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Why Are You Being an Ass on the Internet? GamesNetwork, Communities, and History-Making

  • Jennifer deWinter (author)
  • Gillian Smith (author)
Chapter of: Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be(pp. 95–119)

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Metadata
TitleWhy Are You Being an Ass on the Internet?
SubtitleGamesNetwork, Communities, and History-Making
ContributorJennifer deWinter (author)
Gillian Smith (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.05
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJennifer deWinter and Gillian Smith
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-07-25
Long abstractVossen outlines her experiences in the game studies community from 2012 to 2022 focusing on the ludology vs narratology debate's impact on herself and other game scholars. She argues that these “debates” alienated many scholars looking to become part of the field by outlining a “right” and “wrong” way to study games. Vossen discusses how essays like “Genre Trouble” and the larger ludology vs narratology debate made her feel unwelcome as someone with a PhD in English examining issues of culture and gender in games. In the tradition of historiography, Vossen examines how the histories of the debate have been recorded, reinterpreted, perceived, and felt by multiple generations of scholars. Vossen argues that the debate is the story of how the work of a few men who used similar theories and methods were canonized. Consequently, games-related work that uses other methodologies, often favoured by women and queer people, are marginalized and pushed to the fringes of the field. Vossen concludes that it is only by continuously discussing and addressing the failures of these early debates and their impact on game studies that we can undo the harm they have caused.
Page rangepp. 95–119
Print length25 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Jennifer deWinter

(author)
Dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters at Illinois Institute of Technology

Jennifer deWinter (she/her) is Dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of Technology and affiliated faculty in the College of Computing and the Institute of Design. In her research, she analyzes anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how such concepts as “art,” “culture,” and “entertainment” are negotiated, with specific focus on Japan and the US. She is the author of Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda (Bloomsbury, 2015) and co-editor of Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution and Consumption (Routledge, 2015) and Computer Games and Technical Communication: Critical Methods and Applications at the Intersection (Routledge, 2016). More recently, she is co-editing a book tentatively titled Multidisciplinary Mario: The Tensions of Game Studies as a Discipline with Gillian Smith and Hana Hanifah.

Gillian Smith

(author)
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Gillian Smith (she/her, they/them) is Associate Professor of Computer Science and faculty in Interactive Media and Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on generative design for games and craft, computational creativity, and integration of feminism and social justice into games and computer science education.