1 Kids and Simulation Games: Subject Formation through Human-Machine Interaction Mizuko Ito mito@itofisher.com Paper for the Annual Meeting of The Society for the Social Studies of Science October, 1997 I'd like to start with a vignette as a way of framing the issues around computer games and subject formation which are the topics of this paper. A girl, maybe ten years old, an adept player of the two-player, bloody, hand-to-hand combat game, Street Fighter, told me about how she once went to the local pizza parlor, where the tough teenage boys hang out, and started playing games of Street Fighter against them. A few quarters later, she had beaten them all. Beaming, she described it as a great moment. Her dad, a young radical and a friend of mine, was also beaming at the retelling, and I found myself grinning as well. I heard the story a number of years ago, before I had begun my fieldwork on kids and computer games. At the time, I reflected on the incident and felt ambivalent about the scene and our responses. Why should we be celebrating a young girl's precocious performance of some of the more violent aspects of male adolescent subjectivity, and the technology that enabled it, even if she did succeed in pushing back at a dominant gender and age hierarchy? Wasn't there something profoundly disturbing about the fact that computer games made action entertainment available for kids to not only see and hear, but to actually manipulate and identify with -- that the day to day competitive antagonisms between kids could now be embodied in a graphic and intensely violent form? Through the course of my dissertation work, as I've observed more and more of kids' play with computer games, I've come to see this vignette as encapsulating many of the issues that have come to frame my work, and now feel that there are dimensions to the interaction between the girl, the teenagers, and Street Fighter that point to much more than a simple reproduction or escalation of