Last semester, the initial goal of the horror_games_feminist_themes project was to create a curated dataset by scraping the “Category: Horror video games” tree on Wikipedia to classify keywords from horror video games that feature a female or LGBTQ+ protagonist. Here’s a spreadsheet of the output .CSV file for convenience. This was my first time constructing a dataset, and my hope was to create one that could eventually help identify and analyze recurring feminist themes, patterns, and harmful tropes within the horror video game genre. I chose to scrape, curate, and then manually review Wikipedia pages because video games involve a wide range of elements, from gameplay mechanics to visual design; it would be nearly impossible to begin an analysis on gameplay alone. Starting with Wikipedia seemed like a feasible place to start.
So now what?
The project I propose aims to build a website that brings the dataset to life. The creation of a public-facing website that translates a dataset into an accessible and interactive experience, one that can make invisible structures visible by dissecting feminist themes from a medium that is not often analyzed in such a way. I envision that there will be playful design choices to lighten the load of this sort of gruesome topic–something fun and feminine as an entry point to make sense of the genre and medium where patterns can be analyzed and challenged.
Here are some data viz examples from https://pudding.cool/ that I was inspired by while doing a brainstorm scan:
What question or problem will this project answer? Horror studies is typically centered around film, and video games are often underexamined as cultural artifacts. Scholars like Barbara Creed highlight themes of female monstrosity, embodiment, and patriarchal structures in horror films. For example, the horror genre historically frames female bodies and the reproductive system as something monstrous or abject (Creed, 1993), and this is one of the themes that I have also noticed when sifting through reviewing keywords for my dataset. I’d like to build from these frameworks to examine horror video games as cultural artifacts that expose similar structures and themes, such as patriarchy and embodiment.
What audience will this serve?
- People who are interested in games, horror, and feminism.
- Students who are interested in media/game studies and/or gender studies
- The (female and LGBTQ+) gaming community(?)
- This project contributes to DH by applying feminist principles of DH not only to interpret “data as capta” (Drucker, 2011) but also to design a project that analyzes the medium of video games, which, as mentioned previously, is often difficult to dissect and comprehensively analyze compared to other media.
Tentatively…
the final product is some sort of data viz website, but we might need to refine the data a bit more. This may include refining the keywords and classifiers, or scraping more titles. We might need to narrow down the scope. One thing I found particularly interesting while constructing the dataset was the differences between horror games published in the 90s to early 2000s versus more recent titles. This could be one of the ways to help centralize and narrow the scope of this project.
Tools, skillsets, and various roles I envision us needing:
Some of these roles may be merged, shared, or rotated amongst other team members (based on individual preferences) through the different stages of the project!
- Web-developer:
- HTML/CSS/JS
- Build out the site
- UX & visual designer
- Design the site’s color, typography, and layout
- Tools tbd.
- Data curator & researcher
- Python (for pulling data)
- Review Wikipedia pages and validate keyword entries
- Refine thematic keywords/classifiers
- Help document interpretative decisions
- Writer & content development
- Draft and edit website textual content
- Help shape the project’s voice and tone
- Content creation for the chosen social media platform
Potential barriers and questions:
- Wikipedia bias: I want to acknowledge that creating a dataset using keywords pulled from Wikipedia can have its limitations and biases.
- How can the interface be used to display data and invite engagement without minimizing gendered-violence, trauma, or harm?
This is an exciting and interesting proposal! The intersection of horror, gaming and feminism is a really cool combination of ideas to explore. There’s definitely more detail that needs to be worked out for what exactly this project will entail, but you seem to be on the right track – I really like the idea of using a comparison between games from the 90s/2000s to present day games as a way to narrow the scope. I might suggest an approach similar to Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland’s “Race and Distant Reading” that we looked at last semester. In that case, So and Roland used distant reading to scan over a wide range of texts to find patterns among books written by black and white authors, but then augmented that with a close reading of Giovanni’s Room to show what those patterns looked like in practice and how they broke down in places. In the case of this project, it could be informative to do some wide scale data analysis of feminist themes over the dataset you’ve collected, but then also select one or a few examples of games that either exemplify or push back against the trends of the dataset to “close read”, giving a more balanced view of the data from both close up and far away.
I’d love to work on this project, but whether or not it gets selected for this class, I’m really curious to see where it goes! Nice work!
I totally agree with you that there needs to be more details worked out for this project. Thanks for reminding me of So and Roland’s approach, too. I think their approach is similar to what I was aiming for, but I don’t think the ‘close reading’ part is there yet. When initially creating the dataset, Web-scraping/distant reading was the main approach, which also involved manually reviewing each Wikipedia article. At the time, the main goal was to create a dataset that would serve as an entry point for future layers of research, allowing me to interpret and visualize different patterns and so on in future expansions. Your suggestion to pair wide-scale analysis of feminist themes with a few close readings of specific games is especially helpful, as it is helping me envision different paths that this project might take. I like the idea of having some sort of visualization of the distant read (the keywords from each article that relate to a feminist theme), but connecting that data to broader research is something that needs further development. I can see this being done by comparing games from the 90s/2000s to present-day games, and by incorporating a close study of one game published maybe every 5 years that exemplifies the trends and one that pushes back against them.
I appreciate your helpful insight and would love to work on this project with you if it is selected!
I think this project — as I’ve told you so many times — is absolutely fascinating to me. I do feel like this proposal has too many moving parts and I wonder if nailing down one of them might clarify how the rest might be narrowed. For example, you mentioned wanting to make this an “interactive experience,” which is great, but why? What kind of interactivity? How will that specific mode of interactivity enhance or advance the argument of the project? I think data viz projects do best when the visualization is itself an embodiment of the argument at hand. So that is what I’d be most curious to learn before this project kicks off.
Side note: I love Barbara Creed’s work, and I don’t have an answer here, but I do wonder if it its the best idea to engage in, what I’d call, a form of video game criticism, that mostly transplants theory from cinema studies? I’m guilty of that too. But I wonder if this is one of the “why’s” that can further hone and justify some of the more technical decisions to be made here.
Hi Michelle! I 100% agree with your statement that data viz projects do best when the visualization itself embodies the argument at hand. In terms of interactivity, I think I envision the end product won’t be a completely static website. That some of the visualizations can be sort of “living”. I think interactivity matters here because it could allow viewers to toggle/filter between data points to see how certain keywords and themes change (e.g., over time, or with or without female developers). The interactive element I’m hoping for wouldn’t just present the data, but it would convey the argument by letting users encounter patterns of repetition, resistance, or change themselves.
I love that you bring up existing cinema studies, because I think those frameworks will be important for bringing the project together. Barbara Creed laid the foundation for thinking about feminist themes in the horror genre for me, and I used those ideas to guide my interpretations of the dataset. I love where you’re going with this. A form of video game criticism is very intriguing to me, and I’m thinking about how that might help shape the project.