Evil Mothers and Mechanical Caretakers: the Intersection of Robots, Gender, and Monstrosity in Video Games.

The antagonists or enemies the player faces in video games are traditionally labeled 'monsters.' While monsters appear in various shapes, certain types are typically gendered (Stang 2018). The rise of robots as the monstrous Other is especially prevalent in contemporary video games and although many mechanical enemies have no physical body, their monstrous features are nevertheless pronounced by their implied gender, as is the case with the famous video game antagonist GLaDOS from the Portal series (2007-2011). While feminist studies in other fields, such as film studies (e.g. Mackereth 2019), have done intensive research on the intersection of robots, gender, and the monstrous within movies and TV shows like Ex Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016), for video games there have only been a very small number of mentions of the topic (e.g. Dudo et al. 2014). Video games, however, are a medium that not only thrives on the latest advances in technology but cannot even exist without them. Thus they have the potential to produce patterns and stereotypes that cannot be seen in other media. In this article, I propose a typology matrix of the typical features and forms of androids, robots, and AI that can be encountered in video games and how they intersect with the notions of gender and monstrosity. Next to Cohen's (1996) writing, I will employ Halberstam's (1991) and Haraway's (1991) work on the connection between gendered technology and the monstrous. After a short introduction on the entanglement of monstrous robots and gender (Hester 2016, Nomura 2017), I suggest a typology matrix consisting of the distinctive characteristics of robots in video games, divided by their function, their implied gender, the way their gender is conveyed, their signature skills, and their typical traits. Lastly, in an intersectional close-reading, I show which types of matrix are most prevalent in popular contemporary video games in order to analyze which cultural fears they embody, or, in the etymological sense of the word monster, they reveal. To illustrate how popular culture mainly depicts the aforementioned intersections, my corpus consists of best-selling titles such as the Portal and the Fallout series, DOOM (2016), System Shock (1994), The Turing Test (2016), and Detroit: Become Human (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]