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My Mother Was a Jump Rope Rhyme: A Game Studies That Might Have Been

Chapter of: Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be(pp. 355–368)

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Metadata
TitleMy Mother Was a Jump Rope Rhyme
SubtitleA Game Studies That Might Have Been
ContributorCarly A. Kocurek(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.16
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/
CopyrightCarly A. Kocurek
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-07-25
Long abstractChildren arguing over the rules of tag know that games are complex negotiations of power systems drawn from their material, political, and social context. Awareness of these power dynamics has long been a central concern in play studies. However, game studies is frequently situated as separate from play studies and continues to draw on Huizinga’s legacy, often replicating an elitism and naivete that Margaret Carlisle Duncan first pointed out 40 years ago. This chapter imagines a game studies more closely aligned with play studies. Considering the key findings of researchers such as Carlisle Duncan, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Brenda Laurel, Kyra Gaunt, Vivan Gussin Paley, Linda Hughes, Maria Montessori, and Iona and Peter Opie this chapter interrogates how the relative marginality of these thinkers in game studies reflects an entrenched masculinist impulse to devalue both women thinkers and young girls and their concerns. By engaging works such as Gaunt’s groundbreaking study of Black girls’ jump rope rhymes and Miriam Forman-Brunell’s exhaustive research on dolls both as cultural artifacts and richly meaningful playthings, I suggest a reconceptualized game studies in which certain types of video games are not arbitrarily cleaved from the broader study of areas such as leisure, play, and girlhood.
Page rangepp. 355–368
Print length14 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Carly A. Kocurek

(author)
Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at Illinois Institute of Technology
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2901-1737

Carly A. Kocurek (she/her) is Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She researches the cultural history of video games with an emphasis on gender identity. Her books include Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (Bloomsbury, 2017), and, with Matthew Thomas Payne, Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst, 2024). She is researching the history and impact of the games for girls movement as part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Her articles have appeared in outlets including The American Journal of Play, Feminist Media Histories, Game Studies, Velvet Light Trap, and others.