My interest in the sociological study of video games has resulted in a two-big-binder set of video game research. In their entirety, these binders hold hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds pages of articles copied form journals. The unfortunate majority of these articles deal only with gender and video games while a few deal with race and racism in video games. None of these speak about heteronormativity or LGBTQ issues aside from a couple of very brief articles from The Advocate. What surprises me most, however, is the lack of research dealing with the full spectrum of marginalization in video games. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc all figure into the equation of one's experience of life. And all of these figure in simultaneously. The experience of being a white woman is different from the experience of being a black woman is different from the experience of being a black gay man is different from....well, you get the idea. To study race or gender as two separate factors in video games is to ignore the intersectional nature of marginalization/oppression/privilege/etc. Though I understand that conducting research on the whole gambit is a much more difficult task than focusing on the issues individually, I also feel that more focus should be placed on this than has been. Few articles exist in the academic world which deal with this at all. So, I was, rightfully, excited when I came across an article by David Leonard, "Not a Hater, Just Keepin' it Real: The Importance of Race- and Gender-Based Game Studies".
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