Homo Includens: Surveying DiGRA�s Diversity

Abstract

This article examines which bodies have access to participate in Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) events, and to DiGRA as an organization. It is based on a survey (N=174), among subscribers to the DiGRA 'Gamesnetwork' mailing list. The survey included questions on age, gender, location and career level to gain insight into who is included in the DiGRA community, with further questions on problems and challenges faced by those who have had trouble accessing DiGRA. This paper does not proceed solely by statistical methodology, but draws on feminist theories of embodiment and qualitative methods. Through this diverse methodological approach, the paper analyzes which bodies have difficulties accessing DiGRA�s academic communities and conferences, which practices cause these difficulties, and which policies might be introduced to address these. The survey indicates that young, early-career and women�s bodies are in particularly precarious positions. This situation is perpetuated through various practices of economic and social inaccessibility. Upon reflection, the paper proposes a set of policies to address these practices. We conclude that this survey and its analysis are only a first step to making DiGRA a more diversely inclusive organization.

Time to stop playing

“…At the same time, academia functions as an embourgeoisement of those who do manage to rise through the ranks and can afford to fly around the world and attend expensive conferences, while lower and usually racialized social classes clean and manage the facilities that make the academic factory run. This is reproduced globally, where the 'established' game studies are located in the imperial core, where institutions, conferences, networks, and journals are led by white, Western people (Butt et al, 2018), so that those in the Global South rarely if ever get to speak about research on games and play but are instead underpaid and exploited by profitdriven academic journal publishers, as well as the racial and class stratification between research institutions and publicly funded degrees. The contemporary university as an institution exists to reproduce white supremacy and capitalism (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014); from the grading systems that divide students according to their means and reframe these socially-produced differences as an inherent quality of the individual (i.e., merit), to the research that feeds directly into the military industrial complex and corporate profits (Slaughter, 2009), to the speculation in the housing market (Baldwin, 2021).…”

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire

“…This is because existing work has highlighted the inequities of the global game labour market (Kerr, 2017; Ozimek, 2019) now increasingly challenged by unionization, the industry’s contribution to the consolidation of corporate interests (Kerr, 2017) including through the emergence of platforms that turn players into workers and play data into commodities (Joseph, 2017; Whitson, 2019), the commodification and standardization of cultural representation (De Wildt, 2020), the revitalization of white ethnonationalism in game culture (Ismangil, 2019; Jong, 2020), the mutually beneficial but exploitative relation between higher educational institutions and the games industry (Harvey, 2019), and the extension of new forms of colonialism through globalized supply chains and platforms (López López, de Wildt, & Moodie, 2019; Nieborg, Young & Joseph 2020) and the ecological deprivation brought about by the industry’s growth (Chang, 2019; Nguyen, 2017). But it is not only the industry which manifests problematic tendencies but also the discipline of game studies itself, which has tended to privilege certain experiences and viewpoints, notably white, male North American ones (Butt, de Wildt, Kowert, & Sandovar, 2018), and marginalized participation by those who are not in permanent academic employment and in a position to pay large conference fees. This history has shaped the production of this special issue.…”

Feminist and Furious: Diversity Work(ers) Against Game Studies of Empire!

“…The language of producing diversity as “work” is intentional: diversity workers in game studies, at the nexus of capitalism, games, and academia, produce a quantifiable and tokenizable product of different bodies that can be used to further profits for companies, universities, and other capitalist, imperial institutions. We consider this assemblage in our own discipline for its revolutionary potentials for both games and their communities on the one hand, and scholarship and academia on the other (Butt et al, 2018). Just as the “immaterial” labor which designs and plays games can be a site for identifying and resisting Empire, as Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter demonstrate, game studies is a site where capitalism attempts to control and monetize diversity but also where new forms of resistance can emerge.…”