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Professor and Researcher
PhD Thesis

In this research, I aimed to understand how symbolic gender violence occurs in multiplayer online games in Brazil, specifically in League of Legends and Dota 2. As a result, I created a new concept, discursive gameplay violence, which refers to instances where the rules of the game are subverted to become a mechanism for maintaining symbolic power.

Scope: Thesis for obtaining my PhD at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Duration: 3 years and 9 months

Thesis Advisor: Raquel da Cunha Recuero

Click here to read the full Thesis (in Portuguese)

Context

My start with competitive games was in 2012 playing Dota 2. As I began teaming up with people, I'd often see sexist behaviors from men towards me. When going into League of Legends a few years later, the same happened. In order to channel my anger into a productive thing, I decided to research about it. As I discovered this was a common phenomena, but really hard to track and prove, I went to find explanation in Bourdieu's symbolic violence theory. 

Main research question: How does symbolic gender violence occur in multiplayer online games in Brazil, more specifically in League of Legends and Dota 2?

TLDR;

The Thesis contributes in the fields of games studies, and the game industry to open paths from the intertwining of theories focused on power and symbolic violence with game studies, demonstrating new ways of understanding players and highlighting situations of oppression that are so difficult to unveil.

In a hurry? Click here to jump to Achievments!

Methodology

Analysis of six matches by female players (three from Dota 2 and three from League of Legends, obtained from videos posted by themselves on the streaming platform Twitch. The videos were collected and analyzed between September 22, 2018 and November 10 2019. In order to maintain the ethical principles of research, all analysis were authorized by the players involved in the study, and their information went through the anonymization process. In addition, the project was released from passage by the Research Ethics Committee of UFRGS for not involving or interfering with the players' actions.

 

Methodologies used: Documental and bibliographic research; Laurence Bardin's Discourse Analysis. 

Theoretical Approach

The theoretical foundation runs through the concepts of:

- Power and symbolic violence (Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu; Steven Lukes, Slavoj Zizek);

- Gender violence (Simone de Beauvoir; Guacira Lopes Louro, Paul Preciado, Judith Butler) and through an approximation between these subjects and the digital games scope.

 

The second theoretical axis encompasses game studies. It was sought to define:

- What digital games are and their rules systems (Johan Huizinga; Suely Fragoso, Ivan Mosca; Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, Alexander Galloway);

- and the concept of griefing, differentiating the computer’s ethics from the player’s in the online multiplayer environment (Check Foo and Elina Koivisto, Jesper Juul, Miguel Sicart, Chris Crawford). 

Results

Through the content analysis I understood that:

Symbolic violence does not only reside in the acts of the male players involved in the matches, but also in the design of the characters and the rules of the game. The players themselves present behaviors that constitute self-inflicted symbolic violence.

My hypothesis was totaly refuted: The fact that the player has a good performance and exposes herself more as a woman is the reason for the violence found.

Violence is not only manifested in verbal language, but also through the rules and limits of games.

So, I created the concept of discoursive gameplay violence, and translated to this awesome infographic:

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And, through the analysis, I discovered three distinct categories of those violences:

1. Game design (descriptive rules)

2. Player attitudes against streamers (descriptive and prescriptive rules)

3. Player attitudes against themselves (descriptive rules)

Achievments

At the University database, my Thesis has been downloaded more than 5,800 times between 2020 and 2022. Most of the downloads were from the United States, followed by Brazil, United Kingdom and Germany!

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My Thesis was awarded with honors by the examinators. This means it got the highest score! Look at how happy I was:

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I was also invited several times to talk about the results I found. Here are some examples. In 2021, I participated as a speaker at Fundação Getúlio Vargas at the Playing like a Girl pannel (part of a Games and Politics series). You can watch the whole live here (Portuguese).

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In the same year, I was invited to share my Thesis at a live in the Youtube/Twitch channel called Mimimídias, that has more than 130k subscribers. The channel discusses how media and politics are related to each other. You can see the live here (Portuguese).

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A case study that derived from my main research was published as a book chapter. The book is called "Videogames, Diversidade e Gênero: Pesquisa Científica e Acadêmica" (Videogames, Diversity and Gender: Academic and Scientific Research), organized by Beatriz Blanco and Lucas Goulart, published in 2019. 

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My article, entitled "A violência simbólica contra a mulher nos games online exposta por homens: uma análise da campanha #MyGameMyName" (The symbolic violence agains women in online game exposed by men: an analysis of the campaign #MyGameMyName) had as an objective to understand how male Youtubers reacted when pretending to be women while playing videogames, which was part of this campaign. In the article, I analyze the importance of those agents in raising awareness to this topic among their peers - male gamers, usually teenagers. 

Achievments 1

If you're a nerd like me, you may also like...

I wrote a lot of articles on games. Mostly are in Portuguese, but you can find some of them in English. These are ones I reccomend:

Conservatism and toxic masculinity in gamer culture: An approach to Magic: The Gathering

Thiago Falcão, Tarcízio Macedo, Gabriela Kurtz

In: Matrizes, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 251-277

Click here to read the full article

The “not so” Beautiful Game: a study on Brazilian players of the fantasy soccer game Cartola FC

Gabriela Kurtz, João Pedro Araújo

In: DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

Click here to read the full article

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