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INTRODUCTION
While digital games hold promise for learning and socialization, emerging research and popular debates have critiqued inclusive access to these practices and literacies. This essay examines digital games for their potential to integrate diverse individuals and communities for learning and socialization, especially in online play and broadcasting of gameplay. For example, a level of cultural competency can be attained in well-developed games to overcome essentialist notions and assumptions about women and people of color. Using Black Cyberfeminism1 as a theoretical lens to make sense of players' experiences, and Racialized Pedagogical Zones (RPZs)2 as an analytical frame to situate digital games' entrenched ideologies of race and racism, we contend that games offer highly unproblematized depictions but have extreme potential for cultural competency. We further utilize Communities of Practice (CoP)3 as a frame for understanding and interrogating equitable access to community-supported collaborative learning and mastery within game culture, more broadly, and interest-driven guilds, clans, and affinity spaces, more specifically. In our extension of CoP, we integrate inclusive to highlight the resistive and resilient strategies employed by supportive communities for diverse women in addressing the systematic nature of oppression and power relations that undergird communities of practice, particularly in marked gendered spaces such as gaming.4
Marginalizing practices in game culture have become more widely publicized and understood in recent years, most notably because of high profile incidents of harassment.5 However, representations of women and racial or ethnic minorities by the gaming industry have also been problematic historically. For instance, since the 1980s video games have been critiqued for the hypersexualization of women and women are often the victims of misogynis- tic vitriol, as the incidents around Gamergate have exposed.6 People of color are featured in largely stereotypical ways and are all but absent from the gaming industry.7 Queer gamers and gamers with dis/abilities are almost entirely absent and, when present, are not depicted fairly.8 This differential treatment appears to have a symbiotic relationship with the exclusion of marginalized players.9 As researchers have noted, Internet technologies and virtual communities operate in a manner that benefits privileged identities.10 These unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate and are embedded in the cultural practices of digital technology.
Nevertheless, many gamers-most notably women-have resisted this perpetual state of inequity and the...