Collective Organizing, Individual Resistance, or Asshole Griefers? An Ethnographic Analysis of Women of Color In Xbox Live

We are steadily witnessing the appropriation of new communication technologies to facilitate collective organizing and mobilization. As Eltantawy and Wiest (2011) explain, the development of social media creates opportunities for digital and web based social movements to change the reality of collective action. Cyberactivists have incorporated a host of tools to facilitate their organizational activities from staging boycotts, staging public protests to planning demonstrations (Langman 2005). The types of new communication technologies that have been used include short messaging services (SMS), social networking sites, and as the current research will examine, virtual gaming communities. Typically, one would not assume that collective organizing and resistance would take place in a virtual gaming community. But this is exactly where a cohort of female gamers experience and resist hegemonic inequality every day. This paper explores their community within Xbox Live [1] and documents their struggles with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other intersecting oppressions experienced at the hand (voice) of other gamers. They have responded with various in-game tactics to counter the perceived source of their (linguistic) oppression, the default gamer. By employing virtual ethnography, I examine if these tactics are reminiscent of actual collective organizing, merely reflect individual acts of resistance, or are simply griefing activities used to disrupt gameplay and harass other players. Regardless of their intended purpose, this project will privilege the voices and experiences of these marginalized gamers, a luxury not afforded them inside this gaming community. Before delving into a discussion of the oppressed status of marginalized populations in Xbox Live, it is important to situate video games within a context of dominance – privileging whiteness and masculinity. This often creates a negative environment for women and people of color within the larger gaming culture.

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