Books

Building off of the success of the first edition, author Kishonna L. Gray introduces the audience to a perspective on console gaming environments called “Multi-mediated Interactive Console Environments.” This new chapter provides a necessary understanding of these dynamic digital communities, adding console games, which have been heretofore left out of conversations on gaming, to platform studies, and addressing troubling examples on race, gender, and other identities.

Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers—some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed—affect their experiences of gaming. 

Drawing from groundbreaking research on counter and oppositional gaming and from popular games such as World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, Woke Gaming examines resistance to problematic spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays seek to identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players and gamers toward progressive ends. From Anna Anthropy’s Keep Me Occupied to Momo Pixel’s Hair Nah, video games can reveal the power and potential for marginalized communities to resist, and otherwise challenge dehumanizing representations inside and outside of game spaces.

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities—Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed academic understandings of video games and game culture. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm.

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women’s resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women’s play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

Dr. Gray wrote this book while helping her kids understand melanin, colorism, and cultures across the African diaspora. This story follows a little girl embracing her “sun kissed” skin.

This book was self-published and Dr. Gray is seeking a possible publisher and outlet. Feel free to reach out!