Centre for Critical Psychology
University of Western Sydney
Sydney, Australia

Video games have been the object of some considerable fears and enthusiasms. On the one hand, they are seen as purveyors of violence, especially in boys and on the other, they are promoted as producing practice in important cognitive skills and girls are often understood as missing out because of their relative lack of interest in games. This paper explores both the concerns surrounding young children and evidence about the practices of game-playing themselves. Based on data produced on an Australian Research Council-funded project which explores video game-playing practices amongst boys and girls aged 8 to 11, the paper focuses in particular on gender differences in both game-playing and interview responses and on different ways of performing masculinity and femininity amongst game-players. In addition, the analysis concentrates on the relation of pleasure and danger in video game playing and the ways that girls and boys respond to what appear as ‘dangerous pleasures’ and ‘pleasurable danger’.

Introduction

In recent years a number of major concerns have been raised in relation to the safety of children in public and private spaces, both in relation to their vulnerability to dangerous adults, but also the problem of dangerous children who prey on others. While the media has been implicated in some of the killings (video nasties in the British James Bulger murder, television in the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey), video games have been especially implicated in the spate of high school killings perpetrated by teenage boys, often, it seems, boys who understood themselves as social misfits. All these examples feature characteristically, a dangerous male ( sometimes adult often a child or a teenager) who is violent towards his school mates, and/or sexually predatory towards young children, and often the proto-sexual girl, as in the case of James Bulger and Jon Benet Ramsey respectively. This last point sometimes appears obliquely for example in the case of the Columbine killings the perpetuators were portrayed as outsiders who often described by other students as creepy, unattractive unable to get a date as if this could explain it and where, according to media reports , the victims were selected for their beauty, their athletic prowess, their popularity and most disturbingly for their race. This issue has led to a huge public anxiety about video games, especially in relation to violent games (von Feilitzen and Carlsson Eds, 2000) Equally, there are those who stress the cognitive potential of games and champion them as potential ways to develop the advanced skills necessary for the 21^st century (Provenso, 1991). We are left with a confusion of pro and anti positions, but in a sense both positions tend to share some psychological similarities in that they both assume a pregiven psychological subject who is affected either for good or bad by the outside influence of games. This position lines up neatly with the tradition of media studies usually referred to as ‘effects research’. However, detractors usually use a theory of subjectivity which substitutes activity for passivity and sociology for psychology (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2000). The work presented in this paper attempts to address this problem by using work which understands the human subject as produced within a complex interplay of signs and discourse, rather than as a pre-given individual acted upon by a pre-given society (Henriques et al, 1998).

While there is a considerable amount of hype about the dangers and wonders associated with video and computer games, there is relatively little research which actually focuses on game-playing by young children in a way that allows an understanding of how children are actively produced as subjects within the practices and discourses of game-playing themselves. The project presented here works on the premise that what we might call subjectivity is not pregiven, but is actively produced and regulated by the technologies of the social and the self (Foucault, 1976, 19 ,19 ). In addition, we would understand both ‘violence’ and ‘cognitive skills’ as understandable within this framework. For us, the aim is to understand how game-playing works as a discursive practice to position subjects within it, be they children or parents. Theoretically, we rely on a mixture of post-structuralism, semiotics and psycho-analysis (Henriques et al, 1998, Walkerdine, 1990, for example), as well as notions of performativity (Butler, 1997).

Within this framework we may be able to begin to think about violence, pleasure and danger in video game playing a little differently. In particular, how do the features of violence, sexuality, death and pleasure figure both in video games and in the practices of the players themselves? Perhaps this approach might allow us to move away from a simple dichotomy between violence and cognition and a simple opposition between activity and passivity, towards the implication of a more complex understanding of the production of subjectivity.

The research project discussed here is funded by an Australian Research Council large grant and uses two methods of data collection — ethnography and interview. To facilitate the observation and recording of the children playing video games, video game clubs were set up in two after school care centres in the inner and outer west of Sydney. Children aged between eight and eleven were invited to take part on the basis of their interest in game-playing. In each club, 24 children took part, 12 boys and 12 girls. In the club, which lasted for between an hour and an hour and a half three times per week for 10 weeks, the children played games either singly or in small groups, with one group being videotaped each week. During the taping we chose single and mixed sex groups and recorded the children using a split screen technique in which the game image appeared in one corner of the screen and the children playing the game in the rest. After the club, the children and their parents were interviewed in their homes about the club experience but also about video and computer games more generally. At the time of writing we are into the final stage of interviewing after the second club.

In understanding parental regulation of game-playing, we need to pay attention to the discourses through which subject positions are already set up within public debate and the popular imagination. Games are already set up as potentially violent and harmful and the concerns arising from the killings at a number of American high schools have confirmed this. Previous research has presented two subject positions for boys in particular: the proto-violent/criminal working class black or white boy and the middle class rational explorer of the new information super-highway (Walkerdine, Dudfield and Studdert, 1999). For girls, the position is less clear, but concern about young girls focuses less on violence and more on exposure to adult sexuality (Walkerdine, 1997).

It is noteworthy therefore that in both a British pilot (Walkerdine, 1998) and the Australian study, similar concerns arise on the part of parents about their children’s involvement in video and computer games. In particular, regulation of both boys and girls focuses on amount of time available for game-playing and the time of day when games are to be played. Many parents believe that it is imperative to curtail the time spent game-playing as this is what is likely to produce violence and addiction.

Parents of girls, especially middle class girls, sometimes appear more overtly regulative than the parents of boys. In fact, a number of parents explicitly discouraged their daughters from playing video games in favour of ‘educational’ computer games. The girls simply did not have the games or equipment at home to play, even though they liked the games. A number of parents of girls heavily regulated their daughters’ television viewing, which it was felt would get in the way of homework (even at ages 8 to 11). While they did not overtly regulate game-playing, in effect the regulation was total because hardly any of the girls were actually allowed to own video-game playing equipment or games, while parents were happy for girls to spend time playing educational games on a parental computer.

While parents tended to express a set of concerns about games, these were exclusively parental discourses and anxieties. The children accepted video games as simply part of life and a part of play, which one either liked or not, just like any other game.

Here, however, we want to point to some differences in the practices and subject-positions of gendered game-playing. During the video-taped observations of game-playing at the computer game club, boys’ and girls’ game playing practices tended to differ considerably. We have just completed our fieldwork and are at the beginning of the data analysis phase of the project and so are not yet in a position to present a fully-formed analysis. What we will do here instead is to provide examples of girls and boys playing to demonstrate some of the differences that we are observing.

Almost without exception, girls seemed to play games in a way which suggested they were a vehicle for social interaction. Although girls enjoyed game playing as an experience just as much as boys, and were quite adept at playing the games, their enjoyment seemed to be connected with the social aspects of game playing. The excitement and intensity for the girls seemed to revolve around the overall embodied and physical experience, rather than from the focused attention to a particular game, character or screen event. The girls were quite ambivalent about gaining any mastery over the technical skills required for them in the game, and would play (albeit with a great deal of skill) with much less intensity and involvement in the game.

Girls’ talk around the game would include discussions about the characters and graphics, discussions about their friends, discussions about what happened at school that day and discussions about a television programme they watched the night before. The game playing was almost incidental or secondary to the social interaction occurring. It was certainly not poor playing. But nor was it intense and involved playing. On some occasions, the game was barely even noticeable as featuring in the group experience. In one instance for example, a group of three girls were playing together. They deliberately chose a one player game, and while each girl would have her turn at the controls, the other two girls would sit and watch, whilst chatting about all manner of other topics, and, most interestingly, doing their French knitting! The game was not the focus of attention: it simply represented another form of entertainment which could be undertaken within a social context.

The boys, on the other hand, when playing amongst themselves, did not play in a particularly chatty manner. However there were marked differences between different kinds of boys, especially in terms of class. The degree of interaction between middle class boys is much higher than between working class boys. They talk much more to each other, they explain things and describe their reactions and what is happening in the game to each other. We experimented with a game called Mario Smash Brothers, mixing boys of different ages and markedly different intellectual abilities. It was clear over a number of weeks that the boys who were understood in school as slow learners (who were usually working class) or had behavioural problems, played the game as a kind of solitary passion. They described their activities to themselves and others very infrequently. If mixed up with children of other abilities, they would occasionally enter into the chat, but often did not. When we grouped five boys together, who were all understood as slow learners, the silence was deafening. Finally, after about half an hour, one of them announced out of the blue that playing Mario Smash Brothers with these four people was the happiest day of his life and yet up to that point he had barely said a word. As a preliminary conclusion, there also seems to be differences between boys from different occupational groups within the middle class, especially between business people and cultural industry people such as journalists, artists and academics. It hard to generalise form such a small group, however, among the children of business people a group we could expect to find more imbued with notions of instrumental rationality, there was noticeably a lesser propensity to share information and discernibly greater importance attached to winning. For this group, it is fair to say that the game appeared to represent something more than simply a game. They often openly encouraged themselves to do better with phrases such as ‘come on, you know how to do this’ and ‘don’t let him beat you’. This kind of behaviour was entirely absent in the sons of the cultural industry parents. These boys, who were often dressed in quite an alternative way, would often take delight in something catastrophic happening to them and were more sympathetic to others. In addition, they appeared to have less of an emotional investment in winning.

How might we say that these children are performing masculinity and femininity? What are the features of those performances? In a preliminary paper such as this, it is impossible to capture the detailed and nuanced data that we are collecting. The complexity of the game-playing practices and the production of children as subjects within them cannot be captured at this early stage. However, what we would like to do is to think in a rather preliminary way about the relation of pleasure to danger and some of the differences between girls and boys that are appearing at this stage.

One of the things which has emerged from our very preliminary analyses is that the girls tend to play games differently from many of the boys and be interested in different aspects of the games. In particular, girls appear not to be so concerned about winning and to treat the game as a scenario for fantasy and sociable conversation. This comes up in the club sessions as well as the interviews with both girls and parents. The parental interviews in fact, as we have seen, tend not to favour video game playing and the girls themselves do not report this as their favourite activity. What the girls appear to favour is activities which allow them to develop fantasy scenarios in which they can play-act favourite characters. For this, the current favourite appears to be the American television series ‘Charmed’. It is this which seems to afford at least some of the girls the most pleasure. What pleasure therefore for girls is to be found in video games? One of the problems with the games is that they do not invite the development of alternative story and plot lines, as does a television programme (cf Jenkins, 1992). The structure of the games invites mastery and control as forms of pleasure, rather than exploration of plot or characterisation. For girls (or boys for that matter) to enjoy other aspects of the game, can be understood as subversive. Above we made the point that at least at first sight it appears that it is the middle class boys from business families who are most interested in winning and therefore in the form of mastery and control (instrumental rationality) offered by the games. In fact, in previous work, one of us (Walkerdine, 1990) characterised this mastery in terms of a fantasy of omnipotence. In that respect, the form of pleasure that it produces can be understood as related to what psychoanalysts would understand as a defence against powerlessness, in this case usually understood as the anxiety of (as well as desire for) merging with the mother. This places masculinity, femininity and sexuality as clearly on the agenda when in comes to understanding gender differences in both practices and the pleasures afforded by game-playing. Within psychoanalytic forms of explanation, girls and boys live differently the desire to control the mother, for which Freud used the Oedipus myth and Lacan stressed the importance of the third term and the phallic order of patriarchy. While we do not want to suggest that psychoanalytic explanations in any way offer a total explanation of our data — far from it. We do think that the insights gained from psychoanalysis might be suggestive when it comes to understanding gender differences in relation to pleasure and danger.

In particular, while adults stress the dangers of game-playing, less attention has been focused on the obvious pleasures afforded to children as players and the complex relation between that and danger. In particular what does this tell us in relation to public concerns about the issue of the relation of dangerous children to children in danger (Walkerdine, 2001)?

One afternoon, during the club, two girls were playing a game called Crash Bandicoot 3, using a scenario called ‘Boneyard’. They were playing at its lowest level, 1. What was different and interesting about this part of the game is that it involved a dinosaur- like monster who confronted the players, coming towards them as a monster rather than running away from them and therefore being under their control, as is usual. The girls were sitting in front of the console swinging their legs and alternately screaming and giggling as the monster came towards them. What made this game so much fun and why did they find incredible pleasure in being chased by the monster? The girls were not very good at the game, but this hardly seemed to bother them. In fact, their defeat by the monster seemed to be pleasurable and was accompanied by squeals of ‘ooh, he’s got us!’. While boys too sometimes laughed at defeat and some boys (especially the ones with ‘learning difficulties’) for example, made cars in racing games crash deliberately, it was the aspect of being chased and being afraid of this and taking pleasure in it which was so singular and so suggestive. In fact, in this instance, the girls were making so much noise that a group of boys came over to watch was so much fun, demanding the game for themselves when the girls had finished. However, when they were given the game, the group of boys found it quite uninteresting especially since they could find no pleasure in being beaten at the first level and soon moved on to another game. What, we may ask, was so pleasurable for the two girls about being frightened? And why did the boys not react in the same way?

In order to make sense of what at first seems quite puzzling, we turned to feminist work on the horror movie genre, in which the pleasure of being frightened is a stock in trade. In particular, Clover (1992), Modleski (1986) and Creed (1993) all deal with the relation between the monstrous and the feminine, drawing to some extent on psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Kristeva (1982) on horror, but also on post-structuralism and post-modernism. In particular, Creed makes a clear relation between monstrousness and the figure of the phallic mother, while Clover discusses the importance of the feminisation of the victims of male violence in horror films and therefore the identification of a male audience with female masochism. All of this work assumes a predominantly male audience and attempts a reading of horror which understands it as an engagement of the masculine imaginary with fantasies of the feminine, a feminine which is by turns experienced as compulsive and repulsive, to be moved towards and rushed away from. What the authors of these works raise is the importance of the pleasure of being frightened. But whose pleasure is this? For Modleski (1986) there is little pleasure for female spectators

‘And yet the mastery that these popular texts no longer permit through effecting closure or eliciting narcissistic identification is often reasserted through projecting the experience of submission and defencelessness onto the female body. In this way the texts enable the male spectator to distance himself somewhat from the terror. And, as usual, it is the female spectator who is truly deprived of "solace and pleasure" ‘(p163). Other feminist work, less reliant on psychoanalytic concepts, has attempted to examine women’s pleasure in relation to ‘women’s genres’ such as soaps (Geraghty, 1991), romance novels (Radway, 1984). In particular, the latter work focuses on the place of watching or reading within domestic practices, but has not focussed on the pleasures of horror. However, from this work we can understand why men might enjoy horror and it is indeed instructive when we think about boys and violent games, but what to make of the obvious enjoyment of the two young girls? The game is different from the film in that it is interactive and that does seem to be a constituent of this pleasure: it is the girls who could control the monster coming towards them and it is they who could impede and defeat its progress. The dinosaur is rather masculine in appearance, with a large horn in the centre of its face, as well as two other horns at ‘ear’ height. At first sight therefore, the girls’ pleasure appears to be quite masochistic and female masochism is not only an element in male fantasies of horror films, but was a particular obsession of male psychoanalysts. For after all, the idea that girls enjoy being attacked has formed a staple aspect of issues from justifications of rape to debates about pornography. If we look at it another way, we might see that the girls find it much easier to tolerate being frightened — they are not so full of anxiety that they have to control away the possibility of being frightened.

In the club, the screams of the two girls attracted a great deal of, especially male, attention. The leg swinging and the laughter presented a picture of girls having a good time, of pleasure and enjoyment that seemed to invite envy. Indeed it did. It led some boys to wonder what was so good that the girls had so much fun? But, when the boys played it, they found no pleasure in being attacked. As Modleski argues, if victimisation is understood as feminised, only the defeat can be understood as masculine. The girls could tolerate the anxiety because they had nothing to prove and nothing to lose. If Modleski is correct, and victimisation (losing in this case) puts the boys into a feminine position, they must win to regain their masculinity — and it is this which would bring pleasure. In this respect, the toleration of defeat or lack drive to win by the ‘slow learners’ (already losers?) and the sons of cultural professionals (already feminised?) might be viewed in a different light. The girls in this incident also reported liking the physicality of the vibrating joy stick and being out of control. Of course being out of control, ‘going mental’ (Pini, 2000), is understood as both closer to the feminine and closer to madness and a state which many of the boys want but understandably find much harder to tolerate.

One of the ‘slow-learning’ boys, Terry, liked to play Mario Super Racer. When he played with other boys, he liked to squeal with pleasure, but the others found it annoying. Squealing was perhaps a girlish thing, whereas for them the pleasure was in winning, mastering, controlling. Terry combined high-pitched squealing in pleasure and excitement and exultation with a range of expressions such as ‘I’m gonna get you sucker’, ‘you’re dead meat’ and ‘life is life’ (when he lost) and aside from a series of swear-words, this was the limit of his communication during games. Also, not withstanding his official designation as a ‘slow learner’, he was more than proficient at most of these games and often beat boys who were older than he was. In addition, he consciously worked to improve his games, often practising solo for quite a while before agreeing to allow somebody else to play with him. Finally, he constantly urged himself to ‘pull his socks up’, while literally tugging at his own socks. In summary, one of the things that could be said about Terry and one of reasons why he attracted our interest, was that he represented a site where a whole series of narratives of gender seemed to be written across him. His blood-curdling squeals seemed quite different from those of the two girls, for although they were squeals of pleasure, they appeared to accompany the need to overcome anxiety and race properly (Mario Super Racer) or win fights (Mario Smash). The vigour of the squeals suggested in act that this anxiety was fairly extreme and the need to win therefore very powerful.

We want to propose that this approach to pleasure and danger, through an engagement with an anxiety about the performance of masculinity and femininity, is a fruitful direction to pursue as an explanatory framework in relation to both gendered practices and to violence. We suggest that the thesis of mastery as a masculine fantasy of omnipotent control also bears further scrutiny. We might add here, that while girls appeared not to be interested in mastery when they played games in a social setting, when they talked about home game playing, some of them talked about a more competitive attitude to games when they played alone and in private. Was mastery therefore a secret pleasure for girls? Secret because it would challenge the performance of femininity? Such insights provide hypotheses for us to interrogate in the rest of the data.

Although this work is in its very early stages and is very far from the detailed and nuanced analysis of the data that we need, nevertheless, we would suggest that this line of analysis presents a fruitful way forward in beginning to understand how to understand pleasure and danger in relation to gender. While other aspects of gender issues have been considered elsewhere (Walkerdine, Dudfield and Studdert, 1999; Thomas and Walkerdine, 2000 a and b), there is no doubt that the concern with pleasure and danger hits at the heart of public concerns about video games and therefore merits further analysis.

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