Games as qualified media: Male technologies, epistemologies, and fantasies

About the seminar: For years, computer games have been continuously criticized for reproducing gender stereotypes, and for its objectifying, sexualizing and otherwise unfavourable depiction of women and other marginalized people. In this presentation I trace the gendering of games as a ‘qualified medium’, a term I borrow from the intermediality scholar Lars Elleström. The discussion will be structured around three perspectives on computer games: gender norms and technical media for play; simulation as a masculinist mode of representation; and finally male fantasies and the historic and aesthetic qualification of conventional games.

About the presenter: Ida Kathrine Hammeleff Jørgensen is a postdoc at the department for Design, Media and Educational sciences at University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD in Game Studies from the IT University of Copenhagen where her research revolved around representational conventions and the representation of gender in computerized and non-computerized games. Her current research explores the body as a matter of concern and care in design for play.