Video games as cultural studies other

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.

Introduction

Cultural studies asks us to put video games ¹ into a broader context. How can we think about video games ‘through the intricate entanglements of active meaning-making and power relations,’ as Ang defines the sensibility of cultural studies (2020: 286)? And importantly, how can we do this without focusing on games in isolation? Game scholars Chess and Consalvo posit that ‘those who do not study or play video games tend to think of the topic as “other”’ (2022: 159). I argue, however, that far beyond questions of academic interest in video games’ ‘otherness’ is a cultural construct that deeply shapes how we engage with them. As the editors of this journal have argued, within cultural studies ‘culture remains…a problematic rather than a problem’ (Gray et al., 2019: 8). Thinking about video games here as a problematic for cultural studies, I try to account for why games are relatively easy to talk about as a culture but they seem to pose problems to a cultural studies project that, as Nieborg and Hermes (2008) call for, would ideally seek to position them within popular culture more broadly.

In 2010, I ended an article on video games and cultural studies with a call not to study games as a culture but to study games as part of culture: ‘The legacy of cultural studies on which video game studies should draw is… to investigate how video game culture is constructed. This is a critical, not descriptive practice’ (Shaw, 2010: 418). Yet, as pointed out in Butt's (2022) dissertation ‘Gaming Lifeworlds,’ that call is ambiguous in the action it is hailing:

Reading Shaw's provocation as an aspiring games scholar, that we should look at videogames in culture rather than as culture per se, felt like a complete paradigm shift for me. During the reading group discussion, a PhD student had asked, ‘but how would we even do something like that? Wouldn’t that just be studying everything?’ At the time, none of us knew how to answer this task. (Butt, 2022: 279)

I in this essay I have attempted to respond to my own call by reconciling the popularity of games with their continued ‘otherness’ in the United States via cultural studies. Cultural studies, I argue, can help unpack critical questions regarding games’ relationship to culture. Why is it so hard for us to think about video games as part of popular media culture more broadly? How, despite decades of research, news stories, and popular media representation pushing back on it, has the stereotypical gamer remained so hard to dislodge from our imaginations of who plays games? What does the way we interact with games do to our understanding of where they fit into broader culture?

In answering the above questions, I assert that regardless of their ubiquity video games have consistently been positioned as ‘other’ to popular culture more broadly. We can see the implications of this by considering that the indelible gamer stereotype is as much a product of popular culture as it is game culture. Moreover, the phenomenological experience of playing games reinforces the idea that they are distinct from a broader sense of mainstream US culture. All pose challenges for studying games via cultural studies, and in turn are issues that must be addressed head on in arguments for diversity and inclusivity in games. Cultural studies should more directly engage with the how games are othered as part of making sense of their place within broader meaning-making practices and power structures.

Why are games different

It is easy to point to the proliferation of games and games related media as a sign that games are a pop cultural phenomena (Berger, 2002) or that America is a ‘gamer nation’ (Wills, 2019). Pew reports that 43% of US adults and 85% of US teens play video games (Perrin, 2018; Sidoti, 2024). Engelstätter and Ward show that among people aged 15 and older in the United States ‘video game playing has indeed become more of a mainstream activity’ (2022: 9). Hjorth (2011) and Crawford (2012) show that games and aspects of global gaming culture are increasingly part of everyday life all around the world. The amount of money made by the video game industry is used to justify any attention to them as a phenomenon, particularly when that number is positioned against other traditional media industries that are seen as central to popular culture, like television and film. As Powers argues, though, ‘consumption is not synonymous with endorsement,’ (2012: 868). The revenue generated by the global games industry, is not enough to change how games are situated culturally (Kerr, 2017).

In my own work, teaching, and everyday life, the otherness of video games cannot be ignored. I have taught media studies classes for over a decade, for example, and even as an increasingly large number of my students play or have played video games, it remains difficult for them to critique them in the same way they do other popular culture texts. For my students, games are ‘other’ to the media forms that seem more centrally important for ideological critique. This is true despite the fact that video games are clearly part of popular culture using Powers’ theorizing of the term ‘popular’; we can understand video games through the lens of people using them to make ‘meaning, community, and connection’ (2022: 468) including among those who might not call themselves gamers. Indeed, in making a case that game studies could help innovate cultural studies, Nieborg and Hermes argue that ‘from the perspective of cultural studies, games are more popular culture than most popular culture’ (2008: 143). And yet, a search for ‘gam*’ in the abstracts of the three major cultural studies journals demonstrates that their call for cultural studies to engage with games has yet to be fully heeded. ² The journal Cultural Studies has only six articles that talk directly about games. In the European Journal of Cultural Studies, there are 14, although nearly half of these are from a 2008 special issue on game studies edited by Nieborg and Hermes. Finally, in the International Journal of Cultural Studies there are 19 such articles, more than half of which are about games in Korea, China, and Japan (as I discuss more below). Although these are certainly not the only journals that publish cultural studies scholarship, searches in related media and communication journals yielded similar results. Echoing Yoon and Cheon's argument, interest in games, at least from a publication perspective, ‘has been low among media and cultural studies scholars’ (Yoon and Cheon, 2014: 470). I am not so sure that the problem is that interest is low, however. Rather, games are part of cultural constructions that place them as ‘other’ to the types of popular media cultural studies have tended to focus on, and the gatekeeping of game studies has helped reinforce this (Phillips, 2020b).

I am writing this from the perspective of US culture and of course, and the construction of games’ relationship to popular culture is different in other regions of the world. South Korea (Chee, 2023; Jin, 2010), Japan (Eiji and Steinberg, 2010; Steinberg, 2012), and China (Liboriussen and Martin, 2016), for instance, have long been described as countries where games are more visibly part of a mainstream popular culture. And indeed, as I note above, many of the articles from these three journals are about those three countries. The rest tend to focus on specific game texts or game experiences viewed through the lens of cultural studies, and the rest situate games within broader inquiries into media production or new media theory. Most research on games, even that produced about non-US contexts (Huntemann and Aslinger, 2013; Penix-Tadsen, 2019), is structured by a common thread of treating games as unique in comparison to other media or as unexpected sites of analysis.

That games are unique is not in question. Nieborg and Hermes’ (2008) assertion that game studies could help shape a new era of cultural studies rests on how digital games, in particular, are unique. Yoon and Cheon (2014) outline the many ways games as interactive media are different from other media such as television. However, how we understand that uniqueness, how it has been used to constitute games as ‘other’ is something we must be more critical of. When I push my students on why it seems more difficult to critique games than other forms of media, the reasons are not just about medium specificity or reluctance to critique something they enjoy. On the one hand, students have a clear perception that games and gamers are part of a culture that itself needs to be critiqued, whether they feel part of that culture or not. Also, their experience of games is so personal that they do not think of them as being consumed by a broader audience in a way that they are used to thinking about media they more readily critique. These twin issues, the perception of gamers and gamer culture and the phenomenological experience of games, shape what kinds of cultural critiques of games they see as possible.

The indelible gamer

Game scholars, industry organizations, advocacy groups, and even some game companies have spent decades trying to demonstrate that who plays games is much more diverse than is commonly imagined. Everyone plays games, in myriad ways, around the globe, and there has never been a greater diversity of types of video games and ways of accessing them. And yet, in the US the hegemonic idea of who really plays video games, what they play, who they play with, and what they are like have been very hard to change.

The idea of the ‘gamer’ is one I have tried to trouble in my own work (Shaw, 2012, 2013; Shaw and Chess, 2015), but the image of the hardcore, cisgender man, who is often (but not always) white, younger (or juvenile despite his age), and often (at least) middle class remains prominent in mainstream popular culture. Scholars have looked at the gamer stereotype in terms of how the game industry represents its audience (Chess et al., 2017; Cote, 2018; Kirkpatrick, 2017) and how news media represents gamers and video games (Maclean, 2016; McKernan, 2013; Shaw, 2010; Williams, 2003a). Game studies itself has tended to focus on PC/Console and hard core games, often ignoring mobile and casual games which are played by much larger and more diverse group of people (Chess and Paul, 2019; Leaver, 2017). Gamer as a construct though, however, exists far beyond gaming culture and game studies. Narine and Grimes (2009), for instance, look at Hollywood film representations alongside advertisements for PC and console games to analyze the construct of the ‘child gamer’. They find that the ‘child gamer’ performs ideological work that reinforces dualistic discourses of games as dangerous while simultaneously useful for training technological skills, which have been around since the earliest days of home gaming consoles (Newman, 2018).

The stereotypical male gamer permeates all of aspects US culture, even as counterstereotypical examples abound. Walk into any American chain store with children's clothing or decor, and one is likely to find many items referencing the owners’ dedication to being a ‘gamer’ in the section labelled ‘boys’. Similar shirts are just as often found in the ‘men’s’ section, although those tend to reference more nostalgic games and consoles. The male gamer as the default is bolstered by almost every counterexample media texts offer. The image of the cisgendered male gamer is often, but not always, heterosexual or represented as having no sexuality (although not always explicitly asexual). It is less common, however, that the gamer in mainstream media is predictably white. Increasingly, there are numerous examples of characters of color, straight and queer, of a variety of genders, who are represented as counterstereotypical gamers in recent films and television shows. ³ And yet, for nearly every instance, they are not necessarily being used to challenge the implicit stereotype of the male gamer.

What that stereotypical gamer plays are typically violent games, often online against other people, and their play is represented as obsessive and intrusive to how they should be spending their time (Narine and Grimes, 2009; Yoon and Cheon, 2014). The danger of playing online with others they do not know in real life is also a common refrain in procedural dramas, as is the toxicness of game culture and its overlaps with other misogynistic and racist online cultures. Whether as comic relief or as dire warning, playing in the dark, alone, with unhealthy snacks and detritus surrounding them or among others but glued to a screen and siloed off from the world by noise-cancelling headphones, the stereotypical gamer shows up repeatedly in popular culture. We have evidence that players themselves feel compelled to define themselves against the negative media stereotypes of gaming (Bergstrom et al., 2016), but we also know there are structures of games and gaming culture that reinforces toxicity which makes game spaces feel exclusionary (Gray, 2024; Paul, 2018).

As Dyer (1999) argues, it is not useful to simply reject stereotypes as inaccurate, which as I have suggested has been a recurring theme in game scholarship (Shaw, 2010, 2015). Instead, we must better understand the work these stereotypes are doing. This allows us, as Murray argues, ‘to critique power as relations of attention, and to identify these relations embedded within culture as a way of life’ (2020: 442). Narine and Grimes (2009) do this effectively for the child gamer, but what would such a project look like for games writ large? Related, we must consider that when popular culture such as television, film, and clothing designs define who gamers are and what gaming culture are like, it is working against efforts to make gaming spaces more inclusive from industry, academic, and community stakeholders. Such efforts can never be fully realized if popular representations do not follow suit. These are hegemonic ideas that shape everyone's relation to video games, not just the lives of those who play them. Our relationship to this medium, and interactive media more broadly, is also shaped by how we experience it, which in turn further shapes our ability to critique them.

Video games as ‘for-someone’ structures

Beyond how gamers and gaming have been represented, the phenomenological experience of consuming games is also key to understanding why they seem so separate from mainstream popular culture. Games we know pose methodological problems to text-based research methods because so much depends on how one plays them, who they are played with, and where they are played (Cole and Barker, 2020; Consalvo and Dutton, 2006; Fernández-Vara, 2014). Although all media are structured by the materiality of audiences' reception experiences (Benson-Allott, 2021), the bodily engagement required of games marks them as a very different media experience as Keogh explores: Their ‘embodied textuality… produces meaning across their experiential and textual qualities’ (Keogh, 2018: 199, emphasis in original). Games, and other interactive media, are uniquely personal in contrast to other mass media forms in both how they are designed and experienced.

According to Scannell (1996, 2000) much of traditional broadcast media such as television and radio are best described as ‘for-anyone structures’. A for-anyone structure is that which ‘in its organization and design, presents itself as usable and useful for anyone’ (Scannell, 2000: 6). These are the mass mediated texts that can be experienced as being watched by many others, producing imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) and reinforcing ideologies. Games are much more like ‘for-someone structures’, ‘designed for personal use only’ (Scannell, 2000: 7). This does not mean they do not also reinforce ideologies, but the scale at which they are imagined to work is much different. My students often suggest that there is something about the act of playing games, even with other people, that makes them feel personal whereas other media make them feel like they are part of an audience. And this is core to how they are designed as well.

The notion of an audience is always an industry construction (Ang, 1991), but in game design what has typically been used as the vision for ‘who this is for’ is the notion of player personas or archetypes (Hodent, 2017; Vahlo and Koponen, 2018; Yee, n.d.). People who like certain types of play, game mechanics, etc. can stand in for raced, classed, gendered, and aged people as well (i.e. the assumption that only older white women play mobile match games). Game design textbooks reference audiences and markets, of course, but they still talk about designing games in terms of imaging players who want specific experiences and have specific skill sets (Adams, 2013; Brathwaite and Schreiber, 2008). That core difference matters, as creating for an audience is different than creating for a type of player or experience. Even newer approaches to design that move beyond player personas, still imagine game audiences as aggregates rather than masses. As Kerr outlines, many major game studios increasingly rely on gathering player behavior metrics to make sense of what their ‘audience’ wants and ‘most small independent studios rely on in-game and community-related data to construct an impression of their “audience”’ (2017: 112). The aggregate of behavior becomes a new way of ‘audience making’, Kerr argues building on Napoli (Kerr, 2017; Napoli, 2010). This is in many ways a good shift, as it means designers are no longer simply designing for people ‘like them’ (Kerr, 2017), and some game makers actively bring in communities to inform their design, and strive to make games more accessible and inclusive (Henderson, 2020). This approach though, is different than imagining a mass audience.

In game design there does not seem to be the same sense of a public that legacy media industries use. This is important to understanding how games and the game industry have positioned themselves as, essentially, outside mainstream popular culture in the US. If designing for types of people, rather than groups of people, it will always be difficult for game companies to take responsibility for the toxic gamer cultures their spaces have produced and social/moral responsibility for the content of their products. If a game isn’t for ‘everyone’, or at least not a mass that is being envisioned as a mass, then the bigger picture of a culture that text might be part of is easily ignored by makers and players alike. They are creating an experience and, if they care to, they will try to make it welcoming to the type of people they think are entering the game space. That is different than trying to be part of popular culture's imagining of what types of worlds are possible. This in turn makes cultural critique of games seem, at least to my students and previous interviewees (Shaw, 2014), less important than that of other media. People who care deeply about games, certainly care about representation in them, but they are not seen as part of popular culture more broadly. Games have positioned themselves, and are positioned, as just outside of popular culture in ways that cultural studies is best suited to critically unpack.

Conclusion

Elsewhere I have argued that for my own work cultural studies seems an obvious approach to analyzing video games (Shaw, In press). However, as explored here I think that games pose interesting challenges to how cultural studies has tended to approach popular media. Other media technologies, like film, radio, and television were introduced in more communal consumer spaces (Marvin, 1990; Williams, 2003b). The domestication of these technologies did not make them immune to moral panics of course, but they did help shape them into ‘for-anyone’ structures (Scannell, 2000) although that was not an inevitable result (Williams, 2003b). Where media technologies fit into our lives structures our relationship to them. As Williams (2003b), describes, film went from a novelty to an art form when it moved from a single person viewer in a bar to the existing culturally valued space of the theater. Television became part of a communal family experience as it took the place of the living room radio (Williams, 2003b). The transistor radio, which allowed that medium to become more mobile and more personal, in turn made it an easy target for moral panics (Arceneaux, 2014) in ways that are corollary to video games (Kocurek, 2015). Games, however, did not become part of the domesticated home space in the same way other media did. When video game consoles moved into the home, they carried with them contradictory cultural connotations that surrounded arcade machines, such as being for everyone but really just for boys, or leading to tech savvy-ness while also being a waste of time—connotations video games still carry today (Newman, 2018). And as Taylor's forthcoming book explores, the spaces in which games are played in the home continue to shape who feels welcome to play (Taylor, 2024). This separation of games from other media is endemic to how we experience them and in turn how we might approach them in cultural studies.

Scholars have shown how the dynamics of digital game cultures (Butt, 2022; Phillips, 2020a), and the broader sphere of geek and hobby game culture (Trammell, 2023), shape and are shaped by broader cultural ideologies that have helped mark games culture as a specific, white, and masculine space, narratives against which marginalized people still claim space within games (Gray, 2024). Throughout critical game scholarship there is a thread that we must take games seriously as part of culture, which I agree with and have similarly attempted to argue. Perhaps the trouble, though, is not just that games need to be taken more seriously or that we need to reiterate that games are part of culture. Instead, can we better understand how they have been othered as the starting place for critical analysis? For instance, I have argued elsewhere that game studies have tended to privilege the social aspects of gaming, dismissing solitary forms of play (Shaw, 2015). Understanding games’ place in culture though, requires serious engagement with that solitary experience. The closest equivalent experience to playing video games many of my students offer is reading books. As Deibert (1997) argues, the very notion of the individual self can be traced back to the ability of humans to have a solitary reading experience following the invention of the printing press. What might it change for our understanding of video games, and interactive media more broadly, if we were more attentive to how the experiences they enable shapes culture more broadly and shapes our understanding of their place in culture?

That games are experienced as different from other media is not a problem to be overcome, but rather a problematic they pose to our notions that a medium's ubiquity marks it inherently as part of popular culture. This is perhaps why video games have been ‘other’ to cultural studies which otherwise embraces a wide array of cultural forms and practices, and may help explain why certain arguments around ideology and representation in video games seem to always be fighting an uphill battle. Those invested in making gaming spaces more diverse and inclusive need to account for how the perception and experience of games has shaped the construction of who plays, how they play and what they play, beyond game studies and game culture. Cultural studies scholars could help us better understand the ideological structures that have made games ‘other’ and how that has shaped our understanding of the medium.