Video Games and Childhood Masculinity

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapter, I am arguing that the pleasures of video game play can be understood in relation to Hansen’s kinaesthetics, together with an understanding of affect which incorporates psychoanalytic insights. By looking at research on video game play, I have suggested that the move of at once navigating virtual space and being immersed in it is also engaged with as a kind of god-trick which presents the player as both inside and outside at the same time; inside feeling their way around and being immersed, and outside doing the controlling, which we could understand as an omnipotent fantasy of control, a masculine fantasy. Indeed, we could speculate that because feeling your way around, as I argued in the last chapter, is characterised as feminine, and intuitive, the god-trick of being outside as well as inside is necessary to shore up a feeling of masculinity against its encroachment by the feminine. With this in mind we might explore how video game play provides one vehicle (among many) for the achievement of contemporary masculinity. Remember, that when I say its achievement I am also talking about a fantasy, a fantasy which requires constant work in order to provide some semblance of its success, a success which is always ultimately out of reach and which therefore has to be practised again and again. The pleasure in games which appear to offer one aspect of a route towards the achievement of masculinity is that they seem to offer a certainty that confirms masculine identity.