Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fair Play: Gender, Digital Gaming AndEducational Disadvantage

2004; WIT Press; Volume: 31; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2495/ci040241

1746-4463

Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell,

Child Development and Digital Technology

Since the spectacular runaway best-seller, “Barbie Fashion Designer” appeared on the shelves in October 1996, selling a half-million copies in its first two months and vanquishing the slash-and-bash market leaders “Doom,” “Quake,” “Duke Nukem,” and “Mortal Kombat,” major corporate e-sponsored research campaigns have been launched to identify the differently gendered play patterns of boys and girls and to discover what girls “like best”. This astonishing breakthrough into the previously dormant market for computer-based playware for girls ushered in a retooling of technology – a retooling accomplished, however, by affirming rather than challenging received gender stereotypes that preserve girls’ historically assigned locations in the gender order. In the field of education, video games have the capacity to capture and hold the attention of players of many different ages, and to “teach” new players the functions and controls of a new game with far greater alacrity and to greater functional effect than schools teach. This paper examines gender and computer game playing, in particular questions of identity, access and playful engagement with these technologies. Because computer-based media are not only central tools for learning and work, and because games and simulations are increasingly being recruited as educational and instructional genres, it is likewise exceedingly important, from an educational equity standpoint, to examine the ways in which rapidly evolving computer game-based learning initiatives threaten to compound and intensify girls’ computer disadvantage, a cumulative dis-entitlement from computer-based educational and occupational opportunities.