Bodil Stelter: Lecture at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (Japan) on "Gender-related Valuations in The Last of Us franchise“

In June 2020, the highly anticipated sequel to “The Last of Us” game was released. Within hours of its release, the game’s Metascore dropped to 3.3, while previous reviews from journalistic media had accumulated to a score of 95. What had happened? – The common reading of this “review-bombing” event is that players, unhappy with the depiction of queer-characters in the game, assembled and flooded the meta-critic site with 0 ratings to collectively air their grievances, causing yet another debate about homophobia in video game culture. But is this incident representative of video game players’ stance towards the depiction of queer-characters in general? Is homophobia in gaming the hydra that cannot be defeated? Or can these debates give us a deeper, more nuanced insight into players’ negotiations of gender issues in video games? Bodil Stelter’s research focuses on the large-scale discourse of The Last of Us franchise between 2013 and 2023. Her focus is not so much on gender through gender studies or a feminist perspective, but rather on the analysis of values, informed by Nathalie Heinich’s sociological theory of valuations. Gender serves as a vignette through which particular forms of value negotiation can be made visible. Her research question for this paper is: How do players, journalists, and other actors negotiate their values around and through the gender-related themes and events in the Last of Us franchise? For this day, she will focus primarily on The Last of Us 2, demonstrating values on three levels: Character gender negotiations, game message discussions, and meta discourse discussions. It is a presentation of one of the three empirical chapters of her dissertation.

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