This semester I am teaching a game studies course that I think may be one of the best courses that I have ever taught. The course is called “Women and Games” and it is a cross-listed undergraduate-graduate course. Over the course of the last couple of years as we have looked at developing a minor and graduate focus in game studies I have been teaching more and more of these cross-listed courses and the enrollment result has always been the same…the course fills within hours of registration beginning and fills with students who are 75% (or more) cis-het white male and majoring in technology fields and the majority of the other students are graduate students in the humanities.
This summer I decided to switch gears a bit and narrow the scope of my games and culture course a bit and reframe it as a women and games course that would look at the role and conditions of women in technology fields and the games industry. A funny thing happened with what I thought was going to be a fairly small change. With the inclusion of the word Women in the title of the course the student demographics were completely changed. It went from 75% or more male to 14 women and 2 men of the 16 enrolled students and the disciplines were still varied and we are comprised of folks from the STEM disciplines and the humanities.
The course is broken into 4 units: STEM education and children; STEM education in post-secondary school; stories of women working in the field, and games and research of women in and around the games industry. Within the classroom itself one of the main changes that we made was the way day-to-day class time was spent. In previous semesters we have had distinct separation between discussion and game play days, but this semester we reconfigured class time so that we did both in the same day. Specifically, students were charged to think and talk about the pieces that we had read for the day while playing in groups of 2-4 students and then to reconvene as a group and to talk about our small group discussions.
In terms of games choices, we played games that were discussed specifically in the readings or that were developed by the women’s stories that we were reading for the day. For example, the day that we read a study about group dynamics among middle school students playing Rock Band so we spent a day playing cooperative “party” games like Rock Band, Nickelodean Dance, and Johan Sebastian Joust. While playing these games students had to not only think about the articles that we had read, but how their own group was behaving while playing. I found it fascinating that many of the students playing the games talked specifically about how the articles made them think specifically about how they were behaving while they were playing games themselves. Where they stood, how they moved, who they bumped or didn’t (in Joust, which required physical contact). They were all very aware.
What happened with this change was nothing short of amazing. Students were having real discussions not only about the games that they were playing, but also about the conditions under which these games were created and what effect that the roles and derth of women in STEM disciplines may have on game characters and narratives. Having students engage in these just-in-time discussions also gave them the opportunity to speak from their positions of expertise and add a new point-of-view for students outside of their disciplines. And we also see students putting the readings into action. We have people thinking about their bodies and the ways that those bodies act and are acted upon within this space. We have people thinking about what bodies and beings mean in technology spaces and workplaces. And I think that the changes in the classroom dynamics may have been influenced by the ways that women are socialized and the shared experiences of the women in the class who have had specific (and sometimes shared) experiences working in and with technology.
I don’t think that the behaviors and interactions of the women in the course are because of the sex or gender of any of the participants, but rather because of their own experiences and the readings that are being done in the class. I think that when we focus on reading about mentoring and community building among women in these spaces that it becomes more readily inacted. Students see the import of these things when they read it, but then to talk through these things while playing together it seems a natural extension that behaviors would be effected as well.
When the summer semester originally started I felt equal parts disappointment and joy that I had a games class devoid of cisgendered, heterosexual white men. Disappointed because I knew that they would have the most to learn (and offer if they were willing) to the course and joyous because I knew that this would give already marginalized folks a space to think and talk about their experiences and the intersectional nature of those experiences. As the semester draws to a close I can only hope that the students in this course have learned as much as I have and that their experience has been as amazing as mine has been.
