Gender, Technicity and Computer Games Helen Kennedy, University of the West of England Helen Kennedy has spoken at a number of both academic and industry conferences on the role of women in computer games and computer games culture. She was co-organiser of the first UK international conference in computer games in 2001 entitled Game Cultures and helped to establish the Play Research Group at the University of West of England which organized an international symposium entitled Power Up: Computer Games, Play and Ideology on July 14 and 15th 2003 and is hosting a second symposium on technology and agency in relation to computer games - Playful Subjects May 13th and 14th this year (www.playfulsubjects.org). She has presented conference papers and panels at a number of key computer game conferences since 2001. She was invited speaker at the GDC Europe Academic Summit August 2003 and the Women In Games conference June 2004. About the seminar --------------------------------------------------------------------------------%3EComputer games have emerged as the dominant playful medium for experience and pleasure as well as the most profitable commodification of the potentials of computer processing. Computer games and their appeal to us to be playful with them are for many the first 'hands on' experience they have of developing a 'facility' with technology. This notion of the computer game as critical point of access to technology is what has underpinned the politically motivated 'games for girls movement' and also partly informs the desire to create educational games (two birds with one stone). Importantly, however, computers and computer proficiency are symbolically coded as masculine and unsurprisingly computer games and computer game proficiency have inherited this masculine coding - game design, content, packaging, marketing, exhibition and reviewing all participate in maintaining and elaborating the gendering of games and games play. Using the notion of technicity (the ways in which our tastes, preferences, affinities and aptitudes towards technology shape and inform our identity) this talk will examine the ways in which this masculine symbology is circulated and reinforced and the 'counter-sites' where oppositional or alternative meanings are generated.