Playing The Sims 2 Constructing and Nego
Playing The Sims 2 Constructing and Nego
Playing The Sims 2 Constructing and Nego
Candidate
Hanna Elina Wirman
Supervisors
Director of Studies: Estella Tincknell
Supervisor: Martin Lister
Supervisor: Seth Giddings
Advisor: Helen Kennedy
Evaluation committee
External Examiner: Tanya Krzywinska, Brunel University
Internal Examiner: Jonathan Dovey, University of the West of England
Chair: Josephine Dolan, University of the West of England
Abstract
Despite some remarkable shifts in gender demographics of game players during
the last decade, computer games remain male-gendered media. Engagement in
such a culture, this work suggests, is characterised by confusion and incoher-
ence for women players who are simultaneously taking part in male dominated
leisure which marginalises them and a society which assumes gender equality
as an acquired right. Small-scale ethnography tied together with an analysis of
concurrent cultural discourses and the game system’s characteristics allows a
deep analysis of the construction of identities that conflict with the naturalised
idea of a player.
The Sims 2 (2004) computer game sets out a unique case for a study
of women’s player identities because it is both exceptionally popular among
women and individuated by a theme and a structure that are understood as
‘feminine’. Furthermore, a group of women players whose engagement with
the game is characterised by creation and sharing of new and altered game
content, the skinning of it, appears interesting since the women skinners resist
traditional gender roles by taking active, productive positions towards the
game.
This work’s original contribution to knowledge is in offering a nuanced
view of female game playing which resists easy assimilation to some of the
dominant concepts recently in play within the field of study, such as political
resistance in the form of game content appropriation and female empower-
ment through video game play. While skinners seem to have a possibility to
change a game that results from a male-dominated game development cul-
ture, their skinning is fundamentally facilitated and invited by the game they
play. Such practice therefore appears different from the ‘high’ forms of subver-
sive user-participation that are typically cherished in the studies of media use.
Consecutively, the approach in this thesis questions the straightforwardly em-
bracing undertone of the current Web 2.0 ‘buzz’ that claims democratisation
of media production. The Sims 2 skinning offers an example of a productive
practice that does not go beyond what we understand as gameplay, but de-
mands revisiting the very notion of gameplay itself.
I dedicate this work to my late grandmothers, Elvi and Marjatta, who never
gave me an easy win in Canasta or in Kimble.
Hanna Wirman
Hong Kong
October 2010
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Linkages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Aims and Objectives of Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3.1 Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.2 Computer Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3.3 Gameplay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.3.4 Games and Players: Co-Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.5 The Sims 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.3.6 The Sims 2 Skinning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
1.4 Structure of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
vii
Contents
viii
Contents
6 Conclusions 255
6.1 On Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
6.2 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
7 Appendices 273
7.1 Appendix 1: Interview Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
7.2 Appendix 2: Informed Consent Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
8 References 281
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
I have a little green post-it note which has hand-writing of a young player
on it saying ‘maxmotives’ and a tiny butterfly shaped papercut on the bottom
of the paper. I got it years ago as a gift from a daughter of a good friend.
Actually, I assumed it to be a kind of expression of gratitude in a form of
showing off one’s cultural capital, game cultural that is. I got it because I had,
a moment before, showed the girl how to find player-created clothes and items
for The Sims 2 (2004) game she was playing. In turn, she offered me some of
her secret knowledge of the game by passing a note that included a code, or
a cheat, with which all the ‘motives’ of the sim characters (such as Hunger,
Comfort and Hygiene) stay on maximum level allowing me to concentrate on
things outside the characters’ basic needs.
1
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background
2
1.1. Background
players had aimed to introduce the kinds of game characteristics that do and
do not appeal to women (e.g. Cassell and Jenkins 1998, Ray 2004, Hartmann
and Klimmt 2006) and some research had explored the ways in which women
players actually take part in the cultures of gaming (e.g. Schott and Horrell
2000, Bryce and Rutter 2002, Kennedy 2006, Taylor 2003). Since there already
was a strong indication of women constituting almost a half of all computer
game players (e.g. Harris 2005, ESA 2010), I decided to look at those women
who are active players instead of concentrating on why other women are not
interested in playing. I considered it important to study, “given that games
have been and continue to be a popular cultural site for play, especially for
men and boys, who and what supports their play and under what conditions,
and when, how, with whom and under what conditions do girls and women
play games?” (Jenson and de Castell 2008, n.p.).
More specifically then, I was interested in exploring the cultural con-
struction of ‘a woman player’ and how such a player identity is experienced
in a culture that lacks clear points of identification for being a woman partic-
ipant. Namely, I wanted to write about game cultural involvement so that it
would highlight the problems women face when they use products that result
from male-dominated game development cultures (e.g. Dovey and Kennedy
2007, Section 3.1.4 of this thesis) and situate on a leisure culture that is still
understood as masculine (See Section 3.1): about being a girl or a woman
player when the term player itself is not neutral, but instead naturalised as
masculine.
While a tremendous change has taken place in the games business and
in the player demographics during the last decade, the dominant cultural rep-
resentation of gamers as male remains fixed in and within popular media such
as computer game histories, television shows, magazines and films. Some male
players also attempt to stabilise it by fixing meanings about player identity.
3
Chapter 1 Introduction
Hostility towards women players in multiplayer online games and the re-casting
of existing women players as unattractive on online discussion fora is not un-
usual, for example.1
Given the masculine associations linked to gameplay and their develop-
ment, I took it as a good starting point to look at the ways in which women
players create content for the games they play. This approach offers a pos-
sibility to explore what is it in the games that women players would like to
change in order to like them more. In order to do this I found it important
to show how game products are neither stabile nor fixed. Instead, I wanted to
base my research on an understanding of games as open and flexible for new
interpretations and configurations.
I ended up studying game modifications (or mods) and game modifying
(or modding). In computer game communities the verb to mod, to modify,
that originates from Open Source software development and have been used
among computer enthusiasts, refers to an act of modifying software to perform
a function that was not originally included by the (game) designer. As the
idea of ‘software’ is vague and can be understood very broadly, also changes
made in image, audio and video files are often included in modding. Corre-
spondingly, a mod may be any piece of user-generated content that changes a
function, graphics/texture, sound, game logic/mechanics, game space or other
aspect of the game. These include new levels or quests, items, characters or
enemies, story lines, and similar and are added either by replacing existing
game elements or adding entirely new ones.
Approaching such game modifications from the point of view of gen-
der was nothing new itself. A handful of studies (Kennedy 2006, Poremba
2003a and Schleiner 2001) had already suggested that game modification of-
fers women a possibility for empowerment and proposed modifying as a po-
1
A website called ‘Fat, ugly or slutty’ at http://fatuglyorslutty.com/
offers a good introduction to this kind of discrimination.
4
1.1. Background
5
Chapter 1 Introduction
6
1.2. Linkages
media in regard to skinning. While these popular and scholarly discourses are
also embedded with notions of empowered and democratised users (cf. von
Hippel 2005, Chesbrough 2003, Tapscott and Williams 2008, Mason 2008),
my research sheds light on the ways in which The Sims 2 skinning reproduces
some of the existing power dynamics and continues the long history of women’s
leisure on one hand and offers possibilities for cultural (instead of political)
resistance and appropriation on the other.
The title of the thesis refers to two earlier works on feminine media use,
both forerunners in feminist Cultural Studies. Janice A. Radway’s Reading the
Romance from 1984 approached romance literature as an overlooked genre and
thoroughly explored the experiences of its female readers. Ien Ang’s Watch-
ing Dallas from 1985 grasps another such genre but not in literature but in
television: soap opera, which is a classic case of ‘bad entertainment’ in Cul-
tural Studies. The title of my thesis, Playing The Sims 2, attempts to suggest
The Sims 2 as a contemporary counterpart to romance and soap. Similarities
are linked to exceptional popularity among female audiences coupled together
with cultural devaluing of the genre. These will be discussed especially in Sec-
tion 3.3.2. The way structures of meaning have developed in game cultures
shows a remarkable similarity to these earlier ‘old’ media, with the cultural
marginalisation and stigmatisation of women’s popular cultural pleasures and
identifications.
1.2 Linkages
Such a starting point for research takes an interdisciplinary approach, but one
primarily inflected by the Cultural Studies’ emphasis on lived practice and
identities. Cultural Studies and Gender Studies, as they aim to show how
identities and meanings are culturally constructed, shape the theoretical basis
7
Chapter 1 Introduction
8
1.2. Linkages
9
Chapter 1 Introduction
My work, therefore, moves away from looking merely at the textual mean-
ings of a game, since it combines this approach with a more ethnographic
and player focused intent. The conducted ethnography helps in unpacking the
complex relationships between cultural discourses, individuals’ experiences and
game objects’ features.
Cultural Studies has also influenced the setting of research questions and
research methodology most powerfully.
10
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
These research questions helped establish for me that The Sims 2 would
be the main focus for my research because of its extensive popularity amongst
female players (Boyes 2007, Waters 2006). Concepts central to this approach
will be initially introduced in the following.
1.3.1 Identity
11
Chapter 1 Introduction
in relation to this discursive category. This work can be called positioning one-
self within a category: participants position themselves in a category of being
a Sims skinner. Based on this understanding, we can postulate a distinction
between cultural identities as those that are created around cultural discourses
and the process of constructing individual identities that is about actively posi-
tioning oneself in and in-between these cultural identities and about accepting
and further developing them.
Discourse theory enables us to understand how cultural meanings then
operate through institutions and technologies as well as through the construc-
tion of individual identities. Cultural identities are constructed by and through
institutions such as game media and games industry as well as in people’s ev-
eryday practices. In order to understand individuals’ experiences and identi-
ties, they thus need to be tied together with those cultural discourses that are
parallel to them. Furthermore, these contexts need to be accepted as varying
sets of influences that for any living subject are dependent on factors such as
the person’s individual life history, social surroundings and historical moment.
Identity then becomes understood as a meeting point of various differ-
ent discourses. Importantly, such theory allows for competing and negotiated
models of the self: identities are “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never
singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and an-
tagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (Hall 2007, 17).
To sum up so far, my research, when it aims to say something about
players’ identities, assumes that they are fluid, constructed, historically con-
tingent and parts of a continuous ‘process’, created within, through and in
representations, discourses and everyday practices.
In order to map out how the construction of identities is spread around
in our culture, I have used several methods. Primarily, I have conducted a
set of player interviews with skinners. Second, I have studied game reviews
12
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
and forum discussions that shape the discourses around skinning in order to
study the relationship between skinners and discourses surrounding skinning.
However, because the set of available discourses and approaches to the Sims
skinner identity in particular is highly limited, namely there is no distinctive
cultural discourse on ‘skinners’, it has been necessary to approach discourses
that appear close to it. Finally, I will approach Sims skinners from a variety
of theoretical perspectives, or research traditions, that each highlight different
aspects of the practice and work as possible starting points for individual
skinner’s identity work. In so doing I also acknowledge the influence that
research in general has upon the cultures it examines and take these studies as
texts that have indirect effect on the cultures they discuss. Game definitions
that have been produced within academy and later introduced to the industry
could serve as an example here. It is thus one of the goals of my research to
draw a map or a genealogy of identity categories that become tied together in
the practice of skinning. I concentrate on defining and examining this set of
cultural identities available as a basis of skinners’ identity work.
The work presents identities as being partly constructed and mediated
by games and information technologies in general, as well as being affected by
the identity representations and discursive identity categories which are formed
around them in popular discourse, for instance. In my study, I suggest ways
to challenge and problematise the conventional categories of (game) fandom,
hackerism and tactical use of games as primary discourses that characterise
Sims skinning. Instead, I will introduce a fourth category, playerhood, based
on the empirical material gathered for my study.
Each one of the discourses describes the object of study differently. As
Sari Husa writes based on her reading of Hall (1992) “while a discourse enables
discussing a topic from one perspective, it restricts the other possible ways of
looking at and portraying it” (Husa 1995, n.p., Transl. HW). Reading the
13
Chapter 1 Introduction
interviews and theoretical accounts side by side, I will explore what are the
specificities of each theoretical stand in understanding skinners’ identities. I
will then be able to suggest new approaches that challenge some of the troubles
faced when looking at Sims skinners based on dominant ideas of a player, a
game modifier, a fan, a hacker, an artist, and other related categories.
Methodologically, in regard to selecting theoretical reference points for
a study of such multifaceted identities, this lays out an significant challenge.
The study needs to draw on a broad set of theories that do not necessarily
share a disciplinary background or an epistemological basis. These views may
be based on very different emphases; some on the importance of technology,
expertise and mastery, some on the social structuring of a society and solitude,
for example. However, here it helps to be true to the theoretical starting
point I have chosen, to accept that identities are fragmented and draw from
several potentially separate discourses. Also, the emphasis will always be on
the interview participants’ word.
In terms of understanding gender, I have found Butler’s (1999/1990)
account on gender identity useful. It suggests that gender, too, is discursively
constructed. Extending Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) on the
discursive construction of identities, Butler writes about the performativity of
gender and suggests that gender should be seen as “a set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1999/1990, 43-4).
This approach has been broadly used in cultural research and is suitable, also
for my study, as it emphasises the cultural construction of gender identities as
an ongoing process as well as an individual’s active role in this process.
Gender is a cultural construction, operating through discourses and through
everyday practice, and this constructedness becomes evident in the ways in
which both ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ operate on a continuum that is tac-
14
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
15
Chapter 1 Introduction
16
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
17
Chapter 1 Introduction
dition of studying the relationship between the player and the game character
as a process of identification (e.g. Hefner, Klimmt and Vorderer 2007), and
is instead focussed on the ways in which identities emerge from a wider game
culture as well as from the practice of skinning in particular. This goes beyond
the concepts of ‘narrative’ and ‘ludic’ identities (de Mul 2005), which are also
about the internal workings of a game text or an object. Furthermore, whereas
game skins have also been studied from the point of view of in-game female
representations and thus as possibilities for identification (e.g. Kennedy 2006,
Poremba 2003a, Schleiner 1998), I will focus on the competencies, skills and
pleasures that skinning offers women players instead of the in-game identities
of these women.
Finally, I want to address the impact of online communication for iden-
tity construction. Liberatory and utopian views of the Internet’s ability to
render meaningless those aspects of identities that build on people’s physical
qualities were characteristic to the early studies of the Internet (cf. Turkle
1995). However, more recent research suggests that identity stereotypes of
off-line cultures extend and travel to those online.
Lori Kendall (1998) and Lisa Nakamura (1999, 2002), among others,
argue that online interactions do not generally encourage greater fluidity or
diversity in identities. Instead, “[w]hile telecommunications [...] can challenge
some gender and racial stereotypes, they reproduce and reflect them as well”
(Nakamura 2002, 325). Actually, suggesting that the Internet would be able
to remove such meanings altogether does not take identities as socially and
culturally constructed but reduces “sexism to (almost automatic) reactions
to physical cues, and implies that such reactions cannot be changed except
through the removal of those physical cues” (Kendall 2002, 221). Thus, my
approach does not assume that identities constructed in relation to online
participation build on different discourses that those constructed exclusively
18
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
19
Chapter 1 Introduction
The conceptual framework for my study offers a model for defining a game
from multiple perspectives. To start with, a game is an object made for en-
tertainment and sold as a commercial product. Simultaneously, a game is a
systemic structure consisting of rules and goals, or ‘mechanics.’ A game is
also something that is represented in media and invokes meaning and opin-
ions. Succeeding in a game requires certain skills and competencies and is for
fun and pleasure as well as a source of emotions. A game requires technol-
ogy, which shapes its use and meanings. It needs players and makes people
players. It can be looked at as material or as an abstraction. Computer game
technologies in particular are games that usually take care of the rules of the
game.
In regard to skinning, a game product facilitates certain kind of game-
play. It is an object of endorsement and criticism and open for different in-
terpretations, playings and players’ contributions. A game is always under
development and something that players are actively creating. It is a technol-
ogy which is played in space and time where cultural and social conventions
and hierarchies are in operation, and which itself carries meaning.
If we accept this broad understanding of what a game is, any game is
different from culture to culture, from person to person and from time to time.
A game is easy for one player and hard for another, for instance. Or interesting
due to its graphical quality at one time and old fashioned in another. Each
combination of technologies and arguments over the use of it contributes to the
specific ‘gameness’ of it. The particular game under study is both culturally
constructed and reconstructed as well as individually experienced. It is also a
product that is marketed to a specific group of players or potential ones.
What my study attempts to do, then, is to discuss in which ways The
Sims 2 is played and understood as a game in our culture and how it shapes its
20
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
1.3.3 Gameplay
Despite the complex nature of ‘game’ itself, including its cultural, social and
structural meanings, playing games can be approached from the point of view
of player’s engagement. Here I make a distinction between game, play and
gameplay so that a game is something that can be discussed separately from
its users, play is something that requires a subject and gameplay is the process
of play where the two cannot be separated.
I further approach gameplay as inherently productive and active. Such
definition of gameplay is based on looking at the game product as a techno-
logical artifact that is indeed pre-designed but only created when it is being
played. In understanding this contribution of a player, the concept of config-
uration appears useful.
Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997), which paved the way for one of the
foundational principles of Game Studies, introduces games as texts with unique
characteristics, as cybertexts or as ergodic texts. Compared to linear and thus
many older and earlier forms of media, such as television or film, computer
games allow users not only to interpret, but also to explore, configure, and
add content to them (Aarseth 1997). Games cannot be approached like linear
media because they do not come into being until a player puts life into them,
plays them, creates particular stories out of multiple possibilities, remixes her
own set of actions and outcomes, and thus creates the media text while playing.
As Markku Eskelinen puts it: “in art we might have to configure in order to
be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able
21
Chapter 1 Introduction
2
Aarseth writes that “a text, then, is any object with the primary function
to relay verbal information” where the information is understood as “a string
of signs, which may (but does not have to) make sense to a given observer”
(Aarseth 1997, 62).
3
In multiplayer games, for example, the player affects other players’ ex-
periences of the game. Taylor (2006)’s and Humphreys (2005)’s studies of
MMORPGs extensively describe players’ ongoing impact on each other’s ac-
tions in such games. These activities change and create the game world for
other players. As Humphreys writes, “the trajectory of game play is thus con-
tingent upon the particular dynamics and action generated by shifting combi-
nations of players” (Humphreys 2005, 40).
4
Here it is important to note how the actual material game, not only the
interpretations of it, are created and altered in the process of using a game.
22
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
study of games: “the computer game only exists as an ‘object for contempla-
tion’ and analysis as and when it is played” (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 104).
Productivity can, therefore, be understood as a precondition for the game to
exist as a cultural text. From this perspective it can be further suggested that
every gamer is a co-author of the game, not only an interpreter of its meanings.
Simply put, a user’s involvement in the game text is significantly different from
the contexts of earlier media. And this idea of what a game is seems to be
agreed upon in game studies (e.g. Poremba 2003a).
In other words, individual playings of games cannot be fully pre-determined
before the activity of play takes place, which results that each game as played
can also be interpreted in various different ways once it has been created in
gameplay. In The Sims 2, for example, one player may concentrate on de-
veloping multiple generations of characters while another player’s focus is on
creating a beautiful garden. Depending on the game, the same boxed game
may lead to many entirely different played games as created by different players
or when replayed by the same player. In games, interpretation thus appears
as a level of user participation that comes both before and after configuration.
23
Chapter 1 Introduction
with fan participation, such as the writing of fan fiction, and thus attempts to
establish borders between fan and nonfan activities (Jones 2006, 643). What
Jones calls fan participation is what I will hereafter refer to as co-creativity. An
important difference to the configurative relationship here is that co-creative
practices can usually be separated from the actual playing of the game, when
playing is understood as what the original designers of the game offer for the
player to be played. Texts and knowledge that result from co-creativity can
be used in designing games or, for example, embedded in existing games.
Co-creativity, a term introduced to Game Studies by John Banks (2002)
in his book chapter entitled “Players as co-creators” in 2002 and further elab-
orated by Sue Morris (2003) and Jon Dovey and Kennedy (2006), is a way to
understanding the creation of a game is shared between paid game developers
and players of a game. As a member of the community development team
for the Trainz (2001) train simulator game, Banks studied the ways in which
players of the game had a possibility to offer input when new sequels of the
game were under development. What he then suggests as player co-creativity
gathered together forms of player involvement such as critical commenting on
online fora, development of new graphics for the game, and all-round discus-
sions about the development and contents of the game with the actual paid
development team. The views and knowledge of railway hobbyists on the rail-
ways and trains that were simulated in the game were invaluable help to its
creators.
Morris discusses co-creativity in relation of FPS (First-Person Shooter)
genre and Quake players. The particular genre in question is important since
the majority of mods is created for FPS games and includes global success
stories, such as Counter-Strike (2000) mod, that have been turned into com-
mercial products themselves. Moving towards a fan base that does not emerge
in such a particular way from a non-gaming community as is the case with
24
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
railroad players, Morris looks at the ways in which Quake players influence
professional game development. Morris (2003) suggests first-person shooter
games as products of collaborative creative processes between game develop-
ers and individual players, because game modifications feed new ideas and
content into professional game production. In addition, she describes how
players’ attendance in beta testing 6 helps developers in their work and sug-
gests modding as a source for innovation and experimentation for the official
game development. The industry is constrained by marketing, censorship and
financial considerations whereas modders are free to test and try out various
new aspects for gameplay. This results in a particular co-creative relationship
between player and developers. Like Banks, Morris lists critical feedback on
game related fora as one of the central ways to make an impact.
Dovey and Kennedy (2006) broaden this concept of co-creativity to cover
also other forms of player productivity, such as fan art, mod arts, and tactical
arts, and show its usability in regard to explorations of games as co-creative
media that are not necessarily linked to the commercial production of the
game.
Building on this work, I understand co-creativity as a practice through
which a player can impact the creation and use of games materially and imma-
terially. Synonymous and overlapping use can be seen between the notions of
co-creativity and the creation of custom-content, user-generated content, game
modifications, hacks, fan texts, and, in some cases, game art. Alongside co-
creativity such creativity is sometimes talked about as player productivity or
co-productivity.
In my reading of Game Studies and research on player engagement, the
terms co-creativity, (co-)productivity and user-generated content are used in-
terchangeably. However, as an industry term, user-generated content empha-
6
In beta testing, versions of software are released to a limited audience in
order to eliminate the remaining bugs and flaws of the product.
25
Chapter 1 Introduction
sises the role of the original designer and separates between player and devel-
oper creativity. User-generated content has a feel of an ‘addition’ to a game
that is already ‘ready’ or that can be tweaked or complimented by players.
Industry-oriented texts usually refer to user-generated content without men-
tioning the practice of creating the content itself but concentrating on the
outcome of such practice instead. Meanwhile, productivity assumes a prod-
uct instead of a process and suggests authority over it. Player-productivity,
in parallel to commercial authority, is easily associated with legal and owner-
ship issues and brings along notions of an entity (a product) such as ‘ready’,
‘whole’, ‘hacked’, ‘appropriated’, ‘taken into possession’ and so forth. With its
etymological stance, productivity refers to one ‘product’ and does not support
considerations of fluidity between products such as texts that become parts of
other texts.
Therefore, I prefer the use the term co-creativity over co-productivity
and other related terms. Talking about player participation as co-creativity
allows the notions of shared power over the product, mutual benefit, transfer-
ability, and such that are not tied together with certain materiality. However,
whenever possible, I will refer to the reworking of game character looks and
item graphics simply by skinning in order to separate it from other modding
practices. Using this specific term also makes it possible to leave behind any
theoretical weight that is in dissonance with the specificities of the practice of
skinning, such as any hacker associations of modding or beyond-use produc-
tivity of fandom (See Chapter 4).
While my study is focussed specifically on co-creativity in games, on
The Sims 2 skinning, such research into users’ participation in the production
processes of popular media should appear relevant to the study of participatory
cultures and Web 2.0 /DIY media in general. My research contributes to the
study of participatory cultures as it aims to show how active participation
26
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
The last decade has seen a rapid increase in women’s computer and console
game play. New game technologies such as Nintendo’s consoles DS and Wii
have been forerunners in explicitly targeting women and attracting female
players (e.g. ISFE and Game Vision Europe 2010). Simultaneously has arisen
an outburst of ‘casual games’, those simple online games that take little time
and effort to play and allows temporarily fragmented play. These games are
often referred to as a feminine domain (e.g. Chess 2009, cf. Casual Games
Association 2007).
But even before casual games and Nintendo’s new consoles, there have
been games that have attracted exceptionally wide female audiences. One
of these is Sims. As a global success story and without real competitors The
Sims, which was established as an offshoot of SimCity (1989), appears as a rare
PC game franchise with player demographics constituting a majority of female
players. The game is already being played in 60 countries and translated into
22 languages (Electronic Arts 2008).
The first Sims game came out in 2000 and was created by game designer
Will Wright who had already been designing SimCity games since 1989. While
SimCity was a strategy game about taking care of a city, almost like a digi-
talised train set with a tradition of boys’ and men’s culture, The Sims took
the player into the homes of sim characters and let her lead their lives. In
terms of what the game simulates, this marked a move down and into private
27
Chapter 1 Introduction
domestic space and also out from the city to the suburbs, towards the more
feminine domains.
Two years after its launch the game replaced Myst (1993) as the best-
selling PC game in history (Walker 2002) and by 2009 The Sims franchise had
sold more than 100 million copies worldwide (Electronic Arts 2008). After
numerous expansion packs, the game’s first full sequel The Sims 2 came out
in 2004. Due its timing, my study concentrates on The Sims 2, although the
latest sequel, The Sims 3, was published in 2009. The Sims 2, an extremely
successful continuation for the already best-selling and consistently highly-
ranked game by game reviews had already sold ten million in spring 2008
(Electronic Arts 2008).
Adding to the continuum of life simulations and artificial life games, The
Sims games have been approached alongside games such as Tierra (1998),
SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), SimLife: The Genetic Playground (1992),
SimCity, and Creatures (1996) series that concentrate on controlling the progress
of ‘artificial’ living organisms (e.g. Kember 2007/2000). Meanwhile, the cen-
tering of domestic space in the game links it to games such as Little Computer
People (1985) that represent a similar environment (e.g. Flanagan 2003).
But what makes the Sims games unique is the way they have been suc-
cessful in introducing women and newcomers into gaming. It is indeed esti-
mated that even 65% to 70% of the players of the franchise are women (Boyes
2007, Waters 2006). A look into general computer game player demograph-
ics may give a hint of its influence. While in 1998 it was suggested that the
amount of female players was 15-25% of all players (Cassell and Jenkins 1998,
11), five years after The Sims was launched approximately 45% of all gamers
in the UK were female (Harris 2005) and more women than men in the 25-34
age group played electronic games in the USA in 2007 (Mindlin 2006, cf. ESA
28
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
If the very terms of our calculations, our axiomatic concepts and foun-
dational practices, embody and express and re-cite hegemonic rules, we
will continue to define for women and girls, activities, dispositions, as-
pirations and accomplishments in the terms of what these are and mean
for boys and men. The problem is one of terms and turf. If we define
the matter from the outset in terms that describe only what happens
on male turf, we are unlikely to illuminate much about the situation
as it is possible for women. As Butler elsewhere explained, the state
accords rights to those that it then goes on to represent. This is ‘always
already’ a hegemonic performance, however worthy or ‘progressive’ our
intentions. (Jenson and de Castell 2008, 770)
Janine Fron et al. (2007) use The Sims as an example of those games
that are left outside the ‘hegemony of play’ (See Section 3.1.1) due to their
unconventional characteristics and player base. Thus, while it is important
to acknowledge that The Sims is an exceptional game in many ways, it is
also a good breeding ground for alternative pleasures that are not constantly
evaluated and compared to the dominant ones. Concentration on a game whose
7
A study by Casual Games Association suggests that women outnumber
men in casual game play (Casual Games Association 2007).
8
The introduced statistics provided by the games industry and associated
parties should be approached with caution and work as reference only. The
reasons for making such data available are not neutral, since they are closely
linked to games business and making profit. Moreover, the means of gathering
data or different bases of categorising it are rarely made transparent.
29
Chapter 1 Introduction
30
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
wants to see living together. The names of the characters are invented by the
player, but each family does have to share a family name.
Each family needs at least one adult ‘sim’ if there are Toddlers, Children
or Teenagers in the family. Teenagers or Elders cannot alone have young
children living with them. If the player has added a male and a female sim to
a family, she is also able to add a child that inherits characteristics from both
parents. The game automatically generates his or her physical appearance and
personality characteristics. Relationships between family members need to be
defined for each young person (Toddler, Child or Teenager) and adults can be
either partners or roommates with each other.
The game privileges a nuclear family, middle class or ‘white collar’ ca-
reers (and careerism as a way of life), property ownership and inheritance and
material aspirations for consumer products. It represents a suburban Ameri-
can family life and emphasises the importance of money in achieving a happy
life. This ideology of the game will be discussed in detail in Section 3.2.
After this first phase of The Sims 2 the player continues to choose and
buy a site according to her budget of in-game currency called ‘simoleons’.
31
Chapter 1 Introduction
The budget at this point is not dependent on the number of family members
chosen but simply 20,000 simoleons is allocated for each family. The player
may choose to occupy more houses and create several families, but is allowed
to control only one family at the time.
Once the family has been moved to a site or a house, the player can
actually start directing her characters around the neighborhood. The sim
characters are under the player’s control at home, but cannot be reached while
at work. The player’s perspective in the game is God-like and omniscient,
and the player is able to control and view several characters simultaneously.
The player takes care of the characters to meet the aspirations set in the pre-
gameplay phase.
In addition to the possibility to view and manipulate characters and the
house, the player is offered detailed information about these through the game
interface that consists of menus. The player can view and direct one charac-
ter at a time. For each character, the menu referred to as ‘Simology’ shows
the age stage, wants and fears, interests, needs, relationships, job information,
personality, and aspiration data (See Figure 1.2). Such a model of character’s
qualities is not unique to Sims, but a typical character sheet that has long been
used in RPGs (role playing games), for example. Under these categories infor-
mation such as job description and salary as well as bad and good memories
and friends are shown. These scales and meters contribute to the complexity
of the game as its gameplay is largely about optimising the well-being of an
individual character and a family.
The sims themselves, as the game characters are called, can semi-autonomously
use game objects and move within the limits of a lot. Characters are thus cre-
ated to feel as if they had lives of their own independent from the player. At
some stages the game can be played by merely observing of the sims who have
autonomy in their actions and who manage their own lives. On their own,
32
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
however, the sims can do much less compared to what the player can make
them do. The Sims is effectively like a combination of a simulation game and
an old-fashioned dollhouse with its mix of player intervention and character
autonomy and its emphasis on life in miniature (See Chapter 3).
For the most effective gameplay, the player needs to ‘order’ her characters
to use objects effectively so that the characters’ needs are fulfilled. There
are eight such basic needs in total: ‘Hunger’, ‘Comfort’, ‘Bladder’, ‘Energy’,
‘Fun’, ‘Social’, ‘Hygiene’ and ‘Environment’, and, accordingly, there are several
objects sims can (be made to) use in order to fulfill these basic needs. Energy,
for example, can be gained not only by sleeping in a bed or napping on a sofa
but also by drinking espresso. It is necessary for the player to take care of the
basic needs because if one of them is not filled enough, a sim cannot be made
to do anything else, such as to read a book when she is too tired. The game
is essentially about nurturing the characters.
Depending on the aspiration, sims will be happy when they, for example,
work and make lots of money (Fortune aspiration) or having a big and happy
family (Family aspiration). Each activity has a character-development purpose
in the game: ‘using the bookshelf’ (reading a book) progresses the intellect bar,
practising in front of a mirror adds to charisma value, swimming brings fitness
and repairing a sink gives mechanical points. Not until the maximum level
of a ‘skill’ is reached can a sim do any of these tasks without a progress bar
33
Chapter 1 Introduction
appearing on top of her head. Effectiveness and progress are built into the
technological system – or mechanics – of the game.
Every sim has a skills set of seven including Cooking, Mechanical, Charisma,
Body, Logic, Creativity, and Cleaning. The higher the skill value is (maximum
10), the longer it takes to achieve. However, the higher it is, the more and
faster a sim will achieve in that specific field, for instance in cooking delicious
meals. Skill levels also partly define what kind of jobs are available for a sim.
For example in order to become a Tenured Professor a sim needs the following
skills: Cooking 1, Charisma 6, Logic 8, and Creativity 7 whereas for a Dolphin
Trainer the skills needed are Cooking 2, Repair 2, Charisma 4, Body 2, Logic
1 and Creativity 1.
Accordingly, the skills can be progressed in various ways. A sim can
practice cooking, for instance, by actually cooking food, by studying cooking
from the bookshelf, by watching the Yummy channel on TV, or by using
Schokolade 890 Chocolate Manufacturing Facility. Cooking skill points are
then required if one is to pursue the Culinary career.
Once the player has launched a new family into a neighborhood, she
needs to build a house with furniture and technology in order to fulfill the
characters’ needs: a toilet seat is required in order to stabilise the characters’
Bladder levels, a fridge for preventing the Hunger getting too high and a sofa
or a bed for offering the characters Comfort and Energy. The player may lead
the everyday doings of each of the characters living on the same site. At any
point in the game, the family can move house, given a sufficient budget. Any
individual character can also move together with a character from another
‘lot’ if they agree on it. Detailed information on items, such as furniture
and electronic appliances, available for purchase and materials available for
building and renovating the house is offered in one of the menus of the game
interface.
34
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
During the gameplay, the characters go about filling their days with
domestic chores and personal skills development as the in-game time passes.
They speak ‘Simlish’ and meet neighbours in their gardens, homes or in the
downtown area, which is an area separated from the family neighbourhood.
The characters continue fulfilling needs and develop careers. The available
career tracks are Culinary, Athletics, Business, Criminal, Law Enforcement,
Medical, Politics, Science, and Slacker. Each career track defines the working
hours of a job and how much money a sim can bring home after single working
day, and thus represents some careers more attractive than others.
The game continues as long as the player manages to keep one’s charac-
ter(s) alive, since they can die of old age or in accidents. The in-game time can
be paused or speeded up. While the game is paused, the player may engage
in building and decorating the house, which requires money. The core of the
game is indeed to make money working. This money can then be spent on
furniture and electronics of ‘better quality’. These are more expensive, but
better fulfil the characters’ needs. This is of high importance in regard to the
sims’ social lives; happier sims can better entertain their friends, for example.
When the in-game time passes characters grow up, reproduce or adopt children
and get older, finally dying and leaving their houses to future generations.
Finally, a whole another discussion would be spurred based on the eight
expansion packs and ten so-called ‘stuff packs’ that have been brought to the
market since the game’s original release. These expansion and stuff packs
are made to prolong the lifetime of the product – to keep the brand alive
– and are sold as separate products.9 The expansion packs add both new
9
Some special editions of the game, such as The Sims 2: Holiday Edition
(2005a), include not only the original game but one or more expansions packs
as well. Expansion and stuff packs have also been compiled without the original
game. The Sims 2: University Life Collection (2009), for instance, includes
The Sims 2: University (2005d) expansion pack and two stuff packs: The Sims
2: IKEA Home Stuff (2008c) and The Sims 2: Teen Style Stuff (2007e).
35
Chapter 1 Introduction
features and content, such as clothes, items and furniture, whereas stuff packs
do not implement significant changes to gameplay but add ‘stuff’ – clothes,
items and furniture – only. An average of two expansion packs and three stuff
packs have been introduced every year from 2005 till 2009. The themes of the
expansion packs include lifestyle frameworks such as university, pets, living
in an apartment, and travelling.10 The features these expansions add vary
from new neighbourhoods and NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) to careers and
playable characters. Meanwhile, the ten stuff pack themes cover both branded
goods (IKEA and H&M ) and items and clothes concerning certain occasions
such as celebration, family, holiday and teenager style.11 Such expansions will
be discussed shortly in Chapter 3 and later in Section 5.1.2 in regard to the
influence of skinning to the revenue gained from the sales of the game.
The Sims 2 has proven exceptional also in regard to the volume of player-
created content, skins. Out of the numerous creative practices surrounding
The Sims 2 play, my study concentrates specifically on the practice of skinning
the game. Although some of the players I researched are not using the term
‘skinning’, I have chosen it because it is common among the English speaking
Sims communities and game scholars.
The Sims 2: Nightlife (2005c), The Sims 2: Open for Business (2006d), The
Sims 2: Pets (2006e), The Sims 2: Seasons (2007d), The Sims 2: Bon Voyage
(2007a), The Sims 2: FreeTime (2008b) and The Sims 2: Apartment Life
(2008a).
11
A full list of stuff packs includes: The Sims 2: Holiday Party Pack (2005b),
The Sims 2: Family Fun Stuff (2006a), The Sims 2: Glamour Life Stuff
(2006b), The Sims 2: Happy Holiday Stuff (2006c), The Sims 2: Celebra-
tion! Stuff (2007b), The Sims 2: H&M Fashion Stuff (2007c), The Sims 2:
Teen Style Stuff (2007e), The Sims 2: Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff
(2008d), The Sims 2: IKEA Home Stuff (2008c) and The Sims 2: Mansion &
Garden Stuff (2008e)
36
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
12
http://www.createphpbb.com/radola/
37
Chapter 1 Introduction
out of curiosity and because she already finds the simple gameplay too boring,
the girl tries to create something herself. What she decides to create is a very
modest piece of clothing, a dress that resembles one she has in her own closet,
because it has got that lovely combination of blue and yellow that none of the
game’s readymade dresses have. This is where the skinning starts.
The girl finds out that the game’s publisher offers some tools, including
SimShow (See Figure 1.3) and The Sims 2 Body Shop, that help in changing
the looks of the characters, their skins. But in addition to these, she reads
about various independent programs, such as SimPE, available online. She gets
to know that while some software allows the viewing, changing and importing
of skins, some of them are for changing the texture only and some of them
for modelling the skins on game characters. Since she happens to have Adobe
Photoshop 13 installed on her computer, the girl chooses to use it for actually
creating the dress of her choice for a game character. For testing the outfit
on a character she downloads SimShow provided by Electronic Arts (EA), the
publisher of the game, for free on their website. In addition to learning these
programs, knowing how the folder structure of a computer works is crucial for
her at this point.
The girl learns that for each look there is a ‘mesh’ for the 3D structure of
the skin and a ‘texture’ that is wrapped around the mesh when a 3D character
is rendered by the game (See Figure 1.4). She also needs to know that The
Sims software handles body textures separately from heads and that different
sexes and age groups, body types, skin colours and models of clothing all act
as bases for creating individual skins. This is how they are arranged in the
folders of the game. There is one image file for each body type-age-gender-skin
colour-clothing combination.
benefit from such an advanced tool but create skins with programs such as MS
Paint instead.
38
1.3. Aims and Objectives of Study
Figure 1.4: An example of what a skin looks like for someone editing it.
Source: SimShow tutorial by EA at http://thesims.ea.com/us/getcool/
skins/index.html.
39
Chapter 1 Introduction
most accurately follows the shape and structure of a dress she wishes to create.
SimShow allows browsing of all clothes already available in the game. At this
point it is the mesh that she is interested in first and foremost, since recolouring
the texture is easier than creating a new mesh. She needs to choose where to
start in regard to all aspects of a character and picks up a slim adult female
character with dark skin who has got a long dress on her. The dress seems
to be of the same shape as the one she wishes to create and only the texture
of the skin requires changes. Because the structure of the dress (the mesh)
matches a dress that already is available in the game, she does not yet have to
learn about how to find a player-created mesh online. Neither does she look
into polygon tools such as MilkShape that are meant for creating new meshes
altogether.
After installing all the tools she needs and making them work with the
game and its expansions, the girl creates her skin with various tools. Tutorials
online lead her step by step to reach her goal and because most of the pro-
grams are non-commercial and their compatibility has not been tested, various
problems could arise. But she is lucky and everything goes well up to the point
that the skin is imported into the game. Thus, the most time-consuming part
of her skinning process is to recolour the skin.
The girl examines the colours and proportions of her ‘real’ dress and
imitates them with Photoshop using a readymade skin of a long dress as a
starting point. Using multiple tools in Photoshop, she adds colour and details
little by little. As a novice skinner, her skin is far away from the dress in
her closet, but nevertheless something new for the game. Later, she finds it
fascinating to open the game and see a character wearing the dress she just
made: the same dress she wore on a Sunday brunch. She finds the skin she
created pretty and considers sending it online for her peers to download and
use in their own games. This means that she also needs to learn how to create
40
1.4. Structure of the Work
41
Chapter 1 Introduction
Earlier, Cornel Sandvoss has suggested that we “need to focus, not on the
14
42
1.4. Structure of the Work
43
Chapter 2
45
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
46
2.1. Interviews in Cultural Studies Research
47
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
48
2.2. Email Interviewing
(e.g. Johnson 1997, Oakley 1981, Gray 2003, Walkerdine 1997), as I will fur-
ther discuss in Section 2.3.1. This kind of feminist interviewing explicitly seeks
to reduce differentials of power between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the researched’.
However impossible an entirely equal relationship may be in practice, one
should aim for it and be able to recognise how the imbalance of power affects
the exchange between the researcher and the participant.
Following a constructivist epistemology1 and understanding the situat-
edness of knowledge2 , I accepted that anything I can learn about identities and
experiences of other people will be constructed and interpreted in numerous
ways before it can be written in a thesis. Therefore, the forthcoming sections
of this chapter set out some of the means of constructing such knowledge as
well as my personal position in this process.
There were three main reasons for conducting the interviews by email. The
first was to allow dialogue in the participant’s own space. It has been sug-
gested that it is best to interview participants in environments they know as
people are usually at most ease at familiar settings (Hammersley and Atkinson
2007/1983). Elina Oinas (2004) further suggests interviewing a participant in
a familiar space as an aspect of conducting feminist research. Participants feel
most comfortable at their own space, usually home, and therefore feel freer to
1
Such epistemological perspective in philosophy assumes that scientific
knowledge is constructed instead of being discovered as such from the world.
In regard to any form of ethnography, the knowledge gained then also becomes
constructed in collaboration between the researcher and the participant.
2
Situatedness of knowledge is based on the so-called standpoint theory that
was created as a critique of masculinised version of scientific ‘objectivity’. It
proposes a view that aims to deconstruct what is often suggested as ‘real world’.
Standpoint theory, through the works of Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith and
Donna Haraway in particular, suggests that all knowledge is situated in a way
that every individual holds her own perspective that shapes her views of reality
(e.g. Harding 2004).
49
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
disclose aspects of their personal lives. Also Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuf-
fin suggest that “[s]ituating discourse within a familiar physical location may
enhance participants’ disclosure, and, hence, the richness of the data gath-
ered” (Bowker and Tuffin 2004, 230). Not only were the participants able to
contribute to the research within their homes, but they could do it using the
technology familiar to them and from different locations if they wanted. It was
also possible, and in practice most likely, for the participants to contribute to
the study with the same technology and in the same physical space they are
accustomed to use during their gameplay. This creates an experiential link
between the practice under study and the interview.
When compared to face-to-face interviewing in participants’ space, email
interviewing also allowed the participants to inhabit their own living environ-
ments without the intrusion of a researcher. Email interviewing thus removes
the challenges that result from differences, such as age or personality, between
the participant and the researcher. “E-mail interviews reduce, if not elim-
inate, some of the problems associated with telephone or face-to-face inter-
views, such as the interviewer/interviewee effects that might result from visual
or nonverbal cues or status difference between the two (e.g., race, gender, age,
voice tones, dress, shyness, gestures, disabilities)” (Meho 2006, 1289). One
face-to-face group interview conducted in addition to email interviews offers a
reference point here. Some participants seemed very shy in person but were
comfortable communicating online. This suggests that one major barrier was
overcome with email-based interviews. I also noticed that some personality as-
pects complicated the face-to-face exchange, but these aspects did not occur to
me in email correspondence before meeting the same participants face-to-face.
Matheson and Zanna (in Mann and Stewart 2000) suggest that informal online
communication helps to increase disclosure, because participants are not in-
hibited by researcher’s presence and are thus more relaxed and aware of their
50
2.2. Email Interviewing
51
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
To recruit research participants for this study, I went directly to the online
fora for sharing The Sims game modifications and alongside tried to find skin-
ners from among women gamer communities and general modder communities.
These include Mod The Sims forum3 , Mod DB forum4 , Game Hackers forum5 ,
Gamer Girls Unite forum6 , Boolprop forum7 , and Radola forum8 . The deci-
sion not to approach general The Sims fora was made primarily because only
a fraction of The Sims players create content of their own and those involved
in this practice share and discuss their creations in such places. If for no other
reason, players need to find instructions for skin making from online fora. Both
those publishing their skins and those making them for their own enjoyment
were accessed through the fora.
In an online space, such as a forum for game-related discussion, bound-
aries between private and public are blurred. Even if the information and
content of discussion is public and available to virtually anyone, participants
may consider these spaces private. One practical example of taking this into
consideration was asking for permission from an administrator of the forum
3
http://www.modthesims.info
4
http://www.moddb.com
5
http://www.game-hackers.com
6
http://www.gamergirlsunite.com
7
http://www.forums.boolprop.com/
8
http://www.createphpbb.com/radola/
52
2.2. Email Interviewing
Those fora that operate in English were approached with the following
message.
Hi everyone!
I am doing my doctoral thesis (Ph.D.) on the practice of skin making
and other productive (fan) practices around computer games (skins,
modding, machinima videos etc). If you are making skins or game
modifications, I would be very happy to interview you for my study.
Because I am not able to travel everywhere, unfortunately, I am mainly
interested in people who live in England (UK), Copenhagen (Denmark)
or Finland (and southern Sweden).9
If you think you would like to participate or would like to hear more,
please send me an email. I will then send you more information about
me and my study.
Thank you very much in advance!
hanna
9
At this point I had not yet decided to conduct all interviews by email.
53
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
54
2.2. Email Interviewing
10
http://www.radosims.com
11
See the survey at http://tinyurl.com/radolaplayingwith.
12
This is an estimate given by the administrator of the forum.
55
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
2.2.2 Participants
56
2.2. Email Interviewing
being girls and women, the idea that all except one interviewee were female
suggests that The Sims skinning is a gendered activity and that most The
Sims skinners are women.13
Out of the thirteen participants who all actively contribute to Radola
or Boolprop in the form of discussions, two are not skinners. However, they
were included in my ethnography as they were willing to participate and had
their experiences to share about the distribution, discussion and use of skins.
These players also contributed to what is written about the game itself in the
forum and about skins’ importance in gameplay. Differences between those
who create skins and those who use skins created by other players only are
suggested in Section 5.1.3, for instance.
57
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
and negotiation of their player identities and pleasures. Moreover, the email
interviews respected the construction of such player identities online as it did
not necessitate them to discuss these face-to-face, off-line.
58
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
the rule is the administrator of the Finnish Radola forum. She has agreed on
different terms and given me a permission to publish her name if needed. A
separate agreement was made since altering her name would not have secured
her anonymity as there only exists one significant The Sims online forum for
the Finnish player community and because after the interviews with her was
started in early 2008, two Finnish youth magazines have already carried arti-
cles about her. Thus, while I am not disclosing her real name, it will be clear
from the forthcoming which one of the Simmers is her.
In the previous section I introduced why the interviews discussed in this thesis
were conducted by email. Email interviewing has been advantageous in allow-
ing the players to participate in their own space, when was suitable for them
and without revealing their off-line identities, for example. This is important
for the suggested aim of creating an equal research setting as it empowered
participants in organising the practical arrangements of the study.
I will next discuss what other issues were taken into consideration during
the interviews in order to conduct them in a way that follows participants’
interests and preferences. In the end of this section I will move on exploring
how email interviewing allowed simultaneous interviews that further offered a
possibility to reflect between them. I will end by introducing additional means
of exploring cultural discourses that are close to skinners’ identities.
The interviews started with an open question about participants’ back-
grounds as players and game modifiers. With a little bit of variation I posed
the following request: “Could you please tell me about your general playing
habits and how you came to play The Sims as well as to create skins.” Based
on what the participants then wrote me back, I asked approximately three
59
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
to five further questions per response. From the second reply onwards, the
written structure of the interviews took a very specific kind of rhizomic form
as several topics were discussed parallel to each other and individual subtopics
continuously led towards new questions and answers. While email interview-
ing removes the need for transcription, the suggested kind of material gained
through emails requires organising and connecting the threads that concern
one topic. After conducting the email interviews I created files that each in-
cluded one person’s interview as a whole.
While some researchers ask their email interviewees to keep earlier con-
versation untouched in an email in order to keep record and to ask the par-
ticipants reflect their earlier responses during the interview (e.g. James and
Busher 2006), I decided to erase the earlier responses where possible in order
to allow the participants to develop ideas without keeping them in consistence
with what they had already told me before. However, to make probing or
follow-up questions more understandable, every new question was sent along-
side the specific extract from the participant’s message that lead to posing the
specific question. In some cases, where it seemed necessary, also the original
question I had sent in the previous email was included. Significantly differ-
ing from a one-question-per-email type of interview, my interview messages
could be characterised as ‘in-depth questionnaires’ because multiple clarifying
questions were made on different subtopics.
The interview questions were embedded in the body of the email instead
of enclosing them as an attachment. This was an intuitive choice for me,
but Meho (2006)’s review on the practice of email interviewing proposes that
because it makes the answering more straightforward, higher response rates
are achieved in this way. The informed consent form was, however, sent as
an attached file. Therefore, I sent along instructions for opening it and told
I would be happy to help with any further technical issues in order to avoid
60
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
61
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
62
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
what they do or what they like or dislike in something. This may be because
they were not used to articulating their feelings and experiences to another
person or because of their writing skills were insufficient.
In addition to the difficulty in explaining one’s experiences and insuf-
ficient writing skills, participants’ responses were affected by the limitedness
of cultural narratives and meanings around active woman players. While dis-
cussing a phenomenon that is very little addressed in the surrounding culture,
the participants’ ‘collection of available narratives’ (Hänninen 1996 in Oinas
2004) was very limited. For example, issues related to the gendering of com-
puter game magazines was very difficult to grasp for some. A ten-year-old
player used the word ‘confusing’ while reasoning why she did not read game
magazines.14 When I asked if it could have something to do with the kinds of
games featured in these magazines and gave an example of a ‘war game’, she
replied: “Yes! Now this is what I meant, that is so true. Usually the heading
says: a new amazing war game! That is pretty annoying.” This gendering of
games has already been addressed in the previous chapter and will be further
elaborated in Section 3.1.
Meanwhile, among the oldest participants were players who expressed
very articulate opinions about game culture and its masculinity. Their opinions
were, however, so close to the popular discourse of marginalised female players
that it was hard to find out which part of the narrative told was a story the
participants assumed I wanted to hear and how that really overlapped with
their everyday lives. This phenomenon has been presented by Hänninen (in
Oinas 2004), who writes that while a participant tells a story it is shaped
both by what the participant assumes the researcher wants to hear and the
available related narratives in her culture. The Cultural Studies perspective
14
A survey in Radola also suggests that the members of the community are
generally not interested in reading such game magazines. Find the survey at
http://tinyurl.com/radolagamemagazines.
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
64
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
Among other things, Oakley (1981) writes that the acquired reciprocity
encourages the participant to reveal aspects of her material reality and lead
to intimacy between the participant and the researcher. Juliet Corbin and
Janice M. Morse write that this exchange relationship can be maintained by
acknowledging the researcher’s input in terms of offering “a sense of presence
or of being with the participant in the story” (Corbin and Morse 2003, 342).
The latter I understand as an attitude not to judge or question anything the
participant suggests and by being a good listener. Here it may appear that
understanding and questioning what one has said are contradictory. I believe,
however, that the two can coexist. It simply requires sensitivity and attention
towards the participants’ stories to balance the two in a discussion. Being true
to one’s intuitions and staying sympathetic is what has helped me to balance
the two.
Corbin and Morse (2003) go further proposing that reciprocity extends
beyond being a participant since they usually ‘want something in return’ for
their participation. Again, being a trustworthy listener for whatever the par-
ticipant wants to reveal seems like the most important quality of a researcher
here. This aspect of being a participant is especially important when the re-
search topic covers traumatic experiences or illegitimate activities. In case of
skinning where no sensitive information was discussed, it can be assumed that
the participants were first and foremost attracted to the idea that their hobby
was worth studying for someone and that they were approached as experts
of this topic. I assume what the participants of my study gained from the
interview was an insight into something they usually never talk or even think
about: a new perspective into their own life through an outsider’s acknowl-
edgement of the importance of their preferred practice. I suggest this is why
some of the participants mentioned how interesting the interview had been for
them, and why one participant wrote me in her final email: “NoNoNoNoNooo!
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
66
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
pants by allowing them to start the interview with anything that interested
them in regard to the research topic and with a free form structure of the in-
terview in general. The interviews conducted are situated somewhere between
semi-structured and unstructured interviews. Themes for the interviews were
designed but the order of them not to be fixed, interviewees were encouraged
to discuss their own themes. As Oinas writes, feminist interviewing “is based
on an idea according to which the interviewee is understood as someone who
takes part in deciding what is relevant in the research topic, what is to be
discussed” (Oinas 2004, 214, Transl. HW).
In research writing, this model invites the use of the word ‘participant’
instead of ‘interviewee’ or ‘respondent’. In qualitative studies this wording has
become a usual way of addressing the interviewee. Hence, I will use the term
participant in this study. Interestingly, the researcher remains a ‘researcher’
despite her multiple roles of a listener, discussant, discloser of one’s personal
life, meaning maker, storyteller, and so forth. While it is not possible to discuss
such methodological and research ethical detail in this thesis, I will go with
the norm and call the interviewee, myself, a researcher whenever necessary.
Hamilton and Bowers mention the lack of controlling devices as another
way in which email interviewing advances equity. “It would seem reasonable
that removing the controlling devices of interviews, that is, the tape recorder,
video recorder, or phone schedule, from the professional would shift at least
some of the power toward the participant” (Hamilton and Bowers 2006). Ob-
viously, no such devices were present in the email interviews.
At best, such a study that aims for equal research settings “develops
a participatory model of research that challenges power relationships between
researcher and researched” (Oakley in Landman 2006, 431). Given the adapted
constructivist perspective, I assume that the knowledge gained is partially
dependent on the particular shape of the interviews as a collaborative process
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
I have described how email interviewing and online recruitment both come
with challenges and advantages. Some of them are very practical and mainly
consider the use of time and possibilities to contact participants. However,
these, too, impact on the interview atmosphere and the researcher’s and par-
ticipant’s feelings about the settings. Furthermore, the difficulty of reaching
potential participants, for instance, directly affects the conclusions of my study
as a specific group of people was recruited. As I have proposed, email inter-
viewing have significant advantages in regard to feminist ethnography that
aims towards equal relationship between the researcher and the participant
and seeks to empower the participant. The participants’ possibility to attend
in their own space and set the pace of the interviews by themselves are features
of email interviewing that have contributed in this way. For me as a researcher,
the email interviewing left space to properly reflect upon the correspondence,
although the lack of control over the course of correspondence might sometimes
appear frustrating even.
If the freedom to reply according to my daily schedule and the possibility
to really think about my replies beforehand contributed to the ‘quality’ of
the interviews, these aspects of email interviewing probably had an effect on
the participants’ replies as well. Meho’s review of email interviewing as a
research methodology indeed suggests, based on several studies where both
email and face-to-face interviewing had been conducted, that the quality of
68
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
15
Crouch and McKenzie boldly suggest that the use of small samples “is the
way in which analytic, inductive, exploratory studies are best done” (Crouch
and McKenzie 2006, 496), and acknowledge the problem of using the word
‘sample’ altogether, because such research rarely attempts to generalize results
and thus assume a group of cases as a ‘sample’ of something bigger.
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
body of significant work has been conducted with a small group of participants
including works by Ann Gray (1992), Ang (2005/1985), Walkerdine (1997) and
Joke Hermes (1995), for example. Small-scale qualitative research projects are
good in pointing out complicated cultural processes, such as the construction
of marginalised player identities in my case. This refers exactly to the ways in
which knowledge gained from individual interviewees can be brought together
and elaborated with multiple participants simultaneously. It also allows the
combining of cultural discursive identities, around female players of skinners
for instance, and those expressed and constructed in the participants’ writing,
i.e. how they speak the discourses of gameplay or of femininity. Such a take on
different texts and experiences available as typical for cultural research is often
known as ‘thick description’ as suggested by Clifford Geertz (1973). The main
idea of thick description is to rely not only on the individuals’ experiences, but
on the context within which they take place as well.
Seth Giddings writes about the study of complexity through a limited set
of cases and suggests that the “deep description of everyday life allows for the
acknowledgement of the messy, the conceptually unresolved, the inverted and
metamorphic operations of play” (Giddings 2006, 235). He refers specifically
to his own method, microethnography, which “attends to the textures of, and
linkages between, videogames, play, and players and their cultural and mate-
rial contexts in moments or events rather than through either the abstractions
of the notional ‘subjects’ of film theory, or the surveys and focus groups of me-
dia audience research” (Giddings 2006, 6). Such microethnography overlaps
with my account where I am interested in unpacking the complex relation-
ships between cultural discourses, individuals’ experiences and game objects’
features.
Furthermore, I would like to propose that the advantages of small sample
interviewing that have to do with the cross-comparisons and cross-fertilisation
70
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
of ideas are even better achieved with simultaneous email interviewing. In si-
multaneous interviewing, sharing information between participants is possible.
In this research, I could for example tell a participant that I had understood
from another player about the importance of feedback one can get from the
online forum. Such a comment encouraged the participant to further describe
her own experience, either agreeing or disagreeing with the player who I had
referred to. It might not be entirely wrong to say that the very process of
interviewing creates a sense of community between the participants who felt
freer to state their opinions when they received indirect support from other
players through my interaction with them. In a way, the adopted form of email
interviewing was a type of group interview in certain respects.16
Email interviewing also allowed consultation of online fora during the in-
terviews. Online fora, such as Radola, can be understood as secondary sources
in this study. Small sample sizes allow a research strategy informed by knowl-
edge and understanding of the social context (here, cultural context) that
derives from outside the interview material (Crouch and McKenzie 2006). Fur-
thermore, it continuously “carries out ‘recontextualisation’ ” – the cases can
be compared, answers can be reflected on based on earlier answers, and re-
flection in regard to other knowledge can be practiced. Cross-interpreting and
reflecting between the individual cases is not possible with a large number of
participants. Crouch and McKenzie suggest that “complex reactions and feel-
ings are best given meaning and are optimally articulated – to the respondents’
satisfaction (i.e. their sense of ‘closure’) – through a dialogue which encour-
ages reflection on, rather than mere reporting of, experience” (Crouch and
McKenzie 2006, 487). One powerful source for reflection was the information
16
This approach, depending on the viewpoint, could be either embraced
or criticised for its concentration on a group rather than an individual. Since
several messages were handled simultaneously, the voice of an individual player
was not always as clear as the common tone of the group.
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
gained from other participants and secondary sources. Such research “aims
ultimately to establish, conceptually/theoretically, points of contact (adhesion
or friction, as the case may be) between individual experience/action and the
social context [here, cultural context]” (Crouch and McKenzie 2006, 491).
Because of the simultaneous cross-referencing and interpreting, Crouch
and McKenzie recall the use of the word ‘methodology’ instead of method since
‘data’ collection and analysis cannot be seen as separate processes but happen
parallel to each other17 . “In the course of such research, then, in addition
to the interview material and its extant disciplinary/conceptual background,
a new entity is enticed to come to light as a third force in the proceedings
– the emergent theoretical frame [the discourses] (Layder 1998, 170) which
eventually envelops the ‘findings’ of the research” (Crouch and McKenzie 2006,
491). Over the course of the interviews I gained relevant knowledge from
several sources such as scholarly texts and skinning specific online fora.
As already discussed in this chapter, online fora specifically serving The Sims
players and skinners were consulted and explored throughout the study in order
to form interview themes, to deepen my understanding on specific aspects of
skinning and when analysing the interview material. Even if not systematically,
I followed the discussions on Radola forum throughout the research. Primarily,
the knowledge gained helped me to understand how the community and the
website operate and are beingmanaged. Most of this knowledge has not been,
however, included in this thesis due to its specific focus on individual players’
interpretation from each other, I not only prefer to talk about methodology but
also about the collecting of material (not ‘data’) for further analysis. Material
in this sense can already be partly analysed ‘data’ or connecting thoughts,
ideas or theories that are gathered together and interconnected during the
interviews.
72
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
73
Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
memories, family relationships, wants, fears, skills, job, possessions etc.) and
items all work together creating often unpredictable consequences, some sup-
porting information on the game has been gathered from various Sims resources
online. Player-created wiki pages18 , FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and
walkthroughs19 have been invaluable when describing such a system.
Furthermore, one group interview was conducted in order to further dis-
cuss some ideas and conclusions drawn from the individual interviews (See
Appendix 4). Participants for the group interview were recruited from the
same Finnish The Sims community forum as the participants of individual
interviews. About ten people were interested in attending, but as Helsinki ap-
peared as the only place where more than two people were available, Helsinki
was chosen to be the only place for interview thus resulting in a number of
four interviewees. All participants were females. The interview was conducted
in the center of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, in a quiet park after a short
negotiation of whether to go in a café that was agreed as a meeting place be-
fore. The noisiness of the café and warm summer day led to a decision to stay
outside. The conversation was recorded and later transcribed. The interview
was conducted in two half an hour sessions.
The discussion that took place in the real-time group setting did not
differ significantly from the responses gained from individual email interviews.
As such, many of the conclusions made based on the individual interviews were
supported in the group setting.
Rado, the Radola creator who was also interviewed individually, took
part in the group interview. Because she was almost ten years older than
the other participants and because of her authority over the participants who
were all familiar with her online presence, the dynamics of the group interview
were not what I had hoped for. In fact, her opinions were so clear and well-
18
e.g. http://strategywiki.org/wiki/The\_Sims\_2/Needs\#Comfort
19
e.g. http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/914811/35586
74
2.3. The Course of Correspondence
thought that the other players often merely echoed what she said. As such, this
suggested that she indeed had gained a group of loyal followers and admirers
through the forum. Such community dynamics would be a good starting point
for a whole another research project.
Finally, some very specific questions that I felt needed to be answered
by a larger group of players were sent to Radola through the discussion forum.
For instance, in order to learn about whether The Sims 2 players play alone
or in a group, I created the following survey and acquired the percentages of
answers included in the following.
I also found it important to learn how the players feel about the Northern
American references in the game and posted a question through the ‘survey’
function of posting new threads available on the forum.
The survey has resulted in almost 150 answers already and it seems that
such method allowed me to grasp very specific topics effectively in order to
create a general understanding of the state of affairs and to back up some
20
See the survey at http://tinyurl.com/radolaplayhabits.
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Chapter 2 Methodologies, Approaches and Framings
76
Chapter 3
Simmer4: Sims is just a game, but I think it is still one of the best
ones.
77
Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
culture have to say about the particular game in question: The Sims 2. I
wanted to find out how the game itself sets out a basis for the Sims skinners’
identity work. In order to situate the discussion on gender and The Sims 2 in
a broader research tradition on gender and games and within some dominant
discourses around feminine player identity, I will first introduce how gender
stereotypes are kept alive and constructed in game cultures. Feminist Game
Studies has long worked on describing the ways in which games can be ap-
proached from the perspective of gender and how their production, marketing
and consumption is highly marked by gender, namely the masculine. Intro-
duction to such processes will serve to help in conceptualising the later part
of this chapter where I discuss the gendering of The Sims games in particular.
The main argument in this chapter is that the game is, unlike the majority of
games, gendered feminine instead of masculine.
Finally, this chapter aims to show how the game is excluded from the
canon of games both in everyday settings and in scholarly work. Furthermore,
in the case of The Sims 2, many of the characteristics that discursively con-
struct it feminine are also central in the discourse that labels it a non-game
and to those that devalue skinning of the game. Yet, for the players who par-
ticipated in this study, the game has offered a comfortable and welcoming way
to enter the game culture and a way of play that they consider unique. Un-
derstanding how the game itself works as a simulation of certain ideology and
how it encourages individual play is also crucial for later discussion on skin-
ning since it shows how these aspects of the game make it especially inviting
to modify.
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3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
The following example is quoted by a writer and player Whitney Butts in her
account of her personal experience as a female player of a popular game, World
of Warcraft, on an IRC (internet relay chat) channel where the game was being
talked about. As an ultimate drawback for a person’s playerhood, her player
identity is denied by her peers based on her gender and her gameplay skills are
being questioned.
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
The quotation above indicates the strong prejudices about the kinds of
games women and girl players engage with as well as the themes of games and
the game content they appreciate. Such attitudes emerge as female players
construct their player identities while interacting with other players and peers
in everyday contexts. As Stephen Kline et al. argue, “the moment of game-
play is constructed by and embedded in much larger circuits – technological,
cultural, and marketing – that in turn interact with one another within the
system of information capital” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2003,
270). These attitudes also ‘live’ in the minds of game designers, developers
and those who are marketing computer games to end-users: in the game press,
such as GameSpot and Edge, off- and online.
Simultaneously, those female players who follow the consensus in their
consumer choices re-live these assumptions and strengthen them. And players
who are willing to stand against this ideology of computer game play are con-
sidered marginal exceptions and either embraced as such (e.g. female Quake
players in Kennedy 2006) or ignored altogether (cf. Bryce and Rutter 2002).
But such assumptions and spoken attitudes are linked to a web of meaning
making and statistical facts that are often lumped together as ‘games and gen-
der’ problematics in general. What then forms the ‘vicious cycle’ of gendering
certain games and gameplay activities is rarely broken down into its different
levels and components.
Paul du Gay et al.’s model of the ‘circuit of culture’, which is based on a
decades-long work by British cultural theorists (Champ 2008), helps to unpack
this ‘vicious cycle’: the interconnections of the different aspects of gendering
players, gameplay and games (du Gay et al. 1997). The authors suggest that
the cultural meaning making of a cultural artifact encompasses five processes
that work together in shaping the object. Representation, Identity, Produc-
tion, Consumption and Regulation, as shown in the Figure 3.1, together define
80
3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
They all relate to each other and help to structure each other at different
points in the cycle. While discussing women players, we then need to acknowl-
edge that a game 1) is represented in various forms such as in game marketing
and media, 2) offers meanings that offer a basis for constructing player iden-
tities, 3) is produced under specific design, development and manufacturing
contexts and by people with specific kinds of cultural capital and education,
4) becomes experienced and used in a particular process of consumption1 , and,
finally, 5) is regulated as a certain kind of leisure object whose typical use takes
place in a specific time and space.
Based on these elements of the circuit of culture we can understand that
the gendering of games, players and gameplay works at different levels and sites
that are nevertheless connected to each other. The circuit of culture involved
in the gendering of computer games, players and gameplay includes factors
such as male-dominated development cultures, representations of gamers as
male, marketing games for men and based on masculine desires, game play-
1
This includes ‘decoding’ (Hall 1973).
81
Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
82
3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
Simmer1: Women players are left (I guess unconsciously, not that they
[game magazine editors] would do it knowingly and relentlessly) to the
margins [of potential readers]
It is indeed the case that in the articles of the biggest Finnish game
magazine, Pelit (English: ‘Games’), male players are addressed in a com-
radely heteronormative fashion. A male journalist writes about ‘us guys’ and
talks about the attractive figures of female game characters. By so doing
the magazine in question not only gains an economic disadvantage among po-
tential female audiences but also alienates female readers and contributes to
constructing playerhood as masculine. The continuing dominance of men in
the games world secures the male consumer because the female consumer is
constructed in marginalised, highly specific terms – a situation already com-
mon in other forms of leisure such as sport and popular music. The Finnish
game magazine in question is not an exception in this regard, but gendering
of play and addressing players as males is a common practice worldwide (e.g.
Chess 2009).
The game press has got an important role in bringing together like-
minded players, in manufacturing a sense of community among these players
(Newman 2008, 29). These magazines have powerfully encouraged players to
appreciate their preferred media despite a broader cultural consensus consid-
ering games as waste of time (Newman 2008). Fighting against such strong
negative stereotypes has usually lead to emphasising a set of ‘valuable’ skills
demanded and advanced by gameplay, such as strategic skills and understand-
ing of mathematical complexity. Games are made to look more ‘mature’ form
of leisure by fetishising technical qualities such as high definition graphics.
Also the gloating over sexual content often seen in game magazines could be
read as a defensive act against the infantilised and desexualised geek image
(e.g. Jenkins 1997). Players whose masculinity and sexuality is downplayed
by the identity of a geek can perhaps emphasise such aspects of themselves
83
Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
84
3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
The female gaming community may inhabit a presence both on-line and
in educational contexts, but findings showed that media advertising ap-
pears to occupy a much greater influence, so much so that it had an
ability to dampen the intrigue of potential consumers. Despite the ad-
vances being made in this area of gaming culture, the public face of
gaming continues to be male-dominated which act to exclude female
gamers thus reinforcing the notion that they exhibit little interest in
games and game culture. The reality of this study demonstrated that
the hand-held device, Game Boy Advance SP, was perceived by a fe-
male sample as a gender-neutral design that offered good tactile and
aesthetic qualities as well as an intuitive interface. It was the gender-
specific advertisement strategy employed by Nintendo that served to
undermine their potential endorsement of the product (even retrospec-
tively). (Schott and Thomas 2008, 51)
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
culine
As we can see from the representations offered by game advertising and mar-
keting, playerhood is a masculinised discourse. But such discourse spreads
much wider in the cultures of gaming and non-gaming (e.g. Bryce and Rutter
2002). Consequently, it results in that playing computer games does not ap-
pear as an appealing hobby for women, because they do not find comfortable
starting points for constructing their identities within that discourse.
A recent example of the gendering of gameplay as masculine is a launched
service that allows lonely men to play with ‘hot’ player girls. The service clearly
suggests that the assumed player, at least in regard to certain genres, is a male.
What if you could pay a bit of cash to play Modern Warfare with an
attractive girl? Or maybe relax with a casual game of checkers while you
video chat with said female? A new social service launching tomorrow,
March 23, called GameCrush (www.GameCrush.com) is hoping there
are gamers out there willing to pay for the opportunity to play with
girls.
On GameCrush, guys are Players and girls are PlayDates. Players pay
to play and PlayDates get paid to play. Guys can browse PlayDate
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3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
profiles (there are currently around 1,200), view photos, and even chat
with girls for free.
[...]
After a session you can rate your PlayDate on her hotness, gaming skill,
and flirtiness.
Such representations of a player not only alienate women but also con-
struct a cultural understanding of what a player is. The female player is
represented in a serving role, as someone whose play is entirely in the ser-
vice of the male player’s pleasure – a role similar to a geisha or a courtesan.
Comparison with the earlier example of a player who was claimed to be ugly
because she was simultaneously a good player and a female as discussed in the
beginning of this chapter is interesting here. In the case of PlayDate players,
the play of these assumed attractive female players becomes accepted when it
is not for their own, but for the male player’s pleasure. These female players
are not ‘real’ players, but their expertise becomes naturalised as part of their
servicing roles.
Jessica Enevold’s and Charlotte Hagström’s ongoing research project on
player mothers suggests about a tendency that women avoid labeling them-
selves players as well as disguise their play (e.g. Enevold 2009), possibly be-
cause of the mismatch of the discourses around motherhood and playerhood.
Another study by Q Interactive and Engage Expo offers statistics on women
playing social games, i.e. games on social networking services, and suggests
that while 54% of players are female, only 42% of them consider themselves
‘gamers’ (Reisinger 2010). Both studies further discuss how women hide their
play from their families and friends since they do not comfortably inhabit an
identity of a player. They consider their other identities, as women and moth-
ers for instance, more important. Meanwhile, Jenson’s and de Castell’s (2008)
extensive interviews hint that it can also be the case that the notion of a ‘game’
is so fixed to certain types of games that the games they play do not fit into
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
their understanding of what a game is. Such situation also calls for sensitivity
from the researchers: right kind of methods offer more accurate information.
It has often been the case, for example, when we interviewed girls about
their gameplaying that most of them name a few titles, sometimes not
accurately, and then indicate that they “play” but they do not always
get to choose the game. Interestingly, in one focus group interview, after
going round the table and naming games, one girl asked if computer
games “counted” and the researcher responded “Yes” to which everyone
replied by talking at once and naming off their favorite, free, online
games. So, in one way, we had initially asked the wrong question, or
they had perceived it as a question simply about console gameplay.
(Jenson and de Castell 2008, n.p.)
Some cultural difference exists between the terms ‘player’ and ‘gamer’,
2
88
3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
culine
89
Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
1991). Such a starting point affects upon women’s interest in games and their
possibilities for constructing player identities as well as in-game identities. It
has been proposed that stronger female characters should be introduced in
computer games (e.g. Edge 2003).
When computer games are considered to be a masculine medium, fe-
male characters can be seen as a possible entry point for girls into them (e.g.
Grimes 2003). Some studies suggest that girls are disturbed by representations
of stereotypical females that follow masculine fantasies (e.g. Haines 2004). The
lack of ‘normal’ female characters is especially striking in violent games, where
women are rarely represented in powerful, meaningful roles, i.e. having violent
agency, unless they are also represented as sexually titillating. However, espe-
cially role-playing games today include detailed character customization and
therefore allow players to create their own playable characters at least.
Violence as a broader thematical characteristic of games is understood
as masculine, too. Schott and Kirsty R. Horrell’s (2000) ethnographic study
suggests that where female players recognise some types of games as masculine
and some types as feminine, violence belongs to the first category. Jeffrey Gold-
stein (1994), Peter Nikken (2000) and Christine Ward Gailey (1993), among
others, suggest that women and girls do not like such content in games. Ac-
cording to Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Greenfield (1998), violence is a major
factor in turning girls off from games. But while Laura Ermi et al. (2004)
encourage, conversely, us to look for differences in the ways in which violence
can be present in games, some scholars remind us of those women who do
like violent game activities (e.g. Taylor 2003). In general, violence has been
understood as a broad concept and rarely explained in terms of who, in a
game, executes violent activity, how is violence represented in terms of game
graphics, what are the differences between physical and mental violence, how
much of concentration in the game is drawn into the consequences and results
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3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
A friend of mine once told me about her male co-designer who refused to
create female characters that he did not personally find attractive. Common-
sensically, men who are usually keen players themselves design games that they
themselves find fascinating. Such experience also demonstrates how the sexu-
alised female character is an industry default and does not require justification.
Several studies indeed suggest that the genres, mechanics and content of games,
despite years of criticism and encouragement from feminist game scholars and
wider knowledge about female players, are still designed primarily with young
males in mind (Heeter and Winn 2008, Consalvo 2008, Fullerton et al. 2008,
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
Lazzaro 2008).
Today, only 17% of the workforce in the games industry in the UK is
female, as demonstrated by Lizzie Haines’ (2004) report of women in the games
industry from September 20043 (cf. Dovey and Kennedy 2007). Only 2%
of programmers and 5% of game designers are women. Most women in the
industry are actually in less-paid administrative roles. Thus, it remains a fact
that games are designed by a huge majority of men in the industry, although
measures are taken to recruit more women.
A concern on this matter has been expressed in the articles of a recent
anthology on women and games, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat (2008),
which explores the ways in which the male domination of the games industry
affects on the design of games as well as how such state of affairs could be
abolished. Although it is the game publisher and the investors who decide
on the kinds of games that are published, it has been suggested that a more
diverse workforce in games industry could actually result in games that women
enjoy more (Consalvo 2008).
The games industry, while offering careers that are based on knowledge
on information technology, is affected by the challenges that IT related fields
have in terms of gender. Only a marginal number of women seek their ways
towards the required education on IT (e.g. Margolis and Fisher 2002). While
women might have played a bigger role in IT professions at the beginning
before such work was professionalized (Plant 1998), IT has been re-imagined
as a skilled male-based career rather than a functional female-based servicing
activity.
Science and engineering are nowadays male-dominated lines of education
and the lack of women in these has a direct impact on the amount of women
ciation (IGDA) in their report from 2005 (IGDA 2005). Unfortunately more
recent numbers are not made available to date.
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3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
getting into the games industry. Judy Wajcman writes that “women still face
considerable barriers when they attempt to pursue a professional or managerial
career in technoscience”, since “entering technical domains [...] requires women
to sacrifice major aspects of their gender identity” (Wajcman 2004, 110, 112).
According to her, such professions start to appear more attractive to women
when they can access them without “co-option into a world of patriarchal
values and behavior” (Wajcman 2004, 112).
Marc J. Natale (2002) suggests that the low number of women in the
computer industry is, in fact, partly a result of the gendering of computer
gaming cultures as masculine, since women often lack this easy way of getting
introduced to technology. Games development is also based on enthusiast
players. Tracy Fullerton et al. (2008) suggest that one reason for the lack of
women in game design originates from the ways in which game development
hires new talents. “Currently, the primary path of entry to the games industry
is to take a junior position as a game tester, a job that requires being a ‘hard-
core gamer’, thus ruling out most women” (Fullerton et al. 2008, 169). This is
because the kinds of games that allow the assumed kind of ‘hard-core gaming’
are mostly played by men.4 Furthermore, the games industry alienates women
due the sexism they face and because of difficult working hours which make
it impossible to meet the expectations of conventional motherhood as a game
designer (Consalvo 2008). The male-dominated industry therefore delivers
games that lack the perspectives women could offer and add into the games if
they were taking part in the design of them.
4
Recent casual gaming trend and the associated introduction of female
gamer masses to online gaming must have an impact on the development of
game design cultures as well. Currently, however, data on such changes is not
available.
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
The underlying assumptions which continue to shape the way the industry
imagines and produces games also inform the way in which players are repre-
sented as well as the lived culture of play. Game cultures have traditionally
consisted of various practices that are considered masculine. Many of them are
a direct result from the contents of games such as concentration on highs cores,
competition, war, men’s sports and mastery. Not until very recently, through
the introduction of online casual games and relatively novel gaming platforms,
such as Nintendo Wii, have these thematics been forcefully challenged by new
concepts.
However, the actual player demographics do not entirely support the idea
of gameplay being a masculine pastime. While in the UK approximately 45%
of all gamers are female (Harris 2005), more women than men in the 25-34
age group play electronic games in the USA (Mindlin 2006). According to
Entertainment Software Association (ESA 2010), the division between men
and women is 40% versus 60%. In the practice of play it is the technology
that makes a difference, though. While computer game play, involving some
technical skills in installing and running games, is mainly occupied by men,
relatively recent consoles such as Nintendo DS as well as online games are
popular among women. It is thus that the dominant concept of gamer often
refers to those playing on a computer or expensive consoles while other play
activities are more ‘casual’ and do not create ‘players’ or ‘gamers’. A hierarchy
of games is constructed around what men do and how they play.
Introduction to the games also plays an important role in getting women
into games. Since women do not have the same mechanics of being introduced
to games due to their circles of friends as men do, they do not benefit from
the knowledge of more experienced players. Sharing knowledge among peers is
an important factor in learning about a game. Therefore, as Taylor (2008, 63)
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3.1. Gendering Games, Gameplay and Players
suggests, “what often looks like a ‘women gamers’ problem is very regularly
a ‘newbie’ issue”. The kind of knowledge, such as genre conventions, that
new players do not posses, are often those that complicate women’s access to
games. A player interviewed for this study tells about the happy experience
of being introduction to the game through a friend.
When women are not introduced to games through their friends, they
are less likely to start playing. But the recent social games in Facebook, for
instance, have proven this right because they have quickly become very popular
among women. Wall posts related to games are visible by friends and offer an
easy introduction to games. They also help in creating a sense of community
where such playing is acceptable and ‘normal’. Such games have recently been
suggested to be even more popular among women than men (Nations 2010).
If we think about how the use of games is regulated, this thesis as a whole
sets out a context in which women players attempt to claim gameplay leisure
time for themselves in a culture that links games to men and masculinity. This
cultural regulation of to whom gameplay is accepted and appropriate results in
some women finding it difficult to become players and spend their time playing
(See Section 5.2).
Thinking about children, then, games are forcefully regulated by par-
ents, who have an enormous impact upon the use of them. A fifteen-year-old
player and a participant of this study describes the influence of parents and
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
media in an educated way. However, her view channels a broader cultural dis-
course around an ‘appropriate childhood’ to mere parental care and assumes
parents as powerful educators in ideology. Furthermore, the comment also as-
sumes that it is the mothers (not fathers or the wider society) who bear the
responsibility for socialising children into gender roles. Such view exemplifies
the aforementioned discourse of women’s working, instead of leisured, role at
home which again limits their own access to gameplay.
The previous section offered an overview of the ways in which games are gen-
dered in our culture. I suggested that male-dominated game development,
Questions of gender and technology and technology as masculinised do-
5
main have been discussed among various research traditions. For an intro-
duction of approaching these from the perspective of game culture has been
proposed, for example, by Dovey and Kennedy (2007, cf. Cassell and Jenkins
1998, Kafai et al. 2008).
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
6
http://www.eurogamer.net
7
http://www.gamespot.com
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
8
http://www.gamezone.com
9
http://www.gamesradar.com
10
Given that there are no articles in Finnish grammar, the players (as well
as game reviewers) often leave the definite article out and talk about ‘Sims’
although it is not the official name of the translated game. Many players
also write ‘sims’ with a lowercase first letter in which cases I have made the
correction in translation to make the name of the game visible within the
quotes.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
I have briefly introduced The Sims and The Sims 2 as well as their success
in the first chapter of this work. To summarise, The Sims games have have
long been among the few computer games that have been popular among
women as well as the most popular computer game series in general. The Sims
game series is played in dozens of countries and has been available for ten
years already, and more women than men play the game. It is both the game
content directly and the game content indirectly, through the expectations of
the surrounding culture, that has affected on The Sims games’ popularity.
Nonetheless, it appears culturally more acceptable for girls and women to play
The Sims games than many canonical computer games.
Writing in 2008, but reflecting the hopes of feminist Game Studies at
the end of 1990s, Cornelia Brunner proposes that “The Sims 2, which provides
almost all the features and narratives we were asking for ten years ago, validates
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
our call from a decade ago for gender-neutral games” (Brunner 2008, 33).11
The Sims games include all the features that feminist game scholars were
hoping for ten years ago. For example, as discussed in Section 3.1.3, various
studies claim that girls show preference to games without aggressive themes
and to the lack of violence in general. The Sims 2 includes some possibility
for conducting verbal and even physical violence, but violence in general is
not central to its gameplay and it is possible to maintain play that does not
include violence.12
Furthermore, whereas objectifying and hyper-sexualised game characters
have previously been a stated problem of many games, The Sims 2 does differ-
entiate genders in terms of clothing but could still be considered non-sexist in
terms of character representations. However, the game has a strong set of ideo-
logical assumptions built into various aspects of the simulation. These include
the range of careers available and the relative values ascribed to them. For ex-
ample, Daniel Baker (2004) found that the ‘Science’ career managed to balance
the highest salary compared to free time because the so-called ‘Mad Scientist’
works only four hours a day. This in itself reflects certain assumptions about
the nature of scientific work as a matter of inspired genius rather than applied
effort. Whereas some of the salary rates may have real life counterparts, The
Sims 2 is to some degree more advanced in regard to gender equality. Miguel
Sicart’s study that relies on his own play experience suggests that in “The Sims
there is no discrimination according to sex in terms of salaries. As long as you
follow the pre-established ways of being happy in the game, and you have the
11
While many scholars tend to speak about the gender-neutrality of games,
when it comes to The Sims, all the aspects of non-canonical content seem to be
transformed into feminine instead of neutral. It is often the case indeed that
‘neutral’ is created from the masculine by adding some ‘feminine’ qualities
instead of starting from a scratch.
12
Given the game’s representation simulation of Northern American sub-
urban lifestyle it might actually be surprising that there are no guns in the
game.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
patience and the gaming skills to succeed, all sims are treated in the same
way. Same salaries, same job opportunities, same concept of success” (Sicart
2003). However, the different career paths form a hierarchy in which certain
work is valued higher than other. Such system of preferred careers emphasises
masculine work and virtues, such as being a ‘Captain Hero’, a ‘Criminal Mas-
termind’, a ‘Celebrity Chef’ or a ‘Business Tycoon’, and is based on American
cultural status of specific professions. The top jobs are mostly those considered
masculine and that pay best in the ‘Western’ economical context. Neverthe-
less they appear desirable since they not only offer better pay but also lead to
other benefits such as more days off and shorter working hours. The gender
pay gaps of the real world are largely transferred into the game.
In terms of gameplay, the game offers an equal opportunity to play with
female and male characters and equal representations of female and male char-
acters in regard to the game’s main themes such as repairing electrical objects
or succeeding in and being paid of work. Anne-Mette Albrechtslund suggests
that “gender seems to be treated without differentiating between the two sexes
in The Sims 2 ” giving an interesting example: “[i]f two women make ‘WooHoo’,
one of them can even become pregnant a feature that is not only progressive,
but impossible in the natural world” (Albrechtslund 2007). The Sims char-
acters seem to embody biology different from humans, which adds a fantasy
feature into the game.
Arguably, The Sims games offer very little possibilities for conducting
(physical) violence and the array of female characters is equal to that of males.
However, neither the reviews nor the interviewees emphasise these aspects.
Non-violent gameplay is mentioned in one review and by two interviewees.
One of the players interviewed for this study associates shooting with fast
paced action without clearly suggesting it would be the violence she does not
like. A fourteen-year-old player describes the game based on what it does not
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
Simmer5: Sims games are calm enough for my taste, I don’t like shoot-
ing at all. For example there are no war sequences or battle sequences,
the smallest [sic] dreads [in The Sims] are merely the Grim Reaper, the
UFOs, the vampires etc.
An older player is able to address the lack of violence and sexist game
characters in terms of gender.
The interview participants are aware of the game’s success among female
players and of their male friends’ opinions about it.
Simmer5: I guess girls play Sims more [than boys], and many of my
male friends have been complaining that all the girls are always playing
Sims.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Simmer13: While I like to think that all games are for everybody, and
that there isn’t a certain type of game for females and a certain type of
game for males, I think, in reality most other video games are marketed
for young males (or children). As far as games for older teenage girls,
and women, The Sims is the only game that I can think that’s marketed
towards that demographic. For lack of a better word, it’s ‘cute’. It’s
not the type of game men stereotypically would play. There are some
that play The Sims, but they’re definitely a minority.
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One reviewer uses the rhetoric of a typical computer gamer who does not
appreciate The Sims very much, but nevertheless might be seduced by it. In
the beginning of the review he writes about how he hesitates playing the game
at all.
Later he ends the review with the same tone, yet offering the possibility
he might enjoy the game because of its numerous expansions that keep the
game interesting by offering new content.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Interestingly enough, these new player groups are not referred to as fe-
male or proposed as such. It might be that when these new players are not
explicitly gendered, it is easier to speak about them in a dismissive manner.
Nevertheless, the reader usually knows (as does the writer) that the game is
already understood as feminine in many regards given, for instance, the doll-
house comparison (See Section 3.2.3). Such writings exemplify how, despite the
success and novelty of The Sims games, they have not been openly acknowl-
edged within the community of gamers. In 2008, an article on EuroGamer
website concentrated on the history of the game and started with questioning
the tendency not to recognise the importance of The Sims in game cultures
summarising both the gendering and devaluing of the game – with an ironic
rather than critical tone, however.
Whenever talk turns to the games that have truly broken out of the
games ghetto and impacted the world outside, many within our intro-
spective hobbyist sphere seem curiously reluctant to give The Sims its
due. The attention instead shifts towards the likes of Halo, and their
impressive but carefully presented statistical first-weekend sales victo-
ries. Inevitably, this bias is because games like Halo are about dudes in
cool armour totally shooting aliens to death, while The Sims is about
relationships and choosing furniture and is for stupid gurlz and therefore
not a proper game. (Whitehead 2008, n.p.)
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1986, 58). Whereas GameSpot’s ‘just about anyone’ refers to new players as
‘any’ people dismissing the individual players’ pleasures, interests, knowledge
and skill, GameZone uses a stronger term ‘masses’ as opposite to ‘gamers’
which, again, emphasises the little attention paid on an individual and her
knowledge and skills, for instance. These new players are proposed as a mass
or any people, not as keen and enthusiast gamers not to mention skillful players
who might even have an impact on the industry or the games they play as
individuals. As Andreas Huyssen summarises, the division between inferior
mass culture and superior modernist art remains a powerful tool in everyday
discourse. Such positioning is not only cumbersome in regard to the topic of
this thesis, but also affects on the players of the game that is so labeled.
An answer from one player hints about the mass culture/art dichotomy
while suggesting the captivating quality of the game.
Huyssen suggests that “[t]he lure of mass culture, after all, has tradition-
ally been described as the threat of losing oneself in dreams and delusions and
of merely consuming rather than producing” (Huyssen 1986, 55). GameZone’s
review culminates to this seduction aspect in its last sentences.
In regard to the topic of this thesis, it is interesting how The Sims appears
as a game that can be simultaneously for consuming and producing, heady and
yet encourages creativity and innovation that presupposes a set of skills and
competencies and wide knowledge over the game.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Pelit: There is plenty to do and mess about, and every time you think
you have seen all the old tricks, the little virtual people surprise you with
an unexpected turn. [...] It would be insane to try to explore all as-
pects of such a broad game exhaustively in one review. (Sillanpää 2004)
GameSpot: [...] there’s no denying that The Sims 2’s additions will
give dedicated fans of the series plenty of stuff to do. (Park 2004)
Meanwhile, Pelit magazine suggests the game will put off some of the
potential players due to the lack of goals. The game often appears as a ‘rogue’
in the discussions of gameness due to its lack of clear goals and conclusion (See
Section 3.3.1 on how this exclusion has been done in scholarly work.).
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Simmer4: I like Sims exactly because of the freedom, because you can
do what you like to do, and you are not supposed to pass a level, the
game kind of never ends.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Simmer2: The reason for my own interest towards Sims is that it differs
so drastically from other games.
One player further links the free-formed play to creativity and self-
expression.
More specifically then, the freedom to express one’s own interests, dreams
and fantasies is one side of the allowed free formed play.
14
Here this it is also important to notice that both the player participants
and game reviews suggest relative improvement, not absolute goodness of The
Sims games. The Sims games are not embraced as the best games ever, but
simply much better or at least significantly different in relation to what has
existed before. In fact, these players have little experience on other games an
thus only little to compare with.
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
A similar comment from another player suggests that the game is enjoy-
able because of various ways to proceed.
Simmer10: The Sims is just a great game. There are so many options,
and you can do whatever you want in the sims lives!
The player continues writing that what makes the game of ‘good’ quality
for her are the various little details of the game that offer versatility.
While closely related to the open form, game levels and time limits are
among the structural elements that shape gameplay and allow free-formed play
are mentioned by the players.
Simmer4: I like to play Sims more than other games because there are
no levels that you are supposed to pass. Those [levels] are usually boring
and once you have completed the game, you have really completed it.
This is not the case with The Sims and the gameplay is ‘more relaxing’,
and not so long-winded.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Furthermore, the lack of goals in the game has worked in a way that it
easily adjusts to the level of individual players’ gameplay skills and knowledge.
For example, one player brings up a difference in difficulty between typical
boys’ games and The Sims 2.
Simmer5: Yeah, I find the tasks of driving and shooting games usually
too hard.
It then appears that while the tasks and goals set to the player are clear
and same to everyone in ‘driving and shooting games’, The Sims 2 and its
openness allows a playing style that never feels too hard as everyone can set
their own goals at any given point. It is also that the game, through a concen-
tration on character looks, social relationships and domestic life, emphasises
‘feminine’ skills and therefore might feel ‘easier’ for girls. In other words, it
is not about absolute differences in difficulty but about relative difficulty in
regard to competencies one possesses.
I would also like to suggest that the game feels easy to access both because
the game is created with a theme and settings familiar to the interviewed
players (See Section 3.2.3) and because of the open form that allows free setting
of goals. The familiarity further contributes to the suggested ‘easiness’ of the
game. While various games rely on their experienced players’ understanding
of genre conventions, novice players such as many of the participants of this
study, are not practiced to see the possible options in a situation faced. For
them, it may be off-putting not knowing what to do in some games. But when
the theme of the game is familiar from outside the game culture, the player is,
without earlier knowledge from gameplay, able to guess what to do (or what to
want to do) and to feel free and empowered to act in a way that feels suitable
for herself.
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The freedom that female players describe they face in The Sims games seems
to be partly a freedom to do what they are interested in doing at a given
moment. Facing a set of options to choose from does not come across as a
point of free choice if none of the available options is in accordance with those
that one is interested in doing. Therefore, millions of options for action in
a war themed game are meaningless if no single one of them appeals to the
player. It might then be that the players who suggest that when playing The
Sims they are ‘free’ to choose whatever they want to do, they think so because
those options that are available are something they are interested in.
The arguments that support The Sims games’ superiority suggest that
the players do not like games where one is ‘supposed to’ or ‘need to’ do some-
thing specific. These players do not let the game ‘tell them what to do’.
Instead, the players wish to ‘decide’ both the motivations for action and ways
of executing the action themselves.
Simmer5: Sims differs in that the player has a possibility for free
gameplay unlike in war games, for example, where you need to kill
specific enemies and so on, but Sims [gameplay] is so free form.
Furthermore, as a framework for action of all kind, the game sets out
not only the options to choose from but also the motives for any possible form
of action. These motives are supported and created through the theme and
ideology of the game.15 A familiar domestic setting with a strong consumerist
ideology that reflects players’ everyday life sets out a strong basis for what the
player may find meaningful to do.
15
This argument goes somewhat in line with the ‘programmed freedom’ sug-
gested by Vilém Flusser when he writes that “[i]t looks here as if photographers
could choose freely... But the choice is limited to the categories of the camera,
and the freedom of the photographer remains a programmed freedom... In
the act of photography the camera does the will of the photographer, but the
photographer has to will what the camera can do” (Flusser 2000, 35).
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Such process benefits from a familiar, strong ideology that sets out the
motives for action and suggests the kind of things that one feels relevant to
want to do. This is the Northern American suburban family life which players
know from other texts of popular culture. Successful play of The Sims requires
the acceptance of a stereotypical, popularised American suburban lifestyle.
This framework makes the player want what seems rational to want in such
settings. The player thus adopts the strong ideological and ludic motives for
wanting certain things and feels like she was free to choose. Based on Louis
Althusser’s theory of ideology, this can be seen as a process of ‘interpellation’
in which players are turned into subjects of the game’s ideology (Althusser
1971).16
The freedom in the game thus arises from control, from signing to ideol-
ogy. In other words, if the player is motivated to want something through the
game narrative and ludic structure, a (false?) feeling of freedom is experienced.
When the setting is laid out well enough, it does not even occur to the player
to want something that does not fit together with the ideology. The feeling
of freedom is paradoxically produced by control, by controlling the gameplay
motives of players by this very ideology. As George Orwell famously writes:
“Slavery is freedom” (Orwell 2009/1949, n.p.).17
In the next section I will move on discussing how the idea of a dollhouse
brings freedom and familiar domesticity together and how such combination
is considered feminine.
16
While it is not possible to further elaborate Althusser’s theory of ideology
here, Morris has discussed the way in which interpellation takes place in re-
lation to game texts in her essay ‘First-person shooters – a game apparatus’
(Morris 2002).
17
The full quotation goes: “You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery’.
Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom” (Orwell
2009/1949, n.p.).
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[...] The Sims is a stupid game anyway, [the reason] why anyone would
want to play it in the first place is beyond me. I mean... you get
to simulate the real world. How desparate [sic] do you have to get?
(AnimeOtaku 2004)
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
to take care of home and children alongside it. Such balancing of paid work
and work at home result in women having very little time for leisure of their
own, which will be discussed in Section 5.2.
Furthermore, the dichotomy between work and family, public and pri-
vate, is not even handed. Such discourse does not often recognise work that
takes place at home.18 “This delineation mirrors the opposition and disparate
valuing of the male and female: the work domain [public] is characterized by
the masculine; the family domain [private] is characterized by the feminine”
(Runte and Mills 2002 in Runte and Mills 2003, 4).
Interestingly, The Sims games can then be considered too ‘feminine’ for
boys to play. One of the participants discusses this in relation to how such
feminine characteristics of the game make it ‘unsuitable’ for men and boys to
play.
Researcher: Why do you think they [male school mates] haven’t played
[The Sims games] themselves?
Simmer5: I assume they just haven’t bothered to try, exactly because
it is considered a ‘girls’ game’ it would make them look somehow ‘sissy’
in their friends’ eyes.
While in The Sims games family life is presented in the context of domes-
ticity, it “breaks the dominant code of masculine gender positioning effected
by digital gaming – not simply in that it allows players to identify with fe-
male characters but, more significantly, because it does so in a conventionally
18
Sharing skins that represent aspects of private space online then appears
as a potential mixer of these spaces. Laura Stempel Mumford (1994) writes
that soap opera also blurs this line when the private matters are brought
public. While The Sims 2 play as a solidary activity keeps the matters of
one’s virtual households in secrecy, the sharing of ‘private’ skins allows the
exchange between the private and public.
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The anxieties associated with men playing The Sims can be read from
the comments of two male players below who claim the game enjoyable, but
simultaneously admit that it does not currently offer them much respect, or
game cultural capital, among their peers. What I mean by (game) cultural
capital here is the kind of players’ personal experience, skill and knowledge
that brings them recognition and status within their community. This widely
used concept borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu (1984) helps in explaining what
is it that players gain from doing what they do when no material rewards are
functional. And more importantly, how some game cultural activities, while
gendered, offer such capital for one gender only. So the players write:
I find a lot of people just dismiss the Sims without giving it more than
20 minutes, assuming it’s for girls and only girls like it and it has lots
of flowers in it, not to mention ponies.
I say these people are obviously ‘over-compensating for something’ (I
hate that phrase, but I can’t think of a better way to say it). It’s great.
I can happily play THE MANLIEST GAME EVER (Gears of War) and
then put on the Sims and try and make the ugliest baby ever by getting
the old guy to sleep with the alien.
Don’t be ashamed, give it a go! (Gillen 2008)
[p]laying The Sims is like riding a moped. A hell of a lot of fun but you
don’t admit to your mates (Feeze 2005).
The first player assumes a certain amount of shame in playing the game
suggesting that a more masculine playing style could exist in achieving goals
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
such as creating ugly babies. Contradicting himself the player expresses his
frustration towards general assumptions of the game as feminine and yet blows
life to the very same assumption proposing a masculine way to play the game.
The second player, meanwhile, suggests that playing the game is something
one needs to do in secrecy due to its femininity. Using masculine expressions
and metaphors (‘riding a moped’, ‘hell of a lot of fun’, ‘mates’) he further
emphasises his own masculinity.
The anxiety expressed by the players can also be found on the ‘Yahoo!
Answers’ service board, where a concerned parent writes:
If you think about it, The Sims 2 is basically a doll house game and it
just seems strange for boys to play with a doll house. My son is 12 and
my mother in law bought him The Sims 2 for his birthday. I looked at
the game and it seems wrong for boys to play it. I’m worried that it
will cause my son to become homosexual. I asked my mother in law for
the recpit [sic] of the game so I can return it and I’m really considering
returning it because I don’t know if my son should be playing games
that are meant for girls. (Yahoo! 2007)19
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
may have affected on the gendering of it. Players’ notions about games are
influenced by such game journalism and marketing that shape general opinions
on games and gametypes. Marketing cannot be overlooked when arguing for
reasons of The Sims games’ success among females.
The Sims games’ lead designer’s Will Wright’s comments on the game
have had a remarkable influence on how the game came to be talked about
as a dollhouse. Wright has referred to The Sims games as dollhouses and
computerised dollhouses in dozens of interviews (e.g. Hattori 2000). While
he has tended to be careful when giving interviews discussing who The Sims
games were designed for, the target audience seems rather clear given that the
game’s working title was actually ‘Dollhouse’. Leaking this information to the
journalists powerfully proposes to introduce the game as a virtual dollhouse in
later articles of the game.
Referring to the game as dollhouse, Electronic Arts, the game’s publisher,
made history while they “worked the news value of the allegedly high number
of female players of The Sims to place stories in journals [magazines] such as
Mademoiselle, Working Woman, and Cosmopolitan” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford
and de Peuter 2003, 271-2). This is important because these magazines have
a role in policing the kinds of things women who read these magazines find
as suitable leisure activities. They represent certain things as attractive and
by the mere exclusion of other topics deny their importance for women’s lives.
Video games certainly do not belong to the typical topics discussed in such
magazines. Since 2003, the acceptability of gameplay as a women’s leisure
activity has somewhat changed21 , however, and such adverts are more common
in such magazines today.
The dollhouse metaphor is commonly used in game magazines, too. The
tag line for the game’s review in Pelit, for instance, was “A carefully made
The ‘women’s games’ are restricted to certain beauty and home skill
21
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
dollhouse simulator that has plenty to play with” (Sillanpää 2004). Meanwhile,
Pelaaja magazine’s review includes a short interview with a female player who
suggests a comparison with dollhouses. Also GamesRadar and EuroGamer
mention dollhouse in their reviews. GamesRadar ’s review dismisses the idea
of a dollhouse as if saying that were The Sims 2 a mere dollhouse, it was not
interesting enough.
Thus, on one hand The Sims was reviewed in mainstream women’s mag-
azines but on the other it led to it being treated dismissively in the specialist
press. One of the players I interviewed mentions this troubling meaning of a
dollhouse and criticises the way in which media represents the game as such.
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
Also some of the answers directed to the parent who was concerned about
a son ‘turning homosexual’ by playing The Sims, contribute to devaluing the
concept of the dollhouse. For them it is necessary to suggest that the game is
‘more sophisticated’ than dollhouses.
The person later suggests a rather masculine aspect of the game as some-
thing that offers an alternative to doll play: successful career and becoming a
millionnaire as the final stage in successful play. Interesting is also the way in
which the player suggests that getting involved in a feminine practice is ‘gay’.
Taking a heteronormative position as a given he argues that engagement in
gendered leisure activity is a threat to one’s sexuality.
[T]rust me, there are ‘certain’ things that make the game not gay at
all. such as woohoo ing. its not a dollhouse. its a life simulation game
where u go through stages in life like marriage, having a baby, dating,
buying stuff, and becoming sucessful millionares [sic] with great jobs.
(Yahoo! 2007)
The Sims may well be much more than a ‘simple’ dollhouse, but then
again, what is a dollhouse anyway? In the discourses around The Sims, there
seems to be a tendency, also in my interview material, to take a step away from
dollhouses because dollhouse metaphor is not enough and because it brings
along an idea of a girls’ toy. Nevertheless, as long as The Sims is referred to
as a dollhouse, these connotations come along.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
And yet, it was probably a strategic decision decision for Maxis and
Electronic Arts not to in order to avoid feminising the game by its name already
by branding it with a name ‘Dollhouse’. However, given the strong negative
connotations that gaming still bore in the beginning of this millennium as
discussed by Seth Giddings (2006), the subtly introduced dollhouse metaphor
may have nevertheless been strategically more successful in marking the game
as harmless and suitable for young children, especially for girls since femininity
is typically linked to vulnerability (e.g. Gordon, Iverson and Allan 2010).
Furthermore, from a practical point of view, the familiarity of a dollhouse
might have an impact on its success in welcoming new player demographics.
Drawing on a group of earlier studies on children’s play in general and computer
game play in particular Subrahmanyam and Greenfield (1998) suggest that it
is the familiar settings, such as the home, and characters, such as mother
and teacher, that girls tend to prefer in games (cf. Walkerdine 1999). For
example, Yasmin Kafai’s study conducted among children who designed games
by themselves presents real life settings in contrast with fantasy. According to
the research, six of eight girls placed their games in a real life location, such
as a classroom or ski slope (Kafai 1998) marking a notable difference to boys
who created seven out of eight games with fantasy settings.
While these studies do not go on arguing the reasons behind this pref-
erence, I would like to raise a point that instead of a mere interest towards
imitating everyday life by play, there seems to be a practical reason for women’s
preference for games in domestic settings. A setting familiar from the player’s
everyday life is simply a good starting point for someone with no prior play
experience or, more importantly, not many peers to help in getting into the
gaming as discussed in Section 3.1.5. When games are linked to technologies
that are not familiar to many girls, it is the familiar theme of The Sims games
that may make gaming more relaxed and easier to start for those without prior
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Game
I am now going to look at how the game’s powerful ideology as a dollhouse and
as a simulation of American consumer culture can be seen to act as a learning
22
This does not mean that the game would not offer a fair degree of challenge
to its experienced players. The game is, in fact, very much what a famous game
design adage suggests as a good game: “It is easy to learn and hard to master”.
23
However, it would be too simplifying to understand the domestic space of
The Sims as non-fantastic, since the game includes numerous non-realistic as-
pects such as superstitions and references to spiritual and mythological beliefs
such as ghosts and vampires.
24
Martin Lister et al. discuss this American cultural dominance in regard
to ‘global culture’ and suggest that in videogames the American content is
often mixed together with Japanese (Lister et al. 2003, 268-9). The aspects
of The Sims 2 discussed here do not, however, suggest such reading of the
combination of these two cultural backgrounds.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen
and Vespas” (Barthes 1973, 53). In her book, Made to Play House, Miriam
Formanek-Brunell (1993) explores the social ‘feminisation’ of young women
through dollhouse play. Like dolls, The Sims educates towards motherhood
involving nurturing and caring.
The Sims players are also possibly trained to navigate in a society as
consumers. The emphasis on materialism through consumerism is striking and
exemplified by the way even the spiritual aspects of the game are associated
with objects. For example, death in the game is represented as a grave stone
on one’s yard. Furthermore, the game characters’ identities are constructed
through buying stuff: the purchasing of particular items allows the develop-
ment of specific skills. Flanagan directs our attention towards imitation, which
is in the centre of dollhouse play.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
Janet Murray explains that The Sims “has its own moral physics: ed-
ucation leads to job success; a bigger house means more friends; too many
possessions lead to exhausting labour; neglect of a pet can lead to the death
of a child” (Murray 2004, 5). Thus, the game builds around a set of values
and characteristics of modern neo-liberal society. The Sims 2 is extensively
about consumption because its core mechanic has to do with earning money in
order to buy better furniture and technology and decorate and build a house
as more expensive furniture offers more efficient filling of the need-bars. For
example, ‘Satinistics Loveseat’ sofa worth 150 simoleons offers just 5 Comfort
and 2 Energy ‘points’ (See Figure 3.2) whereas the most expensive one, Lap
of Luxury Sofa (1,700 simoleons) helps a sim to gain Energy worth 2 points,
gives Comfort worth 10 and adds 2 to the Environment.
It is part of the ideology of the game that more expensive items are of
better quality or at least represented as more valuable in regard to a successful
sim life. With an expensive sofa a sim is able to fill energy and comfort needs
more quickly and is then able to concentrate on other tasks. If a sim is poor,
almost all playtime will be used in filling the basic needs. Furthermore, these
items do not wear out, i.e. there is no need to buy new ones because the old
ones are not suitable for the intended use: they keep their ability to fulfill the
sims’ needs. The only reason one would like to buy a new piece of furniture
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
would be to get one with better need-filling qualities and looks to start with.
In order to make one’s sims as ‘happy’ as possible, keeping old furniture and
preferring their simple style over the available new furniture is a poor strategy.
However, as objects can be sold back, they are affected by depreciation. For
example, the Satinistics Loveseat sofa has an initial depreciation rate of 22
simoleons and will depreciate worth 15 simoleons per day after that, but cannot
be of less value than 20 simoleons.
Alongside offering a way to look at The Sims as a education tool for
a ‘Western’ consumerist and individualistic way of life (or even a neo-liberal
society) and nurturing, dollhouse as a concept suggests The Sims as a toy
rather than as a game. Imitation in the game is what children do in their
play – they try out their own versions of the adults’ rules in play. While
the origins of dollhouses are as wealthy adults’ toys in the seventeenth century
(Jaffé 2006), dollhouses are nowadays considered as children’s toys. Also digital
games that have concentrated on nurturing have a long history as children’s
games. This discourse causes a kind of infantilisation of The Sims games.
Rather than games, The Sims products are clearly acknowledged as toys (e.g.
Sicart 2005, Aarseth 2007b). “Will Wright tends to be very reluctant when
it comes to defining his works as video games: he often refers to them as
‘software toys’, as software products oriented to play activity, rather than to
more formal games activities” (Sicart 2005, n.p.). Again, market-wise this may
be a successful strategy for Electronic Arts but it has an effect on the player
communities: while The Sims players may be playing, they are not quite
players.25 As consumer products, the game is often discussed as a ‘sandbox’,
which is also bears meanings such as easiness and immaturity.
25
Today, adults are’ also collecting toys such as various ‘vinyl’, ‘geek’ and
‘cult’ toys available in shops like Forbidden Planet, but the activity of playing
with toys is still reserved to children. Gameplay is, indeed, more broadly
accepted as a form of mature pass time than playing with toys.
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3.2. Gendering and ‘Othering’ The Sims 2
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
proposes that also the traditional doll play was challenged by women as they
went on acting out non-typical scenarios such as funerals with their dolls.
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
27
This work was started with Aarseth’s book Cybertext (1997), were he de-
fined cybertexts as non-linear texts that focus “on the mechanical organization
of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the
literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user,
of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists
would claim” (Aarseth 1997, 1).
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
software tools.
As suggested in the previous sections of this chapter, Sims allows a kind
of free form of play and does not set clear goals for its player. There is no
such closure in the game that would make the player feel like she had reached
the end of the game.28 Following the introduced definition, the early game
scholarship has contributed to the notions of Sims games as non-games, or
‘borderline cases’ (Juul 2003), and resulted in reductive views of them. The
Sims games are seen as different from traditional computer games that include
predetermined goals.
Where ludus emphasises the talents and qualities of the player in general
and makes a point of her efforts, paidia is about leaving oneself behind and
letting the other lead. Basically, paidia is presented as more intuitive and
therefore ‘easier’ whereas ludus requires talent and training. Such an approach
to The Sims 2 does not recognise, or at least does not offer tools to articulate,
the player’s real intellectual contribution, the setting of goals and rules for
example. Approaching the game as a paidia type of play may even lead to the
denial of any intellect and skill in such play.
Such definitions do not aim to recognise differences between players’ ac-
tions originating from different motivations and interpretations.29 Whereas in
28
Some of the mobile versions of The Sims, such as The Sims Bustin’ Out
for N-Gage, have clear goals and tasks in them. Also the recent The Sims 3
has got more goal-oriented focus in it, but no clear closure.
29
Despite an understanding of the player’s essential role in the creation of a
game, such studies concentrate on game objects and ‘ideal’ or ‘implied’ play-
ers instead of real cultural beings. Such definitions suggest the player as a
‘necessary evil’ needed just in order for a game to actualise. The player, then,
is interesting only as it becomes defined by the game text, not vice versa.
This structuralist approach lacks sensitivity to the different playings of the
games and result in the marginalisation and devaluation of the ways that dif-
fer from the anticipated. From a feminist perspective, it is troubling that the
ideal/implied computer game player is constructed based on the masculine his-
tory of computer games. It takes for granted that ‘masculine’ modes of play
are a norm and is therefore ideological in its effect.
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
The Sims both rules and preferred goals are negotiated by players during game-
play, dominant game definitions often fail to recognise these player-originated
rules and goals.
Form
In the 1980s some feminist work indeed attempted to describe play as an an-
tithesis of competition (See Sutton-Smith 2001, 103-104). Play was understood
as an expression of feminine pleasure and identity. But in Game Studies, such
a reading of games emphasises not only the masculine virtue of mastery but
also a distinction between high and low culture. By highlighting the ‘demand-
ing’ technical qualities a game, games that base on other kind of knowledge
and skill such as taste (See Section 5.3.1) are not recognised. These structure-
oriented definitions can be considered as a response to the pressures under
which people involved in both game culture and game research operate. “For
many commentators, if videogames are worth considering at all, they can be
easily and readily dismissed as little more than inconsequential trivialities”
(Newman 2008, 1).
Emphasis on ‘worthwhile’ and ‘mature’ gameplay that concentrates on
rigid rules and goal orientation may then help in legitimising these fields.
Maybe the emphasis on logical complexity, mathematical functioning, pos-
sibilities of mastery over the system in dominant game definitions is a way to
prove the value of games and to defend the ‘good’ aspects of them in order to
further support their acceptance as adults’ entertainment. However, such em-
phasis on culturally masculine technological competencies contributes to the
devaluing of other kind of skills and pleasures. Concentration on the structure
as it is in the commercial product has clear impact on how the player herself
can be seen.
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
Tania Modleski (1982) writes about this polarity between high and low
in regard to earlier ‘feminine’ media forms and suggests that such works are
not receiving the same kind of attention as those considered ‘masculine’. Mass
produced texts for women are not appreciated in their own terms because they
become approached from the point of view of masculine forms and genres (cf.
Chapter 4 on the devaluing of skinning as different to modding).
As discussed earlier in this chapter (See Section 3.2.1), the players inter-
viewed for this study actually suggest that they prefer gameplay without rigid
rules or a goal that leads to closure. I see the highlighting of rigid goals and
complicated rules as a kind of fetishised masculine form of playing computer
games that prevails among games research and is appreciated in the games
industry over alternative forms. Whether The Sims 2 is a game or not might
be a matter of definition and context. But for the identities of its players its
marginalisation as a non-game has clear consequences: they are not typical
players if players at all, but rather as The Sims 2 players in particular. It can
be seen problematic from the perspective of the millions of women playing the
game that it is not considered a game, while it clearly is a product of game
cultures and belongs to this sphere of mediated leisure.
Interestingly, this most discussed and contested feature of the game,
open-endedness, is a pattern that we can recognise also among other kinds of
media texts. I would therefore like to compare The Sims games to two earlier
products or genres of popular culture that have gained huge popularity among
female audiences. If we look at the studies by Radway on romance novels and
Ien Ang on Dallas soap opera, romance and soap opera share two qualities:
they are immensely popular among female audiences and based on a form that
builds on continuity and openness. As romance novels come in series and their
use is characterised by repetitive reading (Radway 1984), soap opera is a very
similar kind of ‘endless’ genre (Ang 2005/1985).
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
as possible.
Yet, it needs to be acknowledged that there might be a practical reason
for women liking open-ended games or other media. Open-endedness is a
structure that has implications in regard to when and how a game is played
and how it becomes synchronised alongside the player’s non-gaming life. I
would like to to draw attention to open-endedness as something that defines
when and where play takes place rather than what the player can do while
playing. This kind of structure works in regard to the temporality in the use
of a media text.
Facilitating fragmented use and spreading of the use over a long period of
time, the structure makes it easy for users without possibilities for prolonged
period of concentration to engage themselves with the text. Women are often
suggested to have this kind of fragmented leisure (e.g. Henderson 1996, So-
derman 2009). Open-endedness here is indeed a characteristic of the text, but
not in regard to the plot or narrative but in regard to the ways in which it
structures its use.
In the forthcoming chapters of this thesis I will go on discussing the
importance of an open form for the skinners’ practice and return to it especially
in Chapter 5 where I look at skinning as an ongoing process of sharing and
co-operation in comparison to mastery. It seems that while The Sims 2 game
is characterised by an open form, also skinning maintains this feeling of endless
addition and lack of closure. In such a discussion, acknowledging player’s own
goals and rules is especially important.
But why is there no clear goal in The Sims 2 game – or is there? I suggest that
looking at the theme of the game helps here. If The Sims games are approached
as simulations of ‘Western’ consumerist and individualistic societies, what else
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
can be expected from a game than a never ending path towards better salary,
better possessions, bigger family, greater number of friends? If we were to ask
what is the goal of The Sims 2, we need to discuss what is the meaning of life
in the world we life in. However, it is rather easy to recognise one ultimate
goal for the player: to stay alive and to reproduce, or, not to die. Such a goal
is a direct result of the adopted thematical basis of the game.
While according to several game definitions there is no pre-determined or
designer-set goal in The Sims games, I would like to point out that, in fact, The
Sims 2, like all simulations and a range of online multiplayer RPGs, contain
one prewritten goal that affects everything the player is able do in the game.
However, it is a goal that does not lead to closure and ending of the game, but
is, on contrary, a goal to keep the system going, to be able to play. It is also
tightly connected to the rule system, because the the rule-system itself exists
to maintain this one goal of the game. To put it in a different way: in The Sims
2 there is no goal to reach but there is a negative goal, a goal that the player
is supposed not to reach. This is to die and, consequently, to stop playing. No
matter how happy the sims in the game are and what they can achieve in life,
every moment the game is running, the player is a winner. While the game
makes its best to fight against, a good player can keep the game going. The
Sims 2 does not end with a fanfare of victory. Instead, it rewards its player
with greater sub-goals and the very possibility to keep playing.
Something in the way in which these structural and thematical aspects of
the game are tied together and support each other appears especially intrigu-
ing in case of The Sims games. Ultimately, not only the theme and settings
of the game but also the mechanics represent progress and aims that change
as we are about to reach them, process that has only goals that are already
forgotten once reached. This is also where the traditional notion of the circuit
of culture does not suffice in exhausting the ‘consumption’ category. As dis-
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
137
Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
Approaching games from the point of view of the player, Cultural Studies
scholars later accompanied such notions that concentrated on rules, closure
and competition and suggested different perspectives for thinking about games
through the player’s engagement and as a system that includes the player.
Dovey and Kennedy (2006), for example, write that game object centered def-
initions share disadvantages with structuralist theories from 1970s and 1980s
where they aim to make suggestions on meaning based on formal textual fea-
tures. According to them, “[t]his approach was increasingly challenged, how-
ever, as it failed to explain the experiences of viewers, or their diversity of
interpretation.” (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 28)
As discussed above, these formal definitions lack sensitivity to the dif-
ferent ways the games can be played. David Buckingham suggests that while
“such definitions and typologies are valuable, considering computer games in
these terms by no means wholly explains the nature of gameplay. The experi-
32
A parallel distinction relating to game objects is the separation between
simulation and representation (e.g. Dovey and Kennedy 2006, Frasca 2001b).
However, the aspects of simulation and representation consider the ontological
nature of game objects and their capabilities to reflect real world, while the
thematic and ludic levels of games as presented by Mosberg Iversen (2009)
cover the ways in which game objects invite certain kind of meaning making.
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3.3. The Sims Games in Game Studies
ence of play also depends upon how we interpret and use these various elements
of the game, and how they relate to our own existing enthusiasms and preoc-
cupations” (Buckingham 2006, 9). Giddings and Kennedy, meanwhile, refer to
these studies on game as an abstract form or structure proposing that such cy-
bertextual analyses “posit only abstract or notional playing subjects, contexts
and / or events” and do not therefore suffice in the study of actual players and
their pleasures (Giddings and Kennedy 2008, 17).
Moving the attention to the player allows us to approach game goals
and rules, among many other things, as they are being set and negotiated by
players themselves. In actual play situations, players can then be seen to affect
and contribute to the structural aspects of a game. In ‘sandbox’ or ‘simulation’
games such as The Sims 2, it is required from a player to create her own goals,
rather than simply respond to goals coded into the game system by its makers.
In The Sims 2, the player can for instance decide to aim for a big house and
large family, or to be a single person with a good career, or even aim to create
a family with a graveyard for a backyard and ghosts coming in every night.
These goals then vary from player to player, though the game supports some
goals better than others. The importance of players’ individual contribution
is highlighted in games that facilitate and support various alternative playing
styles – that allow free and open form of play. Consequently, a game can be
seen as a continuous process throughout which new meanings can be generated.
The essential point, then, is that games are grounded in (and constituted
by) human practice and are therefore always in the process of becoming.
This also means that they are not reducible to their rules. This is
because any given singular moment in any given game may generate
new practices or new meanings, which may in turn transform the way
the game is played, either formally or practically (through a change in
rules or conventions). (Malaby 2007, 103)
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Chapter 3 Games, Gender and The Sims
33
Notice a reference to a popular romance novel publisher Mills & Boon.
140
Chapter 4
So far I have proposed that several structural, thematical and broader cultural
aspects of The Sims 2 game contribute to its gendering as feminine. Also the
cultural discourses around the game, drawing on notions of a dollhouse and
a toy for instance, emphasise the game’s uniqueness, although often in a de-
valuing tone. Interestingly, the best-selling game of all times also marginalises
its players in various ways. What is behind such notions is the open form of
the game that can be approached as a sandbox or simulation, for example.
The multitude of possibilities for in-game engagement available can be seen
as one of the reasons behind the enormous success of The Sims games. The
open form of these games serves as a platform for various kinds of play and no
single right way of playing them exists.
In terms of skinners’ identities, I have suggested that they are built
outside the ‘hegemony of play’ and experienced as different from the dominant
image of players. Discourses around Sims seem to have a significant impact on
the players’ identities, too. Now, moving on to the practice of skinning itself,
I aim to explore the related discourses that have been used in approaching
141
Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
142
4.1. Resistance in Modding
143
Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
take into account the specificities of The Sims 2 and its means to facilitate
skinning. But as my short personal research history had already concentrated
on the aspects of games that sometimes alienate women players, and where
the aforementioned often victimised and vulnerable female characters are in
an important role, it was easy to assume the making of skins as a subversive
practice that gathers together women players who are willing to change the
ways things work. I wanted to see women players fighting back.
After all, such examples had already been documented in the works by
Kennedy, Cindy Poremba and Anne-Marie Schleiner. And more importantly,
work on women’s skinning practices was limited to such accounts. However,
where these works highlight the resistant and empowering possibilities of the
practice, they also refer to special cases that differ significantly from the typical
use of the games they discuss. Skinning practices introduced in these works
acknowledge exclusively the tiny sections of game culture as distinct from
everyday use of the products of the games industry. Importantly, they also
discuss games that are very much in line with the dominant masculine contents
and themes of games, where women could indeed see themselves resisting these
stereotypes (See Section 4.3).
My work, meanwhile, extends and differs from this approach to women
skinners where it concentrates on a practice that is very popular in one hand
and focused on an un-conventionally gendered (i.e. feminine) game on the
other. User nicknames on skin-circulating fora indicate that just like playing
The Sims 2, the practice of skinning is most popular among female players.
As one of the prime sites for The Sims skinners, The Sims Resource 2 brings
together hundreds of thousands players and a vast majority of its ‘featured
artists’ present themselves as women3 . The game skin databases also include
2
http://www.thesimsresource.com/
3
http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/featured/
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4.1. Resistance in Modding
significantly more female character clothes and body parts than male ones4 .
In regard to Radola in particular, some idea of the gender distribution was got
through a survey sent to the forum by an administrator. Within one month
346 players chose between options ‘male’ and ‘female’ resulting in 89% ‘female’
answers. There even exists a forum thread in Radola that aims to list all male
members of the community “to prevent them from becoming lonely”. Also
every player interviewed for this study apart from one were women despite
the fact that no interest towards women in particular was mentioned in the
invitations.
As I briefly introduced in Section 1.1, the historical timing of the work
is significant here, too. Sims skinners are not the pioneering group of female
players who, fighting space for women’s participation, aim to reveal the mas-
culine contents of the games, but in fact a large group of very ‘mainstream’
players. But if we look at the numbers of The Sims 2 skins, such player partic-
ipation, while more numerous, has not gained the attention it, in my opinion,
deserves. My goal is to help filling this gap that exists in the studies on gender
and gaming. It should not only be the explicitly resistant cases of player co-
creativity that gain scholarly attention. I will discuss the value of such form
of skinning that does not explicitly aim to challenge the ideology of game or
game development cultures.
In addition to feminist studies on game modifying, also in the a broader
context of Game Studies skinning is generally understood as the player’s way
to subvert the game artifact and therefore as a way of being resistant. For
instance, Flanagan talks about “[t]he subversion of the game in the form of
skinning” (Flanagan 2003, n.p., See also Flanagan 2009). By being creative
and taking the role of a producer instead of a consumer, it is believed, the
player is allowed to change the game product that has traditionally been ex-
See for example Mod The Sims
4
http://www.modthesims2.com/
download.php
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
5
A similar account on the studies of media fanzine communities has been
proposed by Camille Bacon-Smith in her book Enterprising women: televi-
sion fandom and the creation of popular myth, where she suggests that some
studies “have inadvertently projected a distorted picture of the group [fanzine
communities] as a whole.” (Bacon-Smith 1992, 282)
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
Where the farmer suffered the enclosure of pastoral commons, the hacker
must resist the enclosure of the information commons. (Wark 2004, item
197)
Olli Sotamaa writes that the history of modding traces back to “the first
generation of hackers” (Sotamaa 2005, 108). Given the histories of both com-
puter gaming and mod making in software development, the discourse around
modding often builds on a stronger discourse of hackerism. Accordingly, mod-
ding is discussed as hackerism’s counterpart within gaming communities: mods
are understood in parallel to hacks and modders are referred to as hackers (e.g.
Sotamaa 2005, Flowers 2008, Jones 2006, Lowood 2006). It is argued that it is
the skills of game designers that are acquired by hobbyist modders. Modders
constitute a group of players whose technological knowledge and skills enable
them to take the power of a designer and change what is to be played. This
6
The term ‘afford’ is used in its everyday meaning here. While the Gibso-
nian (Gibson 1977) and Normanian (Norman 1998/1988) concept of affordance
can be used in a similar manner, concentration on cultural meaning and sym-
bolic invitations of this work marks a difference to such theories. What my
idea of an affordance shares with these accounts, however, is a concentration
on the kind of suggestions that a technology makes about its use.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
technological superiority raises them above typical users as they are able to
tweak the code, to master it, and to create (subversive) alterations to it.
That some systems are closed from taking into possession, from free de-
velopment and from gaining perfect mastery over them (Turkle 2005), renders
such activity resistant. As the use of hackers’ knowledge and skill in such cases
(or their technicity, see Dovey and Kennedy 2006) is restricted or forbidden by
different kinds of mechanisms that have been created in order to maintain the
centralised ownership of information, such as copyright laws and IP (intellec-
tual property) rights, what is understood as hacking often appears unruly and
rebellious. Behind such activity lies ideas of ‘information that wants to be free’
and of every individual’s right to use and create information as she wishes (e.g.
Wark 2004, passim). It is in the heart of hacker cultures to understand that
everyone has the right to make use of information. Therefore, hacking takes
the form of resistance against systems that aim to claim some information, in
a way or another, for themselves.
McKenzie Wark’s book A hacker manifesto (2004), quoted above, frames
hackerism as a new class battle between the hacker class and ruling ‘vectoralist’
class that “control[s] the vectors along which information is abstracted, just
as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and
pastoralists the land with which food is produced” (Wark 2004, item 029). In
such discourse, hacking is understood in terms of “reclaiming authorship (or
coauthorship) of a technology by supporting transparency and unanticipated
use. It is a critical as well as playful activity circling around a Do-It-Yourself
approach to the means for our interaction with the world, circumventing un-
wanted limitations.” (Busch and Palmås 2006, 30)
In this process, technology is seen as both the means to an end and the
end of such work itself as the access to information is gained by “using tech-
nology in a way that it’s not supposed to be used” (hacker Ralph interviewed
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
in Jordan and Taylor 1998, 764) and the very mastery over the technology is
one of the motivations behind the activity. Hackers wish to master technology
and use it for their own purposes, which means that they want to overcome
the possible restrictions that deny such mastery and thus need to find illicit
ways to pass them. What the notion of hackerism essentially casts over mod-
ding as a discourse is the rebellious and illegitimate undertone of such activity
on one hand and the emphasis on control and mastery over a system on the
other hand. Furthermore, this mastery is about mastering a system in terms of
knowing how it works and being able to change the underlying code on which
it is based.
In such a discourse of hackerism, and modding as hackerism, the very
resistance becomes romanticised. As Jim Thomas (2005, 606) suggests, “the
romantic view of being part of a social revolution” is something that lies in
the core of the discourse of hackerism. It is therefore almost impossible to
consider a form of hackerism that would not embrace this aspect of glorious
and strongly political resistance. An overwhelmingly mysticising aura and
rhetoric that produces book titles such as Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution (Levy 1984) arguably needs unpacking if we are to cast such a
heritage over new kinds of practices, modding and skinning.
If we then approach skinning as hackerism, three main aspects need to
be taken into account. First, the illicitness of hackerism and many modding
practices in general is challenged because Sims skinners are not involved in an
illegal or unwanted user engagement since skinning is actually supported and
encouraged by the game and its developers, as I will discuss throughout this
chapter.
Second, concentration on skinners as modders as game hackers is chal-
lenging because the hacker identity is highly gendered both in a cultural dis-
course around hackerism, in cyberpunk literature for instance, and in terms
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
hacking skills or technological knowledge.7 From this point of view, skins can
be also characterised ‘disposable’ since they do not change the logic of the
game, but ‘only’ add to the looks of it.8 The kinds of competencies required
from skinners are not the same as those dominant in the discourse of modding
as I will discuss in Section 5.3.1 of the next chapter.
The aforementioned ‘superficiality’ contributes to the separation of the
cultures of skinners and modders of other games.9 The dominant modding
spaces mark The Sims 2 as a game that does not belong to the modders’
sphere and correspondingly exclude skinners as outsiders. Skinners then are
not included in the dominant discourse around modding. This marginalisation
is further emphasised by the fact that modding has traditionally concentrated
on FPS and RTS (Real-Time Strategy) genre and other games that by their
masculine content engage different groups of players than The Sims 2. This
is to say that since the playerbases of FPS/RTS games and The Sims games
differ drastically, their modding communities are far apart from each other.
An example of this exclusion can be drawn from ModDB forum which
claims to be “the premiere online community that unites developers, players
and their ideas, empowering them to shape the games we play” (ModDB profile
7
It is interesting here that the first time graphics were integrated in games,
this was suggested by a female. Steven Levy writes about Ken and Roberta
Williams who are some of the pioneers of game development: “It began to
sound good to Ken. Ken Williams could usually smell some money to be
made, and he thought there might be enough bread in this for a trip to Tahiti
or some new furniture. ‘This sounds great,’ he told her, ‘but to really sell you
need more. An angle. Something different.’ As it happened, Roberta had been
thinking lately how great it would be if an adventure game were accompanied
by pictures on the computer screen. You could see where you were instead of
just reading it. She had no idea if this was possible on an Apple or any kind of
computer. How would you even get a picture /into/ a computer? Ken guessed
they could try.” (Levy 1984, 297)
8
This is not entirely true either, as I will later explore in Section 4.3.2.
9
Which may in fact be beneficial for women in some respects as I will
suggest in Section 5.3.1.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
on Steam Community forums10 ). Among tens of other games, the forum has
got a section that concentrates on The Sims series. Typically in ModDB,
popular games have tens if not hundreds of mods sent to the forum and the
discussion concentrates on the mods themselves. However, no mods (or skins)
have been sent to the section of The Sims games. And out of couple of dozen
messages on this specific section most of the messages have nothing to do with
mods and some even mock the game. The Sims series thread on the forum has
comments such as “You are gay or a girl of you play this game...”11 , “i used
to like this game..... for about a minute! i got sick of my sims and made them
swim and then sold all the ladders so they couldnt [sic] get out!:D:carefree:”
and “me too! got boring very fast. HIGHLY overrated”. I will return to this
marginalisation of skinning in Section 5.3.1 of the next chapter where I discuss
it as one of the ways in which skinning is rendered invisible.
However, while the reality of being a skinner might be characterised by
exclusion from dominant modder communities, I wish to explore if and how
the motivations of skinners overlap with those of hackers’. This section will
concentrate on discussing the kind of pleasures skinners find in their practice.
While it appears that the hacker discourse emphasises intentional and con-
scious resistance, I will show that skinners do not seem to share the hackers’
ideological basis for their contribution. This does not mean, however, that
they have nothing in common.
lenges
The players I researched are primarily making new clothes for their sims and
have various motivations for such skinning. Every single one of them also has
See http://steamcommunity.com/groups/moddb
10
This extract is from September 2009. The specific post has now been
11
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
two or more reasons for creating their own content. But what usually motivates
them to try skinning in the first place is a curiosity about the possibilities
available.
Simmer3: The main reason for me to start creating my own pieces for
the game was my curiosity and my knowhow, which made it possible to
try. I mean that I was interested to see if I was able to create them as
well as to know how to make them.
Simmer9: I think that I also wanted to prove myself that I can make
those. First I made very simple clothes, because I thought that would
be the best place to start from. I made those out of photos first, but
then decided to learn how to draw the textures by hand. I usually start
creating a new piece out of mere interest to try. Once I decided to draw
new hair textures, because I wanted to know how well I can succeed.
It is very clear from the interviews that the players are involved in skin-
ning because it offers them challenges that the gameplay itself could not offer.
One player suggests the requests other people make of specific skins as a chal-
lenge.
Simmer3: [...] wishes are like challenges for me, it is nice to try if I
can do it [...]
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
Later she makes a point that she would not be doing skinning if it re-
quired coding. The players interviewed have a string of prejudices against
what they consider coding and wish to stay out of it.
The interest towards skinning does not build on mastering the technology.
Instead, what encourages them to try is often a feel of easiness. There thus
appears an interesting merging of challenge and easiness that the players find
appealing.
One player finds skinning relaxing and differentiates it from ‘boring mind
work’.
The same player later suggests that she would not even be interested in
making skins if there were no tools available. It appears that skinning for her
is not worth the trouble of developing or searching player-made tools.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
Simmer2: I do not like creating new content for games that do not
offer [game] developer-made tools that make it easier to create custom
content, I think it would require too much effort.
One player notes that much more could be done with the game, but is
not interested in such a complicated practice.
Simmer7: But older and more computer savvy people can do miracles
with The Sims 2. Personally I haven’t got a clue how to edit meshes. I
don’t like editing 3D models in general.
I was also interested whether the players would see themselves developing
their own tools for skinning as such development characterises hacker commu-
nities. Again, players recognise hackers as more skilled than themselves. Based
on my own interpretation of the Finnish terminology, I read the meaning of a
‘nerd’ here as referring to the hacker discourse as something demanding.
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
Simmer3: I have made basically all other kinds of skins but hacks
and furniture meshes. I have tried making hair, walls and floorings,
camouflage clothes, meshes, makeups, skin colours and re-colourings,
but I don’t particularly like it. I have made couple of quite satisfying
walls, but I don’t think I am good enough in making other things.
The knowledge of specific tools and their features may have direct in-
fluence on what kind of skins are created. One player ended up creating a
collection of feathery clothes, because a tool for creating feather patterns was
available on the software she used.
Researcher: Could you please tell me how you ended up creating the
feather collection?
Simmer10: There is a feather in the brushes of PhotoFilter, or a leaf
(I don’t remember), and that’s how I got the idea.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
The player’s confusion over whether the tool is a feather or a leaf further
suggests that what the pattern was actually did not matter. The interviews
suggest that a reason for creating a dress or a hairstyle is often arbitrary: that
such model is easily available in the skinners’ own wardrobe or that skinner has
recognised a pretty image when surfing. Skinners seem to be more interested
in skinning itself and the challenges it offers rather than in the outcome of the
work. I will discuss this in more detail in Section 5.1.1.
Creating skins with random textures and themes also exemplifies how the
skins are often created without a direct connection to specific game situations
or in-game needs for specific looks or items. Very rarely is it that the skinners
themselves create new clothes because they ‘need’ such clothes in the game.
This may nevertheless be the reason for other players to wish certain clothes
as I will discuss in the following section.
Simmer6 has only sent a few skins to the Radola forum and notes as a reason
that ‘Of course I am also a little worried about the critique of other players’.
The player would be interested in sharing her work on the forum but is, as most
of the players, careful with what kinds of skins they want to share with other
people. Another player tells she is aware of other people’s opinions already
when making skins.
Simmer2: I often find myself wondering ‘what would other people think
about this? is this even good.’ and then it often leads to not finishing
and publishing the piece of clothing.
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
that alongside offering a personal challenge, the players create skins exclusively
in order to fulfil other players’ needs in their games. Not very unlike hack-
ers who aim for an ‘elegant hack’ to present for the community, skinners are
interested in the opinions of other players. Jordan and Taylor (1998) suggest
that peer recognition is one reason for people to engage in hacking. Similarly,
Donald L. Pipkin (2003) suggests that hackers’ work can indeed be motivated
socially among many other things.
This aspect of ‘showing off’ one’s skills is even more explicit in the form
of skinning that is based on the requests other players make in Radola. On
the community website, players who are not able to or interested in creating
skins themselves, start forum threads by sending an image or a description of
a skin, usually a piece of clothing, that they wish another player to create for
them. An unoccupied skinner then takes the task and posts the readymade
skin to the thread. The outcome is then evaluated both by the player who
asked for such skin and the entire community who may tell whether they are
going to download the skin or not or about the particular technical or more
taste-related aspects of the skin.
Such a dynamic ties skinners and non-skinners together in a circle of
knowledge and taste. The possibility for making requests is also an important
reason for non-skinners to be active on the forum. While the forum has thou-
sands of players registered, only a small amount of them actually creates skins.
For some players, it is these requests of non-skinners that they concentrate on
in their skinning practice.
Simmer15: Another key reason [for skinning] was fulfilling other play-
ers’ wishes, I haven’t been especially talented in this, but some paint-
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
For one player, there are several possible motivations for skinning, help-
ing others among them. While other people’s wishes are a major motivation
for her skinning, the player however mentions that it might also be the case
that a wish is something she is not able, because of the level of her skills, to
create.
Simmer15: Quite often I think about what the game lacks, and try
to create those (e.g. proper wooden floor)[,] some of the ideas appear
when surfing the net, if I find a nice texture or a picture I want to use
it, in addition other people’s wishes work as inspiration on those rare
occasions when they are simple enough for my skills.
12
A ‘paintbucket’ here refers to a specific kind of skin that is understood not
to require high technical skill. Paintbucket in the name refers to a function in
Adobe Photoshop where any continuous area of an image can easily be filled
with one colour. A skinner who ‘paintbuckets’ a piece of clothing simply picks
one of the existing ones and re-colours it. Therefore, no shadows or shapes can
be seen in the surface and such technique is most sufficient for creating planar
surfaces such as walls.
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
Simmer1: I would like to claim that generally speaking older and more
experienced creators have a higher standard in regard to what kind of
downloadable stuff is worth uploading [to the forum]. And I also feel
that exactly the adults and older players who are most critical and less
serious about their own work tend to call their custom content ‘things’
;D13
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
and what kind of projects they adopt. Some of the interviewees suggest that
the kinds of skins they create need to please their own aesthetic sense. For
example, one player does not want to follow the latest trends in making skins
if they do not please her own sense of good style.
Meanwhile, Simmer3 provides a whole list of things she does not create.
Therefore, the skinning requests and creating skins for other players
forms whole another dimension of skinning, an inherently social one. Radola
forum, as a platform for such exchange, brings together skin consumers and
producers. Players requesting certain kind of clothes, items or decorations may
need them for their ‘photo stories’ (stories about the sims’ lives illustrated with
gameplay screen captures) or for a specific family in the game, for instance.
The skinners enjoy the process of skinning itself. In this exchange those send-
ing out requests have the power to complain about poor execution while the
skinners themselves decide which works to provide and which not to provide.
In order to get the needed item or piece of clothing, it is important to know
how to ask and how to formulate the requirements. The forum administrators
further support this exchange by providing tips for making skin requests.
While age and interests of players of different ages is mentioned by couple
of participants above, it does not appear as a significant factor in regard to how
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4.2. Skinners as Hackers
players describe their skinning or their motivations. Age does not seem to be of
much importance on the forum either. Instead, Radola brings together players
of all ages, who discuss and share their interest despite their backgrounds or
individual factors.
14
While finishing up this project, an article on modders’ motivations was
published (Sotamaa 2010). I believe a comparison between the outcomes of
this thesis and Sotamaa’s study form an interesting starting point for a future
study.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
hackerism of such systems in the old terms and with theories that fitted well
together with traditional centralised media.
The characteristic of hackerism that is most dominant in the discourse
around it, the illicit mastery over technology through the interest in computer
code is less important in skinning. When it comes to mastering the technology,
the skinners do think challenging oneself plays a part in what they are doing.
However, they are not interested in the code itself or in mastering the game
but rather adding to it and making it better in the spirit of the original. I
suggest such form of game alteration is better looked as fandom and will look
at it in Section 4.4.15 We can also approach this change in the original text
as tactical art, which, similarly to accounts on fandom, leads to exploring the
actual content that is being produced.
15
This might approach the idea of being mastered by the game rather than
mastering it. Giddings and Kennedy (2008) suggest that mastery is just one of
the pleasures of computer game play and that there can be pleasure in being
mastered by the game technology as well. Similarly philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamer suggested that “a general characteristic of the nature of play that is
reflected in playing: all playing is a being-played. The attraction of a game,
the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters
the players. Even in the case of games in which one tries to perform tasks
that one has set oneself, there is a risk that they will not ‘work,’ ‘succeed,’ or
‘succeed again,’ which is the attraction of the game. Whoever ‘tries’ is in fact
the one who is tried. The real subject of the game [...] is not the player but
instead the game itself” (Gadamer 1975/2004, 106).
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
Some of the more amusing patches created by game hacker artists, (and
they often create more than one), include the first person shooter Doom
patch that morphs the attackers into monster-sized chickens and kan-
garoos, the Doom patch entitled ‘Barney and his Minions’, and the
Marathon patch that replaces the game characters with different col-
ored Gumby dolls. These patches undermine the extremely macho
codes of interaction in these games by replacing the standard adult
male characters with androgynous animals and goofy children’s fantasy
characters. Although the category of ‘feminist game hacker art’ is pre-
mature since there are very few women participating in this realm of
cultural production, there are female protagonists in patches that pre-
date Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Vigilance. The Marathon Infinity
patch ‘Tina Shapes’ and ‘Tina Sounds’ replaces the protagonist, ‘Infin-
ity Bob’ with a female ‘Tina.’ A Japanese Doom patch entitled ‘Otakon
Doom’ [...] replaces the protagonist with a Japanese anime girlfighter
named ‘Priss.’ Another Doom patch replaces all the characters in Doom
with the cast from the movie ‘Aliens’, including substituting Sigourney
Weaver for the male protagonist. (Schleiner 1998, Game plug-ins and
patches as proto-feminist hacker art, para. 2)
16
This division was earlier used by Newman (2005) in his article from 2005
as well as used as his later book title Playing with videogames from 2008.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
(and other) representations in games. The power players are supposed to have
in this case is over the production of the games’ content (they are co-producers)
and the ideology of the games (they can change what kind of ideology is por-
trayed through a game). And this power is gained by technological expertise
that hackers possess.
In their book from 2006 Dovey and Kennedy present a classification of
game-related co-creativity suggesting ‘tactical media’ and ‘mod art’ as two of
its forms alongside fan art and co-creativity that strives towards independent
game development. Also Dovey and Kennedy suggest skinning as tactical art.
Their definition for tactical media practice in games suggests that such activity
“seeks to use game forms and tools to make critical, subversive and oppositional
works that both critique mainstream game practices and have comments to
make about the wider social and political world” (Dovey and Kennedy 2006,
127). Theories of tactical media probably first grasped the subtle artist-activist
agenda of political consumer practices. For Lovink, tactical media are “a set
of dirty little practices, digital micro-politics if you like” (Lovink 2003, 254).
Dovey and Kennedy’s approach to tactical game art draws on Kennedy’s
feminist study on female game modifiers. Kennedy’s ethnographic study on
female players of a popular first-person shooter game, Quake, concentrates on
players who, alongside forming women’s clans in the game, produce skins that
add strong and, as she calls it, illegitimate and monstrous female characters.
This practice needs to be understood as taking place in the context of a game
which, to start with, is a highly masculine game with plenty of male characters
and themes and activities that are traditionally coded hyper-masculine. In
such context, women players use the power of their technicity to create female
skins that challenge some of the ideological aspects of the game and thus work
as tactical art. Kennedy argues that “[t]he female Quake playing community
makes no specific claims to a feminist agenda or a feminist politics, yet it is
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
clear from the practices of the community that their activities are at least
implicitly informed by issues which have been central to feminist critiques of
technology and of popular culture.” (Kennedy 2006, 197) Similar findings have
resulted from studies among science fiction fan producers who create seemingly
feminist fan texts. Female science fiction fans are not necessarily attached to
the themes of space exploration, but wish to extend their involvement with the
characters via fan texts that concern the social relationships between them,
Rhiannon Bury (2005, 72) suggests.
Thus, Kennedy’s work on Quake has a background significantly different
from mine as the game that is being skinned in her studies is highly masculine
in regard to the characters and narratives it represents. Games such as Quake
and Counter-Strike with their male avatars set a compelling basis for women
to create subversive player texts in the form of strong female characters and
thus form an inviting object for studies on gender and co-creativity. For the
Quake players Kennedy has studied, “[s]uch fantasy constructions of identity
offer an exploration of alternative subjectivities in which being feminine does
not necessarily equal being a victim or needing rescuing.” (Kennedy 2006,
193) The historical moment when the work was written was also a particular
one in Game Studies and in game cultures. Kennedy’s research was one of the
first ones to tackle active female players instead of suggesting ways in which
games could be made better for women to play. Such work was timely in order
to show the variety of women players and their pleasures. Meanwhile, as I will
later discuss in Section 5.3.3, many of Sims skinners do not have experience of
such masculine games that they could be resisting but instead limit their play
to The Sims 2 only.
Furthermore, the first-person perspective of Quake also forms a different
basis for skinning than that which The Sims games afford. In regard to the
mechanics of the game in Quake, the character that is being modified acts as
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
the sole avatar of the player in what is often a multiplayer game. For female
Quake players “[t]he skins often become the means through which a player will
express aspects of her identity to other members of the community” (Kennedy
2006, 193) Meanwhile, The Sims skins are used in single player environment
and on multiple playable characters. The attachment of a player to a first
person single character in a multiplayer game is very different than that of
multiple characters in The Sims. A pleasure very specific to The Sims in this
regard seems to be when the game dresses an NPC with player-made content.
One of the interviewees writes,
[...] I’d done some online chatting, used the computer for emails and
played some free web games and stuff but I hadn’t thought of myself
as any good with computers... A friend is teaching me how to use
Photoshop on his computer and when I’m okay I’m going to try to do
a really good skin and stick it up on the web. (Supergirls) (Kennedy
2006, 192)
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
years, social software and the use of computer technologies at school have
further hastened the speed in which young people are introduced to new tech-
nologies and how easy is their adoption of these technologies. However, for
many players of this study skinning does provide further competencies. This
aspect of skinning will be discussed in Section 5.3.2. Furthermore, they are
unconfident with their skills and downplay them as suggested in Section 4.2.1.
For skinners engaging in a new kind of practice that involves new kind of tech-
nicity admittedly is about learning skills that are considered masculine and
about entering a masculine field of game modifying in this respect.
If we return to Dovey’s and Kennedy’s game art categories, mod art, as
different from tactical art, is understood as a practice of more traditional fine
art that takes advantage in the new forms of expression offered by computer
game media. Acknowledging the overlapping of the two categories, Dovey and
Kennedy use Velvet Strike as an example of tactical art. Velvet Strike is a
famous in-game intervention where the artist, Schleiner, uses anti-war graf-
fiti placed in game spaces as a critique towards the war on terrorism and the
attached politics.17 However, what Dovey and Kennedy suggest as character-
istics of mod art originally presented as characteristics of game art in general
by Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke (2007) – remixing, referencing, rework-
ing and reaction – match very well with the workings of Velvet Strike as well.
Whereas establishing rigid borders between the two is not interesting, what
brings the two together is a critical agenda of an artist and the use of games as
tools for possibly activist and usually political bias. This indicates the connec-
tion between activism and hackerism, sometimes referred to as ‘hacktivism’.
Therefore, the terms mod art, tactical art and hacktivism are interchangeably
used in explorations into game modifications that share a subversive approach.
Somewhat similarly to Schleiner’s and Kennedy’s proposition, Poremba’s
For
17
further information, see http://www.opensorcery.net/
velvet-strike/about.html
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
work (2003a) presents anti-war game skins, patches and in-game events as
subversive art works. Poremba identifies Schleiner’s later artwork from 2002,
the aforementioned Velvet Strike, that consisted of “a collection of spray paints
to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter
terrorism game ‘Counter-Strike’ ” and was featured in the Wired magazine in
June 2002 with a title ‘Make Love, Not War games’ (King 2002). Alongside the
set of graffiti images decorating the games that are being critiqued, Schleiner
posted a manifesto on her website describing her subjective feelings about the
time after ‘9/11’. In the manifesto, she emphasises her own personal account of
game mods that were made soon after the event and that added new characters,
such as Osama Bin Laden, into popular war-themed games. In this case, game
modifications were made to draw our attention to the sometimes disgusting
realism of games that simulate war even when actual and seemingly unjustified
battle that our nations may be involved in is taking place. Such anti-war
modifications criticise not only the violent content of the games themselves,
but also actual war, global politics and military achievements. Games are used
both as a target and a means of criticism.
Female game skins and anti-war images in popular computer games are both
excellent examples of tactical media and how the technological openness of
game systems can be empowering when it is turned to favor players’ art projects
that are resistant and subversive. As tactical game art in general, such cases
are nevertheless rare and also highly invisible to an everyday player. While the
approached form of Sims skinning does not seem to fall into this category, it
is possible to find tactical aspects in the skins the players I researched create.
A good starting point would be found in what I call skins of national identity
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
18
This Finnish word is probably best left without translation. The term
refers to a stereotype of an uneducated and unsophisticated, often but not
necessarily rural, person whose taste and behaviour are not up to a perceived
par.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
I haven’t even thought about the whole thing about American content,
so it definitely does not bother me. And even the mail boxes are prettier
than Finnish ones.
The American culture in The Sims does not matter I don’t even notice
it!
I haven’t really paid any attention to it, but now that you say I can see
it.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
Three distinctive categories of player created skins that point towards na-
tional aspects can be found: local Finnish brands, cultural icons and traditions
and localised anti-consumerist content. Among the brands used in skins are
Marimekko (home textiles) and Kalevala (jewelry), which are simultaneously
global trademarks and local brands (See Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2).
In Finland, such brands and items are known by everybody and possessed
by many. Scandinavian countries and Finland are commonly known from
their design. This is mentioned in the game, too, since the description of
19
A ‘bath whisk’ is a bunch of fragrant boughs of silver birch bound together.
They are commonly used in sauna, by beating oneself or one’s sauna partner,
in order to stimulate the skin and remove tension from the muscles.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
the Satinistic Loveseat suggests that “Everyone loves the look and comfort of
Scandinavian furniture design” (See Section 3.2.4, Figure 3.2). Offering famous
Scandinavian design items and furniture skins for global distribution makes
sense as also foreign players are able to recognise these objects. Arguably, the
idea of Finnish national identity is largely built on innovation in industrial
design. As Roland Robertson suggests,
While certain aspects of the Finnish culture are reproduced in the form
of skins, the emphasis on brands suggests about the importance of strong con-
sumerist values of the game. The game thus invites modification, localisation
and customisation only in some regards and not in others. What is included
from a national culture is not only globally recognisable, but also made mean-
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
ingful within the structure of the game and its emphasis on accumulating
wealth and purchasing everyday items. Most of the players I researched do
not create skins that would break the consumerist, suburban settings and ide-
ology of the game, but clothes with different patterns and items with everyday
looks instead. In this regard their participation is in line with the dollhouse-
type of play with conventional characters and everyday settings, while none of
the skins they talk about include supernatural or out of ordinary aspects.
Although the original game content does not represent any specific brands,
addition of such content is a logical continuation of the consumerist orienta-
tion of the game. Also the designers of the game have later understood this
potential and introduced IKEA Home Stuff and H&M Fashion Stuff packages
for The Sims 2. However, much of what was included especially in the IKEA
furniture expansion had already been produced by skinners.
Marimekko, with its colourful patterns that easily change the looks of
a sim home, are among the most ‘skinned’ Finnish products. Many of the
players interviewed do use skins that feature Marimekko textiles in their game,
and two of them have actually created some. One such player notes that the
making of ‘Finnish houses’ requires a special consideration also in regard to the
furnishing. Therefore it is important that a variety of such skins is available.
The meanings associated with skins that represent real life objects also seem
to bear the values and social status associated to them. So, such local features
are not pure decoration in the game.
For example, one player categorises Marimekko products according to
their use in her everyday culture. During the interview, she aims to prove her
own understanding on how marketing of such products works and how some
more ‘stupid’ people can be easily cheated to believe in marketed conceptions
on the false status of certain items and clothes.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
The player thus shows her cultural capital and brand-awareness in recog-
nising differences in Marimekko patterns. She suggests that the popular pat-
terns bear less value than those more ‘sophisticated’ recent designs that only
an ‘elite’ finds interesting and can afford. In Marimekko’s marketing, Unikko
has indeed been presented as ‘everybody’s Marimekko’ whereas other patterns
have not been used in items such as coasters and socks but remained as textiles
only. This kind of cultural sensitivity to consumer products, namely brands
and fashion, is something that Sims skinners express and will be discussed in
Section 5.3.1.
In skinning, local taste, cultural heritage and traditional lifestyle thus
become reinvented within the frame of American suburban consumerism. Such
skins are more about fitting Finnish-ness into American system than about
arguing against its core values. Such skins reinforce homogenisation of national
culture, and heterogenisation of global culture.
According to Robertson (2003) we could call such customisation ‘glocal-
isation’. Glocalisation is about how global is adopted in local settings so that
homogenisation and heterogenisation cannot be seen as opposite but rather
interrelated and simultaneous processes. Discussing the customisation of jeans
in different countries Robertson, referring to George Ritzer’s idea of the Mc-
20
See the meaning of the term ‘juntti’ in footnote 18 in this Chapter.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
Donaldisation of the world (Ritzer 1993), notes that such globalisation is actu-
ally working as a basis for localisation (Robertson 2003). Paraphrasing Richard
Wilk (1995), J. MacGregor Wise (2008) also suggests that in global capitalism,
the differences between national cultures are standardised.
The contents of skins are then in accordance with the ideology of the
game that represents cultural difference through commercial items and stereo-
typing. A Brady Curlew (2005, 1) writes that “below its progressive façade
The Sims amounts to an exploitation of diversity initiated by targeting un-
traditional markets to better tap into the consuming potential of millions of
non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual people what Hall sees as the commer-
cial appropriation of difference”. In the creation and distribution of such skins
Wise’s description of global capitalism seems to hold well: “Be as different
as you want, but only in certain well-defined ways that won’t rock the boat”
(Wise 2008, 45).
There is, however, some indication of anti-consumerist content being
created by players. These skins include graffiti, dirty faces, crumpled rugs
and broken and dirty furniture (Figure 4.3, Figure 4.4 and Figure 4.5). Such
skins are not essentially representing Finnish culture, but aim to produce an
alternative to the ‘flawless’ game items and characters.
One of the participants, for example, is very proud of an acne face she
has created. She mentions that is it interesting to fight back the ‘perfect’ game
characters with such skins.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
Figure 4.3: Player-created face with skin problems for the sim charac-
ters. Source: http://www.createphpbb.com/radola/viewtopic.php?t=
14008&mforum=radola
Figure 4.4: Player-created dirty face for the sim characters. Source: http:
//www.createphpbb.com/radola/viewtopic.php?t=7906&mforum=radola
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
Figure 4.5: Player-created Ilmari Tapiovaara Fanett chairs that look worn-
out. Source: http://www.createphpbb.com/radola/viewtopic.php?t=
9840&mforum=radola
says she uses such skin in her sim homes inhabited by ‘junkies’ and ‘peräkammaripoika
from Finnish rural districts’. ‘Peräkammaripoika’ in Finnish refers to a socially
restricted middle aged, sometimes alcoholic bachelor who may or may not still
live with his parents (although the etymology of the term refers to living in a
‘back room’) but nevertheless cannot take proper care of his personal hygiene
and housekeeping. The player interested in such characters explains:
Simmer1: For me and my rural sims this bath whisk is a must – and
I think that this still is the greatest single object I have ever, counting
from the very beginning, created to the Sims myself!
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
A sauna room was later introduced to the game officially. In the group
interview one of the players notes that it was a result of insistence by the
Finnish players.
But not all players participating the group interview were happy about
the way it was implemented.
The players are not happy with the fact that while Maxis has included
in the game a sauna that does not function but rather acts as a decoration.
Finnish players are nevertheless lucky in having an aspect of their culture
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
included, although the Sims version of the sauna is clearly drawn from the
world of luxury hotels rather than Finnish tradition.21
To conclude, it appears that the domestic settings of the game welcomes
a productive approach that emphasises the player’s own everyday items and
symbolism. The Finnish skins represent a form of lived Finnishness that al-
low the player to re-live and pre-live everyday situations and to ‘decorate’ and
stage such moments. This characteristic of games as a form of popular culture
remains unique to them. It may also be that players outside Finland down-
load content that represents Finnish everyday life and thus get introduced
to the culture. Such Finnish content can be read as resistant because some
of it attacks the original American ideology and resist the plasticity and the
flawlessness characteristic to the original content.
However, only a small proportion of the skins the players I researched
create includes national, Finnish, meanings. These works can be approached
as tactical art, but they are better understood as attempts to include in the
game something from the player’s personal life rather than proposing political
resistance or agenda of some kind. However, while such skins may appear
politically resistant (willingness to play against the consumerist grain), the
players do not mention an attempt to influence other players or make a dif-
ference within a community. More than political resistance, these works are
examples of cultural resistance.
Finally, instead of resisting the American ideology of the game, many of
the participants of my study seem to be encouraged to create Finnish content
simply because they are not interested in creating skins that already exist or
that are too common in the skin sharing fora. Thus, the creation of Finnish
content serves a simple purpose of producing something new and innovative in
21
The sauna room came together with The Sims 2: Bon Voyage expansion
pack in 2007, which included aspects of primarily Asian cultures and items
related to leisure activities and hotels.
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4.3. Skinning as Tactical Use of the Game
which case such creativity does not imply resistance over the original American
content.
Interestingly, one widely known Finnish brand, Nokia, is not present in player-
made skins. Perhaps a reason for this is that the looks of such physically small
technology would not make much of a difference to the phones that already
exist in the game. This means that the game does not invite the inclusion of
such relatively small everyday items, because the player’s view to the game
does not represent small items as interesting to look at.22 What is included
in the game needs to be graphically meaningful in regard to the technological
specificity of the game. One way to see how the game is localised by its players
is to look at the dualism form/content. It is ‘only’ the surface of the game
system that becomes localised and customised. Therefore the inclusion of
certain items and design is limited to their visual aspects. It could be argued
that whereas the global and American structure of the game remains the same,
it is only the cultural content that is localised.23
However, the relationship between the cultural ‘surface’ of the game, the
graphics, on which skinning concentrates, and the structure of the game is not
that straightforward. Skins do not simply operate on the surface of the game
without changing the intrinsic mechanics of the game. In fact, anti-capitalist
skins rise an interesting challenge to the concept of game mechanics altogether.
They do have the power to change the ideology of the game when it comes
to the central mechanic of the game: spending money. It is up to the player
creating a skin to decide which one of the original items of the game to alter.
22
Further, there are neither mobile phones in the original game, nor me-
chanics that would make a difference between the use of static and movable
items.
23
For the distinction between structural and cultural components of global
products, see Joseph Straubhaar (2006).
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
For instance, if one remodels and re-colours the cheapest in-game chair
into a broken and old-looking one, not much change takes place in regard to
the ideology of the game. But if one remodels the most expensive chair, the
one that also provides more comfort and satisfaction with environment to the
sims living in the house, something interesting happens. It suddenly becomes
desirable for the player to have such cheap and shabby furniture. In fact, the
game mechanics then propose such a home as the most expensive one in in-
game currency although the cultural meanings of individual objects suggest
otherwise. The player is then probably striving for broken and ugly furniture
in order to keep her sims happy. A lifestyle that requires the cheap-looking
furniture then appears as the best one available.
The player can also do the opposite by skinning. If she decides to re-
place a cheap piece of furniture, i.e. something that offers neither comfort
nor happiness for the sims, with a piece of design furniture, i.e. recolour the
cheap piece of furniture with ‘high design’ looks, the ideology of consumerism
as represented in the game is shifted. The player can then acquire a highly
fashionable design home with almost no money at all.
Here one could say that the in-game ideological mechanisms should be
approached independent from those of this world. However, since players at-
tach values and importance on objects based on the discourses of real world, it
is evident that the worlds are not entirely separate. The meanings of players’
everyday culture are in play while skinning as I will later discuss in regard to
taste in Section 5.3.1.
Nevertheless, there are ways to alter the game in regard to its inner
functioning as well. For example, Teen woohoo ‘hack’24 makes it possible
for teenage sims to ‘try for baby’, as it is expressed in the game, and to
become pregnant. Meanwhile, Autonomous Put Away Leftovers helps in home
Note the use of the term ‘hack’ here based on how they are called on
24
modder forums.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
maintenance as it automatically puts away any food left overs that otherwise
would need to be cleaned up by family members or a maid.
A more exhaustive idea for modification of the game was suggested by
Faranak Fotouhi-Ghazvini (2008) at the Women in Games Conference 2008.
Fotouhi-Ghazvini presented a model of what The Sims would look like if it were
‘halal’. According to it, the capitalist values represented through need bars of
The Sims could be substituted by those delineated in virtue ethics. While The
Sims games are banned in Iran, the game culture of which Fotouhi-Ghazvini
is interested in, a halal game would better answer to the requirements of the
government. Fotouhi-Ghazvini for example suggests new sim status indicators
that tell about the attitude of a sim towards the sufferings of other people or
in regard to making good deeds. Compared to extensive goal-related changes
like this, making of skins may seem insignificant.
Due to this work’s concentration on skinning, such modifications are left
outside of it. It could be suggested, however, that when the player has the
technological access and abilities to actually change how the game works as a
system, much deeper alterations in the values could have been made.
We can now see that neither hackerism nor tactical use of games fully grasps
the practice of skinning. A goal to aim for political resistance through skinning
seems to suit better with games that concentrate around themes that are un-
derstood masculine and that include primarily male characters. In such games,
the player’s possibility to make an impact with a female character, for instance,
is much more substantial than in The Sims 2. I proposed that some co-created
Sims content that aims to alter the original American representations with
their own national symbols seem closest to tactical and appropriation art.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
However, I concluded, even those skins are facilitated by the game’s ideol-
ogy that is largely about consumerism. They do, for instance, merely replace
American furniture with furniture that represents major Finnish brands.
Therefore, the kind of resistant position offered by tactical use of games
is, too, unfamiliar to Sims skinners. In seek of a better alternative, this section
approaches the last of the three discourse associated with skinning that will be
discussed in this chapter: fandom. In Game Studies, the term fan is often used
to refer to skinners and modders in a similar way as the term hacker. This
is done without further definitions or developments – in a casual manner and
by borrowing the term from the fan cultures without theorising it.25 Further,
somewhat confusingly, some texts refer to modders simultaneously as hackers
and as fans.
I will now look at how the theories on fandom could explain skinning
as well as discuss whether the resistance suggested by such approaches would,
better than that of hackerism, help to understand the work of the skinners.
Like hackerism and tactical art, also fandom implies a resistant position. Ap-
proaches to resistance in the studies on fandom take two steps. First, fans are
understood as special members of audiences, those who are productive an cre-
ate texts of their own. This has been seen as a resistant position among other
users/members of audience who ‘simply’ consume (Jenkins 1992a, Consalvo
2003b, Consalvo 2003a). It is a precondition for every study of fandom that
fans are somehow different from other, usual media users and audience mem-
bers. Otherwise the entire concept of fandom would become obsolete. Drawing
on his research into 19th-century music lovers, Daniel Cavicchi (2007), for in-
25
In Wirman (2009), I categorised different productive game fandom prac-
tices based on how they reflect the original content. The basis for this cate-
gorisation was a notion very common within Fan Studies that fandom draws
on a special interest towards a text and manifests itself through textual pro-
ductivity. While the topic is not central to this study, it might interest those
looking at how game fandom differs from traditional media fandoms.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
stance, writes about fans as those who refuse to accept the anonymity and
limited involvement of audiences and who want to extend their roles as mem-
bers of audience toward more active participation and engagement. Very often
this activity is presented as a contribution to textual productivity. Second, a
way to think about fans’ resistance more specifically is to think about the
appropriation of texts that fans are engaged in. Fans alter, recontextualise,
rewrite and reconstruct the products of cultural industries creating fan texts
that can seem subversive.
The two aspects of resistance, while closely connected, also form two
methodologically different perspectives: those that concentrate on fan texts
and those that concentrate on the fans, their identities, experiences and plea-
sures, themselves.26 This section looks at fandom and fan productivity from
the point of view of resistance following these two lines of thought.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
for explorations into resistance and power relations in general (e.g. Sandvoss
2005). These days, fandom is often discussed based on texts that are considered
as an outcome of fannish activities (Hellekson and Busse 2006).
Fans rework, cocreate, and recirculate texts that are possibly derivative
and appropriative, or as Abigail Derecho (2006) suggests, archontic 27 , in re-
gard to the original content, as the texts seem to be ever expanding and never
completely closed (for example, when fan fiction is written based on existing
characters from a television series). For Fan Studies, Matt Hills argues, it is
fans’ creativity as producers that “has formed the basis for theorisations of
fandom which celebrate this ‘activity’, whether it be video editing, costum-
ing/impersonation..., folk songwriting and performing or fanzine production”
(Hills 2002, 39). While the mental production of meanings, interpretations,
and identities has long been one of the interests of Fan Studies, the new and al-
tered material forms of culture created by fans are arguably one of the biggest
themes on which scholarly work, both on fandom in general and on games
fandom in particular, has concentrated.
Such critics find fan texts to be important markers of the creativity,
rather than passivity, of fans. Fiske (1992), for example, argues that all audi-
ences produce their own meanings and pleasures around the products of the
culture industries, but fans divert this semiotic productivity into some form of
textual productivity. In the same spirit, Henry Jenkins (1992b) suggests five
further levels of fan activity, one of which covers the particular forms of cul-
tural production and artwork such as fan writing. Also, in her brief history of
media fandom, Francesca Coppa describes the development of “bigger, louder,
less defined, and more exciting” fandom in the early years of the 21st century,
such as Harry Potter fandom on various online fora, and states that “media
27
Derecho (2006) introduces the term archontic literature in order to dis-
cuss fan productivity without the hierarchical liaison as well as questions of
ownership associated with appropriative and derivative works.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
fans are making more kinds of art than ever before” (Coppa 2006, 57). It is
thus the critical textual productivity of fans that this section concentrates on.
Before discussing skins as fan texts, I need to emphasise that such an
approach is not without problems. This is because gameplay itself is produc-
tive already as a nonfan activity as discussed earlier in Section 1.3.3. Where
Fan Studies want to make a difference between typical media users and fans
emphasising the productivity of the latter, computer game players are, in ad-
dition to being consumers (Hills 2002), always already actively participating
in the construction of a game as they it experience – thus producers of one
sort without being fans. For this reason, computer games offer a good, but an
extremely confusing opportunity for explorations on fandom and co-creativity.
It then is just a matter of preference where the line between configura-
tion (See Section 1.3.3) and co-creativity (See Section 1.3.4) is drawn. If we
for example suggest that players become co-creators when their participation
affects other players’ play, this can be done both through configuration – in
multi-player games – and through co-creativity – by offering skins for them
to play with. Therefore I will make a clear working distinction here. What I
discuss in relation to player productivity and co-creativity in the latter parts
of this chapter considers only those forms of productivity that can be seen
extra-textual, i.e. the creation of those texts that are beyond the actual game-
play as productivity, the skins, and not what is usually considered as gameplay
(configuration).
It is also very important to note that in comparison to the fan texts of
many earlier media, the creations of game fans become actual parts of their
object of fandom. And when the skins are shared online, not only the creator
herself, but potentially thousands (and globally millions) of other players may
alter their game with a fan text. Meanwhile, by offering specific kind of tools,
EA and Maxis can to some degree control the kind of content that becomes
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
created and shared within the community. Player-made tools as well as official
ones, however, have both made it possible to create so-called adult content and
items that some players find offensive. While Radola operates independently
from the developers and distributors of the game, it is then the administrators
of the forum that take care of censorship if they see a reason for it. The rules
of the forum define, for instance, that racists and chauvinists are not welcome.
When approaching skinning from the point of view of fandom, the focus is
on skins as fan texts and the relationship between original and fan-produced
content. Such resistance in fan texts is best conceptualised as appropriation.
It is indeed that in the studies on fandom, fan texts are generally discussed as
subversive and appropriative. In regard to games then, Postigo, among others,
suggests mods as derivative works and as appropriation of the original (Postigo
2008).
In this respect it is important to explore what the players think of the
game content they are so eager to change and add on. What is mentioned in
almost all interviews is that players strongly dislike the original style of The
Sims 2 homes and the characters’ clothing. In addition to the excitement of
skinning and enjoying the challenges it offers and for reasons that draw on
the community and social aspect of skinning, the game content itself seems to
encourage players to skin. Such content, the players suggest, is both limited in
terms of quantity and tasteless in terms of quality. For example, as if assuming
one would definitely prefer downloading player-made skins to one’s game, one
player suggests it “is possible to manage with the original content if one has no
possibility to download” skins. The player introduces many ways in which the
original content could be improved. Hair and face skins are something without
which she finds it hard to play.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
In general the players are also very critical about the taste as expressed
in the game’s original content.
Simmer15: Objects, hairstyles and other are partly quite okay, but
some of them are pretty awful, ugly. Even if you counted all the expan-
sions, the selection of objects, clothes, makeup and hair are small and
resemble too much each other. In addition, they are not very detailed,
which results in a [‘]plastic[’] whole.
Simmer3: Yuck, readymade clothes are just horrible :D They are ugly
and really unfashionable and colourless and yuck :D
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
The players further assume that such critical viewpoint is shared among
players.
Many players go into great detail describing the flaws of the game, but
which aspects of the game are disliked varies from player to player. For one
player it is the ‘genetics’ of the game that are not satisfactory.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
Simmer2: The original clothes and objects are lovely, I try to make my
own clothes in a sims style, so that they are not just photographs [as they
are created out of photographs]. Some original stuff is nevertheless just
totally horrible, sofas with floral patterns and such disgusting things.
Another player who has suggested the content is tasteless also admits
respect towards the original.
It may thus appear that the players are in disharmony with their pref-
erences since they keep playing and embracing the game content which they
so much dislike. However, this very merging of frustration and admiration is
familiar from earlier media fandoms. Jenkins has suggested that simultaneous
appreciation and questioning is one of the characteristics of fandom.
The players extend the game in a way that respects the original and aims
to add to it instead of changing it into something entirely different. Working
on the photorealism of the game is one of the areas where the balance between
the players’ preferences and the original seems to differ from player to player,
however, as I will discuss in the following.
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ism
Alongside criticising the game’s content in terms of variety and taste, players
are opinionated about the realism and photorealism of it. Some of the players
think that customised content can reach better photorealism than that of the
of the original game. Other players, meanwhile, suggest that it is important to
preserve the kind of cartoonish style of the game’s graphics. For example, one
of the players explains that a poster of a real life public figure created based
on a photograph would not be suitable in the game. However, a poster created
based on that figure’s sim character look-alike would be fine (See Figure 4.6).
Another player, meanwhile, suggests that the real Sims puritans are those who
aim to maintain the original cartoonish looks of the game. In her comment,
the player seems to be proposing herself as a true fan of the game.
Figure 4.6: ‘In the Beginning’ painting is one of the decorative items available
for purchase and exemplifies the cartoonish ‘simmified’ style of the game.
In the opposition are those players who seek realism in details who can for
example find the ‘genetics’, the physical features of skin characters, insufficient.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
A player writes how more realistic eyebrows and makeup, for example, can be
found in skins.
Similarly, another player likes it when the game better resembles real life,
when it is more realistic. While this comment is rather vague, it may reflect
that there is more potential to draw parallels to one’s own life and the sims’
lives – and to test out fantasies for example – when the game is more realistic.
In more contradiction with the original content are the skins that reveal
intimate body parts that are originally censored. In order to use these features
of the game, the player needs to use a hack that removes the blurring that
appears over exposed private parts. Plenty of skins are created in order to
represent such body parts as realistic as possible. One player suggests such
content as a way to add realism to the game. But because there is nothing
‘under’ the censored (blurred) body parts, one needs to download skins in
order to actually make these areas look realistic.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
of real life, the values, ideologies, cultural meanings etc., as well. Some players
suggest that the game should not share the values and activities of everyday
life. One player suggests that too much realism might indeed appear somehow
uncomfortable.
Another player is concerned about erotic custom content that might ruin
the ‘holy’ space of the game. This reflects the players’ need to separate the
game space as a space where they are free from some of the pressures and
meanings of their daily lives.
Simmer3: At the same time I like a bit more casual style, I aim to
concentrate on clothes that me or other players could find in their own
wardrobes, not just Dolce+Gabbana etc.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
Thus, the game with a seemingly realistic setting seems to offer a safe
place for fantastic adventures. After all, some such features are already in-
cluded in the game through ghosts and other supernatural aspects. While the
framework of everyday life allows players to easily learn the game mechanics
as well as ‘soften’ the masculinity of computer gaming, players are not inter-
ested in bringing their mundane themes and problems as such into the game.
This is very similar to romance novels and soap where everyday space offers
a stepping stone for the most miraculous events. One player is especially ar-
ticulate in proposing her experiences about the realism of the game and how
this connects to her everyday life. First, she acknowledges that she prefers to
keep the game ‘cartoonlike’.
Simmer8: For me the sims has a somewhat cartoonlike quality. It’s not
directly copying reality it’s more of a comedy or even parody. There are
supernatural creatures, weird ways to die, sims swirl when they change
their clothes, etc.
Thus, the sim universe should, according to her, be kept as it is, and
custom content should go through a process of ‘simmifying’ in order to be made
suitable for the game world. Meanwhile, she suggests a potential contradiction
here: if the whole game is about realism, how come it is that she does not
accept realism in it.
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Simmer8: Both the playing and the managing of files, keeping order,
etc. I think that this for me somehow becomes a bounded space that I
can control and order. It’s a contrast to my life with young kids, work
life that I feel somewhat trapped in, etc. So in that respect it’s blatant
escapism.
One player suggests that it is the customised content that allows the
dealing of everyday issues in a ‘game form’.
Simmer15: It is somehow nicer to play a game that looks like its mine,
as such it works as a ‘therapeutical device’, as you can transform things
that annoy in the real life into game form.
Many of the players also suggest that they are interested in skins because
through them they can play with furniture and home decorations as well as
expensive clothes they could never afford in real life.
Simmer1: When I create content and build houses in the Sims, it is all
about living through the dreams, dream houses and ideal reality virtu-
ally and playfully.
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4.4. Skinning as Fandom
Simmer3: I like pretty clothes, shoes etc. and it’s nice to surf on the
sites of mail order companies, looking at them, because I don’t have the
money to buy much of them and no chance of using them, it’s nice to
make them for somewhere. Visual pleasure :D
One player talks about her interest in building houses instead of playing
with the characters and suggests that the game allows the implementation of
ideas that would not be realisable in real life.
Simmer4: Building [houses and homes] also has got that positive side
that you can really make houses yourself, and because it is the sims,
you can make buildings that could not be possible in the real life.
The interviews suggest that the game offers a safe place to live through
confusing everyday situations and to realise dreams. Players also seem to wish
to keep it as a space that is somehow different from the real in order for it to
remain separate enough. References to everyday life such as clothes from the
players’ own closets and designer items of Finnish origin add to the realist feel
of the game, but keeping them ‘simmified’ helps in maintaining the separation
to the off-game reality. Therefore, the realism refers to many things at the
same time. Yet, the game is not a direct simulation of real life.
The players generally wish to include aspects of everyday life that make
the game more realistic in terms of the selection of items available. Meanwhile,
these individual items should not appear too similar to those of this world in
order to create a possibility for escapism. Some aspects of the real they wish
to leave out entirely as this, too, restricts the kinds of fantasies that can be
played out in the game.
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Chapter 4 The Practice of Skinning: Resistance beyond Play?
I have suggested that the players’ explorations into the appropriation of the
original The Sims 2 content maintain a critical approach to their chosen game
similar to those of other fandoms. Fans in general are considered particular
in their resistance since their resistance is based on admiration and loyalty.
A majority of skins do not contradict the values and ideology of the original
sim universe, but add changes in regard to taste and graphical quality of
the already existing representations. These skins do not try to stand out
from the original, but instead smoothly blend into it. As such, the skinners’
engagement appears closer to that of fans rather than that of hackers or using
skins tactically. It seems that in skinning appropriation acts out through the
experiences of expertise and taste. I will look at these closer in Section 5.3.1.
Furthermore, marking a move from what is usually suggested about other
media fandoms, the skinners’ participation is made possible and encouraged
by the game itself. While the original items, clothes and textures are strongly
evaluated by the players, their perceived poor quality creates a basis of cre-
ativity that strives to create a better game in regard to taste and realism, in
addition to personalising or localising it. This results in a striking volume of
player-created skins that complicates the straightforward reading of skinning
as fandom.
We might ask if and how fan productivity is distinct from everyday media
use – including gameplay – that is inherently productive in current participa-
tory media cultures. Given that in current media cultures everybody is invited
to be productive, it is crucial to consider to which extent it is possible to ap-
proach player co-creativity as fandom. Is considering the creation of new skins
or other game modifications as fandom, for instance, to misread them or charge
them with importance and effect greater than what actually exists?
My explorations into skinning as an act of fandom suggest that if resis-
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Chapter 5
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
game itself supports and invites skinning challenge any straightforward read-
ings of skins as subversive works or as fandom. When skinning is looked at
from such perspectives, it often appears insignificant and unimportant exactly
because of its lack of explicit resistance. Understanding skinners from these
perspective thus means labeling them as something skinners do not consider
being themselves. Most importantly, various aspects that characterise their
practice and identities better than political resistance and appropriation are
left unconsidered. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on them.
Where this chapter aims to go, then, is towards an understanding of
skinning as a way of playing the game, rather than as a practice that aims to
appropriate it. I will start by discussing skinning from the point of view of
participatory cultures that emphasise every user’s active creative involvement.
I will introduce ‘simming’, the making and sharing of skins as a way of playing
The Sims 2, and continue to ponder its resonance with ‘women’s leisure’ as
something that is utilitarian and productive. I discuss the idea of invisibility,
as in the ‘culture of the bedroom’ (McRobbie and Garber 1976, McRobbie
and Garber 2005), as another characteristic of skinning as a feminine practice.
Following this line of thought, I explore the ways in which both the marginal-
isation and the special nature of skinning The Sims 2 contribute to how the
practice is rarely recognised in game cultures.
The last part of this chapter aims to articulate how such forms of leisure
are negotiated by women and how they affect their player identities. Instead
of trying to define skinning as a subversive practice where the skins themselves
bear political meaning, we can approach the participants’ resistance as founded
on the process of skinning as a way of playing The Sims 2. This marks a move
from looking at the relationship between the game and the player towards
the implications of being a player in a larger social and cultural context. As
Kennedy (2006) suggests, we should be more interested in players’ technicity
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and the power that co-creativity itself offers despite the criticism expressed
through the skins themselves.
tures: Simming
1
This line of thought is forcefully shaped by the Frankfurt School valuation
of Marxist ideology (cf. Durham and Kellner 2006).
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be productive and to create new content for the game. This section explores
how focusing on Sims skinning addresses the everyday, and the more routine
practices of play, and thus contributes to filling the gap suggested by Newman.
What this has to do with resistance, then, is nicely suggested in an extract
from the group interview.
Approaching this idea of ‘hacking with permission’, I will first map out
the ways in which The Sims 2 game invites players to be productive as players.
I will then discuss if skinning, which appears close to the forms of productivity
in participatory cultures, can be meaningfully conceptualised as exploitation of
players’ creativity and labour. Finally, I discuss how the participants’ identities
are simultaneously built around skinning as a way of playing the game and in
contrast to what they think is the actual or assumed way of playing it.
The Sims 2 has been exceptional in regard of the amount of fan created texts,
because it invites alterations to character features and items. An emblematic
answer from a player implies that in comparison to other games, The Sims 2
game is something that she finds herself particularly tempted to modify.
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
Simmer2: The Sims is the only game I would like to rework, other
games I play would just get worse, not better, if I changed something
in them :DD
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
I would argue that these women who take pleasure in and contribute
to popular games culture [as skinners] contribute significantly to the
democratization of technology and technological competence in a way
that elitist/artist interventions can rarely hope to achieve. (Kennedy
2006, 199)
2
Drawing on Sony Worldwide Studios’ president Phil Harrison’s keynote at
the Game Developers Conference in 2007, Newman (2008) proposes this type
of games as the ‘third generation of video games’ as Game 3.0.
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
The combination of play and work in gameplay has been widely discusses by
researchers who are interested in the economic implications of such partici-
pation and in the consumer/producer dynamics and authorship (e.g. Banks
and Humphreys 2008, Postigo 2003, Kücklich 2005, Humphreys 2009, Sota-
maa 2009, Sihvonen 2009, Poremba 2003b, Nieborg and van der Graaf 2008).3
Among these accounts is a view that suggests the kind of co-creative partic-
ipation that cannot be separated from gameplay as a form of games indus-
try’s exploitation of free gamer labour (e.g. Kücklich 2005). This is because
the games industry gains enormous economic advantage from the co-creative
involvement of players. The developers of The Sims, for example, openly ac-
knowledge the importance of players’ contribution to their business. When
asked “How much of a side benefit is that [player co-creation] in terms of keep-
3
Such merging of play and work has also been discussed in relation to hacker
cultures, since also those rely on the idea of passionate and playful work (e.g.
Levy 1984).
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
ing the development costs down?” the lead-developer Will Wright answered
to Wired magazine “That’s not a side benefit, that’s a primary benefit.” (Ter-
diman 2005, n.p.)
Postigo writes that “many games in a host of genres such as real time
strategy (RTS), role playing games, or first person shooters (FPS) are now de-
signed to incorporate the skilled user into a post-production process” (Postigo
2008, 60) and, alongside Kücklich, suggests that the benefits of modding for the
games industry outnumber those that the modders themselves gain (Kücklich
2005, Postigo 2003).4 What players create has an impact on the expansiveness
and lifespan of the commercial products. It is widely argued, for example, that
“mods can play a role in extending the sales of the original game or developing
a devoted fan base” (Postigo 2003, 596) and that they help in maintaining the
success of a game (Kennedy 2006, 184, See also Poremba 2003b). One player
interviewed supports this notion by telling how her interest in the game has
lasted only because of the availability and creation of skins. She doubts that
her interest towards the game would have lasted without them.
4
In Section 4.3.1 I discussed how the Finnish players create local content
with national meanings. From the point of view of player exploitation, this
kind of skinning could be approached as a ‘localisation’ process that is being
outsourced to players themselves.
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
Banks and Humphreys came to the same conclusion suggesting that play-
ers are indeed aware of the value they create. They further propose that “[i]t
would be a mistake, we argue, to view these emerging participatory culture
relations as shaped and configured through an opposition between the com-
mercial and the non-commercial, markets and non-markets, the corporate de-
veloper and the fan community.” (Banks and Humphreys 2008, 408) Following
Tiziana Terranova, both Postigo (2003) and Julian Kücklich (2005) write that
players’ labour is “[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed
and exploited” (Terranova 2000, 74). The benefits of the games industry and
players are hard to compare with each other as they vary from economical
profit to peer recognition and various forms of pleasure. Comparing monetary
profit to other rewards than money, to intrinsic rewards of participation and
creativity as well as social status for example, only contribute to the confusing
mixing of financial and social economies (Banks and Humphreys 2008).
Yet, it is not straightforward that skinning is always beneficial for EA and
Maxis. It is clear that the use of The Sims games is prolonged by expansions
packs. This, again, forms a significant source of profit for the developers. But
as a comment from one player suggests, there is no such a significant need to
buy expansion packs or stuff packs when player-created skins and objects are
available. The skins can therefore be seen as a competitor for expansion and
stuff packs.
Simmer9: I don’t like at all the clothes that come with the basic
game. Those have mostly odd colours, shapes and some of the are
even poorly textured (such as one of the men’s night clothes, I don’t
remember on which career path). I have only three expansion packs
installed (Nightlife, Seasons and Apartment Life), so I cannot say much
about the new clothes that come with expansion/stuff packs. But I have
noticed that in the later expansion/stuff packs there are much usable
and better textured clothes.
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
The players themselves seem to be equally confused with how to refer to their
practice. Skinning is suggested simultaneously as a form of play and as separate
from ‘actual playing’, as one player puts it. I will now look at the players’ talk
around their gameplay and especially in regard to how they see skinning in
relation to it.
To begin with, the players I researched make a distinction between play
with characters and the game’s build mode during which the in-game time is
paused and building of houses and interiors takes place. For one player the play
with characters differs from building (and skinning) since it does not require
so much effort.
Simmer15: All in all I play quite a lot. Playing with the characters
is about creating stories for me, although I don’t write them down
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
Another player writes about ‘playing’ when she refers to the engagement
with characters thus implicitly proposing building as something else than mere
play.5
Simmer5: I prefer building [houses and homes], making the sims, but
playing is nice too.
The players not only propose this play with characters as actual play, but
also express their preference in building. Interestingly, another player makes
a reference to work/play rhetoric suggesting that the work-like play with sims
is boring whereas skinning offers an alternative to this.
Simmer4: I don’t really play The Sims that much anymore, but build
and decorate houses instead. It is much more fun, since the lives of my
sims lacked imagination. (My play meant that the sims went to work
and fulfilled their needs, as well as tried to fill the skill bars. So it wasn’t
a particularly interesting life.)
Such emphasis on building rather than following the lives of the charac-
ters demonstrates how many of the players suggest their play as different from
the ‘dominant’ way of playing. These players are interested in creative interior
design and designing houses instead of nurturing characters, for instance.
Only one player who separates building from ‘actual gameplay’ is pri-
marily interested in the latter. Interestingly this player is one of the two in-
terviewees from outside the Radola community and is not involved in skinning
herself.
5
This is the phase of play when the in-game time is not paused but runs
and the characters go about in their lives as discussed in Section 1.3.5
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
The distinction results in that the player identities of those who prefer
building over something they consider ‘actual play’ are under constant negoti-
ation. For instance, one player discusses how she as a player differs from other
players of the game.
Simmer4: [...] I admit that some would think that I have bought my
sims for different reasons than others. (I mean that I have bought it for
building and not for playing, but it is not exactly like that either.)
Skinning itself then takes building one step further and supports it. The
players suggest that being interested in skinning diverts their The Sims 2
play experiences from the norm or from the dominant playing style of the
game. One player writes that she does not “play in the most obvious way”
(Simmer1). Another player’s comment demonstrates how skinners suggest
their concentration on skinning limits other possible ways of playing the game.
The player thus suggests that she does not usually even run the game
to play but only to support her skinning and distribution of skins online as it
requires in-game pictures of them.
Most importantly, for the players I researched skinning is not an exten-
sion of ‘actual The Sims 2 play’ but many of them spend more time making
new content than playing in the assumed way. In fact, for many of them play
is limited to skinning.
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
Another player emphasises the creative possibilities over the kind of es-
capism the narrative gameplay would offer.
Therefore, skinning is not a practice that would feed into the players’
own gameplay and enrich it, but in itself a way of playing the game. Some of
the players exclusively refer to skinning as ‘playing’.
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
Simmer3: I have always been a little bit of tinkerer, more than a player,
and modding kind of combines my urge to tinker and playing.
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5.1. Player Co-Creativity in Participatory Cultures: Simming
Simmer15: Tinkering itself is fun. Not even very hard, [and] even if
you wouldn’t like the result, it’s always fun if you can create something
nice to your own or other people’s games.
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
building a good system, than breaking into someone else’s system. (mercury,
hacker, interview).” (Jordan and Taylor 1998, 767-8)
To conclude, The Sims 2 as played by skinners, or ‘simmers’, is not a life
simulator, a nurturing game or a dollhouse, but a genuine Web 2.0 product:
an open system with a theme, tools and form that support co-creative play.
Rather than suggesting skinning as a meta-activity or resistance, I would like
to propose The Sims 2 ‘simming’ as a form of The Sims 2 play that formulates
the game itself as a process consisting of co-creative practices and community
engagement around it. This approach not only assumes different roles of the
player and the developer, but also suggests that players’ additions to the game
can be casual and mundane instead of being resistant in relation to the games
industry, and yet remain important and meaningful for the game culture in
large and for the identities of the individual players. The free form of play
kept alive with notions of dollhouse and toyness, for example, contributes to
the game as a skinning platform.
I have now established that Sims skinning is best approached as a way of play-
ing the game, and suggested that we should consider the game as a product
of participatory cultures. Skinning could then be seen as a form of exploit-
ing players’ contribution. Yet, creativity in participatory cultures cannot be
exhausted through a division between of work and pleasure only, since these
two forms of engaging with a text become fundamentally intertwined and feed
back into each other.
This section will apply an idea of women’s leisure as utilitarian into
the practice of skinning and thus aims to further recognise how leisure can
be ‘useful’. I suggest that this approach as especially relevant given that all
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5.2. Women’s Leisure
except one of the interviewed players are women. I will also examine how such
a notion of leisure may help in overcoming some of the frustrations women may
have when game cultures appear to marginalise them and popular discourse
suggests a player identity that they do not recognise in themselves.
Both written (new) media histories and Women’s Studies recognise a
peculiar difference between women’s and men’s leisure, gendered ways and ac-
ceptance of claiming leisure time, and gendering in its location and connections
to particular technologies. This has to do with the gendered chores at home as
well as in public that have existed in pre-modern and modern ‘Western’ cul-
tures and shaped women’s engagement in work and leisure. That being said,
it is not within the limits of this thesis to write a broader history on gender
roles in ‘Western’ cultures, and I will discuss it only when it occurs tightly
linked with women’s leisure and play.
Mary Celeste Kearney suggests that “[o]ne of those more fascinating
aspects of domestic arts is their blurring of the traditional boundaries of la-
bor and leisure, alienated work and creative expression.” (Kearney 2006, 25)
Women’s leisure has always emphasised education, utility and productivity in
such engagement (e.g. Shaw 1994).6 Soap operas helped women to learn about
social relationships, romance novels told about history, TV cooks taught them
to cook, exercising resulted a healthy and beautiful body and yoga a peace-
ful and strong mind. Voluntary work and charity organisations have always
appeared as a field occupied by middle-aged women. Knitting, sewing, garden-
ing, baking, handicrafts and so on all lead to creating products that benefit the
everyday life. Similarly personal care including beauty, fashion and exercising
aim to serve partners as well as women themselves. An OECD (Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development) report from 2009 concludes that
when home and personal care are excluded from leisure, women enjoy less such
I have discussed this earlier in a presentation at the Women in Games
6
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
7
“To examine gender differences in a broader definition of leisure, daily
amounts of personal care are again normalised to the lowest country (602
minutes for Mexican women). [...] Despite this adjustment for leisure-like
personal care, in the majority of countries examined men still spend more
time in broad leisure activities than women.” (OECD 2009, 32)
8
A further analysis of the ways in which such lack of entitlement to leisure
is based on class would compliment the approach of this work. Arguably, class
is important factor when discussing the meaning of work and leisure in people’s
lives.
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5.2. Women’s Leisure
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
it in order to track down possible reasons for why women turn they play into
co-creativity.
Players experience skinning useful, and thus utilitarian, because they feel they
are making the game better for other players to play. As discussed in Section
4.4.2, the participants in my study emphasise the importance of improving the
game by broadening the range of available clothes and items and by providing
content of better taste. They see themselves as important contributors to the
quality of the game’s content. When players underline how ‘horrible’ or ‘ugly’
the original furniture and clothes of the game are, they value their own work
in making the game better.
I would like to suggest that what feeds such need to be productive are
the negative associations linked to computer game play. For gameplay still
appears as a lonely and a waste-of-time hobby in some popular discourses
around gaming, especially among middle-classes, co-creative playing can work
as a way out from such notions. There indeed exists a strong stereotyping
cultural discourse that presents a figure of a nerd or a geek as a computer
enthusiast obsessed with a very specific activity such as playing a computer
game. The geek figure is often negative and something the players seem to
want to avoid. A question of excessive play as a sign of being a nerd in a
‘wrong way’ was notable during the interviews.
Being a nerd is further mixed up with addiction and other negative mean-
ings as one player suggests. One player brings up the lack of responsibility by
her father and accuses him of being too permitting. What made her situation
change was her move to her brother’s house. The fourteen-year-old player uses
the discourses of excessive use and addictions in arguing her ‘awakening to the
truth’.
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5.2. Women’s Leisure
However the players are often incapable of describing why they think
playing is ‘bad’ for them. This particular player draws parallels with other
objects of addiction and describes the way in which the computer, almost
magically, persuades her to play and forget her surroundings.
Simmer12: Playing is like a drug for me, like gambling is for others.
If I start to play, I can’t get myself off the computer. Hours pass really
fast, and before I notice four hours have gone. Luckily I live with people
who really care about me now, and they drag me off the computer. I
cannot say why too much play is a bad thing.
For another player whose play time is not supervised by adults as she is
one herself, it seems to be the bad conscience that finally stops her play.
When asked about what she means by ‘computer addiction’, one player
refers to ‘feeling terrible’ on the computer without being able to describe it
better.
Although players rarely know the reasons for why they think playing for
several hours in a row is a ‘bad’ thing, almost all of them suggest that being
the case. The older players express more feelings of bad conscience over the
‘nonsense hobby’ than the younger ones.
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Simmer6: The longest I play at a time is about one or two hours, and
then, at the latest, I have a break.
When asked for clarification, she told that she gets a headache if she
stares at the monitor for any longer. The player suggests that it was her
body that restricted her play.9 Her comment expresses concern over healthy
play: instead of using painkillers, she sees it important to have a break. But
what interested me in her comment particularly was the reason she, in the very
beginning of the interview, wanted to state the time she spends with the game.
When discussing one’s favorite game, why start the discussion with playing
times? I read it that she wanted to make it clear, from the very beginning,
that her play is not excessive or an addiction. Instead, she presented herself
as somebody who takes care of her health and knows how to be in control of
play.
This aspect of moderate playing also appears in a comment that refers
to The Sims players as different from the players of other games since they are
able to play within reasonable limits. ’Extreme simming’ does not seem to be
part of the culture.
Simmer4: I know people who own lots of different consoles and games
that they then play millions of hours in a row, having school/work as
the only break out. I think most of the sims players know how to play
within reasonable limits, so I think the playing styles are somewhat
different. :D
9
Aside from the negative connotations towards ‘excessive’ gameplay, her
comment also reflects the work-like nature of gameplay – play is something
to have breaks off. This is connected to how the interactive game medium is
different from television, for example, which does not require full concentration.
The notion of having a break in gameplay implies undivided attention and
intensity or use.
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5.2. Women’s Leisure
Simmer3: I have been to couple of game meetings, but I did not think
I fitted very well – when there are 20 pairs of eyes staring at you as
if an ufo or similar came in, it really gets your mood down. I just do
not think I am a ‘typical’ player, because most of the other players are
quiet, shy people, who do not pick their eyebrows and use ugly clothes.
I am sorry, I sound like a superficial bitch again :D
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The players enjoy helping other players towards their preferred play by
offering them the clothes and outfits they wish to have. It is very typical
for the players to create skins for other players by fulfilling requests sent to
the Radola forum. This is especially important since, as suggested in Section
5.1.3 on simming, the skinners do not often play with the game characters
themselves, but focus on skinning and sharing the skins for free instead. One
player, for instance, writes how important it is for her to create skins for other
players.
Simmer2: Usually when I make clothes I make them for the forum
above all, not for my own use.
For the skinners it is important that they can actually help others. The
players are happy to find out that their creations are always welcomed and
much appreciated.
Simmer15: Another key reason [for skinning] was fulfilling other play-
ers’ wishes, I haven’t been especially talented in this, but some paint-
bucket walls have found their takers at least...
Simmer3: [...] wishes are like challenges for me, it is nice to try if I
can do it, second I think I like pleasing people, I feel good myself when
I know I have made someone happy :)
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5.2. Women’s Leisure
as they gain cultural capital within the community and because they enjoy
helping others. In terms of co-creative play, “community and socialising are
essential parts of the game” (Simmer1).
Hellekson further proposes that this kind of economy that bases on non-
monetary exchange is gendered as feminine and built on the dominant un-
derstanding of economic sphere as masculine and social as feminine (cf. pub-
lic/home sphere in Section 3.2.3). Through non-profit gift-giving, the women
participants sign out from the dominant male-gendered field of commerce.
Therefore, “[t]his sort of exchange turns one role of woman and gift on its
head: the woman is still the gift, but now she can give herself. This permits
women agency that they lack under traditional patriarchal models” (Hellekson
2009, 116). The gifts themselves are symbolic and signal “aspects of the self,
such as time or talent”. However, because skins have actual functional value
and importance in terms of players’ experiences with a commercial product,
they are not merely symbolic. Skins work as true parts of the game and are
essentially influencing what the game is for its players. From an economical
perspective, too, the skins are valuable for the game’s developers as I discussed
earlier in Section 5.1.2.
The aim of this section has been to say that in parallel to justifying an
entitlement to leisure through co-creativity, players are lead to it since the
dominant notion of playerhood does not suit their player identities. Helping
others and making play useful as a feminine approach to gaming is central
to their practice. Hence, such claiming of productivity in their participation
not only has to do with the ethic of care as suggested by Shaw but also with
the aspects of computer game play and geekiness that do not support players’
feminine identities. Skinning is a form of play that attempts to move away
from typical playerhood and its negative and masculine associations through
making play useful. At the same time, the geek figure serves in normalising
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their own engagement since more excessive approaches are seen to exist.10
Attempts to see play as more useful than what it already is as a form
of entertainment are not uncommon to Game Studies either. As already sug-
gested in Section 3.3.2, this kind of rhetoric has emerged alongside the popu-
lar discourse that suggests gameplay as an unhealthy and worthless activity.
Newman (2008), for example, proposes that looking at the ‘productive’ and
therefore beneficial sides of gameplay offers a way to overcome media panics
around them. The moral panics tend to passivise and feminise their audiences
suggesting such orientation as harmful (Boddy 1994). Similarly, some studies
(e.g. Shaffer et al. 2005, Taylor 2006) suggest multiplayer games significantly
different, because of the all-encompassing social interaction and collaboration
that characterises such play. Behind these accounts seems to be an assumption
of solitary play and alienation as a negative quality of play. The skinners them,
instead of challenging these negative associations of ‘feminine’, may attempt
to avoid them by aiming to the opposite. There appears a need to see games as
useful and beneficial. Pleasure and enjoyment, escapism and fun do not suffice
as reasons to play. Meanwhile, computer literacy, tactical skills, mathematics,
language, cooperation and productivity11 turn gameplay into an activity that
is in line with the prevailing rhetoric of ‘healthiness’.
10
Research of fandom and ’obsessed fans’ suggest a similar assumption of
always more extreme fan engagement. Joli Jenson (1992) explores this popular
discourse that tends to pathologise fandom. (See also Nikunen 2001) She
approaches fandom as a category that is always othered resulting in that fans
propose an existence of other, more ‘obsessed’ fans. As a consequence, fandom
becomes a difficult category of identity. The interviewed players cannot see
themselves as fans and suggest fandom in terms of something ‘more’ than what
they are themselves. For example, pre-ordering expansion packs and painting
the walls of one’s room with symbols from the game counts as fandom for
them. Accordingly, owning all expansions and buying them once they hit the
shops is not fandom. Female fandom, when seen as hysterical and uncritical,
also adds to this negative feel of fandom (e.g. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs
1992).
11
Such beneficial aspects of gameplay are extensively introduced in James
Paul Gee’s research on games and learning, for example (e.g. Gee 2003).
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
So far I have suggested that the skinning of The Sims 2 is probably best
seen as a way of playing the game and as such can be approached from the
point of view of the history of women’s leisure that emphasises productivity
and utility. I explored how resistance in skinning is then not about breaking
the rules of the game itself or about engaging in an illicit activity, but more
about challenging the dominant notions of femininity. In the following I am
going to discuss how and with what consequences the unique nature of the
practice leads to rendering it invisible in the game cultures. Essentially, such
invisibility creates a cultural atmosphere in which skinners may feel that their
engagement is not important enough to be talked about. Such invisibility can
result from a lack of power for the women to discuss their practice, from a
lack of access to establish their practice within game cultures or from a lack
of knowledge on other similar practices, game cultures or ways to promote, for
instance, all of which will be discussed in the following.
Angela McRobbie’s and Jenny Garber’s essay entitled “Girls and Sub-
cultures” is significant where it highlights the particularities of girls’ leisure
activities and discusses the ways in which namely girls take part in subcul-
tures. In a passing sentence McRobbie and Garber coined a term that became
influential in the studies of girls and subcultures: “the ‘culture of the bedroom’
– experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing
up boyfriends, chatting, jiving” (McRobbie and Garber 1976, 213). McRobbie
and Garber argued that girls in general seem invisible in subcultures and stud-
ies of them proposing a less oppositional, less creative and, most importantly,
home-centered character of girl’s subcultural involvement. Girls seemed to
be ‘invisible’ in contrast to the highly visible – indeed ‘spectacular’ (as they
were called by early subcultural theorists) subcultural styles and practices of
boys, such as skinheads (cf. Hall and Jefferson 1993). “It might be suggested
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that girls’ culture of the time operated within the vicinity of the home, or the
friends’ home. There was room for a great deal of the new teenage consumer
culture within the confines of the girls’ bedrooms.” (McRobbie and Garber
2005, 107).12
As the interpretation of McRobbie’s and Garber’s work has been in-
formed and often connected to later work by Simon Frith (1978) and ‘bedroom
culture’ has thus been extended from the original formulation of the concept,
it seems necessary to look at the later reformulations of the argument. Sonia
M. Livingstone’s rephrasing is one of the best known.
McRobbie and Garber (1976) noted how girls’ subcultures are too of-
ten rendered invisible by academic and popular discourses, especially
those that focus on problematising boys’ appropriation of public spaces.
Looking back to the 1950s onwards, they stressed the importance of the
culture of the bedroom for girls, which they related to the greater at-
tachment of girls to their family and to either a best friend or a small
group of close friends, a circle which can be accommodated adequately
in the bedroom. Spending time in one’s bedroom is not purely a matter
of choice or convenience, but also reflects girls’ more restricted access
to public and often male-dominated spaces and the domestic duties ex-
pected of them which tie them to the home (Frith 1978). (Livingstone
2002, 157)
The development of the cultures of the bedroom has often been argued
through practical constraints and preferences that were (and are) typical for
girls’ lives. These reasons include, among others, that girls were assumed to
help with household chores and to stay nearby home. Home was generally
assumed as a feminine space and better suitable for girls’ leisure. Girls’ stays
outside the house were further restricted by parents because of safety issues
and leisure centers and sports spaces were occupied by males. Even the kinds
of clothes girls were expected to wear did not allow taking part in many of the
outdoor activities. Alongside, the rise of consumerist popular culture came up
with products that allowed indoor-use.
12
Today, the culture of ‘cosplay’ (costume play), among others, has con-
tributed to a more visible girls’ subculture as well.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
guess what ‘stuff’ is. These names are used to create a sense of intimacy within
the community. However, ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ are somewhat devaluing terms,
too. One of the players suggests that the term ‘thing’ (Finnish: ‘juttunen’)
does indeed express a humble attitude towards one’s creations.
Simmer1: Maybe it is the reason why people use the term, that we
don’t think our works are incredibly pretty, special and revolutionary.
Especially if it is about new textures (only) , since implementing tex-
tures and colours to existing meshes is pretty easy. ‘Modesty beauti-
fies’13 , that’s what we have been taught to believe – and ‘self-praise
stinks’, we think! ;D
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
Simmer9: I don’t like at all the clothes that come with the basic
game. Those mostly have odd colours, shapes and some of the are
even poorly textured (such as one of the men’s night clothes, I don’t
remember on which career path). I have only three expansion packs
installed (Nightlife, Seasons and Apartment Life), so I cannot say much
about the new clothes that come with expansion packs. But I have
noticed that in the later expansion packs there are much usable and
better textured clothes.
I don’t really use the original hair of the game at all. I do like some
meshes but the textures do not please my taste at all. I like hair that
has got a more realistic texture.
There are both usable furniture and those that I don’t use at all. I would
for example use original kitchen counters if they had better colours. I
use some original bathroom items and some tables.
As an inspiration for skinning, players can thus use their own wardrobes.
Where the players can best show off their skill is in clothes, for example,
while skinning simple wall and floor material does not offer enough challenge.
Simmer3: I feel creating walls and floors is too much like working on
a assembly line, it’s not as much fun as creating clothes.
And when one masters such a skill, it can be played with by making
tasteless clothes deliberately.
Simmer8: I love creating really kitschy and overdone blonde type sims
with large hairdos and no taste whatsoever. Where everything is pink,
and gold and fluffy. So I love to indulge in ‘bad taste’, too.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
The aspect of fashion, when applied in games, has been popular among
female players already before The Sims games. Another game concentrating
on clothing and physical appearance, Barbie Fashion Designer (1996), was an
early success story among women players (e.g. Subrahmanyam and Greenfield
1998, Wirman 2008b).
Furthermore, skinners seem to be happy in their own circles and are,
indeed, ignorant about other modding communities. Because the skinning
scene around The Sims 2 is so large, it requires separate forums, such as Mod
The Sims 2. Even the founder of Radola was not familiar with fora such as
ModDB when asked. In addition to different focus and expansiveness of the
practice, one reason for this might be in women’s tendency to do better in
areas of skill and knowledge considered masculine when no men are present.
Studies show that women perform better among other women when the focus
of activity is considered masculine. “Smith, Morgan, and White (2005) have
demonstrated that there is a stereotype that women do worse at computers.
A field of study called stereotype threat paradigm (Steele 1997, Steele and
Aronson 1995) proposes that people belonging to minority groups suffer from
performance impairments when a negative task-relevant stereotype concerning
their ingroup becomes salient” (Koch, Müller and Sieverding 2008, 1796). Sex
segregation in class room, for example, improves girls’ success and confidence
in technical tasks (Crombie and Armstrong 1999). Further, while some studies
present that women enjoy play situations that are social and play mostly with
men (Schott and Thomas 2008), my study suggests that The Sims 2 players,
while socially active in online fora, primarily play alone.
Stephen Flowers (2008) writes that there are two ways in which users’ contri-
bution can be turned to benefit commercial products: 1) through consensus
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
ground in mod scene” (Sotamaa 2003, 23, See also Postigo 2007). The games
industry signals the same thinking. For example, GameDeveloper magazine
quotes an art lead and level designer Ali Bordbar who says: “I definitely think
the best way to start a career is game development is by starting out as a
modder” (Wallis 2007). The modders who gain access to the games industry
bring both name and visibility to their modding practice and can work as role
models for other players.
Unlike modders are believed to, the skinners researched do not see games
industry as an interesting option as a future career. A claim that suggests
that “[t]he secret desire of every mod creator is to get recognition from the
companies who are making the games” (Tom Mustaine in Kücklich 2005, n.p.),
is hardly true to the skinners who associate the games industry with other
computer related careers and think they do not have what it takes. Such fields
are considered masculine and generally struggle with recruiting women (See
Section 3.1.4).
The players emphasise tools that are easy to use and are not interested
in learning to program as discussed earlier in Section 4.2.1. Essentially, this
is because they do not consider skinning as a serious practice that would, for
example, be important for them afterwards. One player, for instance, refers to
skinning as a ‘nonsense hobby’ when she talks about programming.
Very often the players’ lack of interest towards the industry has to do
with their preconceptions of what it would mean to be a game designer or a
‘coder’. One of the players would consider working in the industry if it would
not require static computer labour.
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Simmer1: These skills are indeed useful outside the game. And that
is where they originate as well [...] I cannot see myself working for the
games industry, I think it really is for younger people...
Yet another player considers his skills more beneficial for a graphic de-
signer or an architect.
Such notions express well that the players in general have very little
knowledge about what it could possibly mean for them to work in the games
industry. Some players think they have an idea of the industry, but offer
essentialising images of the ‘mystical coders’ without mentioning any other
possible vacancies in the field. The games industry appears as an ivory tower
where only the few very talented people can get into.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
Simmer15: There’s only space for few talents in the games industry
and my skills and knowledge are very limited. So I guess I’m happy
to leave that field to others. [...] I’ve understood that coding requires
intelligence, persistence and broad acquaintance. In addition, unlike
in image processing, you can really mess up your game (and in the
worst case the games of the other people as well). Through image
processing it is possible to create something pretty with little skill and
little persistence. The code of the game, instead, is total Hebrew to me.
I respect coders deeply and think they are not only intelligent, but also
persistent and have started to play with code years ago already. I don’t
know how accurate my ideas are, but the rarity of coders in comparison
to other content creators tells something. [...] I am a basic user, and I
have no deeper knowledge about virtually any specific area. In addition
I don’t think I have any inborn talents to the field, so I guess this kind
of hobbyist work is enough for me.
As an exception, one player admits she has “dreamed about being a game
designer”. She is the only one mentioning the connection between fashion
design and skinning.
The general lack of interest towards career in the games industry is strik-
ing in the light of earlier research on modders and emphasises, again, the differ-
ence of skinners to the dominant group of modders. And because skinners limit
their participation within player communities, their culture does not benefit
from the kind of publicity that modders who become designers usually offer to
their peers.
The skills and tools the skinners know are not entirely compatible, either.
One of the field’s biggest development software distributors, Autodesk, also
invites hobbyist modders to start their careers with professional tools (See
Figure 5.1).
But the skinners do not benefit from such general modding tools as they
use game-specific tools and general graphics tools instead. Besides general
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
Figure 5.1: Modders are thought to aspire towards a career in the games
industry. Source: http://tinyurl.com/radolaplayingwith, emphasis HW.
graphics and 3D editing software, such as Photoshop and MilkShape, the ma-
jority of the tools the skinners use are created to facilitate specifically Sims
skinning and are therefore useless for anything else. This results in the skills
and knowledge gained by such involvement not being easily transferable. Apart
from general image processing abilities gained through the use of Photoshop
and the like, players find it difficult to apply their expertise elsewhere.
Despite the players’ lack of interest and skills in terms of accessing the in-
dustry, technological skills and competencies are something they do gain from
skinning. The players gain both very fundamental and very specific compe-
tencies through their practice. In this respect there are significant differences
between the participants, however. For some of them skinning is a stepping
point for computer literacy. Here the very fact that the skinners’ play takes
place on a computer instead of a console makes a difference since players need
to understand how to install software and what are the requirements of it.
One player writes that she learned about the functions of hardware because of
skinning.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
For some players, then, more general aspects of computer functions may
cause problems. In such cases, the technical knowledge gained while skinning
is not necessarily connected to a broader technological interest or a hobby.
15
The player probably refers to the exact file format in which the skins need
to be saved in order to be recognised as skins by the game.
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
Simmer5: Yes it has got some influence [to my skills] I have learned
how to use [graphics] editors better and when I learned to download for
The Sims I also learned first time about downloading on the computer.
It thus appears that for many players skinning is a step forward in regard
of their use of personal computers. Additionally, these suggestions can be read
as ways to claim the importance of women’s leisure that aims to utility value
(See Section 5.2). It may be that recognising such benefits of their practice
helps them to argue the use of time in a hobby that would otherwise seem
worthless and in disharmony with their feminine identities.
Throughout this work I have discussed how the participants of this study
struggle to find their place in game cultures. The popular image of a computer
game player as a young male geek does not encourage women to identify as such
(See Sections 3.1.2 and 5.2.1). The gaming press, for example, has the power
to create communities but fails to encompass feminine aspects of gameplay due
to an emphasis on strategic skills of the player and mathematical complexity
and hi-tech aspects of the games (See Section 3.1.1).
The players then seem to avoid being labeled as typical players. Instead,
they ‘only play The Sims’, as one player suggests. The player’s comment is
emblematic in where she denies the identity of a player and claims a particular
Sims player identity instead.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
games without it. And given the long history of the game, most of the par-
ticipants, based on their age, have even never had the need to try any other
games since The Sims has always been available.
The skinners’ status as players is also informed by the fact that the game
is unlike the others – not a typical computer game. As The Sims 2 players,
the participants are already defined outsiders by the ‘hegemony of play’ (See
Section 3.3). The way in which The Sims games are advertised, reviewed
and discussed differently to other computer games within the games media
encourages women players to reject the dominant player identity. Conversely, it
seems to be possible that the very same uniqueness which causes the exclusion
of The Sims games from the canon of computer games may also be what
makes it appealing for my interviewees and women in general. It may well
be that exactly because The Sims games are not considered games with a big
‘G’ or carry the traditional associations of games as violent, competitive and
masculine, they have gained their devoted girl and women followers.
But even as The Sims 2 players, these players find themselves different
from the norm. This is because their play is about creating content and as
such not a ‘typical’ playing style (See Section 5.1.3). Furthermore, the players
are also challenging the dominant images of a hacker and a fan (See Chapter
4 and Section 5.3.1). Due to the masculine and resistant associations of these
discourses and the particular invited nature of skinning, the skinners’ practice
is poorly grasped as what we are used to knowing as modding.
Given these circumstances, it seems reasonable for the women skinners
of The Sims 2 to deny anything that has to do with traditional and dominant
concepts of computer game play and modding as a part of it. Simultaneously,
from the perspective of larger game cultures, the skinners are not recognised
as members of such groups. These denials evidently lead to skinners’ exclusion
from broader player communities and cultures, and to their invisibility in them.
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Simmer5: I don’t really talk about the sims with my friends, I talk
about it enough on the forum, and not many of them plays which means
that they probably aren’t interested. They don’t think I am an expert,
but often I am the one guiding them with downloading etc they are
stuck with. I haven’t told them I make downloadables, either.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
Another player appears somewhat sad about the fact that her friends are
not interested.
Understanding this form of productive leisure also has implications for what
can be seen as resistance. While resistance as we know it from fandom and
hackerism does not match with skinning, other kinds of resistant practices can
exist. The enormous potential for critical and resistant practices in games has
not produced a movement of ‘feminist hacker art’ Schleiner (2001) envisaged
more than ten years ago, but have a practice of women’s skinning that serves
the same cause in terms of offering a space for women’s pleasures in computer
gaming.
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
16
McRobbie here refers to the works presented in an influential book about
(male) subcultures, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War
Britain by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (1993).
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
inant distinction between consuming and producing media users, it also calls
into question the valuing of production over consumption. So far I have pro-
posed that people involved in such co-creative play are better acknowledged
as players, instead of approaching them through the notions of exploitation
or resistance or the discourses of hackerism, fandom or tactical exclusively.17
While such notions often emphasise the productive position of a media user,
another way is to acknowledge ‘consumption’ as a valuable stance alongside.
Whether this consumption, then, is creative and productive, is not important.
As Hills writes, the evaluative use of the terms consumption and production
is indeed one often used in Fan Studies and as such highly problematic.
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5.3. Invisible in the Bedroom
motivations for such involvement are often intrinsic and concern a particular
game and cannot thus be understood by the surrounding game culture. It is
hard to see the difference between subcultural involvement and participation
assumed from the player by the developers.
This is also linked to the types of resistance that become appreciated,
talked about and romanticised in our culture. I have suggested that when
making sense of the participation of the skinners it is easy to get into the
age-old discussion of valuing certain forms of culture over others and to the
gendering of these (See Section 5.3.4). But because of the sedimented cultural
notions and representations on playerhood in general and The Sims 2 play in
particular, the players who fit neither into the assumed category of The Sims 2
player nor to the group of subversive players, struggle with constructing their
player identities.
I see that, for scholars, it is important to acknowledge these users and
consumers of The Sims 2, as players of the game, if we aim to acknowledge
the game’s multitude that includes its invitations to be co-creative and the
support mechanisms for skinning as essential aspects of the game (See Sec-
tions 1.3.2 and 3.3.1). If we are truly to take games as cybertexts that not
only require the player’s contribution but may invite productivity outside the
actual gameplay context, the distinction between consumption and production
should be revised. As Celia Pearce writes, “the boundaries between [...] media
consumption and media production are increasingly blurring” (Pearce 2006,
18).
Now, in conclusion, we begin to see the complexity of the gendering
processes at work in play. The earlier paradigms of resistance, appropriation
and subversion do not help us to understand The Sims 2 players’ practices,
pleasures and motivations. Neither can their identities be exhausted by those
proposed by the categories of playerhood and modding. We have seen that the
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Chapter 5 Skinning as a Way of Playing The Sims 2
skinner has a very particular way of playing The Sims 2 game and this may
have little to do with other ways of playing the game.
This very exclusion and differentiation can be seen as a process of nego-
tiating the players’ identities as significantly differ from the earlier notions of
what it means to be a player. This is a form of resistance in itself. The players
constantly negotiate between resisting the dominant discourse of playerhood
and the dominant discourse of female consumption/passivity. Such resistance
takes subtle forms that are not publicly advocated and are therefore easily left
unnoticed.
Describing these non-identities or negative identities becomes almost as
important as describing the identities they suggest they perform. For Nadav
Gabay writes, “[n]o identity can be an identity without excluding something,
i.e. what is different from itself” (Gabay 2006, 349-350). Meanwhile, William
E. Connolly suggests that “[i]dentity requires differences in order to be, and
it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty”
(Connolly 2002, 64). The skinners construct and negotiate their identities as
different from 1) players, 2) The Sims 2 players, and 3) modders.
In the field of queer theory Butler (e.g. Butler 1999/1990) and many
others have studied sexual and gender identities from the point of view of un-
derstanding ‘otherness’ and suggest this position central to feminine identities.
Hall argues, using Jacques Derrida’s concept, that identity is “constructed in
or through différance and is constantly destabilized by what it leaves out” (Hall
2007, 18). The importance of offering an ‘other’ as a point of imaginary refer-
ence for the interviewees themselves is evident (i.e. when they suggest “gamers
do this but I do that”). It appears especially that when game and information
technological expertise are foregrounded, the lack of available identity posi-
tions for female agency forces women players to seek for points of negation
and difference. It seems easier for the participants to discuss their playerhood,
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253
Chapter 6
Conclusions
255
Chapter 6 Conclusions
the gameplay, there exists a real possibility to change the other players’ ex-
periences. However, it came as a surprise to me how few of the skins created
by the participants and discussed by them actually aim to change the strong
ideology of the game.
What emerged from the interviews was a view of ‘simming’ as an inher-
ently productive way of approaching The Sims 2. Essentially, the thesis illus-
trates that the ways in which skinning is invited and facilitated by the game
and how the skinners discuss their engagement demands a perspective that
allows looking at skinning as a rather conformist use of the game. I proposed
that the kinds of individualistic representations of consumer culture offered
by the game seem to guide what kinds of skins are created. This prompted
me to revise my understanding of what gameplay and games themselves are. I
proposed that understanding skinning as a form of participatory culture allows
a more constructive approach to the ways in which such engagement is invited
by the game. This practice is not a meta-activity or an addition to gameplay,
but a form of play itself.
The players, while made to believe they have power in terms of taste and
quality of the contents, appear to be taking part in a highly commercialised
version of participatory culture. Importantly, The Sims appears as one of the
first games, if not the first, to enter the sphere of participatory culture with
masses of players. My work proposes that skinners are in a significantly dif-
ferent position compared to other similar cultures in terms of their knowledge
over the history of Open Source production and the legacy of hacker cultures.
My thesis shows how the interviewed players do not problematise their help to
the games industry. Instead, they get pleasure from being useful.
The players do not appear very critical towards the media industry in
general, either. For example, none of the skins presented the kind of feminist
agenda that earlier studies have approached. My study suggests, instead,
256
that the players are involved in skinning for other reasons than the results
of skinning. Their inspiration for skinning came from seemingly irrelevant
sources or from other players. Taking other players’ requests as challenges
was typical among them. What the players’ participation emphasised then
was the process of creating. Skins, as it is discussed in this work, extend the
original game product and work as parts of it, not against it. Characteristics
of participatory cultures are based on shared achievement and collaboration
as well as accumulation of knowledge and skill instead of concentrating on the
appropriation of one single media product.
This lead me to explore the complicated question of consumption itself.
I explored how Cultural Studies and the discourses and research of hackerism,
fandom, tactical art and Web 2.0 all emphasise and romanticise the producer
over the consumer. The valuing of production over consumption appears as a
current academic, if not generally ’Western’, cultural consensus that is highly
gendered and linked to the discourses of resistance. While simultaneously in-
herently productive and a forerunner in participatory cultural practice, skin-
ning is simply a way to consume The Sims 2. Based on my study I consider
it important to explicitly embrace such player-consumer identity alongside the
politically resistant one and to acknowledge that resistance and productivity
are not mutually inclusive in current participatory cultures. The lack of ar-
ticulated resistance in the players’ texts can then be read as a positive signal
of skinning offering women a comfortable way to be players without a need to
actively fight back the very culture they are partaking.
Being a Sims player is very important for the players who consider it
significantly different from other games. This thesis argues that The Sims 2
game offers to its players a welcomed new kind of basis of play. In a culture
where the primary actor is considered male, The Sims allows women and girls
a convenient framework to access gameplay. However, this does not mean
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Chapter 6 Conclusions
we should stop exploring the ways in which this same participation is being
marginalised in game cultures.
Therefore, I have conceptualised Sims skinning from the point of view of
feminist Cultural Studies that efficiently helped in grasping the gendering of
the practice. I suggested that the notion of the culture of the bedroom, and
especially how such cultures have been characterised as invisible, overlaps with
the skinners’ creativity as a non-celebratory form of modding. Furthermore, I
suggested how the women engaged in skinning resist the negative associations
of computer games through a productive play practice. I showed how skinning
matches the long history of women’s productive leisure that aims to helping
others and to be functional or instrumental. Skinning is a new form of play
specific to women’s culture and builds on female-gendered competencies such
as taste, fashion, helping other people and being useful and is facilitated by
the open form of the game product. The pleasurable challenges offered by
technology are meaningful for the players, but not as central as those linked
to taste and fashion.
Accordingly, this perspective resulted in looking at resistance from the
point of view of cultural capital. Skinning appears, not politically but perhaps
culturally resistant. The players I have researched do not aim to use the
game as a medium of social critique, for instance. Their resistance is, rather,
about not conforming to the dominant ways of playing, consuming and making
game modifications. Through participation in the practice of Sims skinning the
women players are also resisting dominant gender roles of women as consumers,
as non-players and as technologically inept.
Skinners therefore occupy different positions of resistance. They can be
seen resistant as players, as women, as women players, as users and members
of audience, and as citizens, for instance. As players in general, although the
identity of a player is denied or at least challenged by many of them, the
258
interviewed skinners are situated within a leisure culture that is considered
masculine. From this position they are able to challenge the very masculinity
of the sphere. Yet, by also adapting the ‘non-player’ discourse, the skinners
operate simultaneously from within the game culture and as outsiders to it.
Furthermore, as players of The Sims, the skinners benefit from a discourse
considered feminine and of a practice that is female-dominated. Such starting
point allows them to be productive and in contact with technology without
being constantly compared with men. Skinners also use their productivity in
order to transcend their assumed player positions as ‘American’ and change
some aspects of the game to represent their own Finnish culture. In addition,
their practice that bases on players’ productivity and utility is a position that
provides them a possibility to argue about the dominant ‘waste-of-time’ quality
of playing games.
A parallel development has taken place in terms of another form of
women’s leisure: handicrafts. Through blogging and other models of online
communication, knitting and sewing communities are today facilitated on the
Web (Minahan and Cox 2011). Similarly to what I have suggested about Sim-
ming, “[t]he existence of Stitch’nBitch groups as women’s groups may give fur-
ther cause for optimism against a backdrop of what feminist theorists present
as a gender divide in participation in technology” (Minahan and Cox 2011,
9). Women’s leisure has thus taken a major and leading role in participa-
tory cultures. Alongside, it has turned formerly solitary practices into social,
subversive forms of commenting gender through the possibilities offered by
participatory culture.
By discussing player identities that surround the practice, I have showed
how the dominant emphasis on resistance leaves out certain practices and
games. I hope I have cast light on a practice that does not aim to change the
world or even the game culture, but is nevertheless important in many ways
259
Chapter 6 Conclusions
260
play and game that builds on co-creativity and community interaction. My
research also shows that some extremely popular practices are devalued in
game cultures, and thus exemplifies how the ‘hegemony of play’ operates. In
terms of Game Studies’ methodologies, I hope that my research works as an
example of how ethnographic methods allow nuanced accounting of gameplay.
For new media research, my contribution is primarily in providing knowl-
edge of the ways in which media products invite certain kinds of use by their
theme and structure. I have also discussed how a particular media text and
its technological form can function in the construction of user identities.
What this study shows about the relationship between games and gender
is that games and meanings associated with them are not gender-neutral. I
have showed that even a game that is played almost equally by men and
women, boys and girls, and that has been suggested as gender-neutral, bears
strong gendering in terms of its theme, structure, play and associated cultural
discourses. This, again, might lead to anxiety in the players. There definitely
is plenty of space for further studies on games and gender and for feminist game
studies. For feminist research on women’s cultural practices, I have illustrated
how computer game play can be situated within a longer continuum of feminine
leisure and media use. My study illustrates that communication technologies
and the Internet serve in building women’s communities around former solitary
activities.
In terms of my primary field of research, Cultural Studies that is tightly
linked to the other fields mentioned above, my thesis has offered an example
of valuable engagement in popular culture that cannot be acknowledged by
its political resistance, but by conformist use instead. The multi-disciplinary
take on fandom, leisure, hackerism and gameplay have been important in this
regard. Where Cultural Studies is concerned with power relationships be-
tween consumers and producers, also those practices that do not explicitly
261
Chapter 6 Conclusions
6.1 On Methodology
I suggest that this study has illustrated the importance of doing ethnographic
research on skinning. While the various theoretical approaches of earlier stud-
ies may be relevant for studying the corporate ownership, authority, legal issues
and larger societal importance of participatory labour, exchange with players
has shown that neither fandom, hackerism and artistic practice nor resistance,
subversion or appropriation are enough to explain the specificities of this prac-
tice.
Small-scale email interviewing proved to be a productive form of ethnog-
raphy for this thesis. It allowed the players to participate in their own space
and at times suitable for them. It also offered a computerised form of interac-
tion that is similar to their involvement in skinning. Most importantly, deep
262
6.1. On Methodology
analysis of such material alongside the associated cultural discourses and the
technology in question would not have been possible on a bigger scale. My
personal insights of game cultures helped me to identify these nuances, to ask
relevant questions and to read the players’ meanings as I possessed first-hand
experience on game play myself. I was also able to genuinely respect the work
of the skinners since I myself, as a Sims player who does not create skins, have
been dependent on their works available online.
The advantages that lead to choosing the particular methodology have
been discussed in Chapter 2. But like any approach, also this one came with
a group of challenges. In this study, it has been my aim to present a fair
rapport of The Sims 2 skinners in a Finnish context. However, in terms of how
the participants were reached, the introduced methodology emphasises those
players who have been keen to participate in an academic research. Because
players were recruited with an open call on an online forum, it may be that
only those players to whom the practice is especially important or who see
themselves as particularly talented and experienced in skinning have partaken
in this study. Different kinds of results could have resulted from a study where
participants would have been recruited from general Sims player fora and later
identified as skinners.
I also acknowledge that the general focus on Sims may have occasionally
prompted players’ emphasis of the special nature of the game. As I knowingly
chose a forum that concentrates on The Sims skinning as a place to recruit
research participants and let the participants know I was studying The Sims 2
skinning in particular, this might have affected on their own emphasis on The
Sims’ uniqueness. As Walkerdine writes, “participants in an event understand,
remember and narrate that event differently, bringing into play some of the
same kinds of issues as those of different interpretations and emotions on the
part of the researchers” (Walkerdine 1997, 75). I would suggest, however,
263
Chapter 6 Conclusions
that since skinners operate in a different sphere than those other modders and
because both their experience with other games and their knowledge over those
is limited, the uniqueness of the game is highlighted by their very involvement
already. Also, the qualities of the game that make it special for the players
are the same that have lead to its devaluation and exclusion at times within
game cultures and games research.
Furthermore, email interviewing resulted in another set of more practical
challenges. Because the participants of the study were allowed to take their
time in replying and to write as lengthy replies as they wanted, I was forced
to accept significant differences in the lengths of individual messages.
As a side effect of open email interviews where no facial cues can be given
to encourage the participant to tell more, some of the replies I received were
extremely short. In these cases the participants simply replied to me with
the ‘results’ of their thinking processes, not with the processes themselves. In
face-to-face situations, participants typically speak aloud the course of their
thinking.
Also the fragmented nature of email correspondence, due asynchronicity,
challenged both me and the participants in keeping track of the conversation.
I felt that emotional and affective relationships to what one has written are
hard to maintain between individual email messages that were sent days or
weeks apart from each other. And because I conducted several interviews
simultaneously, it was challenging to respond with the tone and style I had
accepted suitable for each individual participant as well as to remember what
had already been discussed with each individual participant.
Something needs to be said about the challenges of obtaining consent as
well. To my surprise, about a third of those who showed a primary interest
towards my study by sending me a private message or an email, never got me
264
6.1. On Methodology
1
One reason for this is listed by (Meho 2006), who notes that, among
other reasons, many email messages are blocked by spam filters. This is even
more likely because of the attached documents. Based on the interviews that
did take place I learned that several discussions were interrupted or entirely
stopped because the participants simply did not receive my messages that had
been moved to their junk mail folders.
265
Chapter 6 Conclusions
Tuffin’s study “the longitudinal approach taken for online interviews occurred
at considerable frustration to the researcher because there was no certainty sur-
rounding when participants would respond” (Bowker and Tuffin 2004, 236).
Unexpected, long pauses in communication are especially frustrating because
there is no information on the reason of the prolonged reply. While some par-
ticipants simply forgot to write back, some later told they had been unable
to answer due to a sickness, for example. Unfortunately, work on email inter-
viewing does not yet suggest how to re-establish the connection to participants
and such themes are rarely addressed in literature on email interviewing.
Where some researchers set up answering times and deadlines for inter-
views, no rigid time lines were agreed upon in my study. The interviews contin-
ued as long as correspondence seemed comfortable and reasonable to continue.
The length of the interviews between participants altered very much. This
somewhat stretched my original plan and the interviews took place between
March 2008 and May 2010, thus taking twice as long as I had anticipated. Each
interview consisted of correspondence that lasted from five to seventeen weeks.
During this time, six to eighteen questions-reply pairs of correspondence were
sent. However, while the time lapse between individual email messages also
varies, the duration of the entire interview does not tell much about the num-
ber of messages written since the time between email messages varied a lot. In
addition, while some participants preferred writing short answers right away,
those who took more time usually provided more thorough answers. With
most participants there was a point of correspondence when I needed to re-
mind them about the interview. As I did not want to appear officious, time
was lost while waiting for a suitable time to hurry them up. In couple of cases
it took several weeks to get a reply due to personal affairs, illnesses and exam
periods, for example. One of the interviewees answered my messages after a
period of seven months during which I thought I had accidentally insulted her.
266
6.2. Future Directions
Luckily, as I later found out, this probably was not the case.
Lastly, there were no agreed measures to be taken into account at my
university in terms of securing the personal information of the participants.
In general, many of the challenges linked to studies conducted online are not
well documented yet. “In addressing these issues, researchers and Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs) will need expertise, which many currently lack” (Meho
2006, 1289). It is also worth mentioning here that while research ethics guide-
lines are created to inform entire university faculties, instead of individual
departments with specific epistemological bases, such systems can inhibit and
limit effective research by setting up barriers or inviting anxieties on the part
of respondents where none are necessary. Based on the experience gained from
this study, I would for example prefer an online consent system in the future
and would not ask the participants to reveal any identifying information or
names.
For recognising the potential use value and applicability of the perspectives
introduced here, the historical and cultural specificity of this work needs to be
understood.
My research was conducted at a moment when women had only recently
entered, en masse, computer game cultures. The game researched further
proposes a safe place for their explorations into this new culture and is not
just any game available at the late 00’s. In terms of player productivity, The
Sims appears as one of the very first ‘Game 3.0’ products.
The co-creativity associated with it lies somewhere in-between modding
as an extra-textual activity and co-creativity as a designed gameplay feature.
More recent games such as FarmVille and other social networking games have,
267
Chapter 6 Conclusions
for instance, commodified the kind of gift giving practices typical to skinning.
Thus, the mainstream games industry seems to adopt and commodify former
subcultural practices in its products similarly to what music and fashion indus-
try, for instance, have been doing for decades. In comparison to these recent
games that build on productive playing style, Sims skinning appears much less
controlled and monitored. In other words, The Sims 2 can be seen to leave
more room for skins that oppose the game’s ideology, despite the fact that the
players of this study rarely take advantage of such possibilities.
What I believe will keep appearing in future game cultures is that there
will be playing styles that some people try to marginalise (e.g. by labeling
them as ways of ‘playing with’ games). There are also always going to be
dominant ways of playing and identities that need to be negotiated in relation
to these. In general, it is very clear from this work that players construct their
player identities, to some degree, in relation to the cultural meanings of the
game they are playing.
A set of questions that seem worth further research can be postulated
based on the outcomes of this work.
• Are the players of games such as The Sims 2 aware of the strong ideology
of the game or do they understand their possibilities to change it through
game modifying?
• What are the ways in which the specific game development infrastructure
of Sims games benefits from players’ work and how do they communicate
with the players?
• How significant are the suggested kind of differences between Sims skin-
ners and other modders in terms of how tight the relationship between
268
6.2. Future Directions
• What kind of meanings does the general non-player public associate with
Sims play? To which extent are these meanings related to the gendering
of the game?
More generally, future work on women skinners and Sims skinners would
benefit from a cross-cultural comparative analysis. Since some of the most
strikingly subversive works created by the skinners in this research are based
on national symbolism and brands, a comparison between Northern American
and European players, for example, would help in producing further knowledge
on how these practices work in relation to national cultures and meanings.
This work also indicates some differences between older and younger
players in terms of the importance and meaning of skinning for their every-
day lives. A comparison between different age groups could prove helpful in
mapping out these possible differences. I also believe that a study that would
compare those players who play various games with those who play primarily
Sims would address some of the questions that this study leaves unanswered.
Namely, it would be beneficial to explore how game-culturally informed the
players’ experiences about the ‘special nature’ and ‘uniqueness’ of the game
are.
269
Chapter 6 Conclusions
This study suggests that other modding communities may appear alien-
ating and downplaying towards Sims skinning. It would be interesting to
discuss the results of this study parallel to work that approaches these other
modding communities and their knowledge and ideas about Sims as a game
and its skinners as game modifiers.
Also research on other female-gendered games that seem controversial
among players, such as the so-called social games on Facebook, should be dis-
cussed alongside the outcomes of this research. As an example, on the day I
finished writing this work, a piece of news was published online about how the
market value of Zynga, the biggest publisher of Facebook games, passed that of
EA (North 2010). Comments on the piece of news show strong anxiety towards
this new type of games. Facebook games are suggested, not surprisingly, as
non-games and as ‘easily digestible’. These kinds of processes of valuing and
devaluing, embracing and downplaying, individual games and game genres in
the cultures of gaming have gained unfortunately little scholarly attention.
Outside game cultures, comparing the outcomes of this study with feminine
practices on other male-gendered leisure fields could possibly show how the
characteristics of feminine leisure transfer from culture to culture and from
medium to medium.
It was not possible to include the actual making of game skins within the
limits of this project. However, I suggest that a setting where the researcher
would create Sims skins herself and study how these works are being received
and discussed in the game communities could offer a supporting resource for
understanding how the players’ works are negotiated and how the intended
uses and meanings of the skins become understood within these communities.
The downsides of the adopted form of interviewing include the lack of
face-to-face cues and nuances. I see that a study which allows the actual meet-
ing of these skinners when they are engaged in their practice would compliment
270
6.2. Future Directions
the results of this study as they could take into account the material aspects
of skinning as well as the family dynamics in the use of technology.
While I have suggested skinning, or simming, as a way of playing the
game, such approach could be applied to other gameplay practices as well.
Game Cultural Studies on the varying uses of games would offer insights to
the multiple ways individual games can be experienced and played and how
the emerging communities overlap and work together. I see that any cultural
study on games significantly benefits from taking into account the practices
that take place parallel to ‘actual’ gameplay.
Furthermore, in this thesis I have approached the relationship between
human actors and information technology in two ways. First, I have discussed
how the systemic structure and ideological content of The Sims 2 game sup-
ports certain uses and encourage its players to create skins as well as how a
certain set of available tools affects the modifying of the game. Second, I have
looked at the ways in which game technology works in popular and theoretical
discourses as an object and definer of hackers, fans, players and artists. Hence,
this research leaves plenty of space for studies that recognise nonhuman agency
and explores the ways in which the game and the player work together in a
cyborgean symbiosis or as a network. Correspondingly, theoretical approaches
of cyberculture studies and Actor Network Theory would compliment the more
culturally-oriented perspective taken. I have started mapping out such gen-
dered cyborgean skinner in a research paper (See Wirman 2008b) where I
suggest that skinning as a feminine practice is an excellent example of Sadie
Plant’s (1995) idea of the interrelationship between weaving and technology.2
One line of thought that I have only briefly touched upon in this the-
2
In this paper, I touched upon the idea of Arachne, a great mortal weaver of
Greek mythology, as a cyborgean entity. Earlier, Tanya Krzywinska (2007) has
applied the same story from Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphose in her research
of long game narrative.
271
Chapter 6 Conclusions
sis is that of art. Art is something that seems to bring the three suggested
resistant discourses together. Forms of hacker art, tactical art, fan art and
appropriation art have already been introduced in this work. In such uses, the
word ‘art’ is often added to describe both expressive and politically charged
amateur practices. All of these arts share qualities that tie them to the in-
dustry of digital games through the use of original commercial products. This
art is produced from the consumer products and, even when criticising such
products, could not exist without it. If any art ever is, such art is never totally
independent from popular culture and its meanings. As discussed, the copy-
right laws further complicate the making of hacker/tactical/fan/appropriation
art and emphasise its dependence on the original. I see a lot of potential here
to go on discussing the questions of authority and the forms of artistic and
hobbyist practice in terms of their cultural meanings. I think it would be in-
teresting to discuss these forms of art parallel to more institutionalised forms
of making art and to professional game artistry.
Finally, another conceptual framework I would have very much wanted to
include in this thesis, and somewhat related to the concept of arts, is the idea
of craft. Given the skinning’s similarity to other forms of utilitarian female
creativity such as knitting and cooking, discussing it as a form of craft would
have been very interesting. In my future work, I hope to continue exploring if
skinning shares qualities with crafting. Especially that how craft is separated
from ‘high’ arts seems to fit with the outcomes of my work. Peter Dormer
(1997) suggests that what is characteristic to crafting is the separation of
meaning from making, which also stems well with the process-oriented work
of skinners.
272
Chapter 7
Appendices
Background information
Gender?
Age?
How many games do you use to create skins/mods? Which games are they?
How much time per week do you use playing the game to which you make
skins/mods?
Where do you do this? Does the location affect what you can do/how you do
it?
273
Chapter 7 Appendices
Starting point
When do you create skins/mods? What else could you do with this time?
Skinning
Does skinning/modding resemble some ‘nonline’ activity you are involved in?
How?
Fan or not?
Do you think the game you are altering is better with your changes/additions?
In case of skins: what is your relationship with the skins and game characters?
274
7.2. Appendix 2: Informed Consent Form
Thank you for your interest in my study which you are being invited to take
part in! Before you finally decide whether to take part, it is important for
you to understand why the research is being done and what it will involve.
Please take time to read the following information carefully and the list of
interview themes enclosed, and discuss it with others if you wish. Please feel
free to address any questions or ask for any clarifications from me. Take time
to decide whether or not you wish to take part. I will need to know whether
you want to participate within two weeks from the date above.
Time, duration and place of the study: This research project began in
spring 2007 and will last three years (until spring 2010). All the interviews will
be conducted during this period of three years, but some of the results may be
published later on. You are asked to take part in interviews that take place
during spring 2009, from mid January onwards. If an additional interview is
needed, I will ask about your availability and interest again, and ask you to
sign a new consent form.
I would like to interview you via email. Thus, the length of the interviews
depends on how much time you take to answer me and how long you wish
275
Chapter 7 Appendices
to continue discussing. I would like to exchange less than ten emails. The
direction of the interview will be lead by your replies. I would estimate the
correspondence takes around three weeks.
Participants in the study: You have been chosen because you are actively
contributing new content related to computer games. You are also taking
part in community activities, such as discussing your and other’s work (game
modifications, skins, machinima or similar) and using these during your play.
Taking part in the study: The first thing to do if you decide to take part
in my study is to sign a consent form. I will then get in contact with you to
arrange a suitable time to meet.
If you are under 18, please note that your parent/guardian will also need to
sign the consent form. In addition, you will need to choose a responsible adult
of your choice to be present at the interview.
I should only have to conduct one interview with you, but there is a possibility
I may need to do a follow-up interview a year or two afterwards. If this is the
case I will contact you within plenty of time and issue you with a new consent
form.
Due to the subject matter of the project, it is not anticipated that any material
276
7.2. Appendix 2: Informed Consent Form
Possible concerns: If you have any concerns about anything regarding this
project you can contact me on the details below, or alternatively you can
contact my supervisor, Estella Tincknell.
Results of the study: The results of the research project will be published
in my Ph.D. thesis and also presented at conferences. No names will be men-
tioned or associated in relation to specific aspects of the research, to ensure
the confidentiality of the participants. Copies of the thesis, or the relevant
sections, will be available to the participants by request. If you wish, you have
the possibility to go through the work that refers to data collected from your
interview before it is published in my Ph.D. thesis.
277
Chapter 7 Appendices
You can keep this copy of the participant information sheet attached to which
you can find a list of themes I would like to discuss during the interview. If
you decide to take part in the study you will also get a copy of a consent form.
Area of research / Working title of the study: Computer game playing and
gender
General information on your play habits and especially the games you are
customising
Fandom
Please read the information on the ‘Participant Information Sheet’ you have
received. If you agree with the terms as described in that document and are
happy to take part in this study, please sign below and mail this form to the
address below.
278
7.2. Appendix 2: Informed Consent Form
Full name of participant / Interviewee [this line was not included in the later
forms:] ———–
I agree with the terms as described in the ‘Participant Information Sheet’, and
am willing to take part in the Computer game playing and gender research
project.
279
Chapter 8
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