Constituting the player : feminist technoscience, gender, and digital play

It has been argued that game studies scholars need to move beyond any understanding of gendered preferences in the content and mechanics of video games. Instead, we need to conceive of play as an assemblage, shaped through content, marketing, competency, experiences, access, context, and milieu (T.L. Taylor, 2008; Dovey & Kennedy, 2006; Jensen & de Castell, 2008). This paper considers and extends some of these observations on the complex networks of gendered gaming in light of the insights of a branch of science and technology studies known as feminist technoscience. Mobilizing in particular the work of Mol (1999) and Barad (1999), as well as preliminary findings from the author’s doctoral fieldwork, this paper considers the value of feminist technoscience concepts such as ontological politics, multiples, enactments, and agential realism in examinations of the gendered nature of game play.