Derrick Martin
Kirsten Ellis
ABSTRACT
The majority of gender studies of computer games examines game subsets, such as the first twenty minutes of gameplay, and extends their conclusions to the whole game and the game industry in general. The hypothesis of the subset effectively representing the entire game requires testing. This study addresses this problem by comparing the results of two commonly used subset methods to an analysis of a whole game.
The findings show that the two subset analyses fail to identify gender representation inequalities that examining a whole game was able to discover. This result throws into doubt subset analysis methodology in games and indicates that the results of current subset techniques, such as those used by government games rating boards, are flawed. In analyzing the whole game, this study has developed a gender role coding technique for whole games that may be useful in future studies.
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Index Terms
- Playing the game: effective gender role analysis techniques for computer games
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