Reading Lisa Nakamura’s “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital”, I agreed with what she said but I wonder if she did not go far enough in her analysis (which could just be an issue of the context it was published). Most noticeably, though she connected video games and the sexist/racist community surrounding them, she did not delve into the root of both of the issues. I think that by focusing not only on the symptoms of the issues but on the sources of them, a better sense can be grasped of exactly why video games attract the people that it does, and why people attract the video games that they do.
What I mean by this is, why do so much more males self-identify as gamers than women, even though nearly equal amounts play games? Why do the most privileged group find themselves attracted to video games and the culture surrounding them (the two being inseparable)? I believe the answer lies in the historical construction and perpetuation of masculinity.
Western thought has divided the body and the mind into two separate entities, and the patriarchy stakes its claim in both, supposing superiority both physically and mentally. But technology rapidly diminishes the practicality and necessity of physical strength (which is where the supposed superiority originates), as technological advances equalize or eliminate the physical force necessary to survive. With the displacement then of masculine energy and fixation, I believe that it finds a perfect home in video games.
Video games serve as a triumph of technology, satisfying the supposed mental superiority of masculinity, and I believe it perfectly satisfies the feeling of physical superiority. Video games do this by translating physical power into power of a plethora of kinds and of a deluge of fantasies. Video games provide a playground for power structures centered around the player, and the dominant and most successful (financially) games have centered it around giving the player power and constructing a narrative of domination by the player. The most obvious example of this is FPS (first-person shooter) games, where players are prompted to kill oftentimes innumerable numbers of enemies, the player playing the role of a Rambo-fantasy, where players find reward in the ultimate end of life: death, and the inflicting of it upon others.
But other, less obvious, genres also prey on these kinds of narratives to achieve what effects they achieve, and such a pattern exists because video games as a medium require player interaction. Whereas other mediums show or tell their message, with video games, the player has a part in constructing it. Because of this, games fall into the lazy pattern of providing power trips to players, making the game and its objects things to be conquered, overcome, challenges to be completed. This preoccupation with domination of the Other by the Subject of the individual is a western preoccupation, and one endemic of the white patriarchy, so it is only fitting that video games are bent to the will of those in power, and are used to perpetuate the power structures that exist at a societal level.
Other mediums achieve and deliver their message by a diminishing of power of the observer, but video games cede varying levels of power over to the player. But video games as a form have been made by and for proponents of the systems of power and tend to perpetuate them in their video games. So while video by necessity cede over some power to the player, being usually products of white western systems they by popular vote cede over most of the power, and focus the rest on a struggle by the player to accumulate the rest. The Western patriarchy has dictated that video games be about an individual effort to subdue everything else, and even video games that focus on collective effort (strategy games, city-building games, etc) tend to place the player in the role of a ruler or some such position, thus making the actor of action in these games not a unified collective, but an individual, a pattern precious to the Western narrative.
Video games are a medium perfect to the population of the Western male narrative, because rather than simply containing the content of said systems of power (a movie about a male ruler or a male who dominates others), it itself can be a proponent of said system of power. I think commentators like Nakamura would benefit from viewing the culture of video games as not arising only from the social situation of video games, but also from the medium itself, in order to lend further strength to arguments concerning them.