Dr. Angela Cirucci has been breaking gaming stereotypes since she was a little girl. At age 5 she remembers when her and her parents brought the first Nintendo home and played together. She also recalls the time her mother beat Mario Brothers. At this time, it was a novelty to have video games.
Dr. Cirucci is a communication and social media researcher and a professor at Kutztown University. In her research, she wanted to bridge the gap between social media and the gaming world by showing their similarities . Her study showed the difference in ways gamers and non-gamers interact with social media.
People in gaming can be a different gender or person through their avatar. When users take advantage of this platform, they can play as someone else and forget the constructs and expectations of the offline world.
“Just remembering being a gamer has no bounds, it doesn’t have anything to do with sexuality, or gender or race or anything, you kind of find the game you like and play it for the reasons you want to play it,” Dr. Cirucci explains.
(Dr. Cirucci’s World of Warcraft avitar taking a selfie- Night Elf Hunter)
She says that in the gaming world, players can be anyone they want to be. People who use this time to be someone else in a place where its excepted do not run in to the same problems as people who don’t have the same outlet. For non-gamers on social media, when they experiment with identity they are more likely to run into issues. This is because there are different expectations when using these platforms, social media tends to be much more binary.
Dr. Cirucci also studies marginalized groups in the gaming world. Games such as World of Warcraft tend to stereotype race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and back ground. Sexism in games is only the beginning she says.
In college, Dr. Cirucci met her now husband who is a PhD in mathematics who also enjoys gamming. She resides in Philly with him during the weekend, however lives in Kutztown during the week. While she is away, her and her husband use games, such as World of Warcraft, as another way of communicating with each other. It’s the modern-day love letter for nerds.
Dr. Cirucci has been a Professor at Kutztown for two years. She went to Rowan University for her undergrad and Temple University for her Phd. At first she was interested in working on the radio, howeve she worked in the field for a year and found it wasn’t the place for her and moved on to academics and research.
Growing up Dr. Cirucci played games because she liked it. Gaming didn’t have that hold that it was a boy or a girl thing, it was just something she enjoyed. For those who haven’t tried gaming Dr. Cirucci says be mindful of the platform, and understand that its been made and marketed towards a type of player. However the more women speak up, get involved, and start creating more games this binary idea that gaming is for men will start to change.