Chapter 18: Gender and Gaming

The significance of gender in the context of the educational use of video gaming remains a contested and potentially confusing topic. Video gaming has been proposed in part as a means of motivating and engaging otherwise disinterested learners (Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2004). However, the stereotypically masculine content of many entertainment-oriented games (i.e., war games, first-person shooters, football simulations, and so forth) and the often sexist representations of women within these games (with Lara Croft, from the Tomb Raider video game series, as the iconic example of the scantily clad, overly endowed female game character) can make educators wary of using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games for learning, assuming that such games will be appealing to boys but alienate girls. Girls’ and women’s apparent preferences for collaborative, puzzle-based, or narrative-driven game play have been interpreted as a reflection of a distinctively feminine gaming style (Graner Ray, 2003), and seem to suggest that different games might need to be designed or selected for each gender, making the use of games in mixed-sex classrooms a daunting challenge. Some educators (e.g., Denner, Werner, Bean, & Campe, 2005; Hayes, 2008b) have argued for efforts to involve more girls in gaming as a means of enhancing their interest and skills in computer science, yet many of the COTS games that tend to appeal to girls do not have the same affordances for software modification, for example, as games preferred by boys.