries altogether and celebrate gender creativity’ (2018,
p. 87). Further, she writes
It’s not enough to let go of the misplaced hope for a good or a better man.
It’s not enough to honour femininity. Both of these options might offer a
momentary respite from the dangers of masculinity, but in the end they
only perpetuate a binary and the pressure that bears down when we live
at different ends of the spectrum.
In doing so, Shraya gestures toward expanding definitions like Gay’s to include
non-binary, two spirit, and all other gender identities and expressions beyond
the limiting categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’. Foundationally, though, both
Gay and Shraya pursue notions of equality, and moreover equity, in defiance
of a toxic masculinity focused on preserving privilege. On a similar note, for
Erin Wunker a feminist is
one who recognizes that the material conditions of contemporary life are
built on inequities of gender, race, and class. One who recognizes that
patriarchal culture is inherently coercive and stifling for women and other
Others. One who works to make those inequities visible and one who
works to tear them down.
(2017, pp. 25–26)
We consider such perspectives— in turns straightforward, fluid, and

intersectional— as collectively identifying a necessary framework for the
chapters that follow.
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed calls our world ‘not-feminist and
antifeminist’ (2017, p. 1). As Ahmed herself and the writers cited below dem-
onstrate, there are numerous proofs for this claim. Women are frequently
disadvantaged in ways that lead to stymied careers and lowered pay.1 Sexual
harassment and assault in the workplace, home, and on the street is rampant
(Wunker 2017). Men are disproportionately violent, and women are dispro-
portionately the target of this violence (Solnit 2014). In I’m Afraid of Men
(2018), Shraya writes of her experience as a trans woman in Canada: ‘My
fear of men is a fuel that both protects my body, as a survival instinct, and
erodes it, from overuse’ (p. 9). As Rebecca Solnit acknowledges in Men
Explain Things to Me (2014) in the context of the United States, ‘About three
women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It’s one
of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States’ (p. 6).
Moreover, she claims that ‘So many men murder their partners and former
partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year [in
the United States]’ (Solnit 2014, p. 23). Speaking on sexualised violence in
particular, Solnit argues in The Mother of All Questions (2016):
5
Feminist war games? 5

Rape is so common in our culture it’s fair to call it an epidemic. After all,
what else could you call something that impacts nearly one in five women
(and one in 71 men) directly and, as a threat, virtually all women, that
is so pervasive it modifies how we live and think and move through the
world for most of our lives?
(p. 91)2
Such a statistical rendering of the violence that women face—in Solnit’s

account, in the United States—underlines Ahmed’s depiction of the world.
Mainstream videogames have been criticised, culturally, as promoting,
reinforcing, and proliferating the very traits of violent and oppressive mascu-
linity that are key factors in Ahmed’s nonfeminist and antifeminist world, or
in the rape culture Solnit writes of. The toxic masculinity of many videogames
is not surprising, given that these games are the direct descendants of the
table-top war games developed to simulate military experience and command,
and, as discussed by many of the authors in this volume, militarism is often
depicted as inextricably masculine. Whether one considers the chess-based
kriegsspiel of Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig in the late eighteenth cen-
tury as the first war game, as Christopher Kampe and Mark Kaethler do in
this volume, or if one agrees with Matt Shoemaker that Georg Leopold von
Reisswitz’s entirely new Kriesgs-Spiel of the early nineteenth century was the
first true war game, the connection between gaming and militarised mascu-
linity is undeniable.3 Some authors in this volume have chosen to define war
games as strictly games about ‘war’, while others have used the term more
loosely to encompass games that engage with the themes of violence and con-
trol, or the gameplay mechanics, of games based on war without actually being
set in a scenario of armed conflict between nation states. In the popular Grand
Theft Auto (GTA) series, for instance, crime and violence are main goals. The
consequences of such acts are not fatal, nor do in-game consequences dissuade
such behaviour. Trying to escape from the police is ‘fun’ and chaotic, death is
not permanent, and both capture and death result in only a small loss of the
player’s virtual money. The broader problem with games like GTA (and there
are many games like this) is that consequences for player actions are usually
not proportional to the moral weight or implications of behaviour, and thus
accountability, thoughtfulness, and compassionate action are discouraged or
even neglected entirely in the name of fun. This is compounded by the fact
that the player-characters in GTA are all male, a design choice that centralises,
enables, and rewards masculine perspectives and associates pleasurable play
with hypermasculine violence.
Many gamers have considered those who point out these kinds of
nonfeminist /antifeminist elements in videogames to be killjoys, to be people
who get in the way of fun. The reactive toxicity by misogynistic gamers
towards such ‘killjoys’ too often manifests as real violence. For example, Anita
Sarkeesian has been harassed, threatened, and doxed by fellow gamers for her
feminist criticisms of videogames. As Solnit writes, in reference to Sarkeesian,
6

‘[Online gamers] are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice,
power, and the right to participate’ (2014, pp. 30–31)—for being killjoys.
Ahmed reclaimed and popularised the (positive) conception of the ‘feminist
killjoy’ on her blog of the same name and in Living a Feminist Life; Wunker
picks it up in Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (2017).
The figure has become a useful referent for people who ‘[name] the lack and
[speak] the open secrets’ (Wunker 2017, p. 24) of patriarchy; that is, the lack of
female representation and participation in public and private spaces, and the
open secrets of harm done to those who identify as women. In this collection,
Adan Jerreat-Poole also identifies and engages with the figure of the feminist
killjoy. The feminist killjoy can be an important counterpoint to the closed-
loop of dominant videogame culture, where game world behaviours reflect
and reinforce the misogynistic perspectives that shape a dominant culture that
consumes and pays for such media products.
Oft- cited mid- twentieth-
century game theorisers posited games as
establishing an alternative reality magic circle (Huizinga 1949) or as being
make-believe by definition (Caillois 1961). More contemporary game theorists
tend in the opposite direction. Ian Bogost argues in Persuasive Games: The
Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) that videogames are highly influen-
tial on players and their real-world perspectives; in How to Do Things with
Videogames (2010) he makes a claim for the broad reach and impact of
videogames that goes far beyond more simplistic notions of leisure. Like any
mediated representations, the mechanics and narratives of games can nor-
malise, reinforce, and strengthen perceptual habits outside of the ‘magic circle’,
including misogynistic ways of understanding. In a 2006 collection Alexander
R. Galloway suggests that games are a much more active cultural pastime than
passive activities like watching television. By distinguishing the performative,
participatory, and interactive aspects of games, Galloway points to a different
kind of potential influence on players’ understandings. Jane McGonigal sees
this potential as progressive, going so far as to assert that reality is broken
and that designing and engaging with videogames are some of the ways we
can build a better world (2011). Similarly, Mary Flanagan (2009) and Miguel
Sicart (2013) advocate for values-based game design that can instigate critical-
collaborative forms of play, extending the more constructive and thoughtful
forms of design that McGonigal promotes in her work.
Many of the authors included in this collection also push against the
notion that games are somehow separate from reality, or that they exist in or
create an unreal, make-believe magic circle. In ‘Exploring Agency and Female
Player-Character Relationships in Life Is Strange: What Choice do I Have?’,
Andrea Luc discusses how playing Life Is Strange allowed her to reflect on
how she deals with gender-based conflict outside of videogames. Games are
not separate universes; what happens online or on-board bleeds into meat-
space and has ramifications for how players view and interact with the world
around them. Based on this concept alone, it would be easy to disparage the
very existence of war games—predicated as they often are on violence and
7

death—and to discount any argument that they might be feminist. If the
boundary between life inside and outside of games is really so porous, then
the degree of violence in games could only be considered as unethical.
But games—and perhaps videogames in particular—are more complex
than such a superficial reading. And so is feminism. There are two issues
with the claims in the paragraph above; first, the assumption that all games
reflect and possibly even incite violence, and second, the idea that feminism
is equated with non-violence. Yes, war games have war as their subject,
and so an element of violence is present. But games like This War of Mine
acknowledge the violence of war without glamorising it; quite the opposite,
as Ryan House and Kampe articulate in their chapters in this collection. In
her chapter ‘Feminism and the Forever Wars: Prototyping Games in the Time
of “America First” ’, Elizabeth Losh also explores how games about war like
Darfur Is Dying, Hush, Syrian Journey, and Endgame Syria do not shy away
from the reality of a warzone, but focus on the lived reality for civilians. Of
course, many games outside the war game genre also do not prioritise the vio-
lence associated with war.
The existence of violent feminism is another topic of debate. For many,
like notable feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde, feminism should be fun-
damentally anti-oppressive (1984). It is not a far stretch from anti-oppressive
to anti-violence, since violence—or the threat thereof—is so frequently the
tool of oppression. Abolition activist and scholar Angela Davis has been out-
spoken in her condemnation of violence. When asked in an interview about
earlier resistance to the validity or role of violence, Davis responds:
I was attempting to point out that questions about the validity of violence
should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to
hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military … At
the time I was in jail, having been falsely charged with murder, kidnap-
ping, and conspiracy and turned into a target of institutional violence,
I was the one being asked whether I agreed with violence. Very bizarre.
(2016, p. 7)
Ahmed also warns against invoking righteous anger as a feminist. Admittedly,

righteous anger is different than violence, but they are adjacent. On the risks
of anger, she writes: ‘Our anger, when generalized against the injustices of
the world, can become directed toward those who happen to be nearest, often
those who are dearest’ (2017, p. 172). In this collection, Suzanne de Castell
and Jennifer Jenson suggest that even the idea of a feminist war game is offen-
sive because of the violence intrinsic to war, and especially since much war-
based violence is enacted on female bodies.
Other feminists may experience anger and violence as redemptive, desirable,
or powerful. Think of Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot, refusing
to let their anger about oppression be silenced. Consider Naomi Alderman’s
2016 novel The Power, where teenagers and then women learn how to harness
8

their own bodies to electrocute men and systematically turn the world into a
violent matriarchy. Look to Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
(2018), Soraya Chemaly’s recent book on embracing female anger as a tool for
social change, or Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
(2018), where Brittney Cooper extols the potential productivity of anger.
Many of the authors featured in this collection align themselves with the
potential of feminist aggression. Jerreat-Poole’s chapter ‘Gamified Suburban
Violence and the Feminist Pleasure of Destructive Play: Rezoning Warzones’
explores the satisfaction derived from violent destruction in playing games
like Life Is Strange and Night in the Woods. As they articulate,
Playing games may have an emotionally cathartic function for some

players, but pleasurable fantasies of feminist violence do more than this.
They validate our anger. They tell us that we should be angry. They tell
us to hold on to our anger, to nurture it, and to use it. They show us that
anger can be world-making. (Jerreat-Poole, p. 79)
In ‘Gendered Authorship in War Gaming: Whose Fantasy Is It Anyway?’

Anastasia Salter riffs on her own experience as a child gamer playing the
first-person shooter games of her youth. Kaethler explores the videogame
inclusion of empowered, violent women in ‘Failed Feminist Interventions in
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’. Denying women the ability to be violent
is also problematic, as Gabi Kirilloff argues in her chapter ‘Subversive Game
Mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal Franchises: Having Your Cake and
Eating It Too’. As she astutely suggests, ‘Fatal Frame presents non-violence,
or rather, constrained violence, as an intrinsic aspect of desirable femininity,
rather than as an ethical choice’ (Kirilloff p. 171). Violence, for these authors,
is not necessarily anti-feminist.
Throughout this collection the reader will also find recommendations for
game designers to make more games that incorporate a variety of feminist
values. For instance, in the context of Dungeons and Dragons, Salter throws
her hat in with creating ‘space[s]‌more open to subversion of war norms and
hypermasculine strategies and value judgements’ (p. 36). Similarly, Bath and
Cockcroft challenge designers to create real alternatives to violent gameplay
rather than just making not-killing yet another achievement for the expert
gamer. Sarah Stang reflects on the kinds of decisions that go into creating a
feminist war game at a 2017 game jam. Building on his historical recounting
of the gendered nature of war game design and play, Shoemaker closes his
chapter with a section titled ‘Deliberate Choice in Game Design’—a roadmap
for more inclusive design decisions.
We have grouped the chapters of this collection into three main parts:
I. Play as Inquiry
II. Feminism as War
III. Challenging the Industry
9

Part I, ‘Play as Inquiry’, examines how engaging with war games can be an
explorative foray into questions of gender, femininity, masculinity, and vio-
lence. Part II, ‘Feminism as War’, showcases contributions that engage with
the common experience of gender-based violence, and how such an experi-
ence interplays with games and gaming. Part III, ‘Challenging the Industry’,
contains pointed looks at game mechanics and the larger game industry, and
includes selections that both challenge the industry and suggest steps for pro-
active change. The tripartite framework encourages those who engage this
collection to read across the varied content types included. Contributions
range from personal reflections to more objective essays, and each section
includes a curated mix of these forms. In presenting the material in this way
we hope to emphasise the multiplicity of the notion of a feminist war game
itself—this topic does not reside in a purely personal or purely objective
realm, but rather brings to the fore questions of experience, agency, ethics,
and intellectual engagement. The collection closes with a summative after-
word by Flanagan, ‘Taking Binaries Off the Table’.
So can there be a feminist war game? Such a provocation is the guiding
inquiry of this collection, tackled most directly by Jon Saklofske, Emily
Cann, Danielle Rodrigue-Todd, and Derek Siemens in the opening chapter,
which builds on the initial provocation of the 2016 panel that inspired this
collection. Why does it matter if there can or cannot be feminist war games?
Currently, many games and the cultures that they give rise to reinforce creative,
kinetic, and non-critical habits that reproduce and reinforce stereotypical
hypermasculinities when it comes to violence and war. This collection hopes
to at least disrupt uncritical immersion in such problematic perspectives and
invoke a necessary destabilisation that resists both an easy retreat into exclu-
sive habits of conventional perception as well as facile acceptance of uncon-
ventional challenges to such habits. To this end, we hope that the questions
raised by the various authors in this volume will provoke thoughtful and
progressive discussion and action between designers, publishers, and players
regarding the ways that war is represented, practised, and perceived in the
participatory, interactive medium of games. Perhaps the reader will come to a
more solid conclusion to the question of whether there can be a feminist war
game. For us, as co-editors of this volume, the answer still remains:
Yes.
No.
Obviously!
Absolutely not.
Possibly …?
Notes
1 According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, on average fully employed
Canadian women make 75 cents for every dollar that fully employed Canadian men
10

make. Moreover, they claim, ‘Canada is ranked as having the 8th highest gender
pay gap out of a list of 43 countries examined by the OECD, based on 2016 data’
(Canadian Women’s Foundation 2018).
2 It is important to acknowledge that the statistics Solnit quotes here represent
reported rapes in the United States. Given the tendency to not report rape (and
other forms of sexualised violence), it is assumed that there are many more rape
victims than 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men.
3 For a history of the development of war games see Peterson 2016.
References
Ahmed, S 2017, Living a feminist life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Alderman, N 2016, The power, Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY.
Bogost, I 2007, Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Bogost, I 2011, How to do things with videogames, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, MN.
Caillois, R (1961) 2001, Man, play, and games, M Barash (trans), Free Press of Glencoe,
New York, NY. Reprint, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL.
Canadian Women’s Foundation 2018, The facts about the gender wage gap in Canada,
www.canadianwomen.org/the-facts/the-wage-gap/.
Chemaly, S 2018, Rage becomes her: the power of women’s anger, Atria Books,
New York, NY.
Cooper, B 2018, Eloquent rage: a Black feminist discovers her superpower, St. Martin’s
Press, New York, NY.
Davis, AY 2016, Freedom is a constant struggle, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL.
Flanagan, M 2009, Critical play: radical game design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Galloway, AR 2006, Gaming: essays on algorithmic culture, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Gay, R 2014, Bad feminist, Harper Perennial, New York, NY.
Huizinga, J 1949, Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, UK.
Lorde, A (1984) 2007, Sister outsider, Ten Speed Press, New York, NY.
McGonigal, J 2011, Reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can
change the world, Penguin, New York, NY.
Peterson, J 2016, ‘A game out of all proportions: how a hobby miniaturized war’, in P
Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.) Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3–31.
Shraya, V 2018, I’m afraid of men, Penguin, Toronto, ON.
Sicart, M 2013, Beyond choices: the design of ethical gameplay, MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Solnit, R 2014, Men explain things to me, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL.
Solnit, R 2017, The mother of all questions, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL.
Wunker, E 2017, Notes from a feminist killjoy: essays on everyday life, BookThug,
Toronto, ON.
11
Part II
Play as inquiry
12
13
1
Are there (can there be/should there be)
feminist war games?
Jon Saklofske, Emily Cann,
Danielle Rodrigue-Todd, and Derek Siemens
A few years ago, Jon Saklofske gave an art gallery talk on unconventional
representations of war in video games, and focused on games which eroded
the standard tropes of heroic and ideologically driven soldiers, glorified vio-
lence, normative Western perspectives, and good vs. evil binaries. His overall
argument was that while many commercial digital games model systems
and narratives that reductively reinforce and essentialize idealistic cultural
paradigms and perceptions about war, game environments can also function
as a test chamber, a lab in which conditions, parameters and perspectives
can be imaginatively experimented with. In the Q&A session after the talk,
Dr. Rachel Brickner, a professor from Acadia University’s Politics Department
asked a simple but profound question. She recognized that unconventional
or not, most of the games that were cited in the presentation as exceptions
were still operating within the frame of masculine power fantasies, even
as they questioned the locations of power at the heart of more traditional
representations of armed conflict. She asked: ‘Is there a feminist war game?’
Jon was at an absolute loss and had no answer for her at the time, but her
question has subsequently generated a fair amount of research, thinking and
experimentation, and continues to reveal the problematic ways that war and
violence are perceived, represented, idealized and interpreted through various
media forms.
Identifying the need to confront and challenge traditional habits of
head, hand, heart and media representation when it comes to game-based
perceptions of war (which can reflect and shape attitudes towards war in gen-
eral) is not unique to this chapter. Mary Flanagan (2016, p. 706), in ‘Practicing
a New Wargame’, discusses the perceptual limitations reproduced by conven-
tional tabletop wargames and calls for alternative ways of imagining conflict
resolution:
We must look to transcend old conflict models, or we risk perpetuating

the damaging myth that there are limited ways of resolving conflicts …
What will wargames look like with different kinds of rules, with new
expectations, with radical strategies and consensus built in? What if
their simulation of conflict isn’t so much about war as it is about critical
14
14 Jon Saklofske et al.

thinking and critique from an outsider status? … It is vital that game
scholars, makers and players see these familiar models on a continuum
of change, so new play forms that model new solutions to our problems
can be invented. Our games are constantly evolving, and this means we all
have an opportunity, even a responsibility, to evolve with them and push
ourselves to model the world we wish to create.
Flanagan’s call is important to games in general (and is an important

acknowledgement of game design and gamespace as an opportunity to
imagine new models), but ultimately abstract in that it doesn’t specific-
ally identify the militarized masculinity and hypermasculinity that defines
the nature of armed conflict and most of its representations in gaming
environments.
And so this provocation extends Flanagan’s, calling for the use of fem-
inist values to critically influence alternative ways of modelling conflict and
conflict resolution in interactive representations of war. To this end, games
and the ways that they implicate and involve the player can be used as
critical interventions which challenge conventional expectations and which
ask crucial questions about the relationship between masculinity, power
and war.
War: what is it (good for)?
It would be easy to simply equate war with conflict. Conflict is inherent in
all stories and narratives. However, given the subject matter of the popular
games that inspired this project, we would like to define war as armed con-
flict between large groups of people. Another useful definition which calls
attention to an additional layer of consideration and highlights the proced-
ural economies of most game experiences is that war is a violent form of
resource management and acquisition.
Is peace the ultimate aim of armed conflict? Is that the goal of most war
scenarios? No. Peace is the aim of diplomacy, not war, because participants
in armed conflict do not entertain victory, defeat and compromise as equally
desirable pathways to war’s end. War is what happens when peaceful intentions
fail, when diplomacy breaks down.
A persistent narrative in relation to war is the notion of a ‘just war’. A just
warrior is one who ‘takes up arms reluctantly and only if he must to prevent
a greater wrong or to protect the innocent from certain harm’ (Elshtain 1987,
p. 127). Kimberly Hutchings (2011, p. 28) argues that this idea of the just
warrior privileges masculine authority—those who do not epitomize control
and civilization cannot be just warriors. Also, this politics of rescue infers
that those who are protected or helped do not share or possess the capacity of
responsibility of the helpers. More often than not, in these situations, men are
rescuing or protecting less capable ‘others’.
15
Can/should there be feminist war games? 15
La? guerre
Women have participated historically in war in diverse ways. There are par-
ticular legends, anecdotes and histories of women who have been involved in
combat roles: Joan of Arc; women who dressed as men to fight in the US Civil
War; and Russian female soldiers in the First World War who were allowed
into combat out of necessity, and while some were recognized for bravery and
excellence, many were terrorized by men during their service. In the world
wars, many women supported the war effort at home by working in factory
jobs normally reserved for their male counterparts.
However, many of these stories are often-repeated exceptions, as tradition-
ally women have been perceived as part of the helpless population (along with
children and the elderly) that need to be saved or protected through armed
conflict. In this sense, they often function as motivators for male soldiers, as
supportive spectators, as rewards for a job well done. Ironically, populations
that supposedly require protection have historically been the victims of war-
time sexual violence and mass rape during war.
In popular stories and movies, such victimization practices are not often
showcased, but it is interesting to note that a number of literary and cinematic
narratives have not shied away from examining and interrogating the ways
that women have been sexually instrumentalized in times and situations of
war (which mirrors the ways that men are similarly exploited as instruments
of violence in wartime economies). A memorable and uncomfortable example
is Brian de Palma’s film Casualties of War (1989), where wartime rape is
featured to provoke questions about military cultures, hierarchies and gender
performance. The film universally critiques the destructive and dehumanizing
tendencies of warfare for all involved while also exposing the ways that such
situations implicitly favour male privilege.
Casualties of War also highlights the ways in which film viewers often desire
provocative, troublesome, tension-filled and often horrific storylines, events
and scenes. This isn’t a fetishized form of pleasure, but results from a desire
to safely experience and engage with difficult issues and behaviours. Why are
game players so comparatively limited in their desires for various forms of
experience, and why are depictions of rape or sexual violence not present in
and interrogated by war simulations and game-based representations of armed
conflict? Early wargames were more concerned with strategic simulations and
resource management challenges than personal and traumatic consequences
of war on individual participants, and most current wargames continue to
avoid asking or focusing on such difficult questions. Interactive simulations,
especially contemporary digital games and virtual reality experiences, are less
‘safe’ than the spectatorial nature of film viewing. Such participatory involve-
ment has produced tireless debate about the effects of game-based violence
on perception and behaviour. This, along with the fact that the commercial
video game industry’s products have generally been marketed to younger
16

audiences and have been perceived as a largely escapist medium, has likely
skewed developer motivations toward encouraging fun rather than provoking
critical thought. The competition, acquisition and exploration motivations
at the heart of most games also frame them as fantasies of empowerment
rather than positioning them as a stage upon which compassion and equity
are favoured.
The latter part of the twentieth century saw a shift towards the inclu-
sion of women in actual military combat roles. However, this change has
introduced additional concerns that confirm the ubiquity of insensitivity
and intolerance in contemporary military cultures. Anthony King’s ‘The
Female Combat Soldier’ (2015) and ‘The Female Soldier’ (2013) articles
discuss the ways that female soldiers are subjected to discrimination,
harassment and abuse. While some are subjected to an institutional cul-
tural code that identifies them as sluts and bitches, a few have become
recognized as attaining a narrow and exclusive group termed ‘honorary
men’ (an equally troubling category). King’s accusations are confirmed
and extended by a 119-page Human Rights Watch report (2015), which
reveals that 18,900 US service members (women and men) were sexu-
ally assaulted in fiscal year 2014, but that of the 3,261 sexual assault
cases in the Defense Department’s jurisdiction investigated in 2014, just
5 per cent (175) led to a sex offence conviction. More often, victims were
assailed with obscenities and insults, threatened with death by ‘friendly
fire’ during deployment, demeaned, demoted, disciplined and discharged
for misconduct following the assault. More recently, a report completed
in September 2018 and tabled to the Canadian parliament in November
2018 regarding inappropriate sexual behaviour in the Canadian Armed
Forces recommended that victim support be improved and that better
education and training of personnel on the causes and effects of such
inappropriate behaviour is necessary (Auditor General of Canada 2018).
In section 5.84, this report cited a Statistics Canada Survey on Sexual
Misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces in which 960 members
reported experiencing a sexual assault between April– June 2015 and
April–June 2016 and ‘most members (79%, or 44,390) reported that they
saw, heard, or were personally targeted by sexualized behaviour’ during
that same period. It seems that military cultures which are often glorified
in war game environments and narratives as enabling heroic participants
in just war scenarios systematically allow instances of dehumanization,
discrimination, objectification and sexual violence towards internal and
external populations.
Then there are critics such as Martin Van Creveld, who writes scholarly
papers (published in credible, high-profile, high-ranking journals) that com-
municate the following perspectives: ‘The more women in any armed force,
the less likely it is to engage in serious military operations. Yet no society can
survive without either the use of violence or the threat of it’ (2000a, p. 825).
He continues:
17

[Violence] is the method par excellence by which men seek to … justify
their own existence both in their own eyes and … in those of women …
As Nietzsche … put it … ‘man was born to war, women to breed warriors;
all the rest is nonsense’.
(2000a, pp. 843–844)
A further example:
Prevented from fighting their equals, and shrinking year by year, the mili-
tary machines designed for such wars no longer have a vital role to play;
so why not fill them with women who, so long as it does not come to
combat, can do the job equally well? Whether in or out of the military,
feminism is and always has been a peacetime luxury.
(2000b, pp. 14–15)
He concludes: ‘When Freud wrote to his bride that the best thing a woman
can do for herself is to shelter in the house of a man, perhaps he was not so
wrong after all’ (2000b, p. 16).
Creveld’s work demonstrates that the misogyny inherent in military cultures
can easily become internalized and perpetuated through scholarly voices as well.
His critical positions oppose feminism to war by implying that it, and women,
have no place in ‘serious’ military culture and operations, save for corrupting
and weakening a force’s strength. Such a perspective embodies the anachronistic,
sexist motivations and inherent anxieties that feed hypermasculine military cul-
ture, Gamergate proponents, and alt-right and populist perspectives: privileged
voices loudly and threateningly asserting such privilege to sustain their own power
rather than to enable, empower or make room for conventionally disempowered
others. Creveld’s statements, buttressed by misogynist statements from Freud
and Nietzsche, are not well- supported arguments. They are assertions that
uncritically rehearse status quo perspectives via a rhetorical position of moral
certainty, assertions that value violence and war as instruments of a social sta-
bility that favours male dominance.
However, to simply oppose Creveld’s position and argue for equal oppor-
tunity participation in military forces ignores the conceptual dangers of
automatically accepting that a nation’s military force is an essential social
institution and that the threat of armed conflict is perpetual and inevitable.
Women gaining access to all branches of military service to fulfil hopes and
aspirations is an affirmation of military institutions and ideologies. If women
derive empowerment from combat roles, this empowerment is gained at the
cost of giving up their individual power and becoming instruments of the state,
becoming well-trained and well-armed expendables. Giving women and men
equal opportunity to subscribe to a military culture that is known to support
toxic versions of militarized masculinity which value violence, othering, hier-
archy and domination is certainly problematic. Is it better to march in step
with or work to eradicate the old boy’s network? Perhaps Creveld correctly
18

opposes feminism to war and its institutions, but instead of using this oppos-
ition to argue for the exclusion of women from a strong and capable military,
such a premise should become the foundation for a broader critique of the
function and continuing necessity of the military ‘machine’.
War never changes? The potential of feminist values

At the beginning of every Fallout (1997, 1998, 2008) video game, the statement
‘war never changes’ is used to begin the narrative. By asking questions such
as ‘Does the female warrior always need to be a masculine figure? Is violence
a necessarily masculine course of action?’ as well as raising the possibilities
of feminist war games and of feminist anti-war games, we’re hoping to turn
Fallout’s opening statement into a question, and remind people that war not
only changes and impacts every aspect of existence that it touches, but that
habits of perceiving and performing armed conflict can be changed via game-
based narrative, simulation and modelling.
We need new models, diverse approaches and different narratives to expose
war’s patriarchal morphology, to provoke a rethinking of militarized mas-
culinity and the persistence of hypermasculinity in idealistic representations
of war.
Feminism’s scope is broad. To avoid alienating different perspectives on
the spectrum of feminist discourse and to retain the integrated complexity
of feminist iterations, we think the most effective way of challenging mas-
culinist ideals of war is through feminist values. We’ve been inspired by the
work of Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, whose book Values at Play
in Digital Games (2014) focuses on value-centric game design and argues that
game designers have the power to shape players’ engagement with social and
political values systems through technologically enabled stories.
What are feminist values? Given that ‘feminism’ describes and consolidates
a collection of related movements, it would be unproductively reductive and
essentialist to search for a common denominator ‘value’ or set of values
shared between the varieties of feminist perspective. However, feminist
theorists commonly critique gender- based inequality, discrimination, vio-
lence representation, privilege and habits of perception and practice, and it
is this essential questioning of inequality and the violence that often accom-
panies the maintenance of such inequality that matters most to the current
topic. What kind of feminism does war provoke (Cockburn 2012) and what
kinds of war does feminism provoke? A potential answer comes from a quota-
tion frequently attributed to Dale Spender: ‘Feminism has fought no wars.
It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved
no enemies, practiced no cruelties’. The violence that is essential to war and
which appears inextricably braided into so many warlike cultural and social
practices has provoked significant feminist critical interventions (Solnit 2017,
Davis 2016). While many feminist voices are opposed to violence, to assert
that violence is unavailable as a mode of feminist empowerment would be
19

problematic. The ‘right to fight’ is in keeping with feminist values, because
feminism is not necessarily a pacifist ideology. Feminism arises in conflict with
reductive and restrictive systems, searching for solutions to binary and hier-
archical considerations of the sexes and the social and cultural applications
and reinforcements of such a binary. However, while feminist critique might
itself be a form of conflict, arising in opposition to inequality, it is conflict in
search of an equitable resolution. Competition and competitive attempts at
differentiation, and the zero-sum economies that remain a foundation of war
and war games thus appear counterintuitive to the goals of feminist critical
motivations. Perhaps feminist approaches, economies and values can change/
alter/skew/distort/reimagine our habitual perceptions of armed conflict.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play

Testing the compatibility between feminist critiques of inequality and systems
of war through video games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions,
solutions and approaches, and to prototype alternative narratives. We’re advo-
cating for the application of feminist values as a critical method of design, as
an ideological design influence, as a lens that determines how designers and
players interact with/within arenas of war.
Merritt Kopas, from a keynote talk for the 2014 Queerness and Games
Conference published in First Person Scholar, suggests that ‘Games are cul-
tural fantasies of the way things work. Through play— not just through
representations or images—we tell stories about how we believe or want to
believe the world works’ (2014, emphasis added). In addition to affirming that
game-based representations—including those of war—are idealized, Kopas
importantly affirms that games are more than representations. They are play-
able fantasies, participatory interactive opportunities in which the player
actively realizes the systematic potential of the constructed situation. Further:
All games are abstractions, and all abstractions involve human, and thus,
political decisions about what to include or emphasize. In the context of
digital games where the rules can be selectively concealed from the player,
these decisions are invisibilized and naturalized.
(2014, emphasis added)
The values and politics of designers thus subtly shape games into possibility
fields which are ultimately realized by the player. But these biases become
the invisible infrastructures underlying the world of the game, and players,
to an extent, must accept or adapt to them while playing. Representations of
and interactions with war situations in games are shaped by these naturalized
biases, and such biases tend to favour violent antagonism as a means to power.
Finally, Kopas quotes Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria), who ‘points out [that]
most videogames place the player in a relatively straightforward scenario with
clear goals. The overwhelming focus on goals, efficiency, and accomplishment
20

in videogames has led Pedercini to describe the medium as the “aesthetic
form of rationalization” ’ (Kopas & Clark 2014, emphasis added). In other
words, games—including those that simulate war—use abstraction, quantifi-
able goals, and other forms of procedural refocusing to justify and idealize a
player’s allowed-for actions. Within a war game context, this normalizes and
encourages actions such as simulated mass murder, objectification and excess
violence while obscuring the ethical and critical complexities associated with
such actions. Beyond the justifications that could be offered to circumvent
such considerations due to the particular contextual framework or ‘rules’ of
war, games encourage players to achieve more nuanced or greater numbers
of kills. For example, while it is neither pleasurable nor practical to shoot
someone in the head, players are often motivated to aspire to successful
simulated headshots in war games due to the goals, achievements and econ-
omies encouraged by game narratives and systems (Totilo 2010).
While many games are essentially training arenas which demand that
we conform to and master prescribed algorithms or rulesets of action and
achievement, some also allow opportunities for flexible play or a range of
responses. Some, such as The Stanley Parable (2013), Spec Ops: The Line
(2012), Bioshock (2007) and Undertale (2015) even creatively antagonize player
expectations or work to alienate a player’s innate trust in reliable narration.
Ian Bogost recognizes the potential of games to stage persuasive arguments: a
game’s ‘arguments are made not through the construction of words or images,
but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic
models’ (Bogost 2010, p. 125). Games can thus function as models and as
prototypes, as demonstrative conceptualizations, and as early functional
iterations of ideas. These functions can be employed towards argumenta-
tive ends. Since games rely on systems, rulesets and economies to configure
player experiences, the value-determined design of these aspects can be used
to challenge habits and assumptions and the ubiquity of traditionally mascu-
line power fantasies relating to armed conflict. As well, games—specifically
digital iterations of games— involve a complexity of features including
systems, mechanics, controls, sound, visuals, narrativity and interfaces. Each
of these elements of games offers an opportunity for feminist intervention.
For example, what would a feminist game mechanic look like and how could
it be applied to a war game? Finally, games require player participation to
determine outcomes, motivate the narrative and fuel the game’s systems. The
game can tailor these interactions to reinforce traditional stereotypes, or con-
dition new or unexpected responses, expose players to situations in which
critical thought is necessitated, and offer choices without clear right/wrong
alignment.
War ≠ fun
There are many types of war games but most feed similar expectations/habits
through repetitive design assumptions and stereotypical narratives. Most war
21

games feed narratives of just war, conflict, heroism, duty and the destruction
of an antagonistic ‘other’.
But actual war is not fun. It empowers a few through the destruction of
many others. Some games, such as Far Cry 2 (2008), Operation Flashpoint: Cold
War Crisis (2001), the God of War series (2005–2018) and Red Dead Redemption
(2010), to name just a few, try to show this, but go on to justify their excesses
of interactive violence by offering alternative masculine power fantasies of
revenge, retribution, justice, duty, heroism, perseverance and survival. In many
video games (not just war games), violence is the only form of interaction that
characters are allowed to perform—this generates an incredibly over-simplified
construction of a society in which those who cause the most harm have the
most power. This limited medium of interaction makes it difficult to create
complicated dynamics between characters or construct critical interrogations
of war.
In a February 2015 Escapist article entitled ‘Forget Realism, We Need Truth’,
Robert Rath offered an interesting criticism of war games, writing ‘I’m not sure
there’s another medium that’s dealt with [war] so much while saying so little about
it’. As well, Darius Kazemi (2012) and Robert Yang (2011) have pointed out
that war games are less accurate descriptions of the conduct of contemporary
warfare and more a projection of ideas and cultural fantasies about war and
masculine heroism. Exploring the possibility of feminist war games essentially
asks whether war itself is a masculine practice, concept, strategy, or response to
difference. And this is an important question to ask.
It could be argued that imagining feminist war game alternatives would
violate the ‘fun’ inherent in such games. However, the suggestion that digital
games are fun or are supposed to be fun is not quite true. Most early games
were not inherently fun. They trained us to become proficient in assembly
line tasks. For example, Pac-Man isn’t fun. It’s work, inconsequential work
that is encouraged and rendered pleasurable by competitive quantification.
Perhaps the fun comes from inconsequence and competition, which sounds
like the habits that perpetuate the war-based games which reinforce performa-
tive realizations of militarized masculinity. But people play games for more
than immediate gratification delivered through the proficient accomplishment
of tasks. Horror genre games, Bioshock’s philosophical critique of object-
ivism (2007), undermining heroic assumptions related to your actions in Spec
Ops: The Line (2012), the difficult interpersonal situations and choices of Life
Is Strange (2015)—these are games that tell engaging stories, games that act
in a literary way, exposing us to unique circumstances and human drama,
asking us to consider the consequences and implications of our actions. Like
De Palma’s Casualties of War film, many of these games aren’t fun—they are
disempowerment fantasies that are engaging, stressful, intense and ultimately
provocative, leaving us with questions, uncertainties and emotional impact as
sources of pleasure.
Can there be feminist war games? Not only can there be feminist war
games, but such experiences need to be made available to explore alternatives
22

to violence, objectification and inequality, to confront masculinist tropes, and
to trigger more thoughtful and complex responses in players. Games can be
more than simulators which encourage action and experimentation without
consequence. However, games, designed with alternative value sets (to dis-
tinguish them from traditionally masculine power fantasies) might help to
challenge and realign the values that players become reflexively used to per-
ceiving and employing within scenarios of militarization and armed con-
flict. Feminism is a necessary perspective and approach because inequity and
oppressive patriarchal habits persist and are horrifically amplified in situations
of war. Feminist efforts can effectively deconstruct naturalized patriarchal
landscapes and gendered binaries, and thus have the power to challenge nor-
mative myths about war and to transform perspectives.
Feminist war games
While applying feminist values to game design doesn’t always necessitate a
focus on female characters, female characters in most mainstream war games
are perceived and represented as damsels in distress, decoration, prostitutes
and trophies. However, some female characters are also (and this crosses over
between films and games) presented as feminine alternatives to a dominant
male default player-character, as militarized, but often sexualized female
warriors which are designed to aesthetically appeal to straight male players
rather than giving women more agency. Some examples of games which fea-
ture sexualized ‘warrior women’ characters (akin to the ‘Full Metal Bitch’
character in the film Edge of Tomorrow (2014), which resembles a game-like
structure in its ‘try, die, restart’ time-loop narrative) include Resident Evil
(1996), Bayonetta (2010), Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), Metal Gear Solid 5: The
Phantom Pain (2015), Remember Me (2013), Tomb Raider (1996) and Wet
(2009). Even though there was no video-game released as a movie-tie-in
(which is a curious omission), one might even associate Patty Jenkins’s 2017
film Wonder Woman with the above list. While the warrior Diana fights for
peace in this film and supposedly models female empowerment, she is also
dressed in much more revealing clothing than her male counterparts. Jenkins
defended this portrayal by stating that ‘I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman
to be hot as hell, fight badass and look great at the same time’ (Sperling 2016).
While this over-sexualization of female characters should not simply be
accepted as the norm, should it be balanced with other representations, or
eliminated completely in game designs? Should the option to have hyper-
feminine female characters be retained? To offer alternative but equally
limited and limiting representations of women and men in digital war games
is likely not an effective interventionist strategy. More choice and broader
options for gendered appearances and related power and empowerment fan-
tasies would be ideal, but in doing so, game designers need to make sure that
these power fantasies aren’t solely constructed through the male gaze. As well,
while such representational variety might not be in keeping with well-groomed
23

and non-decorative appearance standards pragmatically mandated for both
men and women by actual military forces, adherence to realism in most game
experiences is often exchanged for elements that increase the entertainment
potential of the experience. Imagining diverse forms of femininity and mas-
culinity in military contexts is something that creative game design can proto-
type and explore much more rapidly and effectively than hoping for a sudden
sea-change in real-world military perspectives and practices.
However, a larger uncertainty regarding the overall compatibility between
feminist values and those of the military industrial complex might render
their potential synthesis impossible, in games or otherwise. Is war antithetical
to feminist values or can it be a vehicle for feminist values? Is a feminist war
game more than an anti-war game? Is feminism (ironically) a war against war?
A feminist war game initiative can both make room for a variety of feminist
power fantasies and work to highlight and defamiliarize disempowerment
fantasies. While it is impossible to avoid power fantasies altogether in a war
game context, ideas relating to a feminist war are likely to be quite divergent
from the ways that traditional war is understood.
Conflict is an essential part of stories. Without conflict, most stories
aren’t worth telling. We need to engage with war, but how? While non-sexist
representations of women in strong combative roles is an important step
towards challenging skewed representations of women in war games and
games in general, if war games could be designed to subject female video
game characters to violence in the name of equal opportunity representation,
this would not be an ideal manifestation of feminist equality. More point-
edly, is social equality desirable in a society whose values revolve around war,
violence, economies of objectification and instrumentalization, and resource
acquisition and management? Angela Night (2015) asks ‘If violence against
women in video games is unacceptable, then how can games have more female
protagonists since they’ll invariably face violence?’
We’re conscious that our sceptical perspective (why would women want
equality in hyperviolent, combative environments when we can problematize
those environments through feminist values?) might be limited and limiting.
But the promise of treating people equally even if you are treating them as
equally disposable instruments doesn’t sit right. Does the pursuit of a greater
presence of ‘warrior women’ in game-based representations of war counter
or ultimately support militarized masculinities through the affirmation of
feminist militarism? Could female protagonists undermine the dominance of
genre/gender in war-related narratives? Some examples of prototype feminist
war games that could promote an egalitarian access to militaristic traditions
include:
• A game which allows players to participate in a feminist movement or

cause, such as the suffragette movement. Player-characters would be
working for suffrage and, in keeping with historical events, violence
would play an essential part in this path to equality.
24

• A chess game variant in which the queen is still the most powerful piece
on the board but is also the one that needs to be checked to win. This
shifts the game’s foundation to a feudal matriarchy and would necessitate
new approaches and strategies overall.
• A multiplayer game that depends on female player-character co-operation
to achieve combat objectives in a war scenario. A multiplayer video game
entitled Overwatch (2016) is a step towards realizing this possibility, as the
game necessitates co-operative combat and features 14 out of 30 playable
heroes as women as of April 2019.
• A game that models warfare via the activity of bees. Queen bees produce
up to 25,000 worker bees (all female) who go to war over nests that belong
to other queens. Stinger-less male drones wait on the margins until the
conflict is over.
Feminist anti-war games
Just as equal opportunity sexual objectification isn’t the answer to sexual
objectification, equal opportunity warfare might not be the solution to
warfare’s constitution of women. Alternatively and more broadly, feminist
values could be used to generate anti-war game experiences, to undermine
the conventions of war, and to undermine war itself as a way of negotiating
difference. As Margery Hourihan suggests, the ‘tale of the hero and his quest
… has always glorified the patriarchy … [and] if women are to achieve real
equality … we must change our entrenched perceptions, and that involves
changing the story which articulates and reinforces them’ (1997, p. 233). This
would not just involve telling different stories in different ways, but engaging
the player in participatory narratives that offer alternatives to expectations
with the goal of challenging and overcoming militarized hypermasculinity as
this model of masculinity is a toxic one and is a learned, social construction
of gender that can be resisted, unlearned and redefined.
To effect a critique of current models and idealizations of war, feminist
war game prototypes need to explore methods of empowerment other than
violence or weapons. Perhaps violence needs to be offered as a problematic,
consequential, affective choice rather than a programmed necessity, and war
needs to be presented as not a winning condition (or a gameplay condition),
but as a losing condition. If war means game over not game on, the goals
of games which feature armed conflict would change. Some alternatives to
‘winning the battle’ might include:
• Advancement of political/ social power for women and/ or other

disenfranchised groups.
• Undermining the ‘fun’ of war (exposing the discrepancy between what
war promises and what it is).
• To expose and denaturalize the stories we tell ourselves about violence,
identity and modern subjectivity.
25

• Questioning the necessity of war.
• Questioning economies of war that fundamentally objectify women and
everything else.
• Character progression from object to subject in a war context.
• Diplomacy.
• Contradicting the ‘othering’ that war requires; rehumanizing soldiers and
victims.
• Re-confronting killing as murder rather than reinforcing mechanical dis-
tancing, rationalization and abstraction via politics and technology.
• Working to discover tangential escapes from and alternatives to cyclical
violence.
• Finding ways to de-mechanize/re-humanize conflict.
• Questioning why war is a habitual response to conflict and difference.
• Prototyping feminist economies of war (to counter or balance the con-
ventional modes of violent resource management and acquisition). What
would such feminist economies look like?
Some examples of prototype feminist war games that could promote a cri-
tique of militaristic traditions include:
• Featuring a loading screen with detailed biographies of combatants

you’ve killed (constructing victims with detailed identities in an effort to
reconnect abstracted violent action with human relationships). The more
kills a player gets, the longer the wait or loading time between levels as
these victims are remembered.
• Giving the player a choice to opt out of combat or to achieve empower-
ment through something other than violence (Undertale (2015) is an
adventure game that effectively achieves this).
• A choice-based scenario where ‘I don’t know’ is an option and where
decisions have profound and far-reaching consequences (like the non-
military video game Life Is Strange). This would challenge the objectifi-
cation of victims, the sanitized relation to consequences of violence, and
the ‘just violence’ scenarios of many war games.
• An imperative to end war with a peacekeeping scenario (rather than a
victory). This would involve not trying to stop war from happening, but
trying to end an unjust war with a just peace. An alternative to this would
be to simply equate all potential war victories with tragedy.
• In a conventional card game like War, changing the endgame so that who-
ever loses all of their cards wins. The winner thus escapes from this system
and the ‘loser’ is doomed to keep playing with an excess of resources in an
economy of combative competition.
- Additionally, in the conventional rules of this game, ‘war’ is triggered
by a tie, by equality (in a system that favours high-card dominance).
Could this tie instead be redefined as ‘peace’, be reimagined as a
mutually desirable endgame or goal?
26

• Altering the conventional game of Risk so that players begin in an
unequal scenario. Does it feel good to win if players don’t start out on
equal ground?
• A game in which a player plays as a bullet or bomb and has a limited
amount of time to hit or destroy something. However, every object that
the player selects as a potential target has a pop-up story defining its
importance, the long-term consequences of destroying it, and its undesir-
ability as a target. This necessitating of a full personal knowledge of the
target before they could be fired, counteracts the ease with which conven-
tional weapons anonymize, distance and destroy targets.
• Alternatively, after the bullets contact a hollow, iconic target, the player
has to endure and absorb a flood of humanity, detail, personal informa-
tion and story related to the target. Such a humanizing encounter with
the destroyed other that can only be accessed through violent acts creates
an ironic tension, a too-late sympathy potential.
• A war game you can’t win: every triumph shuts off the player’s ability to
communicate and receive key information from other characters in the
game (isolating the player) and pushing the player deeper into impossible
scenarios and dead ends. The player only figures this out as they play, as
they lose.
• A situation that overlays war on existing, non-combative game scenarios
or local maps to render the experience uncanny.
• A war game that plays backwards: whomever you kill, you become, and
play their past.
In addition to alternative scenarios and goals, the application of feminist

values to war games could occur at the level of the interface, pre-game options
screens, or lucid narrative choices. For example, the potential symbolism of
keyboard keys (space, escape, control, alt, enter/return, delete, backspace, etc.)
could be mapped to particular actions, either literally or ironically. As well, a
game could offer randomly generated genders and sexes for players that force
players to possibly inhabit a player-character position that they would not
conventionally choose. The PC game Rust (2013) has already experimented
with this. A final example would be to give the player an opportunity to defi-
antly engage with lucid narrative interruptions into the game world. For
example, in the same way that the disembodied narrative voice of The Stanley
Parable (2013) confronts the player at crucial, decision-making moments, a
narrative voice could ask the player at various times what they are doing and
why they are choosing a violent course of action.
Let’s play?
Could any of the above feminist gaming models be introduced into conventional
war games without a backlash from habitual consumers? Films that necessitate a
critical confrontation with complexity are being made and are profitable, so why
27

can’t the same expectations be generated for the players of games? Currently,
the habits of gaming culture are fed by the power fantasies that are promoted
by games which feature war as entertainment. Perhaps the answer to this comes
from Mattie Brice’s ‘Queer as in Fuck Me—a Design Manifesto’:
Games themselves aren’t teaching values, rather teaching players to have

capacities for certain kind of values through discipline, so we need to
design games as prompts for reaction and creation instead of teaching
specific parables and lessons.
(2014)
Similarly, Paolo Pedercini asserts:
Computer games need to learn from their non- digital counterparts

to be loose interfaces between people. A new game aesthetic has to be
explored: one that revels in problem- making over problem- solving,
that celebrates paradoxes and ruptures, that doesn’t eschew broken and
dysfunctional systems because the broken and dysfunctional systems
governing our lives need to be unpacked and not idealized.
Strategies are to be discovered: poetic wrenches have to be thrown in
the works; gears and valves have to grow hair, start pulsing and breathing;
algorithms must learn to tell stories and scream in pain.
(2014)
This chapter is meant to be a provocation, to generate discussion about the

kinds of values and economies that inform our work and to remain opti-
mistic about the ways that media technologies can be used as interventions
to challenge, critique and re- humanize systems, ideologies and habitual
narrativities, to pluralize perspectives, confront complexity and facilitate mul-
tiple models of perception and practice. Armed conflict uses technology to
extend violent economies and to disconnect values from practice through
mediated actions. However, the computer is a flexible tool that creative artists
and critical scholars make use of in diverse ways to broaden our understanding
of human culture and to generate inclusive, inhabitable and thought-provoking
stories. Collectively, we need to make use of this technology to pursue alter-
native horizons and innovative interrogations, consciously employing this
mechanical extension of perception and action in connective, integrative and
expansive ways to avoid replicating and reinforcing the distancing, dehuman-
izing and objectifying functions of our military machines.
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30
2
Gendered authorship in war gaming
Whose fantasy is it anyway?
Anastasia Salter
Whose fantasy is it anyway?

I played a man on a mission to kill for many, many hours of my youth. The
disembodied hand that usually represented me on screen may not have served
as the most gendered of avatars, but in many of my childhood favorite games
such as Doom (1993) and Duke Nukem 3D (1996) the hypermasculine avatars
were reflected back to me in cover images, cinematic cut scenes, and even
in health bars designed to showcase the bloodiness of the avatar’s face as a
way to convey both toughness and relative injury. I don’t remember seeing
markers of femininity anywhere within these games: the near-nude bodies of
the captive women strippers in Duke Nukem 3D left some impression of their
victimhood, but otherwise, the only bodies that mattered in the game were
those of the macho hero Duke and the aliens he pursued. It wasn’t until much
later (thanks in part to the rise of 3D graphics and with it the increased ability
to represent overtly gendered bodies) that I played as a woman in games such
as Tomb Raider (1996), with the improbably dressed Lara Croft as shorts-
wearing heroine, and No One Lives Forever (2000), featuring a spy garbed in
gravity-defying outfits straight out of an Austin Powers movie. These bodies
were not much more recognizable or relatable than the grim-faced buzzcut
heads of the previous games. However, returning to these games now, I find
myself wondering at their feminist potential: was the act of playing and par-
ticipating in that discourse inherently subversive, given the marketing of
these games did not imply myself as a player or even as a viewer? Was my
presence—and insistence on playing in cooperative mode, eschewing the com-
petitive toxicity of deathmatch—at all subversive? Or was participating in
those games instead an act of accepting their presented binaries and roles?
First-person shooters were my introduction to games representing war: as
an avid physical and digital gamer, I would quickly find over the years that
most of my play would center on militarized conflict, broadly defined,
although few of those games bear the explicit genre label of ‘wargame’. These
were the war games of my childhood: not wargames as traditionally defined,
which wouldn’t enter my life until much later. The distinction between games
representing war and games dedicated to the art and mechanisms of war is
31
Gendered authorship in war gaming 31

crucial, but even the existence of so many genres represented to the represen-
tation of war from every possible lens (soldier to general to nation-state leader
to sniper, to even civilian in serious and news games) is a testament to our
obsession with playing at conflict. These varied genres and mechanisms for
playing at war are often conflated in the discussions of violence and mach-
ismo that inevitably surround games with a cloud of suspicion. Pat Harrigan
and Matthew Kirschenbaum address the association of wargaming with mas-
culinity in the introduction to their edited collection on the genre:
Our relationship to wargames, let alone war, is gendered: it is also marked

by our privileges of race, class, sexuality and nationhood. We are mindful
of William Broyles Jr.’s observation in his widely read essay ‘Why Men
Love War’ (1984) that men’s fascination, indeed their capacity to love (his
word) the brutality of war is rooted in an early and commonplace indoc-
trination into the fantasy of war as a game … wargames such as we treat
here are often undeniably part of a progression of such masculine fanta-
sies. (Harrigan & Kirschenbaum 2016, p. xxii).
The wargames at the center of Harrigan and Kirschenbaum’s collection are

primarily the board wargames which ‘use (mostly) two-dimensional paper
components to replicate a particular historical battle, campaign, or conflict’
while requiring players to ‘apply principles of real-world military strategy
to create the most favorable conditions they can for success’ (Kirschenbaum
2009, pp. 358–359). Board wargames don’t have the same graphical systems at
work as video games, and thus are less likely to offer polygonal interpretations
of hypersexualized gendered bodies in the manner for which video games are
infamous (Behm-Morawitz & Mastro 2009). However, the hypermasculine
viewpoint embedded in these games is not a matter of superficial appearances.
Meghana Nayak defines hypermasculinity in the context of national identity
as ‘the sensationalistic endorsement of elements of masculinity, such as rigid
gender roles, vengeful and militarized reactions, and obsession with order,
power, and control’ (Nayak 2006, p. 43). Board wargames don’t often engage
with gender roles (and thus comment through absence), but they always
include militarized reactions and invite the player to engage in fantasies of
power and control.
A feminist wargame?
A woman playing a game, and thus fulfilling fantasies of power and control
within the defined play space of the wargame, might engage in subversive
or feminist actions through play. However, the presence of a woman at the
table is not enough to make a game’s power fantasies feminist any more than
my presence as a Duke Nukem player could change the on-screen toxicity of
binary gender roles. It is also important to note in this context that the lens
of feminism on games and play must be intersectional, and the dominance of
32
32 Anastasia Salter
power fantasies centered on cisgendered, heterosexual, white male able-bodied
leaders and soldiers is in and of itself a hindrance to feminist play within
most wargames. The question of feminist war games inevitably starts with
an existence proof: can a war game be feminist? Given the very nature of war
(and the military industrial complex that surrounds it), what does a feminist
war game imply? I believe that this question must begin with authorship. The
games industry is notoriously hypermasculine: the Gamasutra Salary Survey
conducted in 2014 notes that women make up only 13% of game designers, 9%
of artists and animators, and 5% of programmers and engineers. Numbers are
similarly grim for other groups traditionally marginalized within the games
industry, and the recent culture war of Gamergate emphasized the resistance
of that same group to inclusivity (Chess & Shaw 2015). While it is not neces-
sarily impossible for feminist work to emerge in this context, it is rather like
expecting reasonable birth control legislation from a mostly white cisgendered
male legislative body: possible, but exceedingly unlikely (Cosslett 2017).
Authorship in wargames, on the other hand, has historically been tied
to the same structures and institutions of the military itself: in the US, this
means a troubled history of gender equity and exclusions. Within traditional
wargames, women are increasingly visible as authors but far from a majority.
Linda Mosca’s Battle of the Wilderness, released in 1975, is a Civil War module
for Blue & Gray II that is the first wargame credited to a woman designer.
The game features a battle between the Union Army of the Potomac and the
Confederate Army of the Northern Virginia and is set in 1864. The game is
certainly not recognizable as a feminist work, as its mechanics are traditional,
but its existence itself is significant. Linda Mosca addressed women players
in an interview:
I would like to remind women wargamers that while they are fewer in
numbers, they make equally effective generals. That war is a man’s domain
is disproven by the fact that its wellsprings are societal and outcome
affects all, regardless of gender. That history belongs to men is disproven
by the few accounts of great women that filtered down, even as recorded
by male historians. Remember, of the three persons most feared by Rome,
two were women (Cleopatra & Zenobia).
(Mosca 1975/2009)
Writing in 1975, Linda Mosca expresses optimism of a feminist future for

wargames, and particularly for greater gender diversity among players: the
comments on the forum thread following the article (transcribed and posted in
2009) tell a far less optimistic story and include many heteronormative, binary
claims regarding the difference between men and women making women less
suitable for military play. Designers following in Linda Mosca’s footsteps have
faced similar challenges in approaching wargame design. Elizabeth Losh’s
analysis of authorship in wargame and simulation design emphasizes the
importance of women authors who foster ‘potentially subversive forms of
33

exploration and engagement’ even while working in what ‘is often imagined
as the monolithic expression of an organizational culture of masculine
command and control’ (Losh 2016, p. 355).
This type of subversion within these historically defined institutions poten-
tially reflects the discourse of feminist strategic theorizing, which brings a
feminist lens to critique war and strategy:
Feminist strategic theorizing puts gender analysis into the (sometimes

uncomfortable) discussion of how and why states make (normally
masculinized) choices between military strategies. While some feminisms
critique all war violence and others suggest that the current operation
of the making and fighting of war is gendered, engaging the question of
whether gender influences what strategy is and how states strategize can
bring about important realizations both for feminisms and for strategic
thought.
(Sjoberg 2013, p. 215)
Likewise, bringing this lens of strategy and gendered choice (particularly as

far as ‘intentional civilian victimization’) to games is valuable because it is a
reminder of what most wargames erase: cost, consequence, and alternative
strategic choices that could be equally valid to those favored by the game’s
mechanics. A truly feminist wargame, then, might be twofold: it would engage
with and allow for ‘feminist’ strategy while making visible and coherent the
cost and casualties. However, within the realm of history-bound, board-game-
as-computer wargames, this type of representation is more difficult: casualties
and civilians are typically abstractions by necessity.
Simulating fantasy
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by designers seeking to create
opportunities for feminist representation and strategy within board wargames
is their reliance upon history: the history of the military industrial com-
plex does not lend itself to bringing in such opportunities while honoring
the genre’s prevailing interest in historical accuracy and fidelity. Likewise,
the scale of board wargames does not lend itself to representing war’s cost
with the same empathy that is possible in games that use a more focused
first-person or second-person lens, which is more common in video games
than in simulations. However, this is where the intersection of wargames
with other genres yields profitable space for feminist intervention and sub-
version. The space of fantasy is particularly retelling: I remember the first
shooter game I truly loved, Heretic (1994). Heretic is a re-skinning of Doom
(1993): engine-wise, very little is different except the weaponry. In Heretic, the
player is invited to use spells, mana and health potions, and even the ‘Morph
Ovum’, an egg that once launched turns enemies temporarily into chickens.
The ‘Morph Ovum’ resonated with me as a child player on many levels, and
34
not just because of the metaphor of egg as weapon: it also opened up new
avenues of strategy and play, allowing me to choose sections of a level to
disengage with, passing through before my opponents were restored to their
fighting selves.
Obviously, the addition of such a mechanic into the world of the his-
torical boardgame would be fairly ludicrous. However, the genre of fan-
tasy simulations has no such limitations, and while arguments over ‘realism’
still inevitably haunt them, there is inherently more freedom for subversive
design. In 1974, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Tactical Studies Rules, later
Wizards of the Coast) was released by Gary Gygax. The game had many of
the trappings of a traditional wargame re-imagined in a fantasy setting, and
carried with it the deeply entrenched misogyny of both those games and its
designer. One of the most notable features of this first edition was a table of
Harlot encounters, described as
with brazen strumpets or haughty courtesans, thus making it difficult for

the party to distinguish each encounter for what it is … in addition to the
offering of the usual fare, the harlot is 30% likely to know valuable infor-
mation, 15% likely to make something up in order to gain a reward, and
20% likely to be, or work with, a thief.
(Gygax 1979, p. 191)
A roll of the dice decided whether the player would encounter an ‘expensive
doxy’, ‘aged madam’, or ‘slavenly trull’, among other similarly descriptive
options (p. 191). Likewise, early versions of the game included stat limitations
for women: the ‘maximum strength possible for a female gnome character’,
for instance, was 15, while a male gnome was allowed 18 (Gygax 1978, p. 9).
These disparities in potential strength were detailed for every race and binary
gender combination in an abilities table. This was despite text in the introduc-
tion that stressed the game wasn’t limited by an adherence to realism: ‘You
will find no pretentious dictums herein, no baseless limits arbitrarily placed
on female strength or male charisma, no ponderous combat systems for
greater “realism” ’ (p. 6).
In spite of this deeply embedded hypermasculinity and commitment to
reinforcing a misogyny embedded in a gendered binary of sexuality and
perceived promiscuity, the game attracted a wider player base. This is perhaps
in part thanks to how easily these rulings from Gygax could be subverted or
ignored: unlike in the restricted procedural world of a video game, edicts from
the Player’s Handbook could be disregarded without altering the underlying
system. Jon Peterson notes that rapid pace of women authors in joining the
Dungeons & Dragons adventure scene when contrasted with wargames:
One of the earliest Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, Palace

of the Vampire Queen, was co-authored by Judy Kerestan back in 1976.
Consider that from the publication of Charles S. Roberts’s Tactics
35

in 1954, it took over twenty years for Linda Mosca to receive the first
credit as a female wargame designer; it took only a bit more than twenty
months after the release of Dungeons & Dragons for Judy Kerestan to
get a billing for fantasy role-playing game design.
(Peterson 2014)
Of course, the rise of visible women authorship in both areas was contem-
poraneous: the 1970s gaming scene brought with it an increased visibility of
women as gamers, though it would be a long time before those players would
be acknowledged in the main game’s books and modules. In an analysis of
gender representation over 30 years of Dungeons & Dragons, Vanessa Rose
Phin observed:
[T]‌he first PHB was almost entirely populated with males of comic book
buffness … in [the] fourth, the first ambiguously gendered characters
began to appear, and women shot up in representation. By [the] fifth
edition, there were more pictures of women than ever before, and defin-
itely more characters who didn’t have large breasts, heavy brows, or overly
broad shoulders.
(Phin 2016)
However, the more notable contribution of the fifth edition is in rejecting a

binary approach to gender representation: nearly one-fifth of the characters
represented were ‘portrayals of characters whose genders weren’t easily
determined by appearance—a big change, considering how second edition
went out of its way to gender everything’ (Phin 2016). This new emphasis has
been remarked upon:
The new Player’s Handbook explicitly talks about the gender binary
and gender fluidity. ‘Think about how your character does or does not
conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual
behavior’, it reads. ‘You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of
sex and gender … You could also play a female character who presents
herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in a female’s body, or a bearded
female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male’. D&D players are
being pushed to think critically about gender as a historical construct
at the same time they’re deciding whether to be ‘Quarion the elvaan
druid’ or ‘Havilar the dragonborn sorcerer’. Dungeons & Dragons is
a game that hinges on the collective process of imagination, and now
we’re being asked to summon a world that doesn’t share in our dominant
heteronormative paradigms.
(D’Anastasio 2014)
While representation alone does not make the revised Dungeons & Dragons a
feminist wargame, it does provide scaffolding for more imaginative, nonbinary
36
play with gender identity through the game’s system. Previous versions of
the game (particularly in the early editions) reinforced highly toxic binaries,
which, while open to subversion, could be so off-putting that a player might
never get further than the pulp hypersexualized imagery of the covers and
interior imagery. By making more inclusive gender a part of the rules system,
Dungeons & Dragons is, as D’Anastasio put it, ‘summoning’ a world outside
of dominant paradigms—including hypermasculine war fantasies.
Playing feminist fantasies

The fantastical worlds of Dungeons & Dragons have, through the years, cer-
tainly reconstructed more than their share of patriarchal, heteronormative,
and racist assumptions. Wargames (from the traditionally defined genre of
board games to playable representations of war more broadly construed) have
played a similar cultural role, often under the pretext of realism and fidelity,
which makes subversion difficult. However, the distancing of the fantasy world
from the inescapably pressing concerns of normative gender expectations in
the context of the US military makes it a space more open to subversion of
war norms and hypermasculine strategies and value judgements.
Play within these systems of representation enables engagement with the
discourse of feminist strategy (including civilian victimhood and strategic pri-
orities), but such games do not guarantee it. Ultimately, a feminist module
to Dungeons & Dragons might undermine the very foundation of the game
world’s reliance on combat as a means of knowing and exploring the world
(while not necessarily rejecting combat altogether). However, such play would
stretch the expectations of the genre, and be nearly impossible within the
more structured world of the traditional board wargame. If that tradition—
and, indeed, the preferred strategies and values of the ‘military entertainment
complex’ (Lenoir 2000)—is to be challenged, the mechanisms are more likely
to be found in fantasy than in so-called reality.
References
Behm-Morawitz, E & Mastro, D 2009, ‘The effects of the sexualization of female
video game characters on gender stereotyping and female self-concept’, Sex Roles,
vol. 61, no. 11–12, pp. 808–823.
Chess, S & Shaw, A 2015, ‘A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying
about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity’, Journal of Broadcasting
& Electronic Media, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 208–220.
Cosslett, RL 2017, ‘This photo sums up Trump’s assault on women’s rights’, The Guardian,
24 January, viewed 25 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/24/
photo-trump-womens-rights-protest-reproductive-abortion-developing-contries.
D’Anastasio, C 2014, ‘Dungeons & Dragons has caught up with third-wave feminism’,
Vice.com, 27 August, viewed 19 April 2017, www.vice.com/en_ca/article/exmqg7/
dungeons-and-dragons-has-caught-up-with-third-wave-feminism-827.
Doom 1993, id Software, PC.
37

Duke Nukem 3D 1996, 3D Realms, PC.
Gygax, G 1978, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons player’s handbook, 2nd edition, TSR,
Lake Geneva, WI.
Gygax, G 1979, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master’s guide, TSR, Lake
Geneva, WI.
Harrigan, P & Kirschenbaum, MG 2016, Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Heretic 1994, id Software, PC.
Kirschenbaum, M 2009, ‘War stories: board wargames and (vast) procedural
narratives’, in P Harrigan and N Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third person: authoring and
exploring vast narratives, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 357–372.
Lenoir, T 2000, ‘All but war is simulation: the military- entertainment complex’,
Configurations, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 289–335.
Losh, E 2016, ‘Playing defense: gender, just war, and game design’, in P Harrigan &
MG Kirschenbaum (eds.), Zones of control: perspectives on wargaming, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, pp. 355–370.
Mosca, L 1975/2009, ‘Women in wargaming’ posted in ‘Women in wargaming 35 years
hence’, discussion list message, 17 March, Boardgamegeek.com, viewed 2 May 2017,
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/390307/women-wargaming-35-years-hence.
Nayak, M 2006, ‘Orientalism and “saving” US state identity after 9/11’, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 42–61.
No One Lives Forever 2000, Fox Interactive, PC.
Peterson, J 2014, ‘The first female gamers’, Medium.com, 15 October, viewed 12 April
2017, https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37.
Phin, VR 2016, ‘Representation in the D&D player’s handbook’, web log post, 11
May, viewed 12 May 2017, http://wordfey.blogspot.com/2016/02/representation-in-
d-players-handbook.html.
Sjoberg, L 2013, Gendering global conflict: toward a feminist theory of war, Columbia
University Press, New York, NY.
Tomb Raider 1996, Eidos, PC.
38
3
An overview of the history and design
of tabletop wargames in relation
to gender
From tactics to strategy
Matt Shoemaker
Wargames, as we know them today, began their development in the early nine-
teenth century. Though they have branched into a wide variety of mediums,
scales, and mechanics over the past 200 years, their focus on physical violence
as a means of conflict resolution between two or more parties has remained
untouched as the genre’s core theme. While this defining characteristic of
wargames has remained unchanged, how that theme is expressed and explored
has shifted in the past four decades. Wargames have traditionally been made
by men for men and feature characters and strategies represented in gendered
ways, but relatively recent changes to gaming communities have expanded the
player base and the available flavors of these types of games. These changes
have pushed the definition of what is a wargame from its original purpose,
and now provides opportunity to explore topics and themes within this
genre that have previously seldom been broached. By increasing the variety
of wargame designers, both in their background and gender, this genre can
continue to expand and engage new audiences beyond those traditionally
targeted, an example of which can be seen in the following observations by an
anonymous woman:
I have heard him pounding on the table, yelling ‘BLOOD MUST

FLOW!!’. He is, at that moment, separated from me by a gulf that I don’t
even WANT to bridge. It’s no wonder to me that so few women are
wargamers. I think that tendency to lose touch with one’s humanity is a
trait generally shared by far more men than women, with wargaming as
a prime example.
(Greene 1975, p. 81)
A brief history of wargames

The modern wargame can trace its roots to the Reiswitz game. Developed
in Prussia by Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, this wargame was presented to
the two Prussian princes in 1811. The princes were delighted with the game
and their enthusiasm was shared by their father, King Frederick William III,
who desired his own demonstration. Reiswitz reworked the presentation of
39
Wargames in relation to gender 39

his game before presenting it to the king the following year. His 1812 demon-
stration consisted of a large open table with an area of at least 6 square feet,
in which 3 to 4-inch square plaster pieces of modular terrain were placed to
create the battlefield. Porcelain pieces were used to represent units of troops
(Peterson 2012, pp. 221–224).
Reiswitz’s game was improved upon by his son who released Kriegspiel in
1824. Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reiswitz was an accomplished sol-
dier in the Prussian military and wanted to enhance the realism of his father’s
game. He increased the scale of the game to 1:8,000, so 1 inch would represent
400 paces. Every turn in the game represented two minutes of real time on
the battlefield. More importantly for modern scholars, he added dice in
order to resolve the probability of outcomes and uncertainty in combat, and
an umpire who provides a scenario and acts as intermediary for all actions
through written orders and allows for mechanics such as hidden movement
(this also made Kriegspiel a three-player game). This attention to detail and
approximation of realism made Kriegspiel a favorite among several military
men and ensured the integration of the game with Prussian military educa-
tion for 40 years (Peterson 2012, pp. 227–231, 240).
In the 1870s, translations of German wargaming systems based on or
expanded from Kriegspiel began to spread through Europe and the United
States. The audience for these games was primarily those with a keen mili-
tary interest who wanted a ‘realistic’ experience. However, the spread of
these games outside of Germany allowed them to begin to reach into
the civilian world. H.G. Wells published the first widely available set of
wargame rules commercialized for entertainment with Little Wars: A Game
for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That
More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books in 1913.
This publication was important not only for its target audience, but also for
focusing on conflict in an anachronistic theme. Selling the game to civilians
untethered wargames from their roots as an instructional tool in the mili-
tary, and distanced players from the fears of modern warfare by removing
them from a real-world setting (Peterson 2012, pp. 244, 265, 268, 269).
These shifts were the divestment needed to free wargame designers from the
constraints of realism in their rules and separated the player(s) from those
impacted by violent conflict by performing ‘as a release or catharsis of the
war spirit’ (Pratt 1943, p. 3).
In the two decades following the publication of Little Wars, wargames
struggled to expand beyond a childhood pastime for most civilians in the
United States. However, there were a scant few adult groups that regularly
hosted civilian wargame campaigns. One such game was held monthly in the
1930s by Fletcher Pratt. Hosted in an 18-by-18-foot hall in New York, this
naval wargame regularly saw 40 or 50 players in attendance (Peterson 2012,
p. 279). Though its attendance numbers are impressive, Pratt’s game is not-
able here for being the first to accept and acknowledge women wargamers.
As noted in the 1943 publication of Pratt’s rules, ‘the sweethearts-and-wives
40
40 Matt Shoemaker

influence became manifest’ and ‘[t]‌oday there are nearly as many players of
one sex as the other’ (Pratt 1943, p. 2).
Following the Second World War, civilian wargaming continued to grow,
spurred on by publications and newsletters where fans and club members
could share rules and find opponents. This period also saw the birth of the
commercial board wargame industry with the publication of Tactics (1954)
by The Avalon Game Company, which was incorporated as Avalon Hill in
1958. This increase in accessibility, as sparse as it may have been, came with
debate. Primarily between whether wargames should be realistic at all cost
or if flexibility should be allowed to create a more entertaining experience.
Additionally, the role of the umpire that had existed in most post-Kriegspiel
games fell to the wayside during this period (Peterson 2012, pp. 300, 303).
In 1971, with the publication of Chainmail by Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax,
wargames were set on a path of change that reverberates through games and
other media to this day. Influenced by the popularity of fantasy works in
the 1960s and ’70s wrought by The Lord of the Rings, Chainmail contained
the first published set of fantasy wargame rules in a supplement. Innocuous
today, the inclusion of rules for fantasy scenarios in a wargame were contro-
versial for the time. These rules influenced Dave Arneson, who combined the
fantasy elements of Chainmail with the freedom of individual player agency,
which he experienced in a game called Braunstein run by David Wesely, into
the setting of Blackmoor. The extent of the Blackmoor setting became known
to Chainmail co-author Gygax during the Gen Con V game convention in
1972, which led to a collaboration between Arneson and Gygax that resulted
in the publication of Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval
Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures in
1974 (Peterson 2012, pp. 62, 65, 70, 72).
A wargame at heart, Dungeons & Dragons allowed players to experience
battle as individual combatants. Wargames up to this period typically fell into
one of three categories: tactical, which focus on one or more squads of five
to a dozen soldiers and their actions; operational, which rely on the applica-
tion or movement of military resources within a specific area to achieve stra-
tegic goals; or strategic, which focus on large-scale troop movements along
with political, social, and economic influences and strategies. By creating a
wargame that gives a player full agency over a single character in an ongoing
campaign, Arneson and Gygax opened up the possibility for the investiga-
tion and interpretation of character actions beyond combat resolution.
D&D, however, did not start on such a path with intention from its creators.
Examination of how Dungeons & Dragons, a nearly 45-year-old wargame,
has evolved towards inclusion and acceptance mechanically and through the
tone of its rules serves as an example for how wargames can challenge gender
norms at the tactical level.
The original version of Dungeons & Dragons, published in 1974, was far
from inclusive as written. The boxed game came with three booklets. The pri-
mary book for players was titled ‘Men & Magic’. All of the player pronouns
41

are masculine, as are all of the level titles for the various classes (swordsman,
warlock, patriarch, etc.). One of the game’s three main classes is even named
‘fighting-man’. The only two identifiably feminine illustrations within the
book are of a ‘beautiful witch’ and a topless ‘amazon’ (Gygax and Arneson
1974a, pp. 6, 16, 27). Additionally, the majority of rules within this version
of the game focused on the acquisition of wealth and power by taking it from
others, enforcing concepts of selfishness and apathy within D&D.1 The one
check on greed written into the rules was the Angry Villager Rule included
in ‘The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures’ booklet. This rule allows
the referee (which you may recognize as the umpire from Kriegspiel) to use
non-player-characters such as the thieves guild, city guard, or local militia to
bring a player-character back into line after they have committed some unfor-
givable outrage (Gygax and Arneson 1974b, p. 24). It should be noted that
while combat and acquisition of wealth through force was a feature of early
D&D, players often benefited more by choosing routes of exploration and
the avoidance of violence. A vanquished character, after all, could no longer
advance in the game.
While the initial rules for Dungeons & Dragons were not forward thinking
in terms of gender and inclusion they did not remain that way. The relatively
spartan set of instructions for a wargame where a player could attempt any-
thing were ripe for interpretation and imaginative augmentation. Players and
referees were even encouraged to alter the game, ‘for everything herein is fan-
tastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then
make it just that way’ (Gygax and Arneson 1974b, p. 36)! Various amateur
press associations (APA) began distributing play records, character sheets,
and wording changes to make the game more inclusive for women. Though
there were several bumps along the way, some such alterations did work their
way into the official rules with the introduction of the Dungeons & Dragons
Basic Set and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1977. All of this was made
possible by the fact that women were more interested in Dungeons & Dragons
than were previously involved in wargaming. As Jon Peterson notes in his
examination of this topic, Dungeons & Dragons intersected wargaming, which
was estimated to be 0.05 percent female in 1971, with the science-fiction and
fantasy community, which was estimated at 20 percent female in 1960. The
inclusion of so many more women into this male-dominated hobby undoubt-
edly influenced the direction these games would take (Peterson 2014).
Gender-sensitive phrasing within the rules of Dungeons & Dragons may
seem like a minor victory by today’s standards, but this small step echoes
into the largest gameplay feature in D&D for exploring various themes in a
game setting of violent conflict. Dungeons & Dragons was the first published
wargame in which a player has complete freedom over an individual char-
acter within a game world. No longer were the player’s actions abstracted
through an officer’s command to their soldiers in a mission solely to achieve
victory in a battle. Players were now free to question how they would grow
in wealth and power and if strength of arms is indeed the best route to this
42
42 Matt Shoemaker

end. Additionally, players collaboratively constructed a narrative around
their actions and the world in which they took place. This naturally includes
how the players affect the world they are in and how the conditions within
that world create the situations they find themselves in. By accepting the
inclusion of women both within the game’s community and the game’s rules,
Dungeons & Dragons was opened up to more viewpoints around how the
narratives within games were created, who created them, and how characters
were gendered.
This narrative element is the key factor in how tactical-level wargames
can expand beyond concepts rooted primarily in violence. By giving players
freedom within the narrative to be whatever race (in fantasy game terms),
gender, or profession they desire it allows them to explore how those choices
are reflected within their gameworld. Similarly, the players are able to con-
struct how the world itself reacts both to the player’s choices about their char-
acter and the actions taken with that character. For some, it is easy to simply
focus on the combat aspects of D&D and ignore the social implications within
the gameworld. For many, however, the relative fun of D&D comes from
not just the individual actions taken by a character, but how that character
interacts with and changes the gameworld. Questions of how a character’s
fantasy race, gender, and actions are perceived and accepted, or rejected, with
the gameworld are collaboratively crafted by the players and referee. This
requires those participating in the game to collectively decide what is and is
not acceptable within their gameworld and why. It also provides a safe space
for the exploration of topics that echo in the real world.
Dungeons & Dragons has evolved considerably since it was first published
in 1974. Its fifth edition, released in 2014, embraces inclusivity in its rules and
presentation. The Player’s Handbook, for example, includes illustrations of
men and women of various ethnicities, body types, and in a state of reason-
able dress. The book also explicitly invites players to challenge gender and
sexuality structures:
You can play a male or female character without gaining any special
benefits or hindrances. Think about how your character does or does not
conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual
behavior. For example, a male drow cleric defies the traditional gender
divisions of drow society, which could be a reason for your character to
leave that society and come to the surface.
You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. The
elf god Corellon Larenthian is often seen as androgynous or hermaphro-
ditic, for example, and some elves in the multiverse are made in Corellon’s
image. You could also play a female character who presents herself as
a man, a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female
dwarf who hates being mistaken for male. Likewise, your character’s
sexual orientation is for you to decide.
(Crawford et al. 2014, p. 121)
43

Additionally, the 2016 publication Volo’s Guide to Monsters provides options
for players to choose monster fantasy races for their characters (Mearls
et al. 2016). These fantasy races (orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc.) were typically
reserved as antagonists within the game. Their inclusion as possible character
choices provides additional opportunity to explore social perceptions of, and
challenges to, inclusion and intersectionality.
While one can argue that Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game
and not a wargame, it is presented here due to its wargaming roots and the
impact the game has had on gaming and media over the past four-and-a-half
decades. D&D was created through the medium of wargames, which was all
that was familiar to its creators at the time. Though physical confrontation
is not the only form of resolution and advancement in D&D, it continues to
be the set of mechanics most utilized for encounters presented within offi-
cially published campaigns and officially sanctioned third-party adventures
produced for Dungeons & Dragons’ organized play arm, the Adventurers’
League.2 D&D has evolved through its relatively long life to become more
accepting of modes of play that allow for, and in some cases encourage, the
exploration of concepts that interest its current diverse player base beyond
those its male creators envisioned.
Scale of games
The success of Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons proved there was a
demand for tabletop wargames outside of the historicals market. Games
Workshop, a London- based company founded in 1975, produced their
first in-house fantasy wargame, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, in 1983. In
1995, Games Workshop produced the skirmish wargame Necromunda. This
tactical-scale science-fiction wargame focuses on the conflict between the six
houses of the planet Necromunda as battled between players through gangs
in the lower levels of large hive cities. Players of Necromunda choose which
house they wish their gang to represent and then individually customize the
weapons, skills, appearance, and other attributes of their gang’s members
(gangers) and background of the gang itself. As a miniature-based wargame,
this preparation can take considerable time as players not only assign the
mechanical attributes of their gangers, but also paint and modify the mini-
ature representations of these individual characters. Once ready, players
are encouraged to participate in a campaign with their gang.3 Players com-
pete against each other using a squad assembled from a number of their
gangers equal to a predetermined point limit. Injuries, deaths, and other
consequences that occur within one game are resolved during various out-
of-game phases that build the narrative of a player’s gang and their relation
to other gangs participating in the campaign. This cycle continues until the
campaign concludes after a set number of campaign turns, a specific gang
has gained control over a certain size of territory, or other victory conditions
as set by the participants.
44
44 Matt Shoemaker

The above system is not unique to Necromunda. Other tactical- level
wargames have either officially supported or homebrewed campaign systems.
The background setting for Necromunda’s narrative, however, offers an
opportunity for exploration. For one, the Warhammer 40,000 universe,
in which the planet Necromunda exists, is so violent and dystopian that it
spawned the descriptor ‘grimdark’. The gangers that players control exist in
the lowest levels of the hive cities, the underhive, and are some of the poorest
citizens on the planet. The characters depicted within the novelized fiction for
Necromunda are either high-born citizens who have rejected their heritage and
are running from their past, or were born in the underhive and have turned to
violence and a gang in an attempt to elevate their quality of life.
Apart from the somber setting, Necromunda features two juxtaposed
houses. House Escher, which specializes in the manufacture and distribu-
tion of various chemicals and drugs, has damaged its Y chromosome so
severely that any male offspring they produce is withered and imbecilic.
To deal with such a conundrum, the Escher have turned to a partheno-
genetic means of reproduction and ‘look down upon and pity all males’.
The Escher’s counterpart house is the overly masculine Goliath. As their
name suggests, House Goliath consists of huge brutes who value strength
above all other attributes. Genetically altered to be as strong as possible,
the Goliaths value their members according to their size and physical
prowess. Paradoxically, the Goliath are reliant on chemicals and drugs
supplied by their Escher opponents in order to achieve the levels of size and
strength they desire. Might makes right within the Goliath house where the
strongest and often most violent rule (Necromunda: Underhive Rulebook
2017, pp. 25, 26).
Though Necromunda does not attempt to directly explore gender mech-
anically,4 the parody and grand carnage it contains explores the connection
between hypermasculinity and violence thematically. It also explores the
connection between femininity and violence through the Escher, by chal-
lenging the often held assumption that women are not violent. There are
several people in the Necromunda community playerbase that enjoy having
such diametrically opposed options available to them. The Facebook Group,
‘Feminist 40k’, regularly discusses gender issues in both game lore and art
direction within the Warhammer 40,000 universe (including Necromunda) and
uses the group as a safe space for such topics.5 One of this group’s members
even wrote the most recent novella about Necromunda featuring the Escher
(Brooks 2018). Seeking such a refuge is understandable, particularly when
one sees how contentious the topic of gender is with the player base within
the 40,000 universe. For example, a 2017 Reddit post entitled ‘Why has the
idea of female space marines6 become such a contentious topic as of late?’ hit
227 comments in less than 15 hours of open discussion before being locked
by a moderator for a lack of civility (Inquisition 2017). People clearly enjoy
playing wargames that call attention to gender stereotypes, and they have
strong opinions when those stereotypes are challenged.
45

One final tabletop wargame to examine at the tactical level is 2017’s This
War of Mine: The Board Game. Focused more on survival than combat, in this
game, one to six players take on the role of a group of up to four survivors in
a war-torn city. There are 12 possible characters, each one chosen at random
as indicated during in-game events. Of these 12, five of the characters are
women. Game play in This War of Mine is divided between the daylight hours
where players improve their shelter and the nighttime where players may
search other locations for supplies and contacts and must protect their shelter
from intruders and looters. As players attempt certain tasks, they are directed
to read various narrative entries from ‘The Book of Scripts’, which presents
decision paths and results for the characters’ actions. The game ends if the
characters are able to survive until the cessation of hostilities. Players work
collaboratively in this game and take turns at various, changing, points in the
game. No player specifically controls an individual character.
Like Dungeons & Dragons and Necromunda, This War of Mine generates
introspection primarily through narrative means. However, this game also
adds mechanical elements to force players to confront various issues. As the
game progresses, the situation for the characters tends to grow grimmer. Food,
water, and medicine are often in short supply, and the players must decide if
they will steal from or even kill non-player-characters so their characters can
survive. This game also features the mechanic of an empathy score, ranging
from 2 to 9, that serves as an indicator for each character’s ability to negatively
affect fellow humans without incurring a hit to their misery value. Any char-
acter that receives 4 marks in either hunger, illness, wounds, or misery, dies,
bringing the player(s) that much closer to losing the game.
Unlike the above-mentioned games, This War of Mine provides all of
the narrative needed to make in game decisions. The empathy score, in par-
ticular, can drive this fact home, especially when a character with a low
empathy seemingly has no qualms in taking goods or even life from others
in the game. The methods of decision making in the game are quite effective
when it comes to making players consider the circumstances in which sur-
vival forces them to turn violent. This is different from both Dungeons &
Dragons and Necromunda which focus on violence not for survival but the
acquisition of power and dominance. The game designers have made certain
gender-based assumptions by prescribing gender-based roles to some of the
non-player-characters encountered in certain scenarios,7 and by assigning the
player-characters pre-war professions and empathy scores. For example, even
though there are more male characters than female, both genders have a total
empathy value of 33. The males’ empathy scores range from 2 to 7, where the
females’ range from 3 to 9.
Wargames at the operational level that deal with issues of gender are more
difficult to come by, though they do exist. Games at this level focus primarily
on the movement of military resources such as troops and supplies. The
level of abstraction in these games distances the players from the individual
combatants highlighted in tactical-level games, and also keeps them from the
46
46 Matt Shoemaker

overall policy and social issues that games at the strategic level allow players
and designers to explore. Where operational games allow for exploration is
campaigns that view non-combatants or other civilian resources as important
aspects for military decisions within the game.
One such operational-level game is 2005’s The Battle of the Little Bighorn.
In this game, one or two players participate in different events of the Plains
Wars between the United States Army and the Plains Indian Tribes. This game
features Villager units, which ‘represent large numbers of non-combatants
such as old men, women, and children’. This is notable for the game because
how the US Army player handles these units impacts their victory score.
For one, US Army units may capture villager units which then make that
US Army unit immune to attack from Plains Indian units. The US Army
player also receives points on the Village Casualty Track for engaging Villager
units in combat. At the end of the game, a six-sided die is rolled to determine
whether or not the Press and US Public perceive the Villager unit casualties as
a positive or negative thing. Results of a 1–3 give the US Army player posi-
tive points, with a result of 4–6 providing negative points. The Plains Indian
player receives no points, negative or positive, for protecting or failing to pro-
tect Villager units from becoming casualties By making the Villager units a
risk to victory, the US Army player must consider if it is worth inflicting cas-
ualties to them in order to achieve other objectives within the game. Handling
Villager units in this way abstracts any emotional decision that would have
been made by real-world commanders in a similar situation, and frames it in
a way that makes winning militarily all that matters. It also calls into question
the role of soldiers on both sides when it comes to the treatment of non-
combatants during an armed conflict.
Strategic-level wargames focus on the full picture of warfare as specified by
the time period and theater(s) dictated by the game. Strategic-level wargames
need to examine the scenario from the large-scale military, diplomatic, and
social levels. Taking stock of the situation from such a vantage allows for
the examination of issues that are often overlooked as contributing causes of
conflict. For example, near the beginning of the Afghanistan War, an argu-
ment was made that the war on terror was justified because of the oppression
of women within Afghanistan. This argument was made in large part to pro-
mote the notion that the United States valued gender equality and provided
an additional rationale to the country’s involvement (Sjoberg 2013, p. 139).
The gendered values held by a state, the role masculinity plays in the selection
of a state’s leaders, and gender equality within a state all play to a state’s will-
ingness to wage and remain in war. Strategic-level wargames provide oppor-
tunity to probe this.
The Counter Insurgency (COIN) series published by GMT Games pro-
vide the best example for examining how strategic-level wargames facili-
tate the exploration of gender issues related to war at a large scale. The first
volume in the COIN series, Andean Abyss, was created by Volko Ruhnke in
2012. The games in this series, currently at 11 published or near published
47

volumes, are somewhat unusual in the wargame world in that they focus on
asymmetrical warfare. Guerrilla conflicts and insurgencies are the staple of
this line. Though the volumes that feature distant historical conflicts, such
as COIN Series Game #6, Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt against Caesar, are
less useful for this examination, games featuring the Vietnam War (2014’s
Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam), the French–Algerian War (2017’s
Colonial Twilight: The French–Algerian War, 1954–62) and the Afghanistan
War (2013’s A Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan) are suitable.
Games within the COIN series to date allow for between one and four
players. In these games, players focus primarily on area control, dice rolling,
and card-driven mechanics in order to advance military, political, and cul-
tural goals that allow for victory. As the game progresses, event cards are
revealed that dictate the order in which players choose what their actions
will be (based on the faction they are playing) as well as resources and other
effects. These event cards represent individuals, units, and events from the
real-world conflict focused on by the game. Play progresses until a propa-
ganda card is revealed in the event deck. When one of these propaganda cards
emerges, players check victory conditions and then, assuming no one has won
the game, perform some reset functions before proceeding to play. This con-
tinues until someone wins on a propaganda card or the fourth propaganda
card is revealed.
The main application from the COIN series for feminist inquiry is the event
cards. Though they are not all culturally focused, several of them are. When
revealed, these cards provide the acting players with options that may or may
not benefit them depending on their faction. These highlight certain values of
a culture that, when exercised or suppressed, can enhance or limit the culture’s
general enthusiasm for the conflict at hand. Though this may seem like a
minor effect, one must consider the scale at which strategic games are played.
If a culture’s/faction’s/nation’s will is suddenly sapped from a conflict due to
ongoing or new issues it can decimate their ability to continue. Strategic-level
wargames designed with such influential events or cultural norms can drive
home the role that gendered values and assumptions play between different
entities involved in a military conflict. This highlights how the construction of
feminism can be used to frame and justify war, which exemplifies the broader
phenomenon of women as a symbolic source of the nation, therefore integral
to warfare.
Deliberate choice in game design

The above games provide examples of how narrative and mechanics in
tactical, operational, and strategic-level tabletop wargames can allow for
the exploration of gender and its relation to violent conflict through play.
Most of the cases above, however, either grew organically as tabletop game
platforms have matured or can coincidentally be used to explore these topics
while meeting other, primary, game functions. Game designers who wish to
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48 Matt Shoemaker

avoid mistakes of the past related to gender or include such introspection
within their creations can do so more directly without making them appear
shoehorned into the game. Several options to do just this are discussed below.
Inclusion is the first design choice that should be cemented in the game from
the beginning. Building in inclusive elements is typically a narrative choice set
into any game that designers tend to overlook or underutilize. This can be
as simple as using gender neutral language in the game rules and adding a
statement to the beginning of the game, similar to the gender statement from
the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons listed above, letting players know that
these narrative and thematic elements are welcome within the structure of the
game. The goal is to help set the narrative framework for the players and, as
the designer, not make assumptions that the players will do this on their own.
Raising awareness among players that inclusion is both intended and desired
within the game can go a long way.
Creating inclusion within a historical or modern-based game requires a
little more attention. The main thing to remember is that, at best, a game
designer is creating an authentic, but not accurate, representation of events
through any game or simulation. As such, there is no harm in adding women
and minorities into settings in greater numbers than they were historic-
ally present for in the name of inclusion. The rationale used for excluding
women characters and factions from historical wargames is often ‘historical
accuracy’. Historical accuracy would include recognizing, at the very least,
the role of women in war, from nurses to victims of rape and pillage. To erase
them from the story would be more historically inaccurate from some vantage
points. Furthermore, the stage for the conflict at hand can be set as accur-
ately as one likes, but once play begins events will unfold in ways that have
nothing to do with history. Games are a sandbox of experimentation for his-
tory as laboratory and computer simulations are for the sciences. Arguments
regarding accuracy vs. playability are nearly as old as wargaming itself. While
technology and additional rules can attempt to bridge the accuracy gap for
game elements tied to the physical world, there is currently no sufficient
equivalent for the social world. With that in mind, it is best to avoid making
the narrative elements of your games exclusive under the pretense it makes
them more historically accurate.
Another area of inclusivity that ties into the narrative is art direction. If
historical accuracy was an actual concern of wargame designers than they
would at least visually represent the women included in their games in real-
istic proportions, body types, and dress. If a game features illustrations or
miniatures of people the art direction should present them in different
genders and ethnicities, with multiple body types, and in reasonable dress.
Poses requested from an artist should be dynamic, while not sexualized. The
miniatures for the Escher in Necromunda only partly meet these goals. The
women that compose the gang are all dynamic, well-muscled, and fit the punk
aesthetic set for them. However, these models feature breasts that are larger
than the head of the miniature and are, for some reason, all wearing heels.
49

For a better example of miniatures designed with inclusivity in mind please
see Bad Squiddo Games,8 who designs and sells miniatures specifically for this
purpose.
The next focus point for designers is to increase the awareness of those
affected by war beyond direct combatants through gameplay. This can be
achieved narratively or mechanically within a game’s design. The most
important thing to remember when tackling difficult topics like this is to
approach them head on. A game designer creates an experience. What types
of emotions should the players experience through gameplay? Focus on that
experience, mechanically if possible so players cannot avoid it, and build it
into the game’s system. If this type of topic is to be featured in gameplay, but
not the focus of the game, one must be careful of abstraction. All games are
abstractions of systems, but if an aspect is abstracted too much it can quickly
appear as an afterthought or, worse, an attempt to avoid the topic. Abstract
as much as needed to make the theme fit while not bogging down the system,
but make sure it isn’t diluted so much that the topic is trivialized.
Another approach is to build mechanics into the game that force players
to consider their implications beyond the decision’s role in end-game victory
conditions. In order to achieve this, a designer should consider the emotional
impact that goes into making a decision. This can occur partly by tying the
mechanic closely to the game’s theme. It is also beneficial to humanize some
of the components within the game. For example, in The Battle of the Little
Bighorn example from above, it would have been beneficial to tie Villager units
to a morale mechanic that would negatively affect the US Army units and posi-
tively affect the Plains Indian units. This makes it clear that a commander’s deci-
sion to kill or capture non-combatants can impact the combatants’ will to fight.
Modern wargames have come a long way in their more-than-200-year his-
tory. From their roots in military enthusiasm and military education these
tabletop games have grown to a civilian pastime and multi-million dollar
industry.9 The future of these games and their players can, and will, improve
with more awareness, inclusion, and diversity within game development. As
Rex Brynen, co-editor of paxsims.org, estimates, the tabletop wargaming
hobby is currently 95 percent, or more, male (Brynen 2016). Women who
do enter the tabletop wargaming hobby face severe harassment, as wargame
reviewer and game industry professional Katie Aidley has (Aidley 2018).
Making the wargaming hobby more welcoming through its participants’
behavior and more conscious design decisions can only help open up a market
that has thus far been largely ignored by this genre.
Notes
1 Though selfishness and apathy are not strictly feminist or anti-feminist, they do
make it more difficult to explore feminist concepts in a game environment. One
cannot consider the plight of those affected by violence and war if they are not
empathetic of first-and third-party victims.
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50 Matt Shoemaker

2 Organized play for these games is a format sanctioned by the publisher with a spe-
cific set of additional rules for playing ongoing campaigns with different players
and characters. Organized play is singled out because it often has a plethora of
gameplay scenarios created specifically for it that is sanctioned by the game’s pub-
lisher, and therefore promotes the vision of the game’s narrative as the publisher
wishes it to be.
3 Though campaign play is the focus here, it is not the only way to play Necromunda.
Campaign play is best suited for most game clubs and groups that meet on a
regular basis to play. For those who have less reliable options for opponents, or
who simply want to fit in more games, they can opt for tournament or exhib-
ition play which utilize one-off battles that hold no long-term implications for a
player’s gang.
4 Games Workshop, generally, does not have the best track record when it comes to
inclusion and feminist principles. Their original intellectual properties are notori-
ously male centric, with few women characters or factions. The head of Forge World
(a division of Games Workshop), Tony Cottrell, even said during the February 3,
2018 ‘Horus Heresy and Necromunda Weekender’ event that ‘Escher are exotic and
vindictive because they’re women’ (TonyNeedsToGo 2018). Forge World issued an
apology for this statement two days later (Neverdeadned 22 2018).
5 Of additional interest is the sub-group ‘Feminist 40k for venting’ where members of
the Feminist 40k group complain about online and in-person experiences they have
with other gamers related to intolerance.
6 Space Marines are a faction of super warriors within the 40,000 universe that
consists of only male members within the 40,000 official lore.
7 For example, one potential encounter in the game has the players coming across a
group of women and children trying to protect themselves in a school. The players
may steal supplies from these women and children if they wish, but the involved
characters’ empathy values impact whether or not their misery score increases if
they do steal from the group.
8 ‘The number one aim for Bad Squiddo Games is to create and supply the miniatures
that would have made the hobby far far better for my 10 year old self. To welcome
more young girls and women into wargaming and miniature painting, as well as
providing diverse options to the entire gaming community. And yeah –cool toys’
(Norman 2018)!
9 Games Workshop, currently the largest publicly traded tabletop wargame com-
pany, reported £222.6m in total sales for their 2017– 2018 fiscal year (Games
Workshop 2018).
References
A Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan 2013, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series,
GMT Games.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1977, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) Inc.
Aidley, K 2018, ‘The truth about sexual harassment and boardgaming’, Katie’s Game
Corner Blog, viewed 5 March 2019, https://katiesgamecorner.com/2018/06/20/the-
truth-about-sexual-harrassment-and-boardgaming/.
Andean Abyss 2012, by V Ruhnke, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series, GMT Games.
Brooks, M 2018, Wanted: dead, Black Library, Nottingham.
51

Brynen, R 2016, ‘Women and wargaming: the good, the bad, and the ugly’, PAXsims
Blog, viewed 5 March 2019, https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/women-
and-wargaming-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/.
Chainmail 1971, by J Perren and G Gygax, Guidon Games.
Colonial Twilight: The French–Algerian War, 1954–62 2017, Counter Insurgency (COIN)
series, GMT Games.
Crawford, J, Mearls, M, Wyatt, J, Schwalb, R & Cordell, B 2014, Dungeons &
dragons: player’s handbook, 5th edition, Wizards of the Coast, Renton, WA.
Dungeons & Dragons 1974, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) Inc.
Feminist 40k 2019, discussion list, Facebook, viewed 5 March 2019, www.facebook.
com/groups/491243794550692/.
Feminist 40k for Venting 2019, discussion list, Facebook, viewed 5 March 2019, www.
facebook.com/groups/2032328477033855/.
Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam 2014, Counter Insurgency (COIN) series,
GMT Games.
Games Workshop 2018, Games Workshop Group PLC annual report July 2018, viewed
27 November 2018, https://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/
2018/07/2017-18-Press-statement-final-v.pdf.
Greene, J 1975, ‘Wargamer as elitist’, Europa, 6–8, pp. 79–81.
Gygax, G & Arneson, D 1974a, ‘Men and magic’, in Dungeons & dragons: rules for
fantastic medieval wargame campaigns playable with paper and pencil and miniature
figures, Tactical Studies Rules, Lake Geneva, WI.
Gygax, G & Arneson, D 1974b, ‘The underworld and wilderness adventures’, in
Dungeons & dragons: rules for fantastic medieval wargame campaigns playable with
paper and pencil and miniature figures, Tactical Studies Rules, Lake Geneva, WI.
Gygax, G & Perren, J 1971, Chainmail: rules for medieval miniatures, Guidon Games,
Evansville, IN.
Inquisition 2017, ‘Why has the idea of female space marines become such a conten-
tious topic as of late?’, Reddit thread, 1 May, viewed 5 March, 2019, www.reddit.
com/r/40kLore/comments/68kpbv/why_has_the_idea_of_female_space_marines_
become/.
Mearls, M, Crawford, J, Lee, A, Mohan, K, Perkins, C, Reynolds, S, Sernett, M, Sims,
C, Winter, S & Greenwood, E 2016, Dungeons & dragons: Volo’s guide to monsters,
Wizards of the Coast LLC, Renton, WA.
Necromunda 1995, Games Workshop.
Necromunda: underhive rulebook 2017, Games Workshop Ltd., Nottingham.
Neverdeadned22 2018, ‘Apologie [sic] from Forge World about comments made
this past weekend’, Reddit thread, 5 February, viewed 6 December, 2018, www.
reddit.com/r/Warhammer/comments/7vfue5/apologie_from_forge_world_about_
comments_made/.
Norman, A 2018, Bad Squiddo Games, viewed 27 November 2018, https://badsquiddo
games.com/.
Oracaz, M & Wiśniewski, J 2017, This war of mine: the board game, Galakta, Krakow.
Peterson, J 2012, Playing at the world: a history of simulating wars, people and fantastic
adventures, from chess to role-playing games, Unreason Press, San Diego, CA.
Peterson, J 2014, ‘The first female gamers –Jon Peterson –Medium’, Medium.
com, 5 October, viewed 15 November 2018, https://medium.com/@increment/
the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37.
Pratt, F 1943, Fletcher Pratt’s naval war game, Harrison-Hilton Books, New York, NY.
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52 Matt Shoemaker

Sjoberg, L 2013, Gendering global conflict: toward a feminist theory of war, Columbia
University Press, New York, NY.
Tactics 1954, The Avalon Game Company.
Taylor, M 2005, The battle of the Little Bighorn, Khyber Pass Games, Miami, FL.
This War of Mine: The Board Game 2017, Ares Games.
TonyNeedsToGo 2018, ‘ “Escher are exotic and vindictive because they’re women”.
Thanks, Tony Cottrell, head of Forge World’, Reddit thread, 3 February, viewed
6 December 2018, www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer/comments/7v0mcy/escher_are_
exotic_and_vindictive_because_theyre/.
Wells, HG 1913, Little wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred
and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books,
Frank Palmer, London, UK.
53
4
Reframing the domestic experience
of war in This War of Mine
Life on the battlefield
Ryan House
Writing in the 1980s amid debates concerning the admittance of women into
combat positions within the armed forces, Genevieve Lloyd challenges the
conventional notions of the inherent masculinity of war—rhetoric adopted
even by some feminist peace groups at the time—by explicating the conceptual
relationship between war and citizenship in Western philosophical thought
(Lloyd 2013). She posits that war as it is conceived allows men to transcend
self-interest and fear of death in order to attain a higher, sublime form of
selfhood that must be, as this line of reasoning goes, intrinsically masculine:
The masculinity of war is what it is precisely by leaving the feminine

behind. It consists in the capacity to rise above what femaleness symbol-
ically represents: attachment to private concerns, to ‘mere life’. In leaving
all that behind, the soldier becomes a real man, but he also emerges into
the glories of selfhood, citizenship and truly ethical, universal concerns.
(2013, p. 75)
Throughout the roughly 30-year interim between Lloyd’s chapter and this one,
there is ample evidence of these ideas continuing to shape the social construc-
tion of gender through representations of war in media. Narratives of war in
video games, for instance, typically focus on the hypermasculine experiences
of war, presenting the player with a power fantasy in which they assume either
the role of the hero single-handedly combatting an onslaught of enemy forces
or that of a master tactician strategically deploying troops from the perspec-
tive of the general-god, all in the pursuit of an ideologically righteous goal.
These depictions of war frame life as existing in one of two ways: either as a
subject who exists to inflict death upon others or as objects to be killed.
This War of Mine (TWoM), a 2014 game inspired by real events such as
the siege of Sarajevo, breaks from this tradition of heroic individualism. In
it, players assume the collective role of a group of civilians trapped within a
fictionalized war-torn, besieged city who must work together to survive their
precarious situation. To create as authentic an experience as possible, 11 Bit
Studios, the game’s developer and publisher, researched survivors’ accounts
of armed conflicts such as the Bosnian War (1992–1996), the First Chechen
54
54 Ryan House
War (1994–1996), the Kosovo War (1998–1999), the Syrian Civil War (2011–
ongoing), and others (Kwiatkowski 2016, p. 693). These accounts emphasized
the extent to which people relied upon closely knit groups to survive living
within war zones, and the developers chose to underscore this communal
aspect in the gameplay (2016, p. 694). Players control a group of characters
with unique backstories, personalities, and skills, such as being a good cook,
a skilled trader, or a fast runner, who must work together to survive for a ran-
domly determined amount of time until a ‘cease fire’ is declared. Because they
represent the often-unseen ramifications of war, these characters epitomize
what Judith Butler (2010, p. 31) calls ‘ungrievable lives’, or ‘populations [that]
can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or
forfeited’, and the game’s ‘perma-death’ mechanic underlines the precarious-
ness of their lives. Once a character dies, they are gone for the remainder of
the game, and their absence makes survival for the group that much harder.
Through its narrative and representation of domestic responsibility, TWoM
reframes the experience of war from a hypermasculine glorification of vio-
lence and death to a meditation on communal survival and the challenges of
non-violence in the face of violence.
Frames are a particularly useful metaphor for discussing this game’s depic-
tion of war, as its environments are presented in the style of a dollhouse-like
cutaway. Characters are often literally framed within their domestic roles as
the player deploys them to cook food, construct beds and tools, or scan radio
frequencies for news from the outside world. The destabilization of life in a
war-zone disrupts traditional gendered notions of the division of domestic
labor and social order. Likewise, characters are framed within their indi-
vidual narratives, beginning with a backstory of their lives before the war
and developing throughout the game as players navigate the difficult decisions
they’re presented with and contend with the consequences of those choices. In
this reframing of war from the battlefield to the realm of ‘mere life’, TWoM
enables players to consider the human subjects that are often excised from the
frames imposed by traditional portrayals of armed conflict.
[Image]ining war
War, in the popular imagination, is a quintessential rite of passage into
manhood, and this idea is reinforced through most depictions of war and
the military in popular culture. Images of the stoic commander boldly and
decisively leading his men to battle and of brave, loyal soldiers dutifully
holding the line are for many the perfect ideal of masculinity. Although many
portrayals attempt to depict the horrors of combat, war remains a privileged
space for boys to be tested and for men to achieve glory.1
Participating in a war, or at least the fantasy of participating in a war,
takes on a meaning that is somewhat divorced from its geopolitical causes. It
becomes not unlike a team sport in which one seeks to best the other team
through steadfast teamwork and individual heroics. In their book Reel Men
55
Reframing the domestic experience of war 55

at War: Masculinity and the American War Film, Donald and MacDonald
describe the significance of sports and war on the construction of masculinity
through a discussion of the shared code of behaviors between both activities.
Both privilege teamwork, of course, and emphasize trusting others to do their
job as well as sacrificing oneself for the good of the collective, or ‘taking one
for the team’. Similarly, maintaining a dispassionate and professional tem-
perament while undertaking one’s duty is not only imperative to success, but
to being a real man as well. Emotion taints rational thinking, as this line of
reasoning goes, and in order to win, one must act as boldly and decisively as
a man. Winning is characteristic of masculinity while ‘male norms classify
losing as lacking sufficient male hormones … and it is classed as equal only to
the female’ (Donald & MacDonald 2011, pp. 31–32). Thus, to maintain one’s
maleness, it is imperative to win at all costs.
Emotions, then, are an obstacle to be overcome on the path to manli-
ness and victory. In a chapter on the history of maps in wargames, Anders
Engberg-Pedersen writes that such games can be thought of as emotional
technologies, or ‘a means to manage and train the emotions for the actual
experience on the battlefield’ (2018, p. 60). To illustrate this process, he begins
with an account of the presentation to the Prussian army of Kriegs-Spiel, a
wargame played upon a topographical map on which players ‘could practice
the complex skill of moving their corps across an actual terrain at both a tac-
tical and strategic scale’ (2018, p. 60). Surprised by its evident utility, one gen-
eral reportedly proclaimed, ‘That is no ordinary game, that is a war school’
(2018, p. 59). Engberg-Pedersen posits that by
inviting players to project themselves into the representation, the map

… constructs a simulation that transforms passive spectators into active
agents and allows them to live vicariously a life of passions and emotions
across the flatness of its surface.
(2018, p. 60)
It allows the player to experience the emotions of the battlefield through

simulations of randomness and danger that must be overcome through
measured reasoning. Military tactics, maneuvers, and contingencies can be
premeditated, taught, and trained for in advance, ‘thereby transform[ing]
warfare into a rational endeavor subject to simulation, planning, testing, and
control’ (2018, p. 65). As Engberg-Pedersen explains, ‘the wargame is a tech-
nology for keeping violent emotions flat and reducing their intensity: fear is
tempered, emotional heat reduced to coolness’ (2018, p. 70).
Engberg-Pedersen ends the chapter with a discussion of two contemporary
projects: STRIVE (Stress Resilience in Virtual Environments) and VRET
(Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy). These projects immerse ‘users in a virtual
combat zone and expos[e]‌them … to a traumatic incident such as the death
of a child or the loss of a comrade … to offer an emotional inoculation … to
gradually lower the emotional response’ (2018, p. 72). The potential of digital
56
56 Ryan House
games as emotional technology is unprecedented because they render imme-
diate the violence and stress of war that prior media have only been able to
present indirectly through the user’s imagination. Although much has been
said on the ability of the affective power of games to strengthen interper-
sonal relationships,2 Engberg-Pedersen warns that the effectiveness of these
new wargames at eliminating our innate fears of war may one day ‘remove a
dimension of human experience that is fundamental to preventing that war
becomes anything other than the action of last resort’ (2018, p. 73).
Indeed, most video games about war glorify the battlefield by offering
players the opportunity to embody the hero in a militaristic power fantasy.
The Call of Duty franchise, for instance, allows players to virtually take part
in the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and fictionalized versions of
modern wars through the point-of-view of an army-of-one, blasting through
enemy troops to secure a checkpoint or rescue someone. These types of games
reinforce the hypermasculine values traditionally associated with war by
allowing players to enact them. When teammates are present, they are typic-
ally relegated to little more than decoration—the AIs are designed to appear
to be fighting alongside the player, but usually just fire wildly in the general
direction of the enemies. The glory is reserved for the player who must move
from behind cover to brazenly advance on the enemy and to accomplish the
objective against seemingly great odds. Ironically, the immediacy of these
images of war may actually undermine our ability to form lasting, meaningful
readings of them. Jan Mieszkowski (2018) argues that our contemporary
mediascape, in which anyone from a drone pilot to a bystander can capture
and upload images of conflict that can then be viewed by virtually everyone on
Earth, is double-edged. While its democratization circumvents authoritative
discourses of the ‘theater of war’, its proliferation also potentially separates
images from their original context. Cell-phone footage of IEDs exploding
may be recontextualized as a viral internet video, for instance, that one sees
repeated on morning news shows. Mieszkowski posits that through this con-
textually isolated method of spectatorship:
a curiously self-reflexive public discourse has emerged in which the stories

being told about warfare focus as much on the unique ways in which
its audiences process—or fail to process—it as on the violent events
themselves. Whereas previous generations worried about the dangers
of aestheticizing warfare and treating mass destruction as a beautiful
phenomenon, today we are more at risk of aestheticizing the technical
prowess of our communicative media.
(2018, p. 194)
Mieszkowski contends that our ability to view war directly has not resulted
in any greater understanding of war, but rather has caused an increasingly
sophisticated scrutiny for what looks (and thereby is) real in our war media.
Furthermore, any ‘experience’ of war derived from games like Call of Duty
57

is yet another step removed from this process of what Mieszkowski calls ‘the
spectacle of the spectacle’ because these games are representations based on
prior representations that are themselves based upon those first-hand, sub-
jective viewpoints of a phenomenon that is practically unrepresentable (2018,
p. 194). Yet when presented with a verisimilitudinous virtual representation of
the storming of Normandy’s beaches on D-Day, it is tempting to bestow upon
the experience a level of gravitas equivalent to that of the actual events in the
minds of players. With the potential to change how we perceive the experience
of war that these emotional technologies present, perhaps more effort should
be made to portray a wider range of discourses than might and glory.
Reframing the image
Images of war are framed not only within their context, but by the subjects
that capture them. These embedded perspectives can easily be mistaken as a
sense of objective immediacy, or an unconstructed reality. In her book Frames
of War, Judith Butler discusses how these representations establish norms for
the ‘recognizability’ of life, that is, how those norms enable us to recognize a
being as a life or as not-a-life. Butler claims that, in this way, all life is precar-
ious because of the dependency on others to recognize one’s life as life and,
furthermore, the conditions for that recognition are constantly shifting. Yet,
rather than finding common ground in this shared condition of precarious-
ness, ‘each body finds itself potentially threatened by others who are, by defin-
ition, precarious as well’ (Butler 2010, p. 31). This inevitably leads to:
a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite

lives, cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’. Such populations are ‘lose-
able’ or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being
already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know
it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate
state violence, famine, or pandemics. Consequently, when such lives are
lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their
death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the
lives of ‘the living’.
To illustrate these embedded frames, Butler writes of the use of ‘embedded

reporting’ during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq as an example. During this
time, journalists were allowed to accompany military units under the condi-
tion that the military could dictate what was to be reported. Thus, the mili-
tary created its own narrative of the war by establishing the frames around
which US civilians understood the actions undertaken by the military and the
deaths on both sides that resulted from those actions (2010, p. 64). Just as the
abstraction of the rules of war in a wargame function to temper the emotions
of one in the midst of battle, these established parameters of representation
propagandize emotional responses to the acts of war for those back home.
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58 Ryan House
This formulated, yet fragmented perception of war correlates with Angela
Davis’s claim of the ‘unrepresentability of war in the United States’ which has
not seen a war within its own borders since the mid-1800s (2008, p. 19). To
live as a civilian in modern America, then, is to have only a mediated know-
ledge of war that is always situated elsewhere—a knowledge framed through
distance and entertainment and news media. Davis argues that in order to
redress this often incomplete knowledge, we need to emphasize ‘certain habits
of perception, certain habits of imagination’ (2008, p. 26) that empower us to
‘remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants’ (2008, p. 20) into a
world without war. One small step on the road to this utopian idea may be to
rethink our use of the emotional technology of the wargame.
‘In war, not everyone is a soldier’

TWoM is unique to the wargame genre because it reframes the experi-
ence of war by moving away from the soldiers fighting in battle to focus on
noncombatants’ struggle for survival. The title alone suggests a personaliza-
tion of global conflicts—it removes the experience of war from geopolitical
affairs and places it squarely in the realm of everyday life. Initially released
in November 2014 by 11 Bit Studios, the game has garnered a reputation for
its ability to put players in uncomfortable situations that ask them to endure
the precariousness of living within a battle zone.3 It does this through the
genre of a survival strategy game, where players take on the role of a group of
civilians as they attempt to survive in a war-torn city by scavenging for food,
medical supplies, and materials to improve their shelter. Players must often
make decisions that affect not only the player-characters but also the various
non-player-characters (NPCs) that they encounter, such as stealing food from
neighbors to feed themselves. As one reviewer said of the game,
it’s not much fun to actually play. It’ll make you feel terrible about your
actions at almost every turn. But in spite of all that, there is something
so essential about this gaming experience that I urge you to give this
game a try.
(Lange 2016)
This turn away from the goal of producing ‘fun’ entertainment to instead
edifying players through perspectives other than their own perhaps situates
TWoM closer to didactic wargames such as Kriegs-Spiel than to Call of Duty.
Interestingly, where the map of the Kriegs-Spiel provides an overview of its
game space to teach aspiring generals to control their emotions, the close-up
and intimate play space of TWoM, situated as it is within the domestic realm,
enhances its potential for emotional realism. Although the gameplay strongly
resembles real-time strategy (RTS) games,4 the change of the player’s point
of view from a bird’s-eye-view to ground level reframes their perception of
59

their actions from the general on the battlefield to the denizen of the domestic
space—they cease deploying units to secure resources and begin to enact a
collective in its pursuit of shared goals. The game’s space, presented from
a side-view angle, allows a close proximity of the characters and the shelter
they share. The designers modeled the characters on real people, using photo-
realistic images on the character tabs and animating their movements with
motion-capture. These design choices demonstrate the impetus to
humanize the experience of war. Players’ resources were named our

things instead of the typical inventory found in other war games. Also, the
character’s health status was displayed with the terms of affect (i.e., sad,
depressed) instead of a numerical indication.
(de Smale et al. 2017, p. 14)
Ideally, the ‘realisticness’5 of the game decreases the instrumental, strategic

model of gameplay for players. So, while players may still call on a character
to complete a task much like one would deploy a squadron in a RTS game,
they may be less likely to reduce her worth to a utility in the playspace. Players
remain narratively associated with the point of view of the collective that
itself depends on the interpersonal relationships within it. This group coher-
ence is reinforced through the game’s systems, such as when sadness affects
a character’s ability to perform various responsibilities, and its semiotic
domain,6 as described in the quote above.
Despite this resistance to the player’s abstraction of game rules, the
designers still very much privilege emergent stories created through the player’s
interaction with the game’s systems over a plot-driven narrative. Gameplay is
divided into two phases, day and night. During the day, players are confined
to the house by sniper fire and must use this time to attend to characters’ basic
needs, such as eating, resting, and treating wounds. Kacper Kwiatkowski, a
writer and story designer on the development team, explains that the limited
‘choice of activities available for the player during this phase reflects how the
lives of people during such events [are] frequently reduced to minimal, primi-
tive forms, where even satisfying basic human needs becomes a challenge’
(2016, p. 696). From these challenges arise narrative details that slowly start
to form a story. For instance, if a player’s group is running short on food,
decisions must be made as to who will be fed and who will have to wait for
more food to be found. As characters go without food, their behavior (and
playable actions) may begin to change; they may start moving more slowly, or
it may take them longer to complete tasks. Hunger may be compounded by
fatigue and/or sadness, which will exacerbate the effects. In this phase, players
must attend to the characters’ physical and psychological needs, and both
success and failure at these tasks will result in narrative moments. During
the ‘night’ phase, players may choose to send characters out of the safety of
the shelter to scavenge for supplies, assign them to guard the shelter, or allow
60
60 Ryan House
them to rest. Kwiatkowski (2016, p. 697) highlights the importance of the
emergent narrative to the player’s experience:
A freedom to make one’s own decisions is an essential part of the game

experience and affects most of its aspects. The player decides whose needs
come first among the group. They choose the places to visit for supplies
and the way in which they acquire them. It is possible to approach other
characters in a variety of ways, including trading, violence, scaring them
off, helping them, or just ignoring them. The game does not prompt the
player to do one thing instead of another.
This ambivalence of the game’s system to the decisions of the player

underscores its usefulness as an emotional technology. Rather than presenting
the player with the arbitrary ‘sliding scale of morality’, the game acknow-
ledges the impossible situation that the characters find themselves in—there
rarely are right answers in this world, and that is very much the point. Players
must make whatever decision is available and live with the consequences,
weighing the morality of their actions for themselves.
An example of this occurred in a recent playthrough of mine. The well-
being of my group was quickly deteriorating after having not been able to find
food for several days. I decided it was worth the risk to send Katia, a reporter
before the war who is skilled in trading, to a military-controlled supermarket
to scavenge for supplies. She was sure to find some food, and with everyone
nearing starvation, what choice did I have? During the excursion, Katia was
shot by an armed soldier and severely wounded. Although she made it home,
she was unable to return with food, so the trip had been in vain. Lacking the
necessary medical supplies to treat her, I chose to send Bruno, a former pro-
fessional cook and my only other survivor, to the home of an elderly couple
I had encountered earlier in the game. On the first trip, I had decided to leave
the couple alone, leaving their food and medicine behind. This time, however,
I could not afford this kindness. As the elderly man begs for me to leave his
wife’s medicine, Bruno quickly snatches what he can and returns home to
Katia. As Bruno walks through the door, I learn that we are too late; Katia
had died while Bruno was away. Bruno, now alone, is distraught at the death
of his comrade and haunted by the memories of the elderly couple pleading
for their lives. His status changes to ‘Broken’, and after two more days, he
hangs himself. Game over.
This vignette is an example of the sort of hard questions this game asks
of its players. When in an impossible situation, what would you choose to
do? In this playthrough, the precariousness of my characters’ lives reframed
the lives of the elderly couple as forfeit, despite the earlier decision to treat
them as fellow survivors who should be left alone. Rather than prescribing
this morality lesson to me, the procedurality of the game’s mechanics allowed
me to come into the situation myself that would lead to my undertaking of
this impossible problem. The game functioned counter to typical wargames
61

like the Kriegs-Spiel—instead of flattening the emotional responses to war,
it expands them, causing the player to reflect on decisions made in terms of
their human impact.
From the ashes of war

In her book Tactical Media, Rita Raley (2009, p. 98) discusses the efficacy
of games and digital media to disrupt nationalistic, networked accounts of
war through their ability to depict ‘the experience of atrocity “over there” ’.
She argues that these virtual experiences ‘have acquired a representational
authority, and the cultural knowledge they produce has the authority of the
real’ (2009, p. 70). This representational authority can be particularly prob-
lematic when ascribed to masculine power fantasies of war, such as if a player’s
political ideology becomes informed primarily through their experience of
playing a Call of Duty game. The framing of these super-soldier simulations,
often encased within a first-person perspective, crop any emotions that do
not fit into the fantasy, such as fear, guilt, or doubt. Moreover, they prohibit
consideration for lives or experiences on the periphery. These games present
themselves as objective perspectives while simultaneously projecting their
own interpretation onto the depicted images.
TWoM represents a break from these traditional representations of war
by shifting the focus away from the hypermasculinized glory of the battle-
field to the mundane realm of ‘mere-life’. This reframing confronts the
objective immediacy that often goes unquestioned in popular portrayals
of war by offering alternative narratives of wartime experience. The game
achieves this reframing in large part through a reconfiguration of the
wargame’s play space—by substituting an area of domestic cooperation
for the arena of armed conflict. In this space, the actions of the characters
are framed within the context of precarity, not heroics, and players must
adopt a playstyle that matches this situation. Unlike other strategy war
games, TWoM resists the player’s abstraction of the game’s rules and
systems. It accomplishes this through design choices that encourage players
to empathize with the characters rather than viewing them as deployable
units. Finally, players are afforded the ability to make meaningful choices
through their interaction with the game’s systems, and these choices and
their consequences build the narrative of the game and strengthen the
player’s emotional connection to the characters.
By situating its play space within the domestic realm while society at large
collapses outside, TWoM allows its mechanics to disrupt preconceived notions
of the structures of power. Players assign tasks to characters based not on
traditional gendered divisions of labor, but by the aptitude of the characters
to carry out the task or by simple necessity whether that be caring for children,
engineering a filter for rainwater, or the manual labor of removing rubble. This
act of communal survival, of simply continuing to exist, interrupts the inevit-
ability of patriarchy as the de facto social structure as an inherently political
62
62 Ryan House
act. This experience is one that only a feminist wargame could provide—a
reframing of the experience of war through a disruption of the masculine and
feminine spaces of life to lead us to consider new ways of living.
Notes
1 Jessica Meyer calls war ‘a sphere of masculine attainment and suffering’ (2009,
p. 1); Stefan Dudink et al. describe it as the ‘seemingly “natural” homelands of mas-
culinity’ (2004, p. xii); and Leo Braudy notes that ‘war enforces an extreme version
of male behavior as the ideal model for all such behavior’ (2003, p. xvi).
2 See works by Katherine Isbister (2016), Aubrey Anable (2018), and Rosalind
W. Picard (2000).
3 See reviews by Dennis Scimeca (2014), Evan Narcisse (2014), and Harry Slater
(2015).
4 A genre that typically simulates military campaigns from a top-down, god-like per-
spective as seen in games like Warcraft, Civilization, and Command & Conquer.
5 Alexander Galloway’s term for having the property of ‘mimetic reconstruction of
real life’ (2006, p. 72).
6 Miguel Sicart’s term for ‘the metaphors, contexts, and cultural practices that wrap
around a game’s procedural core’ (2013, p. 45).
References
Anable, A 2018, Playing with feelings: video games and affect, University of Minnesota
Braudy, L 2003, From chivalry to terrorism: war and the changing nature of masculinity,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.
Butler, J 2010, Frames of war: when is life grievable? Paperback edition, Verso,
New York, NY.
Call of Duty: Ghosts 2013, Activision, PC.
Command and Conquer 1995, Virgin Interactive Entertainment, PC.
Davis, AY 2008, ‘A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique’, in RL
Riley, CT Mohanty & MB Pratt (eds.), Feminism and war: confronting U.S. imperi-
alism, Zed Books, London, UK, pp. 19–26.
de Smale, S, Kors MJL, & Sandovar AM 2017, ‘The case of This War of Mine: a
production studies perspective on moral game design’, Games and culture, August
2017, pp. 1–23, viewed 8 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017725996.
Donald, R & Macdonald, K 2011, Reel men at war: masculinity and the American war
film. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD.
Dudink, S, Hagemann, K, & Tosh J 2004, ‘Editors’ preface’, in S Dudink, K
Hagerman, & J Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in politics and war: gendering modern his-
tory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, pp. xii–xv.
Engberg-Pedersen, A 2018, ‘Flat emotions: maps and wargames as emotional tech-
nologies’, in A Engberg-Pedersen & K Maurer (eds.), Visualizing war: emotions,
technologies, communities, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 59–77.
Isbister, K 2016, How games move us: emotions by design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
63

Kwiatkowski, K 2016, ‘Civilian casualties: shifting perspective in This War of Mine’,
in P Harrigan & MG Kirschenbaum (eds.) Zones of control: perspectives on
wargaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 691–702.
Lange, S 2016. ‘This war of mine [The little ones] (Xbox One) review’, 411Mania, viewed
15 October 2018, www.411mania.com/games/this-war-of-mine-xbox-one-review/.
Lloyd, G 2013, ‘Selfhood, war, and masculinity’, in C Pateman & E Gross (eds.),
Feminist challenges: social and political theory, Routledge, London, UK, pp. 63–76.
Meyer, J 2009, Men of war: masculinity and the First World War in Britain, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, UK.
Mieszkowski, J 2018, ‘World in the age of anti-social media’, in A Engberg-Pedersen
& K Maurer (eds.), Visualizing war: emotions, technologies, communities, Routledge,
New York, NY, pp. 182–196.
Narcisse, E 2014, ‘This war of mine: the Kotaku review’, Kotaku, viewed 8 March
2019, https://kotaku.com/this-war-of-mine-the-kotaku-review-1660267338/.
Picard, RS 2000, Affective computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Raley, R 2009, Tactical media, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Scimeca, D 2014, ‘The horrifying truth of This war of mine is that war isn’t a game’,
The Daily Dot, viewed 8 March 2019, www.dailydot.com/parsec/this-war-of-mine-
review/.
Sicart, M 2013, Beyond choices: the design of ethical gameplay, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Sid Meier’s Civilization V 2010, Firaxis Games, PC.
Slater, H 2015, ‘This war of mine: let it completely destroy you’, Pocketgamer, viewed
8 March 2019, www.pocketgamer.com/articles/066489/this-war-of-mine-let-it-
completely-destroy-you/.
This War of Mine 2014, 11 Bit Studios, PC.
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans 1994, Blizzard Entertainment, PC.
64
65
Part III
Feminism as war
66
67
5
Gamified suburban violence and the
feminist pleasure of destructive play
Rezoning warzones
Adan Jerreat-Poole
Child’s play
In those hot July nights, we played at war: Cops and Robbers, Risk, GoldenEye.
We played to the backdrop of the Kingston Penitentiary, the Royal Military
College, the army base, the police station. I was young, safe in my whiteness,
in those early years before gender reared its ugly head, and I played at war
without understanding that the suburb was already a war zone, that the
structures that propped up my polite Canadian city were used to police and
terrorize people of colour (POC), particularly trans-and cis-women, and
queer bodies of all kinds (Ahmed 2017; Browne 2015; Davis 2013).
Last night I was followed down the street by a man catcalling. Fear settled
into my bones and I recognized the shape—it has been living in my body for
years. Always, there are men. Sometimes these men have uniforms. Always,
they are permitted to follow us. For a few moments I fantasized about turning
around and screaming, wielding my ragged fingernails like talons. I wanted to
gift him my fear.
Games have the potential to disturb the white middle-class suburb by
uncovering the violence of the police city. Games can also allow players to
explore fear, anger, power, agency, and resistance through feminist fantasies
of violence. In this chapter I first explore the representation of the suburb and
the gendered and racialized concept of ‘safety’ in Life Is Strange (2015) (and
briefly, its prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)), and Night in the
Woods (2017) before moving on to discuss the messy and ambivalent perform-
ance of feminist violence as a form of pleasure. I make the uncomfortable
claim that role-played and imagined acts of feminist violence are modes of
‘critical play’ (Flanagan 2009) that allow for complicated feminist identity
performances that acknowledge and celebrate the bad feelings of hurt, fear,
and anger that marginalized bodies experience under settler colonialism.1
This mode of affective play honours Rebecca Traister’s call to ‘recognize
our own rage as valid’ (2018, xxviii). As the tagline for her Feminist Killjoys
blog suggests, Sara Ahmed envisions ‘killing joy as a world-making project’
(2013); in these games, suburban digital spaces become reclaimed through
destruction-as-feminist-creation.
68
68 Adan Jerreat-Poole
Welcome to the ’burbs
Mailboxes and tennis shoes, manicured lawns and blonde couples with 2.5
kids: welcome to the suburbs, the American Dream, the safest and most
boring place in the world. In pop culture the suburbs are used as shorthand
for the white middle-class experience, designed for white middle-class viewers
and players. The Burb family in The Sims 2 (2004) epitomizes this represen-
tation: they are a white, heterosexual, nuclear family living in Pleasantview.
‘Pleasant’ may be the best way to describe the representation of suburbia in
pop media: suburban neighbourhoods are used to provide a safe and boring
setting to teenage romance and drama, or, in television shows like Santa
Clarita Diet or Desperate Housewives, this pleasantness is used to provide
a playful juxtaposition to the outrageous over-the-top murder and intrigue.
What rarely gets represented on screen is the suburban legacy of racial
segregation, from the ‘white flight’ of the 1950s and 1960s following the
desegregation of education, to present-day policies and practices (Avila 2004;
Boustan 2010). Eric Avila writes that ‘Postwar suburbanization sanctioned
the formation of a new racial geography’ as ‘federally sponsored suburban-
ization removed an expanding category of ‘white’ Americans from what
deteriorated into inner-city … racialized poverty’ (2004, p. 4). In Canada, the
increase in visible minorities and immigrants in urban centres has been cited
as one impetus for white Canadians moving out of urban centres as early
as the 1920s but particularly after the Second World War (Belshaw 2016).
The racialization of the city and suburb in North America continues today,
from gated and policed communities to gentrification, which displaces lower-
income and working-class families (often along racial and ethnic lines) (Arel
2017; Hwang 2015; Kirkland 2008).
High school suburbia

The suburbs in French developer Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange
(LIS) feel familiar: wide garage doors, sidewalks, fenced lawns. They feel
familiar partly because I had a white middle-class childhood in a suburb in
the west end of Kingston, Ontario, and partly because I’ve seen these garage
doors and lawns in hundreds of films, TV shows, and video games. But while
the game takes us into the suburban home and drives us through the wide
paved streets of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, like all good teenage dramas it pri-
marily exists in the school. Blackwell Academy is a middle-/upper-class
educational institution similar to the wealthy high schools that have become
ubiquitous in teen dramas like One Tree Hill and Riverdale (while inner-city
schools and rural schools continue to be under-represented on screen).
Framing the narrative through the school signals to the player that LIS
falls in the Young Adult (YA) genre of high school narrative: I can expect
crushes and heartbreak, bullying and tests, brushes with drugs and alcohol.
69
Gamified suburban violence 69

I am introduced to the narrative and world through the classroom, and then a
hallway filled with lockers, teenagers, and anti-bullying posters. I look for the
cookie-cutter characters: the love interest (Warren), the sidekick/best friend
(Chloe), the villain (the parent who doesn’t understand us: Chloe’s stepdad),
the mentor (the nice teacher who does: Mr. Jefferson). These archetypal fig-
ures are helpfully offered to the player early on in the game.
The school is a liminal space in YA stories: a place to enter as children and
leave as adults; the chrysalis for the transformation into full citizens; the per-
fect setting for a bildungsroman. LIS, however, uses the setting of the school
to deconstruct this genre and to reveal the artificiality of divisions of age and
life-stage that are tied to myths of security and safety. LIS is less a coming-
of-age narrative than it is an unravelling of the false binaries of child/adult,
innocence/experience, and ignorance/knowledge. This unravelling is enacted
through the time-rewind mechanic, an ability the young female protagonist
Max gains at the beginning of the game. Ahmed writes that our society/cul-
ture orients us along a path, and ‘a path gives life a certain shape, a direction,
a sequence (birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death)’
(2017, p. 45). Moving backward and forward in time, the game disorients the
player, queering timelines and heteronormative pathways. Through this dis-
orientation, the game makes visible the harm of these binaries that refuse to
accept the knowledge that young people experience violence, and that young
women are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and violence under settler
colonialism.
Small town cuteness

Made by the Canadian studio Infinite Fall, Night in the Woods (NITW) is
set in the picturesque small town of Possum Springs. The narrative plays out
against a backdrop of beautiful autumn foliage and frolicking squirrels. The
art style is cartoonish, with a bright colour palette, round faces, big eyes, and
a cast of adorable animals: Mae is an anthropomorphized cat, and her friends
are a fox, a blue crocodile, and a bear that looks like a teddy. The houses are all
similar in appearance: multi-storied with windows, complete with mailboxes
and picket-fences. The cartoon suburbs in this video game embody the aes-
thetic of cuteness.
Cuteness is an aesthetic for girls: it’s sweet and sugary and adorable, pink
and yellow and baby blue. Cuteness is associated with baby animals and
stuffed animals, which NITW clearly imitates. Cuteness has a relationship
with innocence which in turn has a relationship with childhood. Cute things
are to be protected, to be kept safe. Cute things are incapable of being harmed
because they transform all potential villains—think Despicable Me—into
heroes and saviours. The adorable vulnerability of cute objects and bodies is
used to signal what and who is worth protecting, and what kinds of vulner-
ability invoke protection rather than violence.
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The aesthetic of cuteness is also ‘a historically-specific category shaped
by and deeply invested in hegemonic formulations of race, gender, and con-
sumption’ (Schlesselman-Tarango 2017, p. 2). Cuteness is a cultural construct
that reflects dominant discourses of race, gender, and class (Ahmed 2010,
2017; Lury 2010; Schlesselman-Tarango 2017). As these writers remind us,
‘cuteness’ is ideologically used to mark the child worthy of protection (white
girlhood) from the child on the margins (Black girlhood) through associating
white femininity with ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’. Sara Ahmed, speaking of Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, explains that the novel describes ‘the conflation of
whiteness with beauty and virtue: the happy ones are blue-eyed, the blue-eyed
ones are beautiful, the beautiful ones are the good ones, the good ones are the
happy ones’ (Ahmed 2010, p. 80). When confronted with the blonde, blue-
eyed, able-bodied toddler, viewers are prompted to protect. When confronted
with a Black body, or a disabled body, these taught codes of response are
not initiated. Instead, more troubling reactions emerge: Tobin Siebers writes
that ‘observers of the disabled body often feel compelled to fly into action, to
cure or kill the ungainly sight before their eyes’ (2010, p. 62). These socialized
affective responses to different bodies function toward the same goal: the
reproduction of the white heteronormative able-bodied middle-class.
So maybe we should all stand with Mae on this one: ‘I hate cute people!
Cute is the worst!’
Feminist snap
I’m in a junkyard smashing shit with a baseball bat. I’m playing Life Is
Strange: Before the Storm. It’s the day Brett Kavanaugh is elected to the
Supreme Court.2 It feels good to break something, even virtually. Bottle?
Smash. Toolbox? Smash. Car? Fuck yes. Smash. Smash. Smash.
Ahmed calls these moments ‘snap’: ‘Snap is quite a sensation. Your snap
can be to make a sharp sound. As a feminist killjoy, I have been giving my
ear to those who sound sharp’ (2017, p. 188). Snap can be a refusal, a rejec-
tion: ‘By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear,
a world I do not think should be borne’ (p. 199). Moments of snap appear
across these games, where things are irrevocably broken: silences, buildings,
family ties. I can see that anger carrying Max and Mae towards the destruc-
tion of their charming little abusive sexist colonial towns. I wonder where it’s
going to take me. These breaks are not the trauma of a bone snapping on
pavement but the healing re-break of a bone that needs setting. By snapping,
they are broken again, making visible the original wound and site of trauma.
Broken bottles, promises, and bodies: the undercurrent of violence that winds
its way through these stories and virtual suburbs oscillates between domin-
ance and resistance, the brutal status quo and the painful burns that allow
new growth.
Chloe: ‘Glass looks way prettier when it’s broken. Wonder what else that’s
true for?’ (Before the Storm).
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Breaking (into) the school

Graffiti on the wall reads ‘121 M to Misbehave’, and soon I’m the one misbe-
having, queering the heteronormative pool scene with the deep (end) affect of
women who love women splashing, playing, and revelling in bad behaviour.
This scene in LIS is the finale to a sequence that starts with Max and Chloe
breaking into the school and includes searching the principal’s office. There
is a thrill in this rule-breaking, breaking and entering; an endorphin rush in
entering this symbolic space of patriarchal authority. Chloe sits in his wing-
backed chair, symbolically dethroning the straight man. Here, queer girls
assert agency through law breaking and occupying and transforming straight
spaces with queer feminism. When we break in, we are also breaking out of
the heteronormative construct that has shaped our family life and our life
narrative. When we break the rules, we are following in a tradition of queer
feminist rulebreakers and lawbreakers.
It feels good to be this kind of bad.
This badness takes us on a dangerous journey through the public secrets
of prominent townsfolk as we search to uncover the mystery of Rachel
Amber’s disappearance. The popular town narrative is that she ran away
to Los Angeles; however, the benevolent mentor-figure, Max’s celebrity
photography teacher Mr. Jefferson, is revealed to be a predator, assaulting
and murdering his female students. The real mentee is not aspiring pho-
tographer Max, but a young white man raised into privilege, power, and
violence. Nathan is teased for being geeky, weird, and slight of frame, but
reclaims hegemonic masculinity in two ways: (1) through the capitalist
value of accumulating financial wealth, and (2) by following in his cha-
rismatic teacher’s footprints and asserting physical power over the bodies
of young women. Nathan is, as so many young wealthy white man are,
untouchable.
The female characters we play as and with—Max, Chloe, and Rachel
Amber—are  not.
In the cat-and-mouse game that follows, the only thing keeping fear at
bay—and keeping the game from slipping into the horror genre, also littered
with the bodies of dead teenage girls—is the intense rage that burns in fem-
inist killjoy Chloe. She is sick of being told what to do by domineering men.
She is sick of not being believed. She has learned to not trust authority fig-
ures: teachers, cops, fathers. And she passes on this hard-earned knowledge to
us, the protagonist/player, and our avatar in the game, Max.
This peeling back the layers of politeness to the violence at the centre
of the school and the town reaches a climax at another staple of the teen
drama genre: the party. The End of the World Party. Teenagers everywhere
are mocked for thinking everything is the end of the world—a pimple or a
low grade on a quiz—and in true pop culture teen fashion, the popular kids at
Blackwell Academy throw a wild party to celebrate the apocalypse.
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One of the background frames to the game is global warming and envir-
onmental degradation. Climate change has decimated the fishing industry in
the fictional (but all too real) town of Arcadia Bay, and poverty is perva-
sive when you leave the sheltered grounds of the academy. While ‘kids’ are
made fun of for thinking that an unrequited crush is the height of horror, this
high school drama is explicitly set in an uncertain world that echoes our own,
where sea levels are rising, the ozone layer is being depleted, and the economy
is crashing.
Within the wealthy suburban school, the Blackwell students are nowhere
near safe. From pregnancy to bullying, from suicide to sexual assault and
drug addiction, these teens deal with real-world trauma and harm in a vio-
lent colonial heteropatriarchy that has never spared the young. The End of
the World Party concludes with photography teacher Mr. Jefferson himself
taking the stage and the attention of the crowd. At the centre of the revelry is
a white male adult who signifies one of the harshest realities of life in our cul-
ture: the man you know, the man who masquerades as a mentor or caregiver.
The man who abuses. The white man who wields social, political, and physical
power over the body of these young women.
Are we still laughing at the teens who think the end of the world is coming?
The celebration of apocalypse has distinctly queer undertones. In No
Future, Lee Edelman argues that time is focalized around ‘the pervasive trope
of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity’
(2004, p. 19). Here, the party seems to implicate the player in jettisoning
futurity as a means of reclaiming queer time. We celebrate the bodies that are
framed as having no future (because there is no future imagined possible for
them under the heteropatriarchy). Somewhere in the booze-drenched YOLO
of an apocalypse party is the rejection of heteronormative futurity that marks
not only the conventional generational break (only to be later mended as
youths become adults and turn into their parents) but a queer uncertainty
that spirals out (of control) across the time-jumping, time-bending, time-bent
narrative. In this scene we are ultimately confronted with both the violent
reality of the world, and a generation of young people who are celebrating
the end of that world.
The end of the world

The end comes, in full environmental feminist fury, in the form of a tornado
that will decimate Arcadia Bay.
LIS has rightfully been criticized for perpetuating the ‘bury your gays’ trope,
a trend in popular media where queer characters (particularly women) are
killed, like Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Riley in The Last of Us (Chan
2017). Chloe is murdered in the beginning of the game, which commences the
turn-back-time narrative and ludic elements of the game. The player saves
Chloe, only to have her die over and over again throughout the story, as her
73

body continues to be resurrected merely to be punished once again for her
queerness. Chloe is shot three times in the game, and the player has the option
of euthanizing her in another timeline. Including the finale, Chloe can die up
to five times, and has to die at least twice.
The finale of the game hinges on an absurd decision between saving
Chloe or saving the town from a tornado. Rather than taking this final
decision literally, I read it as a metaphorical choice. Does the player as
Max choose to save Chloe and therefore turn away from her heterosexist
middle-class white community in place of an unknown radical queer fem-
inist future? Or, nudged by the narrative, do we agree to be straightened out
in the arms of the male love interest, Warren, and let the dissenting voice
of queer feminism die?
Do we sacrifice Chloe for the facade of stability and safety, trading her life
for the double garage doors and security cameras?
Do we allow ourselves to become complicit in a town that is willing to let
young women suffer harm in order to protect the reputation of men?
I snapped.
‘Snap: when she can’t take it anymore; when she just can’t take it anymore’
(Ahmed 2017, p. 190).
I let the town burn.
I drove away with Chloe through the rubble of the town that had been
tying me to a life I didn’t want. A life that permitted and concealed vio-
lence against women, bodies of colour, fat bodies, and queer bodies.
A heteronormative life that had already been mapped out again and again
in the homes and families of the town. A blueprint that I was being asked
to accept and reproduce.
‘Sometimes we have to struggle to snap bonds, including familial bonds,
those that are damaging or at least compromising of a possibility that you are
not ready to give up’ (Ahmed 2017, p. 188).
We don’t look back.
Wrecking the mine
While LIS revolves around the disposability of young women in our culture,
it still allows us to mourn the female characters because of their whiteness
(if you choose the town over Chloe, there is an extended funeral scene of
mourning). NITW, however, is more critical of the racialized and classed
nature of state-sanctioned violence. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler poses
the question ‘What makes for a grievable life?’ (2004, p. 20). This question is
deeply embedded in the racialized discourses of cuteness and childhood: the
dead ‘angel’ of the white child versus the ‘criminal’ body of a Black child
murdered by police. Who is mourned as a tragic loss, and whose death is
accepted as collateral damage, understood as the price ‘we’ pay for keeping
the city ‘safe’? (Paid by whom? And safe for whom? These questions fall
74

along racialized lines.) Jasbir Puar critiques the dominant framing of these
murders as
The police were merely ‘doing their job’, a dangerous, life-threatening one.
This calculation of risk is the founding rationalization for the impunity
of ‘the right to kill’ wielded by U.S. law enforcement.
(2017, p. x)
I would extend the ‘calculation of risk’ that puts the risk onto racialized and
vulnerable bodies beyond American borders and into Canada.
Police officers have been granted the right to kill by the state, but only
some bodies are calculated as an acceptable loss, if they are figured as a loss
at all. Imogen Tyler uses the term ‘social abjection’ to describe the visceral
and affective process in which ‘figurative scapegoats’ (2013, p. 9) are used by
governments when capitalism fails to live up to its promises, and as rallying
points for nationalism and community- building. Some vulnerable bodies
require saving, while other ‘lives are deemed worthless or expendable’ (p. 10).
And while all bodies are vulnerable, vulnerability shifts and transforms
through different bodies and sociocultural positions. Puar reminds us that
‘National recognition and inclusion … is contingent upon the segregation
and disqualification of racial and sexual others from the national imaginary’
(2007, p. 2). We (white bodies) accept the violence committed against bodies
of colour as necessary, as the price we pay to retain our white privilege. The
Black child is recast as criminal, as a threat to white civilization. We do not
grieve the death of the Black or brown child.3
Mae is black, working class, queer, and mentally ill. Her best friend, Gregg
the fox, identifies as queer and is in an interspecies relationship with a bear
named Angus. As many authors have discussed, Mae embodies a careful and
nuanced representation of mental illness, as do her friends: Gregg lives with
bipolar, Angus lives with trauma, and Bea lives with grief (Saas 2017; Spencer
2017; Wald 2018). The cuteness of Possum Springs is quickly juxtaposed
with the reality of a former mining town that is struggling with poverty and
unemployment, and a town council that is pushing for gentrification (and
pushing many of the residents out). There is a homeless character that the
council refuses to shelter, and a cast of underpaid and overworked minimum-
wage employees. And Mae, the first person in her family to attend higher edu-
cation, is a college dropout. Welcome to Possum Springs (‘Awesome Springs!’),
where people sift through garbage to make a living, friends go missing, and
storefronts close overnight. Oh, and that severed-arm-on-the sidewalk thing.
The story follows Mae’s adventures with her friends, conversations with
locals, and culminates in a ghost hunt. The climax reveals that the ghosts
are not, in fact, mental illness-inspired hallucinations, but a ‘murder cult of
dads’ (Mae) who have been sacrificing homeless youth in an attempt to save
the town, including Mae’s former friend and bandmate, Casey. The revela-
tion of the existence of a ‘Death Cult of Conservative Uncles’ (Mae) is where
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the game is at its most absurd and most real, as the older figures that have
haunted Mae throughout the game turn out to be angry white-coded men
who blame the economic decline of their town on ‘lazy people ’n’ immigrants’
who they describe as ‘trash’ and ‘dirtbag kid[s]‌’. Imogen Tyler reminds us that
discourses of waste are used in the creation of ‘national abjects’ (2013, p. 192),
and NITW shows us the extent to which metaphor enables violence against
racialized bodies.
The depiction of failed white masculinity that is embodied by the cult is
reminiscent of Trainspotting or Fight Club. Jack Halberstam, on Trainspotting,
writes:
The novel collapses into the angry and seething language of the male
punk from whom a legacy of patriarchal and racial privilege has been
withheld. In this example of unqueer failure, failure is the rage of the
excluded white male, a rage that promises and delivers punishments for
women and people of color.
(2011, p. 92)
This ‘unqueer’ anger emerges in Possum Springs quite literally from the
ruins of the closed mine, bubbling up from under the surface of white rural
camaraderie and small-town friendliness. Here, angry white bodies seek to
reclaim the privileges of hegemonic masculinity and whiteness through vio-
lence. They accept ‘the symbolic and material scapegoats’ (Tyler 2013, p. 192)
that neoliberal colonialism offers to them. They blame the failed promises
of capitalism on a ‘them’ that encompasses immigrants, queer, mentally ill,
and disabled bodies, and in so doing, reinforce the social cohesion of ‘us’
as white, heteronormative, and able-bodied. The cult therefore reproduces
the violent colonial binary of ‘civilization versus barbarianism’ (Puar 2007,
p. 20). The cuteness of Possum Springs and NITW is revealed to be a delib-
erate candy-coated facade, a cover for the violence of capitalism that destroys
unions, towns, and homes, and to obscure the violence of white supremacy
that threatens bodies at the margins, especially feminized and queer bodies
of colour.
Like in LIS, the dominant town narrative is that Casey ran away, and just
as the gameplay in LIS is punctuated by missing persons posters, the town
notice board in Possum Springs contains a missing persons poster for Casey
that clashes with the ‘Firewood 4 Sale’ sign and a full-colour Possum Springs
advert. It’s worth noting that Casey is described as last seen in a ‘black
hooded sweatshirt’, a visual cue that echoes the racialized and classed UK
term ‘hoodie’ to describe criminalized youth. This stereotyping of a particular
kind of youth (who are not cute but rather contaminating) foreshadows the
discovery of the murder cult later in the game.
The irony in both games, of course, is that most of the people in the town
know or have guessed that Casey and Rachel Amber aren’t missing, making
everyone complicit in the violence. Bea tells Mae that one of her dad’s
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employees offered to teach her to drive, and her father ‘said No, and then
told me not to be alone with him. He still works for us’, says Bea. The cult
knows Mae by name. These are not strangers in the woods, but neighbours,
friends, small business owners. They are someone’s dads. They could even
be ours. By explicitly using the words ‘Dad’ and ‘Uncle’ to describe the
cult, NITW makes you feel the crumbling safety net of family and commu-
nity. The safety of the peaceful small town is a myth, and the game doesn’t
shy away from the important step of questioning and snapping the ties of
family. The ending of the game isn’t so much a shocking twist as a gradual
revelation of the truth that Mae—and myself, the player—have been trying
to avoid, as we are constantly turning away from the reality that predators
live among us, are known, and are continually protected by the community
they live in.
Nuke Possum Springs

A vandal has spray-painted over the historic Possum Springs mural of miners,
a mural that commemorates and celebrates the heyday of the town’s economic
prosperity and the strength of its unions. The vandal turns out to be our friend
Lori M., an introverted teenager living in poverty who spends most of her
days hanging out on the tops of buildings or out by the railway tracks. ‘The
dudes are sacred!’ Mae has the option of exclaiming, and to the town, and
the murder cult, they are, and that’s the problem—and the point. Lori: ‘This
entire place is royally messed up! And nobody cares! I wanted someone to
notice things aren’t OK’.
‘Nuke Possum Springs’ foreshadows the climax of the game, in which
Mae and her friends trigger a cave-in at the old mine, an act carrying leg-
acies of classed danger, vulnerable bodies, and the violence of capitalism
that demands sacrifices in blood. This contemporary cave-in, however, while
echoing that original wounding, is a new break, a final snap. It’s an act of
violence that ultimately kills and ends the cult. The player comes to under-
stand that Possum Springs has already died—the prosperous mining town no
longer exists, and never existed as an ideal—and it’s necessary to kill the idea
of what it was, to get rid of the ghost that is haunting the town and hunting
marginalized bodies. And it’s significant that a group of queer and racialized
bodies make this second break.
Both LIS and NITW explore vulnerability; what kinds are valued, what
kinds are radical, and what kinds are manufactured, and challenge the
assumption that our culture values the young. The ‘sheltered’ teens and young
adults in these stories, predominantly young women, are vulnerable in many
ways, and are not kept safe. Their lives are sacrificed by towns and the people
that make up those towns who aren’t willing to face the brutal reality of life
under settler colonialism, or who are willing to sacrifice marginalized bodies
in order to maintain the status quo. In each narrative, the economic and emo-
tional survival of the community—and community cohesion—is literally
77

built on the bones of the young, and it’s the young, without help from their
parents, working around and against the cops, teachers, and city councillors,
who uncover the bones.
Feminist violence, pleasure, and love
I will shout down the throats of men who only understand the language of
violence.
(Janice Jo Lee, ‘Hard Femme High Power’, 2016)
I saw Janice Jo Lee perform the brilliant spoken-word piece ‘Hard Femme
High Power’ in Kitchener, Ontario, in the summer of 2017 as part of a queer
cabaret. The room was filled with queer bodies and laughter and wine as we
cheered for Lee’s performance of a bad-ass femme who would kick down any
man who got in her way. Words of violence and declarations of aggression
were met with recognition and delight by a room full of people sharing space,
air, music, experiences, love.
This articulation and celebration of anger and aggression appears again
and again in feminist media, from widely favorited and retweeted tweets to
memes and gifs shared across social media platforms. In September 2018, a
tweet by author Madeleine L’Engle (a quote from her novel A Wrinkle in
Time), ‘ “Stay angry, little Meg”, Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all
your anger now” ’ garnered over 26,000 likes on Twitter. Around the same
time, a meme of a woman walking through a fiery explosion with the caption
‘BURN IT ALL DOWN’ circulated through my networks on Twitter and
Facebook. In October 2018, Bitch Media published a weeklong series entitled
‘The Future is Furious’ and announced that ‘It’s Time to Embrace Feminism’s
Anger’ (Zeisler 2018).
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed reflects on anger as a form
of ‘Feminist Attachment’ (2004, p. 168). Describing ‘the role of emotions
in the politicisation of subjects’ (p. 171), Ahmed discusses the early feelings
of anger that brought her into contact with feminism, and writes that ‘Such
emotional journeys are bound up with politicisation, in a way that reanimates
the relation between the subject and a collective’ (p. 171). Relationships are
built through shared anger and collective action—from the furious shared joy
of rule-breaking in LIS to the companionship and community that ends in
healing violence in NITW. On and off-screen, communal anger invigorates
feminist action and enables queer community-building.
Games are affective, assemblages of digital and physical bodies, feelings,
and code (Anable 2018; Shaw 2014; Sundén, and Sveningsson 2012). Games
move us, touch us, are touched by us. The revolting video game avatar
becomes my revolting Twitter avatar becomes my revolting body off screen.
Bodies resisting in digital and physical spaces. As Mae, I run through a dream
sequence with a baseball bat, smashing cars, garbage cans, lampposts, and
neon signs. The sound of breaking glass is beautiful. As Max, I drive through
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the damaged site that was once a town, tires crunching over demolished
buildings. Chloe’s journal in Before the Storm reads ‘Death to Fascists’ with a
knife drawn through the centre, while Mae’s therapy-prescribed journal reads
‘Nuke Possum Springs’ in a mushroom cloud. I imagine the kinds of creative
violent journaling practices feminists are doing off screen.
There is a fierce joy and a guilty pleasure in this kind of play; in this par-
ticular kind of feminist identity performance that validates my experiences,
feelings, body. Guilty because we are taught that anger is a masculine
emotion, that anger can only ever harm, and never heal. But I think we were
taught wrong. There is power in this critical play and identity performance
that claims a right to anger. Feminist anger, like feminist snap, is not needless,
reckless, apocalyptic, unqueer. Feminist anger is a complex affect that starts
in the bones of a body that has known and witnessed harm; it works its way
from our skeleton and into our muscles, tendons, and ligaments, stretching
across space to touch other bodies and draw us together. Some days it holds
me together. Some days it holds us together as people, as feminists: ‘It is a
communicative tool’ (Traister 2018, p. xxvii). We like each other’s posts on
Facebook; we share our friends’ mad memes; we emotionally connect with
our angry avatars in-game.
Revelling in feminist violence on screen rejects myths of forgiveness and
gendered narratives of standing by your man, of passivity and silence and
suffering as holy. Feminist anger, importantly, is never just anger. Traister
writes that ‘We must come to recognize … that anger is often an exuberant
expression’ (2018, p. xxvii). Anger can be joy. Anger can be love; the way we
express love for ourselves and for each other. Claiming our anger can be pleas-
urable. Coming together as angry feminists can be pleasurable. Destroying
violent structures and systems can be pleasurable, and an act of love. Audre
Lorde wrote that ‘everything can be used/except what is wasteful /(you will
need/to remember this when you are accused of destruction)’ (1973, lines 20–
23). Feminist destruction-as-creation uses our anger, our hurt, our pain, and
our love; it uses the materials of our city and our bodies to make something
new. We are ripping apart old sheets and dresses to make patches for a quilt.
Our needles are sharp.
Anger is world-making
I live with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, and when I’m overwhelmed
by the violence that is allowed and allowable in our society, when I’m
exhausted from reading testimonies and headlines and vitriolic abuse online,
it isn’t hope that drags me out of bed.4
It’s anger.
Sadness makes me small and quiet, shrinking into corners and edges, but
anger makes me expansive and loud. And while smashing street lights with
a baseball bat in-game doesn’t drive me to smash street lights outside my
apartment building, it just might drive me to bang pots and pans together
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outside City Hall. It might take us to walk-outs and sit-ins, and to embodying
refusals of all kind. This is anger channelled toward change. This is targeted,
strategic destruction. We want to dismantle the system of policing, the ‘justice’
system that has never been just, prisons, and violent and corrupt governments.
We want to remake the education system.
Playing games may have an emotionally cathartic function for some
players, but pleasurable fantasies of feminist violence do more than this. They
validate our anger. They tell us that we should be angry. They tell us to hold
on to our anger, to nurture it, and to use it.
They show us that anger can be world-making.
Women are routinely accused by Gamergate, meninists, and alt- right
groups of ‘ruining’ video games by making them diverse, accessible, and fem-
inist. Millennials have allegedly ‘killed’ golf, the diamond industry, and break-
fast cereal (the values we hold most dear in the suburbs!) (Bryan 2017; Taylor
2017). We’re not finished with the games industry. We’re not finished with the
suburbs. We’re not finished with breaking and re-making our communities.
We’re just getting started.
LIS and NITW are part of what Ahmed calls my ‘killjoy survival kit’
(2017, p. 235). They remind me of the creative possibilities in feminist
destruction. That while love between two women does not have to destroy
a heterosexist town, maybe it could—maybe it should. Identifying with cute
anthropomorphized animals reminds me of my own queerness, and the queer
communities I’ve been a part of that enable connections across bodies that are
not and need not be cis-female. These games remind me that some things need
to be destroyed. They move me and keep me moving forward. These ‘com-
panion texts’ (p. 17) keep me company through the often lonely experience of
being a feminist killjoy, especially as a Mad/crip/queer body. They insist that
I don’t have to get over my anger or temper it into a more consumable friendly
passive tentative question.
Ahmed: ‘When it is not over, it is not time to get over it’ (2017, p. 262).
Notes
1 My (still developing) understanding of settler colonialism comes primarily from
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always: Indigenous Freedom through
Radical Resistance (2017), as well as from the works of other Indigenous scholars,
and will be discussed in the chapter as (binary) gendered, patriarchal, ableist, and
capitalist.
2 In the summer of 2018 Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court of
the United States amidst accusations of sexual violence. Despite the testimony of
Dr. Ford, a series of hearings, and the outspoken outrage of feminists and women
across the United States and Canada (this story dominated our news cycle in
Canada), Kavanaugh’s nomination was confirmed on 6 October, and he was sworn
in later that day.
3 Challenging the white nationalist archives of memory that deny Black suffering,
#BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName have been used as a method of witnessing
80

and mourning the deaths of Black bodies murdered by the police (Fischer and
Mohrman 2016).
4 Many people with these conditions are not able to drag themselves out of bed.
My white and middle-class privilege also make it significantly easier to manage my
disabilities.
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82
6
Because we are always warring
Feminism, games, and war
Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson
It’s a planet of resistance

It’s a whirling flame of choice
Are you my comrades in persistence
I swear they’ll know us by our voice
Though we lay down in dusty corners
We are ragged as a scar
And when we rest our eyes stay open
We are always off to war
(‘Misty Mountain’ ©1980 Ferron;
℗1980 Nemesis Publishing)
‘Feminist war games?’

Questions about ‘feminist war games’—whether there can be such a thing,
what such games might do, be, and look like—well illustrate what Wittgenstein
characterized as ‘language gone on a holiday’. The words can be assembled
as lexical items in grammatical sentences, but as conjoined concepts, they are
conceptually incoherent and discursively contradictory. They simply make no
sense. Questions about ‘feminist war games’ can’t be answered, because, unable
to coalesce into an intelligible construct, such a line of inquiry is outflanked,
so to speak, and undermined by its own terms of engagement: these are
questions that cannot be meaningfully posed.
Consider its grammatically constitutive parts. ‘Feminist’ is that which is
allied to and aligned with ‘Feminism’, a social movement that places women
at the center of concern, with the aim of advancing the interests and well-
being of women, as a generic class. How, then, does that concept align with
the concept (or concepts) of ‘war’? how does or could war support those
interests?
‘War’ is a sustained campaign of antagonism aimed at subjugating a
defined enemy through coercion. How then might women be a ‘center of con-
cern’ in such a campaign? How can women’s wellbeing be advanced through
war?1 Wars have never placed women’s wellbeing at the center of concern, nor,
indeed, have women ever been a ‘defined enemy’. In fact, the opposite has
been and is ubiquitous.
83
Because we are always warring 83

In particular women, with their children, are chattel, rewards or else ‘spoils’
of victory in an engagement over which they have no choice, and no place.
They have no right of consent, and they have at many times and places been
disqualified from military service.2 Women do not determine military action,
nor are they agents of their own defense or protection. An intrinsic disregard
of individual sovereignty characterizes war as against, for instance, fights,
feuds, disagreements, and other kinds of agonistic relationships between and
among sovereign individuals.
As a class, women are only ever victims of war, they do not ‘make’ it. So in
war, as in language, ‘woman’ is the disenfranchised other.
In what sense, then, could war ever be ‘feminist’?
‘Game’ is of course the dodgiest term. At minimum, ‘game’ is something
actually or potentially ludic (both voluntary and playful), and rule-guided.
Digital games in particular constitute a techno-cultural environment in which
women are already very explicitly embattled (Jenson & de Castell 2017; Cross
2017; Sarkeesian & Hudson 2016). By ‘war games’ we understand actual and
possible games modelled upon activities whose aim is to conquer, through stra-
tegic violence, a defined group, regarded collectively, thus not as consenting
subjects in a conflict but as dominated objects. Obviously, feminists can play
war games so understood, but this is not feminist play.3
They say they have the strength of the lion the hatred of the tiger the
cunning of the fox the patience of the cat the perseverance of the horse
the tenacity of the jackal. They say, I will be universal vengeance. They
say, I shall be the Attila of those ferocious despots, causes of our tears
and our sufferings. They say, and when, fortunately, all will want to rally
to me, each will be Nero, and will set fire to Rome. They say, war, mine.
They say, war, forward. They say that once they have guns in their hands
they will not abandon them. They say they will shake the world like light-
ning and thunder.
(Wittig 1969, p. 172)
The closest thing we have to a feminist war game, this paper argues, is to be
found in the experimental literature and critical essays of Monique Wittig,
one of feminism’s most radical writers and thinkers, whose work enacts,
through its ‘terrorist’ mobilization of language, an explicit call to arms
against a deeply patriarchal language whose ‘rules are no game’ (Wilden
1987) for women.
As far as men are concerned, though, the situation is very different. In
Cannibals and Kings (1977) American anthropologist Marvin Harris identi-
fied, among four theories of war’s origins, the theory of war as ‘play’ noting
that, ‘especially men … are frequently brought up to believe that warfare is
a zestful or ennobling activity’ (p. 52). Four decades and several wars later,
this zestful and ennobling activity of warfare has become a paradigmatic
narrative and design structure for generation after generation of videogames.
84
84 Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson

Not insignificantly, and deserving of more extensive discussion than can
happen here, the defense of those mechanics, and the ‘war’ narratives
accompanying them, have composed a persistent theme at the heart of the
vehemently misogynist rhetoric of #Gamergate. Wargames share with war
the core ‘mechanics’ of domination through dehumanization and destruc-
tion. For this reason, it won’t make a wargame ‘feminist’ to re-position
women from ‘chattel’ to leading role—an update of the ‘add women and
stir’ approach to feminist strategy. Nor are those rare, aspirationally ethical
wargames, like This War of Mine (2014), ‘feminist’ because they focus on the
roles of non-combatants and evoke empathy for the position of women and
others trying to survive, because feminism is an activist movement, it’s ‘more
than a feeling’, and limiting feminist aspirations to feelings of empathy is
a fundamentally conservative stance. It’s worth mentioning that This War
of Mine is less a ‘wargame’ than a ‘war-themed survival game’: its goal is
simply to endure, not to put an end to war. Other games, like Portal (2007),
acclaimed by many reviewers as a ‘feminist game’, involve combat, even vio-
lence, but it is not a war game—nor is there anything antithetical about fem-
inism and aggression or feminism and violence But war is a very particular
form of violence. Paradigmatic designs and mechanics of wargames (indis-
criminate destruction, for instance) make no sense, as sociologist Dorothy
Smith characterizes it, ‘from the standpoint of women’ (1987). From the
standpoint of women, war is unaffordable and insupportable, its ‘terms of
engagement’ antagonistic towards them. War calls always and everywhere for
evasive manoeuvers on their part.
But, from, another perspective …
We are always off to war …

Three cats are caught by the tail in a trap. They each go their own way
miaowing. The heavy trap jerks forward slowly behind them. They scream,
they lash out, scratching the ground with their claws. Their hair is on end.
One of them stands still and begins to arch its back grinding its teeth and
shrieking. The two other cats strive to shake him off by tugging at the
trap. But they only succeed in making him turn a somersault in the iron
collar. Then all three fight each other, they fling themselves against each
other scratching and biting, they wound each other’s eyes, their muzzles,
they tear the hair from their necks, they can no longer stop fighting and
the trap which gets between their legs only adds to their fury.
(Wittig 1985, p. 21)
Described by Monique Wittig in Les Guerilleres, as ‘a game the women

play’, this description offers us a useful way to consider what language and
its ‘games’ are like for women ‘from the standpoint of women’ (1985, p. 21).
What kind of game is it that traps and infuriates to the point of ‘catastrophe’?
This, ‘the game that is not one’, is neither freely engaged nor playful, and its
85

rules work systematically and inescapably against its players. They play, not
because they choose to, but because there is no other choice; they play because
they must: ‘Better for you to see your guts in the sun and utter the death rattle
than to live a life that anyone can appropriate’ (Wittig 1985, p. 71).
What could women hope to gain from this coerced play with/in an inescap-
ably antagonistic battlefield whose brute reality cannot be defeated or
escaped? Because, as Wittig’s story imagines and enacts, its rule and laws and
operations, its grammars and its lexicons, can be refused, disarmed, prodded,
and taunted and driven to madness; indeed, it is only in those arts of war that
the wargames of language can be overwhelmed.
Indeed, the extensive use in this paper of quotations directly from Wittig’s
bellicose triumph, Les Guerilleres, with neither prosaic elucidation nor
didactic explication, is very much in deference to her argument that such a lit-
erary ‘assault’ is not at all about arguing the rightness of a particular position,
but is everything about working the play of language so as to instantiate the
confrontation itself in and through that play: that work is itself the enactment
of battle, and a realization (or not!), of its purpose, rendering ‘translation’
a treachery. As such, we contend this extensive quotation is in Wittig’s own
terms, an incontrovertibly necessary deployment.
Wittig’s warriors recount:
[M]‌en have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have
given you names, they have called you slave … They write, of their
authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the origin of lan-
guage itself may be considered an act of authority emanating from those
who dominate … to reduce you to silence. The women say the language
you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say the language
you speak is made up of words that are killing you.
(Wittig 1985, p. 65)4
In such a poisoned language, how are women’s voices to be heard? The

warriors’ narrative continues:
Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced
on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you
speak. This is apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have
not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this
can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their
discourse.
(Wittig 1985, p. 69)
This radical refusal, this embrace of lacunae as key to remaking the language
games of patriarchy, is not, however, the making of a ‘new feminist order’,
a replacement of men as masters by women—for whom language doesn’t
even admit of a counter-term, in its treacherous asymmetry of master and
86

‘mistress’. Not a war of their own choosing, these warriors’ victory is the end
of war, not mastery, not possession, not subordination.
The women say, I refuse henceforth to speak this language … I refuse

to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If
I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it
be to forge new links between myself and the world.
(Wittig 1985, p. 66)
Core mechanics: the Trojan Horse

Any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is
produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because
its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions.
It is always produced in hostile territory.
(Wittig 1992, p. 69)
The Trojan Horse, as explained by Wittig above in her essay of the same name,
is a particularly apt technology for women’s warring in always-hostile territories.
Wittig’s is a full-on feminist assault upon language games—which of course are
not really games for those pre-programmed to disadvantage. Her parable of
the Trojan Horse is about literature’s power to unseat a language of domin-
ation, diminution, and silencing. For Wittig this IS war, this is the war all other
wars are built with and built upon, and the weapon of choice is language itself.
Explains Wittig, ‘A writer must take every word and despoil it of its everyday
meaning in order to be able to work with words, on words’ (1992, p. 72).
Literature affords a protective cloak for subversive designs to weaponize
meaning in enemy territory: this is the core mechanic of the Trojan Horse.
Once infiltrated, its stratagems effect a violent, shocking breakthrough, like the
‘ice-axe’ Kafka urged that literature has to be (Kafka 1924/2016). But this kind
of persuasion is not about arguing a position, an ideology, a particular point
of view, all of which can be ‘gamified’ easily enough. As Wittig continues,
What I am saying is that the shock of words in literature does not come out
of the ideas they are supposed to promote, since what a writer deals with
first is a solid body that must be manipulated in one way or another. And
to come back to our horse, if one wants to build a perfect war machine,
one must spare oneself the delusion that facts, actions, ideas can dictate
directly to words their form. There is a detour, and the shock of words
is produced by their association, their disposition, their arrangement,
and also by each one of them as used separately. The detour is work,
working words as anyone works a material to turn it into something else,
a product. There is no way to save this detour in literature, and the detour
is what literature is all about.
(1992, p. 72)
87

Wittig is very much speaking about language games when she writes
that ‘Literary work cannot be influenced directly by history, politics, and
ideology because these two fields belong to parallel systems of signs which
function differently in the social corpus and use language in a different way’
(1992, p. 69). And this is why we say, if there is any way we can intelligibly
speak of a feminist war game, Les Guerilleres is paradigmatic in a way that
no number of female commanders leading charges in Call of Duty could
ever, ever be.
Storyline: writing feminism beyond the feminine

It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not
turn a literary work into a war machine.
(Wittig 1992, p. 75)
In her critical essay ‘The Trojan Horse of Universalism’ Linda Zerilli (1990)
has particularly focused on explaining the universalism implicit in Wittig’s
presumptions about language’s overthrow and transformation, remarking
that, unlike French theorists of difference to whose work most critical
attention has been paid, (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous)
who used the feminine to deconstruct the universal, Wittig employs the
universal to deconstruct the feminine: ‘it is her radical and unflinching cri-
tique of a heterosexual episteme that allows Wittig to deploy the universal
in ways that suggest challenging directions for feminist theory’ (Zerilli
1990, p. 149). Such a deconstructive turn has surely particular interest
in times like our own where grammar, itself a kind of repository of cul-
tural ways, an ‘anthropological grammar’ (Havelock 1989) is profoundly
challenged by the refusal of speaking subjects to accept the confinements
and mis-castings of so-called ordinary language, the game-that-is-not-one.
In Les Guerilleres, the masculine pronoun is expurgated, and its systematic
replacement with Elle and Elles, results, in its original French, in a com-
plete overthrow of the male subject and all his dominions. In its compos-
itional form, the narrative is cleft in two, pages alternating between story
and a strident, insistent ‘naming of parts’—in Les Guerilleres, naming the
women warriors; in The Lesbian Body (1986) naming nerves and muscles
and tendons and fluids. Patriarchy, heterosexism, The Straight Mind (1992)
make of language a poison unspeakable by women, so, better the ‘death
rattle’ than to live a life ‘anyone can appropriate’. The violence elicited by
refusal to speak a ‘poisoned tongue’ is considerable, and should be sobering
in its persistence to the present day. Wittig’s literary project, surely ironic-
ally enough, seeks only to universalize a right which defenders of the patri-
archy claim for themselves.
‘I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest’,5 pronounces
University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, secure in the
presumption of the rights of the dominant to define the rules of language.
88

The claims of those harmed by that language are overturned with that self-
righteous hostility6 turned against anyone who chooses their way outside nor-
mative grammars, a stance that has been enthusiastically received by a public
hungry enough for a ‘Gospel of Masculinity’ (Sanneh 2018) that his proverbi-
ally seminal publication, 12 Rules for Life (Peterson 2018), hit Amazon’s top
sales figures and was the top-selling book in Canada in its year of publication.
Peterson’s 12-step primer of patriarchy has been repeatedly and very publicly
endorsed by an explicitly populist brand of censorial journalism dedicated to
upholding traditional gender orders (Blatchford 2016). But as Wittig’s corpus,
both critical and literary, has been dedicated to making clear, the gender order
entrenches gendered violence.
Gender remains a battlefield, and, like it or not, we are always off to war.
Forced to speak in a linguistic war game both bitter and bloody, unwilling
participants are like the cats trapped by their tails whose struggles only inten-
sify their suffering. Driven to madness as much as to fury, Les Guerilleres are
warring to expunge their enemies, utterly and finally.
Win condition: the last of all wars

What makes possible this war as the last? That a new language can be created,
natures and histories remade, the world named anew by free people—not
just the ‘victors’—free people who choose their way beyond languages of
domination and oppression including, as one of the women sings ‘men who
open their mouths to speak/a thousand thanks to those who have under-
stood our language/and not having found it excessive/have joined with us
to transform the world’ (Wittig 1985, p. 80). When the war is finally won,
Wittig urges, ‘take your time, consider this new species that seeks a new
language’ (Wittig 1985, p. 81) one in which ‘everything has to be remade
starting from basic principles … the vocabulary of every language is to be
examined, modified, turned upside down … every word must be screened’
(Wittig 1985, p. 83).
For that to become possible, language must be ‘played’ to and beyond its
limits: inverted, stretched, upended, in order to give voice to a ‘universal,
ungendered subject’ (Zerilli 1990, p. 2). As the story goes,
The women address the young men in these terms, now you understand
that we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves. In this war,
which is also yours, you have taken part. Today, together, let us repeat as
our slogan that all traces of violence must disappear from this earth.
…
Then the men bring their weapons, the women add their own and all
are buried. Far from being celebrated, the history of this violence must
disappear: ‘… let here be erased from human memory the longest most
murderous war it has ever known, the last possible war in history’.
(Wittig 1985, p. 79)
89

For Wittig’s warriors, there is no ‘winning’ this war, there is only ending war
altogether and for all time. And where there is no war, there can be no war
games, feminist or otherwise.
Notes
1 This small point matters very much when an American president declares that ‘all
options are on the table’ and that his is the ‘largest button’.
2 In the Canadian forces, for example, those few women who achieve officer
status are concentrated in personnel and nursing, not leading an operational
unit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_discrimination_in_the_Canadian_
Military.
3 This is certainly not to suggest that playing wargames so understood will erode or
undermine the feminism of its players, a kind of ‘monkey see/monkey do’ theory
judging games by their presumed impacts or ‘effects’ on players. Deeper questions
are being asked about the paradoxical pleasures of 3D videogame play, grappling
more critically with the psychology and politics of ‘violent play’.
4 As Zerilli explains, for post-structural feminism, ‘a critical strategy that would
seek fuller or equal representation for women in the dialogical structures of lan-
guage and politics must founder on the very phallogo-centrism of representa-
tion itself ’ (1990, p. 147). This critique, however, in striking universalism from
the feminist agenda, has thereby abandoned its best politics, its most powerful
enunciations, its most fruitful trajectories towards a universalism that refuses
to suppress, to silence or to (dis)possess. Zerilli further argues that feminist
refutations of ‘the enforcement of sex in language’ that takes from women the
authority to speak has beaten an inadvertent retreat into a mimetic gender order
that celebrates a ‘feminine’ which never has, and never will, do the political work
that needs doing (1990, p. 148). Gender, femininity, ‘womanhood’ has never
worked in women’s favor, and it has impeded feminism from working in anyone
else’s, either. Argues Zerilli, such ‘feminist theories of difference pose difficult
questions for feminist theory as a political theory, as a theory of citizenship,
and as a theory of counterpublics organized around collective speaking subjects’
(1990, p. 148).
5 Jordan Peterson, Public Lecture, University of Toronto, ‘Free Speech, Political
Correctness, and Bill C-16’, 19 November 2016.
6 Peterson’s strident public opposition to Canada’s Bill C-16, prohibiting discrim-
ination based on gender identity or expression, is based on ‘freedom of speech’,
where freedom to maintain the patriarchal language game Trumps the rights of
those harmed by it.
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UK.
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writings of Monique Wittig’, Social Text, no. 25/26, pp. 146–170.
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7
Exploring agency and female
player–character relationships
in Life Is Strange
What choice do I have?
Andrea Luc
Life Is Strange in feminist war

The same thought runs through my mind every time a male co-worker speaks
over top of me or dismisses my comment; every time I feel unwelcome eyes
on my body; every time I apologize for something completely benign—‘What
was your fault in this? Why can’t you stand up for yourself ? You are weak’.
The only retreat I’ve found from these noxious mantras I tell myself is when
I’m given a space to redeem my inaction through meaningful choices: when
I game. A game that has provided me this space for a few playthroughs is
Dontnod Entertainment’s 2015 title, Life Is Strange (LIS) and I had to make
impossible choices as Max Caulfield—a teenage girl who can manipulate time
at will. By engaging with a medium where I was forced to act decisively within
the game’s world, I felt as if I were somehow redeeming myself from times
when I didn’t stand up for myself, or for others. When playing LIS, every
battle and every victory felt monumental because of the choices I made, cre-
ating an experience that was deeply personal and cathartic.
This experience is important in developing a reflexive and reactive space to
make consequential choices in a ‘feminist war’. I think of feminist wars as the
everyday onslaught of living in a culture that seeks to undermine and violate
cis-women, trans, and non-binary identities. Its battleground can manifest in
our workplaces, our schools, our homes, the media we consume—any space,
physical or virtual, where we have to fight for our voices to be heard and our
presence to be treated as the default. I often fight with myself over my fre-
quent (non)reaction in situations that I feel reflect a feminist war. I’m hesitant
to engage in combat, afraid that I will be emotionally annihilated by a barrage
of misogyny or racial slurs. My only respite comes when I pick up my con-
troller and enter a beautifully rendered space that offers mental triage—a time
to assess, reflect, and react.
Videogames comprise the sum of their parts—level design, sound design,
writing, graphics, mechanics, and so much more—that are interpreted through
the positionality of each player. I recognize that because of this, I can only
offer my own experience as a cis-Asian Canadian woman, while playing LIS
in exploring what I interpret ‘feminist war games’ to mean. In writing this
chapter, I’m offering insight into how my personal narrative can impact how
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and why I play—I will not provide a unifying definition of what ‘feminist war
games’ may be. This chapter will not attempt to define what constitutes a
‘feminist war’ game, as I am wary of reducing an entire experience into a sin-
gular genre. Naomi Clark writes that ‘reducing a game to its formal elements,
whatever the rationale … seems akin to insisting that invertebrates, as a class,
must primarily be understood by examining and evaluating their internal
bone structure’ (2017, p. 8). Inspired by participating in the Feminist War
game jam—a jam which took place over a weekend in mid-March at OCAD
University—this chapter will instead serve as a reflection on how playing
games can be an active operation of self-reconnaissance—they are a space to
act self-reflexively and reconcile personal battle scars inflicted on us and by us
because of our identities.
Specifically, this chapter will examine the choices offered to players in
LIS and how player positionality can influence the relationship between
self and a player’s avatar. Using Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s concept of recur-
rent attractors (2015), I argue that my relationship to the game’s protagonist
provided a space to enact and reclaim agency that is essential to fighting fem-
inist wars. By offering a reflection of my LIS playthrough, this chapter will
focus on one major narrative choice presented to the player and my reaction
to this scenario: to act as a bystander or intervene when Max witnesses a
female classmate being harassed by a campus security guard. In analyzing
this choice, my hope is that we will gain a better understanding of how we
often bring our own histories into what we play and how play can be both
empowering and reflexive.
A conversation on player–avatar relationships

While at times fantastical, our agency in these polygonal environments allow
us to emotionally and cognitively feel as if what we are subjected to in-game
is also what our experiences would be in the flesh. There is no distinction
between real and virtual. We react to the narratives, spaces, and characters
based on our own subjectivities. In doing so, play becomes intensely personal.
Of interest is how as players, we are inherently negotiating our relationship
to the player-character—is the avatar I’m playing a reflection of myself ? Or is
the avatar enacting her own agency through me? Some quantitative method-
ologies have been used by game scholars to explore this further, specifically to
examine player motivation and player representation to their on-screen avatar
(Banks & Bowman 2016; Vandenbosch et al. 2017; Yee et al. 2009). Underlying
this area of research is the notion that the avatar is an external projection of
ourselves—that the avatar is a representative vehicle to explore our physicality
or sociality. It’s impossible to divorce the player from their avatar—they exist
together symbiotically. However, in order to understand the nuances of how
player–avatar relationships are experienced and interpreted, this chapter will
focus on a framework that relies on qualitative methodologies which are fur-
ther supported by personal writings on this topic.
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Agency and female player–character relations 93

Play is inevitably shaped by our intersectional identities, and nowhere is
this more evident than within independent game development. Goldberg and
Larsson note:
Recently, a new generation of independent video game designers have

begun to explore how games can be used for social and political activism
and commentary. Topics such as sexism, race, politics, and class injustice
are today being grappled with to an extent that has previous been absent
from the form.
(2015, p. 9)
While it’s significant that game designers and developers are striving to make
the medium more inclusive—a departure from the normative hegemonic mas-
culinities that aim to gatekeep game development and play (Gray 2014)—
ciswomen, women of color, trans, and non-binary identities continue to face
misogyny, bigotry, transphobia, and homophobia in these spaces (Quinn 2017;
Massanari 2015; Vossen 2018). Gaming culture has always been a warzone for
all women involved in its development and in its participation. Despite this,
we continue to fight by playing, creating, and occupying virtual and physical
gaming spaces. When we game, the act is in itself a form of resistance to the
normative narrative of who is a ‘gamer’. Play becomes intensely meaningful
then in this context, particularly when interacting with a game that is focused
around diverse and inclusive perspectives.
Indie game developer Merritt Kopas touches on this idea and offers a
personal reflection into their experience playing Gone Home (2013)—a game
‘about space and absence and leaving and most obviously it’s about a love
relationship between girls’ (Kopas 2017, p. 145). Kopas writes:
I know I’m bringing a lot of my own stuff to this game. I know my

experience of it is being shaped by my history, even more because the
player character is a kind of cipher with no real spatial storytelling to
indicate much of the substance about her relationships to any of the
other characters in the game. I know all that, and honestly? I don’t really
fucking care, because this is a game that feels like it was made for me,
and that’s rare … especially in a medium that caters overwhelmingly to
straight boys.
(2017, p. 147)
It’s inevitable that the player will always bring their personal histories into how
they experience a game—and it’s significant that more non-heteronormative
stories are now told through this medium. At a time when marginalized voices
are creating personal narratives through videogames, feminist wars are being
fought by invading this space. What Kopas is so powerfully articulating is
the oscillation between the player-character and the player—the ability to not
only (re)experience your subjectivities and identity with the avatar, but also
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the avatar’s ability to become a part of those very things. This is essential to
how videogames offer players—specifically women and non-binary players—
a space to reflect on our own positional agency and the choices we make.
Attracted to ourselves: framing the reflection through recurrent

attractors
I’d like to offer a personal reflection on my affective relationship with this oscil-
lation, however, before I begin, it’s important that I frame this chapter through
Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s work on recurrent attractors (2015). Employing a
microethnography, Taylor, Kampe, and Bell identified four attractors— ‘a
force that explains the tendencies on observed processes to move toward pre-
dictable states’ existing to ‘empower or constrain a way of interpreting a situ-
ation’ (2015, p. 8)—when analyzing two participants’ play through Telltale
Game’s The Walking Dead (TWD) (2012). TWD is a choice-driven game
where players make branching dialogue and narrative decisions to drive the
game forward (which is a very similar mechanic to that in LIS, as will be
discussed further). By observing participants process their choices and navi-
gate which option would lead to their desired outcome, Taylor, Kampe, and
Bell (2015) found that four consistent forces that attracted participants to their
decisions were: simulated, lived, conventional, and situated attractors. Due to
the scope of this chapter, I will only focus on simulated and lived attractors.
A simulated attractor occurs when ‘players act in response to or justify
actions with reference to diegetic elements of the game world’ (Taylor et al.
2015, p. 9). A simulated attractor could be ‘the argument made by a character
for a specific course of action, or visual cues taken to indicate weakness in
a monster’—its defining trait being that it is an event caused by the game’s
systems such as mechanics, user interface, text, or visual and audible cues
(2015, p. 9). The authors recognize that simulated attractors are often
intertwined with lived attractors—‘understandings of life outside of the die-
getic gameworld … this force comes from behaviors that have been observed
or are believed to exist in players’ everyday (and/or) past experiences’ (2015,
p. 9). In short, lived attractors are decisions made based on what the player
feels would be the ‘right’ thing to do in real life. This is influenced by their
own lived experiences, comparing choices made in their past or present and
knowledge gleaned from making them. It’s significant to note that Taylor,
Kampe, and Bell acknowledge that these factors do not act in isolation. These
attractors are fluid and often interact with each other.
I’m interested in exploring these two attractors in the context of my
playthrough of LIS to reflect on how my positionality and personal history
influenced the choices I made. This framework provides the language needed
to better understand how games can give us a space to practice and reflect
on our decisiveness through a resonant player-character. It’s a way for me to
take a step back and understand how I choose to react in feminist war, within
a medium where non-reaction is not a choice—a way for me to both distance
95

and observe an ongoing internal conflict I have with navigating my identity.
This chapter is a mission of self-reconnaissance: who am I when I play? And
how does this help shape who I am when I stop?
A personal minefield
Feminist wars are fought in any space we occupy—they are at times, inescap-
able, at least for me. I stand only at 5′5″, 120-something pounds. I worry that
my body couldn’t shield me from unwanted confrontations, something I’ve
been made aware of my entire life. And so, when something does inevitably
happen—while walking alone in the evening or waiting at the bus stop on my
own—I freeze. I say nothing. I run through every possible consequence of me
standing up for myself and often realize it’s not worth it. Sometimes I wish I’d
find courage and do something.
It was autumn when I took the subway from my basement apartment to
the university’s campus. Autumn in southern Ontario is much milder than
what I was used to in Muskoka—a municipality two hours north from
Toronto—and I made the choice not to wear a jacket over my polka-dotted,
long-sleeved blouse. Maybe if I had worn a jacket that day, I’d feel a bit safer
traversing this city now. When I stepped onto the subway, I shuffled towards
the middle of the train to stand between two poles. I’ve never liked sitting on
the train. I like knowing that if anything were to ever happen, I could run or
relocate myself. In hindsight, this was a thoughtful decision. Once I settled
in my spot and the train lurched forward, I heard a man yell in my direction.
‘Hey, polka dots!’ I turned to look around and saw a man staring right at me.
‘It’s true what they say about Asian women: you’ve got a flat ass!’ I froze and
desperately hoped that someone would help me call him out. But everyone
remained silent, eyes fixed on the subway ads. Feeling unsafe, alone, and angry
I started to walk in the opposite direction towards the next connected train.
I paused for a moment to weigh my options, playing out each branching path
in what felt like a few minutes: I could hit the safety strip to call an officer
though that would require me wading through everyone standing near one;
or I could walk away. I chose the latter and exited the train at the next stop.
Non-reactive.
I think about what would’ve happened if I had stood my ground and said
something. I think about the unthinkable—what if he had physically attacked
me? I forgive myself for reacting the way I did: the situation could’ve escalated
quickly and I removed myself from something potentially dangerous. But
then I feel angry at how it turned out—shouldn’t I feel empowered to speak
up for myself ? How has this man normalized his bigotry and misogyny?
I cycle through these thoughts endlessly, accepting that this harassment is
nothing new and is a part of living as a visible woman. This experience and
countless others like it invade my thoughts more than I’d like. A large part
of my turmoil is within my agency or lack thereof. There are contexts that
impose constraints on my person—a crowded subway, the presence of a male
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authority—and as a result, I often choose not to act. It seems odd then, that
I’d find comfort in enacting my agency in another constrained space, a space
arguably dictated by systems and pre-determined rules—videogames.
Playing Life Is Strange

Games provide players a space that encourages trial and error—a space to fail
and start over, to rewind and begin again. It’s through this process that I find
relief from stressors I face in my everyday and is what attracted me most to
LIS. The game centers around player-character Max Caulfield: a teenager
attending Blackwell Academy, a prestigious arts high school in the fictional
town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. Max is passionate about photography, taking
polaroid pictures as she explores the town. Arcadia Bay is a sentimental place
for Max. She spent a few years of her childhood living in Arcadia Bay and
befriending Chloe, a close friend who she lost touch with after moving away.
Max is thoughtful but unsure of herself. Intelligent, empathetic, and deeply
self deprecating. And Max has an ability that most people desperately wish
for: the ability to rewind time at will.
Max discovers this ability when witnessing one of her classmates, Nathan
Prescott—who comes from a wealthy and privileged family—shoot Chloe
in the stomach after arguing about a drug deal. Upon observing this, Max
‘reached out for some dumb reason, as if [she] could stop the bullet’ (2015).
Max then experiences a dream-like prophecy of a tornado destroying Arcadia
Bay, and subsequently wakes up in the photography class she attended only
moments earlier. Max and the player are afforded the ability to rewind and
restart events from the mundane to something life altering, like someone’s
death. With the looming threat of Arcadia Bay’s destruction, the player is
asked to make impossible choices. LIS ultimately forces the player to choose
if Max should sacrifice Arcadia Bay or Chloe, whose death would restore
order to the natural state of things.
Making choices in Life Is Strange

Where do you begin deciding whether to save your best friend or your town?
The choices we’re asked to make through Max are designed to evoke moral
and affective responses from us, the players. For the purposes of this section,
I’ll focus on my process making one specific choice in LIS—to intervene in a
situation where a depressed female classmate, Kate Marsh, is harassed by the
school’s security guard and ex-war veteran, David Madsen. In weighing the
consequences of the choices presented to me, I cycled through two recurrent
attractors: the living and the simulated. Drawing from my own experiences
and identity, I’ll explore how I landed on the choice I made—the choice to
intervene and stand up for Kate despite facing off against an authoritative
97

male figure. My affective response to this specific scenario was a way for
me to experience what it’s like to fight, not flee, in a safe and exploratory
medium.
After wandering the grounds of Blackwell Academy—a few moments
after Max discovered her time- traveling abilities—the game gave me an
objective: head back to Max’s dorm and grab a flash drive for her friend.
When I retrieved the USB and exited the dorm, I came across an incident
that prompted me to act. I witnessed David Madsen harassing Kate Marsh,
someone Max considers a close friend. The scene plays out like this: David
Madsen dressed in his security uniform, walks towards Kate as she’s trying
to back away. He says, ‘so don’t think I’m blind. I see everything here at
Blackwell. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ as he reaches out to shove
Kate on the shoulder. Kate, voice quavering, responds with ‘no and leave me
alone’ (2015). Then the game pauses, and two choices appear on screen: ‘Take
a Photo’ and ‘Intervene’.
My first reaction was to walk through the consequences of both choices.
My thinking went something like this—if I take a photo, at least the inci-
dent will be documented. And maybe I’ll be able to use the photographic
proof somewhere else in the game. But if I act as a bystander, what message
does that send to Kate? Kate, who just got bullied in class for a viral slut-
shaming video? Kate, who started drawing nooses on her notepad in class and
seems visibly depressed? If I intervene, at least she’ll know she has someone
who’s supporting her. If I intervene however, I also run the risk of physically
endangering us both.
These were familiar thoughts to me. Weighing the cost of all the choices
presented to me, paralyzed for a moment while I played out the worst of both
possibilities. My lived experience told me to take the photo. My instinct told
me it’s better for us both to be safe. I wouldn’t personally wish to face off
with a male security guard, someone who is much larger than I am. I chose
to remove myself when I was harassed on the subway because I was afraid
of what physical consequences might transpire—isn’t this a similar situation?
We just saw him physically shove Kate, who knows how this might escalate?
I acted on the first option: ‘Take a Photo’, based solely on my subjectivities,
my positioning—the ‘lived’ attractor.
After making my choice a cutscene played out where David, still
encroaching on Kate’s space says to her ‘you can’t fool me. I know everything
about this school. I cover the waterfront, so you better decide what side you’re
on’. Kate continues to plead, ‘Please leave me alone’ and David leaves. Kate
turns around to see Max and she says, ‘hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks
for nothing Max’ (2015). Kate’s dialogue cut into me. In a feminist war, where
Kate was literally facing off a returned war veteran, I chose to do nothing. She
made it clear that my inaction let her down, that it made her feel even more
alienated. Kate’s disappointment and anger towards Max, and by extension
me, were akin to the self-loathing I inflict upon myself. Moments that I’ve
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mulled over in my mind, the times I’ve let myself down by not standing up
for myself more assertively—it was far too familiar. Regretting my indecision,
Max reminded me that she ‘could rewind and try something different’ (2015)
after Kate expressed her frustration with me: a simulated attractor. Based on
Max’s in-game monologue, it was then that I didn’t hesitate to act—I fervently
took advantage of the rewind mechanic. I pulled the controller trigger to
rewind, now knowing the consequences of my first choice. This time, I’d take
a stand. I’d put up a fight alongside Kate. We’d face whatever consequences
came from intervening, but at least she wouldn’t feel alone.
When you make the choice to intervene, Max shouts, ‘Hey why don’t you
leave her alone?’ Defensive, David responds with ‘Excuse us, this is official
campus business’ and Max retorts, ‘Excuse me, you shouldn’t be yelling at
students. Or bullying them’. As the exchange continues, David says to Max
that ‘you’re part of the problem, missy. I will remember this conversation’,
which seems threatening in tone. Despite this, Kate expresses her gratitude
at having us step in, ‘Oh Max, that was great. I think you scared him for
once. I have to go but thank you. It means a lot’ (2015). This moment left
a lasting affective impression on me—I was able to go back to a time where
I made a mistake, where I wish things had gone differently, and with convic-
tion, committed to intervening.
On a personal level, it resonated with times where I’ve played the role of
bystander and also as a casualty of feminist warfare. The few unfortunate,
memorable moments where I’d been cornered by a cis-male figure; where I was
harassed simply for being who I am in a public space; where I was touched
when I didn’t want to be. This narrative event left me feeling empowered and
reminded me of my agency in situations where I feel unsure and helpless—
that there’s always something I can do. It gave me a space to enact and explore
my agency as not only Max, but also for myself. This game mechanic forces
players to reflect on their own personal histories and provides a safe space to
deliberate decisions that we make. Though we might not be able to rewind
time in our ‘real’ lives, being able to do so in a simulated environment was a
cathartic and reflexive experience.
Conclusions on recurrent attractors and implications on play

When I chose to act as a bystander in the incident with Kate, my choice left
me feeling deeply unsettled. This gameplay moment became a self-reflexive
exercise—it empowered me to make choices that are within my agency,
it reminded me that I have agency. By examining how lived and simulated
attractors influenced my choice-making process, it’s clear that my personal
history became naturally entangled with my player-character, Max. I weaved
my own lived experiences into reasoning which decision to make and unmake.
My experiences aligned with Taylor, Kampe, and Bell’s findings on recurrent
attractors (2015)—I found my thoughts oscillating between my experiences
99

and the experiences of the characters in game, a force between the lived and
the simulated. In exploring how I committed to a decision that left me at
peace, it’s evident that I could never have disregarded my lived experience as a
woman. Playing through LIS was, for me, a mission of self-reconnaissance—a
mission that reminded me of who I am and the choices I’m capable of making
when fighting the everyday feminist war. My agency within these systems is
defined by how I choose to interact with its affordances, and those decisions
are constantly being negotiated with myself, my own values, my own beliefs.
Finding solace and reflection in a medium that continues to be a hostile space
for all women is especially empowering—when I game, this experience is
my experience. When I game, everything that has made me who I am—my
trauma, my regrets, my sociality, and so much—is presented in the choices
I make. In reclaiming and actively practicing my agency, I’m arming myself
for the next violation of my identity. Videogames can give us a chance to
resist, redeem, and reclaim who we are as historically marginalized players.
Though we will continue to fight feminist wars in our everyday, games can
provide us respite from daily assaults—a place to make mistakes and undo
them; a place to unapologetically react and interact; and a place to make
meaningful and personal choices.
References
Banks, J & Bowman, ND 2016, ‘Avatars are (sometimes) people too: linguistic
indicators of parasocial and social ties in player–avatar relationships’, New Media
& Society, doi.org/10.1177/1461444814554898.
Clark, N 2017, ‘What is queerness in games, anyway?’, in B Ruberg & A Shaw (eds.),
Queer game studies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 3–14.
Goldberg, D & Larsson, L 2015, The state of play: creators and critics on video game
culture, Penguin Random House, New York, NY.
Gone Home 2013, The Fullbright Company, PC.
Gray, K 2014, Race, gender, and deviance in Xbox Live, Anderson Publishing,
Waltham, MA.
Kopas, M 2017, ‘On Gone Home’, in B Ruberg & A Shaw (eds.), Queer game studies,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 145–150.
Life is Strange 2015, Square Enix, PS4.
Massanari, A 2015, ‘Gamergate and the fappening: how Reddit’s algorithm, govern-
ance, and culture support toxic technocultures’, New Media & Society, doi:10.1177/
1461444815608807.
Quinn, Z 2017, Crash override, Hachette, New York, NY.
Taylor, N, Kampe, C, & Bell, K 2015, ‘Me and Lee: identification and the play of
attraction in The Walking Dead’, The International Journal of Computer Game
Research, vol. 15, no. 1, https://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/taylor.
Vandenbosch, L, Driesmans, K, Trekels, J, & Eggermont, S 2017, ‘Sexualized video
game avatars and self-objectification in adolescents: the role of gender congru-
ency and activation frequency’, Media Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, doi.org/10.1080/
15213269.2016.1142380.
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Vossen, E 2018, ‘On the cultural inaccessibility of gaming: invading, creating, and
reclaiming the cultural clubhouse’, PhD dissertation, UWSpace, Waterloo’s
Institutional Repository, viewed 25 April 2019, https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bit-
stream/handle/10012/13649/Vossen_Emma.pdf.
The Walking Dead 2012, Telltale Games, PS3.
Yee, N, Bailenson, JN, & Ducheneaut, N 2009, ‘The Proteus effect: implications
of transformed digital self- representation on online and offline behavior’,
Communications Research, doi.org/10.1177/0093650208330254.
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8
‘What is a feminist war game?’
A game jam reflection
Sarah Stang
In 2017 I was invited to participate in a game jam held at OCAD University in

Toronto and organized by Jon Saklofske, Emma Westecott, and Emily Flynn-
Jones in affiliation with ReFiguring Innovation in Games (ReFiG), a feminist
game studies collaborative research project. The jam’s theme was ‘feminist
war games?’ The question mark at the end is an important focal point, as the
question which introduced this proposed game jam was ‘can a feminist war
game exist?’ The following question was, naturally, ‘if so, what would it look
like?’ This query helped us as game makers, or ‘jammers’, to think through the
kind of game we wanted to make and within what context we wanted it to fit.
The aim of the game jam was to use the practice of game-making as a tool to
facilitate productive conversations about the connections between feminism
and war. Importantly, the jam was also conducted in a feminist space with
feminist principles in mind, prioritizing self-care, collaboration, kindness, and
generosity.
In this chapter, which is part game jam post-mortem and part academic
reflection, I discuss what a feminist approach to war might look like, the
game we made to explore the topic, and why it is important to provide fem-
inist spaces, not just feminist themes. I begin by looking at the historical
connections between gaming and warfare, and elaborating on my search for
inspiration in both the mainstream entertainment industry and real-world
history. Next, I discuss the theoretical basis of the game we ended up making,
particularly regarding its critique of mainstream media’s tendency to ‘other’
certain groups of people and foster an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality. The chapter
moves into a look at the game itself and a reflection on my own experience
during the game jam. Finally, I end with a discussion of the importance of
feminist spaces and themes in game production given that, in many ways, fem-
inist players, scholars, critics, and developers are already fighting a ‘war’ over
the diversification of the medium and its culture.
War games
The topic of feminism and war is especially interesting for the field of game
studies, as video games, and computers in general, trace their technological
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102 Sarah Stang
roots back to military research (Huntemann & Payne 2009). Perhaps because
of this connection, or perhaps simply due to the centrality of war and war
narratives in human society, countless video games have been made about war
and conquest. In these games, such as the Call of Duty series (2003–2017),
the Gears of War series (2006–2016), the Medal of Honor series (1999–2007),
the Wolfenstein series (1992–2015), the Battlefield series (2002–2009), or the
Brothers in Arms series (2005–2010), to name only a few, the player is gener-
ally invited into the role of soldier, pilot, or god-like commander. Whether
realistically-rendered or more abstractly portrayed, gameplay is almost always
extremely violent and the protagonist is almost always male. This is perhaps
unsurprising, given that war has historically been considered a masculine pas-
time (Hartsock 1989). There are, of course, many role-playing games (RPGs)
which involve war, yet would not necessarily be called ‘war games’, and in many
of these the players can choose the gender of their character. Some popular
examples include Skyrim (2011), which involves a civil war; the Mass Effect
trilogy (2007–2012), which features a spaceship commander waging war against
hostile synthetic alien beings; or the Massively Multiplayer Online RPG World
of Warcraft (2004–ongoing), which centralizes an ongoing conflict between
the forces of the Horde and those of the Alliance. However, regardless of the
potential to play as a female character, these games still glorify warfare and
centralize violent gameplay. As I will discuss, this is a common problem when
trying to find examples of ‘feminist’ approaches to war in mainstream media.
What is a feminist war?
In thinking about what a feminist war game could look like, I envisioned
empowered cinematic women soldiers, like Meg Ryan’s Army Captain Karen
Emma Walden in Courage Under Fire (1996), Demi Moore’s Lieutenant Jordan
O’Neil from G.I. Jane (1997), or Emily Blunt’s Sergeant Rita Rose Vrataski
from Edge of Tomorrow (2014). I also thought of women warriors from more
fictional cinematic universes, such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from
Alien (1979), Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill (2003), Scarlett
Johansson’s Black Widow from The Avengers (2012), or Charlize Theron’s
Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). However, every single
one of these films was directed by a man, and each woman soldier or warrior
is either working within or molded by patriarchal ideals of conflict, including
oppression, conquest, and vengeance. Furiosa might have come the closest to
a feminist woman warrior, and Wonder Woman (2017) may have provided an
even better example, though the film was unfortunately released after the jam
was over. Ultimately, while these characters are progressive in some ways, the
films they star in still glorify violence as a spectacle for entertainment. In this
sense, simply presenting a ‘strong female protagonist’ is not really a feminist
act if that protagonist and her story reinforce hegemonic patriarchal ideology
(for more on the ‘strong female protagonist’ trope in media, see Chocano
2011). Indeed, simply replacing male soldiers and warriors with female ones
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‘What is a feminist war game?’ 103

without questioning or challenging the extreme violence these characters
enact or the patriarchal power structures that facilitate their agency will only
continue to serve those power structures. As Luce Irigaray (1985, p. 81) has
argued, if feminists ‘aim simply for a change in the distribution of power,
leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves,
deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order’. That phallocratic order requires
‘a definition of power of the masculine type’, which we must reject if we are
to subvert patriarchal ideology (1985, p. 81).
Disappointed with what Hollywood could offer me, I turned to history
for inspiration. I researched real examples of women revolutionaries, guer-
illa soldiers, and usurpers, but I was still not satisfied. Women like Joan of
Arc and Hua Mulan are certainly inspiring, though donning men’s armor
and working within the patriarchal norms of violent warfare is not what
I would call ‘feminist’. Again, as Irigaray pointed out, if we are continuing to
work within existing patriarchal power structures, rather than challenging the
system itself, then our project is not feminist (or, perhaps, not feminist enough).
I also thought of renowned women monarchs, like Catherine the Great, who
revitalized Russia and presided over its Enlightenment. However, as reformist
and progressive as she was, becoming the dictatorial leader of a patriarchal
governing system was, again, not very ‘feminist’. In the end, it became clear
that a feminist stance on war must be a critical one that challenges patriarchal
structures and ideology rather than just replacing male soldiers and leaders
with female ones. A feminist war game therefore cannot glorify war, no matter
how righteous the cause seems to be. I was inspired by organized feminist
anti-war movements that waged ‘war’ against war itself, especially during the
anti-Vietnam War efforts of the 1960s and 1970s (Frazier 2017). Although
there was hardly a unified feminist anti-war front, much of the rhetoric
espoused by these movements focused on women, children, and minoritized
groups (sexual, racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and so on) as those most
often victimized, displaced, and marginalized by war. There are also many
examples of anti-war films which dramatize the horrors of war by centralizing
the perspectives of its victims or by highlighting the trauma experienced by
soldiers, such as Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse
Now (1979), or Full Metal Jacket (1987). However, there are very few games
which do so—Darfur Is Dying (2006) is one example, and This War of Mine
(2014) is another.
In Darfur Is Dying, the player-character is a member of a Darfuri family
that has been displaced by the ongoing conflict. In the first part of the game,
the player must gather water from a nearby well to bring back to their camp
while dodging, hiding from, and avoiding patrolling soldiers of the Janjaweed
militia. If the player is unsuccessful at avoiding capture, the game informs
them of their character’s fate and they have to select another member of the
family to play as and try again. If the player successfully carries water back to
their camp, the game switches into a management mode in which the player
must grow crops using the water gathered in the first part of the game. Every
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time the water runs out, the player must return to the water fetching part,
and the overall goal is to keep the camp running for seven days. This War of
Mine, based on the 1992–1996 Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, also
focuses on the civilian experience during wartime. The game is about survival,
as the player must strategically manage a group of survivors in a makeshift
shelter, keeping them alive until a ceasefire is declared. Both games have been
applauded for their alternative take on war-inspired gaming and their ser-
ious and respectful treatment of the topic. Compared to the war-based games
mentioned earlier, which glorify the strategy and violence of war and battle,
these games present heavy critiques of war by centralizing the perspectives of
its civilian victims and survivors.
Our game’s theoretical underpinnings

Both Darfur Is Dying and This War of Mine provided some meaningful
inspiration for our game, but since I am a privileged middle-class white
woman living in Canada, I did not feel that I should make a game about the
experiences of those who have been victimized and displaced by war. This
awareness of my own positionality spurred me to instead make a game set in
a democratic country whose leaders have declared war. In this way, I could tell
a story about war that addresses complicity, responsibility, and the dangers
of both apathy and patriotism. It would also underscore the dangers of
‘othering’, a dehumanizing or devaluing logic which shapes Western thought
and identity construction by presenting an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality usually
tied to differences of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, religion, and
economics, among other things (Said 1978, 1994; de Beauvoir 1949). Mass
media like film, television, and games are particularly effective at dissemin-
ating messages that reinforce this oppositional mentality because, as cultural
theorist Stuart Hall (1997, p. 3) has observed:
[W]‌e give things [and people] meaning by how we represent them—the

words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of
them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we clas-
sify and conceptualize them, the values we place upon them.
Representation is therefore an ‘essential part of the process by which meaning

is produced and exchanged between members of a culture’ (Hall 1997, p. 15).
The meaning transmitted through mediated representation gives individ-
uals a sense of their own identities, the groups with whom they belong, and,
consequently, how they should relate to others. Hall has noted that those
meanings also regulate and organize our conduct and practices—they help
to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social life is ordered and
governed. They are also, therefore, what those who wish to control and influ-
ence a society’s conduct seek to structure and shape—hence the history of
105

government-led propaganda campaigns that used entertainment media to
promote wartime patriotism and glorify the idea of waging war against a
perceived Other (Cull et al. 2003).
Philosopher Michel Foucault (1976) argued that the process of othering
involves the creation and maintenance of knowledge of the Other through
imaginary representations of that Other. Those representations, which include
discourse, images, texts, and so on, exist in service to structures of power and
domination. While Foucault’s work was not focused on ‘representations’ in
the way Hall and other media scholars use the term (see Hall 1997, p. 42),
his concern for discourses and discursive formations, knowledge and power,
and the formulation of the subject is shared by media scholars interested
in uncovering the ways in which media relates to all three of those topics.
Indeed, a representation is a kind of discourse—a way to produce and frame
meaning and knowledge about a particular topic (Hall 1997, p. 44). The way
in which knowledge about a certain topic is produced and framed is intrin-
sically tied to power and control over that topic and the meanings related to
it. The way we frame, discuss, and imagine (or represent) a specific group in
our discourses—in other words, the way we attempt to produce and claim
knowledge over that group—shapes how that group is perceived and treated.
Our discourses around and representations of a group of people—which con-
stitute our claims of ‘knowledge’ of that group—therefore give us a kind of
power over that group and its place in society. Media representation can there-
fore be understood as a tool of discursive power and although the represen-
tation or the meaning behind it might be symbolic, it has real repercussions.
The power of mediated representation is therefore an important consider-
ation when discussing how media glorify war against a perceived enemy Other
and brainstorming ideas about how that process might be subverted by an
overtly feminist war game.
Invasion! The game
With the power of discourse and media representation in mind, I pitched this
idea to my team members on the first day of the game jam: a game in which the
player can control various ‘ordinary’ people in a patriotic country which has
recently declared war on another country. The game would consist of a series
of vignettes that exemplify the ways in which people in various positions can
influence global conflict. Happily, my team members liked my idea, though
they decided to wage war against aliens, instead of a real country, to avoid any
kind of potentially offensive description of ‘the enemy’. To make it topical,
we also agreed that our president was a Trump doppelgänger, though he never
makes an actual appearance in the game. While writing the dialogue for the
game, we agreed that it was important to offer the player choices: if they want
to foster fear and hostility towards the alien Others, then they were free to do
so. In fact, we designed the game so that war was inevitable by default, since
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106 Sarah Stang
the gameworld was a mirror of our own current global political situation, in
which populism, racism, and xenophobia seem to be the norm. If the player
works hard enough, however, war can be avoided and the ending can be a
happy—or at least peaceful—one.
The emphasis on player choice highlights the power that individuals have
when it comes to influencing cultural discourses. To demonstrate this, we
offered the player various scenarios to enact, which were all full of choices
and consequences (Fig. 1). For example, the player could become a parent
talking to their child, answering questions about the war (Fig. 2). Depending
on how the player chooses to answer these questions, the child can be
influenced into a pro-or anti-war position (Fig. 3). Another example could
be a member of the government or military conversing with others in influ-
ential positions (Fig. 4); again, depending on player choices, the mood could
sway from pro-to anti-war (Fig. 5). A third example sees the player as the
host of a televised discussion in which panelists give their opinions on the war
(Fig. 6). Depending on who the player allows to speak, their words will influ-
ence public opinion (Figs. 7–8). Though we only got as far as three scenarios,
we imagined that the player could become a teacher who chooses to teach
Figure 8.1 Screenshot.
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109
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110 Sarah Stang
tolerance rather than hatred, or a priest who preaches love instead of glorious
sacrifice, or a university student who chooses to join anti-war protests instead
of going to class. Each choice would lead to an eventual outcome: either the
war would continue into a long and bloody conflict if more ‘war’ points were
earned (Fig. 9), or the country would call for the president’s resignation and
an immediate armistice if the player earned more ‘peaceful resolution’ points
(Fig. 10). Through dialogue, the game also shows that some people are heavily
influenced by cultural discourses, which are often informed by entertainment
media (Figs. 11–12), some people will automatically hate anyone who looks
different (Fig. 13), while others argue against waging war against the alien
Other (Fig. 14).
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114 Sarah Stang
Why a feminist game jam?

Although we never completed our game, the process of thinking through
what a feminist war game might look like and brainstorming ideas for ludic
experiences that could provide a feminist, or at least alternative, take on war
was valuable for me as a game scholar. Not only did this allow me to put
into practice some of the theories and skills I had learned as an academic, by
designing a feminist game in a feminist space, this experience demonstrated
that game production itself can be a feminist process. This is important
because, as many developers have revealed, video game production can be
a harmful, toxic experience, especially during ‘crunch’ time—a period when
developers are forced to work for extremely long hours to finish a game on
time for release (for one example, see Schreier 2016). Scholars and developers
have also long noted that the culture surrounding game production and con-
sumption is often exclusionary and sexist (Consalvo 2008, 2012; Shaw 2010,
2011; Prescott & Bogg 2011). By now, these issues are public knowledge, as
they were brought to media attention during 2014’s Gamergate controversy,
in which feminist game developers and critics were victims of harassment
campaigns carried out by self-declared gamers (for more on Gamergate and
its aftermath, see Chess & Shaw 2015; Jenson & de Castell 2016).
Gamergate exposed the widespread assumption in gamer culture that
women do not belong in the industry, that games should not be made for
women, and that women do not seriously play games (or play ‘real’ games).
Although women have always been involved in game development, many
women hesitate to join the industry after hearing these horror stories and
reading the disheartening statistics. According to the International Game
Developers Association (IGDA) workplace survey, in 2014 only 11 per-
cent of game designers and 3 percent of programmers in the video game
industry were women and these women made on average $10,000–$12,000
less per year than their male counterparts (Burrows 2013; Makuch 2014).
Many game developers have discussed the industry as a toxic environ-
ment for women; game developer Marleigh Norton, for example, claimed
that ‘[i]‌f you are a woman in the industry, there are all these little signals
that you are not part of the club, that this is not your tribe’ (as quoted in
Burrows 2013).
Feminist game jams, or at least jams which have a feminist topic and engage
with feminist principles, can provide opportunities for those who might not
ever otherwise attempt to design a game. Given the commonly unpleasant
context of game development, fostering supportive spaces for experimen-
tation and feminist engagement is vital. This was my first game jam, and
making a game over a weekend is an intense and unforgettable experience.
Game jams can be incredibly stressful, yet although we were working hard,
there was never a moment where I felt pressured, or felt like I was struggling
to keep up. This was at least partially due to the emphasis on jamming in a
supportive, inclusive, and safe space—a feminist space.
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Conclusion: our feminist war
The feminist struggle against widespread misogyny and toxicity in the game
industry and within gamer culture reveals that video game players, scholars,
and developers are already, in many ways, fighting a feminist ‘war’ over the
diversification of the medium and its culture. In this sense, it is rather fitting
that we worked within a feminist space to create a feminist critique of war
itself. While a critique of war suggests that we would like it to stop, feminist
scholars, creators, players, and critics will not be able to stop until the ‘culture
war’ is won; that is, until games are a safe and enjoyable medium for every-
body. The war is widespread—even game studies itself has been critiqued for
its toxic and exclusionary aspects (Wilcox 2013; Moberly 2013; Vist 2015;
Batti & Karabinus 2017; Vossen 2017). Perhaps a future game could be about
a team of feminist game scholars, critics, players, and developers fighting to
make the game industry, gamer culture, and academia itself more inclusive,
accessible, and fair.
Indeed, perhaps inspiration for fighting a feminist war ought to come
from real-world activists. Clearly, as I discussed, Hollywood offers few posi-
tive examples of feminist warriors and is instead a bastion of hegemonic
ideology. Historical examples are similarly hard to find, as only passive anti-
war movements struck me as ‘feminist’ enough. Although finding inspiration
was tricky, I feel that the game we made does serve as a feminist critique
of war, specifically in how it demonstrates the ease with which people can
be complicit in violence and cruelty—the banality of evil, in other words,
fostered through the process of ‘othering’ (Arendt 1963). As a feminist game
scholar, this jam allowed me to blend theory and practice, and I believe that,
with more experience, I can use this blending as ammunition in the ongoing
feminist ‘war’ against exclusion and misogyny in game content, the game
industry, gamer culture, and game studies.
References
Arendt, H 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Viking Press,
New York, NY.
Batti, B & Karabinus, A 2017, ‘A dream of embodied experience: on Ian Bogost, epis-
temological gatekeeping, and the Holodeck’, Not Your Mama’s Gamer, web log
post, 1 May, viewed 20 July 2017, www.nymgamer.com/?p=16363.
Burrows, L 2013, ‘Women remain outsiders in video game industry’, The Boston
Globe, 27 January, viewed 20 July 2017, www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/01/
27/women-remain-outsiders-video-game-industry/275JKqy3rFylT7TxgPmO3K/
story.html.
Chess, S & Shaw, A 2015, ‘A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying
about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity’, Journal of Broadcasting
& Electronic Media, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 208–220.
Chocano, C 2011, ‘Tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to not saying goodbye
when they hang up the phone’, The New York Times Magazine, 1 July, viewed
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26 February 2019, www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/a-plague-of-strong-
female-characters.html.
Consalvo, M 2008, ‘Crunched by passion: women game developers and workplace
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Mortal Kombat: new perspectives on gender and gaming, MIT Press, Cambridge,
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Consalvo, M 2012, ‘Confronting toxic gamer culture: a challenge for feminist game
studies scholars’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, vol.
11, no. 1.
Cull, NJ, Culbert, DH, & Welch, D 2003, Propaganda and mass persuasion: a historical
encyclopedia, 1500 to the present. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA.
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Vintage, New York, NY.
Foucault, M 1990/1976, The history of sexuality, trans. RJ Hurley, Vintage, New York.
Frazier, JM 2017, Women’s antiwar diplomacy during the Vietnam War, The University
of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Hall, S 1997, Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, Sage in
association with the Open University, London, UK.
Hartsock, N 1989, ‘Masculinity, heroism, and the making of war’, in A Harris &
Y King (eds.), Rocking the ship of state: towards a feminist peace politics, Westview
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Huntemann, NB & Payne MT 2009, Joystick soldiers: the politics of play in military
video games, Routledge, New York, NY.
Irigaray, I 1985, This sex which is not one, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Jenson, J & de Castell, S 2016, ‘Gamer-hate and the “problem” of women’, in YB Kafai,
GT Richard, & BM Tynes (eds.), Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: inter-
sectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming, ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA,
pp. 186–199.
Makuch, E 2014, ‘Percentage of female gamers has more than doubled since 2009’,
Gamespot, 24 June, viewed on 20 July 2017, www.gamespot.com/articles/percentage-
of-female-developers has-more-than-doubled-since-2009/1100-6420680/.
Moberly, K 2013, ‘Preemptive strikes: ludology narratology, and deterrence in com-
puter game studies’, in JC Thompson & MA Ouellette (eds.), The game culture
reader, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, pp. 162–174.
Prescott, J & Bogg, J 2011, ‘Career attitudes of men and women working in the com-
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Vist, E 2015, ‘Actually, it’s about aca-fandom in games studies’, First Person Scholar,
web log post, 20 May, viewed 20 July 2017, www.firstpersonscholar.com/actually-
its-about-aca-fandom/.
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Part IV
Challenging the industry
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9
Feminism and the forever wars
Prototyping games in the time of
‘America First’
Elizabeth Losh
Less than a year after the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center,
the video game America’s Army (2002) became widely available as a free
download. Although designed to be rather conventional as a first-person
shooter, America’s Army was uniquely conceived to represent the interests
of its developer—the United States Army. The game was promoted with fan-
fare at industry events like E3, but its goals were clearly different from the
titles distributed by triple-A entertainment corporations, given that it was
intended to encourage young people to enlist in the armed forces. Video game
journalists and scholars have used America’s Army as an object of analysis
to understand how a game might operate as a tool for recruiting in which
two sides are reduced to one (Wagner 2002), as a rhetorical exemplar of the
obfuscated rules of ideological systems (Bogost 2010, pp. 75–80), and as a
means for articulating ‘realism’ as a desire for political advantage (Galloway
2010, pp. 71–83).
As the first-person shooter format became associated with the so-called
‘War on Terror’, digital artists and activists deployed game engines and
platforms as sites of political protest and critique. For example, on 27
February 2009, I sat on a panel organized by the New Media Caucus of the
College Art Association about war, representation, and new media inter-
activity with Wafaa Bilal and Joseph DeLappe. DeLappe was the creator of
dead-in-iraq (2006–2011) a performance piece played in America’s Army in
which the artist entered the name and death information for every casualty
of the war. Bilal used game-like interfaces for two significant participatory
art installations that were critical of the war in Iraq: Domestic Tension (2007)
and Virtual Jihadi (2008). In Domestic Tension, members of the public were
encouraged to ‘Shoot an Iraqi Online’ by using their home computers to
remotely fire a paintball gun, which bombarded the artist in his studio 24
hours a day for a grueling month. Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi
was a modified version of the anti-American game Quest for Bush (2006),
itself a modded version of the pro-US video game Quest for Saddam (2003).
In Virtual Jihadi the player views digital content projected in the gallery space
as he or she explores the role of a suicide bomber using components of Bilal’s
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122 Elizabeth Losh
own personal history as a brother of a victim of a US missile strike and as a
refugee from warfare in the region.
In the 2013 documentary Joystick Warriors, I asserted ‘the relationship
between videogames and violence might be weaker than the relationship
between videogames and militarism’. Filmmaker Sut Jhally similarly claimed
that ‘one of the functions of popular culture is to bridge the divide between
the public and the military, to provide a kind of fantasy that connects the two’.
When the movie was released, I was pleased to see that Nina Huntemann also
appeared in the film, since she is a fellow feminist who has also written exten-
sively about military games from a nuanced perspective. While conceding that
wargames are ‘sanitized fantasies’ lacking ‘any alternative viewpoint about
military action’ that ‘glamorize the use of force’, Huntemann still allows for
the possibility of ‘critical engagement’ (Huntemann 2010, p. 232).
Now, almost two decades after the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, it is worth asking what game interfaces and digital simulations
can contribute to the public’s understanding of the ramifications of American
military presence at a time of planned troop withdrawals, de-escalations of
force, disinvestment in strategic coalitions, and militarization of the border
rather than territories farther abroad. Many feminists might welcome troops
coming home from theaters of occupation, but there are costs to isolationism
that exacerbate existing situations of precarity around the globe. The Trump
doctrine can make the lives of women, children, the disabled, dissidents, and
refugees much worse, and procedural systems can show how these deterior-
ating conditions operate. In other words, to encourage critical thinking about
the current ‘America First’ policy of President Donald J. Trump, how might
it be useful to prototype digital games that help audiences evaluate how
simulated involvement in military culture functions in the political imaginary
of the present moment? Of course, Trump himself has been famously crit-
ical of the use of digital media as a pedagogical tool (Trump 2011, p. 75).
Yet game-playing fans of the president might be open to exploring playable
systems capable of fostering doubt about current administration policies.
Turning the tables
The availability of tabular data about armed combat has unquestion-
ably been an important component of the history of military simulation.
As Jon Peterson has noted in his research on wargaming, beginning in the
early modern era, commanders tried to formulate a more rigorously scien-
tific version of military science ‘reduced to systems with the clarity and con-
stancy of Newtonian mathematics’ and infused with ‘sufficient data’ to make
logical predictions. If everything could be ‘measured and quantified’, the
reasoning went, then war could be ‘modeled, predicted, regulated, and con-
trolled’ (Peterson 2016, pp. 3–4). As Jacqueline Wernimont (2019) has pointed
out, this emphasis on quantification as a manifestation of supposed Western
rationality has produced a number of different genres for tabular data,
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Feminism and the forever wars 123

including the accounting ledger, the ship’s register, the inventory, the popula-
tion table, and the mortality schedule. These precursors of the contemporary
digital spreadsheet also informed the planning of military campaigns, and
such tabular data could be also used for information visualizations, such as
charts, graphs, and graphics that use color and geometric figures to represent
numeric values. The back-end of the vivid and interactive displays of many
of today’s video games can be similarly reduced to sequences of numbers that
feed data to the machine.
Numerical lists that give specific values to different choices about deploy-
ment have been a mainstay in military simulation, planning, and training for
centuries—whether it be calculating the balance of archers and cavalry in
a medieval siege or the balance of cruise missiles and ICBMs in a twenty-
first-century nuclear strike. A battle in a fantasy card game like Magic the
Gathering (1993) similarly uses mathematical calculations of power to pre-
dict outcomes and plan challenges. Hobbyists and reenactors have often used
real military data from historical engagements to replay famous scenes of
conflict as playable simulations that might generate different outcomes if the
inputs or operations of chance would be different. According to French the-
orist Roger Caillois, the aleatory possibilities of randomness offer rewards (or
punishments) in cases where work or merit alone might not exclusively dic-
tate results (Caillois & Barash 2001, p. 66). Because many of these numerical
tables for combat merely generate probabilities, luck always plays a role on the
virtual battlefield.
During the Trump administration, however, key data points are often
absent. For over a decade, quarterly reports on troop deployments have
been available online with spreadsheets showing how many members of the
armed forces are stationed in particular states or countries, separated into
columns for active duty and reserve troops in each of the five branches of
military service (Defense Manpower Data Center n.d.). But now the entries
for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are blank. There are no zeros in these cells;
the numerical values are completely absent. A small asterisk informs the
reader that with ‘ongoing operations, any questions concerning DoD per-
sonnel strength numbers are deferred to OSD Public Affairs/Joint Chiefs of
Staff’. National Public Radio has lambasted this ‘information blackout’ and
has complained about the inconsistency of the administration’s commitment
to ‘transparency’ (Welna 2018), but relatively little public discussion of this
gap in the data has resulted from their coverage. Perhaps a wargame that uses
tabular data could incorporate this discontinuous numerical hole. What if an
alien spaceship landed just outside Erbil, and only the US military had the
key solution to neutralize the invader? As a player, you would know that you
have 1,761 military personnel in Turkey, that you have none in Iran, and that
you can count those in Armenia on one hand. But how many troops are in
Iraq near the landing site or in Syria a Humvee ride away? Prototyping this
game might raise a key issue worthy of a policy debate, since if the numbers
are unknown in these war zones the president could increase deployments
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dramatically without any citizen oversight. And since a number of troop
withdrawals have been announced on Twitter, it also might be important to
hold the administration accountable for its progress in achieving its goals.
Failed states
Vacuums in power can contribute to failed states in which civilians are
terrorized, starved, or subjected to human rights abuses. For example,
civil wars and ethnic conflicts led to a catastrophic genocide in Darfur and
produced 2.5 million refugees. Susana Ruiz’s Darfur Is Dying (2006) begins
with the player’s avatar foraging for water. Running away from the armed
men in jeeps is impossible in the Flash-based digital game, but there are few
bushes in the barren landscape under which one’s character can take cover
and potentially survive to the next round. Similarly Jamie Antonisse’s Hush
(2008) encourages empathy for a Tutsi woman seeking to calm her baby and
thus avoid alerting Hutu vigilantes armed with machetes to the young family’s
presence. The region’s conflicts spun out of control after the 1994 downing
of a plane with Hutu political leaders aboard from Rwanda and Burundi.
In both these cases games can show the consequences of the absence of civil
society and the rule of law in countries where political infrastructure has
broken down. Since the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, US troops have
been much less likely to intervene despite widespread human rights abuses,
and averting genocide has become an even lower priority during the Trump
administration.
Certainly there have been a number of games about the dilemmas facing
Syrian refugees in recent years. The hypertext choice architecture of Twine as
an authoring platform for composing serious games has been extremely access-
ible to those who might lack the technical skills or publishing bandwidth for
3D game engines (Stewart 2016). For example, Syrian Journey (2015), which
was published on the BBC website, begins with the player choosing between
playing as female or playing as male and then traveling to either Egypt or
Turkey as a first destination. The trajectory of vulnerability past waypoints
on the journey always ends with the player stranded, impoverished, separated
from family members, completely demoralized, or dead. Swindlers and the
travails of other victims keep taking the player off course.
Endgame Syria (2012) shows the dynamics of a rebel coalition being
advised by the player to move strategically through political and military
phases of a conflict with the ruling regime. It uses numerical values, like other
strategy games to gauge success, and different cards can be slotted into place
to form a matrix. Game play can include making choices about alliances with
governments like Russia or Iran, fortifying units engaged in conventional
warfare, or trying unconventional tactics like assassination. For instance, an
opening move in the political phase might be to mobilize exiles and to gain
a statement of support from a senior French official. Although the game’s
developers were promoted by the same Games for Change initiative that
125

launched the award-winning Darfur Is Dying (2006), the mobile version of
the Endgame Syria game was rejected three times by the Apple store (Lien
2013). Apparently the game’s design violated a policy against messaging that
solely targets ‘a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or
any other real entity’ (Crecente 2013). Ultimately designers chose to release
a completely generic product, Endgame Eurasia that featured made-up coun-
tries like ‘Aquilonia’, ‘Elysia’, and ‘Zothique’ and made-up non-state actors
as well. Those in the know could consult a translation key to keep track of the
real-world entities (Endgame Eurasia n.d.), but this was certainly cumbersome
and extraneous to game play.
Obviously this prohibition on naming specific entities undermines the
ability of games such as Endgame Syria to engage with real-world issues or
pose substantive critiques. As Ian Bogost (Bogost et al. 2012) has pointed out
newsgames can perform many functions familiar to consumers of conventional
news content, by extending the possibilities of traditional newspaper offerings
like puzzles, editorial cartoons, or infographics. By modeling the interactions
of multiple rules at work in complex procedural systems like diplomacy and
warfare, Bogost argues that newsgames can also deliver sophisticated jour-
nalism backed by in-depth research. However, if the references of a game are
fictionalized, the benefits of this fact-finding process are reduced. While the
Endgame Syria game was at one time available on Facebook as a way to reach
a mass audience via social media with its proper names intact, it is no longer
supported on the site.
When refugees and asylum seekers are dehumanized in presidential rhet-
oric, it is important that games humanize them. Neither of these Syria games
use human avatars. Furthermore, the model for action presented emphasizes
tropes of rational choice that are likely to be rejected by feminists who have
considered how technology and gender are interrelated.
Hostile allies
As the United States abdicates its position as a superpower and gives more
territorial control to Russia and Saudi Arabia, there are also new opportun-
ities for feminist designers to prototype games that highlight the homophobia
and sexism that have become officially endorsed policies in those nations.
Clickable and consumable digital media interfaces have also promoted
patriarchal control and or complicity with the persecution of sexual minor-
ities. For example, human rights groups have called upon Apple and Google
to stop offering a mobile application designed to help Saudi men track female
relatives. According to the New York Times, Absher, which was launched in
2015 by the Saudi government, is an e-government portal that
allows men to manage the women under their guardianship by giving

or revoking their right to travel through airports, tracking them by their
national identity cards or passports. The men can turn on notifications
126
that alert them with a text message any time a woman under their guard-
ianship passes through an airport.
(Hubbard 2019)
In Russia a homophobic website named after the horror movie Saw marketed
itself as a ‘game’ that encouraged ‘people to upload photos of people they
accuse of being gay with personal information and how to find them’ (Power
2018). The site was associated with several gay-bashing incidents, and many
in the database were extorted by developers of the ‘game’ into paying a hefty
fee to have their content removed. Dating apps for gay men in Russia, such as
Hunters, have had their landing messages hacked, accounts have been deleted
en masse, and users have been ambushed or threatened (Power 2018, Love
2015, Staples 2018).
At the same time, video game companies have certainly been complicit
in Russian and Saudi Arabian image marketing that supports celebratory
national narratives. For example, the production of Mario and Sonic at the
Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games (2013) showed the Black Sea city as a
magical snowy wonderland, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 (2013) featured
the kingdom’s King Fahd International Stadium. Story lines that address
the more nefarious aspects of these regional military powers tend to rely on
trite plots about espionage or terrorist networks rather than everyday human
rights abuses and sexual politics.
US military alliances with authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia and
Russia present opportunities for feminist and queer game designers to create
playable simulations that create empathy for political subjects experiencing
state-sanctioned oppression. For example, users of the Steam platform might
be familiar with the critically acclaimed game Life Is Strange (2015), which
addresses same-sex attraction and heterosexual exploitation of young women
in telling the story of Maxine ‘Max’ Caufield, a lesbian teenager able to rewind
time. How might the game be different if set in Russia or Saudi Arabia? What
would it mean to have all her in-game actions vulnerable to exposure or sub-
ject to control?
Of course, feminists in the Global South have rightly been critical of neo-
liberal and neocolonial empowerment narratives that claim to solve the com-
plex problems involving gender or sexual oppression with techno-solutionism.
Thus, it would be critical to have local activists be lead members of any design
team, perhaps starting with community-based paper prototyping or fabri-
cating board or card games that model these systems of persecution.
Base instincts
The persecution of sexual minorities within the US military itself is also a
phenomenon that game designers should not ignore. As troops withdraw to
their bases, which may claim separate governance under military law, issues
of discrimination, harassment, predation, and sexual violence can more easily
127

be covered up, particularly without journalists and filmmakers with access to
create the primary sources that newsgame designers draw upon. The brutal
killing of Jennifer Laude, a transgender woman from the Philippines, by a
US marine has been made into the compelling documentary Call Her Ganda
(2018). Overall, however, Americans tend to be exposed to relatively little
media coverage about sexual misconduct by US military personnel and the
ways that the dehumanization of racialized others, which is far too common
in the armed forces, can contribute to acts of violence.
Game designers under contract with the military itself have used virtual
reality technologies, 3D game engines, and virtual worlds to address persistent
power inequities reinforced by a macho hierarchical institutional culture.
Jacquelyn Ford Morie, a member of the famed feminist game design collective
Ludica who worked on several military-funded training games, authored an
influential white paper on ‘Enhancing Sexual Harassment Training for the
21st Century Military’ that advocated for using game technologies in basic
training to counteract blame- the-victim scenarios that otherwise become
default sets of assumptions (Losh 2016, p. 366). Morie and Nonny de la Peña
(2011) had previously worked on how gender swapping in the virtual world
Second Life might impact understanding of unwanted sexual advances and
promote empathy.
The USC Institute of Creative Technologies has used virtual humans
with the Unity game engine to develop ELITE SHARP CTT, the Emergent
Leader Immersive Training Environment Sexual Harassment/ Assault
Response and Prevention Command Team Trainer. SHARP is a laptop
training application that is supposed to feature photorealistic 3D avatars,
although promotional videos for the program still show demos with 2D
cartoon animation as stand-in footage. The 3D virtual humans modeled
by the design team only appear in stills with dialogue bubbles. The training
simulation uses a rule-based feedback system to reinforce the procedural
norms of a sexual assault investigation. For example, the user might be
asked to respond to the statement ‘I got hurt fooling around with a few
guys in the barracks. They were being stupid and all, that’s it’ (ELITE
SHARP CTT n.d.).
The Institute for Creative Technologies is also launching the Digital
Survivor of Sexual Assault (DS2A) system, which emphasizes the potentially
transformative force of a first-person story told by a virtual human (DSA2
n.d.). Much as new media theorist Janet Murray (2017) sees traditional oral
narrative as integral to the cultural value of cyberspace, the DS2A design team
asserts that storytelling is ‘one of the most powerful ways people share infor-
mation, connect with, and learn from each other’. Promotional materials show
a male survivor of assault dressed in camouflage sitting in a red chair. He bears
witness from within a vertical screen in the demo. Text explains that assault
survivors have been recorded using one of the institute’s signature proprietary
inventions, the ‘Light Stage’, which consists of a dome of strobe lights that
captures the data from a person’s appearance from every angle and lighting
128
condition, thus rendering color, shading, texture, shine, and translucency of
the actor’s skin in highly precise photorealistic detail (The Light Stages n.d.).
To offer interactivity as well as vividness for the audience (Steuer 1992),
DS2A also incorporates ‘natural language dialogue technology to enable
conversational engagement with survivors’. D2SA is billed as part of the
institute’s partnership with the Shoah Foundation in the New Dimensions
of Testimony initiative. Given the looming mortality of the last remaining
survivors of Nazi genocide, developers promise that the use of virtual humans
in museums and classrooms of the future ‘can provide a path to enable young
people to listen to a survivor and ask their own questions directly, encour-
aging them, each in their own way, to reflect on the deep and meaningful
consequences of the Holocaust’.
From the standpoint of feminist thinking, Lisa Nakamura (2018) has
questioned how well virtual reality technologies designed by white men in the
tech industry actually work to effect social justice. Although Chris Milk’s 2015
TED talk about VR as an ‘empathy machine’ has been viewed over a million
times, Nakamura demands more proof from his ilk that affective engagement
alone is sufficient to make change, particularly when such ‘empathy machines’
reward the moral satisfaction of the user and exploit the pain of the victim for
the user’s edification. The culture of the armed forces is likely to only become
more toxic to sexual minorities with the recent ban on transgender troops
serving in the military and top commanders publicly expressing wishes to roll
back policies to earlier norms that excluded gay men, segregated units by sex,
and prohibited women in combat. Without the kind of systemic transform-
ation, commitment to coalition building, and infrastructure for deliberative
processes that Nakamura describes, how will a single session with a virtual
human disrupt patriarchy?
The inhuman peace
In the time since the 11 September attacks, the military might of the United
States has expanded dramatically with digital technologies to make asym-
metrical combat with anti-American radicals seemingly even more asymmet-
rical. The use of aerial vision technologies implanted in drones, the arming of
autonomous vehicles and robots, and the development of machine learning
algorithms that make massive surveillance of data networks much more effi-
cient appear to put fewer American bodies at any real risk of battlefield harm.
All of these twenty-first century technologies have begun to appear in video
games that represent the cyborg military practices of today’s armed forces.
Yet these alliances with non-human agents do come at the cost of a superior
moral position in the world, particularly when the United States is seen by
other countries as averse to a fair fight.
In Homo Ludens, Dutch cultural critic Johan Huizinga lamented the
fact that modern warfare had become completely divorced from play, as a
129

power-hungry superpower abandoned the egalitarian social ceremonies of
just combat and mutual risk.
‘States of the highest cultural pretensions withdraw from the comity of
nations’, Huizinga wrote. ‘The code of honor is flouted, the rules of the game
are set aside, international law is broken, and all the ancient associations of
war with ritual and religion are gone’ (2014, p. 210). At the time, Huizinga was
a noted anti-Nazi critic who understood the political stakes of both games
and military action.
The spectacle of multiple generals in the White House and of troop visits
converted into one-sided political rallies has raised concerns among today’s
cultural critics about America’s own slide into authoritarianism. Now that
we are putting down our weapons from the first-person shooters of the Bush
administration’s War on Terror, we need to think about the militarism that
has become domesticated and about the gender wars that have become more
divisive with the election of Donald J. Trump. If we consider the poten-
tial cultural products of what Tim Lenoir (Lenoir and Caldwell 2018) has
called ‘the military-entertainment complex’, it might be difficult to imagine
how to gamify the current administration’s ‘America first’ policy, much less
imagine how those playable simulations might model a usable path to social
justice. Nonetheless, principles of feminist and queer game design could be an
important way to prototype political resistance. Arguments that critical play
is rooted in feminized role-playing practices of playing house or dressing up
(Flanagan 2009) and that videogames ‘have always been queer’ (Ruberg 2019)
seem to offer new possibilities for feminist wargaming. To move from theory
to practice, however, it will require much more diverse development and
playtesting teams and much more independence in independent games as they
exist today, because distribution channels are still controlled by corporations
averse to controversy.
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10
Seven dimensions of a feminist
war game
What we can learn from This
War of Mine
Christopher Kampe
Introduction
While it is commonly accepted that war is driven by economic, political, reli-
gious, and ethnicity/racial factors, feminist scholars have argued that histor-
ically constructed notions of masculinity have facilitated the recruitment of
young men and incentivized violent action—in this light, gender is seen as an
important aspect of war (Cockburn 2010; Moser & Clark 2001). Throughout
the modern era, feminist groups have organized against war. Part of fighting
against war is fighting against the dominant narratives that come with war,
exposing and revealing the perspectives of civilian women who have been
terrorized by war (Cockburn 2010).
The majority of wargames position the player as either an elite warrior
or a commander supervising/ directing combat engagements— the player
occupies a role that is empowered by the conditions of war and violence,
with minimal access to the social consequences of war or the experiences of
those marginalized by it (Huntemann & Payne 2009). I argue that gameplay
purposed towards combat is inherently at odds with the idea of ‘feminist
wargames’ because it tends to validate violence as desirable, and position the
player as someone who both benefits from and thrives in a violent world.
Drawing from Feminist Standpoint Theory (Harding 2004) I contend that a
feminist wargame must—through in-game goals, available actions, and sub-
ject representation—allow the player to explore the social realities of war
through the perspective of one who has become marginalized by it.
As an example of a feminist wargame, I examine This War of Mine (2014),
in which the player controls a group of civilians as they attempt to sur-
vive in an active warzone: players occupy the perspectives of marginalized/
disempowered scavengers, who form an ad hoc community and must manage
the risks and traumas of collateral damage. Using This War of Mine (TWoM)
as a case study, I analyze characteristics of the game itself and also the
interactions between the developers and communities of players. Following
from this analysis, I delineate seven dimensions through which a wargame may
adopt critical, feminist values: (1) Characterizations, (2) Setting, (3) Goals/
Objectives, (4) Gameplay Dynamics, (5) Access/Accessibility, (6) Reciprocity,
133
Seven dimensions of a feminist war game 133

and (7) Modifiability. Overall, this method will offer a critical framework
through which war video games may be analyzed and a set of considerations
for future designers of feminist wargames.
On wargames
A clarification of terms: ‘war games’ refers to military field exercises involving
troops and equipment, but without actual combat. I make no argument as to the
possibility of feminist ‘war games’. A nearly identical term ‘wargames’ refers
to model-driven simulations of battlefield engagements. This latter term will
be the focus of this chapter. Historically wargames have been ‘played’ by both
hobbyists and military actors. Although there is a tradition of abstract battle
games (e.g. Latrunculi) dating back to 110 BCE, these games are not classified
as wargames, while some of these games (e.g. Chess) are acknowledged as
precursors (Lewin 2012). Unlike abstract games, which favor simple, elegant
rules, wargames are often characterized by complicated rules surrounding
terrain, units, and various interactions between them (Lewin 2012).
As a military technology, wargames serve as a tool for exploring human
decisions (within a theater of combat), investigating hypothetical scenarios,
stimulating insights, and providing players with experiences from which they
can learn. The wargame affords a virtual situation in which practitioners can
explore tactical decisions without the constraints of ‘safety, rules of engage-
ment, real- world territorial boundaries, or training objectives’. In these
contexts wargames provide problem-solving activities that encourage experi-
mental thought and cultivate skills/ideas that could have purchase in future
military engagements (Burns et al. 2015, pp. 1–6). While these activities serve a
practical purposes for the development of military strategy or the training of
soldiers, for the hobbyists these games offer many opportunities for pleasure.
In the European tradition, we have records of the first wargames (or rather,
the published handbooks dictating their rules) in 1770 (Schuurman 2017).
These handbooks referenced actual military units and their abilities, while
also detailing historical scenarios. However, the purpose of these handbooks
varied; some were designed to help military personnel as training or simu-
lation tools, others were clearly marketed at hobbyists interested in accur-
ately recreating historical battles (Schuurman 2017). This overlap has always
existed, and continues to exist in the modern era. While some wargames have
been classified (e.g. Sigma), the designers of these games often produce com-
mercially available wargames that can be ‘played’ by hobbyists (Sabin 2012).
As modern examples of this practice, Bohemia Interactive and Slitherine
Software each produce wargames for both commercial (e.g. ARMA,
Warhammer 40K) and military (e.g. Virtual Battplace, Command) consump-
tion. While not universal, there exists a longstanding overlap between mili-
tary/recreational wargaming.
Structurally, all wargames are predicated upon model- based systems.
Practitioners can use these models in order to simulate the various perspectives
134
134 Christopher Kampe
in a combat scenario—be it, historical, hypothetical, or fantastic (Schuurman
2017). Simulations work with simplified models, wherein some aspects of
reality (i.e. those deemed insignificant) will be excluded, while other aspects of
reality (i.e. those deemed significant) will be emphasized. In this way, scholars
have argued that simulations possess an implicit rhetorical leaning that will
communicate a set of values to their users (Brummet 2003) even if this com-
munication is unintentional (Bogost 2007). Recreation games (as opposed to
training simulators) tend to be purposed towards a particular form of player
engagement (often enjoyment); thus, when simulating real-world systems,
they tend to abstract away elements that would be disruptive to the form of
engagement that the designers wish to cultivate (Susi et al. 2007). The models
that drive historical wargames, focus on the combat and movement abilities
of various units; they allow the exploration of combat (totally) removed from
the social consequences of warfare.
There is a great deal more that can be said about wargames and the his-
tory of their usage. Philip Sabin’s Simulating War (2012) contextualizes the
modern practice and the theories of analysis that accompany it. The more
recent anthology, Zones of Control (Harrgin & Kirschenbaum 2016) offers an
assortment of perspectives on a variety of wargames, the cultures surrounding
them, and the rule systems that drive them.
Let us now return to the notion of a feminist wargame. If it is indeed
a wargame, it should be predicated upon a model, and said model should
facilitate the simulation of events. This simulation will simplify reality and
present reality from a particular vantage. We now approach a question of
rhetorical priority: what aspects of war do we want to see? What sorts of
actions would this game permit? I argue that this comes down to an issue
of standpoint: from what perspective are we (the players) perceiving this war,
and through what set of affordances are we able to interact with this conflict.
The traditional wargame houses us in the perspective of those who are (ultim-
ately) empowered by war, rendering those displaced by war (i.e. civilians) as
scenery or scoring factors, if these marginalized figures are acknowledged at
all. To this end, a feminist wargame, as I am conceptualizing it, should operate
from the perspective of non-combatants, exploring war as an impediment, a
site of disruption and trauma.
War from a different perspective: standpoint theory

Building off a Marxist, feminist perspective, Nancy Hartsock worked to
reconceptualize the notion of working-class consciousness in such a way that
attended to the collective, yet highly situational experiences of marginalized
women. She asserts that the oppressed, because of the position they occupy
relative to extant power structures, possess a different view of the world (e.g.
of social structures, necessities, freedoms, etc.) than what is held by individ-
uals occupying positions of privilege. She argues that women, who have been
historically obligated to various forms of unpaid (e.g. domestic, reproductive)
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or underpaid labor, possess a ‘standpoint’. She argues that these standpoints
represent collective perspectives that differ from contemporary hegemonic
views (Hartsock 1983; Cockburn 2010).
As a term, a standpoint refers to something greater than a perspective: it
has been ‘earned through the experience of collective political struggle’
(Bowell 2011). One does not speak of a unifying ‘feminist standpoint’, but
as plural ‘standpoints’ derived from different, particular experiences of
oppression, marginalization, and resistance. The practice of identifying a
standpoint is ethnographic: driven by talking to a population and identi-
fying certain commonalities of experience among members despite disparate
aspects of their background. From an activist perspective, standpoints have
epistemic value because they are able to identify structural problems and
inequalities that would be invisible from prevailing/acknowledged points of
view (Harding 2004). So, particular standpoints can be useful either as a
means of expanding awareness (i.e. recognizing problems), or as a means of
cultivating empathy.
Cynthia Cockburn argues that the civilian experience of war (especially
female) in its various forms (e.g. militarization, active conflict, ‘so-called peace’,
etc.) have the capacity to give rise to one such standpoint. She offers this stand-
point as an antidote to the ‘glorification of war and warriors’ (2010, p. 145) or the
sanitized discourses that present war as ‘political, institutional, calculated, and
organized … [while] downplay[ing] the messy cultural detail of armed conflict’.
She contends that, in order to access this standpoint, we need to utilize the tools
of the ‘culturally attuned sociologist or anthropologist’ (p. 146), examining the
perspectives of the civilians who lived through war. From this standpoint, there
is a great deal of observed trauma, but there are also more mundane accounts
of people figuring out how to survive and stay sane during periods of upheaval.
While the idea of approximating the standpoint of a civilian war survivor
may seem daunting, it isn’t inaccessible. Cockburn’s writing, both her essays
and books (especially From Where We Stand: War, Woman’s Activism, and
Feminist Analysis, 2007), detail a number of organizations which are dedicated
to helping war survivors and recording their narratives. Similar efforts are
taken up by journalists and ethnographers. Regarding the Siege of Sarajevo
(the inspiration for TWoM) journalist Barbara Demick chose to examine the
conflict by examining the changes a specific neighborhood went through in
Logavina Street (2012); Ivana Maček performed a more scholarly analysis in
her book Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (2009). Similar texts
exist for many contemporary conflicts.
Framework for a feminist wargame

A feminist wargame, as I am conceptualizing it, must embrace standpoint
theory relative to the experiences of war. It must operate from the perspective
of actors that have been marginalized or displaced by war. The dynamics of
the game (i.e. actions, strategies) should be capable of expressing activities of
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historical survivors, albeit imperfectly. The gameplay should not be combat
oriented, though it need not exclude combat. The game should not operate
from the perspective of a warrior; rather, it should operate from the perspective
of a civilian in war time. The mechanics and aesthetics of the game should be
grounded, to some degree, in the actual human experience of these civilians.
Finally, historically feminized activities, such as preparing food, caring for
children, maintaining the house, insofar as they are essential to human life,
must be included in the game’s model. The purpose here is not complete
fidelity (which is definitionally unattainable in a simulation) but verisimili-
tude. Absent this, the player will be unable to experience the game as ‘Social
Realism’ (Galloway 2006) and their experience will be more of a mediation on
abstract strategy than empathy-building visit to another’s perspective.
A feminist wargame cannot exist within a vacuum. It will be designed,
distributed, and put in the hands of an audience who will play the game.
I view the act of play as a potentially expansive activity, one that is historic-
ally imbricated in other historical practices ranging from simple discussion
(e.g. forums) to the development of mods with which other players interact
(Consalvo 2009; Mehlenbacher & Kampe 2017). To this extent, the game must
be deployed in a manner that adheres to the principles of socially responsible
design: it must involve the community it represents, remain accessible to the
community it represents, give (some degree of internal) control over to the
community it represents, and ultimately serve to empower the community it
represents (Melles et al. 2011). In practical terms, designers need to consider
how language, cost, and hardware requirements might impact access to the
game. Furthermore, the game should be ‘open’ to the extent that members
of the represented group could modify it or tell their own stories through the
game’s engine/model.
In the table below, I articulate seven dimensions through which a wargame
can advance feminist and/or socially responsible design. I provide a definition
for each dimension, and advance a criteria that it can be evaluated against or
considered beside. Some dimensions exist within the game itself, while others
refer to the manner in which it is distributed and the engagement strategies
following its release.
I do not advance this criteria as some objective standard. Just as there are
numerous feminisms, there exists the capacity for wargames to espouse fem-
inist ideals without satisfying these criteria. Furthermore, I do not mean to
advance this criteria as prescriptive; its origins are descriptive: principles taken
from the critically praised anti-wargame TWoM. I derived these dimensions
by playing TWoM and noting the behaviors of the developers (11 Bit Studios)
in the years following the game’s release. I do not mean to suggest that TWoM
is a perfect realization of these principles. It is merely a successful exemplar of
these principles. In the section that follows, I will provide a brief description
of the game; I will then examine the game, and actions taken after its release,
through the lens of the framework I have provided.
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Table 10.1 Seven dimensions for the feminist and/or socially responsible design of

wargames
Dimension Definition Criteria

Characterization The appearance, Does the player operate from
background and qualities the perspective of a character
of the playable characters who has been marginalized or
and the non-playable displaced by war? Were details
characters that will be relating to representation
encountered. of player and non-player-
characters adapted from first/
second-hand accounts of
civilian war survivors (CWS)?
How accurate and nuanced are
representations of gender, race,
ability, etc.?
Setting The spatial/temporal Does the setting take inspiration
qualities of the virtual from specific historical incidence?
environment in terms of Does the locale take direct
audio/visual appearance, inspiration from places that were
as well as denotative and historically accessible by CWS
connotative in-game during times of war?
references.
Dynamics1 The complex/multi-step Are the dynamics of play (i.e.
actions that the player multi-step actions) congruent
is able to perform with the prevailing activities
when utilizing the basic of CWS (as reported through
mechanical affordances first-and second-hand sources)?
of the game. Do the dynamics of play
include historically feminized
actions?
Objectives Specific or general goals Are the micro/macro goals imposed
that the player will by the game, congruent with the
recognize and (attempt stated goals of CWS? Are these
to) accomplish via goals (generally) predicated upon
dynamics. Said goals can non-violent forms of (inter-)
be mandatory, optional, action? How does the game
or impossible. This only explore consequences of violence/
refers to ‘formal’ goals war?
that are in some way
recognized by the game.
Localized Requirements to run the Does the game require expensive
Accessibility2 game (e.g. hardware, hardware to run? If the game
OS, and platform), cost is not free, how will cost
to access and run the impact player exposure? What
game, as well as language linguistic barriers might prevent
options for the game. populations from playing this
game?
(continued)
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Table 10.1 (Cont.)
Dimension Definition Criteria

Reciprocity Benefits the game provides Does the game provide any social
for the communities it benefit to the populations it took
represents or drew from. inspiration from? Does the game
provide financial benefit to CWS
in some way?
Modifiability The public availability of Have the developers provided tools
developer or community- that could be used by CWS
built tools that allow (or their allies) in order to tell
for the creation of new their own stories or otherwise
scenarios that run using add content relevant to their
the game’s engine. own experiences? What level of
technical knowledge/equipment is
required to use these tools?
Notes
1 Dynamics refer to the more complex actions/maneuvers that can be accomplished through the
game’s mechanics (Hunicke et al. 2004). For example, the ‘dynamic’ of methodical scavenging
is predicated on a number of mechanics: limited inventory, variable good utility and value,
map areas for exploration, basic movement, the ability to search through rubble and pick items
up, etc.
2 Regarding general accessibility and approaches for game design that accommodate varying
forms/degrees of disability see Yuan et al. (2011) for a more general discussion of how dis-
ability can productively inform design see Pullin (2009). While I acknowledge the need for
game design that respects different user abilities; however, discussion of these principles and
techniques is beyond the scope of this paper.
Case study of a feminist wargame: This War of Mine (2014)

In March of 2014, 11 Bit Studios released an eerie trailer:1 the screen starts
from black; somber, arpeggiated chords play in the background; from the
darkness, the camera tracks right, and we see a world in slow motion. Armed
soldiers sprint forward. Most look forward, one hesitates, looking back. We
hear the first notes of an electric guitar, floating in and out. A soldier passes
a personnel carrier; the camera tracks through a nascent explosion, as a sol-
dier beside it falls; the music comes to crescendo. The camera speeds up,
tracking though soldiers shooting and being shot. Then the camera tracks
into darkness; the guitars and orchestral support recede, leaving only the
piano chords. The long tracking shot finishes, settling on several individ-
uals huddled in a ruined house. A man braces against a wall holding his face.
A woman holds onto a bleeding man barely kneeling upright, while a child
looks at the scene. A caption appears: ‘In war not everyone is a soldier’.
TWoM, taking inspiration from the 1992–1996 siege of Sarajevo,2 explores
war from the perspective of a group of survivors who scavenge for food and
supplies. The goal is simple: do not die; survive, however you can, until the
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end. The political message of the game is rather unambiguous: just outside
the survivors’ shelter, graffitied on the remnants of a brick wall, are the words
‘Fuck the War!’
As is always the case, it is easier to understand the game by playing it or
watching a ‘playthrough’ (many of which are accessible online). As a game,
TWoM consists of several scenarios which are based on a common under-
lying model. Before we can analyze the game, we must describe its pertinent
elements:
• The player controls a group of civilians, each has a backstory, a set of

skills, and drawbacks.
• Civilians have mental and physical states. Player actions and inactions
can affect these states.
• In order to stay alive, civilians need to eat, drink, rest, and stay warm. If
these needs aren’t addressed, the civilian will get weaker and die.
• Mental well-being is variable: different activities (e.g. reading, singing)
benefit civilians according to their dispositions; in the same way activities
(e.g. stealing, witnessing violence) have different effects on their mental
well-being. If mental needs are not addressed, the civilian will leave or
commit suicide.
• Play is divided into two stages: a day stage, in which the civilians collect-
ively attend to their domestic needs, and a night stage, in which a single
civilian goes out to scavenge for resources.
• Time is a resource: the day is 14 hours long, the night is 8 hours long.
• The game ends if all the civilians die/leave; the player wins if the civilians
endure until a ceasefire is declared (20–40 days depending on the scenario).
• Survival requires resources; resources can be scavenged, constructed/
cultivated, and traded.
• All domestic tasks (e.g. growing crops, cooking food, resting, reading,
making tools, etc.) require labor; some tasks consume resources (e.g.
fermenting alcohol requires sugar and water); a civilian must work at a
task for a set amount of time—thus labor hours are a finite resource.
• When scavenging, carrying capacity is limited, and (depending on the
location) it is possible for the civilian to get injured or killed; by exten-
sion, the civilian may also injure, kill, or steal from non-player-characters
(NPCs).
• When scavenging, there are two modes: scavenge and combat; the default
mode is scavenge, here the interface facilitates hiding, searching for items,
and using tools; the combat mode allows the character to use whatever
weapon they have equipped on an NPC, hostile or otherwise.
• The game autosaves at the end of every day or night session; this makes
actions more-or-less permanent, meaning combat is very risky.
• If a character dies, there is no replacement; fewer resources will be
consumed, but fewer labor hours will be available.
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Applying the dimensions

Because the dimensions I lay out are not and could never be completely dis-
crete units of evaluation, it is difficult to divide a game’s characteristics neatly
into sections; in many places, dimensions bleed together. For example, Setting
and Characterization both draw from interviews with war survivors. The
company’s decision to release keys on a popular torrenting website Pirate Bay
because they knew some people couldn’t afford the game3 could relate to both
Reciprocity and Accessibility. The context-specificity that this mode of ana-
lysis offers dictates that dimensions should remain discrete for the purpose
of analysis but discretion is ultimately relegated to the researcher employing
this framework. This ethic is in line with extant feminist thought; as Haraway
states: ‘only partial perspective promises objective vision … Feminist object-
ivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcend-
ence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable
for what we learn how to see’ (1988, p. 583). Therefore, although a single
dimension’s contents may also fit under another dimension, the thoughtful
and purposeful placement of a quality (and its requisite justification) is what
ultimately matters.
Characterization and setting

The developers of TWoM, wanted to create a game ‘about war … about
ordinary people who face extremely difficult moral choices’ (Kowalczyk 2015).
Exploring this premise, they realized that they knew the most about conflict
close to them (i.e. ‘the Warsaw Uprising, Kosovo, Monrovia, Sarajevo’), and
chose to loosely base the game around these events. When researching the
details to be included in the game, they interviewed family members and
acquaintances who had first-hand accounts of these experiences, while also
making use of interview recordings provided by Amnesty International. To
their surprise, it turned out ‘people did not remember they were attacking
Germany, or attacking Russians, or Croats, or anyone … [they recalled aspects
of] everyday life: they lacked tea, but they exchanged eggs with a neighbor …
[their concerns were to] survive and take care of their families’ (Kowalczyk
2015). As one anthropologist put it,
The experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans’ struggle to

recreate normality during the siege, as well as their constant oscillation
between knowing and not-knowing, was a typical limit situation … in
this ‘grey zone’, any action and view is potentially acceptable. Norms and
normativity itself are eradicated.
(Maček 2009, p. 35)
The game itself, through art, events, and naming conventions, gives the
impression that it is happening in the Balkans; however, because it doesn’t
ascribe religion or specific ethnic identity to its characters or provide concrete
141

locations for events, its decontextualization arguably ‘opens space for a more
universal message … [while refraining] from taking [nationalistic] political
stances’ (Sterczewski 2016). The characters (six male, four female) represent
a variety of ages and backgrounds, though all present a sense of uniform
ethnicity. Their backgrounds range from academics, lawyers, and laborers
to thieves—reinforcing the idea that war has uprooted all of their lives. Play
begins in a large, half-destroyed shelter, impressing the idea that none of them
has a ‘whole’ home to return to. To a certain extent, their pasts are irrelevant;
they are all now survivors. While some may be more efficient at a task or
might have a different response to an event, all characters are fundamentally
capable of performing all of the actions permitted by the game (e.g. cook,
rest, dig, shoot). Thus the game facilitates a degree of character differenti-
ation without limiting their fundamental capacities.
Dynamics and objectives

The player’s goal is to keep at least one member of the group alive until the siege
relents. As indicated above, characters can die from direct injury (e.g. they are
shot while looting) or neglect (e.g. they starve or catch fever). Though the out-
side world is dangerous, the player is motivated to scavenge because she will need
external resources in order to ensure that her group does not succumb to neg-
lect. At the start of the game, the characters are able to scavenge from low-risk
locations. As these locations are stripped of resources, characters will be forced
to venture into more dangerous (i.e. high-risk/reward) locations.
In order to explore the dynamics of this game, I will describe an emergent
narrative from my own playthrough.
This game is hard. If you do not play it well, your group will die. Here is
the story of my first failure.
• My group consisted of four people: Pavele, Arica, Bruno, and Katia.

Pavele was my scavenger; he could always carry the heaviest loads, which
meant more resources for the house, but he moved slowly.
• For weeks, I sent Pavele to scavenge in safe places, and that worked for a
while, but eventually, those locations were picked clean. So, I sent him to
scavenge in a dangerous place. An armed man saw him looting and shot him.
• Pavele was badly wounded, but he made it home. I used the medical
supplies I had and gave him constant bedrest. I did not have the money to
purchase sterile bandages; I needed that money for food. I sent out other
scavengers, to less dangerous places, but these sites had been picked clean
by others.
• When Pavele came down with a fever, I knew I had to get medicine. This
meant that I would need to rob a warehouse. I sent a young girl, Arica,
into a dangerous place, thinking she could slip by the guards. I was mis-
taken. She was shot and died.
• Pavele died from his fever. On the following night, Bruno stole the last of
our food supplies and left. Katia killed herself. The game was over.
142
I did not adequately appreciate risk. I did not realize how quickly a character
could die, nor did I comprehend how the loss of a character could trigger
a cascading failure that would destroy the entire group in a matter of days.
I had spent hours building up the compound; now it was gone. The failure
felt personal as did the emergent narrative surrounding it. But I learned.
In my third playthrough, I found myself in a similar situation: Pavele had
been shot. I sent Arica into an old apartment building where snipers had
been active. This time, I was more cautious. I understood how quickly death
could take her. Carefully, quietly, nimble Arica snuck from room to room,
eluding the dangerous men. She could not carry much, but she brought back
electronic parts and medicines, a haul worth more than anything we had.
Because of her limited strength, I thought of her as expendable and never
much cared for her. But in that particular playthrough, my bravest hero was
a little girl.
While I cannot speak to all the lessons one could learn from playing
This War of Mine, I can speak to the lessons I learned. In order to win,
I needed to cast aside some notions of who is the hero, who is the worker.
In fact, I needed to get over the idea of the singular hero. Inasmuch as Arica
saved the day, the survival of the group was predicated on every character
working to the fullest of their abilities. During the day, so much work needs
to be done: the front door reinforced, plants tended, tools built up from
scrap, rainwater gathered, meals cooked, dinner served and eaten. When
it came to scavenging, Pavele was best suited for safe places where much
could be taken, but he was ill-suited for the stealth that dangerous places
required. When merchants came to the door, or when we needed goods
from the market, the house relied on Katia. She knew how to haggle and
always got the best deals. By the late game, I didn’t need to scavenge. Bruno
handled the cooking and much of the crafting. Sveta worked constantly,
tending to the plants, rolling cigarettes (our currency at the markets), and
keeping the group sane.
At a macro-level, the player’s objective is simple: survive until the war
ends. At a micro-level, the player is overwhelmed by a fleet of possible
objectives, some of which involve the carrying out of daily routines that
facilitate survival, some are wholly reactive (e.g. our food was stolen, a char-
acter is sick, etc.), while others are more strategic (e.g. what should I be
trading in winter). In this way, long-term objectives are impossible to attain
without ritualized attendance to domestic obligations (i.e. recurrent micro-
objectives). These domestic obligations require the simultaneous manage-
ment of many individuals, rewarding players who are able to get more done
within the shelter. Furthermore, the dynamics are such that if one is highly
productive at the shelter (where there is little risk of injury), there is less of
a need to venture into locations where harm/injury are probable. Work that
has been traditionally feminized, though often slow, tedious, and mundane,
remains as essential actions that the player must perform religiously if their
group is to survive.
143
Localized accessibility
In an effort to overcome language barriers the developers worked with
the community to create new (albeit imperfect) translations of the game.4
Abstractly, developers have to perform a cost-benefit analysis when it comes
to translation: will more potential customers justify the costs of transla-
tion? However, the developers are not the only stakeholders in this instance.
When the constellations are just right, a game’s community will generate what
would otherwise be expensive labor for free. It began in the forums; poten-
tial players were interested in the game, but lamented that it wasn’t in their
native language. The developers were sympathetic, as was the game’s com-
munity. Almost as soon as non-English-speaking players made translation
requests, multilingual players volunteered to help.5 The developers immedi-
ately recognized that the community itself was a powerful resource for free
translation so, they developed a web page6 where volunteers could coordinate
their efforts.
Just as language posed a barrier to some players, so did cost. Shortly after
the game’s release, torrents for cracked versions of the game appeared on
Pirate Bay. The developers responded ‘if because of some reasons you can’t
buy the game, its [sic] ok. We know life, and we know that sometimes it’s
just not possible’. Following this, they posted a number of Steam keys that
could be redeemed for legal copies of the game.7 This may have been a very
clever move.
There is something of a common ethos among individuals who pirate
games/software. They are stealing from the ‘haves’ and giving to the ‘have
nots’. They believe information should be free and shared (Yu et al. 2015).
Among developers, there is a common perception that piracy will only harm
them. The reality is inherently more complex: ‘In certain circumstances,
limited piracy can benefit a copyright holder’ by speeding up the ‘digital
diffusion’ of their product (Hill 2007, p. 14). There are more nuanced ways
to deter piracy than attempting to shut down torrents or rely on third-party
DRM software. Short of a fully permissive stance, experts argue that some
of the best ways to counter piracy include giving pirates easier ways to legally
acquire the game (e.g. free samples or keys), lowering the price of the product,
and performing positive actions which would increase a moral resistance to
piracy. In this style, the developers made several canny decisions. Rather than
voicing outrage at piracy they said, ‘if you cannot afford the game, take it for
free’. Within six months of release they heavily discounted the game ($5 or
less) during Steam, GoG, and Humble Bundle sales. Through these actions,
they demonstrated empathy while (probably) dissuading piracy.
Reciprocity
The developers of TWoM expressed ‘concerns about monetizing from war’
(de Smale et al. 2017, p. 11) and through purposeful efforts took steps towards
144
direct and indirect reciprocity. It must be noted that the developers recouped
costs for this game very quickly; the commercial success of the game presented
them with opportunities for reciprocity that would have been financially dif-
ficult for a struggling company. The most noteworthy action the developers
took was partnering with a number of street artists to develop the ‘War Child’
DLC expansion.
Following the commercial success of the game, the developers went
through a semi-standard cycle of patches before producing an expansion for
the game. The ‘War Child’ expansion added two elements to the game: chil-
dren, who require resources but cannot produce or scavenge; and street art,
which appears both in game and as a digital collection. The art itself was
developed by various street artists who either lived through times of war or
created art lamenting war. Although this content enriched the world of the
game, it also provided a platform for lesser-known artists. Furthermore, all
monies from the DLC went directly to the War Child charity. Though the
quantity of money raised is unknown, Polygon reported enough money was
raised to assist 350 refugee children (Hall 2015);8 donations have continued
since the time of publication, but the studio has not since published new
milestones.9
Modifiability
After the game’s release, members of its community were motivated to
create their own stories, based on first-or second-hand experience or
entirely fictional. The developers responded by creating modding tools
that allow for the construction of new characters and scenarios.10 While
these scenarios are limited by the underlying engine and the technical pro-
ficiencies of their users, they are an expressive tool. If an individual was so
inclined, they could gather new anthropological data from war survivors
of a particular region, develop their own characters, set a new sequence of
events, and use this software to tell another survivor’s story. I do not claim
that the TWoM engine can possibly express all of civilian experience during
times of war; however, I contend that the openness of the engine is worthy
of replication. Just as the first wargames were handbooks that presented
models upon which scenarios have been run, I assert that future feminist
wargames need to be in the business of building new models which can be
used convey different standpoints on war.
Conclusions
I recognize that there are many ‘war themed’ games that could adopt a fem-
inist standpoint; however, I wish to make a distinction between these games
and ‘wargames’, which constitute a historical genre of battle simulation. With
that distinction established, I can summarize the internal qualities of a ‘fem-
inist wargame’ as I am conceptualizing it:
145

• Model-based: simulating basic human needs, interactions, finite resources,
and environmental obstacles/variables.
• Scenario-driven: a ‘game’ as will consist of one or more scenarios that
utilize a common model. These scenarios will determine player start state,
desired end state (i.e. goal), available resources, and present obstacles.
• Historically informed: while complete verisimilitude is not necessarily the
goal, elements of the game, such as model characteristics (i.e. variables,
interactions, etc.), scenario parameters/objectives, protagonist abilities,
etc. should leverage historical/ethnographic data—even if the scenario
itself is fantastic.
• Standpoint- oriented: play focuses on the behavior/ survival of non-
combatants during a time of war. By extension, play should abstractly
represent essential behaviors/activities that civilians would perform. Said
activities must be inclusive of essential, but historically feminized, activ-
ities (e.g. getting food, cooking, offering emotional support, supervising
children, etc.).
• Difficult: the scenarios should be, in a non-trivial sense, difficult to com-
plete but not impossible; such that initial players are likely to fail in a
manner that will hurt. Sadistic as it may sound, pain is a goal.
Up until this point I have spoken of gamic difficulty indirectly; however,

I contend that difficulty and complexity serve a rhetorical purpose in feminist
wargames. Designers of wargames have historically had to grapple with an
ambivalence: the more complex the system the better it can simulate reality;
however, the simpler system is more approachable to players (Schuurman
2017). If one were designing a training simulation to teach civilian wartime
survival, a higher degree of fidelity would be warranted, but if one’s goal is
to create a (recreational) serious game, then extreme fidelity is undesirable. At
the same time, difficulty itself can serve a rhetorical purpose.
As a player, if you tell me I’m playing a survival scenario and I manage
to traverse that scenario without losing, I may well infer that survival, in this
scenario, is relatively easy. On the other hand, if the scenario you gave me was
difficult—if I lost several times before succeeding—I might infer that survival,
in said scenario, is difficult. A classroom study found similar results when
it examined the effect that playing a poverty simulation, Spent (2011) had
on students’ perceptions of poverty. Spent did not lead students to increased
empathy or positive views of people living with poverty, whereas observing a
classmate playing Spent, and struggling with it, did. Players able to traverse
the game successfully, a task taking roughly ten minutes, were more disposed
to report that poverty is an individually controllable phenomenon—after all,
they won (Roussos & Dovidio 2016). As simulations are predicated on player
operation, the difficulty of the game may impact the values/meanings that
players infer from it.
In The Art of Failure, the author describes two experiences of gamic
failure: ‘fictional failure’ which befalls a character in a game, and ‘real failure’
146
which a player can experience after they have invested energy/emotion into a
game and lost (Juul 2013, pp. 24–29). A TWoM scenario takes approximately
ten hours to complete. The autosave system prevents players from undoing
mistakes (clever cheaters not-withstanding). A critical mistake will have a
cascading effect, such that the full gravity of the loss may take time to set
in. These mechanical decisions not only make the game difficult, but they
facilitate player investment, which in turn makes failures ‘real’ rather than
‘fictional’. I argue that games that elicit experiences of ‘real failure’ are better
tools for cultivating empathy, than games where failure is inconsequential (in
terms of lost time/effort).
If it is your goal to build a feminist wargame, do so with the community in
mind. Critically minded developers should adopt socially responsive design
practices ‘building sociotechnical structures that are explicitly designed in col-
laboration with, and toward the continual growth of, individuals and those
communities in which they are nested’ (Barab et al. 2005, p. 88). In the context
of feminist wargames, this practice will include:
• Developing connections to organizations devoted to helping war

survivors. Through these organizations, you will gain access to first-and
second-hand accounts of civilian war survivors. Cynthia Cockburn has
written about this extensively; her books and essays name many of these
organizations.
• Establishing forums where players (current and potential) can voice
interests and concerns. An engaged community, if they are able, will assist
in translation.
• Building tools that will allow users to build their own scenarios, add their
own characters, and tell their own stories.
• Finding ways to help the populations that have inspired your game,
whether through active charity or promotion.
If you are an educator who is interested in bringing such a game into your
classroom, think about how you might contextualize it for your students.
Nursing programs have used poverty simulations to help students better
understand the difficulties impoverished households faced, and the experi-
ence was perceived by students to be effective as a means of teaching and
correlated with a reduction in stigmatic views of individuals in poverty.
However, these students did not simply play a game; rather, they examined a
body of literature and a number of case studies while interacting with a simu-
lation (Patterson & Hulton 2012). As other scholars have cautioned before,
educational games are not a ‘silver bullet’, insofar as they are not intrinsically
superior to other forms of educational media (Young et al. 2012). However,
when a game/simulation is brought into a classroom thoughtfully, when
students are asked to reflect on its simulation beside other accounts of fact,
then it can be a powerful tool.
147
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my colleague Sarah Evans who helped me develop this idea
and gave me insightful feedback. Without her support, this chapter would not
have been written.
Notes
1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxf1seOpijE.
2 See Developer Trailer (www.youtube.com/watch?v=gotK5DLdVvI).
3 https://segmentnext.com/2014/11/17/war-mine-developer-handing-free-steam-
codes/.
4 See Developer Update 1.4 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKxg6of03BE).
5 Anecdotally, some of these translators were teachers living outside the US.
A handful of these records can be found in the Steam Forums dedicated to TWoM.
For one such example, see: https://steamcommunity.com/app/282070/discussions/
0/357286119110895220/.
6 http://babel.thiswarofmine.com/.
7 https://segmentnext.com/2014/11/17/war-mine-developer-handing-free-steam-
codes/.
8 www.polygon.com/2015/4/2/8331411/this-war-of-mine-charity-dlc.
9 https://store.steampowered.com/app/348040/This_War_of_Mine__War_Child_
Charity_DLC/.
10 See Developer Update 2.0 www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkPSM4k5qmY.
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150
11
Failed feminist interventions in
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Mark Kaethler
Introduction: make America Nazi-free again … through obscene

acts of violence?
When Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017) was released, the advertisement’s
slogan read ‘Make America Nazi-Free Again’, an overt reference to the events
in Charlottesville and the presidency of Donald Trump. Creator Tommy
Bjork wrote the script and plot long before these events occurred, but he
has recounted in an interview with VICE News how his own experience of
Nazism in his home country of Sweden was influential (VICE News 2017).
The game franchise has always been about killing Nazis and was one of the
pioneering series in the first-person shooter genre. As Souvik Mukherjee
notes, developments in graphics and gaming have allowed the original spy
narrative of the game to become enhanced over the course of the various
iterations of the storyline, thereby ‘growing interest in exploring narrative
possibilities’ (2015, p. 60).1 Wolfenstein II is no different in its evolutionary
approach to what was a basic plotline and imbues newfound interest in fem-
inist values as well as an effort to implicate the series in contemporary pol-
itics.2 In this manner, the most recent game picks up where the last one left off.
A cut-scene from Wolfenstein: The New Order’s (2014) conclusion presents the
protagonist of the series, B.J. Blazkowicz, as ready to die; his voice narrates a
scene in which his pregnant partner, Anya, holds a light, ushering survivors
from Nazi captivity to safety while he quotes Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The
New Colossus’. Highlighting the Statue of Liberty via Lazarus’s poem as a
feminized symbol of freedom who will bring hope and safety to those suffering
while ostensibly preparing for his death, Blazkowicz seems to be passing the
torch to his female counterparts who we see departing at the conclusion of
Wolfenstein: The New Order for what will be a mission in Wolfenstein II: The
New Colossus to liberate the United States.3
On the surface then, the latest game in the series appeals to challenges
to hegemonic systems of power through utilizing feminine icons as emblems
of recalcitrance to fascism. This challenge to oppressive ideologies and
impositions of normalcy is rooted in feminist discourse. Drawing upon the
work of Drucilla Cornell, Elizabeth Grosz reasserts that at its core feminism
151
Failed feminist interventions 151

entails a challenge to oppression (2005, p. 75). By conceiving of proper mili-
tary combat as that which is opposed to hegemony, Wolfenstein II clearly
fits the bill by demolishing fascism and Nazism, but it makes more unique
efforts to question this hegemony, thereby distinguishing it from other Second
World War videogames. Through establishing empowered women in mili-
tary combat, Wolfenstein II offers a clear challenge to patriarchy specifically,
and it questions the self-sufficient and able-bodied ideal of the male soldier
that reflects the embodiment of this fascist regime. As Michael Kimmel has
elucidated, this toxic model of selfhood is aligned with an oppressive mas-
culinity of ‘self-reliance’ (1996, p. 16). The game’s intervention to envision
alternative masculinities resists this domineering patriarchal norm, thereby
maintaining a feminist ethos. Although these interventions also challenge
conventional first-person shooter war games, there are significant flaws with
the game’s implementation of these clear goals. Even the counterpoint to
Nazism begs the question of whether or not violence constitutes a valid fem-
inist response to this fascism. Memes and gifs that were created after Richard
Spencer was punched in the face by someone protesting white supremacy led
to such questions. Wolfenstein II offers players a hypothetical world where
Nazism has become the dominant worldview and militaristic resistance is
the only option. As a fictional, alternative timeline in which the Nazis won
and took over the United States, the narrative does not have direct bearing
on current political affairs, but its dystopian imaginary world still mirrors
present-day anxieties and politics in the United States. Despite the fact that
the violence it depicts is against Nazis, the onslaught of nameless figures who
are obliterated by the player should nevertheless still be questioned. Although
Jinee Lokaneeta has identified that ‘resistance’ characterizes feminism and
may take the shape of ‘political violence’ (2015, p. 1021), it is important to
keep in mind that the member of the resistance that the player operates in
order to enact this political violence is a man, not allowing for a non-cis-
white-man person to see someone representative of themselves as the enactor
of justice.4 That male character also inhabits the masculine genre of the first-
person shooter, which C. Thi Nguyen labels as a ‘destruction game’ (2018,
p. 184).5 Although oppositional games typically entail a degree of violence
or dominance,6 the killing of thousands of faceless Nazi soldiers in varying,
gory ways makes it destructive. From this standpoint, Wolfenstein II is fem-
inist in its use of violence to combat fascism, but the gory details risk allowing
its users to indulge excessively in these acts. Nevertheless, the game offers an
intervention of the genre by interrogating the conventions of the first-person
shooter and supplying an improvement upon previous games in the series as
well as militaristic games as a whole.
With respect to genre, the ability to codify Wolfenstein II or Wolfenstein
as a game series into any distinct category becomes a problem as well. As
Nathan McKenzie identifies, where the original Wolfenstein game ‘came from
… is … difficult to trace despite its massive impact on the first-person shooter’
(2012, p. 53). For McKenzie, this problem distinguishes Wolfenstein from
152
152 Mark Kaethler

other militaristic games like the Soldier of Fortune series. B.J. Blazkowicz is
the protagonist in the main storylines of all iterations of the franchise thus
far, and he is regularly presented as a spy infiltrating the Nazi regime in order
to assassinate key leaders and obliterate any officers who stand in his way.7
Although this narrative has clear ties to the Second World War, the supernat-
ural elements of the franchise as well as the historical revisioning of the recent
two reboots, in which the Nazis have won the Second World War, are likely the
reasons why critics are hesitant to discuss it as a war game. The oppositional
context of the war combined with tactical strategies, however, allow for it
to be defined as a war game. While Huntemann and Payne define military
games as part of ‘the military-entertainment complex … [that] blurs the line
between entertainment and militarism’ (2009, p. 4),8 Wolfenstein II’s hypo-
thetical history abstracts it from military conflict and positions it in relation
to Johann Christian Ludgwig’s eighteenth-century invention, Kriegsspiel. As
Sebastian Deterding notes, Ludgwig’s concept means ‘war game’; it follows
the oppositional nature of chess, but transmutes the parameters of the game
to involve tactics and rules based upon terrain, much as Wolfenstein II’s
spatio-temporal contours allow for spy, combat, and escape narratives to take
shape (2009, p. 23). In this manner, Wolfenstein II does not serve the military-
entertainment complex in advancing the interests of the military and enter-
tainment industries, especially as its direct implications concern conflict at
home; hence, the war game becomes about the player’s own experience rather
than the benefits of industry. For the purposes of this chapter, the genre of
war game thus provides an apt way to examine the ways in which the game’s
world and mechanics manifest feminist values while still undermining these
efforts by not marking a full departure from the first-person shooter genre.
Therefore, while the origins of the narrative echo other spy adventures, ‘first-
person shooter war game’ best describes Wolfenstein II.
This chapter examines the ways in which Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
revises the traditional masculinist framework of this genre,9 but still contains
persisting issues. It first accomplishes this by elucidating the game’s novel
approach to disability through gameplay at the beginning of its narrative;
this work examines this depiction of disability as aligning with feminist goals
in an intersectional manner that challenges the aforementioned ‘self-reliant’
masculinity that Kimmel espouses.10 Indeed, as Judith Butler identifies, ‘the
critique of gender normativity, able-ism, and racist perception have made
clear there is no singular human form’, namely the ideal classical male body
is a fiction that must be dismantled (2016, p. 52). However, the study critiques
the narrative’s presentation of disability over the course of the game, eluci-
dating that Wolfenstein II ultimately falls back on an ableist and classical mas-
culine model of the body despite having initially made progressive changes
to gameplay mechanics. The women in the game are approached in a similar
way, namely that they are improvements upon the typical representations of
women in first-person shooters, but the player’s alignment with Blazkowicz,
a white man,11 at times compromises these attempts at integrating feminist
153

empowerment. The expansion Agent Silent Death (in which the user plays
as a woman) is explored as a potential alternative to this ongoing problem.
Overall, the chapter argues that Wolfenstein II makes slight interventions into
the parochial militaristic videogame narrative, both through cut-scenes and
gameplay, but fails to realize or consistently retain this feminist potential
throughout its narrative.
Disability as feminist intervention, but then as obstacle

Although Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen identify
the emerging intersectional communities that have been marginalized as a
result of the hegemony of white, cis masculinity in gaming culture (2018,
pp. 2, 9), they do not touch upon how disability factors into this conversation.
If the white cis male is consistently allocated a privileged position at the centre
of gaming, then the embodiment of that group is likewise portrayed as able-
bodied. As this section illuminates, Wolfenstein II begins with a narrative that
defies this normative framework by having the player navigate the first level
with Blazkowicz having a disability, but it gradually presents his disability as
a foil to his masculine prowess in not thinking himself able to have sex with
Anya and believing that he is dying. The narrative ‘resolves’ the issue through
Blazkowicz being born again after Frau Engel decapitates him. His head is
then surreptitiously captured by his fellow resistance fighters and attached
to a bioengineered Nazi superhuman body they have acquired. What begins
as a feminist intervention that celebrates disability thus reverts to a disre-
gard for that same disability. The first level casts disability as able to enact
warfare, contrary to popular military belief in gaming.12 But the narrative
thereafter frames the body as tragic until its execution, wherein the classical
head is preserved and what is portrayed as the grotesque body is abandoned.
The narrative therefore frames the death of this former body as a necessity.
By adopting Butler’s theories on bodies that are and are not valued in rela-
tion to the violence committed against them in warfare, we can identify the
shift that occurs in the game, for the violence committed against the body
labelled as disabled by the game is ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’, given that
Blazkowicz’s body is ‘already lost or forfeited’ (2016, p. 31). The body is lit-
erally abandoned as the camera in the cut-scene focuses only on the head’s
descent. The game therefore begins by making an intervention through chal-
lenging the able-bodied masculine soldier as the only valid combatant, but it
gradually undermines these efforts by transmuting this narrative into a tra-
gedy and eventually justifying the violence done against this body, as it leads
to Blazkowicz’s rebirth as the able-bodied stereotype once again.
Despite these ends, it is rare to find a mainstream videogame, let alone
a first-person shooter, that features a character with a disability. The first
level of Wolfenstein II thus offers a departure from this norm by narrating
Blazkowicz as a character in a wheelchair rather than having him miracu-
lously recovered from the ending of Wolfenstein: The New Order, wherein he
154
154 Mark Kaethler

was ostensibly dying. First-person shooter series like Call of Duty replicate
these militaristic ideologies by offering no suggestion that the protagonist has
a disability. Wolfenstein II provides an alternative to this narrative that allows
players with disabilities a chance to play out the narrative as someone who
approximates their own lived experience. This is at least the encounter Michael
Matlock had while playing the game. In his ‘Disability Game Review’ of
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Matlock first identifies the common way in
which disability is used as a narrative gimmick before assessing the difference
in Wolfenstein II, namely that one ‘can be a badass in a wheelchair!’ (2018).
As per the aforementioned destructive nature of the first-person shooter, this
evaluation can neglect the fact that being a ‘badass’ still involves slaughtering
hundreds of faceless soldiers, even if they are Nazis, and committing senseless
acts of violence. One of the trophies a player collects, for instance, is entitled
‘Crippled but Able’, which the user achieves through performing a silent
takedown on a Nazi soldier.13 Aside from the offensive use of language,14 the
trophy encourages excessive violence; however, in doing so it simultaneously
identifies that Blazkowicz is still perfectly capable of performing his military
actions in a wheelchair, which has the capacity to empower a player with a dis-
ability. In this way, Wolfenstein II nevertheless reshapes the traditional ableist
narrative of military-based games. While still destructive in nature, then, this
game manages to subvert the ideologically destructive narrative of a soldier
needing to be able-bodied in favour of plural masculinities that steer the
player away from conformity and make for an open playing field.
Matlock’s identification that the gameplay actually integrates the disability
is likewise crucial for achieving the subversion of ableist military games.
Tamer Thabet’s study of videogames using narrative criticism allows us to
conceive the complexity and multivalent nature of a videogame’s narrative,
namely that it combines experiential gameplay with cinematic cut-scenes. As
Thabet points out, videogames ‘are closer to films than they are to written
texts’, and the cut scenes operate much like a cinematic that positions the
player as an audience participant who aligns themselves with the protagonist
(2015, p. 9). By allowing the narration in which a player can act through a pro-
tagonist with a disability during gameplay, Wolfenstein II transitions represen-
tation into active narration wherein the player is able to play out the storyline
as Blazkowicz with a disability. This choice on the developers’ part provides
players with a disability an avatar they can possibly identify with, as Matlock
has, and/or a character who makes them more aware of the normative frame-
work first-person shooter war games have conditioned them to expect.
As Matlock points out, though, the illusion of identifying with a protag-
onist who has a disability vanishes as soon as chapter one concludes. The
gameplay then resumes an ableist narrative that effectively ‘cures’ the dis-
ability, rendering it a foil rather than a celebrated lived experience. When
reverting back to a typical first-person shooter war game, however, the user is
aware from the cut-scene that they are using a different prosthetic technology
in order to accomplish this feat. After the leader of the opposition, Caroline,
155

is executed by Frau Engel, the Nazi leader and antagonist of the game’s story-
line, her mechanical suit that allows her to navigate as though she does not
have a disability is passed on to Blazkowicz, who uses it for the remainder of
the game. There is no clear indication or reminder during gameplay from this
point onward that Blazkowicz relies upon this technology in order to progress
in the narrative. Cut-scenes at times draw attention to it, but the suit is often
concealed by the clothing he wears over the top of it, rendering it invisible.
One cut-scene in particular undermines the positive narrative the game
establishes with disability. Up until this point, Blazkowicz’s disability is not
perceived as a hindrance and any offensive language or negative depictions
are provided by the Nazis, thereby vilifying these labels and outlooks. When
Anya, Blazkowicz’s pregnant partner, approaches him because he has been
avoiding her, he calls himself ‘the tin man’ (in reference to the suit he wears)
and asks her, ‘how am I gonna get close to you?’15 The common presumption
and falsehood that disability precludes sexual intercourse is foregrounded
here, and Blazkowicz’s masculine identity seems to hinge on this ability.16
Although it is possible to view this interaction as hubris on Blazkowicz’s
part, given that Anya repeatedly points out that he is being pessimistic and
deterministic without any evidence, the narrative does not make any efforts
to portray Blazkowicz in a sexual manner while he has the disability or as
having come to terms with his uninformed conclusions about his future and
condition.17
The game instead offers a post-human answer to the matter that ends
up occluding disability entirely. This narrative device is foreshadowed when
the scientific brains of the opposition group, Set, introduces Blazkowicz to
his monkey-cat which has been created by taking the head of his cat that
was dying and attaching it to the body of a monkey. After Blazkowicz has
been captured and then publicly executed by Engel, his head is caught by a
flying robotic instrument and brought back to the opposition’s submarine
base, where it is attached to the biogenetic superhuman torso they have stolen
from the Nazis. When he wakes up, after the procedure of attaching him to
this ‘new body’ is completed, Blazkowicz states, ‘I feel powerful’, indicating
that he did not feel this way previously. The body is a biological technology,
which could lead one to the conclusion that Blazkowicz utilizes it like he did
the wheelchair or mechanical suit, and Set does indicate that something can
still go wrong with the wiring between his head and the body, but from this
point onward we are no longer reminded of the fact that Blazkowicz depends
upon this new body, and the narrative simply allows the user to ‘feel powerful’
through possessing an able body that seamlessly connects for the duration of
the game with Blazkowicz’s mind and the conventional gameplay the user is
familiar with from other first-person shooters.
The biogenetically engineered body can be said to maintain the feminist
narrative that debunks the self-efficiency and perfection of the masculine body
through illuminating that Blazkowicz is no longer himself, but this chapter
contends that it instead simply enables this gendered ideology to perpetuate.
156
156 Mark Kaethler

Cassandra Loeser, Vicki Crowley, and Barbara Pini have identified that under-
lying disability is a gendered narrative, namely that if a male body cannot per-
form as society expects it to, whether that be physically, sexually, mentally, or
otherwise, then ‘the disabled male body is used to illuminate a deviant and
abnormally gendered performance: a defective masculinity’ (2017, p. xxx). The
playful manner by which the videogame aligns Blazkowicz with the monkey-
cat repeatedly does present human tissue as no more superior than any other
creature’s and identifies the limited and fallible nature of the protagonist. This
view is in keeping with Rosi Braidotti’s view that posthuman feminism should
establish ‘cross-species alliances with … zoe or life in its nonhuman aspects’,
but the use of the description of the torso as a ‘new body’ rather than a pros-
thetic causes it to be presented as remedy to disability rather than a new way
of experiencing disability, signalling an ‘ethical and political’ conundrum that
is not in keeping with Braidotti’s theory (2015, p. 690). This structuring of the
storyline reflects what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call ‘narrative pros-
thesis’, wherein disability is used either to develop character or as a metaphor
to shape the plot (2013, p. 222). Although Wolfenstein II commences with a
positive reinvention of first-person shooters that disrupts the conventional
ableist framework, providing what Mitchell and Snyder refer to as a ‘fleshly
example of the body’s unruly resistance to the cultural desire to “enforce nor-
malcy” ’ (2013, p. 223), the game’s narrative gradually devolves into depicting
the disability as tragedy that must be overcome by means of a new classical
male body,18 regardless of whether or not it is originally his.
The treatment of prostheses in the videogame beyond those of Blazkowicz
is troubling in more overt ways from the feminist angle this chapter is applying.
The general approach of the game’s narrative and game mechanics is Hegelian
insofar as Nazi technology is stolen and rewired as prostheses or other weap-
onry in order to combat Nazis.19 Like Blazkowicz’s ‘new body’, Fergus’s mech-
anical arm, which he is fitted with after Engel dismembers him at the end of
the first chapter, is a Nazi invention repurposed for the opposition’s use. The
long-standing Hegelian notion of using the master’s tools to dismantle the
master’s house readily equates with this motif, but Fergus’s use of the tool
should give us pause to reflect upon Audre Lorde’s reminder that the master’s
tools will only ‘allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game’ (1979, p. 2).
Unable to control his arm, as it attacks him unexpectedly during the adjust-
ment period, he seeks counsel from Blazkowicz who tells him, ‘Maybe it’s
like training a game dog? You show weakness, it’ll pounce. What you gotta
do is show that thing who’s in charge’.20 Fergus then attempts to wrestle with
the arm, but the notion of masculine control and domination over the pros-
thesis is augmented by the language Fergus uses: first referring to it as a ‘good
girl’, then, after it turns on him, calling it a ‘deceitful bitch’, and once he has
trapped and overpowered it, reverting back to calling it a ‘good girl’. The
dialogue between the two men, who both have disabilities, is therefore based
in recovering a masculine ideology of dominance and control over their new
bodies and technologies.21 Although the game accomplishes a landmark shift
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in its first level, then, the rest of the game’s narrative replicates the masculine
narratives of ableism. The game thus illustrates Lorde’s point that using the
master’s tools will never fully dismantle the master’s house, for the men con-
tinue to mirror the hegemony of their oppressor.
Feminist cut-scenes as empowering, but also ‘gazy’

Fergus’s misogynist language towards his gendered prosthetic arm reinforces
stereotypical narratives of male dominance by positioning women as good
when they are submissive and bad when they are aggressive. This cut-scene
should immediately illustrate that Wolfenstein II’s rhetoric is not purely fem-
inist; however, as a first-person shooter war game, it nevertheless makes signifi-
cant strides in representing empowered and recalcitrant women in militaristic
roles. Blog posts dedicated to the subject, like William Galani’s ‘The Feminine
Influence of Wolfenstein 2’, likewise perceive Blazkowicz in this iteration of
the franchise as a direct response to historic events like Gamergate and the
general misogynist climate in videogames, but ‘[w]‌ithout sacrificing the mas-
culinity of B.J. Blazkowicz’ (2017). These reactions identify the progressive
nature of Wolfenstein II in the greater scope of videogames, particular first-
person shooters, but also indicate the ways in which it remains comfortably
nested within the franchise by allowing men to retain their masculinity and
still exercise intense violence as a white man. Part of the issue is reading the
videogame as a narrative surface rather than attending to the complexities
that result from a clash of media in a dynamic fictional world. As Christopher
Paul points out, the rhetoric of videogames is often misconstrued because
‘elements of media like games … can be foreign to critics, often resulting in
an incomplete analysis’ (2012, p. 11). Although videogames are not foreign to
players like Galani, Wolfenstein II’s reinforcement of conventions, mechanics,
and cinematic nature can obscure perception because anything that differs
from the typical masculine fantasy is automatically radical. As this chapter
explores the feminist representations of the women in the game, then, it
retains a cautious attention to the imperfections of the game’s narrative and
the ways in which its generic conventions and conflicting media disrupt these
progressive aims.
The game certainly displays powerful women, especially the resistance
leader Grace. After interrogating Blazkowicz to ensure that it is safe to allow
him entry into their resistance’s headquarters, Grace sits down to speak with
him, breastfeeding her newborn as she does. When Blazkowicz states that
monsters let the bombs drop on the United States, Grace clarifies that it was
‘men’, and when they discuss Caroline, former leader of Blazkowicz’s troop,
and he says that she had balls, Grace again challenges him, asking, ‘Now
why is it that balls are always used to some fucking default definition of bad-
assery? Small little delicate things, resting all snug and warm and cozy and
comfortable in their little wrinkly wrapper of fucking skin’. Near the end of
their dialogue before they are interrupted with news of an impending attack,
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Blazkowicz says her child is a ‘cute little guy’, to which Grace clarifies it is
a girl and he apologizes, leading Grace to ask, ‘sorry for what?’22 The cut-
scene establishes Grace as an icon of female empowerment who challenges
the dominant phallocentric discourse around strength, and the designers’
decision to have her breastfeed openly in front of someone who is a complete
stranger clearly draws upon the scrutiny women continue to face concerning
such action. The comment feed on this video, however, shows the variety of
reactions to her character, wherein ‘the most annoying character ever’ is one
of the kinder reactions and the fact that she ‘triggers all these little Trump
Nazis’ reveals the lingering political dimensions of the game. It is clear from
this online banter that Grace defies the conventional expectations of these
fans of first-person shooters and the Wolfenstein franchise, especially with
how she poses a challenge to Blazkowicz and masculinity more broadly. Debra
Wilson, the actress who played Grace, opines in an interview with VICE News
that the game ought to serve as an intervention to white America, stating ‘I
think gameplay should make you uncomfortable … because you don’t learn
from comfort levels’, while still acknowledging that its contours allow players
to disregard these lessons (VICE News 2017). No artform can flawlessly com-
municate a political agenda, but Wolfenstein II does provide a revisioning of
traditional design and representation.
The powerful representation of Grace, however, is compromised some-
what by the fact that the gamer never actually plays as Grace. She is therefore
relegated to the cut-scene dimension of the narrative rather than the game-
play portion. A player can thus only ever navigate the narrative as Blazkowicz
and perceive themselves as this character during gameplay, despite possibly
having the ability to see a powerful character in the narrative that reflects
their lived experience of the world.23 Grace becomes an exception to this rule
in some ways, though, as Blazkowicz follows her orders and plans during
the game’s narrative and throughout the sub-missions after the main plot’s
conclusion. During gameplay, the user is continually reminded that Grace is
the commander leading the resistance, issuing orders, offering guidance, and
instructing Blazkowicz. Although the player cannot be Grace during game-
play, this narrative structuring helps Wolfenstein II avoid what would other-
wise be a white-saviour narrative in which the white male protagonist enacts
justice for the various minorities he encounters along the way.
There are nevertheless times at which female empowerment is fragmented
through the game’s rhetorical alignment of the player with Blazkowicz during
cut-scenes, given that he is the only character they can play as. This inter-
pretive dynamic disrupts efforts to champion women other than Grace. In
what at first appears to be an empowering scene, Anya pushes Blazkowicz out
of harm’s way, launches a grenade at the enemies, and ducks for cover as it
explodes. This segment reveals a development in Anya’s character that shows
a shift from the stereotypically timid pregnant wife figure to an active warrior
woman who saves her male counterpart, indicating the potential for an active
female presence in the game. The segment turns absurd, however, when the
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mechanical enemy has not died, prompting Anya to first rip off her clothes
and then dual-wield machine guns to assault the mechanical beast until it explodes,
at which point the camera turns back to Blazkowicz’s face as he says ‘wow’.
The powerful image concocted of Anya on the one hand displays a woman
in combat, which one commentator in the YouTube discussion forum notes is
similar to a Tarantino aesthetic; however, the irony akin to Tarantino is prob-
lematic, as the scene clearly sexualizes her, given the perverse comment from
another viewer, ‘perfect pregnant, topless, action, gunshots, blood amazing
scene’.24 The objectification of Anya and the violence she enacts thus plays
into the desires of the male viewer. The framing of the scene suggests as much
given that Anya straddles Blazkowicz as she performs this bizarre action. This
choice on the creators’ part signals a sexualization of the body despite placing
the woman on top of him and in a position of power. The double gun barrels
being positioned where they are correlate them with the breasts, sexualizing
the violence. In this instance, empowerment shifts from an active female char-
acter to a figure who demonstrates action in a sexualized manner for the
viewer’s pleasure. The game does not eschew the narcissism and objectifica-
tion inherent in the male gaze of cinematic art, pace Laura Mulvey, that the
videogame player is led to encounter in a voyeuristic manner from their pri-
vate engagement with the filmic cut-scene that depicts a character they do not
play as and is therefore passive as far as the gameplay narrative is concerned
(2016, pp. 623–626).25 However, this approach presumes that a player views
the scene in the same manner as YouTube commentators.26 Anya, like Grace,
provides an alternative to Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s view of
‘new mainstream game “sheroes” ’ who ‘are corporate-military professionals,
death-dealing, punishment-absorbing exemplars of what Camilla Griggers …
terms “becoming-women who kill” ’, thereby creating ‘an imperial feminism
compatible with militarized capitalism’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009,
p. 22). By serving as part of the resistance against such patriarchal forces,
the women’s actions, regardless of the quagmire that results from Anya’s
portrayal, do challenge this dominant norm in videogame culture; however,
it remains important to perceive the sexist medial rhetoric of the game’s
mechanics and the sexist conventions of film that it integrates.
One of the expansion packs to the game, Agent Silent Death, offers the
player the opportunity to play as a woman, Jessica Valiant, which shows the
potential to compensate for this masculine narcissism, but the experience
differs significantly from that of the male protagonist. Before addressing the
flaws in this game, it is first worth considering what the expansion manages
to accomplish. The soundtrack, particularly to the third volume, clearly pays
homage to the James Bond franchise, but is mimicking its structure with
a woman. This framing device helps to compensate for or explain the plot
wherein Jessica pursues alcoholism and sex as means to deal with the death of
her husband and fellow agent Jack Valiant, making her a female James Bond
rather than merely some male fantasy. Information sent to her on the where-
abouts of the three men who were responsible for Jack’s death then leads her
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to pursue vengeance instead. By the end of the game, Jessica has recognized
that Jack was not her sole purpose for living, but rather the political cause
of battling the Nazi regime is. In this manner, Agent Silent Death showcases
a woman who is able to perform the same actions as James Bond, offering a
satirical commentary on this ‘conventional’ agent whose actions to do not
actually fit the bill, and who comes to realize that her purpose in life can be
more than just a man, as she has her militaristic duty to combat oppression
as well.
While the narrative offers these alternatives to traditional gender roles
and first-person shooter war games, the gameplay leaves something feminist
to be desired. This schism is apparent when Jessica from Agent Silent Death
is compared with Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein II, Joseph Stallion from The
Adventures of Gunslinger Joe expansion, and Captain Wilkins from The Deeds
of Captain Wilkins expansion. These three men can dual-wield all the guns,
carry explosives, charge enemies, use technologies, and have copious amounts
of ammunition available to them. Jessica must operate by stealth in order to
complete her objectives and is limited by the number and kind of weapons
she can carry, as well as the amount of ammunition that is available to her.
She also cannot carry as much armour with her. Although the game explains
that this feature is because of her need to move faster and quieter as a spy,
like James Bond, the inability to hold even 50 per cent of the armour that the
men are able to carry (Valiant can only hold 40 by comparison to the 100 of
Blazkowicz, Joe, and Captain Wilkins) leads the player to see her as weaker
than these characters. The men are able to barge into battle wielding multiple
weapons without having to sneak around the battlefield unless a more formid-
able opponent than usual is present. Jessica’s inability to do the same can be
likened to the James Bond narrative of secrecy, but the choice to provide this
particular storyline to a woman communicates that a woman’s gameplay in
arenas of war or military conflict is different from a man’s.27 While the stealth
gameplay offers a different experience for the player, its alignment specifically
with a female character nevertheless carries the implication that she is weaker
than her male counterpart.28
Conclusion: the Bethesda wars or capitalism?

After the wake of Wolfenstein II’s advertising campaign, attention to the fran-
chise subsided for a time; that is until DOOM Eternal’s (not yet released)
gameplay, graphics, and narrative were previewed at Bethesda’s showcase at
the E3 Expo in 2018. Similar to how neo-Nazis criticized Bethesda’s decision
to advertise Wolfenstein II with a slogan that mocked them, players with leftist
politics lambasted DOOM Eternal for phrasing like ‘mortally challenged’ and
describing Earth as the ‘melting pot’ of the universe. The DOOM franchise
has always been a second option to Wolfenstein players, as it is created by the
same software companies, but made and devised by different developers. The
premise of the forthcoming game in the DOOM franchise is that demons are
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now coming to Earth and the DOOM soldier must vanquish them all and put
an end to humanity’s foolish decision to allow them to inhabit Earth. Framing
this agenda as an immigration matter and mocking politically correct ter-
minology therefore aggravated players with leftist politics while ostensibly
reassuring conservative and racist consumers that not all Bethesda games
would follow suit with Wolfenstein. The videogame wars seem to polarize
players much as politics have already, but ultimately this seems to be more
about capitalism and ensuring that everyone purchases Bethesda products than
about shifting the political leaning. By having different developers, writers,
and creators for different series or even games within a series, Bethesda is able
to remain apolitical and capitalist. This backdrop elucidates that Wolfenstein
II only presents itself as feminist (unsuccessfully) in order to serve a consumer
market, which explains why its script contains feminist perspectives that are
not fully realized.
The reaction to the Bethesda wars likewise reinforces the ways in which
Wolfenstein II is an outlier in the first-person shooter genre and could in fact
be making some positive changes in spite of the tired conventions it rehashes.
Take for instance the meme Virgin vs. Chad that a DOOM Eternal fan created
that compares the protagonists of the two games (‘Virgin vs. Chad’ 2018).29
The credulity of the image is immediately discredited when one sees the
illogical disconnect between ‘The Virgin Blazkowicz’ having an ‘expecting
girlfriend’; however, this JPEG is worthy of examination not for its authority
or validity, but for what it says about the expectations male videogame players
have regarding first-person shooter war games. Masculinity is clearly defined
by the number of weapons one can carry, which supports the chapter’s pre-
vious analysis of Jessica Valiant’s limitations; ableism (‘entire body is crippled’
compared with ‘his running speed IS his walking speed’); and egotism (‘people
give him no credit whatsoever’ versus ‘people worship and bow to him’). Like
the commentators on the YouTube videos of the cut-scenes discussed above,
the creator of the image misconstrues challenges to masculine dominance
or the value of collaboration rather than egocentrism as disrespect to mas-
culine authority, given that all of Blazkowicz’s ‘friends are assholes’ (‘Virgin
vs. Chad’ 2018). The image therefore provides a means to identify the varying
levels of destruction or ethics embedded within first-person shooter war
games. Although they are all systemically violent, some are more ideologically
violent than others, which may be a way to envision resistance. As this chapter
has shown, Wolfenstein II remains entrenched in the toxic conventions of first-
person shooter games that celebrate the oppositional, gory violence of mili-
taristic combat, but the game has improved upon these dangerous elements,
making it a less corrosive member of the first-person shooter swamp. The
next game in the series, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, promises to rectify the genre
further by providing collaborative gameplay, wherein Anya and Blazkowicz’s
twin daughters depart on a mission to save their father from Nazi captivity
in France. Hopefully the narrative’s gameplay and cinematics will provide an
improvement upon this iteration’s failed feminism.
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Notes
1 This chapter addresses the multivalent nature of what constitutes a videogame
‘narrative’, for Astrid Ensslin defines narrative in videogames as ‘fictional envir-
onments which are explored spatio-temporally by players in the shape of their
avatars’ (2012, p. 24). While this is true, cinematic and other media encapsulated
by the product of a videogame complicate a unified understanding of narrative,
and this chapter attends to those complicated mechanics while also exploring what
videogames as a medium offer that is novel to narrative framework.
2 Despite Bethesda Studios’ efforts to clarify that aligning the game with current
politics was not the original intention of the game, indicating that the series has
always been about killing Nazis, there are Easter eggs in the game that clearly
allude to topical subject matter. Take for instance the collectible newspaper
clipping found in the New Mexico street that describes a ‘dapper’ white suprema-
cist leader, clearly referring to an actual newspaper article on Richard Spencer
following Donald Trump’s election (Gach 2017).
3 Lazarus’s poem is for the Statue of Liberty, hence the connection between the
series.
4 The implication here is not that cis white men cannot enact feminism or be
feminists, but that the videogame does not challenge the first-person shooter mould.
5 First-person shooters have had a long history with violent behaviour. Criticism of
violence in videogames was magnified by the Columbine shootings in 1999, espe-
cially with respect to the game DOOM (1993), another franchise by the id team
that created the Wolfenstein series (Lukas 2010, pp. 75–76). As Steven Poole has
identified, although videogames do not essentially create violent individuals (as
they can also elicit catharsis), the US military’s history of not only creating their
own games but also using franchises like the first-person shooter DOOM or the
military game Battlefield as a means to train their soldiers should give us pause
(2000, pp. 207–209).
6 C. Thi Nguyen points out that oppositional, competitive games usually entail
some degree of violence (chess would be a very minimal example of this, with the
taking of pieces), but almost all involve an exercise of dominance and superiority
over the other player, as one is inevitably the winner or victor, whether or not they
wish to acknowledge it (2018, p. 184).
7 Before id’s franchise, though, there were two earlier games that inspired the new
franchise, Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), both of
which only feature a player rather than Blazkowicz.
8 The military-entertainment complex entails the intermingling of the interests of
militarism and entertainment industries which align with one another, as with say
G.I. Joe cartoons, which celebrate and condone capitalist endeavours through
upholding the American army and profiting from action figures and cartoons
consumed by children potentially indoctrinated into militaristic ideology.
9 Although the videogame still casts Blazkowicz as the avatar, it nevertheless
still attempts ‘to decenter men and masculinity’ from the game by representing
empowered and leading women in its narrative (Gray et al. 2018, p. 7). The game-
play likewise challenges oppressive and toxic masculinity’s tendency to advance
a self-sufficient and dominant character as a norm and necessity in society as a
whole, but specifically in its military campaign (Kimmel 1996, p. 16).
10 This intersectional approach that couples the challenge to ‘normalizing tendencies’
and the need for ‘visibility’ in both disability studies and feminism mirrors Bonnie
163

Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw’s call for a queer approach to game studies that com-
prehensively addresses a range of minorities disregarded in a realm dominated by
white, cis, able-bodied men (2018, pp. xviii, xx).
11 It is worth noting that Wolfenstein II nevertheless elaborates upon Blazkowicz’s
Jewish-American and Polish-American heritage more so than any other game in
the series, framing his father as a bigoted, hypermasculine foil to his character and
portraying his mother as hidden away in the house. While Blazkowicz continu-
ally disassociates from his father, he never reflects upon or clearly self-identifies as
Jewish in the game at any point.
12 As John Derby states, America’s Army (2002) (a game free to the general public
and developed by the military for recruitment purposes) is used ‘to promote an
ableist military culture that contrasts the disabling effects of military service’,
whether those be physical disabilities or PTSD (2016).
13 The author has offered links to YouTube clips in lieu of images to provide the
reader with a comprehensive understanding of the video game’s narrative. It
should be noted that the liveness and individualized experience of gameplay have
been rendered cinematic as a result, but it is nevertheless a more accurate represen-
tation than still images. As a warning, many of these clips entail graphic violence
and unsettling content. www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiTVDjexs4U.
14 This is not uncommon for first-person shooters. A companion named Piper in
the 2016 video game Fallout 4, another Bethesda production, regularly requests
to assist the protagonist in carrying items, as otherwise they will ‘cripple’
themselves.
15 www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQgz32FN_o.
16 Surveying Sweden and Denmark specifically, but acknowledging the matter as a
global issue, Don Kulick and Jens Rydström observe that while there is some lit-
erature on sex for those who develop disabilities later in life, particularly from
spinal injuries, ‘the sexuality of people with congenital disabilities is’ wrongly
treated ‘like a sleeping bear best left unperturbed’ (2015, pp. 82, 84).
17 In the previous game there were multiple cut-scenes either directly or indirectly
depicting Anya and Blazkowicz having sex, so it is clearly not the eroticism or
nudity that deterred the developers from including such a scene.
18 Blazkowicz’s previous and new body both fit this concept that Maria Wyke iden-
tifies is established in Greek sculptures from antiquity and introduced into maga-
zine culture of the 1950s in the United States (1997, p. 366).
19 All of the weapons that Blazkowicz uses in the game are collected, meaning that
they are originally engineered by Nazis and then used to kill them.
20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcxeBh45lVo.
21 Lokaneeta identifies this issue with language and masculinity in relation to mili-
tary warfare: ‘discourses pertaining to nuclear weapons are both masculinized and
sexualized’ (2015, p. 1021).
22 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwyN-TmeCg.
23 Wolfenstein II is quite impressive for a first-person shooter when it comes to
representation, providing a cast of characters from various genders as well as
racial and cultural backgrounds, and who have varying disabilities. The exception
to this statement are LGBTQIA2+ persons, who are notably absent. For a first-
person shooter videogame this degree of diversity is still remarkable, despite these
limitations.
24 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePgcBBTbgT0.
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25 The issue is widespread and repeats conventions rather than challenging them.
Derek A. Burrill uses Mulvey to discuss the way in which the cinematics of
videogames, especially first-person shooters, cater to a male player (2008, p. 56).
26 It is important not to occlude female gameplay, regardless of how the dynamics at
work in this cut-scene render the character into a cinematic rather than a playable
avatar. It is still worthwhile identifying that women or non-gender conforming
players could see an image of power here, much as Esther MacCallum-Stewart
has aptly reconsidered criticism of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series
wherein scholars automatically view ‘her positioning as solely a tool for the male
gaze’ (2014). The gaze can likewise be complicated in videogame play, as Helen
W. Kennedy regards Lara Croft establishing ‘a feminine coded “desire to know” ’
that disrupts the male gaze (2002). Even if the scene remains problematic in its
potential to objectify Anya, its pornographic nature does not automatically render
Anya powerless for a female player. As Mari Mikkola states in her study of porn-
ography and videogames, the absurdism of such scenes do not render them morally
reprehensible like RapeLay (2006), an incorrigible game as its title suggests, and
in the case of Anya the degree of active heroism allows for a feeling of empower-
ment regardless of the problematic rhetoric of the cut-scene (2018, p. 218). All
this to say, I do not wish to preclude the possibility that a woman or non-gender
conforming player could feel empowered in this moment.
27 This is a significant issue, as women are proven to be more likely to see themselves
as having more ‘self-efficacy (that is, belief that one could achieve a goal)’ if they
are able to play as a woman, specifically one who is not sexualized (Patridge 2018,
p. 167).
28 This is not the first time Bethesda studios has done this in a game franchise. The
expansions to The Evil Within (2014) likewise offer the player an opportunity to
play as a female character, but she too must rely on stealth and less effective weap-
onry in order to survive the challenges posed to her.
29 Although the meme is crucial to comprehending the ways in which Wolfenstein
II does represent a real challenge to masculine war games, the author has opted
not to include the image itself in order to avoid permissions sanctioning and pro-
moting the work further.
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Mikkola, M 2018, ‘Pornographic videogames: a feminist examination’, in J Robson
& G Tavinor (eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, New York, NY, pp.
212–227.
Mitchell, D & Snyder, S 2013, ‘Narrative prosthesis’, in LJ Davis (ed.), The disability
studies reader, 4th edition, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 222–235.
Mukherjee, S 2015, Video games and storytelling: reading games and playing books,
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY.
Mulvey, L 2016, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in L Braudy & M Cohen, Film
theory and criticism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 620–631.
Nguyen, CT 2018, ‘Games and the moral transformation of violence’, in J Robson
& G Tavinor (eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, Abingdon, UK,
pp. 181–197.
Patridge, S 2018, ‘Videogames and gendered invisibility’, in J Robson & G Tavinor
(eds.), The aesthetics of videogames, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 161–180.
Paul, C 2012, Wordplay and the discourse of video games, Routledge, Abingdon, UK.
Poole, S 2000, Trigger happy: videogames and the entertainment revolution, Arcade
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12
Subversive game mechanics in the
Fatal Frame and Portal franchises
Having your cake and eating it too
Gabi Kirilloff
Critical conversations about feminism and video games often focus on

game culture and the thematic treatment of gender within the game world
(Dietz 1998; Dill et al. 2005). The representation of violence is a key part
of these discussions, as games have a history of portraying violence against
women and of perpetuating images of toxic masculinity. These conversations
are important because game culture and in-game tropes impact real-world
emotions, attitudes, and behaviors (Bègue et al. 2017). However, the seemingly
minute design choices behind game mechanics also impact player attitudes
and emotions.
Typically, game mechanics are defined as the actions available to the
player-character (PC): what players are ‘able to do in the game-world, how
they do it, and how that leads to a compelling game experience’ (Rouse 2005,
p. 131).1 In Tetris, one of the core mechanics is the ability to rotate blocks,
while in Super Mario Galaxy jumping is a core mechanic. In what follows,
I utilize Miguel Sicart’s conception of game mechanics as ‘action[s]‌invoked
by an agent to interact with the game world, as constrained by the game rules’
(2008). This definition is oriented toward granular analysis. For example, in
Uncharted 4 it is possible to separate the cover mechanic (the action of taking
cover), from its context (the player takes cover when there is an object to take
cover behind), and from the rules governing cover (the player remains ‘hidden’
if behind cover). All of these are separate from the representational level of
the game: the visual portrayal of the PC, the visual portrayal of the objects
the PC can hide behind, etc. These various aspects of gameplay work together
to foster specific forms of engagement.
Mechanics are often obscured in ways that characterization and narrative
are not. In many role-playing games (RPGs), players are conditioned to pay
close attention to characters and plot in order to make complex choices and
judgements. What character will you add to your party? Whose faction will
you join? While successful characters and plot lines are visible and mem-
orable, successful mechanics are often not visible as such; if a player views
the rules of the game as rules, then the player is no longer immersed in the
fictional world.2 Many players and scholars see mechanics only as they are
filtered through the representational, or semiotic, layer of the game world
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168 Gabi Kirilloff

(Sicart 2013). This is analogous to the way in which level designers will often
disguise the boundaries of playable space with non-traversable terrain, such
as mountains, in order to encourage immersion.
Game mechanics are relevant to a discussion of gender and violence pre-
cisely because they often go unnoticed and are presented as natural and
intrinsic elements of the game world. While developers have proven that it is
possible to imagine and execute a Tomb Raider game with a less sexualized,
more physically realistic Lara Croft, it is difficult to imagine a Call of Duty
game in which there are no combat mechanics. Though mechanics, and the
contexts and rules that govern them, can be used to further a wide array
of emotions (such as excitement, fear, anxiety, and frustration) in combat
scenarios, they are often designed to make violent behaviors desirable,
engaging, and satisfying for players. For example, in the Destiny series, when
players shoot with specific in-game weapons, the camera shakes, conveying
the gun’s power. This design choice, as much as the game’s themes, characters,
and narrative, is intended to make combat gratifying. Such elements are
intertwined with representation, yet, the act of shooting, and the rules that
govern this act, exist beyond the visual appearance of the gun (or the fact that
the gun is presented as a lethal weapon, rather than as a paint gun). When
mechanics and representation merge in certain configurations, players under-
stand that in-game violence is occurring.
Just because players do not always notice mechanics, does not mean that
they do not function rhetorically. Ian Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric,
‘the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions,
rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures’, helps to
clarify the way in which games make claims about the world through their
mechanics (2010, Preface, para 6). Sicart expands on the notion of procedural
rhetoric to consider not only the way in which player agency is responsible for
shaping game rhetoric, but also the ways in which games can create ethical
play, or play that encourages players to reflect on their morality in and outside
of the game world (2013). Mechanics have also been associated with specific
critical lenses and world views: recent work in queer game studies has argued
that mechanics can foster a form of queer play, or play that rejects dominant
systems of logic (Ruberg 2017).
The rhetorical and ideological power of mechanics raises an interesting
question: what might feminist mechanics look like, particularly in games
that feature combat or combat inspired elements? Further, how might such
mechanics interact with the representational and thematic level of the game
world? In this chapter, I examine two games that, through their combat
mechanics, present different views of the relationship between gender and
violence. I argue that games in the Fatal Frame and Portal franchises, noted
for their thematic attention to gender and inclusion of female heroines
(Warren 2016; Perron 2018), play with the link between first-person-shooter
(FPS) mechanics, violent combat, and masculine identity, a link that pervades
the FPS genre (including games such as Call of Duty, Doom, and Halo). At
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Subversive game mechanics 169

the level of representation, both games appear fairly progressive, providing
players with non-sexualized, playable female agency. In Fatal Frame (2001),
Portal (2007), and Portal 2 (2011) ‘shooting’ is divorced from its typical repre-
sentational context (in Fatal Frame the player shoots pictures with a camera,
in Portal the player’s gun produces doorways). Female protagonists ‘shoot’,
but not to kill (ghosts and robots are the shootable antagonists).
Despite these similarities, Fatal Frame and Portal further different
attitudes about women and violence, partially through their use of distinct
combat mechanics. In Fatal Frame the player’s ability to commit violence is
constrained. However, power ups and ‘damage boosts’ encourage the player
to view violence as desirable. The game links a ‘limited’ form of violence with
the protagonist’s, Miku’s, gender, reinforcing the stereotypical notion that
women are less capable of violence than men.3 Conversely, Portal’s represen-
tational and thematic focus on gender equality (the game features a racially
ambiguous female PC who is characterized by her physical and intellectual
prowess) is supported by unconventional mechanics. Despite the centrality
of the Portal ‘gun’, the game does not encourage the player to view violence
as desirable. Rather than emphasize speed or precision Portal divorces the
act of ‘shooting’ from immediate feedback and gratification. In examining
these games, I do not mean to suggest a strict binary between regressive and
progressive depictions of gender. Rather, I seek to show how representation
is complicated (and at times complimented) by other aspects of game design.
Fatal Frame
Set in 1986, Fatal Frame, released in Japan as Zero, follows 17-year-old
Miku as she attempts to rescue her older brother Mafuyu from a haunted
mansion on the outskirts of Tokyo. Though I focus on the first game, the
Fatal Frame franchise has produced five main games in total, each revolving
around similar themes.4 Fatal Frame has been critically lauded for the way
in which the mechanics and setting work together to evoke fear and for
the inclusion of an unconventional weapon: Miku’s only line of defense
is a magical camera that damages the hostile ghosts she encounters. Like
many survival horror titles from this period, Fatal Frame takes place pri-
marily from a third-person point of view. However, when player-characters
encounter a ghost, they may access a first-person point of view in which
they see the ghost through the lens of Miku’s camera. This view is reminis-
cent of the way players may look down a gun scope in games like Counter-
Strike and Borderlands 2. The fact that Miku carries a seemingly non-violent
object, a camera, and yet, uses this object to ‘damage’ hostile non-player-
characters (NPCs), hints at the way in which the game’s representational
level is complicated by the game’s mechanics. The camera simultaneously
evokes non-violence and violence.
While the inclusion of a capable female playable character would suggest
that the game subverts conventional gender stereotypes, in reality, Fatal
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170 Gabi Kirilloff

Frame’s depiction of gender and violence is complicated. Thematically, the
game both adheres to and departs from gender tropes. Throughout Fatal
Frame, Miku encounters descriptions of violence against women: every ten
years at the Himuro Mansion, a series of rituals take place in order to pre-
vent the gates of hell from opening. A female child is ritualistically blinded,
while another female child is selected to become the rope maiden. As part of a
ceremony called the strangling ritual, the rope maiden is torn apart by a rope
fastened around her neck and each of her limbs. The game’s main antagonist
is the ghost of Kirie, a rope maiden who did not participate willingly in the
sacrifice. Because of Kirie’s romantic (and arguably sexual) desire for a young
man who visits her village, the gates of hell open and Kirie’s spirit is corrupted
by the evil that is unleashed.
As Laurie Taylor notes, the fact that the ghosts in Fatal Frame have com-
plex backstories and human motivations, makes them more sympathetic
than many of the non-player antagonists that players encounter in FPS
games (2006). In addition, the player-character Miku becomes cursed and
it is implied that unless the gate to hell is closed, she will join the sacrificed
women. For Taylor, this ‘confuses questions of good and evil and human and
monstrous’ (2006, p. 39). At the same time, however, in making the ghosts
more ‘human’, Fatal Frame further accentuates the way in which the camera
is a weapon and photography is a form of violent combat. Miku is not ‘taking
pictures’ of objects, she is fighting against active, human-like agents. In add-
ition, the game insinuates that the camera ‘releases’ these spirits from their
tortured existence, but does not specify the fate of the spirits after they are
seemingly destroyed. Though not all of the spirits are women, this is remin-
iscent of Sarkeesian’s comments on mercy killings; acts of violence toward
an NPC for the NPCs ‘own good’ (2013). This trope allows the player to feel
a sense of accomplishment, or relief, upon killing an otherwise sympathetic
human NPC.
The notion of unavoidable mercy killing is echoed in the game’s conclu-
sion. The ending adheres to conventional, and stereotypical, depiction of
morality. Fatal Frame ends with the ghost of Kirie, now cleansed of evil, will-
ingly accepting her ‘duty’—living in perpetual torment as the rope maiden
sacrifice. Once Kirie’s background is revealed, it becomes the player’s job to
not only rescue Mafuyu, but to help Kirie transcend her earthly attachments
and accept her role as a sacrificial heroine (Dumas 2018, p. 146). If Kirie had
accepted this duty from the onset, the events that befell Himuro Mansion
would have never occurred. These violent female sacrifices are intended to
contribute to the game’s frightening atmosphere. However, rather than
challenge this violence, the depiction of Kirie’s willingness to sacrifice herself
equates positive female behavior with an obedient adherence to oppressive
systems. Much like Miku’s ‘pacification’ of the ghosts she encounters, Kirie’s
‘necessary’ sacrifice allows the systemic violence against women to continue,
unchallenged and unchecked. Kirie’s character brings to mind a variety of
gendered tropes, including elements of the sinister seductress—Kirie’s evil
171

form is a direct result of her unwillingness to remain a ‘pure’ virgin sacrifice
(Sarkeesian 2016).
In featuring a female heroine who rescues a male character, Fatal Frame
departs from one of the most prominent gender stereotypes in games, the
damsel in distress (Sarkeesian 2013). Though rare in games overall, the inclu-
sion of a playable female heroine is a feature of the survival horror genre.
As Irene Chien notes, ‘[survival horror] protagonists are typically not brawny
commandos, but rather ordinary people, often women … The games involve
endurance and cunning as much as military style marksmanship or physical
strength’ (2008, p. 64). Chien’s observation is particularly helpful because it
connects the representation of gender with the mechanics of in-game vio-
lence. In this sense, female PCs in survival horror games function much like
the ‘final girl’ trope in television and film. This trope has sparked mixed
critical reactions, with some scholars claiming that the inclusion of capable
female protagonists within the horror genre is at least partially subversive
(Clover, 1992).
However, this interpretation is complicated by the way in which Fatal
Frame presents non-violence, or rather, constrained violence, as an intrinsic
aspect of desirable femininity, rather than as an ethical choice. When asked in
a 2005 interview for GameSpy why Fatal Frame games always feature ‘a cute
female character’, the game’s co-creator Makoto Shibata answered, ‘This is a
game that is not violent. You can’t muscle your way through. To portray that
concept, obviously a female main character is better. We all know that females
are a bit more spiritual than men’ (Christian 2005). Shibata insinuates that
men are naturally more capable of violent, physical behavior than women,
suggesting that a non-violent male character would be less believable in the
game world. It seems likely that the representation of the weapon as a camera,
an object with artistic, non-violent, generative connotations, is tied to Shibata’s
understanding of ‘non-violence’ and ‘spirituality’. The representation of the
camera as a weapon mirrors the representation of a woman as a hero. In this
sense, the inclusion of a female player-character does not challenge cultural
expectations so much as support essentialist notions about women.
This attitude is reflected in the design of the game’s mechanics and in the
way these mechanics interact with the thematic level of the game. At the level
of representation, the game employs unconventional characters (young girl
instead of brawny man) and objects (camera instead of gun). Yet, at the level
of core mechanics Fatal Frame slips into familiar patterns. Though the player
does not shoot a gun, the mechanics of using the camera replicate common
FPS mechanics: it is necessary to balance precision and speed in order to suc-
cessfully ‘hit’ and damage threatening, moving targets. As in many FPS titles,
the amount of damage inflicted varies and is based not only on the demon-
stration of these skills, but on the use of power ups and ammo. In Fatal Frame
players must strategically ration and use different types of film, each of which
inflicts different amounts of damage. Further power ups are dispensed when
a player inflicts damage on a ghost.
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172 Gabi Kirilloff

These design choices encourage a particular play style and consequently,
foster a specific set of emotional responses: shooting in Fatal Frame is
stressful but necessary. The scarcity of ghost encounters, which punctuate
slow dungeon crawling and jump scares, creates a feeling of dread interrupted
by intense fear.5
Entering the first-person mode increases the player-character’s perceived
proximity to hostile, attacking ghosts. This view also cuts off the player’s per-
ipheral vision and greatly limits the player’s mobility; in the first-person mode,
it is almost impossible to flee. As Chien notes, ‘[in] Fatal Frame vision is fearful
not commanding’ (2008, p. 64). Scarce ammo and the recharge rate of the
camera (comparable to the conventional ‘cool down’ period for many in-game
guns) mean that aim and timing (rather than rapid, blind fire) are necessary.6
It is possible to read the affect produced by this style of combat as sub-
versive in its own right: while many FPS games encourage players to
delight in feelings of competency and mastery (which in turn can foster a
hypermasculine ethos), shooting in Fatal Frame produces feelings of vulner-
ability and anxiety. It is important to note, however, that while Fatal Frame’s
mechanics are distinct from those of FPS titles like Doom, this does not mean
that the game is, as Shabata claims, ‘not violent’. In fact, the assumption
that the game is not violent indicates the degree to which players and critics
often make such determinations based solely on the semiotic, or represen-
tational, level of a game. However, in Fatal Frame the player is bombarded
with descriptions of violence against female NPCs and by the constant threat
of violence to the female player-character. Stressful, sporadic combat with
limited motion controls is common for weapon-based combat in popular
titles such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Even though a camera is not a real
world weapon, the game renders it capable of performing violence. This trans-
formation is accomplished through importing mechanics that are typically
markers of gun-based combat. Fatal Frame’s mechanics constrain the player-
character’s opportunities to use violence, rather than eliminate violence. In so
doing, the game teaches players that the inability to inflict violence in a violent
world is terrifying. Unlike combat-based genres, survival horror games often
feature physical disempowerment in violent situations. However, in Fatal
Frame and other survival horror titles, this physical disempowerment does not
encourage us to question the validity of violence. Instead, the terror evoked
by constrained mechanics renders violence all the more desirable: given the
stressful nature of combat, the player is intended to desire the ability to inflict
more violence (to obtain film that does more damage, to be able to power up
one’s camera so that it can perform critical hits, etc.).
In pointing this out, I do not mean to suggest that there is something inher-
ently harmful about the game’s use of constrained violent combat mechanics.
The problem is neither the inclusion of combat mechanics nor the inclusion
of a female protagonist. Nor do I intend to suggest that Fatal Frame cannot
produce ethical gameplay. Rather, I wish to highlight a link between the game’s
mechanics and underlying assumptions about the player-character’s female
173

gender. Miku is neither a completely passive nor disempowered figure (she
does, after all, emerge triumphant). She is also not configured as a non-violent
figure, but rather as a figure who yields a lesser violence. James Malazita
points toward a similar move in Burial at Sea (an expansion for Bioshock
Infinite), in which the player-character Elizabeth relies on gun-based combat,
but has access to a limited supply of ammo. As a result, hiding and running
away become viable tactics (2018). As Malazita notes these mechanics do not
represent a radical shift in ‘problem-solving or exploratory game design’ but
rather position Elizabeth, and characters like her, as ‘weakened men, leading
to the material and performative propagation of misogynist media tropes’
(2018, p. 38). Though Miku is given a camera instead of a gun, she is also
bound by a conventional style of combat mechanics that neither question
dominant modes of play nor create alternative modes of play.
Portal
The problem posed by Fatal Frame’s coupling of a female protagonist and
conventional combat mechanics is not easy to overcome: how can an uncon-
ventionally violent, or less violent, game include a female protagonist without
furthering the idea that women are ‘naturally’ less capable of violence? Valve’s
Portal, a game which borrows from both FPS games and puzzle platformers,
highlights some of the ways in which novel mechanics can be used to circum-
vent player expectations and empower the player-character without defaulting
to stereotypically violent interactions. Portal, like Fatal Frame, focuses on a
female protagonist fighting against a powerful female antagonist, a dynamic
that is quite rare in games. Released as part of Valve’s The Orange Box game
compilation, Portal follows the player-character Chell as she attempts to
escape Aperture Science Lab, an abandoned research facility that is run by a
threatening female AI, GlaDOS. In both Portal and Portal 2 Chell must com-
plete a series of tests, or puzzles, using the Aperture Science portal gun in order
to progress through the game. The gun produces two portal ends, an orange
and a blue end. These portals create a link between two different locations in
three-dimensional space that the player-character can travel through. Chell,
like Miku, uses an unconventional object (a gateway producing portal gun) to
‘shoot’ her way out of dangerous environments.
Scholars, reviewers, and players have pointed out the ways in which Portal
thematically questions conventional gender stereotypes; Jamin Warren from
PBS’s Game/Show refers to Portal as a ‘feminist masterpiece’ (2016) while Joe
McNeilly from gamesrader+ describes Portal 2 as ‘the most subversive game
ever’ (2011). Through dialogue Portal and Portal 2 focus on the way in which
patriarchal oppression can cause violence against and among women. This
is particularly true of Portal 2, in which the player comes to realize that the
antagonist GlaDOS has been transformed into a violent and dangerous entity
in part because she was mistreated and manipulated by Aperture’s founder,
Cave Johnson. As Christopher Williams notes, Johnson’s character functions
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174 Gabi Kirilloff

as an example of retrograde sexism and serves to provide a sympathetic back-
story for GlaDOS’s threatening behavior (2011). Portal 2 ends with Chell
and GlaDOS working together to defeat Wheatley, a male AI who becomes
controlling and demeaning once he is corrupted by his position of power.
Wheatley repeatedly makes incorrect assumptions about the player-character
based on her gender. For example, even though Chell defeated GlaDOS in the
first game, Wheatley assumes that a male character was responsible, ‘do you
know who ended up taking her down in the end? … A human … Apparently
this human escaped and nobody’s seen him since’.
Wheatley’s comment alludes to the way Chell’s gender is presented in the
first game. Because Portal positions the player as a silent first-person char-
acter, there are no clues about Chell’s identity at the start of the game. The
only way that the player can discover Chell’s gender is to catch a glimpse
of her through one of the portals. Because of the lack of female playable
characters in the FPS genre, many players are surprised when they realize that
the player-character is a woman. The assumption that the player-character is
male is furthered by the fact that none of the other player-characters in The
Orange Box release were female.7 Players may not realize Chell’s gender until
they are partially through the play experience (or may not notice her gender at
all).8 If the player has assumed that the character is a man, the reveal implies
that the gender of Chell’s character has no bearing on her environment or
actions. The rules of the game do not change once the player’s understanding
of Chell’s gender has changed. This experience, created by a disjuncture
between the game world and player expectations, adheres to Sicart’s notion
of ethical play (2013).
However, Portal’s presentation of gender suggests an aspect of ethical play
that is at times overlooked. Underlying many examples of ethical play is the
notion that the player’s ethical stance must be challenged by the game. For
example, in describing ethical play, Sicart uses a scene from Unmanned, in
which the player-character, a drone pilot, plays FPS games with his son. The
assumptions the player brings to the game, along with the familiar mechanics,
are at odds with the thematic context of the scene, which creates an ‘eth-
ical tension’. As Sicart notes ‘the dissonance between players’ actions and
the context in which they are placed cue the possible ethical experience of
the game’ (2013, p. 51). Many players who are not concerned with the dis-
parity of representation in games likely experienced a moment of dissonance
when playing Portal. For such players, Chell’s gender opens a self-reflexive
space: why was I surprised that I am playing as a woman? However, for players
aware of and invested in issues of representation, the reveal of Chell’s gender
offers a slightly different affectual experience, one that is both validating and
empowering. It is important to note that gameplay experiences can positively
reinforce (not just problematize) players’ preexisting ethical commitments.9 To
focus primarily on the ways in which games challenge dominant assumptions
about identity, runs the risk of ignoring members of the gaming community
who participate in marginalized identity categories.
175

It is important to note that these complex affectual responses are not
purely a result of representation. They are enabled by the game’s unique
mechanics—the way in which the player- character is revealed and made
visible through portals. By revealing Chell’s gender in this way, the game
normalizes the notion that an FPS protagonist can be a woman. The first
person point of view prevents the sexualization of Chell’s body, encouraging
the player to see from her perspective, rather than to view her as an object in
the game world. Examining oneself becomes a conscious, intentional choice
rather than a passive experience.
The portal gun, like the camera obscura, does not function in the same
way as a typical gun—both tools provide perspective, allowing players to ‘see’
and navigate their environments. Both objects connote creation, producing
images rather than simply destroying the environment.10 However, whereas
the camera obscura capture, correct, and in a sense ‘cleanse’ the environment,
the portal gun disrupts the environment, allowing the player to bend the laws
of physics, move objects in impossible ways, and transgress the boundaries
of seemingly ‘playable’ space. The ability to create mirrors is not the only
unconventional property of the portal gun. While in Fatal Frame the camera’s
mechanics enforce the notion that the camera is a weapon, in Portal the gun
is detached from combat. The game foregrounds this distinction; at the begin-
ning of Portal 2 Wheatley informs the player that ‘you’re looking for a gun
that makes holes. Not bullet holes, but—well, you’ll figure it out’. What makes
the portal gun unique, however, is not simply its lack of ‘bullets’, but rather the
lack of mechanics typical of gun-based combat. Players can shoot portals an
unlimited number of times, no ammo of any sort is required. The gun cannot
be changed, upgraded, or modified. There is no sense that a more powerful
gun would alleviate the stresses of the game. One might expect a game with
no enemies and no rapid fire to emphasize aim and precision. However, in the
Portal games the hitboxes are large and typically stationary. When the player
has to open a portal in a particular part of a wall or floor, this section is
often raised from the surrounding area, making it easier to target. One of the
effects of these design decisions is that all thinking and strategy occur before
the act of shooting.11 In delaying the time between the act of shooting (which
if playing on a PC is executed through right and left mouse clicks) and any
positive or negative feedback, Portal disrupts the typical emotions created by
the act of firing a gun. Shooting is neither particularly stressful nor rewarding
in and of itself.
While strategy is an important aspect of almost all combat-based games,
Portal reconfigures aspects of shooting such as speed and timing. None of
the levels in Portal (with the exception of the final level) are timed. In Portal
the player rarely has to shoot a moving target, which lessons the emphasis
on players’ reflexes. Timing is important in Portal since players often have
to figure out when, and in what order, they need to create portals in order
to solve a puzzle. However, the consequences for mistiming an action are
unusual. In most combat scenarios, the player is penalized for mistiming a
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176 Gabi Kirilloff

shot. In Fatal Frame for example, if the player waits too long to shoot (in an
attempt to get a critical hit) they run the risk of receiving heavy damage. In
most of Portal’s puzzles, nothing happens to the player if they mistime their
actions, they simply try again.
Ruberg’s notion of queer play helps articulate why these unexpected
mechanics constitute an interesting rhetorical move in and of them-
selves: ‘queerness means both desiring differently and simply being differ-
ently (or, in this case, playing differently): a longing to live life otherwise, a
resistance to social structures, and an embrace of the strange’ (2017, p. 200).
Portal encourages players to play differently, and to play outside of the par-
ticular rules and parameters typically associated with games in which a first-
person protagonist clears levels with a gun. In creating novel play mechanics
that are not simply a twist on combat mechanics, but are rather a radical
rethinking of what players can do with guns, Portal is also able to avoid the
‘weakened men’ trope and the association between women and ‘lesser’ forms
of violence. Though Chell does not kill, the game does not present this as
a function of her gender, but rather, as a function of the parameters of the
game world.12
Conclusions
In discussing the representation of women writers, Linda Abbandonato
observes that the ‘problem’ of representation cannot be easily resolved: ‘Put
bluntly, how can a woman define herself differently, disengage herself from
the cultural scripts of sexuality and gender that produce her as feminine sub-
ject?’ (1991, p. 1107). This problem exists across genres and media. Fatal
Frame demonstrates the fact that in games, defining female subjectivity
differently, is not simply a matter of better representation. Miku is a non-
sexualized female PC—a woman with agency who ultimately triumphs over
evil. However, in examining the ways in which this agency functions, the
rules of the game, it becomes clear that Miku’s abilities in part stem from
an assumption that women are less physically violent, and perhaps less phys-
ically capable, then men. There is a seeming dichotomy between the games’
depiction of violence and non-violence: Fatal Frame engages with ‘non-
violence’ through representation—the spiritual, mystical camera is a tool
‘appropriate’ for the young female protagonist. Yet, at the level of mechanics,
the game offers the player violent combat rather than alternative modes of
play. Rather than create ethical tension, this disparity works to reinforce the
notion that Miku is only capable of lesser violence. By associating Miku’s
power with the mystical camera obscura, the game implies that Miku’s
power is ‘feminine’ in a potentially essentializing way. By linking the camera
obscura with constrained, conventional combat mechanics, the game implies
that this ‘feminine’ power is a lesser form of masculine agency. Violence is
desirable, fulfilling, and engaging in the game. The fact that it is constrained,
177

does not encourage players to question its validity. Instead, it encourages
players to perceive the inability to perpetuate violence as weakness and links
this weakness with Miku’s gender.
Conversely, Portal and Portal 2 manage to create a non-violent female
protagonist without suggesting that women are essentially non-violent or
less violent than men. In both Portal games, this is in part achieved through
design choices, such as the first-person point of view, which normalize the
PC’s gender. Just because Portal does not emphasize Chell’s gendered body,
does not mean the game is not about gender. By highlighting the way in which
Wheatley essentializes both Chell and GlaDOS, Portal 2 thematically tackles
sexism. Both Portal games employ unconventional mechanics that reinforce
and complement the thematic attention to female agency. Unlike Fatal
Frame’s inclusion of power ups and weapon modification, Portal’s minim-
alist approach to combat mechanics divorces shooting from its typical posi-
tive feedback system. This is not simply a product of the fact that Portal is a
puzzle game—it stems from the fact that the player’s puzzle-solving abilities
can not be augmented by in-game rewards. There is simply no way to shoot
‘better’ or to be rewarded for doing so.
To some extent, the differences that I have described between Fatal Frame
and Portal are not intuitive: through its third-person point of view Fatal
Frame foregrounds female representation in a way that Portal does not.13
Similarly, one might guess that Fatal Frame’s camera would make for less
violent gameplay than Portal’s space-bending gun. The differences between
these games highlight the ways in which mechanics and representation
merge to perpetuate cultural values. Focusing on mechanics underscores
the way that games with non-sexualized female characters still further
gender stereotypes. However, as Portal suggests, focusing on mechanics can
also offer insight into how games go about subverting and productively
challenging stereotypes.
In juxtaposing Fatal Frame and Portal, I have attempted to highlight the
fact that though representation is significant, it cannot alone account for the
complex ways that players experience a game’s rhetorical portrayal of gender
and violence. Despite the fact that both games eschew certain markers of
gun-based FPS combat, such as waves of enemies and weapon variety, they
produce dramatically different effects and further different attitudes about the
strengths and abilities of their female characters. This offers a reminder that
it is not only important to critically examine representation and mechanics,
but also to consider the ways these two levels of game design intersect with
the cultural values players bring to the table. Looking at game mechanics, or
the rules of a game, allows scholars and players to better understand the way
that ‘cultural scripts’ underlie design choices and further player attitudes and
assumptions. Unfortunately, many of the real-world ‘rules’ that constrain,
limit, and define appropriate or natural behavior, are often reflected in the
rules of the game world.
178
178 Gabi Kirilloff

Notes
1 As Sicart notes, the meaning of the term ‘mechanics’ is slippery, particularly in terms
of the division between game actions and the rules governing game actions (2008).
2 This is clearly not true of all games or all players. In competitive gaming circles
(for example, the competitive StarCraft community), players are often extremely
aware of mechanics as mechanics.
3 It is important to note that while Fatal Frame and Portal were created within
different cultural contexts, both games resonated with US audiences. Fatal Frame
draws on Japanese folk culture and Shinto in a way that other Japanese horror
games (including Resident Evil and Silent Hill) do not. However, the depiction of
gender and violence that I discuss here can be seen in other games developed in
the US, such as Burial at Sea (which I discuss later). Still, the depiction of ghosts
in the game can be linked specifically with the Japanese horror tradition. Koji
Suzuki (as cited in Balmain 2008, p. ix) notes that ‘the Japanese don’t regard spirits
only as enemies, but as beings that co-exist with this world of ours’. This relates
to the fact that Fatal Frame includes ‘helpful’ NPC ghosts. However, this furthers
the connection between Miko’s photography and violent combat by associating
the ghosts with people, rather than objects, animals, or monsters.
4 Fatal Frame (2001), Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (2003), Fatal Frame
III: The Tormented (2005), Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008), Fatal
Frame: Maiden of Black Water (2014). All release dates are the original release
dates for Japan. While I do not discuss the other games here, other fans and critics
have noted that the representation of female characters in the series becomes
increasingly sexualized in several of the later games. For example, later games fea-
ture unlockable ‘sexy’ outfits for the PC. In later games the camera can also be
used for voyeuristic purposes. See Brian Ashcraft’s post ‘Gamers Wonder When
Fatal Frame Got This “Erotic” ’ on Kotaku (2014).
5 This is fairly characteristic within the horror genre, though less typical in the FPS
genre overall. Some combat-based FPS games, like F.E.A.R. and Prey (2017) do
rely on this emotional response. Stealth missions in FPS games may elicit similar
responses in which the player’s dread is punctuated by moments of stress and anx-
iety: e.g. Dishonored and Metal Gear Solid 2.
6 For example, many of the guns in Borderlands 2 and Mass Effect feature a cool
down period that constricts the shooting mechanic.
7 The other games released as part of The Orange Box were: Half-Life 2, Half-Life
2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2. Portal takes place
in the same universe as Half-Life, though the characters are distinct.
8 This is evidenced by blog posts and online comments by players. As a starting
point, Becky Chambers’s essay ‘Looking for a Few Good Chells: Why Player
Character Gender Matters’ does a nice job of describing the emotions some
female gamers experienced when realizing, with surprise, that they were playing
Portal as a female character (2011).
9 It is also important to note that fans and players have observed (and appreciated)
the fact that Chell’s race is ambiguous.
10 Some fans and critics have argued that the portal gun symbolically represents
a specifically ‘feminine’ agency. They contrast the ‘yonic’ portal gun with the
‘phallic’ imagery connected to conventional weaponry (Boluk and LeMieux 2017).
This argument has been criticized by some fans. It would be possible to extend a
179

similar reading to the camera obscura. However, I choose to focus primarily on a
more literal reading of the ways the rules governing these objects influence player
attitudes about violence.
11 It is important to note that for most players, these design choices do not make
the game ‘easy’, inaccessible, or boring (in part evidenced by the fact that Portal 2
was voted game of the year in 2011). In fact, these designs decision arguable make
Portal particularly accessible for players unfamiliar with the FPS genre.
12 Portal repeatedly calls attention to the strangeness of its own design, and conse-
quently, encourages players to reflect on their play experience. Seb Franklin sees
Portal as a game that ‘simultaneously exposes and undermines informatic control
at the intertwined levels of narrative and play … by implementing [the portal gun]
as the sole “weapon”, the game is highlighting the arbitrary way in which its world
functions, walls becoming nothing but code’ (2009, p. 178).
13 Some players have criticized feminist analyses of Portal because Chell’s gender is
not foregrounded in the game. Bonnie Ruberg’s analysis of lesbianism in Portal
received similar critiques, with commenters and trolls criticizing them for ‘making
it up’, since the game does not overtly represent lesbian characters. As Ruberg
notes, analyzing beyond representation allows scholars to articulate the ways in
which play creates meaning outside of the overt identity characteristics of indi-
vidual characters (2017).
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182
13
Toxic pacifism
The problems with and potential
of non-violent playthroughs
Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft
In early 2012 the Wall Street Journal profiled Daniel Mullins, a Skyrim player
who had undertaken to complete the fantasy role-playing game without
killing anything. The title of the article, ‘Videogamers embark on non-killing
spree’, was a play on the common sensationalist titles linking video games to
real-world violence, and the article highlighted players that were seemingly
subverting the violent imperatives built into many games (Dougherty 2012,
p. A1). The story was picked up by online games forums such as Kotaku,
and the comments on those stories made it clear that this was not a unique
occurrence and that players had been finding ways to complete many other-
wise violent games without killing anything (Totilo 2012). Some developers
have even embraced the notion of non-violent play strategies for games that
otherwise require the players to commit violent actions. For instance, Fallout
4 director Tom Howard has noted that they consciously tried to appeal to
different game styles by providing non-violent resolution options for some
scenarios, and players have managed to complete the entire game without dir-
ectly killing anything (Stuart 2015). These designers, and their players, seem
to have embraced Mary Flanagan’s ‘Critical Play’ game design model which
includes consciously designing for diverse play styles and subversion of the
culturally accepted norms for such games. She notes that such actions are
‘powerful sites of empowerment for giving voice to marginal groups’ and that
‘Feminist criticism and practice has played an important role in informing
such disruptions’ (Flanagan 2013, p. 256).
By removing the violence from these games and celebrating alternative
play styles, the non-violent game movement appears to be challenging the
hegemonic masculinity of games based upon war and violent acts, and their
players. As will be discussed, forum posts and YouTube comments related
to non-violent playthroughs are remarkably free from explicitly gendered
comments, which is astounding given the typical content of these arenas.
However, the acceptance of these ‘subversive’ gameplay strategies is under-
standable when one realizes that the non-violent play is generally complicit
with traditional violent and competitive means for completing the games.
Often the playthroughs focus on non-lethality, rather than non-violence: like
Batman, the player can be as violent as they want as long as the games do
183
Toxic pacifism 183
not actually register them as being responsible for the final killing blow. The
player may need to rely upon other forms of violence, such as mental con-
trol or theft, to gain experience to progress the game, or they may coerce or
goad potential enemies into killing each other. Reading the discussion around
non-violent playthroughs it becomes clear that the motivation behind most
of these attempts is not a refusal of the violence inherent in so many games,
but a competitive drive to make the games more challenging. Players discuss
optimizing character builds and, like another competitive gaming playstyle,
speedrunning, taking advantage of game glitches to avoid scenarios that
require killing. Game developers have even begun rewarding the challenge
of these playstyles by creating in-game achievements for not killing. Rather
than subverting the gender norms of the violent game genre, these players
and developers have instead made non-violence just another means for exclu-
sionary play tactics that reinforce hegemonic masculinity.
In this chapter we begin with an examination of pacifism and the gender
dynamics surrounding non-violence.1 Rather than relying upon a binary of
masculinity = war, femininity = peace, we instead focus on the ways that the
various means of non-violent playthroughs can be seen as performances of
either hegemonic or alternative masculinities. We examine two of the most
common game franchises for non-violent playthroughs, Skyrim and Fallout,
and look at the various ways players are complicit with the practices of hege-
monic masculinity despite their non-lethal gameplay.2 Finally, we will look at
Dontnod’s 2018 Vampyr as an example of a game that requires the player to
more explicitly confront the moral implications of their violence. We believe
that by designing games that reward multiple playstyles, including non-
violence, developers can help to diminish the use of games for the perform-
ance and perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity.
Militarism, violence, and masculinity are so inextricably linked that, as Jeff
Hearn states, when embarking on a discussion of them ‘it is hard to know
where to start; indeed it might seem gratuitous to labour the point’ (2011,
p. 48). We start at the same point as many contemporary examinations of the
subject, with Raewyn Connell’s work, subsequently re-formulated with James
Messerschmidt, on multiple masculinities and hegemonic masculinity. Rather
than there being a single ‘masculinity’, Connell proposes that there are a plur-
ality of masculinities produced by the intersection of race, class, ability, sexu-
ality, culture, and other influences (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 848).
These masculinities exist in a hierarchy, with hegemonic masculinity as the
dominant form. Hegemonic masculinity
was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority

of men might enact it. But it was certainly normative. It embodied the
currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to
position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the
global subordination of women to men.
(Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 832)
184
184 Jon Bath and Elly Cockcroft

In ‘Army men: military masculinity in Call of Duty’, Gregory Blackburn
discusses the strong connections between military service and the conception
of the ideal hegemonic male (2019, pp. 38ff). Suzanne Hatty similarly sees
warfare and other forms of shared violence as crucial for socializing young
men into hegemonic masculinity, and argues that one of the principal means
through which hegemonic masculinity retains and reconstitutes its hegemony
is through mass media: ‘In film, or any public performance … masculinity
becomes a corporeal display; it unfolds, as action, as violence, as omnisci-
ence, in a cascade of arresting images’ (2000, p. 176). Violent video games are
undoubtedly part of this media, especially as opportunities for performativity
increase through multi-player play and streaming.
In choosing not to kill, players appear to be challenging the norms of hege-
monic masculinity. It would be a mistake, however, to label these so-called
‘pacifist’ playthroughs feminist, for although there are strong connections
between feminism and pacifism, the two should not be considered syn-
onymous. Jean Elshtain, in Women and War, explores how the stereotypes of
men as ‘Just Warriors’ and women as ‘Beautiful Souls’ serves to keep men in
a position of power and to obfuscate possibilities for both more aggressive
women and pacifist, emotional men (1987). Undoubtedly between paci-
fist movements in the early part of the twentieth century and the suffrage
movement there are parallels; for example, the International Woman Suffrage
Alliance (IWSA) was founded in 1915 based around the premise that there
was a strong connection between women being denied the vote and the use of
war for solving international conflicts (Kuhlman 2017, p. 34). And as feminist
movements developed they tended to be more aligned with peace rather than
war. As Christine Sylvester states,
Feminism was outside war, above it, and in a position of belligerence to

it. By implication, women warriors must be captives of delusion or false
consciousness. They could not actually choose violence as a politics, per-
haps even a feminist politics.
(2011, p. 7)
This emphasis on peace has not been unproblematic, or uncontroversial,

and some feminists have advocated for a more aggressive approach. Pam
McAllister, editor of Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence,
argues that ‘we must rage against the patriarchy without adopting its ways’
(McAllister & Halper 1983, p. 20). Kronsell and Svedberg go even further,
and believe ‘there has to be space for feminism and feminists to ask the
question whether there are times when violence might actually be necessary’
(2011, p. 26).
The binary of masculinity = war, femininity = peace has similarly limited
opportunities for expressions of non-violent masculinities. For example, in
England during the First World War young men who refused to serve were
publicly shamed by women who handed them white feathers, petticoats, and
185
Toxic pacifism 185
other ‘soft’ items indicative of femininity, ‘implying that because they were not
man enough to conform to masculine gender norms, they should wear fem-
inine clothing instead’ (Kuhlman 2017, p. 32). Gender, as defined by Judith
Butler, ‘is a performance with clearly punitive consequences’ (2006, p. 190).
By failing to comply with the traditional norms of masculine militarism, these
men were mocked for their femininity, a practice that continues through lan-
guage such as using ‘man up’ and ‘big balls’ for being brave or bold, and the
pejoratives ‘pussy’ and ‘little girl’ for instances of hesitation or caution.
Like militarism, violent videogames are also so inextricably linked to
masculinity that it is gratuitous to labour the point. One would expect
that players who choose to undertake ‘pacifist’ playthroughs of other-
wise violent video games, and especially those who choose to publish their
performances on video platforms such as YouTube, with their often toxic
anonymous comments sections, would be subject to ridicule. However,
this is not the case. At worst, these players are criticized for playing the
game in a manner that ‘is not fun’. More frequently pacifist players are
lauded for their actions and other players relate their own experiences
with similar playstyles. To understand various reasons why this might be
so, we will look at two game franchises commonly used for non-violent
playthroughs: Skyrim and Fallout.
Bethesda Game Studios’ 2011 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an open-world
single-player fantasy role-playing game (RPG) with plenty of freedom to
choose how you play the game, including the ability to select character class,
race, with both human and non-human options, and gender. This provides
some allowance for players to interact with their environment on their own
terms rather than just completing the game through standard hack and slash
violence. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, players have used
this flexibility to complete quests, or the entire main plotline, without killing
anything. In video playthroughs, Daniel Mullins, outlines his strategies for
playing the game as ‘Felix the Peaceful Monk’ (2011). These include using
illusion magic such as charm and fear to render enemies non-threatening,
sneaking by enemies, and healing himself so that he can simply run through
combat situations. Randy Yasenchak managed to complete the main quest and
various sidequests (as long as they did not require killing) using a strategy that
combines illusion magic with high levels of persuasion and pick-pocketing
(2012). For the required dragon battles he relies upon various non-player-
characters (NPCs) to kill the dragons for him. And in the final battle he was
required to land the ultimate killing blow for the game to finish. In his guide
to ‘Playing a “pacifist” ’, James Lapham outlines three character builds: the
Manipulator, who gets others to do the killing for them, the Chillpill, who
uses sneak and calm to avoid combat, and the Heal/Shield, which requires the
use of a special shield that causes bleeding damage and takes advantage of a
game glitch where creatures that bleed to death are not counted as a ‘kill’ on
a player’s statistics (2016). Even without looking at the community’s response
to such gameplay, these techniques are obviously problematic in their reliance
186

on traditionally masculine strategies of control and coercion, and a definition
of pacifism as simply not being registered as killing by the system.
There is no evidence that the makers of Skyrim intended it to be played in
a non-violent manner; the main quest actually requires the character to kill
the last dragon themselves. For another of their games, however, Bethesda
intentionally considered non-violent play possibilities. The Fallout series is
a single-player RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world. In discussing Fallout 4,
Todd Howard, vice-president of development at Bethesda noted,
You can avoid [killing] a lot … I can’t tell you that you can play the whole
game without violence—that’s not necessarily a goal of ours—but we
want to support different play styles as much as we can.
(Stuart 2015)
Fallout and Fallout 2, which were developed by Interplay, a different game

studio, allowed the player to complete many missions using charisma and
intelligence-based skills rather than violence (Cheong 2015). And even in the
beta testing stage of Fallout 3 someone managed to complete the game killing
only a single creature at the beginning (Howson 2008). Thus it should not
be surprising that Kyle Hinkley completed Fallout 4 without killing a single
creature. In order to do so he used the standard ‘pacifist’ strategies of either
calming enemies or using them to kill each other, and depended upon the
ability to reload saved games multiple times until the correct random events
happened to allow him to proceed (Hernandez 2015). The game narrative
itself was unable to support Hinkley’s non-violent resolution of some events,
and the game grew increasingly glitchy as he progressed. Although the game
can be completed this way, it was not intended to be.
Examining the reasons why players attempt pacifist playthroughs of
Skyrim and Fallout, as well as the community’s reaction to such playthroughs,
reveal that such activities are not the challenges to the hegemonic masculinity
inherent in violent video games that they might first appear to be. As has been
already discussed, this playstyle is heavily dependent upon getting others to
commit the violent acts for you and/or using theft, coercion, and other forms
of psychological control. It is not that violence is wrong—just that you cannot
be the one registered as actually committing lethal acts. And most players are
aware that they are not actually pacifists; Ember Jones describes her Skyrim
character as ‘inspiring strife or discord to manipulate the odds in her favor
while not actual being the one with blood on her hands’ and acknowledges
that it is odd that using others to kill for her did not count ‘as a kill in my
statistics which allowed me to technically still be a pacifist’ (Totilo 2011b).
Thus, they are not undertaking these non-lethal games on moral grounds;
they are undertaken after having already completed the game through more
standard violent approaches. What seems to be most appealing about playing
the games without directly killing anything is to play a familiar game in a
more challenging mode. Jones undertook her pacifist playthrough on her third
187
Toxic pacifism 187
time through the game and describes her playstyle as ‘contrived’, ‘frustrating’,
and an exercise in ‘theorycrafting’ (Totilo 2011b). Theorycrafting is ‘is the
mathematical analysis of game mechanics, usually in video games, to discover
optimal strategies and tactics’ (‘Theorycraft’ n.d.). Yasenchak called upon his
experience of ‘years of playing Elder Scrolls games’, which allowed him to
optimize his character’s abilities and as a result his playthrough was ‘surpris-
ingly easier’ than he thought it would be, but even for him some battles were
‘harder than hell’ (2012). Hinckley’s efforts to complete Fallout 4 required
both a great deal of theorycraft (like using the pickpocket skill in reverse to
actually give NPCs better weapons) and a tremendous amount of patience,
including one 75-hour playthrough that had to be discarded when he inad-
vertently killed, but he felt the effort was worthwhile: ‘If we can do that, that’s
a pretty crazy achievement. That’s something that most people have already
dismissed as being impossible’ (Hernandez 2015). For all of these players the
motivating factor is the difficulty of a non-lethal playthrough, not its moral
‘rightness’.
Nicholas A. Hanford outlines the deep connections between the ‘gamer’
identity and masculine notions of mastery and work in ‘At the Intersection of
Difficulty and Masculinity: Crafting the Play Ethic’: ‘The effort that gamers
put into their play becomes a badge of commitment and their abilities merit
their use of the term [gamer]’ (2019, p. 150). Players who choose to, or are
forced to, play on lower difficulty settings because of their lack of skill are
often subjected to some form of ‘gender offense punishment’ (2019, pp. 155ff).
Much like the conscientious objectors of the First World War presented with
feathers and petticoats, games use various methods, including forcing their
characters to wear feminine clothing, to diminish the masculinity of easier
settings and celebrate the more difficult. With this in mind, it is easy to see how
the ‘pacifist’ playthroughs previously discussed are actually entirely complicit
within standard performances of hegemonic masculinity in games. As we
have seen, players adopt this playstyle because of the challenge, and it is evi-
dent from the community reaction that these performances are seen as exem-
plary, and worthy of imitation, rather than as a threat to the masculine gamer
identity. For example, the Reddit post ‘I just completed a Fallout 3 Pacifist
Run, AMA’ by AsimovsBrokenRules has 189 comments and an upvote rating
of 89 per cent (2013). Most of the comments are questions about details of
the playthrough or strategies for overcoming certain areas (i.e. ‘How’d you
do it, exactly?’) and the most negative comment is ‘Sounds like a nightmare.
I don’t think I have the skill or patience to do that’. Even this comment fits
within the masculine gamer as it is a backhanded compliment of the original
poster’s skill and patience. The notion that such playthroughs, while requiring
skill, are boring is not an uncommon comment—Lapham even feels the need
to address this in his community guide to pacifist Skyrim in a section entitled
‘Boring playstyle?’ (2016). The Reddit post has two comments that use expli-
citly gendered language. The first is by the original poster in response to a
comment and signals that they personally are not sexist: ‘Of course man! Or
188

woman. I mean this is the 21st century’ (AsimovsBrokenRules 2013). And
the second is an explicit comment on the ‘manliness’ of the difficulty of this
playthrough, and thus of the original poster: ‘Do your balls have their own
bra?’ (AsimovsBrokenRules 2013). From this comment it is clear that playing
games like this in a pacifist fashion might challenge the player, but most def-
initely not the patriarchy.
Dontnod Entertainment’s 2018 Vampyr begins to more meaningfully
address pacifism in otherwise violent game genres. The main character is a
First World War London doctor named Jonathan Reid, who wakes up after
being made a vampire in the middle of an outbreak of the Spanish Flu.
The game is designed in such a way that you are in a constant battle with
Dr. Reid’s dual nature: the desire as a doctor to do no harm, and the need for
blood, which you can acquire by feeding on any of the residents of London.
The combat you encounter during the game is tedious, but the characters help
to create a compelling narrative. In his review of the game Charlie Hall states,
And the truth is that I’d be happy to go on a killing spree. It’s just that
everyone is so damned interesting that I can’t bring myself to do the deed.
If they’re dead then I can’t talk to them anymore, and their part in the
overall narrative of the game is lost.
(2018)
By refusing the standard trope of making the NPCs dispensable, Vampyr

encourages the player to interact with them rather than just seeing them as an
easy pathway to experience points and increased power. In this regard it is not
unlike Tiltfactor’s Layoff, a casual matching-style game where you are made
aware of the backstories of all ‘employees’ before you eliminate them as part
of the gameplay (2009). This has a real effect on players; one commenter on
Hall’s article notes, ‘The only character I’ve killed so far was the kid in the docks
(joe’s kid I think?) I haven’t slept to see the consequences yet, but I already feel
bad about it’ (2018). Furthermore, as a doctor players can heal the NPCs.
This leads to the ‘quality’ of that person’s blood improving, meaning if you
do decide to kill that person, you will gain more experience, but you also gain
a lesser amount of experience just by healing them. If the player does decide
to kill a NPC, the developers have tried to make that decision meaningful in
other ways as well. The game emphasizes the seriousness of the choice you
are about to make with chanting and heavy string accompaniments. As the
victim dies you are made aware of their last thoughts. Finally, the more NPCs
you kill the faster the Spanish Flu spreads. The game as it was first released,
however, still required you to kill or else experience extremely difficult game-
play, awarding a corresponding ‘achievement’ for completing the game in
this fashion, thereby placing this form of pacifist play in the category of the
competitive pacifism seen in Skyrim and Fallout. But a later patch released
‘story mode’, in which players are allowed more freedom in playstyle and, if
they so choose, to complete the game without killing. This same patch also
189
Toxic pacifism 189
made it even more difficult to complete the hardest difficulty level so that
players were more dependent upon killing NPCs. In both cases the developer
appears to be responding to a situation where, by making players think about
the ramifications of their actions, players were actively choosing not to kill.
Thus the developer both had to make not-killing more viable, and to actually
encourage players to kill. It turns out that gamers will not automatically kill
everything if other ways to emotionally involve them in the game are found.
Maleeha Aslam, in Gender-based Explosions, examines the linkages
between hegemonic masculinity and jihadist terrorist movements:
wartime roles are manifestations by which existing cultural and psycho-

logical understandings of gender roles are further authenticated and
made relevant to current political contexts … programmed by societies
to conceptualize their own masculinity in a peculiar fashion, men indulge
in flamboyant displays of physical force to either assert or regain their
(lost) ‘honour’.
(2012, p. 2)
Relying upon Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and Connell’s the-

ories of hegemonic masculinity, she sees one appeal of joining a jihadist
movement as a way for disempowered men to be able to perform their
masculinity. However, exactly because this is a performance, there is the
possibility for these men to perform a different masculinity should a sat-
isfactory alternative be made available (Aslam 2012, 89). Similarly, Taylor
and Voorhees believe that ‘while gaming certainly reflects the ideologies and
aims of hegemonic masculinity, it is also agential in transforming how hege-
monic masculinity operates’ (2019, p. 7). As players continue to demand
games that provide them flexibility in how to play, it is essential that both
players and developers continue to critique what Jim Sterling has called the
‘dead dog strategy’, the over-reliance on using death and killing to commu-
nicate emotion (2016). Rather than the pacifist playstyle being the domain
of only the hyper-skilled ‘gamer’, game developers, and game communities,
need to embrace truly non-violent alternative players; as one commenter on
a pacifist playthrough noted, ‘It’s not Bethesda’s fault a gamer isn’t playing
a game the way Bethesda intended, but it is their fault they’re not giving him
freedom, for better or worse’ (Totilo 2011a). This will take active effort from
both parties, but, as Duane Cady so eloquently phrases it, one should never
mistake pacifism for passivism (2014).
Notes
1 The authors should note that they both come from families with traditions of reli-
gious pacifism, and that they both have grandfathers who were required, as con-
scientious objectors, to work in labour camps during the Second World War. Both
authors also really like shooting things in video games.
190

2 It is probably not surprising that options for pacifist play in games based more
closely on war, such as Call of Duty, are limited to passively spectating the actions
of your computer-controlled squadmates (see Plunkett 2016), or to playing a non-
combat role such as a medic or a mechanic. In the first case the lack of player
agency removes this playstyle from our discussion; in the second, these personnel
are an important part of the military and thus cannot be classified as pacifist.
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193
Part V
Afterword
194
195
Taking binaries off the table

Mary Flanagan
Violent catharsis
Jerreat-Poole’s chapter in this volume describes moments of redemption, of
catharsis, where players enjoy the power of destruction and subversion, the
messy and ambivalent performance of feminist violence as a form of pleasure.
I can identify. There are few games that change the power dynamics of the
existing social order. Jerreat-Poole’s subversive in-game actions, admitting
pleasure at smashing up a virtual school, reminds me of the cathartic experi-
mental fiction film Born in Flames (1983) by filmmaker Lizzie Borden. In
the film, feminists battle racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism, crossing
difference in an intersectional union that transforms into an extremist group.
The characters took direct action against the patriarchy and specifically the
media systems that represented and promoted inequities.
I remember watching this film not long after it came out, cheering on the
women as they raged against injustice. Sometimes, you just need that cath-
arsis. And one needs to comprehend how power operates, especially in games,
for games are an artform of power and choice.
Speaking the truth to power in ways that undermine and challenge

that power can often best be done as an insider … Challenging power
structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however,
requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.
(Patricia Hill Collins 2000, xiii)
About a decade ago, my student Suyin Lui learned these languages and
crafted a game called Hey Baby, where you can shoot men on the street who
catcall you. She used the derogatory, real-life abuses hurled at her during
her typical days as a student in New York City and had friends record the
voice overs. Her game shocked. It turned the tables, and did so bluntly. It was
radical.
But most games are not concerned with underrepresented women finding
catharsis—just the opposite. War games in particular seem on the surface as
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196 Mary Flanagan

far away from a liberating social theme as you can get. Yet in this volume,
the authors have explored a range of war games from the seemingly obvious
choices of triple-A battlefield games to smaller game examples which offer
different interpretations of what war might mean, and how players might per-
form outside expectations. In this book, then, the definition a war game has
expanded beyond Call of Duty-style battle-specific settings to include games
where violence is the raison d’être for play, where game goals are structured
around binary winning, aggression, or annihilation. Such a reworked defin-
ition recasts a huge variety of games reliant on violence and aggression as
war games.
Feminist violence
Can one be a feminist and still play such problematic games? This remains
a good question to negotiate, just as feminists examining other media forms
have asked. Can I be a feminist and enjoy heterosexist romantic comedy films
or romance novels? Foucault’s notion of the power fantasy can remind us that
games of violence, in particular those that feature armed conflict to foster ‘vio-
lent economies’ and ‘disconnect values from practice’ (as noted by Saklofske,
Cann, Rodrigue and Siemens), maintain the conditions of the violence in the
first place. Foucault assumes this position when discussing power: ‘if we speak
of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose
that certain persons exercise power over others’ (Foucault 1983, p. 217). Make
no doubt about it: however they may appear, however their moral conflicts
are posed and the multiple endings offered to give the illusion of true choice,
we can categorize the majority of war games as games where persons exercise
power over others, where violence is a means to, if not the end goal for, victory.
In this volume, Kampe draws upon Feminist Standpoint Theory (Harding
2004) to set looser boundaries for war games. He argues that a ‘feminist
war game must— through in- game goals, available actions, and subject
representation—allow the player to explore the social realities of war, through
the perspective of one who has become marginalized by it’. But what exactly
counts as ‘war’ is expanded in nuanced ways. Two chapters, one by Kampe
and the other by House, explore This War of Mine (2014), a game in which
players control a group of survivors during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s,
which highlights basic human needs and cooperation in the midst of moral
choices over engagement in the violent conflict. The focus not on the battle-
field, but instead on civilian survival, disrupts the genre.
Taking a broader look at what ‘war’ means and looking at social real-
ities in conflict seems to both take into consideration the options avail-
able to ‘feminist’ makers as well as shed light on feminist aims themselves.
After all, some feminists would argue that merely being ‘woman’ means that
one is engaged in a violent power struggle by default. In this volume, Luc
examines the aggression and power dynamics inherent in everyday life that
undermine any kind of female identity. To this end, Jenson and de Castell
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Taking binaries off the table 197

call upon French feminist theory to question the very possibility of a ‘fem-
inist war game’, examining the history of women’s rights as in and of itself
an ongoing war, and the social movement of Feminism that places the very
existence of woman at the center of concern. Arguing that digital games are
already an embattled site for women in terms of unbalanced representation
in the making process, sexist representation in the games themselves, and vit-
riolic culture surrounding games and their culture, the authors argue against
the possibility of a feminist war games using the work of philosopher Moniq
Wittig, arguing that ‘Gender remains a battlefield, and, like it or not, we are
always off to war’. This war moves beyond trends in politics to much deeper
questions of language, hierarchy, and authority. In other words, if women
must continue to fight for simple autonomy, safety, and fundamental human
rights, then playing out ideas about war under other guises would just be an
activity that distracts from the root of the problem.
Binary boundaries
One of the biggest challenges with war games is not merely the number of
games out there that celebrate hypermasculinity and unquestioning re-
representation of patriarchal order. It is their very reliance on binary conflict,
their refusal to uproot the fundamental structures of inequity that lead to
conflict in the first place. While writing in a particular time and political cli-
mate, the observations of Karl Marx and conflict theory still hold water: in
a state of perpetual conflict over limited resources, in a competition-based
world that therefore favors power and social hierarchies, those with power and
wealth will work to suppress others, and create further conflicts through war,
both covert and overt. Many game designers situate players in this conflict
without attempting to imagine alternatives.
Take for example the analysis of Life Is Strange (2015), and its prequel,
Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017) by Jerreat-Poole, a game serial set in
a high school narrative dystopia. The repressive environments of suburban
life and its racial and gendered segregation is queered by the player while the
dark underbelly of the town is revealed: young women are framed, abused,
and even killed. The game’s key feminist character Chloe dies multiple times,
but the player-character Max has the power to rewind time, so it is possible
to save her, albeit with other consequences. Chloe’s rage is a familiar theme to
players who are victims of inequities and violence, players who are ignored,
unseen, targeted, or abused in the surrounding heteropatriarchy. Ending with
an environmental catastrophe, the player faces a choice: save Chloe, or save
the town, a town that conceals violence against women, bodies of color, queer
bodies. The choice is meaningful because it recognizes a new kind of lens
in game play: the hero who might save the day might be saving something
that desperately needs changing or destroying anyway. The game builds on
other moral dilemma games, such as Shadow of the Colossus (2006), where
we realize that in playing out Wander’s mission to resurrect his true love, we
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198 Mary Flanagan

are in fact massacring to extinction beautiful ancient massive beings and
empowering an evil magician.
Overriding themes in popular war games—winning conflict, making great
sacrifices, facing difficult moral questions with tradeoffs, and becoming the
hero, where the individual triumphs evil and often, but not always, prevents
global harm— celebrate binary solutions that, if they are ‘solved’, by
hypermasculinity instead of negotiation, reinventing the values system, chan-
ging rewards or game elements themselves (upgrades, levels, points, inven-
tories, and other markers of status), valorize might and intimidation over
persuasion. Most games themselves are typically created in hypermasculine
environments and in a culture currently toxic for diverse workers and
players alike.
Fans of big war games such as the Call of Duty series extoll the virtues of
these games based on their involvement of moral dilemmas, and the game
reward systems reflect an attention to player moral choices. The sheer number
of war games that have been released is indeed astounding, but most of them
factor in some moments of moral choice-making, such as gunning down
already wounded soldiers or civilians. War games allow players to make vio-
lent decisions in the midst of moral dilemmas given in singular, consumable
moments. After all, in a real-life situation, with hunger, the sides taken by
neighbors, the protection of children, homelands, beliefs, ideologies—with
these all involved, the dilemmas are multiplied on top of each other in a huge
confounding mess. Call of Duty: World at War (2008) was advertised with the
intertitles ‘No rules. No fear. Only chaos’, which flies in the face of consider-
ation of a global conflict that left over 70 million people dead and makes the
Geneva Convention seem like a practical joke.
These moral dilemmas extend into fictionalized wars, even zombie
apocalypses: Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015). There are, as typical with a
large game, multiple ways to experience the ending. In one ending, one of the
player-characters, Barry, refuses to execute a child, even one possessed by the
mind of a zombie Nazi overlord. He lets her free, and we know she will crush
humanity on earth. To avoid this resolution, one would have had to get the
character who had accidentally shot her sister to use a gun. This character
is a teenager, someone who refuses to shoot. In the end game, if the player
finally directs her to take the gun, something against her fundamental char-
acter, and shoot, the outcome is far more heroic. But at what cost? Save the
planet and lose your values seems to be the ongoing theme, which I read as a
dystopian design choice, a hopeless moment that transcends the particulars
of narrative and rather reflects the ‘deer in the headlights’ inability to act
given the despairing choices afforded by hypercapitalist systems in the face
of a globe on the brink of catastrophe. Players are given a choice structure
where they have no good choices at all, especially those who are playing the
game critically or subversively. As bell hooks said, ‘Being oppressed means
the absence of choices’ (1984, p. 5). We seem to have fewer and fewer choices
that have any real power to change the systems we encounter.
199
Beyond binaries
Games are games because they simplify systems, and this includes simpli-
fying conflict and the logic behind it. Games are in some ways always a set of
abstractions, some with powerful narratives alongside them, others with mere
tokens on a game board. Unfortunately, game design has not caught up to the
difficult, challenging-to-design-for situations of conflict we face in the twenty-
first century. It means experimenting. It means less profit as game industries
try something new. Capitalistic concerns therefore remain unquestioned.
Perhaps this has always been the case: perhaps the world has always
been a very messy place, with the mass simplification of politicians and
warmongers boiling complexity down to two clear sides and one definitive
notion of victory to simplify the truth, to funnel energy. But in doing so in
our play systems, our games therefore teach a kind of one-sidedness, a binary
sickness, an ‘us vs them’ mentality, a position that engages the mind’s deepest
primordial biases and whose distillation continues to be useful to the status
quo, to capitalism, to greed, and war-mongering; it fosters virulent gender-
based discrimination, racism, and behaviors such as interpersonal violence,
hate speech, and more.
There are never two sides to any story, but there is a gravitation to that
type of logic to distill the complexity, to reduce, to reject contradictions and
tradeoffs in order to divide and conquer. Ultimately war-type binaries act to
renounce the personhood of all involved, each participant worldwide with
their own complex story. Human life is messy. It’s complicated. But the rhet-
oric of war, of binary oppositions, reduces it all into neat packages. Good vs
evil. Right vs wrong. It is this phenomenon which makes the continuing fan-
tasy about playing out war all the more unsettling.
Subversions and solutions

I started this short essay with an anecdote about empowerment through
imagined violent retaliation in games and films. But I have developed new
perspectives through the years as a media maker and designer. I no longer
stand behind the notion that catharsis changes anything—just the opposite.
My questions have forced me to see that the systems contain the resistance.
Instead, I am pushed to make new systems instead of reacting to the old.
Foucault writes, ‘The strategic adversary is fascism … the fascism in us all,
in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love
power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (1983, p. xiii).
What are games in which you don’t feel the urge for power? Are they even
games at all? New theories for game studies must emerge with this question
front and center to address the questions of oppression, choice, and play.
Indeed, there are too many games that give us too few good choices.
Perhaps a positive result in the search for feminist war game is to take
‘binarism’ off the table. Perhaps the solution is to create a feminist utopia.
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200 Mary Flanagan

Women have long been writing feminist utopias, as early as Christine de
Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 in which three women, Lady
Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice, advise on how to create a city
for women so they may live as educated equals, free from harassment. More
recently, the 1970s through the 1990s saw a number of writers inspired by
the women’s movement pen novels about utopian worlds designed by women.
Curiously, war is not absent from this set of feminist utopias, but where there
is war, it is because women have been attacked and must defend themselves.
In A Door into Ocean (Joan Slonczewski 1986), a nation of advanced, pacifist
women living on an oceanic planet face invasion by neighboring patriarchal
planets. Their struggle plays out while they negotiate danger while attempting
to maintain their culture of non-violence. Or take The Wanderground (Sally
Miller Gearhart 1979) where women take to the countryside and form their
own feminist communities away from the violent patriarchy that controls the
cities. Or He, She and It (Marge Piercy 1991), in which the lead character
returns to her autonomous childhood town under cyberattack by multi-
national corporations who have gained control of most of the planet’s regions.
These are just a few of the many examples of feminist fiction that propose
alternatives to the way things are and the way conflict can be negotiated. The
great many novels that explore feminist utopias demonstrate that other cre-
ative media forms have the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities to the
conditions of heteronormative, hypermasculine scenarios. We’ve had enough
of games based on Tom Clancy or Joseph Conrad, for game genres to tempt
players to become enamored with power. Now is the time for something else.
We need new game genres to build feminist utopias.
The future of conflict in the Anthropocene

The good news is that there are some emerging games that tackle alternatives
to rehearsing war. This volume has explored a few of these burgeoning
alternatives, from player’s actions and their participation in war games that
avoid killing to games that bring the conflict into one of team building and
survival. But as of yet these examples do not rework the fundamental ways
conflict happens in the first place, and that is where we must look in the next
generation of war games. As Patricia Hill Collins so astutely observed,
To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular

system of ‘commonsense’ ideas that support their right to rule. In the
United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexu-
ality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize
alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that
they justify.
(2000, p. 284)
As far as scholars can tell, games emerged in Neolithic times after the last
Ice Age. Writing, cities, and organized larger-scale societies seem to have been
201

necessary ingredients for game systems to emerge as a thought process. Thus,
games have long served as a means for people to understand and model conflict,
and work through strategies to find solutions. But they have done so mostly
through the given order of the day, from the accepted norms of the societies in
which they developed.
Given the state of the planet today, we are poised for an unprecedented era
of global conflict: human, animal, vegetal extinction; a lack of clean and boun-
tiful resources; territory grabs, exploitation, and die-off. Our time may be one
of those turning points, such as when Mancala developed to help explain the
harvest and fate in neolithic times, or war games like chess emerged in the dark
and middle ages to help articulate conflict at that time. We have games avail-
able as an imaginative resource to rework consequence-laden global human
conflicts, the celebration of intersectional, queer interests and the dire need for
planetary equity. In an age when the limited earth’s resources have reached a
turbulent yet undeniable state of instability, we could look to games to find
creative ways to problem solve by altering their reward systems, understanding
there are multiple stakeholders, coming to equilibria instead of winner-take-all
solutions. We desperately need new models for power, to build new notions of
survival in the anthropocene. It is up to the game development community to
lead the way in such thinking, to design new kinds of games for an entirely new
epoch of human history.
There are tiny moments in time where humanity—groups, individuals,
societies—is given the opportunity to try something different, to change
the way things have always been done, to refuse to attend to the struc-
tural inequities producing race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, discip-
line, expertise, and capital as systems of power. It’s time to reinforce values
that hold precious the rights of everyone and everything around us. This is
our opportunity, our moment with games at this very instant: to imagine
new kinds of war games—even utopias—in order to imagine new kinds
of futures.
References
de Pizan, C 1405/1999, The book of the city of ladies, reprint, trans. R Brown-Grant,
Penguin, London.
Foucault, M 1983, ‘Preface’, in G Deleuze and F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism
and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Gearhart, SM 1979, The wanderground, Persephone Press, Watertown, MA.
Harding, S (ed.) 2004, The feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political
controversies. Routledge, London.
Hill Collins, P 2000, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics
of empowerment, Routledge, New York, NY.
hooks, b 1984, Feminist theory: from margin to center, South End Press, Cambridge,  MA.
Piercy, M 1991, He, she and it, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.
Slonczewski, J 1986, A door into ocean, Arbor House, New York, NY.
202
Index
Note: Page numbers in bold indicate information in tables, those in italics in figures.
vs. indicates a comparison
9/11 attacks 121, 128 attractors: recurrent see recurrent

12 Rules for Life (Peterson) 88 attractors; simulated 94
authoritarianism, United States and 129
Abbandonato, Linda 176 authorship, war games 32–33
Absher (2015) 125–126 Avalon Hill 40
accessibility, localized see localized Avengers, The (2012) 102
accessibility avoidance, violence in games 184
adults, tabletop war games 39–40 awareness, game design 49
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
(AD&D): feminist representation Bad Feminist (Gay) 3–4
34–36; non-binary gender barriers, emotions as 55
representation 35; see also Dungeons base instincts 126–128
and Dragons (D&D) battlefield, gender as 88
Afghanistan: US military deployment Battlefield series (2002–9) 102
123; see also Distant Plain: Insurgency Battle of the Little Bighorn, The (2005)
in Afghanistan, A (2013) 49; gender issues 46
Agent Silent Death expansion, Battle of the Wilderness (1975) 32–33
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Bayonetta (2010), female characters 22
159–160 bees, as feminist war game basis 24
Ahmed, Sara 4, 6, 67, 70, 77 Bell, K 94
Aidley, Katie 49 Bilal, Wafaa 121
Alderman, Naomi 7–8 binaries: beyond 199; boundaries
Alien (1979) 102 197–198
allies, hostile 125–126 Bioshock (2007) 20, 21
America’s Army (2002) 121 Bjork, Tommy 150
Andean Abyss (2012) 46–47 Blackburn, Gregory 184
anger 78–79 Blackmoor 40
Antonisse, Jamie 124 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) 70
Apocalypse Now (1979) 103 board war games: feminist
ARMA 133 representation 33–36;
Arneson, Dave 40 masculinity and 31
art direction, gender inclusion 48–49 Bogost, Ian 6, 20, 168
Art of Failure, The (Juul) 145–146 Book of the City of Ladies, The (de
Aslam, Maleena 189 Pisan) 200
asylum seekers, dehumanization of 125 Borden, Lizzie 195
203
Index 203
Born in Flames (1983) 195 Cultural Politics of Emotion, the
Bosnian War (1992–96) see This War of (Ahmed) 77
Mine (TWoM)(2014) cuteness, girl aesthetic as 69
Braidotti, Rosi 156
Braunstein 40 D&D see Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)
Brice, Mattie 27 Darfur is Dying (2006) 7, 103–104,
Brickner, Rachel 13 124, 125
Brothers in Arms series (2005–10) 102 Davis, Angela 7, 58
Burial at Sea expansion 173 dead-dog strategy  189
Butler, Judith 54, 57, 73–74, 152, 185 dead-in-iraq (2006–11)  121
Deer Hunter, The (1978) 103
Cady, Duane 189 Defense Manpower Data Center
Caillois, Roger 123 123–124
Call Her Ganda (2018) 127 dehumanization, asylum seekers and
Call of Duty series (2003–17) 102, 198; refugees 125
gender and violence 168; masculinity DeLappe, Joseph 121
in 168–169, 184; playing the hero 56; Demick, Barbara 135
political ideology 61 de Palma, Brian 15
Call of Duty: World at War (2008) 198 de Pisan, Christine 200
Cannibals and Kings (Harris) 83–84 destruction game, Wolfenstein II: The
Casualties of War (1989) 15, 21 New Colossus as 151
Catherine the Great 103 Deterding, Sebastian 152
Chainmail (1971) 40 difficulty, feminist war game design 145
character gender 30–31; feminist war digital simulations, American military
games 22; first-person shooters 30–31; presence, understanding of 122
Portal 174; see also female characters Digital Survivor of Sexual Assault
characterization: feminist war game (DS2A) system 127–128
dimensions 137; This War of Mine disability, feminist intervention as
140–141 153–157
Chemaly, Soraya 8 Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan,
chess, as feminist war game basis 24 A (2013) 47
cinema see films/cinema domestic play space, This War of
civilian experience, of war 135 Mine 61–62
Cixous, Hélène 87 Domestic Tension (2007) 121
Clancy, Tom 200 dominance, presumption of rights 87–88
Clark, Naomi 92 Donald, R 54–55
Cockburn, Cynthia 135 Dontonod Entertainment 68; see also
Colonial Twilight: The French–Algerian Life Is Strange (LIS) (2015)
War (1954–62)  47 Doom (1993): character gender 30;
combat roles, female empowerment 17 masculinist game mechanics 168–169
Command 133 DOOM Eternal 160–161
community, feminist war games and 146 Door into Ocean, A (Slonczewski) 200
conflict see war drivers, of war 132
Connel, Raewyn 183–184 Dr Strangelove (1961) 103
Conrad, Joseph 200 DS2A (Digital Survivor of Sexual
Cooper, Brittney 8 Assault) system 127–128
Cornell, Drucilla 150 Duke Nukem3D (1996), character
Counter Insurgency (COIN) game series gender 30
46–47; feminist inquiry 47 Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 40–43;
Courage under Fire (1996) 102 feminist modules and 36; feminist
critical confrontations, films 26–27 values in 8; fifth edition characteristics
critical thought, fun vs. in games 15 (2014) 42–43; gender sensitive
Crowley, Vicki 156 phrasing 41–42; narrative element 42;
204
204 Index
role-playing game vs. war game 43; 172–173; gameplay 171–172; gender
structure and play 40–41; violence stereotypes 169–170, 171; non-
avoidance 41; women authors in violence claims 172; story 169;
34–35; see also Advanced Dungeons and unavoidable mercy killing 170–171;
Dragons (AD&D) violence in 171
dynamics: feminist war game dimensions female characters 22–23; Advanced
137; This War of Mine 141–142 Dungeons and Dragons 34–36; board
war games 33–36; disability as
economics, war driven by 132 representation 153–157; disposability
Edge of Tomorrow (2014) 102; female in Life is Strange 73; empowerment
characters 22 in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The (2011) 102, 158–159; over-sexualization of 22–23;
183, 185–186; criticism of 187–188; representation difficulties 176, 177;
non-player characters 185; story 185 underrepresentation in games 195–196;
ELITE SHARP CTT (Emergent Leader Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in
Immersive Training Environment 152–153, 157–158, 161
Sexual Harassment/Assault Response Female Combat Soldier, the (King) 16
and Prevention Command Team females: authors of Dungeons and
Trainer) 127 Dragons 34–35; honorary men as 16;
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist non-participant population in war as
Discovers Her Superpower (Cooper) 8 15; participation in war 15, 16; “spoils
Elshtain, Jean 184 of war” as 83
embedded reporting 57 Female Solder, The (King) 16
Emergent Leader Immersive Training feminism: definitions 3–4, 82; inquiry in
Environment Sexual Harassment/ Counter Insurgency game series 47;
Assault Response and Prevention monarch association 103; posthuman
Command Team Trainer (ELITE 156; scope of 18; value potential
SHARP CTT) 127 18–19; violence, opposition to 18–19;
emotions 78–79; barriers as 55; war vs. 23
rational thinking vs. 55; technology feminist anti-war games 24–26;
in This War of Mine 60; training in outcomes opposed to winning 24–25;
Kriegspiel 55 prototypes 25–29
Endgame Eurasia (2013) 125 feminist game jams 114
Endgame Syria (2012) 7, 124–125 Feminist Killjoys (Ahmed) 67
end of the world, Life is Strange (LIS) feminist modules, Dungeons and Dragons
(2015) 72–73 (D&D) 36
Engberg-Pedersen, Anders  55–56 feminist snap 70
“Enhancing Sexual Harassment Training Feminist Standpoint Theory 132, 196
for the 21st Centuary Military” (Ford feminist utopia writing 200
Morie) 127 feminist violence 77–78, 196–197; joy/
ethical play aspects, Portal (2007) 174 pleasure in 78
expectations, war games 20–21 feminist war: definitions of 102–104;
films/cinema 102–103; historical
failure of masculinity 75 representations of 103
Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt against feminist war games 3–4, 22–24,
Caesar 47 31–33, 82–84; character gender 22;
Fallout 183, 186 community and 146; definitions
Fallout 2 186 101–117; design qualities 144–145;
Fallout 3 186 Fatal Frame as 168, 172–173;
Fallout 4 182 framework for 135–138; fun violation
Far Cry 2 (2008) 21 21; Life is Strange as 91–92; mechanics
Fatal Frame 8, 169–173, 176–177; 168–169; non-glorification of 103;
feminist game mechanics 168, Portal as 168; possibility of 32;
205
Index 205
prototypes of 23–24; seven dimensions game interfaces, American military
of 137–138; socially responsible design presence, understanding of 122
136; testing for 136 game mechanics 167–168; feminist
fictionalized wars 198 mechanics 168–169; gender 168;
Fight Club 75 Invasion 105–106; player-character
films/cinema: critical confrontations and definition of 167; role-playing games
26–27; feminist war 102–103 167–168; violence 168
Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam game piracy 143
(2014) 47 gameplay: Fatal Frame 171–172;
First Chechen War (1994–96) see This Kriegspiel (1824) 58–59; This War of
War of Mine (TWoM)(2014) Mine 138–139
first-person shooter (FPS) games Gamergate controversy 114
121–122; character gender 30–31; Games Workshop 43; see also
masculinist game mechanics 168–169 Necromunda (1995);Warhammer
Flanagan, Mary 6, 13–14, 18 Fantasy Battle (1983)
Ford Morie, Jacqueline 127 gay-bashing, Russian website
Foucault, Michel 105, 199 encouragement 126
frames, This War of Mine and 54 Gay, Roxanne 3–4
Frames of War (Butler) 57 Gears of War series (2006–16) 102
frameworks, feminist war games gender: as battlefield 88; Battle of the
135–138 Little Bighorn, The 46; definition 185;
French–Algerian War see Colonial game characters see character gender;
Twilight: The French–Algerian War game mechanics 168; mechanics in
(1954–62) Necromunda 44; performativity of
French feminist theory 197 189; sensitive phrasing in Dungeons
Freud, Sigmund, misogyny 17 and Dragons 41–42; tabletop war
From Where We Stand: War, Woman's games 39–40; war games 45–46
Activism and Feminist Analysis Gender-based Explosions (Aslam) 189
(Cockburn) 135 gendered authorship 30–37
Full Metal Jacket (1987) 103 gender stereotypes: Fatal Frame 169–170,
fun, critical thought vs. in games 15 171; questioning in Portal 173
G. I. Jane (1997) 102
Galani, William 157 girl aesthetic, cuteness as 69
Galloway, Alexander R 6 God of War series (2005–2018) 21
Gamasutra Salary Survey 32 Goldberg, D 93
game(s): definitions 83; effects of Gone Home 93–94
77–78; female underrepresentation Grand Theft Auto series 5
195–196; fun vs. critical thought 15; Gray, Kishonna L 153
history of 200–201; hypermasculinity Grosz, Elizabeth 150–151
31; ideology of Wolfenstein II: The groups of people, representations 105
New Colossus 150–151; inclusive Gygax, Gary 34–36, 40
design 93; language as barrier 143;
language in 88–89; as models 20; as Halberstam, Jack 75
possibility fields 19; as prototypes 20; Hall, Charlie 188
reality vs. 6–7; subversive designs 86; Hall, Stuart 105
Syrian refugees 124–125; theoretical Halo, masculinist game mechanics
underpinning 104–105; see also 168–169
war games handbooks, war game records 133
game design: awareness of non- Hanford, Nicholas A 187
combatants 49; deliberate choice in Harlot encounters, Advanced Dungeons
47–49; feminist war games 144–145; and Dragons 34
inclusion 48; military contracts 127 Harrigan, Pat 31
game industry, hypermasculinity in 32 Harris, Marvin 83–84
206
206 Index
Hartsock, Nancy 134–135 International Game Developers
hatred, tolerance vs. 110 Association (IGDA) 114
Hatty, Suzanne 184 International Woman Suffrage Alliance
Hearn, Jeff 183 (IWSA) 184
hegemonic masculinity: jihadist intersectional identities 93
terrorism and 189; non-violent games Invasion 105–113; game mechanics
challenging 182–183 105–106; player choice 106;
Hellweg, Johann Christian Ludwig 5 screenshots 106–110, 111–113;
Heretic (1994), feminist tolerance vs. hatred 110
representation 33–34 Iraq, US military deployment 123
hero, playing of, in games 56 Irigaray, Luce 87, 103
He, She and It (Piercy) 200 IWSA (International Woman Suffrage
heterosexual exploitation, Life is Alliance) 184
Strange 126
Hey Baby 195 Jhally, Sut 122
high school suburbia, Life is jihadist terrorism, hegemonic
Strange 68–69 masculinity and 189
Hill Collins, Patricia 200 Joan of Arc 15, 103
historical accuracy, gender inclusion in Jones, Ember 186
historical games 48 joy, feminist violence in 78
historically informed design, feminist Joystick Warriors (2013) 122
war games 145 just war, definitions 14
history, feminist war 103
Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 6, 128–129 Kampe, Christopher 94
honorary men, women as 16 Kazemi, Darius 21
hostile allies 125–126 Kill Bill (2003) 102
Hourihan, Margaret 24 killjoy survival kits 79
Howard, Tom 182 Kimmel, Michael 151
How to Do Things with Videogames King, Anthony 16
(Bogost) 6 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 31
Huizinga, John 6, 128–129 Kopas, Merritt 19, 93
Human Rights Watch report Kosovo War (1998–9) see This War of
(2015) 16 Mine (TWoM)(2014)
Hush (2008) 7, 124 Kriegspiel (1824) 39, 152; emotional
Hutchings, Kimberly 14 training 55; gameplay 58–59
hypermasculinity: definition 31; Kristeva, Julia 87
diminishment in This War of Mine 61; Kwiatkowski, Kacper 59
game industry and 32; gaming 31;
see also masculinity language: game-playing barrier 143;
playing with 88–89
identities, intersectional 93 Lapham, James 185, 187–188
IGDA (International Game Developers Larsson, L 93
Association) 114 Laude, Jennifer 127
I'm Afraid of Men (Shraya) 4 L'Engle, Madeleine 77
image reframing, war 57–58 Lenoir, Tim 129
inclusion: art direction 48–49; Lesbian Body, The (Wittig) 87
game design 48, 93; historical Les Guerilleres (Wittig) 84–85, 87
games and accuracy 48; role-playing Life is Strange (LIS) (2015) 6–7, 21,
games 48 67, 91–100, 197–198; choices 96–98;
Infinite Fall 69 criticism of 72–73; end of the world
inhuman peace 128–129 72–73; female character disposability
Institute for Creative Technologies 73; as feminist anti-war game 25;
127–128 feminist war 91–92; heterosexual
207
Index 207
exploitation 126; high school suburbia militarism: misogyny 17; violence/
68–69; as killjoy survival kit 79; masculinity and 183–184
non-violence 8; personal history military alliances, United States 126
influences 94–96; play of 96; same-sex military contracts, game design 127
attraction 126; storyline 71–72, 74–77; military deployment, numerical lists
vulnerability 76–77 and 123
Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017) military force, social institution as 17
67, 70, 197 military simulations, history of 122–123
Little Wars (Wells) 39 military technologies, war games 133
Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed) 4, 6 Milk, Chris 128
localized accessibility: feminist war game Miller Gearhart, Sally 200
dimensions 137; This War of Mine 143 misogyny 5–6; fight against 115; military
Loesser, Cassandra 156 culture 17
Logavina Street (Demick) 135 Mitchell, David 156
Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), female model-based design, feminist war
characters 22 games 145
Lorde, Audre 7 modifiability: feminist war game
Losh, Elizabeth 32–33 dimensions 138; This War of Mine 144
Ludwig. Johann Christian 152 monarchs, feminism 103
Lui, Suyin 195 Morrison, Toni 70
Mosca, Linda 32–33, 34–35
MacAllister, Pam 184 Mother of All Questions, The
MacDonald, K 54–55 (Solnit) 4–5
McKenzie, Nathan 151–152 Mukherjee, Souvik 150
McNeilly, Joe 173 Mullins, Daniel 182
Maček, Ivana 135 Murray, Janet 128
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) 102
Magic the Gathering (1993) 123 Nakamura, Lisa 128
Malazita, James 173 narrative elements, Dungeons and
Mario and Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Dragons 42
Olympic Winter Games (2013) 126 narrative prosthesis 156
Marx, Karl 197 Nayak, Meghana 31
masculinist game mechanics 168–169 Necromunda (1995) 43–44
masculinity: board war games and new feminist order 85–86
31; Call of Duty 184; failure of 75; Nguyen, C Thi 151
framework in Wolfenstein II: The Nietzsche, Friedrich 17
New Colossus 152–153, 161; historical Night, Angela 23
construction of 132; mastery linkage Night in the Woods (NITW) (2017)
and 187; oppressive 5; violence and 67, 69–70; cuteness of 75; as killjoy
militarism 183–184; violence in games survival kit 79; non-violence 8;
185; violent and oppressive 5; war- vulnerability 76–77
gaming and 31; see also hegemonic Nissenbaum, Helen 18
masculinity; hypermasculinity non-binary gender representation,
Mass Effect trilogy (2007–12) 102 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 35
mastery linkage, masculinity and 187 non-glorification, feminist war
Matlock, Michael 154–155 games of 103
Medal of Honour series (1999–2007) 102 non-player characters, Elder Scrolls V:
media, depiction of war/conflict 56–57 Skyrim, The 185
Men Explain Things to Me (Solnit) 4 non-violent games 182–191; criticism
mercy killing, Fatal Frame 170–171 of 182, 187–188; Fatal Frame 172;
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain hegemonic masculinity challenging
(2015), female characters 22 182–183; Life Is Strange 8; pacifist
Mieszkowski, Jan 56–57 playthroughs, reasons for 186–187;
208
208 Index
see also Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The 146; hero role 56; role in This
(2011); Fallout; Vampyr War of Mine 132–133; warrior/
No One Lives Forever (2000), character commander as 132
gender 30 pleasure, feminist violence in 78
Norton, Marleigh 114 plot-driven narrative, This War of
Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Mine 59–60
Everyday Life (Wunker) 6 politics: Call of Duty 61; war
driven by 132
objectives: feminist war game Portal (2007) 173–176, 177; character
dimensions 137; This War of Mine gender representation 174; ethical
141–142 play aspects 174; feminist game
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis mechanics 168; as feminist war game
(2001) 21 84; gameplay 175; gender stereotype
opposition to violence, feminism 18–19 questioning 173; story 173; strategy
oppressive masculinity 5 175–176; timing 175–176
organizational connections, feminist war Portal 2 177
game design 146 possibility fields, games as 19
origin identification, war 83 Power, The (Alderman) 7–8
othering, process of 105 Pratt, Fletcher 39
outcomes opposed to winning, feminist Precarious Life (Butler) 73–74
anti-war games  24–25 presumption of rights 87–88
over-sexualization of female procedural rhetoric 168
characters 22–23 process of othering 105
Overwatch (2016), as feminist war Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 (2013) 126
game 24 prosthesis, game treatments 156–157
prototypes, feminist anti-war
pacifist playthroughs, non-violent games games 25–29
186–187 Pussy Riot 7
Pac-Man  21
patriarchy: challenge in Wolfenstein II: Queerness and Games Conference
The New Colossus 151; control of (2014) 19–20
125–126 Quest for Bush (2006) 121
Paul, Christopher 157 Quest for Saddam (2003) 121
Pedercini, Paolo 19–20, 27
Perren, Jeff 40 racial segregation, suburban violence
persecution, sexual minorities of games 68
126–127 Rage Becomes Her: The Power of
personal histories 93–94; Life is Women’s Anger (Chemaly) 8
Strange 94–96 Raley, Rita 61
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power rape, in war 15
of Videogames (Bogost) 6 Rath, Robert 21
Peterson, Jon 34–35, 41, 122 rational thinking, emotions vs. 55
Peterson, Jordan 87–88 reactive space 91
Phin, Vanessa Rose 35 reality, games vs. 6–7
Piercy, Marge 200 real-time strategy (RTS),
Pini, Barbara 156 Kriegspiel 58–59
play: war as 83–84; war, separation from reciprocity: feminist war game
128–129 dimensions 138; This War of Mine
player-characters, definition of 167 143–144
player choices: Invasion 106; This War of recreation games 134
Mine 60–61 recurrent attractors 92, 94–95; play
players: avatar relationships 92–94; implications 98–99
forums in feminist war game design Red Dead Redemption (2010) 21
209
Index 209
Reel Men at War: Masculinity and simulations 134
the American War Film (Donald & Slonczewski, Joan 200
MacDonald) 54–55 small town cuteness, suburban violence
reflexive space 91 games 69–70
refugees, dehumanization of 125 Smith, Dorothy 84
Reiswitz game 38–39 snap 70
religions, war driven by 132 Snyder, Sharon 156
Remember Me (2013), female social abjection 74
characters 22 social institution, military force as 17
representations 104–105; of females, socially responsible design, feminist war
difficulties 176, 177; groups of people games 136
105; of violence 167 Solnit, Rebecca 4–5
Resident Evil (1996): female characters Spec Ops: The Line (2012) 20, 21
22; violence in 172 Spencer, Richard 151
Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015) 198 Spender, Dale 18
Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism Spent (2011) 145
and Nonviolence (ed. McAllister) 184 “spoils of war,” women as 83
rhetoric, procedural rhetoric 168 standpoint theory 135–136; feminist war
rights, presumption of 87–88 game design 145; war 134–135
role-playing games (RPGs): game Stanley Parable, The (2013) 20; feminist
mechanics 167–168; inclusion 48; anti-war game as 26
wars in 102 Sterling, Jim 189
Ruhnke, Volko 46–47 stories, conflict in 23
Ruiz, Susana 124 storylines 87–88; Life is Strange
Russia, gay-bashing encouragement 71–72, 74–77
website 126 Straight Mind, The (Wittig) 87
Rust (2013), as feminist anti-war strategic-level war games 46
game 26 strategy, Portal 175–176
Stress Response in Virtual Environments
Sabin, Philip 134 (STRIVE) project 55–56
same-sex attraction, Life is Strange 126 STRIVE (Stress Response in Virtual
Sarajevo siege 135; see also This War of Environments) project 55–56
Mine (TWoM) (2014) suburban violence games 67–81;
Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in breaking into school 71–72; feminist
Wartime (Maček) 135 snap 70; high schools 68–69;
scenario-driven design, feminist war racial segregation 68; small town
games 145 cuteness 69–70
scope of feminism 18 subversion 199–200; design in games 86;
screenshots, Invasion 106–110, 111–113 war games 33
setting: feminist war game dimensions Super Mario Galaxy 167
137; This War of Mine 140–141 Sylvester, Christine 184
sexualized violence 4–5 Syria: Civil War (2011-present) see
sexual minorities, persecution of This War of Mine (TWoM)(2014);
126–127 refugees, games based on 124–125; US
Shadow of the Colossus (2006) 197–198 military deployment 123
Shibata, Makoto 171, 172 Syrian Journey (2015) 7, 124
Shoah Foundation 128
Shraya, Vivek 4 tabletop war games 38–52; for adults
Sicart, Miguel 6, 168 39–40; genders 39–40; history 38–43;
Silent Hill, violence in 172 perceptual limitations of 13–14;
Sims 2, The (2004) 68 post Second World War 40 see also
simulated attractors 94 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
Simulating War (Sabin) 134 (AD&D); Chainmail (1971); Dungeons
210
210 Index
and Dragons (D&D); Necromunda United States: authoritarianism
(1995); Tactics (1954); This War and 129; military alliances 126;
of Mine: The Board Game (2017); military deployment 123; war
Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) unrepresentability in 58
Tactical Media (Raley) 61 user-built games, feminist war game
Tactics (1954) 40 design 146
Taylor, Laurie 170 us-versus-them mentality  104
Taylor, N 94
team sports, war vs. 54–55 Values at Play in Digital Games
Telltale Games 94 (Flanagan & Nissenbaum) 18
testing, feminist war games 136 Vampyr 183; gameplay 188–189
Tetris 167 Van Creveld, Martin 16–18
Thabet, Tamer 154 videogames: criticism of 5; production
themes, war games 198 as toxic experience 114; structure
theoretical underpinning, games 91–92; violence relationship 122
104–105 Vietnam War see Fire in the Lake:
This War of Mine (TWoM) (2014) 7, Insurgency in Vietnam (2014)
53–63, 104, 132–149, 196; background violence: avoidance in Dungeons and
of 53–54; case study 138–139; Dragons 41; avoidance in games
domestic play space 61–62; elements 184; catharsis 195–201; in Fatal
of 139; emotional technology 60; Frame 171; feminist opposition
example of play 60; as feminist war to 18–19; game mechanics
game 84; frames and 54; game play 168; masculinity in games 185;
138–139; game structure and play militarism/masculinity and
58; hypermasculinity diminishment 183–184; representation of 167;
61; player choices 60–61; player role videogame relationship 122
132–133; plot-driven narrative 59–60; violent feminism 7–8
reality of 59; war game dimensions of violent masculinity 5
140–144 Virtual Battleplace 133
This War of Mine: The Board Game Virtual Jihadi (2008) 121–122
(2017) 45–46 Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
timing, Portal 175–176 (VRET) project 55–56
tolerance, hatred vs. 110 virtual representations of war 57
Tomb Raider (1996): character gender von Reisswitz, Georg Heinrich Rudolf
22, 30; gender and violence 168 Johann 39
toxic pacifism 182–191 von Reisswitz, Georg Leopold 5, 38–39
Trainspotting 75 Voorhees, Gerald 153
Traister, Rebecca 67 Vossen, Emma 153
transgender individuals 127 VRET (Virtual Reality Exposure
“Trojan Horse of Universalism, The” Therapy) project 55–56
(Zerilli) 87 vulnerability 76–77
Trojan Horse, The 86–87
Trump, Donald J 122, 129, 150; military Walking Dead, The (TWD) (2012) 94
deployment 123–124 Wanderground, The (Miller
Tyler, Imogen 74 Gearhart) 200
war: civilian experience of 135;
unavoidable mercy killing, Fatal Frame definitions 14, 82–83, 196–197; drivers
170–171 of 132; feminism vs. 23; future of
Uncharted 4 167 200–201; glorification in games 56;
unconventional representations image reframing 57–58; images and
of war 13 imagining 54–57; media depiction
Undertale (2015) 20 of 56–57; origin identification 83;
ungrievable lives 54 participation by women 15, 16; as play
211
Index 211
83–84; play, separation from 128–129; expansion 159–160; challenge to
rape in 15; standpoint theory 134–135; patriarchy 151; as destruction game
stories in 23; team sports vs. 54–55; 151; disability as feminist intervention
unconventional representations of 153–157; female characters 152–153,
13; unrepresentability in US 58; 157–158, 161; female empowerment
virtual representations of 57; win 158–159; female play 159–160;
conditions 88–89 feminist cut scenes 157–160; game
War, as feminist anti-war game 25 ideology 150–151; game structure
War Child charity 144 153–154; genre of 151–152;
war games 101–102, 133–134; authorship masculinist framework 152–153,
of 32–33; criticism of 21; definition 161; non-female play 158; storyline
133; expectations 20–21; gender issues 152, 156
45–46; handbooks as records 133; Wolfenstein series (1992–2015) 102
history of 133–134; masculinity and 31; Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) 150
military technologies 133; overriding Wolfenstein Youngblood 161
themes 198; structure 133–134; women see females
subversion of 33 Women and War (Elshtain) 184
Warhammer 40K 133 Wonder Woman (2017) 102; female
Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1983) 43 characters 22
War on Terror (Bush) 129 World of Warcraft (2004-present)  102
Warren, James 173 Wrinkle in Time, A (L'Engle) 77
warrior women 23 Wunker, Erin 4, 6
Wells, H G 39
Wernimont, Jacqueline 122–123 Yang, Robert 21
Wesely, David 40 Yasenchak, Randy 187
Wet (2009), female characters 22 Young Adult (YA) genre, Life is
Williams, Christopher 173–174 Strange 68–69
win conditions, wars 88–89
Wittig, Monique 83, 84–85 Zerilli, Linda 87
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Zones of Control (Harrigan &
8, 150–166; Agent Silent Death Kirschenbaum) 134
212

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i

Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia,

Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab

Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities

Digital technologies are increasingly important to arts and humanities

A History of Place in the Digital Age

The Historical Web and Digital Humanities

Humans at Work in the Digital Age

To learn more about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/​Digital-​

Edited by Jon Saklofske, Alyssa Arbuckle,

This collection is dedicated to Dr. Rachel Brickner, whose original

List of contributors xii

Feminist war games? Mechanisms of war, feminist values,

1 Are there (can there be/​should there be) feminist

2 Gendered authorship in war gaming: whose fantasy

3 An overview of the history and design of tabletop wargames

5 Gamified suburban violence and the feminist pleasure of

6 Because we are always warring: feminism, games, and war 82

7 Exploring agency and female player–​character

8 ‘What is a feminist war game?’ A game jam reflection 101

9 Feminism and the forever wars: prototyping games

10 Seven dimensions of a feminist war game: what we can

11 Failed feminist interventions in Wolfenstein II:

12 Subversive game mechanics in the Fatal Frame and Portal

Taking binaries off the table 195

Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab

Emily Cann is a Master’s of Science candidate at Columbia University in

Suzanne de Castell is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University

xiv List of contributors

Can there be a feminist war game?

Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional

4 Alyssa Arbuckle et al.

We consider such perspectives—​ in turns straightforward, fluid, and

Feminist war games? 5

Such a statistical rendering of the violence that women face—​in Solnit’s

6 Alyssa Arbuckle et al.

Feminist war games? 7

Ahmed also warns against invoking righteous anger as a feminist. Admittedly,

8 Alyssa Arbuckle et al.

Playing games may have an emotionally cathartic function for some

In ‘Gendered Authorship in War Gaming: Whose Fantasy Is It Anyway?’

Feminist war games? 9

10 Alyssa Arbuckle et al.

We must look to transcend old conflict models, or we risk perpetuating

14 Jon Saklofske et al.

Flanagan’s call is important to games in general (and is an important

Can/should there be feminist war games? 15

16 Jon Saklofske et al.

Can/should there be feminist war games? 17

18 Jon Saklofske et al.

War never changes? The potential of feminist values

Can/should there be feminist war games? 19

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play

20 Jon Saklofske et al.

Can/should there be feminist war games? 21

22 Jon Saklofske et al.

Can/should there be feminist war games? 23

• A game which allows players to participate in a feminist movement or

24 Jon Saklofske et al.

• Advancement of political/​ social power for women and/​ or other

Can/should there be feminist war games? 25

• Featuring a loading screen with detailed biographies of combatants

26 Jon Saklofske et al.

A History of Place in the Digital Age

Humans at Work in the Digital Age

To learn more about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/Digital-

1 Are there (can there be/should there be) feminist

7 Exploring agency and female player–character

Can there be a feminist war game?

We consider such perspectives— in turns straightforward, fluid, and

Such a statistical rendering of the violence that women face—in Solnit’s

War never changes? The potential of feminist values

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play

• Advancement of political/ social power for women and/ or other

Computer games need to learn from their non- digital counterparts

Gendered authorship in war gaming 31

Gendered authorship in war gaming 33

Gendered authorship in war gaming 35

Gendered authorship in war gaming 37

Wargames in relation to gender 39

Wargames in relation to gender 41

Wargames in relation to gender 43

Wargames in relation to gender 45

Wargames in relation to gender 47

Deliberate choice in game design

Wargames in relation to gender 49

Wargames in relation to gender 51

Reframing the domestic experience of war 55

a curiously self-reflexive public discourse has emerged in which the stories

Reframing the domestic experience of war 57

Reframing the domestic experience of war 59

Reframing the domestic experience of war 61

From the ashes of war

Reframing the domestic experience of war 63

Breaking (into) the school

The end of the world