Video Games, Gender, and Sexuality

Catalog description

Video games and the cultures surrounding them have become pervasive forces that not only reflect but shape contemporary culture. From games as seemingly simple as Minecraft and Pokémon Go, to complex open-world narratives like the Grand Theft Auto series and The Last of Us, every video game says something about gender and sexuality. This course will explore the multiple ways in which the field of Video Game Studies approaches video games as cultural texts that, upon analysis, reveal something about important aspects of our lived experiences. We will use the lenses of gender and sexuality to examine video games as primary texts upon which to perform analysis and consider the cultures that spring up around individual games and "gaming" as a whole.