This book examines gender attitudes in Reddit’s popular video gaming community subreddit, r/gaming. Video gaming has long been understood as a masculinised social space and, while increasing numbers of girls and women now engage in the pastime, boys and men remain the predominant social actors. Furthermore, the gaming community has been widely identified as a prime case study in broader concerns around ‘toxic’ masculinity and gendered online harassment. However, there is also underexamined evidence of a growing movement in the community coming forward to voice its collective opposition. Utilising an innovative combination of computational and qualitative methods, the research undertaken here exposes this fuller picture, revealing significant contestation and a spectrum of attitudes that mark out this popular gaming community as a battleground for gender (in)equality. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, games studies and computer sciences, will find this book of interest.
Author(s): Marcus Maloney, Steve Roberts, Timothy Graham
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 109
Tags: Culture And Gender, Video Gaming
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
List of Tables......Page 9
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 10
Idle Hands, (Folk) Devil’s Playthings......Page 13
Why Reddit?......Page 15
Methodology......Page 19
Data Collection and Text Processing......Page 20
Methods of Analysis......Page 21
Discussion of Methodology......Page 24
Ready Player One......Page 25
References......Page 27
Chapter 2: Hegemonic, Inclusive and Geek Masculinities......Page 31
Hegemonic Masculinity......Page 33
Geek Masculinity As Hegemonic Masculinity?......Page 36
Adding to Connell’s Tools......Page 37
Conclusion......Page 40
References......Page 41
Chapter 3: Computational Survey......Page 45
Voting and Sentiment Analysis......Page 47
Topic Model Analysis of ‘Masculine Gendered’ /r/Gaming Comments......Page 56
Topic Model Analysis of ‘Feminine Gendered’ /r/Gaming Comments......Page 61
References......Page 64
Chapter 4: Masculine Discourses in r/gaming......Page 66
‘I’m Very Glad You Enjoyed This Game but I Actually Hate It’......Page 68
‘I’m So Confused Why I’m Failing. I WAS Following the Damn Train’......Page 74
Competition and Cohesion......Page 77
References......Page 79
Chapter 5: Feminine Discourses in r/gaming......Page 80
‘Half Naked Women Make Literally Every Single Thing Better’......Page 82
‘Spare Me the Bullshit …’......Page 85
‘If You Weren’t Female They’d Harass You for Something Else’......Page 87
‘… Not Even If You Were TheLastDudeguy on Earth’......Page 89
Battlegrounds and Contestations......Page 92
References......Page 94
Chapter 6: Conclusion......Page 97
References......Page 106
Index......Page 108
