Amanda Phillips

This dissertation is a transdisciplinary study of video games and gaming culture that builds on a foundation of race-conscious feminist and queer scholarship, as well as existing paradigms on electronic media and gaming to understand ‘gamer trouble.’ Gamer trouble is the rich interplay between the cultural control structures embedded in a digital game system and the freedom allowed by the possibilities of play, or by the virtuosic disruption of the system through modification, cheating, and emergent behavior. This project works across multiple layers of the gamic system, from technology to representation to community discourse, and brings traditional critical methodology together with digital humanities experimentation like text analysis and image manipulation.