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Challenging Notions of Gendered Game

Play: Teenagers playing The Sims

Catherine Beavis a & Claire Charles

a

a Deakin University, Australia

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Catherine Beavis & Claire Charles (2005): Challenging Notions of Gendered

Game Play: Teenagers playing The Sims , Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,

26:3, 355-367

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Challenging Notions of Gendered GamePlay: Teenagers playing The Sims

Catherine Beavis* and Claire CharlesDeakin University, Australia

This paper challenges notions of gendered game playing practice implicit in much research into

young women’s involvement with the computer gaming culture. It draws on a study of Australian

teenagers playing The Sims Deluxe as part of an English curriculum unit and insights from feminist

media studies to explore relationships between gender and game playing practices. Departing from

a reliance on predetermined notions of ‘‘gender’’, ‘‘domestic space’’, and ‘‘successful game play’’, it

conceptualizes The Sims as a game in which the boundaries between gender and domestic space are

disturbed. It argues that observing students’ constructions of gender and domestic space through

the act of game play itself provides a more productive insight into the gendered dimensions of game

play for educators wishing to work computer games such as The Sims into curriculum development.

Introduction

There appear to be significantly different gender-related patterns of engagement with

both different forms of digital media and with the out-of-school digital online culture

(Kress, 2002) through which so much of young people’s familiarity and expertise

with digital media is acquired. Unpacking such differences and considering their

implications for the production of the curriculum for both boys and girls engaging

with ICT-based texts and literacies is significant for schools and systems seeking to

imagine and anticipate how literacy communication and curriculum might be

reconfigured in the networked society.In the predominantly male field of computer games gender studies frequently

focus on issues of representation and content, the male culture surrounding games,

women’s and girls’ lesser involvement and interest, and the ways in which access to

games is limited for a variety of reasons in domestic and social space (Agosto, 2004;

Bryce & Rutter, 2003; Schott & Horrell, 2000). By rendering visible aspects of

computer gaming inimical to the involvement of many girls, such approaches are

useful in alerting educators and others to the ways in which gender relations may be

perpetuated through computer games. However, they do less to suggest what we

might learn about what characterizes successful game play and computer confidence

*Corresponding author. Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood 3125, Australia.Email: catherine.beavis@deakin.edu.au

ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/05/030355-13# 2005 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/01596300500200151

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of educationVol. 26, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 355!/367

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and the way gendered identities are actively constructed through game play amongst

both boys and girls.This paper discusses a project designed to explore the gendered dimensions of

teenagers’ engagement with digital culture online and the implications of apparent

differences when translated into classroom practice in a literacy curriculum

organized around ICT. The project was predicated on the notion that girls may be

missing out on developing important aspects of computer literacy due to their lesser

involvement and interest in games culture.As part of the study three computer games were incorporated into an English

curriculum unit offered at Year 8 to a mixed group of 14- and 15-year-old students.

The study took place in an independent, co-educational school in the southern

suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, with a group of largely middle class students,

mainly of Anglo-Celtic heritage. The Sims Deluxe (Electronic Arts, 2002) was chosen

as a game popular with girls as well as boys and one that has been used in other

studies exploring the utilization of commercially produced computer games in the

classroom (McFarlane, Sparrowhawk, & Heald, 2001). A ‘‘god game’’, where players

have the power, like gods, to create their own universe and direct the lives of the

characters who inhabit it, The Sims invites players to recreate contemporary

suburban life in ways that epitomize coolness, domesticity, and consumption.

Flanagan (2003) described The Sims as providing ‘‘subtle yet powerful methods of

enculturation by which social values, interaction styles and every day activities are

practiced’’ (no page number). The popularity of the game, the emphasis on creating

domestic space, and the strong consumer and social values built explicitly into the

game made it a useful choice for a unit designed to teach extended textual analysis

and the exploration of ideology. As well, the game provided a rich research site in

which to explore complexities around gender, digital media, and domestic space in

students’ readings of the game, game play strategies, and approaches to the game and

technology.

Questions of Location

Durrant and Green (2000) described techno-popular culture as both a context and a

resource for literacy teaching in the media age. The ways in which young people

experience and engage with media culture is powerfully influenced by the context in

which that engagement occurs. In calling for research into the ways in which young

people ‘‘utilise the material presence of technologies in their everyday lives as ‘arenas

of action’ in which to manifest and organise displays of social competence’’ Hutchby

and Moran-Ellis (2001, p. 2) drew attention to the significance of the spaces and

material contexts within which digital culture and the texts of the new technologies

are engaged. As social geographers (Holloway & Valentine, 2000; Skelton &

Valentine, 1998; Soja, 1989) suggest, location plays an important role both in the

construction of meaning and the formation of identity and community, for young

people as for others. In relation to gender, these observations suggest that gendered

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identities do not simply pre-exist the act and location of game play. Rather, they are

actively formed and constituted through particular instances of game play in

particular contexts. In this study we were conscious that while a number of students

played these games out of school, the ‘‘artificial’’ framing of the classroom coloured

both the nature of students’ engagement with the text that we observed and the ways

in which the games worked as a resource for identity formation within the context of

classroom dynamics and relationships.

Young Women, Digital Media, and Domestic Space

Feminist media studies have often drawn attention to domestic spaces and issues of

access and equity for women and girls in these spaces. These studies have sometimes

relied on predetermined notions of what constitutes ‘‘domestic space’’ and what

constitutes ‘‘gender’’, treating these categories as distinct. By its very nature The Simsdisturbs this binary conceptualization. Ang (1996, p. 125) alerted us to the notion

that gendered practices are shaped at the site of interaction with media technologies:

media consumption is not always a gendered practice, and even if it is a genderedpractice its modality and effectivity can only be understood by close examination ofthe meanings that ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ and their inter-relationships acquire withina particular context. What we have tried to clarify, then, is the importance ofrecognizing that there is no prearticulated gender identity.

Attention to the location and space of game play opens up possibilities for resisting

predetermined notions about gendered game playing practices, focusing on the way

gender is shaped and constructed at the site of game play. Through allowing players

to build ‘‘virtual’’ domestic space The Sims extends domestic space outside the home

and into the context of play, in this instance primarily the classroom. It disturbs the

boundaries between domestic space and classroom space, extending the reality of

domestic space from life outside the classroom to life in the classroom, opening up

possibilities for different gendered game playing opportunities and practices than

those found in studies of gendered patterns of access to digital media in the home.A number of studies (Ang, 1996; Gray, 1992; Morely, 1986; Sieter, 1999) have

found that domestic space instantiates particular gendered practices which impact

upon girls’ and women’s use of new technologies. The infiltration of media

technologies into domestic space has not necessarily meant that females and males

experience these technologies in the same way. Mechanisms that operate to constrain

women’s activities in domestic spaces can in fact have the effect of reifying the notion

that media technologies are part of a ‘‘masculine’’ culture. Seiter (1999, p. 3)

suggested that ‘‘Dynamics around media consumption are gendered in terms of

space (who uses what media and where), time (who has more leisure time) and the

use of media technologies in the home (who gets priority in using the TV, the

telephone, the computer)’’.The movement of computer games from public spaces such as arcades into

domestic spaces has been heralded as allowing girls much greater access to a games

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culture, often characterized as a ‘‘masculine’’ domain. Cunningham (2000, p. 217)

asserted that ‘‘the move of computer games from ‘street culture’ in the arcades to

‘bedroom culture’ in the home (achieved through the dedicated games console) has

transformed the experiences of games-playing for young girls’’. This domestication

of computer games, she argues, allowed girls greater access to game playing because

it ‘‘fed into girls’’ existing ‘‘bedroom culture’’ (p. 217). However, other research

suggests that women’s involvement with computer games in domestic spaces is

mediated by similar factors to the earlier studies on television and VCR use. Schott

and Horrell (2000) found that whilst the entry of gaming into the domestic sphere

theoretically allows girls potentially unlimited access (p. 36), their experiences of

gaming tended to be embedded in existing social dynamics and gender hierarchies

(p. 42). For Schott and Horrell this was characterized by incidences of men having

unequivocal control over games technology within the household. Even when the girl

gamers owned their own games consoles it was found that ‘‘ownership did not always

secure or determine the girl gamers’ relationship with their console . . . one of the girlgamers revealed that she faced stiff competition from her father for access to her own

console’’ (p. 41). Schott and Horrell argued that this incident was based upon ‘‘a

common perception that males are ‘the experts’ when it comes to knowing what is

required and how it is achieved. In all cases males constituted a vital frame-of-

reference for girl gamers’ gaming practices’’ (p. 41).Schott and Horrell (2000) also found that gaming for females often had to be fitted

around domestic chores and that men were able to spend more time playing. ‘‘With

particular reference to domestic chores, girl gamers stated that even thought they

enjoy gaming they are unable to attribute as much importance to it as males do’’

(p. 49). Such examples indicate that female gaming in domestic spaces is heavily

implicated within existing household practices relating to gender, technology, and

domesticity. These studies suggest that the gendered politics of domestic spaces

regarding media technologies allow men greater access and control and that domestic

spaces are characterized by gendered practices in which women are more generally

responsible for chores and men have time for leisure. Such research suggests that

attitudes and practices outside school may mitigate against that ease of entry into

digital worlds to which boys and young men have more ready licence in the home.

This is a significant argument for research exploring how girls and young women may

become more confident and fluent users of technology in school contexts.

Domestic Space and The Sims

Utilising game space*/domestic space*/is central to the pleasure and purpose of The

Sims. Thus, in attending to the intersections of gender, digital media, and location

we looked at how the students in our study approached and used the domestic game

play spaces on offer in The Sims and on how they took up or rejected the invitations

to build characters and houses, acquire wealth, and succeed, and the attendant

subject positions and ideologies.

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The exploration and conquest of space is a key dimension of computer games

(Fuller & Jenkins, 1995). Jenkins argued that the development of video game echoes

the gendered play spaces of ‘‘real world’’ 19th and mid 20th century childhoods and

children’s literature (Jenkins, 1998; McGuire, 2004). He cited Segel’s account of

reading practices which ‘‘taught children to replicate the separation between a male

public sphere of risk-taking and a female domestic sphere of care taking’’ (Jenkins,

1998, p. 290). Where role play and strategy games for the most part construct

military or fantasy landscapes as the terrain of play, The Sims centres round domestic

space. In this it continues a long tradition in both literature and childhood*/utopia

and the dolls house*/as spaces for imaginative play (Flanagan, 2003; McGuire,

2004).In her study of The Sims Flanagan (2003) explored the ways in which domestic

spaces constitute a ‘‘feminized’’ domain, tracing this historically through the

development of suburbia in the 1950s as the post war ‘‘American Dream’’,

reinscribing women’s place in the home. She argued that a binding of women to

the home was closely associated with the consumerist drive to create a perfect home.

As the ‘‘perfect home’’ was a high maintenance project, women were required to

spend more and more time achieving the ‘‘American Dream’’. Flanagan argued that

the focus on consumption and creation of domestic space in The Sims positions

players as ‘‘feminine’’. This makes the game interesting in looking at how both boys

and girls build and maintain domestic space as they play.Game play is not only about the game. The context for game play and the histories,

agendas, relationships, expectations, and experiences of game players all also

influence the ways the game is played and the meanings players take and make

from the game. In the ‘‘lived culture of playing’’, as de Castell and Jenson (2003,

p. 651) noted:

games are not just played, they are talked about, read about, ‘‘cheated’’, fantasisedabout, altered and become models for every day life and for the formation ofsubjectivity and intersubjectivity. There is a politics, an economy, a history, socialstructure and function, and an everyday lived experience of the game.

In the classroom context of our research some players drew on their out-of-school

experience of the game and game communities as they played, while others were

neophyte or even hostile to the world of games. This provided the opportunity to

contrast the attitudes and strategies of different groups in the course of playing.

Through group and individual interviews we were also able to contrast game players’

representations of themselves as players in the public world of school and the more

private spaces of the home.

The Gendered Practices in Playing The Sims at School

Activities undertaken in the course of the unit included playing the games for an

extended period, imaginative writing asking students to design an extension pack for

their chosen game, small group discussion, textual analytical work, and the

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presentation of selected segments to the rest of the class with an analytical

commentary via data projection. Students and the classroom teacher were

interviewed at the start and end of the unit, and a third time towards the end of

the year. Data also included the analytical grids completed by the students, their

imaginative writing, and videotapes of the presentations where they played and spoke

about their game.From the outset it was evident that some of the girls were equally adept at playing

The Sims as the boys, challenging the stereotype that girls are less interested or

capable players. Many male and female students were well versed in The Sims from

playing at home, disrupting findings that females have limited access to new

technologies in domestic space. This may have been related to the relative affluence

of the student group or a reflection of the widespread popularity of the game with

both males and females more generally. However, throughout the course of

delivering the unit we observed game playing practices that have gendered

implications in terms of ‘‘use’’ and consumption of domestic space within the

game. Whilst the game offered both male and female students an arena for living out

fantasies, pushing boundaries, and experimenting in ways not necessarily possible in

their own homes, they nonetheless acted out gendered identities in the classroom as

they constructed domestic space in gendered ways.After giving the students time to play and get to know The Sims we asked them

what they liked about the game. Two pairs of Sims players, Mark and Joe and Emily

and Sue, had differing perspectives on what was on offer in the game. For Sue these

classes were her first exposure to the game, while Emily, Mark, and Joe had all played

it before.

Building a Dream House

The central activity in The Sims is the development of neighbourhoods and their

inhabitants, the construction of a domestic space that Flanagan and others have

described as ‘‘feminized’’. Students were divided about the appeal of the game, with

attitudes both confirming and complicating stereotypically gendered views:

Mark: I like The Sims because it’s fun and you can just do a whole lot of crazystuff. Like put TVs in the bathroom and put a bed in the kitchen.

Sue: It’s pretty boring though.Mark: No it’s not.Sue: Yes it is. Just making other people do things.Emily: No, but it’s like fun experimenting.Sue: What, what, like making people flirt and like, you know hug and things like

that.Emily: No, like you can with the fireworks, you can like blow them up.Mark: No, it’s cool, cos you just get to make your house, your dream house.Emily: Yeah.Mark: It’s just unrealistic and it’s cool.

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For Emily and Mark the pleasure lies in experimentation and chaos, rather than in

the drive to maintain an orderly house and the norms and expectations of game play.

It is Mark, not the girls, who argues that it is cool to build a house, however, the

pleasure in house making is that it’s ‘‘unrealistic’’ and ‘‘you can just do a whole lot of

crazy stuff ’’. Emily’s comments show her moving between in-school and out-of-

school peer groups and identities. As quickly became apparent, she was a highly

adept player. In later interviews she spoke at length of games played at home alone,

with friends, or with her brother and displayed a great deal of satisfaction and

expertise in the ‘‘serious’’ playing of the game. Her comments here, whereby she

enjoys both ‘‘experimenting’’ with the game and also ‘‘blowing [characters] up’’,

demonstrate her expertise and knowledge of the game, but also establish her insider

status as both game player and a member of the class group, largely boys, who know

about and value options for subversion built into the game.From a different position Sue also rejects the most obvious pleasures of the game.

What she finds ‘‘boring’’ are the expected actions and possibilities formally offered by

the game, but it is unclear whether her boredom derives from her evaluation of the

game or the need to protect herself from being positioned by the other students as

weak or vulnerable through her ignorance of this game, and games in general. All

three players are attuned to what you are ‘‘supposed’’ to do and demonstrate both

knowledge and resistance simultaneously. But where Sue has little time for what is on

offer, both Emily and Mark, in different ways, are excited at the same time as

positioning themselves as ‘‘cool’’. They are playing both in the spaces of the game,

where they are positioned as game players and members of the community of the

game, the affinity group (Gee, 2003), and in the spaces of the classroom and youth

culture where more maverick and resistant agendas may obtain.We asked the students whether they would enjoy a day in the world of The Sims.

Mark’s pleasure in converting domestic space into a giant anarchic fairground was

shared by Joe. This exchange also provided further opportunity for Sue to defend her

case for The Sims as boring, while also striving to legitimate her position through

arguing from a base of knowledge and expertise.

Joe: You could just eat the whole day, lie in the hot tub and just watch TV.Sue: But that’s okay for one day, but it would be pretty boring I reckon.Mark: Nah, cause you get a job.Emily: Yeah, and there’s like, you can invite people over....CC: Why wouldn’t you want to spend more than a day [in The Sims]?Sue: Cause it’s, there’s nothing to do.Mark: Yes there is.Sue: It’s boring. You just . . . I know you can eat, you can swim and all that but

it’s.Joe: (Interrupting) So, you have 4 TVs and a pinball machine in every room!Sue: No that’s what I’m saying, don’t you want to go out and do things?

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Socialising and Relationships

In addition to foregrounding the boys’ enjoyment of the possibilities for absurdity

and excess as the epitome of household leisure, these discussions also picked up a

second interest area stereotypically characterized as female: an interest in socializing

and relationships as a primary form of leisure. Emily’s suggestion that ‘‘you can invite

people over’’ for something to do contrasts with the boys’ enthusiasm for watching

TVand getting a job. However, both the male and female students expressed a desire

for social experiences of domestic space. For example, in an echo of Sue’s position,

when the girls were presenting a section of their game to the class one male student,

Sam, yelled out to them ‘‘Invite someone over! It’s too boring!’’Socialising appeared important to both boys and girls, but was inflected rather

differently. For the boys, delight in the lack of order and responsibility was also

present in this sphere. For example, they delighted in random people walking into

their house and using their things.

Joe: You don’t invite them [the people] they just come![Laughter][Later]Joe: We’ve only got two in our family.Mark: Except guys keep coming into our house. They just walk in and they’re like

‘‘Oh’’ and they like [lie] in our bed and stuff, and you can ask them to leaveand stuff and they’re like ‘‘Oh blah blah blah [talks gibberish]’’. And theyswim in our pool and stuff. And we’re just sitting there like asleep andthey’re still there.

[Later]Joe: People just walk into your house. That would be cool!

Housework and Domestic Responsibility

Housework and domestic responsibility are rarely the stuff of dreams. Perhaps

unsurprisingly, for the boys housework, and order of any kind, scarcely figured in

their ‘‘fantasy world’’. Yet the game itself does not ignore this unpleasant reality, but

it is managed by giving this responsibility to a maid, thus signposting the assumptions

about class position implicit in the game. As part of the unit we asked the students to

fill out a grid asking them to write short responses to a saved section of their game. In

response to the question ‘‘What things are valued in the game?’’ Mark wrote ‘‘You get

money when you have a job so you can hire a maid’’. Emily, on the other hand, gave

her character some domestic responsibility in the form of child rearing. In response

to the question ‘‘Which jobs are the most important?’’ she wrote ‘‘Taking care of

daughter, socializing and eventually working’’. For Mark getting money was his

priority, a job the vehicle for doing so, whereas for Emily the emphasis was raising a

child and socialising. The social status of these middle class students was perhaps

consistent with that implicit in The Sims , where money is gained and valued and

hiring a maid is not completely unattainable. Mark’s creation of a ‘‘bogan’’1 character

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living in disorderly chaos was in sharp contrast to the emphasis on materialprosperity and order.

Character creation

The house and characters created by the boys seem to constitute an exaggeratedfantasy of endless TV and entertaining numerous arbitrary visitors. Their characterswere disorderly disreputable people, in Mark’s instance ‘‘a bit similar to you’’. Inbuilding Sims, they drew on a range of multimodal elements such as colour, clothes,physique, and musical tastes to extend beyond the personality parameters providedby the game. Mark’s creation of a ‘‘bogan’’ character named ‘‘Johnny Pot-smoker’’was consistent with his creation of a house and lifestyle that was quite chaotic:

CC: What sort of character personality do you think your characters suit?Mark: Oh mine was like, kind of a bogan he had, like blond ratty hair and a beer

gut and like a white shirt and stuff and one of those leather vest kind ofthings.

Sue: Typical.Mark: Pretty much a bogan.CC: So what sort of music would you give him?Mark: I don’t know, like heavy metal or something like that. And if you made

someone all nice or something you could give them like pop music ofsomething like that . . . it kind of represents you kind of thing, like you makeyour character a bit similar to you I guess, even though I don’t have a beergut.

The girls were more mixed in the ways they approached characters and what theywanted them to do and be. At home Emily spent hours playing with her friends withcharacters explicitly designed to represent themselves in a set of spaces she and herbrother had created where they each had a neighbourhood of their own plus a spareone ready for any friends who might come over to play. As she described in a laterinterview, away now from her social group and speaking privately, ‘‘we make it like adream house . . . we try and make characters that look like us and give them ournames and make them do what we want to do’’. In the privacy of home the gameworks well as a fantasy space and one where she welcomes the character creationconventions as one more tool in the game. In the classroom, however, she is moremeasured in what she will claim. In response to Sue’s lack of enthusiasm for thepretence of verisimilitude she presents herself as conscious of the artificiality ofcharacter creation but prepared to embrace it for the sake of the game. Once again,her comments show her as playing in both spaces, game players space and classroomspace, and she demonstrates her authority in both worlds.

Sue: No, You can make your own personalities.Emily: Yeah I know but not really though. But they’re all kind of the same.Mark: If you play it over a long period of time like what their personalities are and

stuff.Sue: No, but you create their personality but you don’t really know.Emily: Like there’s nothing that makes them really individual. It’s like.

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Sue: Even if . . . like me and Emily, we made one person really mean and oneperson really nice and you couldn’t even tell which one was mean andwhich one was nice. It was just like, you know.

Emily: Yeah, but sometimes it does appear in conversations like they’ll just be like‘‘go away, I don’t want to talk’’. Not like that but . . .

Sue: yeah, but they can’t talk though, they’re like.Emily: If you press ‘‘joke’’ and then they don’t laugh you can tell that they don’t

like the jokes.Sue: Yeah but, don’t you have better things to do than to play games and make

people say a joke on the game and then laugh, I mean!

Protection and Destruction: The climax of the game

For their final presentations the students were asked to replay a selected section ofthe game using data projection and to comment on how the multimodal elementscontributing to the construction of meaning and ideology in their clip. Under Emily’sguidance Sue and Emily rapidly built a well-furnished and luxurious house as aprelude to the production of a genie; one of a range of triumphant if unpredictablemoments in the game. In this instance the genie produced a plague of cockroaches,and the remainder of the girls’ presentation consisted of spraying every corner withinsecticide. For the girls their skills and familiarity with the game became directed tothe preservation and protection of their house and characters, in the spirit of ‘‘caretaking’’ that Jenkins described.The boys, in contrast, after building quite a complex house, decided to burn it

down. To do so took careful planning. While a female character slept they filled thehouse with wooden furniture, bought rockets and set them off, only pausing to wakethe female character in the meanwhile. As the fires developed (somewhat slowly) thetwo presenters gleefully discussed its progress, interspersing their conversation witharguments about what to do about the woman and whether she could or should besaved. When at last it became apparent that it was too late, their pleasure turned toanticipation of the arrival of the Grim Reaper (‘‘there’s Grimmy’’) and the ritualmusic and appearance of that figure that accompanies a death in The Sims.On the face of it the boys’ delight in this conflagration bears out popular views

about boys’ love of games centring around violence and destruction and providesevidence of the antisocial and misogynist attitudes said to be fostered by game play.However, to jump to such conclusions is to misread the more complex responsesacross genders and to misunderstand the nature of game play. The motif of disorderpicked up in the boys’ playing contextualizes their decision to burn down theirhouses and families, subverting any ‘‘feminine’’ desire to nurture and create in anextremely dramatic way. Mark writes of his saved section of game: ‘‘The fireilluminates the room and crackles as you run frantically’’. At the same time, however,for Joe this was privately a matter of some regret. As he explained in a later interview,‘‘I liked our house so I didn’t want it to burn down’’.A different reading of the fire incident foregrounds the textual nature of the game

and the genres within which it is played. The fire is also a way to bring an end to the

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game. As Consalvo (2003, p. 181) noted, ‘‘there is no winning in The Sims , and no

end to the game. Actually, Wright has stated that The Sims isn’t a game*/instead, it’s

a ‘software toy’’’. Seen in this light, the boys have turned the options for destructionbuilt into the game to their own purposes, using these means as raw material for

game-sanctioned subversion, for ending, if not ‘‘winning’’ as you might in other

games, for coming to a resolution as you might in reading a novel or watching a

horror movie.A further reading confirms the ways in which these boys, and the girls in different

ways, are using popular culture as resources for identity work. In their burning of thehouse, and the construction of the fire, they are not only activating other, similarly

pleasurable transgressive genres (Jill, their teacher exclaimed ‘‘you’ve turned it into a

horror film’’), they are also engaging in a form of ‘‘ironic subversion’’ (Burn, 2003)

directly analogous to Burn’s account of Year 7 students making Harry ‘‘trample thecat’’ in a classroom unit around the Harry Potter computer game. What we see here,

as there, is an attempt to rewrite the game and create agency for players beyond that

provided by the game, although in the case of The Sims such destructive possibilitiesare built in explicitly, as the game makers anticipate the seductive pull of subversion

in a ‘‘game’’ that has no necessary ending and is arguably not a ‘‘game’’.

Conclusions: Gender, games, and the classroom

In playing The Sims girls and boys did not stereotypically fall into uncriticalacceptance, on the one hand, or outright rejection, on the other, nor were the

categories of ‘‘risk taking’’ and ‘‘care taking’’ divided simply along gendered lines.

Rather, positions were more mixed and reflected an alert and ironic attitude in bothboys and girls that was both resistant but also ready to enjoy the game. In this their

responses and understandings seem reflective of Beach and Bruce’s (2002, p. 149)

observation that

while adolescents may continue to use media to construct themselves according tothe values of a consumerist, narcissistic world their emerging participation in digitaltechnologies portends the possibilities of alternative ways of constructing identities.

Certainly, in the instances we have described Mark, Joe, Emily, and Sue are using

their game play in The Sims very actively in their creation and representation ofthemselves in interaction with their peers, whether in the private domestic spaces of

their homes or in the more public classroom sphere.Walkerdine (2004, p. 28) argued that computer games ‘‘offer one site for the

production of contemporary masculinity’’ and that ‘‘the task for boys and for girls is

different in each case . . . [girls] have to pursue the demands of contemporary

femininity which blend together traditional masculinity and femininity’’. In our studythe boys’ experience and subversion of domestic space centred on creating a fantasy

world characterized by chaotic, exaggerated, and irresponsible lifestyles. While the

girls constructed situations that mirrored order and ‘‘reality’’ a little more closely,Emily also savoured the opportunities for subversion, although she did so as a

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demonstration in part of her out-of-school expertise with the game. With regard to

confidence and ability, Emily was at least as capable a player as the boys. She took an

active role in teaching Sue how to play and inducting her into the world of the game.

In this she held a double position, simultaneously encouraging her to enter into the

spirit of the game while at the same time perservering with her stance of superiority

to such uncritical immersion. This stance, in turn, helped her consolidate her

authority with the boys.The way gendered identities were constructed and enacted through game play

extended beyond The Sims itself and into the space of the classroom. The use and

consumption of domestic space within the game, the game play strategies and

pleasures adopted by both boys and girls, and the ability to straddle both in and out

of game worlds were not confined to one group or the other. We did indeed observe

game playing attitudes and practices which could be regarded as gendered, most

notably in the fire incident, which paradoxically claimed so much of our attention

despite our intention to focus more proactively on girls. However, in the complex

context of the classroom other dynamics also seemed at play, with game playing

practices and preferences contributing to, but also taking their place within, the

larger project of identity construction under way.

Note

1. Australian term used to describe members of society that are a combination of what the

Yanks call Rednecks, Jocks and Trailer Park Trash. Most likely found wearing mockies

(mocassins), flanalette shirts and consuming VB (bad Aussie beer). Retrieved June 26, 2005,

from www.urbandictionary.com.

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