6 Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games

In one corner of the game World of Warcraft, forty players have just gathered in Molten Core to begin their weekly raid. Every Friday night, these players spend five to ten hours working together to defeat the same series of increasingly difficult monsters. Tonight, a sixty-­year-­old female player is raiding with her granddaughter on her lap and the baby’s gurgles are heard over the VoIP chan-­ nel amid commands to “hold aggro dammit.” Over in the game Eve Online, infiltrators inside a leading corporation are moments away from assassinating the CEO and emptying the resource and equipment stores in a synchronized heist (Francis 2006). And in a small, undecorated room in the Chinese prov-­ ince of Fuzhou, four teenage boys are rushing to meet their daily quota of virtual gold while evading the systematic harassment from Western players who have branded them as “Chinese gold farmers.” These are a few glimpses of the structured and emergent play in the digital constructs known as massively multiplayer online role-­playing games (MMORPGs, or MMOs for short). In talking about gender and gaming, we often hear assumptions that men and women simply prefer different kinds of games. These assumptions echo a growing body of literature suggesting that our evolutionary past has engineered much of our current social behavior (e.g., Diamond 1998; Wright 1995), including why we play games (Steen and Owens 2001). These accounts also tend to propose hardwired biological differences stemming from different challenges for men and women in our evolutionary past (Low 2001). Indeed, game designer Chris Crawford (2005) explicitly argued that men and women prefer different kinds of video games because of how we lived in the Pleisto-­ cene savannas. These arguments lead us to believe that creating games for the “female brain” is the only sensible solution to attracting women to play video games; there is a particular set of “feminine” game mechanics that we simply haven’t found or perfected yet.