Carol Stabile

Watch this keynote on youtube. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6.

Affiliation

Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society; Professor, English; School of Journalism and Communication; Department of Women's and Gender Studies

Keynote lecture: 'OMG UR Gai, Why U Plai Gurll??': Decoding Gender in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

In massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), players read gender and communicate on the basis of specific reading practices. Gender remaining a core element of how we understand identity, these online interactions take place against an anxiously gendered background. In MMOs, anxieties about gender abound, since unless you know another player IRL or routinely use voice communication software (and your voice is unambiguously male or female), you have to read gender from a toon's name, gender, appearance, and communicative practices.

To add to these complexities, research suggests that men are still much more likely to gender swap, or play as female characters. According to MMO researcher Nick Yee, men are 7-8 times more likely to play as female characters in WoW than women: in other words, one out of every two female characters is being played by a man, while only one out of every hundred male characters is being played by a woman. The older explanation -- that this owes to the fact that the game remains male-dominated -- no longer holds. A recent Nielsen study estimated that WoW was the most often played game for women aged 25-54, with over 428,621 unique female players estimated in December 2008, compared to 675,713 unique male players.

Based on game play, forums, and ethnographic interviews, this address looks at the reading practices players use to decode gender and other aspects of identity in these online games and the complex range of responses anxiety over identity provokes in and around games, ranging from hate speech to gender swapping practices that seek to challenge and in some cases undo dominant ideologies of gender.

In addition to her keynote lecture, Carol Stabile will also organize a seminar entitled: Persisting Inequalities: Gamification and Education

About

Carol Stabile earned a PhD in English from Brown University, where she did research on gender, technology, and feminist theory. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in media and popular culture She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix, editor of Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies, co-editor of Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, and author of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture. She is currently finishing one project on "old" media - a book on women writers and the broadcast blacklist in the 1950s, entitled Black and White and Red All Over: Women Writers and the Television Blacklist - and is beginning a project on "new" media - a research project on the role of gender in massively multiplayer online games.