Blog

On my emotional attachments to online spaces (mourning Reddit)

As I write this, Reddit might be imploding. Reddit has been planning changes to the availability of their API for the last few months: namely, they will be charging fees of heavy users of the API in order to use it. Reddit’s API has traditionally be very open, to the extent that there has been little to no company-driven regulations with regard to who can use it, what it can be used for, or how many API calls can be made. This has been a boon for researchers (like me), but also for developers who have made (and make money off of) third party Reddit apps using the API, people who have made tools so that moderators can more efficiently moderate their subreddits, tools that allow people with visual and other disabilities to access content, and more. Reddit’s large amount of public user data has also been used to train AI and various other text-based algorithms. As Steve Huffman, Reddit’s cofounder and CEO noted in the New York Times in April, “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” Like many other social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Reddit has noted that the value in their company lies in data generated by its users. There are rumors that Reddit is planning an IPO later this year, and speculation is that Reddit is attempting to take control of its API as a means of having greater control over both revenue (third party apps are largely ad free, and ad revenue accounts for the bulk of Reddit’s total revenue) and greater control over its user-generated data.

Subreddits, the diverse forum-like communities that populate Reddit, are run by volunteer moderators. Most platforms, like the aforementioned Twitter and Facebook, enforce moderation from the top down, employing numerous people and utilizing algorithms of various sorts to assist in the process. Subreddits, on the other hand, are created by users, who form and enforce their own rules within the subreddit. Anyone with an active account can create a subreddit or be a moderator of an existing subreddit. Not only does this user-focused structure contribute to making subreddits, particularly subreddits focused on more niche topics or niche communities, into interesting, vibrant, and supportive communities, it also gives the volunteer moderators of subreddits a disproportionate amount of power on the platform relative to other online spaces.

Right now, moderators across Reddit are using that power to protest. Moderators also have the ability to switch subreddits into private mode, meaning no one who isn’t a moderator can see the contents of the subreddit. When done at a large scale, this can vastly reduce the amount of content on Reddit that is publicly available, which reduces traffic to Reddit’s website and subsequent ad revenue. This technique has been used to good effect in the past to protest the repeal of a law protecting net neutrality in the U.S. in 2017 and the sudden dismissal of an instrumental Reddit employee in 2015, among other examples. At its peak on Tuesday, June 13th, nearly 8500 subreddits, many having millions of subscribers, were set to private, according to the reddark.untone.uk tracker. Some of my favorite subreddits, including r/GirlGamers and r/WitchesVsPatriarchy, are still participating in the protest as I write. For more information and nuance about the protest, I found this article from The Verge to be helpful.

How I use Reddit

All of this hubbub with Reddit has got me thinking about my own relationship to the platform, and where it fits more broadly into my online life. I’ve had a Reddit account for over 10 years, but I’ve only been a regular user for the past 5 years or so – dating back to when my brother (also a long-time Reddit user) recommended Relay for Reddit to me, a third-party mobile app for Android. Prior to that, I flirted with Reddit, finding and engaging in smaller communities for a month or two and then floating off again. Relay has a much more streamlined design than Reddit’s website and made Reddit much easier for me to navigate and interact on. Aside from Relay, the other key tip I got from my brother that really shaped and sharpened my Reddit use was to avoid r/all (the feed that collates “top” posts from all other subreddits) and focus on finding subreddits that really clicked with me. Being able to pull up Reddit anytime on my phone using an interface that didn’t suck and seeing content that I genuinely enjoyed was a gamechanger for me.

Since I discovered how to curate Reddit to suit my own needs, Reddit has been a solid source of funny, entertaining, uplifting content for me. Reddit has been a more reliable source for this need than any other social media platform I’ve ever been part of it in large part because the platform lends itself so well to curation. On Reddit, I’m not following individuals like on Twitter or Instagram, or real-life social connections, like on Facebook. I’m following interests, because that’s what subreddits tend to revolve around. If I want to see fiber-based craft projects based on Nintendo characters and properties, there’s r/NintendoStitch. If I want to be inspired by what women and queer folk are doing to positively affirm their existence in a patriarchal society, r/WitchesVPatriarchy is my go-to. My partner and I have spent many a cozy night sitting on the couch, browsing our phones, and sharing fun things we see on Reddit with one another.

I’ve also discovered, as many others have, how useful Reddit can be when searching for answers to esoteric questions, or when searching for recommendation for things to buy, books to read, places to visit, and more from people who have actually done the buying/reading/visiting/etc. Append the word “Reddit” to any Google search and Google returns a treasure trove of useful information from Reddit’s archives about what people have done or experienced that might be helpful for what I want to know. I’ve also found Reddit to be a useful resource for troubleshooting tech and programming-related issues, up there with StackOverflow.

Reddit isn’t only a space where I go to see funny, uplifting content or to find information about miscellaneous things. I’ve found subreddits that have proven to be excellent learning communities. I learned to cross stitch a couple years ago thanks to r/crossstitch. The subreddit hosts a number of resources on how to get started and where to find good patterns (or make your own). It’s also actively moderated to make it a safe space for people who are learning and people who have been stitching for years alike. Members are warned not to shame other users for using unconventional techniques, or for not understanding basic aspects of the craft. Moderators and users alike work to enforce these rules, making the subreddit an excellent and supportive space to learn and grow with the craft. Posts asking questions and seeking help are welcome and encouraged. It’s also a wonderful place to get new ideas for future projects, as members routinely post projects they’re working on or have recently finished.

I’ve also found Reddit communities which have been extremely helpful in terms of providing emotional and social support for members. Last October, I was told a hysterectomy would be the best way to address ongoing health concerns I’d had for years; I ended up having the surgery in mid-March this year. In the few weeks after the initial talk with my doctor, I found r/hysterectomy, which has proven to be an invaluable resources. Through what users had posted and linked to on the subreddit, I was able to find resources on what the procedure was like, what kinds of questions to ask my doctor, what to expect when recovering, what kinds of foods to eat and things to have around the house to help me recover more smoothly, and more. It also proved to be a helpful place to post when I had questions or worries that wouldn’t go away – there would always be someone (usually many someones) giving advice or simply wishing me well and reminding me that I’d be feeling better soon. The help and support I’ve received through the subreddit motivated me to provide support for others in return.

Communities on Reddit have also had a direct and impactful affect on my own research interests. I entered my current PhD program in 2019 with the goal of studying gender and toxicity in video game communities, a topic that had caught my interest in large part due to reading posts and comments on r/GirlGamers. In the years since, my focus has shifted away from toxicity and towards how women and queer folk make space for themselves in gaming communities. Posts and comments on r/GirlGamers have shown me so many examples of how gender impacts people’s experiences in video games and gaming communities, and also given me many examples for how women and queer folk are fighting back in those spaces and supporting one another in the process. Being a part of r/GirlGamers has also informed how I approach playing games with others and being in online spaces in ways that actively and positively support other players.

The Impact of a Changing Reddit on Me

Many third party mobile apps, including Apollo and RIF (Reddit Is Fun), have already already announced they will be shutting down at the end of June before Reddit’s new API pricing structure kicks in. As one of the smaller third party apps, the developer of Relay is somewhat optimistic that he can continue offering the app, though only if he charges users monthly for the privilege of using what is currently a free app. If Relay goes, or if the cost-to-value ratio is too high for me, I’ll be stuck with the mobile website (which is abjectly terrible, from a usability standpoint) or the first party mobile app, which I haven’t tried but am not expecting to be any better. Or I could constrict my Reddit usage to the desktop, where old.reddit.com is still somewhat usable, though I understand Reddit plans to eventually phase it out in favor of their redesigned – and ad-heavy – primary website.

Part of what makes Reddit’s first party mobile and web offerings so awful from a usability standpoint are the ever present ads. The worst of these for me are Reddit’s own “recommended posts” which show posts from other subreddits I’m not subscribed to in the hope that I’ll deepen my engagement with the platform. I’ve spent years curating the subreddits I belong to so that I won’t be faced with content I don’t want to see – I avoid many of the bigger subs, for example, because of how bro-y and toxic they tend to be. This aspect of Reddit’s website actively works to erode the boundaries I’ve put up for myself that make Reddit a pleasant place for me to be.

In my heart, I’m already saying goodbye to Reddit. Despite the protest, I don’t expect Reddit to change its new policies in any substantial way. I expect many of the communities I love to change, and not for the better, as moderators lose access to tools or lose their faith in Reddit as a system and leave (or get kicked out). Where will the people who have shaped these communities end up, I wonder? Interest-focused Discord servers, perhaps, which would be an option for some community-focused subreddits. I joined a cross stitch-focused Discord server which I found through Reddit that provides much of the same value to me as the subreddit and has allowed me to foster more personal connections with other cross stitchers around the world. The mods of r/GirlGamers also run a Discord server, though I find it much less valuable than the subreddit because my interest in that community is geared more towards following and joining deeper conversations about gender and gaming. Conversations on Discord are much more ephemeral and harder to follow.

Discord also doesn’t provide the same value in terms of searchability or providing valuable resources for members. Some Redditors have spoken of decamping to Lemmy, an open source and federated forum-like system similar to Reddit – Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter. Unlike Twitter and Reddit, Mastodon and Lemmy are decentralized, consisting of software and servers run entirely by volunteers. On the one hand, changes will be less likely to be motivated by greed. On the other hand, as Reddit is discovering, running a platform on the backs of volunteers is a shaky proposition at best when it comes to maintaining the stability of the platform. I was not particularly sorry to delete my Twitter account, and so was unwilling to try out Mastodon in an attempt to replace it. However, I’m seriously considering trying out Lemmy, for the sole reason that belonging on Reddit has meant enough to me that I actively want to find similar spaces elsewhere.

What I want – what I think all social media users want – is to find spaces where like-minded people congregate. Spaces where I can learn from others, where I can share my knowledge with others, where I can have conversations (or debates) with others about topics that are important to me. Over the past few years, I’ve found some of these spaces on Reddit. Because I have an attachment to these spaces, I also have an attachment to Reddit, the platform that, through its structure and design, enabled these spaces to exist. Reddit, to me, is like a city I’ve loved living in. I don’t particularly want to move to a new place right now, but the cost of living is becoming too high to bear.

Revisiting Influential Readings from My Comprehensive Exam

I’m just about a year out from having taken my comprehensive exam, which I completed (and passed!) in June of 2022. Passing the exam was a culmination of an intense five months of reading and notetaking, including fitting reading in between classes (two I was teaching, one I was taking) and two other small research projects. I planned my time well, however, and was able to take weekends and most evenings off for most of the semester.

My comprehensive exam itself consisted of four questions, given to me by each of my four committee members, which I answered in essay format over the course of four weeks (4 days per question with a 3-day weekend in between each question). I wrote a total of 86 pages, not including citations. At the time, I found it to be stressful. Now I look back on the process with a surprising amount of fondness. Writing my comprehensive exam was probably one of the most intellectually stimulating things I’ve done to date.

I just reread my comprehensive exam essays last week in preparation for putting my dissertation proposal together. Aside from being pleased at how eloquent my stress-induced word vomit was, I was struck by how much I’ve been thinking about some of the things I read and wrote about in the year since. I want to call out a few of those articles and books, as reading them has informed the ways I think about video games and the people who play them, about doing research, about writing, and about a lot of other things I wasn’t anticipating when I added the works to my list.

See my full reading list, which I published in a post last year.

T. L. Taylor – Play Between Worlds

This book, published in 2006, is the result of a multi-year ethnographic research project that T. L. Taylor performed within and alongside the game EverQuest. EverQuest, released in 1999, was one of the first notable MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) and paved the way for others, most notably World of Warcraft. Taylor started playing the game because she was curious as to how being in a virtual space with others could inform social structures and sociality. What she ended up writing was a treatise on how the complex interactions between the software, structures of play, and the players themselves informed how players played the game.

I first read this book in spring of 2019, prior to starting my PhD program, and before I even knew if I’d be accepted into a program. I’m not sure how it came across my radar, but at the time, it seemed like an interesting example of what games research could be. And I was blown away by it. Unlike many of the other articles and books I came across at the time, Taylor’s writing style was both accessible and persuasive. T. L. Taylor was the scholar I referred to the most when writing or talking with others about the kind of work I wanted to be doing in a PhD program.

The book ended up on my comps list because I wanted to revisit it. When I initially read it, I had very little background in game studies or in the literature that Taylor pulls from throughout the book. I’d known when reading it that many of the references had gone over my head and added it to my comps list because I felt I’d get more out of it with 2+ additional years of reading, thinking, and writing about games and player communities under my belt. I’d intended to look over my notes from my first reading and skim the book, in the interest of time.

But I started reading the introduction and was immediately sucked back in. I read the entire book cover to cover for comps and I enjoyed every minute of it. Taylor is a gifted writer and does an excellent job of building nuanced, thoughtful arguments. And despite having been written 17 years ago now (which is a long, long time in the worlds of video games and game studies), pretty much everything in the book is still relevant. In one sense, the book stands as a historical document describing what EverQuest as a game and its associated player communities were like in the early 2000s. Taylor could’ve left it at that, but instead she uses the context of EverQuest as a way to ask questions about games, players, technology, and game communities more broadly. Taylor’s work exemplifies what makes ethnography compelling to me – telling stories about specific people in specific contexts which can be expanded to understand people and things more broadly. This is the kind of work I would like to produce someday.

This Bridge Called My Back – edited by Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (4th Edition)

This book, originally published in the 1980s, is a collection of essays, stories, and poetry revolving around the life experiences of Black and brown women in the U.S. It includes works from folks like Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective. It includes stories of inclusion and exclusion from Asian American women, from Native American women, from queer women, from women who pass as white, from women who have chronic pain and illnesses, and above all, from women who used the written word as a medium to have their voices heard.

This Bridge Called My Back (or “Bridge”) originally came to my attention when reading Eli Clare’s excellent book Exile and Pride a few years ago. At some point in the book, he cited Bridge as a formative influence for how he thought about his own life and his writing. I picked up my own copy of Bridge soon after and it was one of the first books I added to my fledging comps reading list that fall. (Did I use my comprehensive exam as an excuse to read books I’d intended to read on my own anyway? Yes, yes I did.)

This was such a powerful collection and my copy is covered in sticky notes and annotations. Since reading it in early 2022, I’ve gone back to it multiples times to reread parts of essays and stories to remind myself of how deeply affecting they are. If there’s one thing I took away from this book it’s that for people who are marginalized in any way, writing and using words to express one’s own experiences – and how those experiences complicate and resist the status quo – is an act of power and activism. This book inspires me to write, even when I don’t feel I have much to say. And it inspires me to listen to and encourage stories from others about their own lives.

I highly recommend this book to everyone. Absolutely everyone.

Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions – Susan Leigh Star

My advisor, Steph Jordan, recommended this article to me. I had heard of Susan Leigh Star, but all I knew about her was that she had done some compelling work on infrastructure and classification systems. To be honest, these topics sounded rather boring to me. But looking at the boring things happens to have been Star’s approach to research. One of her primary goals was to illustrate a larger and more complex picture of how research and science get done and how constructs like categorizations come to be and are supported by a large network of people and systems. One of her particular concerns in doing this research was to highlight the people who get lost or are otherwise hidden in the larger narratives behind how science and research happen, such as secretaries and research subjects.

In this article, she attempts to wed feminist research methods and ideals with actor network theory, the latter of which is concerned with mapping the complex connections between people, systems, and things. She uses the example of her own onion allergy and her experiences eating in places like McDonald’s as a means of illustrating the potential of such a connection. I found the resulting article to be a very thoughtful and intricate examination of how systems of power and marginalization, as well as the concept of “universal”, can affect individuals.

This is one of the first things I read for my comprehensive exams last year, and I was blown away by it. From the notes I wrote after reading: “This was an excellent article. Truly excellent. Well written, easy to understand, personal, political. Would read again.”

Since reading it, I’ve been pestering people in my department to read it as well so I can reread and discuss it with someone else (no luck yet, but I’m working on it). Star packs so much detail into so few pages; I knew at the time it would take me multiple readings to unpack everything. I decided to reread the article again in preparation for writing about it, and I was surprised by how much I’d forgotten. I feel I have more context for much of the theoretical background she pulls on from this article, having since read many of the authors she’s in conversation with (e.g. Donna Harraway, Sandra Harding, etc.).

Having reread the article recently, I agree wholeheartedly with my past year’s self: this is truly an excellent article. Would read again.

Intersectional Tech – Kishonna Gray

Kishonna Gray is an academic I’ve been following for some time. Intersectional Tech is, in some senses, a culmination of the work she started while doing her PhD with a focus on Black women gamers. In this book, she pulls on many years of ethnographic work to show how people (particularly Black people) and technology interrelate through the lens of video games. She has a lot to say in this book about how the design of systems can exclude certain people, what masculinity looks like when it’s not white, how people use multiple forms of media when building and maintaining communities, and more.

What most impressed me about this book was how she approached writing about the people she worked with as part of her ethnographic research. She specifically calls out the need to go beyond narratives of violence when discussing Black people and people of color in research – too many popular narratives focus on the violence present in communities of color. Instead, she focuses on showing many aspects of people’s lives: their joys, their friendships, and their resiliency alongside their hardships. The people she writes about are real, multifaceted, and complex. Through the inclusion of some of her fieldnotes and other asides, Gray also represents herself as multifaceted, committed to both the research and to her participants and to untangling the contradictions between those two commitments.

I can only hope that my work will represent the people I work with (and myself!) with as much complexity and nuance as Gray does.

My Comprehensive Exam Reading List: Feminism, Activism, and Video Games

The PhD program that I’m currently in at Michigan State University is, fortunately for me, pretty lax when it comes to comprehensive exam reading lists. The program is diverse and interdisciplinary, and as such, there are no prescribed readings which all students in the program need to get through for their comprehensive exams. I was able to create a reading list based on what I wanted to read, as well as on the advice and recommendations of my advisor, Steph Jordan, and my committee members (Casey O’Donnell, Jean Hardy, and Kjerstin Thorson).

I made this list with the intent of reading things which I hoped would help me further down the line, and particularly with my dissertation proposal. For my dissertation project, I would like to do some kind of virtual ethnographic work with players of video games, and particularly players who a) play competitive online games with others and b) don’t identify as men. Video games, and particularly online competitive games, are frequently coded male: that is, the expectation of many players (and even many non-players) is that young men are the people playing these games. Players who aren’t male and/or don’t conform to male norms face a lot more harassment in online games because they don’t fit norm. And that sucks.

As a woman-identified gamer myself, I’m particularly interested in how players who aren’t male find others to play with and practice resilience in online games and related spaces. I’m also interested in how players practice activism within these spaces. I’m not sure what direction my dissertation project will take in terms of methods yet, but I’m hoping to be able to spend a lot of time talking with and playing games with other women and queer gamers.

To that end, my reading list consists of four sections: 1) feminism, feminist theories, and technology; 2) communities as potential activist spaces; 3) game studies, with a specific focus on critical theories, gender, and communities; and 4) methodologies, with a focus on virtual ethnography and feminism. The full list consists of 30 books and 57 articles.

Feminism, feminist theories, and technology

Foundational feminism

  • Judith Butler (1990) – Gender Trouble (book)
  • This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (4th ed., 2015) (book)
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017) – How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (book)

Feminism and tech

  • Susan Leigh Star (1990) – Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On being Allergic to Onions (article)
  • Donna Haraway (1991) – A Cyborg Manifesto (essay)
  • Judy Wajcman (1991) – Feminism Confronts Technology (book)
  • Ellen van Oost (2003) – Materialized Gender: How Shavers Configure the Users’ Femininity and Masculinity (book chapter)
  • Oudshoorn, Rommes, and Stienstra (2004) – Configuring the user as everybody: Gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies (article)
  • Judy Wajcman (2007) – From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience (article)
  • Lisa Nakamura (2002) – Cybertypes (book)

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and feminism

  • Lucy Suchman (1993) – Working relations of technology production and use (article)
  • Shaowen Bardzell (2010) – Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design (article)
  • Nancy A. Van House (2011) – Feminist HCI meets facebook: Performativity and social networking sites (article)
  • Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell (2011) – Towards a feminist HCI methodology: social science, feminism, and HCI (article)
  • Sarah Fox, Rachel Rose Ulgado, and Daniela Rosner (2015) – Hacking Culture, Not Devices: Access and Recognition in Feminist Hackerspaces (article)
  • Amanda Menking, Ingrid Erickson (2015) – The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World’s Largest Online Encyclopedia (article)
  • Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman (2016) – An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design (article)
  • Shaowen Bardzell (2018) – Utopias of Participation: Feminism, Design, and the Futures (article)
  • Menking, Erickson, Pratt (2019) – People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and Navigate Safety (article)
  • Catherine D’Ignazio, Rebecca Michelson, Alexis Hope, Josephine Hoy, Jennifer Roberts, and Kate Krontiris (2020) – “The Personal is Political”: Hackathons as Feminist Consciousness Raising (article)
  • Michael Ahmadi, Rebecca Eilert, Anne Weibert, Volker Wulf, and Nicola Marsden (2020) – Feminist Living Labs as Research Infrastructures for HCI: The Case of a Video Game Company (article)

Communities as potential activist spaces

  • Paulo Freire (1968) – Pedagogy of the Oppressed (book)
  • bell hooks (1994) – Teaching to Transgress (book)
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) – Care work: dreaming disability justice (book)
  • adrienne marie brown (2017) – Emergent Strategy (book)
  • adrienne marie brown (2020) – We Will Not Cancel Us: Breaking the Cycle of Harm (short book)
  • Mariam Asad (2019) – Prefigurative Design as a Method for Research Justice (article)
  • Sciannamblo, Cohn, Lyle, Teli (2021) – Caring and Commoning as Cooperative Work: A Case Study in Europe (article)
  • Elijah Anderson (2015) – “The White Space” (article)

How narratives mobilize protest

  • Francesca Polletta (2006) – It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (book)
  • Dimond, Dye, Larose, Bruckman (2013) – Hollaback!: The role of storytelling online in a social movement organization (article)
  • Zizi Papacharissi (2015) – Affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality (article)

Mobilized political action in non-political spaces

  • Henry Jenkins (2015) – “Cultural acupuncture”: Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance (article)
  • Neta Kligler-Vilenchik (2015) – Qualitative Political Communication| From Wizards and House-Elves to Real-World Issues: Political Talk in Fan Spaces (article)
  • Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Ioana Literat (2018) – Distributed Creativity as Political Expression: Youth Responses to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election in Online Affinity Networks (article)
  • Communities of practice
  • Etienne Wegner (2011) – Communities of practice: a brief introduction (brief article)
  • Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger (1991) – Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (book, skim)
  • Stephansen, Couldry (2014) – Understanding micro-processes of community building and mutual learning on Twitter: a ‘small data’ approach (article)
  • Joe Curnow (2016) – Situated Learning, Situated Knowledge: Situating Racialization, Colonialism, and Patriarchy Within Communities of Practice (article)
  • Gabriela T. Richard (2017) – Video Games, Gender, Diversity, and Learning as Cultural Practice: Implications for Equitable Learning and Computing Participation Through Games (article)
  • Gabriela T. Richard, Kishonna L. Gray (2018) – Gendered Play, Racialized Reality: Black Cyberfeminism, Inclusive Communities of Practice, and the Intersections of Learning, Socialization, and Resilience in Online Gaming (article)
  • Komorowski, Huu, Deligiannis (2018) – Twitter data analysis for studying communities of practice in the media industry (article)

Game studies

  • T. L. Taylor (2006) – Beyond Management: Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture (article, revisit) 
  • Kishonna Gray (2012) – Deviant bodies, stigmatized identities, and racist acts: examining the experiences of African-American gamers in Xbox Live (article) 
  • Jenny Sundén (2012) – Desires at Play: On Closeness and Epistemological Uncertainty (article, revisit) 
  • Alexis Pulos (2013) – Confronting Heteronormativity in Online Games: A Critical Discourse Analysis of LGBTQ Sexuality in World of Warcraft (article)
  • Adrienne Shaw (2014) – Gaming at the Edge (book, revisit) 
  • Whitney Phillips (2015) – This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (book) 
  • Shepherd, Harvey, Jordan, Srauy, Milner (2015) – Histories of Hating (article) 
  • Salter and Blodgett (2017) – Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (book) 
  • Shira Chess (2017) – Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (book) 
  • Karen Skardzius (2018) – Playing with Pride: Claiming Space Through Community Building in World of Warcraft (book chapter, from Woke Gaming) 
  • Amanda Cote (2018) – Curate Your Culture: A Call for Social Justice-Oriented Game Development and Community Management (book chapter, from Woke Gaming, revisit) 
  • Gray, Voorhees, Vossen (2018) – Reframing Hegemonic Conceptions of Women and Feminism in Gaming Culture (book introduction, Feminism in Play) 
  • Tom Welch (2018) – The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods (article) 
  • Harvianien, Brown, Suominen (2018) – Three Waves of Awkwardness: A Meta-Analysis of Sex in Game Studies (article) 
  • Christopher Paul (2018) – The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games (book) 
  • Megan Condis (2018) – Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture (book)
  • Bonnie Ruberg (2019) – Video Games Have Always Been Queer (book) 
  • Amanda Phillips (2020) – Gamer Trouble (book) 
  • Amanda C. Cote (2020) – Gaming Sexism (book) 
  • Kishonna Gray (2020) – Intersectional Tech (book)

Evolution of Community in World of Warcraft

  • Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, Moore (2006) – “Alone Together?”: Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (article) 
  • Mark Chen (2009) – Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft (article) 
  • Bonnie Nardi (2010) – My Life as a Night Elf Priest (book, revisit; also in Methods section of list) 
  • Crenshaw, Nardi (2016) – “It Was More Than Just the Game, It Was the Community”: Social Affordances in Online Games (article) 
  • Crenshaw, LaMorte, Nardi (2017) – “Something We Loved That Was Taken Away”: Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft (article) 
  • Amanda Braithwaite (2018) – WoWing Alone: The Evolution of “Multiplayer” in World of Warcraft (article, revisit) 

Methods and methodologies

The Basics (good for citing)

  • Emerson, Fritz, Shaw (2011) – Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (book; read parts)
  • Kathy Charmaz (2014) – Constructing Grounded Theory, 2nd Ed. (book; read parts)
  • Lora Bex Lempert (2007) – Asking Questions of the Data: Memo Writing in the Grounded Theory Tradition (book chapter)

Ethnography, general

  • George Marcus (1995) – Ethnography in/out of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography (article)
  • Susan Leigh Star (1999) – The Ethnography of Infrastructure (article)
  • Virginia Eubanks (2007) – Trapped in the Digital Divide: The Distributive Paradigm in Community Informatics (article)
  • Jenna Burrell (2009) – The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research (article)
  • Kim Fortun (2011) – Figuring Out Ethnography (article)
  • Laura Nader (2011) – Ethnography as Theory (article)
  • Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) – The Mushroom at the End of the World (book)
  • Dorothy Howard, Lilly Irani (2019) – Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care (article)

Ethnography, online / virtual worlds

  • Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, Taylor (2012) – Ethnography and Virtual Worlds (book, revisit)
  • Tom Boellstorff (2008) – Coming of Age in Second Life (book, revisit)
  • T. L. Taylor (2006) – Play Between Worlds (book, revisit)
  • Bonnie Nardi (2010) – My Life as a Night Elf Priest (book, revisit)
  • Jeffrey Snodgrass (2014) – Ethnography of Online Cultures (book chapter)
  • Robert Kozinets (2019) – Netnography, 3rd Ed. (book)

Feminist methodologies

  • Donna Haraway (1988) – Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (article, in Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader)
  • Patricia Zavella (1993) – Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with “Chicana” Informants (article)
  • Lucy Suchman (1995) – Making Work Visible (article)
  • Sandra Harding (2004) – Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate (intro, in Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader)
  • Adele Clarke (2003) – Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory Mapping After the Postmodern Turn (article)
  • Barbara Lazar (2007) – Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Articulating a Feminist Discourse Praxis (article)
  • Christopher Le Dantec, Sarah Fox (2015) – Strangers at the Gate: Gaining Access, Building Rapport, and Co-Constructing Community-Based Research (article)

Ethical approaches for working with digital data

  • Fiesler, Young, Peyton, Bruckman, Gray, Hancock, Lutters (2015) – Ethics for Studying Online Sociotechnical Systems in a Big Data World (article)
  • Fiesler, Proferes (2018) – “Participant” Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics (article)
  • Suomela, Chee, Berendt, Rockwell (2019) – Applying an Ethics of Care to Internet Research: Gamergate and Digital Humanities (article)
  • Michael Zimmer (2010) – “But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook (article)

Note: I chose not to include full citations for each work on the list above, as pretty much all of them can be found easily on Google Scholar with only the title, author last name(s), and year published. And the list is much easier to read this way. But if you’re interested in reading a particular book / article / essay and can’t find it, feel free to contact me!

Playing Support in Video Games as a Woman

I had an interesting conversation with my partner not long ago about playing support in multiplayer games. I don’t play many games which have discrete roles, but when I do, I tend to prefer support roles. I’ve been thinking about stereotypes of women gamers quite a lot recently, in part due to the research I’m doing, and in part because I find it personally interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of the women gamers I encounter tend to gravitate towards support roles. I brought it up with my partner, and we both started to wonder: why is that? Are women being shoehorned into support roles in games, or is it an honest preference? Or perhaps a bit of both?

To provide some context, this is what I mean by roles and by support: a lot of team-based multiplayer games and game modes involve building teams with other players in which each player plays one of a number of roles within the team. In World of Warcraft and Overwatch, for example, there are three roles you can choose to play: tank, damage, and support. Tanks are harder to kill and their role involves pulling the focus of the enemy in order to a) absorb most of the damage and b) protect the rest of the team. Damage players (also known as DPS – damage per second) aren’t as strong, but can do quite a lot of damage – their role is to do damage to the enemy. Support players primarily stand in the back and heal their teammates, though they also often have abilities which provide utility to the team, such as abilities which weaken the enemy or which buff their own teammates (for example, by enhancing their existing abilities).

In both Overwatch and the multiplayer modes of World of Warcraft, I primarily play in the support role. It is fairly common for women players to play support. Most of the women I’ve encountered in Overwatch have been playing in a support role. In fact, it’s so common for women to play support that it’s become a bit of a stereotype.

I recently listened to an interesting episode of the podcast Group Up, hosted by SVB on YouTube and Twitch. SVB is well-known for creating video content around the game Overwatch. In this episode of his podcast, he interviewed three women who regularly stream Overwatch on Twitch about their experiences playing and streaming the game. Each of the streamers had gotten started in Overwatch by playing support characters. More than that, each of them recounted times when other players had asked them to play support specifically because they were women. In Overwatch, a common ask of women is that they play the character Mercy, who is, incidentally, the support character with the most stereotypically feminine design in the game.

Mercy
Mercy, aka Angela Ziegler

There were a couple of interesting themes that came up during the discussion in the podcast, one of which was the widespread belief that many female players are introduced to certain games (particularly competitive online multiplayer games) by their male partners, brothers, friends, etc. The assumption that goes along with this belief is that because male players are typically more experienced with these types of games than female players, the female players are asked to play roles which support the male players – typically, that means playing a healer. The negative (and perhaps unfounded – but perhaps not) interpretation of this is that many men want the women in their lives to support their hobbies, and the best way they can think to bring women in is to ask them to literally support them in game.

The supposition behind this interpretation is that women are expected to be in the support role in relation to the men in their lives. Historically, many women have been expected to play support in the home and for their families. Women stay home and take care of the house and the children while men go off to work. Women knit socks and cook food while men go off to war. In games, this translates to women healing and staying in the back lines while men do the flashy, important work of killing members of the enemy team. Women aren’t supposed to do the flashy, important work. They’re supposed to remain relatively unseen in their roles.

This got me thinking: where do I fall in this discussion? I typically don’t like conforming to stereotypes, and yet in this case, I am. How much is my desire to play support in games due to societal gender norms and other sexist ideas which I’ve unconsciously internalized, and how much of it is just that I’m drawn to the role? Why did I specifically choose to play support when I started playing World of Warcraft, and more recently, Overwatch?

Like many women, I was introduced to both World of Warcraft by my (male) partner. He had been playing on and off for years at that point. I grew more and more interested in playing myself as I watched him play, and finally created my first character in 2015. Of course, I asked my partner for advice: which class should I play? He told me about the three roles, and that each class had multiple specifications allowing for damage, tanking, or healing. He also told me that the roles of tanking and healing were much more variable in nature, as they involve choosing the correct abilities to react to what’s happening in the game. My partner started playing WoW as a priest, a class primarily known for its healing specifications, and spent a lot of time healing when playing group-based content in the game. The way he described the role to me made it sound interesting and fun; for that reason, I chose a priest for the first character I created. My priest is still the main character I play in WoW.

I was likewise introduced to Overwatch by my partner, who started playing when it was released in 2016. I was initially attracted to the art and design of the game and spent a lot of time watching him play. I was convinced, however, that I’d be terrible at the game if I tried playing myself – I’d had no previous experience with first person shooters (well, unless you count Portal) and knew I didn’t have the aim necessary to play such games well. As I continued to watch others play the game (I also started watching a lot of streamers on Twitch, as well as following professional play via the Overwatch League), I realized there were a number of characters – specifically tank and support characters – which didn’t rely on having good aim to play. I finally decided to give it a shot in 2019 and latched onto support because I was more familiar with the characters from having watched my partner play support characters, and because it seemed like any mistakes I made would be less obvious than if I was in a tank or DPS role. I still almost exclusively play support, which I’ve been enjoying more and more as my skills have improved and as I’ve been able to uncover some of the nuance of each character’s abilities.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve pigeonholed myself into the support role because it was the first role I chose in both WoW and Overwatch and I’m not confident enough in my abilities as a player to venture beyond it. That said, I feel my choice to play support has been a good one. I’ve recently been enjoying being a healer in WoW dungeons, as it’s much more interesting and variable than damage. I also really enjoy zipping around maps in Overwatch as Lucio (a support character known for his speed-boosting abilities), and tend to have more fun playing that character than others I’ve tried in the game. I’m not particularly interested in being a jack-of-all-trades at this point – I want to play one role, and I want to play it really well. In doing so, perhaps I am conforming to gender norms. But I’ve decided not to worry about it, so long as I’m having fun.

On Being a Positive Influence in Online Video Games

I’ve been playing a lot of video games recently, which I attribute to being home a fair bit more than usual, what with one thing and another. I’ve also been playing quite a lot of Overwatch recently, and have even been participating in the most recent competitive season. I normally avoid online play which puts me in connection with strangers like the plague, but I’ve started thinking: why should I? Unlike what’s happening in the real world right now, playing online can’t actually spread the plague. I’ve decided I deserve to be able to play this game as much as anyone else, and I’m not going to let random strangers stop me. If that means I expose myself to a bit of toxicity, well, I think now I have some of the tools I need to be able to deal with it.. 

I just recently finished my classes for the semester. As part of one of my research methods classes, I designed and executed a small research project. I chose a topic which I thought would foreshadow what I’m interested in pursuing for a dissertation – talking to female gamers about their experiences in competitive online video games with the aim of understanding why they continue to play, in spite of the toxicity that rages through those types of games. It was a fascinating project in a number of ways, not least because it confirmed for me – again – that I like doing this whole research thing. But more importantly, talking with other women who have more experience playing online than I do helped me to understand the kinds of things I can do personally which will help make me more confident playing games online.

One of the major things that came up in my research project was the idea of being a positive influence as a way to combat toxicity. One of the gamers I interviewed had been playing League of Legends for a number of years. Given how infamously toxic LoL is, it’s not surprising a lot of what she told me about her experiences with the game involved her encountering and dealing with toxicity from other players. She, of course, had numerous strategies to deal with it – muting players, ignoring what they said, justifying to herself that their comments didn’t reflect on how she was actually playing, etc. She would sometimes talk back to toxic players, in order to defend herself or to defend other players. 

Most of the things she did were simply avoidance tactics, but she did one thing that really stood out to me: she made it a point to be a positive influence in game. She would compliment other players if they did something well. She would encourage teammates. She would make it a point not to say anything negative in chat. She told me she consistently maxed out her honor points in game. I gathered from talking to her that being positive in game was something she was really proud of. Being positive was also something she did with the aim of encouraging other players to be more positive as well. 

Ultimately, the theory is that spreading positivity is a way an individual can help to reduce the amount of toxicity in game. Around the same time I was in the midst of interviewing women gamers for my project, I was spending a lot of time on the GirlGamers subreddit, which I’ve found to be a very friendly, welcoming place to talk with other women about playing video games. The subreddit actively promotes something called the Good Luck, Have Fun pledge, which I discovered through a sticky post in the subreddit. 

The pledge was started by a non-profit organization called AnyKey, which has been working for the last few years to support diversity and inclusivity in video games and gaming communities. Incidentally, one of the cofounders is T. L. Taylor, one of my academic heroes. By taking the pledge, you are essentially confirming that you believe everyone you’re playing with deserves respect. Signing the pledge also gives you a badge, which you can put on your profile on Twitch or YouTube Gaming to signal to others that you intend to abide by the terms of the pledge as you play. I don’t stream my play, but I did sign the pledge – you can use my referral link to sign the pledge, too.

Between what I learned from talking with other women players and the ideas behind the Good Luck, Have Fun pledge, I decided to come up with my own guidelines for myself so that I could not only be a more positive influence in game, but enjoy playing online more as well. 

  1. Always say “gg” (short for “good game”) at the end of a match.
  2. If one of the other players in the match makes a good play, call it out – even if they aren’t on my team.
  3. Thank teammates when they heal me or protect me.
  4. If someone compliments me, remember it and take it to heart.
  5. Make it a point to endorse players who have been positive in game.
  6. If someone is mean to me or to another player: call them out on it and report them.
  7. Give kind words of support to players who are getting targeted by toxicity, particularly when they don’t respond in kind.
  8. If I start getting angry at the game or at other players, take a break from the game and go do something else until I feel I can be positive again.

Since I’ve started thinking about this, I’ve actually been communicating more with other players during games. Sometimes it’s not been super positive, but most of the time it has. I find that being positive in game – even if no one responds to it – helps me to feel more positive about the game. But I also find that when I make it a point to say positive things, other players are more likely to say positive things to me in return. That alone is motivation for me to keep doing it. I also feel like I play better when I approach the game with a positive mindset, which is also a bonus.

On Playing Overwatch and Toxic Communities

I love the game Overwatch. I’ve been a fan pretty much since it launched in 2016. I typically don’t care for first person shooters – in part because I’m terrible at them, and in part because I don’t much like the idea of shooting people, even if they’re made of pixels. But Overwatch has excellent character design (well, mostly), a very well-designed UI, and beautiful maps. The designer in me was attracted to it, and I couldn’t look away.

As far as gameplay goes, Overwatch is a fairly nuts-and-bolts team-based shooter. The primary game mode is a competitive mode in which two teams consisting of 6 players each are pitted against one another with the aim of “winning” the map. Teams may take on three different roles, depending on the map – defending an objective, attempting to capture an objective, or battling against the other team in a “capture the flag” scenario. Teams consist of 2 healers, who help other team members regain health; 2 tanks, who can take high amounts of damage and defend their team members from taking damage; and 2 “DPS” (damage per second), whose role is to damage the players on the other team. 

Why has Overwatch kept players’ interest for so long? The game itself is evergreen – the game’s developer, Blizzard Entertainment, has obviously invested a lot of time and thought into keeping the game relevant as it ages. The addition of a new character or a new map a few times a year adds a variety of new ways to play the same game. Even tweaking the stats of a few characters here and there – which Blizzard does consistently – can vastly change how the game is played. But mostly, the primary mode of play features six real – and often random – people collaborating together in order to defeat the six real people on the other side. Nothing keeps a game fresher than not knowing exactly what you’ll be up against when you start playing.

Blizzard intends to keep the trend going with the release of Overwatch 2, just announced in November 2019, which will feature updated character designs, more new characters and maps, and more game modes.

Overwatch 2 promotional image featuring new character designs

My Personal History with Overwatch

I’ve been really enjoying Overwatch as a spectator sport for years. My partner picked up the game when it was released, and I started watching him play. I was drawn in by how well-designed the game and its characters seemed, and wanted to know more. I found the barrier of entry to be a bit high, but once I understood the basics of how the maps were played and what each character could do, it became a really fun game to watch. I currently follow several Twitch streamers who primarily play Overwatch, and tune in every so often. I’ve also been keeping up with the Overwatch League since it started in 2018, and am looking forward to the beginning of the next season in January. 

Overwatch League match in the Blizzard Arena in southern California
An Overwatch League match in Blizzard Arena in southern California

But I haven’t really played the game much. Though I’ve been enjoying Overwatch for nearly three years now, I didn’t start actually playing the game myself until a few months ago. That seems crazy, doesn’t it? I’ve spent all this time learning about Overwatch and watching a variety of people play it, but it took me two years to buy the game and start playing myself.

At first, I didn’t particularly want to play because Overwatch is just not the kind of game I normally play. I don’t like first person shooters. Games that require a lot of precise hand-eye coordination frustrate me. I don’t often have the patience to work at building the muscle memory I need to play such games well. I tend to prefer strategy games and puzzle games that rely more on speed of thought than on reflex and dexterity.

There’s a part of my brain that just says I’m bad at those types of games. And sometimes I listen to it more than I should. But when it comes to games like Overwatch, I’ve realized I don’t necessarily have to be good at the game to enjoy playing it. It’s one of those games where I win some, and I lose most. And I die quite a lot. I don’t particularly like dying in games – who does? – but I’ve found if I approach it sensibly, dying constantly doesn’t much bother me. Sometimes, dying in games is out of my control. Even then, dying becomes an opportunity to learn. 

So if I go into it with the right mindset, I’ve discovered I can play games like Overwatch and enjoy them. But I still don’t play Overwatch a whole lot. When I do, I play with people I know, or I play alone with voice chat turned off, even though I know doing so limits how far I can make it in the game. Why? Because I don’t want to open myself up for harassment from other players of the game. Using voice chat with strangers means outing myself as a female player. And it’s a dangerous thing to be visibly female in a competitive online game.

Overwatch’s Community is Toxic

What do I mean by toxic? I mean that there are a number of (quite vocal) people in the Overwatch community who get off on harassing and bullying other players. When gamers bring up games with toxic communities, Overwatch often ends up in the top ten. Blizzard has taken steps to police the community and discourage bad behavior, including implementing a reporting system, using machine learning to regulate chat, and adding an endorsement system. But it’s not enough, and a lot of bad behavior still gets through. 

The nature of the game lends itself to toxicity. Overwatch is a competitive game, and competitive games are stressful. There are links between stress and anger – being in a stressful situation can cause people who are prone to anger to lash out. There’s also only so much you can control about the way a match in Overwatch will go after all, you’re only one player on a team of six. In a game like Overwatch, if things aren’t going your way, there are 5 other people on your team you can blame for your misfortune. For some players, it’s easy to justify being toxic because they may never encounter those teammates again, and the social consequences are low. Ranked competition, relative anonymity, and a relative lack of consequences makes toxic interactions during game play rather common.

As with many other competitive online games, the primary demographic for Overwatch in the U.S. consists of younger white, straight, cisgendered men, and those players tend to make up the vocal majority in the player base. Behavior they don’t consider egregious (like, for example, rape jokes) often slips through the cracks. Making fun of women, or black people, or people with accents is so common as to be considered the norm. And unfortunately, it’s the players who represent minorities in the community (women, and in the U.S., non-white people and non-native speakers of English) who bear the brunt of the toxicity in the community. 

Blizzard is actively trying to regulate the community, but it’s clear they’re not doing enough to account for all of the different motivations people have for being toxic. It’s also clear that the solutions they have put in place address toxicity only from a high level (“bad behavior is bad, and you should report it”) without specifically addressing the types of bad behavior (like gender or racially motivated harassment) which disproportionately affect the more vulnerable people in the game’s community.

My Thoughts on Playing Overwatch Going Forward

I play video games for fun. I think most people do – the primary purpose of games is to have fun. What’s not fun for me – and, I suspect, for most people – is having a random person tell me I suck, that I should stop playing, that I don’t belong in the game. Even in the early days of Overwatch, it became clear to me that the Overwatch community has its fair share of toxic people, and that encountering them in game is so commonplace as to be accepted as part of the game. 

Sometimes, toxicity in gaming communities can get particularly bad – I’ve seen more than one Twitch streamer in tears because of what some anonymous person has said to them over voice chat. I’ve heard of people quitting games that they love because the toxicity leveled at them has been too harsh for them to want to deal with anymore. I’ve seen streamers whose defense mechanism towards toxic comments is to be just as toxic in return, which only makes the situation worse. 

And I hesitate to put myself in the kinds of situations where I know I’ll be targeted for being an unskilled player, for being a woman, or even simply for being a team member on a losing team. As much as I want to practice and get better at playing the game, I’m not sure the potential damage to my mental health is worth it. 

I suppose that’s why I’m so interested in studying toxicity in video game communities. I really, really want to play games like Overwatch, and I want to have fun doing so. I want to be able to play with other people who are also having fun, and maybe even form connections with the humans behind the avatars. I’ve spent so much time actively avoiding playing online games because I’m afraid of what I’ll encounter from the other players. I’m sick of feeling like a fringe gamer. I feel that by studying the motivations behind toxic behavior and the effects of it on players, I can help others understand what the problems are. Maybe then game developers and other players can take some real steps towards making game communities more welcoming spaces for players like me to be in.

I still plan to keep playing Overwatch – but in small doses, and most likely with voice chat turned off. I haven’t played a single match since August, because school has been taking up all of my brainpower. Overwatch is a lot of things, but I do not find it to be a relaxing game. But winter break is on the horizon, and I find myself feeling cautiously optimistic about playing again.

Why I Want to Be a Video Games Researcher

In August, I started a PhD program. This decision seems to have come as more of a surprise to me than it has to my friends, family, and former colleagues. I swore up and down for years that I’d never be interested enough in anything to want to immerse myself in researching it for 4+ years. I haven’t exactly changed my point of view there, but I’ve come to understand that a PhD is more than just what you study.

I wanted to write this post as a way of recording my reasoning behind wanted to pursue a PhD, and specifically, my reasons for deciding that video games are where I want to start. I am, in part, writing this for myself: I anticipate there being a time a few years down the road when I’m dead sick of being a PhD student and am wondering why I got myself into this mess to begin with. I want to have something concrete I can look back in to remind myself that I was once a (cautiously) optimistic person with a real passion for the subject and for the work involved. 

I’m also writing this for people I know (family and friends, mostly) who have wondered why video games are even important enough to study, and why I’d want to devote years of my life, and perhaps even the rest of my career, to studying games and the people who play them. To them I say: keep reading!

Why change careers?

About 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to be a user experience designer. I wanted to create things, and put them out into the world where people could use them. I wanted to spend lots of time working in Adobe Illustrator, writing CSS, and thinking about how best to arrange elements on a screen so that users would be able to find the information they needed without getting too frustrated in the process. I started a new career by taking graphic design classes, applying to schools, and moving across the country to start a masters program.

Well, it turns out that while I liked the detailed-oriented process of designing screens, I enjoyed the process of figuring out what people needed and wanted when they used a website quite a lot more. Even more than that, I enjoyed the process of defining research goals, understanding the different dynamics that came into play when making user research decisions, and the act of actually talking with users and potential users and getting a peek into how their minds worked. 

The nitty gritty of choosing colors and visual styles interested me less and less as time went on. I found I enjoyed critiquing existing designs and thinking through the possible ramifications of design choices much more than I actually enjoyed creating the designs in the first place. This tendency of mine to overanalyze, while sometimes quite helpful, often didn’t go over well when I was working in environments where decisions had to be made quickly and where profit was generally the primary factor in making decisions. 

I’ve also found that design in the software industry is often treated as a way to make something attractive, without regard for other considerations (like usability or usefulness). When that point of view is pervasive among non-designers and designers alike, user research and testing is undervalued. So when I tried to do research to better inform design decisions, I had to fight to show that I wasn’t wasting time, and fight even harder to show that the “attractive” designs that other designers were producing were deeply flawed in other, more important ways. 

In the end, I decided my values as a researcher and a designer were at odds with the values of most of the software industry, and that I wanted to get out of the industry for awhile. More than that, I realized that what I most enjoyed doing – what really made me happy at work – was performing user research. I like talking with people, I like collating interview data and survey data, and I even enjoy the process of scheduling interviews and usability tests. So I started thinking – how could I do more of that?

Why a PhD?

When I was working in the software industry, I really wanted to spend more time doing ethnographic-style research: observing people as they work, interviewing people, watching as people perform everyday tasks, understanding the context in which people live and work, etc. The small taste I’ve had of doing this kind of research have been fascinating, and really fun. But ethnographic research is hard to do in much of the software industry, because it takes a lot of time, effort, and money. When I quit my “cushy” UX designer job in 2018, my first thought was to look for other jobs at different software companies that included a focus on user research. But there were very few jobs in my area that did focus on research, and almost none that would have allowed for ethnographic research. 

So I broadened my search, and started thinking about ways I could spend more time doing ethnographic research, and also find mentors and training opportunities which could help me learn the skills and techniques I’d need. The idea of pursuing a PhD occurred to me within a few months. PhDs are all about research, and I figured if I could find a program which supported a topic I was interested in and which housed a number of professors and students who were doing the kinds of research I wanted to do, it would make for a great apprenticeship. Plus, PhDs are generally fully funded, and though I knew the pay wouldn’t be great, I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about taking out more loans in order to go back to school again.

I also decided pursuing a PhD would also give me a chance to see if academia was a place where I could enjoy working. I knew I’d likely end up assisting professors with teaching or with research in exchange for my tuition, and both seemed like good opportunities to get a feel for what being a professor would be like. I will be starting my PhD journey as a teaching assistant, and I’m looking forward to seeing what teaching at the college level is like.

If I decide academia isn’t for me, though, what next? I know I’ll at least have a decent amount of training in being a researcher by then, so I can always fall back on finding a research position in a company or organization somewhere. Though if it comes to that, I suspect I’ll need to look farther afield than metro Detroit to find something I’m truly interested in, particularly if I still want to work with video games after I graduate.

Why Video Games?

So far, this is the question I’ve been asked the most – why would anyone bother to study video games? I suppose my answer to that is: why not? People have been studying other forms of media (like radio, television, and literature) for generations. If you have any contact with children, it’s hard to ignore the fact that they always seem to be paying attention to a screen, and often, what they’re paying attention to is a video game of some sort. Additionally, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2019 report, 65% percent of adults in the U.S. play video games. Video games are an integral part of our culture, both in the U.S. and around the world.

The second question I inevitably get: are you going to be studying how violent and/or addictive video games are? No. No, I am not. Plenty of people are already studying those two topics, and I can’t say I’m all that interested villainizing a hobby I enjoy. I’d rather spend my time focusing on topics that are personally interesting to me, if only to keep my motivation up. Really, that’s the whole reason I chose video games as a topic – I enjoy playing video games, and I enjoy watching other people play video games. I also very much enjoy thinking about how video games fit into my life, how differently a game can be viewed by different people, and what different people enjoy about games. If I’m going to be spending years studying something while learning to be a researcher, I intend to focus my research on something I’m truly interested in.

One topic that’s near and dear to my heart is why it’s so much harder for women to play – and enjoy – online games than it is for men. There’s a toxic culture surrounding video games, and a lot of men out there who seem to want gaming to be an exclusive club just for them, and that mentality has many real-world societal implications. Wikipedia’s summary of the social, political, and cultural impact of the Gamergate controversy, while a depressing read, sums it up nicely. 

In essence, what I want to do is research something that negatively affects people (like me) so that I can work with others to start making it better. Video game culture is something I’m already steeped in, and I can see very clearly that there’s room for improvement in the space. For the time being, I’ve chosen to focus on researching ways to make online gaming less horrible for women (and tangentially, other people who aren’t heterosexual white men), because dammit, I want to be able to play online games without having to deal with the inevitable harassment that comes with it.

Other Goals

So here I am, starting a PhD program with the intent to do ethnographic research around why people are such dicks to other people in online video games. I’ve got a few other goals for my time in school which I’d like to touch on here, for the sake of posterity.

Firstly, I would like to get better at writing. It’s my intent to continue this blog while I’m in school, hopefully with a new post every couple months. I’m really interested in sharing what I’m learning and researching with people out there in the world. More importantly, I’m very interested in improving my ability to write about complex topics for the average reader. I’ve read my fair share of academic books and papers over the years, and holy hell, but most academics can’t write for shit. I don’t want to be one of those academics. Fortunately for me, the School of Journalism at Michigan State is under the same umbrella as the program I was accepted into, and I will be working alongside students and professors who are interested in science journalism topics. I’m hoping to either create or join a writing group while I’m in school as well.

Secondly, I want to try my hand at teaching and see if I like it. I’m starting off as a run-of-the-mill teaching assistant, with a focus on grading, being present during classes, and holding office hours. I may or may not get a chance to create a syllabus or design class activities while at Michigan State, but I hope I do. As a PhD student, I have the option of pursuing a teaching certification through the graduate school at the university, and I’m already seriously considering it. 

Thirdly, I want to learn about and take advantage of everything Michigan State has to offer to its PhD students. This is the third time I’ll be going back to school after a sizable gap. The first two times (community college and masters program), my primary goal was to learn and improve my skills so I could get a job that paid better. I was focused on learning the skills I needed and getting out as fast as I could. This time around, I don’t want to rush it. I’m not only going back to school: I’ve gotten a new job. I’ll be learning how to teach and to research, but I’ll also be teaching and helping others with research. When I was at the University of Michigan, there were a lot of resources available that I ignored because I wanted to be out, doing bigger and better things. This time around, the bigger and better thing might end up being staying in the same place, but changing my title from “PhD student” to “Assistant Professor.” I want to evaluate Michigan State University – and other places like it – as a potential place of work. To me, that means learning about what all the university offers and taking advantage of as much as I can.

And last (but not least), I want to use this opportunity as an excuse to play more video games. I strongly feel that video games, like books and movies and radio, are a form a media that can help people learn, gain skills, relieve stress, and a host of other beneficial things. I want to challenge myself to play games that are outside of my comfort zone, just to see if I will enjoy them. I want to play more games with other people. I also want to get practiced at thinking more critically about the games I play and why I play them. And above all, I want to have fun, and to enjoy the work that I do.

The Disappointing Lack of Female Body Diversity in Overwatch

Overwatch is a multiplayer, online, team-based game, the primary mode of which pits one team of six players against another team of six with the goal of gaining control of a map. It’s currently one of my favorite games to watch and to play. The game is engaging, because every match is different. It’s easy to hop into, play for half an hour, and hop back out. It’s also easy to play for hours at a stretch. There are lots of tricks and techniques to learn, and lots of potential for mastery. There’s also a lot of potential for hilarity when the mastery part of it just doesn’t work out. I even find it a fun game to watch – I enjoy watching my partner play, I enjoy watching streamers play on Twitch, and I enjoy watching official esports league for the game, the Overwatch League.

What really drew me to the game at the start was the design. I enjoyed watching the game and learning about the characters well before I started playing it myself. The maps are gorgeously illustrated, with so many fun, hidden details and random corridors and rooms to explore. The gameplay is smooth, colorful, and engaging to watch. The UI is surprisingly elegant and simple, and tailored to each character’s abilities, which are each impressively unique. And the characters themselves are well designed: they are cartoonish, but not overly so. They each have their own distinct personalities, with voice lines and emotes to match. They are characters designed not only for the game, but for compelling media in general – video shorts, comics, etc.

The characters in Overwatch are geographically, ethnically, and socially diverse, in a number of important ways. About half of the current roster of characters (14 out of 30) are female, or present as female. They represent different countries and cultures – India, China, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Nigeria, Egypt, Australia – with corresponding skin colors, clothing, accents, and languages to match. Some characters even represent people in social minorities, such as gay and lesbian (Soldier 76 and Tracer), autistic (Symmetra), PTSD (D.va, Mei, Reinhardt), all of which are officially a part of their background stories, as governed by Blizzard (the game’s developer). There are elderly characters, well past their physical prime: Reinhardt, Ana, Soldier, Torbjorn. There are characters from impoverished backgrounds: Sombra, Baptiste, Lucio, probably a few more. There are even a number of characters with obvious physical disabilities: missing an eye (Ana), missing limbs (Junkrat, Torbjorn, McCree, Symmetra), or more serious damage requiring extensive cybernetic support (Genji, Reaper).

That’s a lot of diversity and representation to cram into one game. So much so that I feel almost (but not quite) guilty about pointing out one obvious deficiency in the design of the characters: believable female bodies. Among the male characters, there are plenty of obvious physical differences beyond skin color and age. There are the conventionally attractive heroes, like Hanzo, Baptiste, Lucio, and McCree. There are big, beefy, scarred, muscular characters, like Reinhardt and Doomfist. Torbjorn is short, chunky, and scarred. Junkrat is pointy-faced, thin, and wiry (and scarred). Roadhog is tall, fat, and hides his face. In fact, many of the male heroes hide their faces: Soldier, Reinhardt, Reaper, and Genji all also have masks which makes their facial features and expressions nearly or entirely impossible to discern. There are even two male characters who are not human: Winston and Hammond. Those that don’t hide their faces might be smiling, smirking, frowning, or straight-faced.

The only thing these men have in common are well-defined muscles.

And then there are the female characters. By and large, the female characters in Overwatch have attractive, smooth faces, not obscured by masks. They have few to no scars. They smile or smirk almost exclusively. And just about all them of seem to be size 0, with skinny waists and curvy hips and chests, which you can easily discern through their form-fitting clothing. They pose in painful-looking backbends, the better to show off their boobs and butts. Or they tilt their hips, to better show off their curves and legs.

And for some characters, it gets worse. I can’t look at Tracer running around the map without wondering how uncomfortable her pants must be, they’re so shoved up her buttcrack. I can’t look at Symmetra’s outfit without wondering if her legs get cold. I can’t see Widow without wondering how much double sided dress tape she had to use to keep her boobs from falling out of her extremely low cut catsuit. And do Mercy’s (and Symmetra’s and Widow’s) feet hurt after running through battle after battle in heels?

Blizzard removed this victory post from the game, but not the super obvious butt crack.
Zarya for the win.

There are a few exceptions to the rule. Zarya in particular is represented as a tall, strong, muscular woman. According to the character’s background story, Zarya is a champion athlete, probably of the track and field variety. She is one of three female tanks in the game, and the only one who isn’t significantly supported by technology. She looks both physically strong and physically feminine. Interestingly, because she doesn’t fit the same mold as most of the other female characters, a number of players assume she is gay.

As a female gamer who enjoys the game, it’s demoralizing to me to see practicality and realism fall by the wayside in favor of making eye candy for the “ideal” player of the game, which is presumed to be only straight men. It’s disappointing to think that I could never be a hero in the Overwatch world unless I became anorexic, developed a penchant for uncomfortable, form-fitting clothing, and bowed to male society’s desire to see women “smile more.” I’m tired of feeling that female characters in games (and movies and TV and any other visual media) have to sell sex in order to seem strong. Blizzard, you did such a good job with so many other forms of diversity, so why couldn’t you put more effort into this part?

What’s the solution?

There are a number of things I think Blizzard could do to for both Overwatch and other present or future games to address this issue. First and foremost, don’t assume that all players are primarily interested in viewing female characters as sex objects and male characters as power fantasies. Characters in games often tend to be designed with the straight, male demographic in mind, and in particular, game developers assume that the people who play their games want to see sexy female characters. While some players certainly do, I would argue that players play Overwatch primarily for the gameplay. If you made the female characters less sexy and more realistic, I’m sure a number of male players would complain because Blizzard took away their eye candy. But would they stop playing as a result? Probably not.

Look at all those female fans! Photo from an article about Overwatch in the Washington Post

Secondly, get feedback on character designs from women and take it seriously. I’m making an assumption that the character designers and other people involved in design decisions at Blizzard are primarily men, because game development as a field contains way more men than women for a variety of reasons. If Blizzard did their due diligence, I’m sure they consulted people of various ethnicities when designing characters to represent different cultures around the world in order to avoid egregious stereotyping or any other faux pas that could cause offense. Obviously, Blizzard wants people around the world to play their games. But they seem to be ignoring the fact that half the world is composed of women, and that many women play and enjoy their games. The live audience for Overwatch League games often seems to be half women. So why not make an effort to include female voices in the design decisions so as not to potentially offend women like me who play the game?

Frankly, I am a bit offended that Blizzard seems to think I’m not worth the effort it would take to make how female characters look less offensive to me, and I imagine, many other players. That’s not to say I will stop playing Overwatch, or stop watching the Overwatch League. But making female characters look less sexy and more believable would make my gameplay experiences more positive. I sometimes play with my partner and his (male) friends, and it’s not uncommon for me to hear comments along the lines of “that new Mercy skin has nice boobs.” I’m told I should just ignore it, let it slide, because that’s “just how games are.” To that I say: that’s not how games have to be.

My Childhood History of Video Games

For a good chunk of my life, I’ve been fascinated by video games. I remember playing games on my dad’s computer when I was little – I can’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. I played games while listening to the dot matrix printer underneath the computer, and then was taught how to make slinkies out of the edges of the paper so I would still be entertained when my dad needed the computer again. They were “educational” games, I’m sure, though I can’t remember which games I played back then.

“Educational” was the major theme of the games I was allowed to play as a kid. Some of these games I remember very fondly – we had several of the Super Solvers games, including Treasure Mountain and Challenge of the Ancient Empires, which my brother and I played over and over. I also played quite a lot of Oregon Trail (I particularly remember playing it both at school and at home in 3rd grade), and Sim City 2000, which remains one of my favorite games to this day. My dad may still have the 3.5 inch floppies which contained many of these games floating around somewhere.

One game that proved pivotal in my childhood was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Not because it was a particularly exciting game – it wasn’t. But when I was in 3rd grade, my dad had promised both my brother and I that if we were able to reliably type 30 words per minute, we would each get our own computer which we could keep in our respectives rooms. I took that offer quite seriously – I really wanted my own computer – and sunk many hours into Mavis Beacon. Being older than my brother by a couple years, I was the first one to reach the goal, and had my very own computer in my room by the end of 3rd grade.

I remember that computer fondly. It was a hand-me-down from my dad’s work, and ran Windows 2.1. I wasn’t allowed to install much on it, only the pre-approved games like Sim City and Treasure Mountain. I probably spent more time playing the default Windows games that have come with Windows for decades – Solitaire, Minesweeper, Freecell and Hearts. I got to be particularly good at Freecell, to the point where it was rare that I wouldn’t be able to solve any board put in front of me.

PC games were pretty much all I had at home when I was growing up. My parents refused to buy us any consoles, even though our cousins and friends all seemed to have either a Nintendo or Sega system. When we visited family in Denver, my brother and I would spend as much time as we could playing games on one cousin’s Super Nintendo or another cousin’s Sega Genesis. I would watch more than play, but I had a particularly fondness for playing Columns on the Genesis. During the summer, we would head down the street to our neighbors, who had two kids of the same age as us, and who also had a Super Nintendo. I remember spending many afternoons trying – and failing – to beat Disney’s Aladdin, and being terrible at Street Fighter II.

The first handheld game system I remember being exposed to was the original Game Boy, which an older cousin had brought on a visit when we still lived in Denver. I remember that he had a Bugs Bunny game of some sort. I was obsessed with Bugs Bunny at the time, and wanted to play. I may or may not have monopolized that Game Boy the entire time my cousin was in town – I don’t recall. But I daydreamed for years after about having a Game Boy of my own.

This only intensified in 5th grade, when I met the girl who would remain my best friend through high school. She and her sister shared a Game Boy, as well as my favorite game at the time – Tetris. Sometimes I felt like going over to her house to hang out or spend the night was just an excuse for me to spend hours playing Tetris. I suspect she was annoyed with me more often than not in those days.

At one point, my brother and I hatched a plan to pool all of our Christmas money in order to buy a Game Boy and hide it from our parents. It was somewhere around $90 back then to get a Game Boy and a game, though I don’t think we ever agreed on which game we wanted to get with it. I had to have been the mastermind behind this scheme, because my brother decided at some point that he’d rather spend his hard-earned Christmas money on something more immediately gratifying.

Instead, I took what money I had and secretly bought a handheld Batman game – one of those horrible Tiger games that were difficult to make any sense out of. I never made it very far in that game, but I hid it away in my room and spent too much time on it anyway. The lure of being able to illicitly play a video game overrode any other considerations. When I was in elementary school and middle school, any game was a good game.

By the time I was in late middle school, my brother and I had begun more seriously petitioning our parents to let us get new games. My dad was generally on board, though consoles were still out of the question, as were any games that involved guns or other obvious forms of violence. Caesar 3 is a game my dad picked up that was a particularly big hit with my brother and I – and my dad as well. He put as many hours into that game as my brother or I did. We all remember it fondly, too. My brother had some success in convincing my parents to let him get games that his friends were playing, like Baldur’s Gate. I also was allowed to keep a copy of Dune 2000 which had been gifted to me by a friend.

My brother and I rarely had time limits on the games we played as kids. Since we often shared the same computer, we did have to swap places every so often. Caesar 3, for example, was only installed on the family computer, despite the fact that my brother and I both had our own computers by that time. More than anything else, my parents policed for content. I was in 8th grade by the time we were first allowed on the internet (it had only been around for a couple years by that point anyway), and we had strict limits on how much time we were allowed to spend online each day. My parents had complicated the matter by subscribing to dial-up without adding a second phone line, so sometimes our allotted time was cut short when my mom needed to use the phone. I didn’t even try to play games online until college because of those restrictions.

The world of video games only really started to open up to me towards the end of high school, when my brother managed to get an emulator plus a number of NES and SNES emulations from a friend of his. We both installed the emulators somewhat illicitly – my parents caught on at some point, I know, but by that point, we were both old enough and had enough control over our own computers that they couldn’t stop us. I spent many, many hours catching up on Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (I was really into the X-Men at the time), among others. Even though we were playing those games using mice and keyboards, we were both still able to grab pieces of the past that we felt we’d missed out on.

Looking Back

To this day, I’m still nostalgic for games in the SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64 eras. We never owned any of those systems, but through my cousins and friends, I was able to watch and even sometimes play a number of games on them. Back then, I was often resentful of my parents for not allowing us to spend our childhoods like our friends did, lost in the worlds that video games created. But I understand now why my parents made the decisions they did. Though our computer time was not limited (once we got our own computers, anyway), what we could do on them was. As a result, I probably spent a lot more time reading, writing, drawing, building with Legos, and playing outside than I would have otherwise.

I also truly think I appreciate games more now as a result of desiring them – and not being able to have them – as a kid. For lack of my own video games to play, I spent a lot of time at other people’s houses, watching as those other people played games. I still enjoy watching other people play games, and often find it more fun and less frustrating than playing those same games myself.

On the other side of that coin, I’m often more reluctant to jump into new games, for fear that I won’t be good that them because I didn’t put in all those hours of practice as a kid that my peers did. Before I bought my first system for myself – a refurbished Nintendo DS – I agonized over whether I would have too much trouble playing the games for it to be worth it. My fear was, of course, unfounded – Nintendo excels at making games with a very low barrier to entry. But still, I often keep myself from playing some games because I assume I am just bad at some types of games, and that they will only frustrate me as a result.

Which I am. My hand-eye coordination leaves much to be desired, in part because I’m not willing to put in the time needed to perfect my timing and precision. A part of me wonders how much of this comes from absorbing the tired trope that women aren’t as good at games as men. I know that’s not true, but I also know how powerful the social constructs behind those tropes really are.

Another part of it may be because… well, I’m an adult now. I know that my time has limits, and that I have other obligations. I also know what makes me frustrated, and am more apt to want to avoid becoming frustrated. I’m also conscious of how playing games can affect my mood, and how my mood can, in turn, affect how I feel about a game as I’m playing it. I have an amount of self-control and self-awareness with regard to how and why I play games which I certainly didn’t have when I was a kid.

Do I have an appreciation for games now that I may not have had, were my parents more lenient around the issues of video games when I was a kid? I honestly don’t know. I feel nostalgia for the games I encountered as a kid, but that nostalgia is based on small snatches of memories, tinged with jealousy and desire, which I was only able to start to satisfy as an adult. I felt like an outsider in the world of games then. In many ways, I feel like an outsider now – my relationship with games is still often one of looking at them from afar, rather than experiencing them firsthand.

Maybe, had I grown up with the ability to play any game, any time I wanted, I wouldn’t be so interested in them intellectually now. Perhaps having it all wouldn’t have driven me to seek out games as an adult to the extent that I have over the past 15 years. Or maybe I would’ve become much more a part of the gaming community, rather than feeling as though I can only exist on the fringes.

On the Process of Starting a Blog

To a creative person, there’s nothing more intimidating than a blank piece of paper. Like most creative people out there, I want to be able to express myself in any way I want, with no limitations. But, also like most creative people, I am at my best when I am given boundaries and constraints which I can work within. If an artist tells you they feel the most inspired when staring at a blank canvas, there’s a 95% chance they’re lying to you.

I’ve been wanting to start a personal blog for many years now. I enjoy writing. I’ve been journaling on and off since elementary school. In college, and I’m dating myself a bit here, I had a LiveJournal, which I kept up to date particularly while studying in Germany. Later, during grad school, I attempted to add a blog to my first hand-coded personal site, and succeeded in writing two posts which have since been lost to wherever badly coded websites go when they die.

My most successful blog to date was a book review blog. I designed the site myself, built a theme in WordPress, and launched it in early 2014. I made myself a schedule. I forced myself to write more than a sentence or two about most of the novels I read. I started following the blogs of other book reviewers so that I could have a hope at getting a readership. After a year of reading, writing, and posting, I decided the only part I really enjoyed about it was reading the books. When the hosting and domain name expired, I let the blog disappear without protest.

In the three years I worked for Deque, I wrote a handful of blog posts about accessibility and design. And you know what? Writing those posts was fun. They required research. They helped me to learn new things. Even more, writing the posts helped me to understand the breadth of my existing knowledge. As a person who’s experienced varying degrees of impostor syndrome throughout my professional life, I found that particularly helpful. And I resolved to start writing about things I knew on my own.

That was a couple years ago now. I refreshed this website – and finally got it moved to WordPress – in late 2017. In spring of 2018, I stopped working at Deque, and reclaimed a lot of free time as a result. Now it’s the beginning of 2019, and I am finally writing my first post.

It’s taken me a long time to understand what I want this blog to be. I’m not sure I fully know yet. What I do know is that I like to write, I like to research, and I want to spend more time researching and writing about things I’m interested in. I’m interested in a wide variety of things, so I’m not going to limit myself to any particular topics. I want to aim to write a post every month or so. So far, those are my only goals for this blog.

So here’s to 2019, and here’s to writing.