Asymmetric Play: Feminist Digital Arts Pedagogies and the Gendered Politics of Video Games

Move the conversation beyond “How DO we teach video games?” to “How SHOULD we teach video games?” Concepts and practices for art teachers to address the gendered politics within games and within the culture(s) that create them.

Presentation notes PDF, with reference list, available here:
http://gildedgreen.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/asymetric_play.pdf

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Digital games are being created by and for a broad, diverse array of people, and are now a ubiquitous cultural media form. Over two-thirds of Americans report participation in electronic games, owing in part to the omnipresence of mobile devices. Unsurprisingly, over the last decade, art educators have explored ways to meaningfully engage with this facet of visual culture through arts pedagogy.

However, while they are ubiquitous in contemporary culture, embody a wide variety of voices, and address a wide variety of audiences, video games, and the professional and critical cultures that accrete around them, have had a historically poor record with respect to gender equity, representation, and justice. Critical, academic, and popular discourses around video games reiterate androcentric narratives, professional creative cultures around them engage in tacitly and overtly sexist workplace practices resulting in a field were men are over-represented, and games as cultural artifacts themselves often invoke rote gendered tropes.

K-12 arts pedagogues, if we choose to include games in our curricula, have a responsibility not just to impart technical skills and formal literacies with respect to games, but to address, via feminist pedagogical practice and curricular content, the gendered politics both within games as artifacts and within the culture(s) that create them.

The aim of this talk is to move the discourse regarding video games in art education beyond the novelty of games as a medium and discuss rationales and strategies for thinking critically about how we teach games as an artform. This talk will discuss how the K-12 art classroom, rather than the computer science classroom, or post-secondary game design program, is especially well-positioned to address the gendered political realities of games as artifacts, and of the creative/professional cultures that surround them. Invoking the holistic nature of most feminist pedagogies, which entail both feminist curricular content and pedagogical practice, the talk will then share examples and experiences of both. The question of curricular content will be addressed with recommendations for disrupting traditional game canons that prioritize technical and entrepreneurial achievements of mostly male creators by introducing experimental works by creators from traditionally marginalized positions. The question of pedagogical practice will be addressed through discussion of ways to teach games that go beyond technical skill building and respect feminist art pedagogy’s emphasis on the importance of embodied experience.

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