Stephanie Orme

Media portrayals of comic book fandom routinely depict the comics community as a masculine space, one in which the female fan is an anomaly. Yet, women reportedly represent a growing number of comic book purchasers and convention attendees. If women are, in fact, such a large contingent of the comic book fan community, then why do these gendered stereotypes of female fans persist? Moreover, why do we continually see narratives about the ‘exotic’ female comics fan if women are such a large population within comics culture? I theorise that many female comic book fans render themselves invisible in the comics community out of fear of stigmatisation, from both non-comics fans as well as male members of comics fandom. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, I use semi-structured interviews to explore how female comics fans in the United States experience fandom as members of a culture that is coded as masculine.

Released in October 2013, Papers, Please is an independently-produced game in which players are an immigration officer working at the border checkpoint in the fictional, Soviet-esque country Arstotzka in the year 1989. Gameplay is centered on checking and verifying immigration documents of the NPCs who wish to enter Arstotzka. With only each traveler's documents and the options to inspect their papers, search their body for concealed contraband or weapons, or fingerprint them at your disposal, the player decides who will gain entry into the country and who will be denied. In addition to the dozens of immigrants vying for admission, there are also smugglers, spies, and terrorists attempting to cross the border. As relations between Arstotzka and its neighboring countries become more tense over the course of the game – even resulting in terrorist attacks at the border checkpoint – players are continuously confronted with additional challenges and regulations they are expected to perform, with limited time and resources – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the bureaucratic issues that continue to plague immigration policy and practice.

In this paper, I analyze the ways in which Papers, Please functions as a critique of migratory policy and enforcement. Specifically, I examine the game's take on notions such as immigration, nationalism, and the gendered and racialized migrant subject. Drawing on literature from the disciplines of game studies and feminist geography – the latter specifically in relation to migration politics – I conduct a feminist analysis of Papers, Please's constructed narrative of global migration. As I hope to illustrate, migration is an inherently gendered and racialized experience.

This dissertation explores possible explanations and complexities surrounding women’s relationship with leisure and video games. One of my objectives with this study is to understand how women players view their relationship with gaming: how they become involved with video games, how gaming fits into their adult lives (specifically, as wives, mothers, etc.), and the reasons they play games. Primarily, I am interested in how women’s reported experiences with games affirm or challenge dominant narratives about their experiences. After surveying more than 3,000 women players and conducting 21 follow-up interviews, I discuss trends in women’s video game play, including their genre and play style preferences, motivations for playing games, the extent that they consider themselves “gamers,” and how their relationships with gaming have evolved over the course of the lives. Specifically, I investigate how gendered constraints on women’s access to and enjoyment of leisure time influence the reported trends in women’s gaming experience. I argue that such trends, which are often framed as “natural” gender-based affinities for certain types of games or ways of experiencing games, might be influenced by broader social contexts such as gender socialization, the nature of women’s leisure time, constraints placed upon their play such as physical and virtual spaces that restrict access based on gender, and the ambivalent relationship many women players have with the games industry. Scholars interested in gender-based motivations and preferences in digital games should continue to explore the various constraints that are imposed on players of different gender identities. I believe the key to understanding the complexities of how gaming decisions are made relies on researchers’ ability to examine the interplay of multiple, sometimes competing constraints.