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Abstract: This paper reports on an ongoing, 5-year, international feminist intervention research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, "Re-Figuring Innovation in Games". The project includes researchers, students, game designers, community members, and video game companies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Its most fundamental goal has been to build an explicitly feminist coalition to intervene in the habitually hostile and misogynist cultures of making and playing digital games. To date, our collective work has involved examining the structural and cultural issues in play that continue to successfully marginalize, harass and exclude women and others from a highly lucrative technology industry. The paper will also focus on describing some of the interventions that effectively interrupt and reconfigure persistent patterns of inequality and will demonstrate how the international network is striving to realize local, and extra-local change.
Keywords: gender, video games, inequity, feminism, video game industry, interventionist research
1.Background and context
A very real challenge of the 21st century is the enduring inequity between men and women, especially in relation to the design, uptake and use of digital technologies, including digital games (Hill, Corbett, & St Rose, 2010; Burrows, 2013). Researching this persistent under-participation of women is of social, cultural and economic interest and importance. For example, companies in Canada and the United States that have more women in positions of power (corporate officers and/or boards of directors) outperform those who have few to no women (Gillis, 2010). In late fall 2018, California, recognizing the deep structural inequities at all levels of pay, passed legislation that required all companies registered in California to have women on boards of directors (at least two on boards of 5, and 3 on boards of 6 or more) by 2021 (Stewart, 2018).
The digital games industry, like the technology sector in general, is and has been male dominated for decades, and recent reports indicate that of those women who begin careers in technology, 56% eventually leave its inhospitable and often outright discriminatory culture, and this is especially true in the games sector (Burrows, 2013; Cain Miller, 2014; Huhman, 2012; McWhertor, 2014; Snyder, 2014). In the past few years, Google announced that it would work to fight "deep set cultural biases and an insidious...