Talking Casual Games and Gender
In Aubrey Anable’s book, Playing With Feelings, she discusses the relationship that casual games have with gender. By their very name casual games are written off as not serious games. As games that aren’t for “real gamers.” This begs the question of who a real gamer is? In most people’s minds the real gamer is probably male, heterosexual, and a nerd. He probably spends all his time playing video games to the detriment of his professional and social life. He probably takes video games more seriously than society thinks he should. But is the real gamer a real person? Well, yes in the sense that there are people that do fit this mold. But no in the sense that this mold does not fit all (and probably not even most) gamers. Still, this is the stereotype which tends to represent gamers in popular consciousness and it is the real gamer who sees, judges, and speaks for gamers.
The narrative that casual games are dismissed solely because of their content, solely because they are too easy or less engaging is convenient enough, but is there something more behind the dismissal of casual games? I think there probably is. As Anable writes, “casual games are . . . dismissed as culturally insignificant because they are so strongly associated with women” (82).She goes on to quote notable game studies scholar Ian Bogost, who compares casual games with “kitsch” in his own book How To Do Things With Videogames. To illustrate his idea of kitsch, Bogost invokes Thomas Kinkade.
Kinkade painted nostalgic, idyllic pastoral landscapes. His work “functions as a relationship between the aesthetics of sentimentalism and their display as markers of class location and aspirations of class mobility” (84). It is this sentimentality that casual games like Diner Dash evoke, with its cute characters and its relationship to class ambition (owning a restaurant, for example.) Bogost sidesteps the gendering of this argument by rendering casual games as “sentimental” rather than “for women.” But sentimentality is a loaded idea, strongly associated with women. The invocation of Kinkade is another marker of this gendering who in my experience is mostly associated with middle-class white women. It is not so different from the real gamer who says that these same games are not real games because they are frivolous or simple. When plenty of core gamers are playing games that are considered casual games and when casual gamers are investing at least as much of their time as core gamers are then is the persisting dismissal, the persisting usage of the term casual game, merely rooted in the frivolity of these games or their kitschi-ness? The unspoken assertion here is that they aren’t games for men.
I think this is a largely unconscious gendering. It perhaps does not speak to an overt misogyny in the gaming industry (although I do not deny that there is overt misogyny and that it is worth combating). Rather it speaks to how we passively accept normalized gender ideals. Writing about casual games as kitsch dismisses much of what a user may experience when they engage with them. The comparison to the work of Kinkade seems almost an unconscious invocation of a feminine context, but it is present. Unconsious or not, until we gamers can dethrone the real gamer as the only gamer we may have to deal with these ideas about games for some time.
