Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit's r/gaming Community

Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, Timothy Graham

Research output: Book/ReportBookResearchpeer-review

27 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This book examines gender attitudes in Reddit’s popular video gaming community subreddit, r/gaming. Video gaming has long been understood as a masculinised social space and, while increasing numbers of girls and women now engage in the pastime, boys and men remain the predominant social actors. Furthermore, the gaming community has been widely identified as a prime case study in broader concerns around ‘toxic’ masculinity and gendered online harassment. However, there is also underexamined evidence of a growing movement in the community coming forward to voice its collective opposition. Utilising an innovative combination of computational and qualitative methods, the research undertaken here exposes this fuller picture, revealing significant contestation and a spectrum of attitudes that mark out this popular gaming community as a battleground for gender (in)equality. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, games studies and computer sciences, will find this book of interest.

Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCham Switzerland
PublisherPalgrave Pivot
Number of pages104
ISBN (Electronic)9783030282622
ISBN (Print)9783030282615
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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