Depathologizing Addiction: Considerations of Hegemonic Masculinity in and Around Problematic Video Gaming

(Re)production of Masculinity in the Game Medium

The most intimate, individual relation between men and video games is to the medium and its production. Given that computer science, as other technical sciences, has traditionally been a male-dominated field (Cockburn, 1985), the emergence of video games within it has been no exception. The first prototype and basic video games in the 1950s have been created by men, among men and, under the circumstances, accessible mostly to men—a trend which continued in later history as well (Newman, 2015). According to a 2019 survey of International Game Developers Association, the majority of game developers (71%) are still male, even if the percentage is slowly decreasing (Weststar et al., 2020). Male dominance is strongly expressed in developers’ studios (DeWinter & Kocurek, 2017), for example, by playing militarized video games during work breaks, privileging the most technical job roles, insisting on hypersexualized character design (Johnson, 2014), and isolating women in feminized positions, such as art and design. With the exception of the family-oriented Nintendo Wii console, marketing choices for game-related products have typically also been oriented primarily towards boys and men, from naming a console ‘Game Boy’ or designing X-Box controllers for big hands (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009) to the American Army recruiting young males through sponsored video games or ads in them (Allen, 2017). While the overall percentage of people who play video games has almost equalized in terms of gender, males still spend more average time playing and dominate the mainstream and professional gaming culture (Gilbert et al., 2018) which is defined by games that usually demand big time commitments, high technical skills, deep knowledge of the game, and competition with others. At the same time, females are excluded from the latter kind of ‘serious’ gaming either passively, through marketing, or actively, through misogynist bullying and sexual harassment, in effect limiting them to filling secondary roles or playing ‘casual’, less publicly valorized games (Vermeulen & Van Looy, 2016; Soderman, 2017). This dynamic produces the stereotype of female gaming as leisurely and amateurish and opposes it to male gaming as a committed lifestyle and mastery of a medium. Even if the situation is slowly changing, the historical male bias of the game industry remains prominent.

The narrative content of video games is another aspect of how they cater to men and (re)produce particular types of masculinity. Most of the biggest hardcore games, also known as AAA games, feature male main characters that run and jump around, shoot, wield weapons, taunt, maim, and kill opponents in a perpetual display of virtual manhood, whatever else is happening in the game. The top 10 best-selling games of the recent decade in the US (Grubb, 2020) are also some of the most violent ones: the open world gang-crime game Grand Theft Auto V; seven instances of the first-person shooter Call of Duty franchise, sponsored by the American Army; Red Dead Redemption 2, a gory wild-west action game; and the one exception at number 10—Minecraft, an online world-building game, which still includes combat. In other popular games which do not feature direct violence, such as sports or strategy ones, intense competition and the goal of domination is often still a core element. Such content tendencies are unavoidably gendered and gendering. Blackburn and Scharrer (2019), studying the relation between video game content and views on masculinity, find that the ‘amount of time spent playing games that the respondents themselves described as violent predicted beliefs that masculinity should entail aggression, toughness, dominance, and restrictive emotionality’ (p. 318). An earlier study by Thomas and Levant (2012) found that exposure to violent video games increased male aggression and that this increase was proportional to prior endorsement of traditional masculinity norms. Thus, it could be argued that the gameplay content of the biggest games in the industry both incentivizes male dominance and answers a demand for it among men who look for it.

Aesthetic representation of men and women in video games is also a big factor in the gendered profile of the medium. Male characters are often designed as muscular and tall, clad in armor or fully clothed, with somber or angry facial expressions and vocals: ‘Feelings of anger and rage are encouraged in “real men” because they are associated with high status and power’ (Gabbiadini et al., 2016, p. 3). Female characters, on the other hand, are mostly hypersexualized: their scant clothing emphasizes big breasts, wide round hips, lean waists, and long legs for the male gaze (Krobová et al., 2015); their facial expressions, besides angry or somber, can also be scared, desiring, joyous, or silly; their voices—fragile or teasing, or sexy. Some popular roles of males in video games are soldier, fighter, rebel, leader, renegade, scientist, criminal, wizard, or super-hero, whereas females are more often depicted as victims, princesses, seductresses, witches, healers, and wives or mothers, which is consistent with the traditional depiction of genders in other media (Giaccardi et al., 2016). Most female roles are relational, supportive, or passive, in comparison to the active, independent, lonesome men. One could expect that virtual environments would allow for experimenting with material identity boundaries, but studies find that players transgressing heteronormative, traditionalist expectations are often met with mockery, harassment, and exclusion, as witnessed by openly female, black, or queer players (Condis, 2018; Fox & Tang, 2014). The aesthetic emphasis on the gender binary maintains and reproduces sexist stereotypes and related hierarchies.

Last, the very form of video games is arguably masculine. The formal uniqueness of video games in comparison to other media is that they require consumers to (inter)act and make decisions—they are actions (Galloway, 2006). To engage in a game, players have to figure out algorithms, press buttons in correct orders, manage menus, make plans or strategies, and be prepared for surprises. The actions of video games are most of the time controlling and managerial in their nature, requiring maximization of efficiency, domination of the algorithm (and opponent, if there is one), and competition with others (for high scores, prizes, levels, items, ranks, etc.). The gameplay emphasis on control, domination, rationality (over emotionality), competition, and contempt for weakness and mistakes align smoothly with patriarchal, hegemonic ideas of masculinity. Now I turn to how these ideas are spread and maintained in gaming culture and men’s social groups.

Masculinity in the Social Cultures Around Games

The world of (hardcore) video games is becoming increasingly attractive to men as a venue for seeking and acquiring cultural dominance in forms of public visibility, admiration, and influence. While video games have been previously associated with boys, ‘nerds’, and ‘geeks’—subordinate forms of masculinity (Connell, 2005)—the popular explosion of the industry and its professionalization in the last decade has legitimized it as a cultural field which serves as a ground for broader social recognition, especially for males. Mendick et al. (2021) even argue that entrepreneurial geek masculinity is becoming the new form of hegemonic masculinity.

The respectability of video gaming has been raised through the rapidly growing and well-paying e-sports, online streaming, and YouTube scenes. Gaming careers provide new, widely recognized, almost exclusively male role-models: a professional gamer, a successful Twitch streamer, or a YouTube gaming celebrity with millions of followers. These role-models can be pointed at by aspiring hardcore gamers to legitimize their big time, money, and effort investments in video games (Grant-Taylor, 2012). The emergence of competitive gaming and online celebrities, especially, has raised a lot of games to the status of sports, thus opening a new route to hegemony for previously subordinate men. At the same time, the culture surrounding these games has also assumed the problematic gender-defining aspects of sports: ‘overwhelming focus on male athletes, its celebration of force, domination and competitive success, its valorization of male commentators and executives, its marginalization and frequent ridicule of women’ (Connell, 2005, p. 288). As of summer 2021, only 2 of the top 100 most viewed Twitch streamers were female (TwitchTracker, n.d.), and female or mixed-gender professional e-sports teams are almost non-existent. While other media industries, such as film or music, have seen campaigns and trends towards more representation of women and minority groups in recent years, video games have outgrown these industries but remained an overwhelmingly male-representing and oriented medium (DeWinter & Kocurek, 2017).

Video games have not only grown as an industry but also acquired a privileged position in young male culture in technologically advanced societies in terms of peer recognition and formation of masculine identity. They have become a central part of a young man’s routine (Gilbert et al., 2018), next to other traditional male activities such as participating in sports, consuming alcohol (and other drugs), or doing street crime (Sanders, 2011). Kimmel’s (2008) theory of Guyland provides insight into some of the circumstances which form the conditions for such change. According to Kimmel, guyland is an extension of adolescence into mid- to late-twenties due to changes in the job and education markets in advanced capitalist societies. Increased educational and career expectations, on the one hand, and decreased job opportunities, on the other, have meant that young people devote more years to higher education and working random jobs. More and more of them come back to live with their parents or continue sharing apartments with friends due to lack of stable and fulfilling career opportunities in a volatile labor market (Kimmel, 2010). Guyland is the temporal space where boys become guys but not men—they play games, gamble, seek sex, do sports and drugs, and seek risk, free from responsibilities (and opportunities) traditionally associated with grown-up life. Left on their own and with little prospect or need of family or career, the guys settle in a culture of peers, where proving oneself cool is more important for social inclusion and survival than family, educational, or career achievements.

In the recent decades, video games have come to the forefront as a new space where boys and men look for a sense of power and validation from peers. As Kimmel puts it:

In their daily lives guys often feel that they don't quite measure up to the standards of the Guy Code—always be in control, never show weakness, neediness, vulnerability—and so they create ideal versions of themselves in fantasy. The thinking is simple: If somebody messes with your avatar, you blow him away. (Kimmel, 2008, p. 164, p. 164)

Being a proficient gamer by achieving high ranks and overpowering your peers in-game is the new way of proving and asserting one’s dominant masculinity. Showing off one’s power and status is not only allowed but also encouraged in most video games by rewarding higher ranks with badges, avatar skins, trophies, and other in-game bonuses to demonstrate achievements. This, effectively, creates a toxic meritocracy (Paul, 2018) which makes one-upmanship the core driving motive for playing. Some achievements are expressed in points collected, gold gathered, or level reached, but killing streaks, headshots, and damage done to opponents are also often a part of a gamer’s goals. Furthermore, the social culture of many multiplayer games (the massively popular e-sports battle-arena game League of Legends being a prime example) is notorious for breeding toxic masculine behavior and includes frequent bullying, rape jokes and threats, sexist banter, racist provocations, and in-game violence or trolling (being purposefully useless to ruin a game; Condis, 2018; Fox & Tang, 2014). This culture of violent competition arguably both attracts men and traumatizes them, creating a vicious circle of hardening in and against violence only to further reproduce it.

The social dynamics around gaming and masculinity provide insights into why men would still see the world of gaming as desirable, even if its hurtful to themselves. As Edwards (2006) notes, ‘the experience of being male or masculine may often be as much about violation as it is violence’ (p. 67). A way to compensate for violence experienced, whether in real life or virtually, and escape from it is to cause it. For example, a study of men sentenced to therapy against violence has found that their aggression (including self-injury) was strongly related to experiences of violence, neglect, and shame in childhood, as well as later mental health issues (Jansson, 2019). Another study of men’s explanations of violence (Dagirmanjian et al., 2017) found that “[m]en explained repeatedly in their responses that violence is most often necessary in response to a threat to one’s masculinity […], to verbal or physical threats from another man” (p. 16). Thus, on the one hand, violence is a threat, but, on the other hand, it is also a tool for responding to the threat and asserting one’s masculinity (also in games). Men have traditionally been socially pressured and expected not to seek help when they have problems, not to express or share their feelings, and to deal with any life challenges and complicated emotions on their own. Shame of not being man enough is both a source of mental health problems and an obstacle to dealing with them in healthy, social ways (Gordon, 2019). When unable to see alternatives or ask for and receive help, men seek other outlets for their frustrations: acting-out, violence, drugs, risky behaviors, etc. Mendick et al. (2021) assert that suffering functions as a core trait of (often straight white male) geek masculinities by turning the pain of social rejection into a moral cause for climbing masculine hierarchies and enacting revenge on others (often women or ethnic minorities).

To sum up the overview of masculinity in gaming culture, there is a strong double incentive for men to make a problematic habit of video gaming—it is not only a way to escape and act-out one’s problems (as with drugs or sexual harassment) but also a space for feeling social validation, achievement, and connection. Under stressful circumstances, video games become an easily accessible, culturally encouraged (especially in comparison to other masculine ‘vices’), and sometimes socially rewarding go-to habit.

Neoliberal Incentives for (Male) Gaming

The conditions for the rapid growth of importance of video games in men’s lives exist not only within the cultures in and around video games but also in broader social change. The guyland that Kimmel describes, as already mentioned, could not exist without macro shifts in economics, labor, or education. The development, roles, and symbolic value of masculinity in Western capitalist societies have changed and are still changing since the emergence of video gaming. At least two big and related engines of change can be named: (1) neoliberal social and economic reforms; and (2) emergence of new social and civil rights movements.

Neoliberal political-economic policies—deregulation of markets, reduction of welfare and social security, privatization of public services, cutting corporation taxes, and reducing the power of unions (Cornwall et al., 2016)—have had and continue having a broad impact on all social spheres. As video games have reached the cultural mainstream in the 1970s, at around the same time as the first neoliberal policies started being adopted across the world, masculinity in and around video games should also be understood in the context of these transformations. The changes in the material conditions of many men’s lives under neoliberalism are summarized by Edwards:

Neoliberal changes have meant fewer stable jobs, increased borrowing, and a transition from industry to service-based economy—all challenging the traditional role of a working man as a breadwinner, head of a household, and, by extension, the hegemony of this kind of masculinity in society.

Neoliberal challenges to masculinity manifest in a tension between upper-class standards and lower-class realities. According to Connell,

[t]he ‘individual’ of neoliberal theory has in general the attributes and interests of a male entrepreneur, the attack on the welfare state generally weakens the position of women, while the increasingly unregulated power of transnational corporations places strategic power in the hands of particular groups of men. (Connell, 1998, p. 15, p. 15)

A successful (presumably male) individual is defined by economic power, technical rationality, and social detachment (ibid.). A ‘real’ man is a self-made man who manages (business, political, romantic) affairs but does not get attached as that would be risky in a fast-changing competitive environment. However, this kind of individuality and masculinity is not available to most subjects of neoliberal societies. Many men might experience exploitation in the labor market and loss of domestic authority as emasculating. Thus, not only femininity but also lack of economic success, power, and capital mark marginalized subjectivities, putting working and middle-class men closer to other traditionally oppressed groups than they used to be (Walker, 2017). This situation has been further complicated by a cultural stigmatization of working-class masculinity as backward in a context where everyone is expected to be flexible, responsible, and work on self-improvement (ibid.). When the type of economic affluence and social flexibility that is required of a neoliberal man is not attainable, the technical rationality and social detachment emphasized by Connell come to use as a means for achieving compensatory virtual power in video games.

Whereas neoliberal reforms have undermined the material grounds of traditional masculine dominance, the influence of social movements has challenged the symbolic primacy of the white man and his previously unquestioned position in society. Second-wave feminist separatism, queer critique of heteronormativity, intersectional notions of privilege and oppression, the MeToo movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement are just some examples of social movements challenging hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal social order over the last 50 years. These challenges have been met with a backlash which has become closely related to sports and gaming. According to Connell (2005, p. 288) it is a new, cultural kind of backlash which ‘has not mobilized men as a sex class for political warfare, defending a collective interest. To the extent it has mobilized men, it is as consumers, through genres such as the ‘new lad’ magazines, hyper-masculine computer games, and the culture of sports fans.’ Some gamer masculinities, in this case, can be seen as protest masculinities. They express a hypermasculine, chauvinist agenda to counter a sense of helplessness and loss of privilege. Running, shooting, fighting, constructing, and otherwise dominating in video games virtually embodies masculinity which stands in sharp contrast to the real-life requirements of feminized, docile, repetitive, and exchangeable work.

Even if devoid of its social context and toxic in its own ways, a revalorization of traditional masculinity, according to Walker, might be ‘interpreted as an antidote to the toxicity of neoliberalism’ (ibid., p. 25). In face of both work and familial disenfranchisement, even the most harmful forms of masculinity can appear as a source of meaning and dignity when alternatives are painfully absent or require ‘unsuccessful’ men to take responsibility for their own marginalization through psychologizing narratives such as that of trauma (ibid., p. 24). Thus, paradoxically, even if video games are a neoliberal medium par excellence—managerial, competitive, meritocratic, individualistic—they are also a space (especially and primarily for men) of compensating for and escaping the problems of actually-existing neoliberalism experienced by working and middle-class people: exploitation, loneliness, stress, anxiety, etc. Changing cultural expectations towards men, arguably, add to the dynamic. In Kimmel’s words: ‘In a world where their entitlement is eroding, where the racism and sexism that supported white male privilege for decades is taking hits left and right, where women are “everywhere they want to be,” and affirmative action has provided at least some opportunities to minorities, the need for a “Band of Brothers” feels stronger than ever’ (Kimmel, 2008, p. 32). This is exemplified by numerous misogynist men’s groups emerging online in the recent decades—pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, gamergaters, incels, etc.—as well as election of the explicitly misogynist and racist state leaders and the resurrection of far-right politics all over the world (Condis, 2018). Reactionary men’s groups have relied heavily on online forums for communication, recruitment, and consolidation, targeting young, lonely, insecure, frustrated, but digitally active and literate men, who also tend(ed) to be gamers (ibid.). For many men, gamers’ online groups and discussion boards, in addition to the games themselves, have become a locus of protest against challenges to their social status.

On the other hand, whereas protest can be seen as one option of gamer masculinities, there is also a great degree of complicity among other male gamer identities. Mendick et al. (2021) argue that the social exclusion, high intelligence, and anti-establishment attitudes that define geek masculinities are becoming revalorized in a new form of hegemonic masculinity represented by geek entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the fictional Iron Man. By extension, online geek masculinities are complicit to this hegemony (ibid.) in that they share the values but not the wealth and public impact of geek entrepreneurs. Celebrity gaming content-creators, streamers, and e-sports champions appear to share a piece of hegemony of geek entrepreneurs and validate the struggles of an everyday gamer. In the figure of a successful gamer, the social reject becomes the hero and thus neutralizes the tensions and inequalities of capitalism. Hence, games offer both a path of protest and a path of complicity for men who struggle to find their place between the demands of neoliberalism and social movements.

Individual Pathologization versus Systemic Care

To reiterate, working and middle-class men have both economic and cultural reasons to feel insecure and seek safety and power in video games. The latter provide both in emphatically masculine ways, and male groups form through and around them to further encourage and maintain the activity as one of the dominant pass-times of technologically advanced societies. What do these connections between games and masculinity mean for the pathologization of gaming through the framework of addiction?

At the very least, the diagnosis of (I)GD risks functioning as a distraction from broader personal and institutional issues surrounding gaming. The industry and culture of video games has been known to cause concerns in society about violence, detachment from reality, abandonment of social connections, and, same as for other deviations, a psychiatric diagnosis provides a comforting explanation—it is just a disorder of an unlucky few (mostly male). Even if such an explanation appears doubtful upon examination, one also ought not to deny that games have been related to a lot of personal suffering—narratives of men’s and boys’ lives lost, destroyed, and impoverished through involvement in gaming are plentiful (Chen et al., 2018). Nonetheless, coming up with a diagnosis for gaming-related issues serves as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it enables individuals at the extreme end of immersion in gaming to be validated in their struggle and receive both professional help and social understanding more easily. On the other hand, it portrays gaming as potentially problematic only on an individual level, relieving developers, gaming communities, and other institutional agents in the (re)production of harmful masculinity ideals in and around games of most responsibility.

Seeing personal gaming issues in a social context makes pathologization questionable. Even if ‘addicted’ gamers’ brains are different from non-gamers or casual gamers, as numerous studies grounding IGD show (Gelūnas, 2019), the demonstration of difference does not explain the motives for excessive gaming, or prioritizing gaming among all other activities. Chen et al. (2018) name achievement, sociability, and immersion as the main motives for gaming found in psychiatric studies, but ambiguities remain—achievement of what, what kind of sociability, immersion into or away from what? I sympathize with the intention of being better able to understand and treat (I)GD through complementing the model with studies of masculinity but disagree with staying focused only on the level of individual treatment and illness.

As an alternative, I follow Fraser et al. (2017), who propose seeing addictions as habits which become problematic in problematic circumstances and find that addiction diagnoses can as often stigmatize and isolate people already in distress as enable the seeking of help. A look at the sociocultural links between video games, masculinities, and neoliberal social norms provides some missing insights into why games have exceptional attraction to men. This attraction is problematic, but it is not (only) an individual problem—it is produced and reproduced institutionally on many levels. ‘Addicted’ men are not only inconvenient agents or victims of (gaming) society but also its products. Video games, as a dominant cultural industry, are one of the primary fields where ideals of hegemonic masculinity are tapped into for commodity value and reproduced. Hence, the relations between masculinity and video games go far beyond questions of individual pathology and sensational extremes. As Taylor and Vorhees argue:

… maintaining critical attention to the ways masculinity is represented and enacted within games and gaming-related communities, on one hand, while also exploring the work games do in priming the masculine subject for support for (and participation in) the overlapping projects of patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism—is crucial to understanding our present cultural moment. (Taylor & Voorhees, 2018, p. 20, p. 20)

Rather than existing prior to gaming or outside of it, contemporary hegemonic masculinity finds there one of its core (re)production engines. Addiction, understood outside of this engine, falls short of a concrete understanding of what makes gaming addictive, and reproduces psychiatric staples rather than providing insights into or sustainable solutions of the actual problem.

The situation of women’s problematic gaming remains even less understood but some available studies also point to the importance of gender practices and relations. In one recent study on gaming disorder, Kneer et al. (2019) challenge the notion that men are more likely to develop problematic gaming habits than women, finding that specific personality traits are more predictive of gaming motivation than gender. However, the study group does not feature ‘addicted’ gamers. In another study of gaming addiction in a US sample of young adults, Stockdale and Coyne (2018, p. 270) also find that ‘female video game addicts displayed hyper-masculine tendencies and gender atypical behavior […] [and] it is also possible that frequently playing video games changes scripts and schemes regarding gender for females.’ The authors hypothesize that lower rates of gaming addiction among females might be related to female gamers being more ashamed of reporting the exttent of their gaming habits due to it being seen as a male activity. In a review of studies on female gaming, Lopez-Fernandez et al. (2019) note that despite more and more women engaging in gaming, they still face obstacles such as online harassment, hypersexualization of female characters leading to decreased self-esteem, and game requirements being geared toward male audiences (for example, in expecting high rates of aggression). It is possible, that if these condition change, the addiction rates across genders might equalize. However, if hegemonic masculinity always depends on subordination of other gender practices, and most mainstream games rely heavily on commodifying hegemonic ideals, then a true gender equality and less harmful cultures of masculinity in and around video games might be a far way off.