Identity Play as Identity Work: Representation, Identity Integration, and Possible Selves in Digital Games

This study examines how marginalized players, including LGBTQ+, disabled, and neurodivergent gamers, experience representation in digital games and use play as a site of identity exploration and integration. Its central argument is that representation is not reducible to demographic visibility. Instead, players evaluate inclusion across a multilayered process spanning accessibility, expressive customization, and narrative and relational design. Grounded in identity theory and the concept of possible selves, the authors contend that games offer embodied, active agency that carries particular weight for players who face stereotype threat and scarce affirming identity models.

The empirical basis is a mixed-method analysis of 2024 Reddit discourse drawn from nine identity-focused gaming communities, with r/gaming serving as a comparison group. Identity-specific communities showed engagement disproportionately high relative to their size, signaling the salience of these topics to their members. Across the data, players describe accessibility features and customization not as optional extras but as foundational conditions for imagining and inhabiting alternate selves. Players also report using games for self-discovery, emotional regulation, and belonging, while critiquing misrepresentation and tokenism.

To organize these findings, the authors propose the "Representation Triad," comprising structural, aesthetic, and experiential representation. Structural representation concerns accessibility and pacing, aesthetic representation concerns visible identity cues, and experiential representation concerns narrative, relational, and affective alignment. The study's conclusion is that meaningful recognition depends on the coordination of all three layers, with structural accessibility serving as the precondition for participation. The authors acknowledge limitations, most notably the absence of race-focused gaming communities in the sample, and position the framework as a guide for inclusive game design and future research.