How and Why Women Play Shooters
“individual reward, relaxation and reduction of tension, which makes it easier for people
to cope with real life problems”
, they satisfy one of the social functions of media – that
of entertainment. Second, and related to the first, such studies add to a growing area of
communication research known as gender studies, providing additional insight into not
only biological but also cultural understandings of how men and women respond to
entertainment forms differently
. Concerns regarding violence in entertainment media
enrich such investigations.
This project, then, addresses two interrelated questions, namely: How do women
participate in shooter video games? And, following this initial question, Why do they
play them? The uses and gratifications model founds this exploratory study.
Uses and Gratifications: A Brief Overview
The uses and gratifications approach specifies that media audiences are proactive
in their media content and medium selection, and they hope to derive specific
gratifications from their medium involvement. It argues that media audience members are
proactive in their media choices and media content consumption, as per varying sets of
experiences, desires and motivations. These sets can be collapsed into four general
categories, namely surveillance, or the cognitive ordering of the environment; curiosity,
or the need to know about particular events or phenomena; diversion, or escape; and
personal identity, or sense of self-meaning”
.
Although the exact date of the model’s origin is debated among media scholars
U&G studies can be grouped into at least three stages of development
directly traceable to the Payne Fund movie studies of the 1920s
of the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, researchers turned from a more passive audience
understanding, with questions such as what the media do to people, to a more active
2
Convention