Feminist War Games?: Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games

Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence.

Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealizations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment.

Feminist War Games? is a timely volume that questions the often-toxic nature of online and gaming cultures. As such, the book will appeal to a broad variety of disciplinary interests, including sociology, education, psychology, literature, history, politics, game studies, digital humanities, media and cultural studies, and gender studies, as well as those interested in playing, or designing, socially engaged games.

Jon Saklofske is a literature professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His interest in the ways that William Blake’s composite art illuminates the relationship between words and images on the printed page has inspired current research into alternative platforms for open social scholarship, as well as larger correlations between media forms and cultural perceptions. In addition to experimenting with virtual environments and games as tools for academic research, communication, and pedagogy, Jon’s other research interests include virtuality and environmental storytelling in Disney theme parks, research creation experiments, and the relationship between networks and narratives in video games.

Alyssa Arbuckle is Associate Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, Canada. Through this role she serves as the Project Manager of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and assists with the coordination of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Arbuckle is also an interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, studying open social scholarship and its implementation. She holds a BA Honours in English from the University of British Columbia and an MA in English from the University of Victoria, where her previous studies centred around digital humanities, new media, and contemporary American literature. Currently, she explores open access, digital publishing, and how we communicate scholarship generally. To this end, Arbuckle's work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among other publications. She has also recently co-edited a print and online collection called Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities.

Jon Bath is an associate professor of Art and Art History at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where he teaches electronic art, design, and the book arts, and researches the connection between the form and content of communication technologies.