Adrienne Shaw’s new book “Gaming at the Edge” touches on representation in video games.

For one of Dr. Adrienne Shaw’s research interviewees, it wouldn’t matter if the chained-blade wielding male protagonist in the game, “God of War,” was replaced with a bunny rabbit.

This way of thinking, along with years of research conducted by Shaw, an assistant professor in Temple’s Media Studies and Production department, is detailed in her new book covering the issue of lacking diversity in video games.

The book, titled “Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture,” discusses what Shaw calls the “intersection of representation” in video games, looking at race, gender, age and other identification factors as a whole.

On Feb. 19, Shaw gave a book talk and signing at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, on the heels of the book discussion she held at Temple’s Annenberg Hall on Feb. 9.

Originally a sociology major at Mount Holyoke College, Shaw said she was always interested in media representation, but never considered communication studies as a possible career until she was encouraged to attend graduate school at Penn, where the study of video games was sparse.

“When I got to graduate school, it turned out that that was really interesting to the faculty there because there was only one other graduate student that was even vaguely interested in video games,” Shaw said.

With video games studies a relatively new field of study overall, Shaw’s interest in the medium needed plenty of research on her part to connect it with media representation.

“A lot of it was basically just teaching myself what games studies was,” she added.