{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019765739385065886, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008784773060029283, 'mean_word_length': 5.54066985645933, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Of Dickwolves and Killjoys

This chapter argues that gamers, including academic gamers, use the angry feminist as an abject figure to reinforce gamer identity and impose politically-motivated limitations on what constitutes an “expert” of video games. It historicizes the conversation about harassment in video game culture most recently initiated by the #GamerGate campaign of 2014 by analysing the earlier Fat Princess (2008) and Dickwolves (2010) incidents to show that these encounters rely on hypocritical standards of affective performance and an emphasis on the “right” kinds of knowledge about video games. It then goes on to demonstrate that the conflicts accompanying the formation of game studies as a discipline shares structural similarities with these fan fights. The chapter ends with an analysis of early work on the Grand Theft Auto video games to show that the exclusion of feminist and critical race perspectives in game studies resulted in racist and sexist scholarship. The similarities in fan and academic conflicts about video games demonstrate that feminist epistemology continues to exist at the fringes of acceptable discourse – no more poignantly demonstrated than when #GamerGate discovered the Digital Games Research Association and separated its members into “academic” (legitimate) and “feminist” (illegitimate) experts on video games.