GENDER REPRESENTATION IN TRADING CARD GAMES: WOMEN AND MEN IN “MAGIC THE GATHERING”

Resumo

Gender representation is an aspect of games that may not be part of the main focus of game designers and developers, but it is something that players enjoy very vocally (Rosewater, 2012). Considering the importance of investigating gender representations in games due to their potential harm of, namely, influencing players towards objectification and violence against women, for instance, this article presents an investigation on how women and men are represented in illustrations of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering from a Critical Discourse perspective. Specifically, this study is based on Van Leeuwen (1996)’s representation of social actors framework; it provides several categories to observe how social actors are represented in discourse. The data is comprised of 249 cards from the first expansion self-entitled Theros. Firstly, a quantitative analysis was conducted in order to collect and compare the number of female and male representations in this block of cards; this numeric information allowed a qualitative analysis, observing which elements were more evident in terms of all of Van Leeuwen’s categories. The illustrations were, therefore, analyzed and described through Exclusion, Role Allocation, and Identification categories. The results showed that, although there are some traces of stereotypical gender roles, Magic is progressive in representing women: the number of representations between women and men depicted in the cards is balanced; it was also observed that there are less scantily clad women, and they are more empowered in comparison to other (digital) games.