Contexts, Pleasures and Preferences: Girls Playing Computer Games

Diane Carr's study examines how girls' gaming preferences are formed, drawing on observations of a computer games club at a single-sex state school in South London. Over a school term, nine 13-year-old girls played games in weekly lunchtime sessions, with their play observed and video-documented and supplemented by interviews, questionnaires distributed to 55 classmates, and the girls' own lists of favourite games. The paper argues that preferences are neither static nor formed in isolation, but are instead an assemblage of past access, peer culture, and situational context, shaped in turn by gender.

The findings show that preferences shifted over the course of the term. The girls' favourite-game lists expanded from 26 titles to include 16 newly encountered games, many of them played during the sessions, suggesting that offering new games in a new context was enough to alter stated tastes. Physical site features, such as the room layout, the placement of consoles near the noisy social area, and the solitary PC corner, shaped which genres were chosen. Consoles favoured instantly gratifying, social, turn-taking games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 and Dead or Alive 3, while the quieter PCs favoured narrative-driven titles such as The Sims and the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings games.

Representation and avatar gender also emerged as less decisive than might be assumed. The girls showed little particular interest in female-led games, and questionnaire responses about ideal characters rarely specified gender, with those who did sometimes choosing male avatars, a tendency most pronounced among girls with the greatest home access. Genre familiarity proved decisive as well: the role-playing games offered at the PCs went unplayed, apparently because the girls lacked prior experience, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer became popular only after peers had demonstrated it. The author concludes that gendered tastes exist but must be understood through the access and literacy practices that produce them, and warns that attributing preference directly to gender risks underestimating the complexity of players' subjectivity.