1) Gamergate started out with a huge misogynist outburst against (female and feminist) game developer Zoe Quinn. The term “gamergate” itself was coined by right-wing actor Adam Baldwin (of Firefly fame), endorsing a Youtube video which falsely accused Quinn of sleeping with a male journalist in exchange for a good write-up of her game. The misogyny was not subtle.
2) On the other hand, it seems likely that Zoe Quinn was, in fact, emotionally abusing her boyfriend Eron Gjoni. (( I’m a little bothered by the conflation of “cheating on your lover and lying about it” with “abuse.” There is a big difference between what a cheating liar does and what someone who beats up their lover does, even though both of them are doing great harm. There is a good reason only one of these two things is a crime. But probably I’m trying to stop a train that actually left the station years ago. ))
3) But that in no way excuses Gjoni’s abusive acts against his ex-girlfriend (publishing tons of private correspondence and encouraging gamergate), or the huge misogynist flood against Quinn, which Gjoni encouraged while maintaining a very thin shell of deniability. (( I’m in agreement with people who say “Quinn was emotionally abusive and grossly unethical and we shouldn’t make her a hero.” I’m not in agreement with people who deny that Gjoni was also emotionally abusive and grossly unethical, or who say that what happened to Quinn is in any way justified by what she did to Gjoni. ))
4) I don’t see how it’s possible to look at something like the wildly disproportionate, almost incomprehensibly numerous, violent, ((If you don’t think that counts as violent, there’s also this.)) misogynistic overreaction to Anita Sarkeesian criticizing sexism in games, and not conclude that there’s a misogyny problem in the gaming community. And yet, many gamergaters deny that there’s a misogyny problem there at all. To me, this saps them of credibility.
5) Gamergate got huge – too huge to be any one thing. I think there genuinely are gamergaters who aren’t misogynists, don’t participate in abuse, report abuse when they see it, etc.. I’ve met some Gamergaters who seem to be not at all woman-hating (although imo they are making the wrong call by associating themselves with GG). There are tens of thousands of gamergaters, and I’m not comfortable with painting them all with a single brush.
6) But on the other hand, it’s not like Gamergaters couldn’t simply choose another label. They could very easily disassociate themselves from their misogynistic beginnings, if they wanted to, just by creating a new name for “anti-corruption-in-gaming-journalism-but-not-rooted-in-misogyny.” Instead, they choose to associate themselves with a name that is obviously rooted in large-scale misogyny. (( It is true, as I’ve seen some pro-GG folks argue, that the Democrats began as a racist party and we’re mostly willing to overlook that now. But there’s a difference between overlooking a group’s origins in 1782, versus overlooking a group’s origins this past August. ))
7) There’s abuse from both sides. The death threats referred to in my previous post almost certainly came from anti-gamergaters. Less seriously (because not threats) but more seriously (because thousands of times more common), I’ve seen a huge amount of mean and dehumanizing tweets from both sides.
8) But it’s my strong impression (albeit one I cannot prove) that the abuse and death threats are more extreme for female, feminist developers in gaming than for anyone else involved in gaming. (( Adam Baldwin will not be forced to cancel any public appearances by threats of a repeat of the Montreal Massacre. ))
9) But after a certain point of mindless and mean tweets becoming commonplace on both sides, as well as death threats and the like being used repeatedly by the outliers on both sides, I no longer want to associate myself with either side, even if one side is worse.
10) On the substantive issues that they claim to be concerned about, Gamergaters are, imo, mostly wrong. It is not corrupt for critics to discuss sexism in their written criticism of a game. It is not corrupt for an award for indy game design to go to a game that most gamergaters don’t like. Etc, etc.
10½ ) I think gamergaters are also wrong to say that it’s corrupt for a critic or reporter to write about work by someone whose patreon or kickstarter they’ve supported. Supporting a patreon is not a friendship relationship, or an investor relationship; it’s more like supporting someone’s zine by subscribing to it. There is nothing corrupt about critics writing about work that they passionately support. However, this is a somewhat grayer area, and what gamergaters are asking for here – disclosure – seems harmless.
11) The gamergaters I’ve spoken to have a truly terrifying lack of depth in how they view art and art criticism.
12) Some Gamergate actions are – although not literally censorship – doing pragmatic harm to freedom of speech. Gamergaters attempt to use economic coercion to shut up reporters and publications with opposing views. This is contemptible. I have not seen a single gamergater disagree with this common and much-publicized gamergate tactic. (( And yes, I have looked. I’m sure there are some out there – there are, after all, so many thousands of gamergaters – but any gamergater who questions these economic-strongarm tactics must be an extreme outlier. ))
13) I think gamergate has vastly increased the number of feminists and nerds who parse these issues as “feminists vs nerds” conflicts. Unfortunately, this parsing erases the existence of feminist nerds, who comprise approximately 99% of everyone I’m friends with ever, so I’m really annoyed by this.
This roughly summarizes my views as a gamer who wouldn’t associate himself with feminism if someone paid him. So you’ve got at least one confirming result from outside your own camp.
1. Is definitely true and the extent to which gamergater kids pretend otherwise is just sad. I was there; they can’t tell me that I didn’t see what I saw.
6. Also needs emphasized. At this point calling yourself a gamergater because you care about media ethics is like calling yourself a 9/11 truther because you care about government transparency. We’re allowed to make negative assumptions about you if you do this. Making assumptions about someone based on membership in a political advocacy group isn’t prejudice; declaring commonalities of beliefs and perspectives is literally the purpose of collective assembly into a political advocacy group.
8. You’re probably right about this.
10. Gamergater’s understanding of media corruption is just pathetic. They’ve got this laser-like focus on who’s dating who in Seattle, and this weird belief that reviews will somehow be “biased” in completely impossible to describe ways because of it. Meanwhile, half the gaming publications out there earn money by selling advertising to game companies, giving them a direct financial incentive to engage in behavior that can harm consumers. And the other half of gaming publications earn their money by clicks and page views, giving them a direct financial incentive to ALSO engage in behavior that can harm consumers. And yet this is never an issue. This is the ONLY issue! And yet it never comes up because we apparently need to hear more about someone writing a pointless puff article about a new game that’s still under embargo, while possibly dating someone from an entirely unrelated division of a huge corporation connected in some way to the game. Argh.
10.5. I’ve always been confused by this as well. Did Kickstarter start producing dividends when I wasn’t looking? The only harm I can come up with here is that someone who’s kickstarted something isn’t entering into the review process with a complete open mind- they’ve already got expectations and hopes that will color their review. But you know what else does that? Being a fan of other games in the same franchise. Being a gamer who likes games and gets excited about them. Everything, basically.
11. Oh my yes. Example- a little bit ago some feminist outlet claimed that the latest Wolfenstein’s difficulty menu (google it, check google images) was full of “toxic masculinity.” Now you can argue about this if you want. But the narrative that had legs with the gamergater’s was that 1) it’s only a difficulty menu so it doesn’t have messages to begin with, and 2) it can’t have toxic masculinity because it is a shoutout to the original Wolfenstein. Both of these arguments are ridiculous. The menu clearly uses ideas about masculinity to humorously caricature the different difficulty options (easiest difficulty is a man in baby clothes, hardest is a grinning badass). And the fact that these were expressed before doesn’t rob them of expressive content. You can argue that this isn’t toxic, make your case and go for it, but there are clearly ideas being expressed which are capable of being approved of or disliked.
12. I’m not sure that this position can be squared with your general support for keeping “calling people out as racist” open as an option. For reference, I agree with your position on the racism thing- it has to be an option. Well, so does loudly proclaiming that you refuse to purchase products from anyone who associates with a business you find despicable.
The only thing I can add is- feminists are really good at pointing out that other people’s bad behavior is due to systemically held bad attitudes. But… the fact that the anti gamer gater crowd would also throw around death threats and generally behave in an awful manner was predictable, and it was predictable because of systemically held bad attitudes among feminists. As you note, feminists aren’t as bad as gamergaters. I think you’re right. But the reasons you’re not willing to associate yourself with the anti gamergater crowd are essentially the same reasons I won’t associate myself with feminism. Being “less bad” isn’t enough.
Is cheating and lying about it emotional abuse? I mean, I guess It depends on the form of the lying (possibly the cheating too?). But as a generality it seems more like “I dated an asshole.”
Meh. Makes me think of eg’s post on bad sex on Feministe. Sometimes relationships are angry and damaging and bad.
I think it can be emotional abuse, Mandolin, depending on context. But, then, I am biased on this subject.
Hi, Ampersand! I’ve been lurking for a while, decided to comment.
I have to say, this makes little sense to me. We’re talking about what is mostly (with a handful of outliers in either direction), a dispute between feminists and anti-feminists. So what it sounds like you are saying here is that even though you are a feminist, you don’t want to be on the feminist side of an argument if there are enough other people on the feminist side of an argument who behave badly. But what does that have to do with the substance? Gamergate is a virulently misogynistic entity and people should decry it, even if some other people who decry it don’t behave well, the same way people should support anti-racism or trans liberation or whatnot even if some people are mean on Tumblr. I could understand not wanting to be part of a particular organization (formal or informal) because its members behave badly, but there is no such organization (formal or informal) as “Anti-Gamergate” – there are only a bunch of semi-random people who don’t like Gamergate.
My problem with Gamergate on this one is not that they are boycotting organizations and suggesting that others boycott those organizations. Are people just supposed to keep patronizing a company no matter how much harm they think it is doing? Is it somehow incompatible with a culture of free speech for them to say to others, including corporate entities, “I think this company is doing harm, for these reasons, and for that reason I’d like to encourage you to stop patronizing them”? Why? Do you oppose all boycotts? If they are threatening violence to individuals or entities who continue to support the companies, that’s very different, but I’m not sure why a culture of free speech requires people to give companies their money or to refrain from making suggestions to others about spending and values. My problem with Gamergate on this one, again, is that the ideals they are serving are wrong and harmful.
Regarding the abuse question: Keep in mind that there is no such thing as mutual partner abuse, because for asshole behavior to be partner abuse, it requires a pattern of one partner nonconsensually using power to control another – in other words, it requires a power imbalance. It is unfortunately not rare for abusers to claim that they are the ones being abused, which is why good anti-partner-abuse programs should have a screening process (but unfortunately few, and especially, few that focus primarily on straight cis people, do). So cheating and lying are not necessarily abuse, but could be if taking place in the context of a pattern of power and control. In the case of Quinn and Gjoni, I don’t have a real sense of who abused whom because I haven’t pored through the info (it didn’t seem relevant to whether Quinn or anyone else should be stalked or targeted for misogynistic attacks).
I think that what Gjoni described was emotional abuse– it might not have been if Zoe had successfully concealed evidence of her infidelity, but what actually happened was she kept pressuring Gjoni to ignore what he was perceiving.
Patrick, you say ” the fact that the anti gamer gater crowd would also throw around death threats and generally behave in an awful manner was predictable, and it was predictable because of systemically held bad attitudes among feminists.”
However, acceptance of death and rape threats were already in place, and they were used against a woman who was just writing books about programming (she wasn’t especially feminist)– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra. I admit I’m assuming that programmer culture and gaming culture aren’t wildly different.
There’s a little game I play to test whether I’ve unfairly dismissed the GamerGate folks and their concerns.
I head to the subreddit where they tend to congregate, Kotakuinaction (They also congregate elsewhere, but it’s apparently also full of child porn, so I’ll pass, thanks), and check how many of the 25 links on the front page have anything to do with video game journalistic ethics, as opposed to lashing out at their opposition or attacking named women, “feminism,” or “SJWs.”
Right now it’s 1. I’ve never seen it hit more than 3. Swipes at their perceived enemies are probably 75%.
If your movement is ‘really about’ something, I would expect it to take up a somewhat larger chunk of your time.
—Myca
Is 8chan even still up? Last I heard, that domain had been seized because of the content you mentioned (but I’m not even going to try surfing over there to find out if it’s still down).
I kinda see Lirael’s point about not wanting to align with a side, but I kind of understand where you’re [Amp] coming from, too. It’s a little like how I am an atheist, but I don’t want to be associated with many of the people in movement atheism. And I myself would probably clarify that I don’t like Gamergate, but don’t feel that I’m part of an anti-Gamergate movement. On the other hand, I make fun of Gamergate stuff from time to time on Facebook, and I’m looking forward to seeing Brianna Wu at a convention (I haven’t followed her closely but like the writing/interviews I’ve seen from her, and knowing her as “one of the people who’s on the panels at a convention I go to” makes Gamergate feel more personal), so I don’t think it would be honest to say I’m not anti-Gamergate.
If you don’t like the Gamergate movement, it seems misleading to say that you’re “not anti-Gamergate”–but that isn’t what you said, it was that you “no longer want to associate myself with either side”–but it takes a close reading to see the difference.
#13–yes. Encouragingly, I have seen quite a few people on We Hunted The Mammoth (including David Futrelle) talking about how they play video games and don’t appreciate being spoken for by the gamergaters.
Probably most of the nerds/geeks I know offline are either feminists or feminist-leaning. But the one MRA-ish* guy I’ve met was also a nerd/geek.
*”MRA-ish” because he said some of the talking points but I don’t know if he actually interacts with other MRAs or calls himself an MRA.
#12: I’m not sure why you didn’t mention it–maybe it was simply too obvious, maybe because it doesn’t have quite as broad support among Gamergaters–but harassment, death threats, threats of mass murder if talks are not cancelled–are pretty big threats to a free speech culture, too.
This is the first I’ve ever heard of 8chan, but I did some googling.
Gosh, anyone would think that the domain had been seized by the FBI or something.
No the site appears to have been temporarily suspended by Cloudflare, its US-based hosting provider, in response to complaints. The site is back up now, with the same host, so I’m guessing the complaints were investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, because, you know, hosting child porn is illegal in the US, and Cloudflare would be criminally liable if it knowingly facilitated this. (I don’t doubt that it hosts some pretty awful content.)
The sequence of events appears to be: 1 The subcadre of the gamergate crew which used to frequent 4chan got kicked off and decamped to 8chan. 2. At least one Journalist ties gamergate generally to the alleged pedophile material on 8chan. 3. 8chan suffers a DDOS. 4. A week later, 8chan’s host responding to a “swell of complaints” about CP suspends it pending investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conjecture a link between these events.
The most interesting thing about that dailydot piece is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that any pedophilia-related content has been posted by gamergaters. Nor does it say that any such content appears in gamergate channels. The sole point appears to be that a lot of highly-dubious content is also hosted by the provider used by gamergate. You could say the same about feminist redittors. Heck at one point you could have said something similar about Alas a Blog.
The Daily Dot piece is a classic smear-by-association job. Now why would a journalist want to do that to a movement which is critical of journalism?
You mean the exact same way that I chose to create a new name for “criticism-of-feminism-but-not-rooted-in-mysogyny”, in order not to be associated with antifeminists?
Yeah, that worked really well.
Thank you, Amp. I’d wondered where this ridiculousness about “feminists v. nerds” had come from (as well as the insistence on identification with “nerd” as…a thing, but that seems to be something else).
I find myself mainly annoyed by having to pay attention to something that’s primarily about games and people who fervently play games. I used to play games, and I’ve tried again recently, because I have a kid, and kids like games and for good reasons. But I’m just not interested, mostly because I spend nearly all my time playing Actual Middle-Aged Life, which is oompty-million levels harder than any board or video game I’ve ever met, and has stakes involving Actual Homelessness, Actual Loss of Custody, Actual Responsibility for Getting Real Child to Real Adulthood, Actual Inability to Retire when Actually Old, Actual Death of Friends, Actual Legislation, and An Actual Deadline for Getting One’s Own Actual Work Done (Actual Death). No pause, no do-over, no reset with changed parameters.
The games are cool and both the misogyny and the bled-into-real-life whomping ethics are real, but too much of the time I feel I’ve wandered into a fight over what’s for lunch.
eta: The aspect of GG I’m most interested in (almost the only one I’m interested in) is legal, which is why I’ve been in touch with Mark Potok at SPLC about it. There are laws on the books to do with online threats, stalking and harassment, and the point at which people are being driven out of their homes and hiring security details is the point at which to use them. The problem appears to be finding lawyers conversant with the issues and the technology. I do not see, for instance, why Twitter has not been forced to hand over the registration info of the accounts threatening Brianna, and why cops have not shown up at those addresses. Nor do I see why we’re not talking, in legal terms, about the issues related to hosting nests for what can properly be called hate groups, particularly if members of those groups are going to go out making credible threats against the objects of hatred.
I don’t know which lawyers are teaching themselves about these things and extending practice into these areas, and it takes forever for new issues to show up in law school curricula, but I think it’s time.
Re, point 6:
The whole post is well worth a read.
Daran, that was an honest question from me, so thanks for the answer.
I read the post you linked to in comment #13, and I didn’t find it persuasive. The author seems to have a wider and subtler view of what corruption in journalism entails than most of the GamerGate folks I’ve read, although I think his perception of the frequency of such corruption is so flawed as to warp the rest of his argument away from reality (and from the bulk of the rest of GamerGaters, too). But some of it–and particularly the point you cite above–has a sort of conspiracy flavor to it, a “since people want to weed out corruption in gaming journalism, the corrupt gaming journalists have been spreading lies about us and therefore you can’t trust anything that’s been said about us” underpinning, and I just don’t think that’s true, partially because I can go and look (and have gone and looked) at stuff like various GamerGate blog posts, fora, Twitter comments, etc myself, and yep: the misogyny is strong. Not 100% prevalent, but very common. The cited criticism of GamerGate may not apply to that blog post creator in particular, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrue in general.
The issue isn’t just avoiding a name that’s “become associated” with hating on women. The issue is that the name literally references a specific event of hating on women.
@Daran – jesus, and I thought my posts were long. I guess it’s nice that a new group of people is noticing what journalism is and is not. Here’s who else has been shocked by these things: everyone who’s had anything to do with journalism, or been covered by journalists, in the last 25 years and is over the age of maybe 25. Once again, I think what this underscores is the extraordinary narrowness of the POV, and the naivete about things offscreen, in the GG arguments.
Journalism hasn’t been All the President’s Men in at least 35 years. It hasn’t been the Gray Lady in at least 15. It’s been indistinguishable from PR and gossip for at least a decade. And I mean that literally: if you go to j-school now, you’re going to spend a lot of time learning to do PR, because that’s who has money to pay journalists, people buying PR. Science journalism is in a hell of a state outside the community Bora managed to rebuild before he wrecked it with his nonfunctional fly, because very few people reporting sci stories have any idea what they’re talking about. The same is true in almost every other kind of broadsheet journalism: political, foreign-affairs, business. And in journalism that’s actually a collection of fanboys who can write, like music and games, the distance from old-fashioned legit journalism can be measured in parsecs — and that’s always been true. Off the top of my head, the only kind of journalism I’d take as a guide to anything but “story approximately here” is regulatory, because that kind of journalism’s full of nerds, and even then you have to know who’s writing, because some people are smarter and more careful than others.
Is the shriveling-up of real reporting consequential, sure. But until a group of young journalists who aren’t terrified of what people online are saying about them actually comes together to starve together and go do actual reporting under some coherent masthead, well, this is how it will go. These things are hard not just to organize but to maintain: you can’t live on nothing if you have a family, and most people want eventually to go have families. And I do mean DIY starving – the indies that were refuges for people who really wanted to be journalists started dying long ago. The Boston Phoenix closed last year, abruptly, and the Chicago Reader was bought and fired its terrific editor, Allison True, a few years back. They struggle on but belong to the Sun now, and it’s a matter of time. Why the allergy to the DIY starving I don’t know. I used to blame j-schools for teaching kids that they were owed actual livings, but who knows now.
Ampersand (and others), can you explain what you mean by “misogyny”, particularly in the context of the origins of gamergame? I remember that there was a lot of what could be called slut-shaming directed at one person, but I’m not sure what you’re referring to outside that.
For the most part, I see gamergate as the natural reaction to what happens when advocates of a particular tribe of politics decide that interfering with peoples “real” lives in response to something they’ve said (online or otherwise). Online feminists have been using these techniques in an attempt to enforce their political perspectives for years. These techniques are those that are supported by a majority of gamergaters (as distinct from physical threats), which they’ve chosen to use after seeing them used effectively elsewhere. I’ve don’t think I’ve been that supportive of these things regardless of who is using them.
The other aspect is related to the whole “sea lion” thing. I get the impression that a large number of gamers are frustrated at the frequency with which social justice politics is being covered in games media. Gaming is their escape from the bullshit of day to day life and it’s going to be tireing to have that escape constantly invaded by people trying to put their political opinons in your face. I suspect the this sentiment is driving the movement as much as the complaints about actual corruption or engineered bias.
The end result being an endless tribal war between gamergate vs anti-gamergate/SJW with most energy going towards petty point scoring.
Speaking as a life-long video game-player who enjoys escapism, I don’t like men screaming sexist vitriol at me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. I don’t like being called an interloper or an invader in my own subculture. I don’t appreciate “tribal politics” people of the right-wing, racist persuasion playing gatekeeper with my toys, either. I don’t appreciate self-appointed guardians o’ nerd pretending that people of color don’t like science fiction, video games, and comic books. I don’t appreciate being called a would-be point-scorer or an attention-seeker for merely existing and for choosing where and where not to spend my money, my energy, and my time.
Desipis #17 and mookie #18 – Which builds on what I was saying above about games’ relation to adult life. It’s not a new idea that games are in a very real sense preparation for adult life, for playing for real and for keeps. So it matters quite a bit what those games are about. If your games are teaching you that casual violent misogyny is dandy, and that winning is about killing, what exactly are you being prepared for?
I find myself thinking about this, too, working on a chem-ed game that people, in particular women, might actually want to play, and play for a long time. Escapism is a good part of it — but what are people escaping from, and what do they find that’s better than real life in the game? It occurred to me that a major draw for women would simply be respect. In this game, you are treated with the same sort of respect accorded in everyday fashion to men. What an amazing thing that would be for so many women. But if this is why you’re escaping, why, if you’re an adult, the game is more compelling than life, then something is very wrong with life. And rather than escape, the thing to do is to fix what’s real. The advantage in being an adult is that you’re allowed to try to do these things — you get to do, for real.
I’m saying this, incidentally, as a product of times when “game” meant “old board game” like parcheesi or backgammon, or “new board game” like Sorry! or Monopoly or Diplomacy, or “video game” like Space Invaders, or RPG like early D&D. Absolutely nothing there had the violence or the misogyny of something as currently-sweet as GTA. In fact when I first tried Minecraft, I was put off by the fact that the first thing I was supposed to do, showing up in this idyll, was to destroy plants and animals. But this is an unobjectionable children’s game now.
Nobody, in 1975, found it necessary to play violent, misogynistic games as a form of “escapism”. Here’s how guys escaped, communally: They played cards and drank and smoked, and, as now, watched other guys beat each other up, if they liked that kind of thing. Or, if young enough, they went to clubs and thrashed a lot. So I find it very disturbing that so many guys now say they need to blow off steam by murdering and raping in a fictional world.
Gaming is their escape from the bullshit of day to day life and it’s going to be tireing to have that escape constantly invaded by people trying to put their political opinons in your face.
You mean political opinions like “heroes are white dudes, black and brown people are sidekicks or enemies”? Or “females only exist as romantic interests or fucktoys”? Or “no fat chicks allowed”? Or “gay people, how are they formed”? Or “we don’t consider you to be a real gamer, only people who fit a narrow social and racial demographic are real gamers, and we don’t give a fuck about your existence”? Yes, it is indeed absolutely tiring to have one’s escape invaded by those political opinions. Equally tiring is the attitude that political opinions aren’t really political when they cater to your interests, that’s just the market talking, people – but suddenly, when they cater to somebody else’s interests, OMG SAVE US FROM POLITICS.
@Amp, what Patrick said – and you’re putting yourself up as a candidate for the Ross Douthat Golden Mean Fallacy Award, here. The issue is not whether a number of people on ‘both sides’ have behaved inexcusably; the issue is that GG has an organized, hardcore group of people who are in the movement precisely because it gives them a new set of targets for this behavior. That’s why EG deliberately cultivated ‘chan culture to help him get back at his ex. There did not spring from the earth a newly-formed cadre of doxxers. These are the same people who call up the parents of teenage suicide victims to mock them and who call in SWAT teams during streams so they can listen to people hopefully getting shot by law enforcement.
Absolutely nothing there had the violence or the misogyny of something as currently-sweet as GTA
Er. You do remember that the whole point of Space Invaders was to shoot aliens with a turret gun. Shooting things and beating people up (or trying to avoid others shooting you and beating you up) also being the main theme of most video games of the time – to the point that largely nonviolent games like Q*Bert were considered innovative and remarkable. The whole goal of early D&D was to kill monsters and take their stuff; misogyny was perhaps not so much of an issue because women were almost entirely absent, but that came later in D&D with the addition of the evil, matriarchal drow (with some questionable racial attitudes thrown in!).
I say this not to defend GTA, but to express bafflement at the idea that violence or misogyny in games are newfangled. I’m not sure why Minecraft would be disturbing to someone who was OK with, say, Joust.
mythago – There was a considerable difference between Space Invaders and the realism (and human target-ism) of later games. And I never played Joust; there was no beating-up in any of the games we had. Most of the games were maze/prize-oriented – jump over this and get a jewel, that sort of thing.
The D&D of the time was interesting, and if you were a girl, then there were girls in the game. Because everything relied on the DM, and you presumably weren’t going to play with someone who was fantasizing about rape and abuse of women, these things didn’t turn up in the game; you were simply part of the party.
I should say that it *never occurred to me* that my DMs would put things like that into our world, btw. Monsters, treasure, alliances, diplomacy, commerce, yes. Women as fucktoys and points for wanton killing, no. I don’t remember anyone simply going on a spree for kicks.
…alright, in defense of the hobby, I have to point out that the “misogyny” of games themselves tends to be vastly overstated. I have a steam library of about a hundred games, and I’m scrolling through them right now- zero of them involve women as “fucktoys,” or “points for wanton killing [of women].”
The closest games come to that would be an open world crime sim like GTA, and even then, these only qualify in the most technical of senses. Or the occasional game made explicitly for the purpose of cashing in on moral outrage against gaming. You know- the Piss Christ’s of the gaming world. And I’m not inclined to count those since they exist because of the critics, and not the other way around.
The sexism of games is usually more the sexism of a football game, a superhero comic book, or a beer commercial. They are products aimed at male audiences. The implied “you” or point of view character is often male, with women used as decoration, or at least with significant decorative elements.
The usual “misogyny” in a video game is something like this: the game offers male and female character models- the males are designed to look like badasses a guy would like to play as, and the females are designed to look like sexy badasses a guy would like to look at while playing, meaning, a guy would like to play as.
That’s… about 90% of the fight over the actual games themselves rather than the culture surrounding them. An additional one percent is the occasional video game that probably should offer female character models but doesn’t. Another one percent is the occasional game from Japan that pretends gay people don’t exist. And the remainder is arguing about Grand Theft Auto with people who sound like a grumpy old man who hasn’t seen a moving picture, but did read an article about this Hitchcock fellow who makes smut about naked women getting murdered in showers, and knows exactly what he thinks about naked woman murder porn.
Now the culture AROUND gaming, yeah, that’s got issues. OH yeah.
Incidentally, mythago, I understand the impulse to say “it’s ever been so”, but in fact it hasn’t been. I’ve been alive since the ’60s and spent much of my life online since the early ’90s, and until fairly recently it’s been not only possible but easy to play games and wander around online without encountering this sort of ravening horrible bullshit, the violence and the concerted attacks specifically on women. We’re also not talking about women turning up with a temperance movement, Tipper-Gore-style, but a suggestion that there be gaming spaces free of misogyny and racism. Also relatively new, though, is this flash-fury online in which “I disagree with you here” means “I hate you and am trying to destroy you and all that is good and holy in the world.” And I see that all over the online debates and arguments about feminism.
I do think the thing you keep pointing to — organization — is instrumental there, and again that’s why I’ve been talking to Potok, who’s relatively unacquainted with all this stuff. And to be fair I think he’s been dealing with what have been more immediate problems: abuse of children, immigrant women, prisoners in schools and jails, etc. But this stuff is becoming immediate in that sense, too.
Louise:
Games are not teaching anyone that casual violent misogyny is dandy. Games aren’t “teaching” anyone anything in that sense. The idea that people uncritically assimilate their gaming experiences into their actions in real life is bogus. It’s been shown to be bogus when it comes to violence and its still bogus when it comes to sexism.
It’s not an escape from a “very wrong” life, it’s an escape from the normal regulations and restrictions of real life. It’s a form of play, which is a psychologically healthy thing to do. It’s an exploration of the aspects of life and human psyche that people don’t get to explore in real life.
Mookie@18, I’m not saying you have to like it. I saying you should avoid the things you don’t like, rather than try to force others to change to your liking.
From the sounds of it you’re doing the former and hence I wouldn’t call you a point-scorer or attention seeker.
mythago@20,
Are these views being published in mainstream media? For example, there’s any number of mainstream media publications telling their readings about the horrible misogyny in GTA V. Are there a large number of mainstream media articles that I’ve missed stating how CJ from GTA-SA shouldn’t have been black, or how Lara Croft in the new tomb raider just had too much personality and not enough tits?
This isn’t about what some random people on the internet are saying. If there’s some random people saying things you don’t like just avoid them. It’s a little bit harder to avoid those same opinions when they’re on the front page of many of the major sites where you get news about games and the gaming world.
Louise, I don’t know if I think contemporary video games are exceptionally or unusually violent and misogynistic when compared to their counterparts in other media. Popular culture tends to (consciously or no) reinforce the status quo and replicate power structures. Singling out video games feels a little bit like taking rap to task for its sexism while ignoring or hand-waving away the sexism in all other pop genres . Neither would I readily agree that puzzle games are free from bias, any more than I would say an IQ test is an objective means of measuring intelligence across different cultures.
And I do understand the compulsion to write off the more ubiquitous games as irretrievably homosocial, violent, racist, jingoistic, and woman-hating, but then where does that leave the women who can’t or won’t do so? Who’ve been there all their lives and don’t want to be pushed out or erased? Their desires matter. The work they’ve done thus far should be recognized. GG has always been, pace some apologists for the harassment, about a schism within the gaming and developing communities, between those agitating for change, for more inclusive storylines, for the excising of banal but persistent instances of sexism and racism, for eliminating the woman/girl as victim/prize motif, for creating more playable characters of color, for less heteronormativity. For more diversity and more choices and more voices, period.
As for games being childish rather than edifying: eh, that’s not a speculative assertion that moves me. As for all leisure activities needing to be preparation for adulthood, I give you sport or chess: war-games for babies. What complete strangers do to unwind after a long day in The Real World (dealing with all the grown-up things you listed in #12) doesn’t really concern me. I’m not worried about games stunting a person’s emotional growth, making them violent, any more than I think heavy metal creates satanists, too much gardening leads to too much solitude, or too much embroidery ruins my eyes.
And, just to reiterate: gamers aren’t a white, male monolith. Never have been. Women have always been here. POC have always played. There’s a reason why the pro-GG outfit targeted female developers, female critics, and famous female gamers: they want to cling to the notion that they belong to a super secret, intelligent, nerdy, anti-jock, anti-politically correct, he-man woman-hater’s club, and hate to be reminded that that club never existed except in their heads. Jocks game. Women game. Left-wingers game. Working class folk game. Being a gamer doesn’t make you special, different, or an oppressed minority. Critiquing games for what they lack — treating it as an art form subject to close observation and analysis, academic theory, and criticism — is not an attack on gamers themselves. That’s the great thing about the interwebs being accessible to almost everyone; you can’t just lie and expect no one to notice.
Great! Can you tell that to the GG people? That it’s okay to analyze video games? That they don’t have to read feminists if they don’t want to?
Diddums. They can start their own sites, then, and spend their money elsewhere. That’s what women have been told for years and that’s exactly what we’ve done.
As a side note, as a roleplayer, I deeply resent that ‘gamer’ has come to mean video gamer.
I realize that ship has long since sailed, but still: dammit.
—Myca
@Patrick: I’m not sure how GTA qualifies in ‘only the most technical of senses’; it’s a ginormous and lucrative franchise that’s in its fifth incarnation. That’s more like the Mona Lisa than Piss Christ. And sure, most games don’t rise to that level of kill-hookers-get-points misogyny; it’s also true that most games are, as you say, at least beer-commercial-level sexist. That’s kind of the problem. They don’t have to be. Slapping a better jubbly engine on a game with crappy mechanics and boring gameplay isn’t going to save it, no matter how many times the marketing guys stand in front of the mirror and chant “sex sells”.
@desipis, I’ll put it more directly: You were whining that people were trying to inject politics into escapism. You’re wrong because the politics were always there. It’s just that when they were politics that don’t bother you, it’s easy to say “just go do something else” to people who object.
(As a side note, I find it hilarious how selective this whining about ‘political stuff in games’ and ‘it’s just escapism’ is; Bioshock Infinte gets praised for its interesting and thoughtful political approach, and Assassin’s Creed IV snuck in absolute fuck tons of politics about race, gender and class that nobody bitched about because they were too excited about the pirate ships.)
@Louise: I have been around and a gamer about as long as you, and yeah, it really was ever thus. Arcade games were pretty uniformly violent, even the ones that didn’t involve shooting. (Unless we’re only classifying active violence directed by the player as ‘violence’, of course. I thought getting squashed in Frogger was violence.) Mortal Kombat, anyone? There was plenty of online harassment directed at women – remember the debate about MUDs and whether sexualized threats to a character ‘counted’ as bad behavior if they weren’t directed to the player per se?
Regarding D&D well, we were talking about violence in games, correct? (Unless the tree-punching in Minecraft is somehow tied into misogyny, which I don’t think you meant to say.) It’s not really in question that D&D, which developed as an extension of table top wargames, was centered around violence and trophy-taking for gain; there was less overt misogyny baked into the game because it just didn’t pay much attention to women, for the most part.
Mookie:
I suspect their response might be something like:
So much here I want to respond to! But there’s also so much Hereville I need to draw!
So I’m going to just respond to a single comment, for now. :-(
Lirael #4:
First of all, welcome to the comments! Thank you for de-lurking. Although (as you’ll see) I disagreed with much of what you wrote, I liked your comment, and I hope you’ll keep on commenting.
You wrote:
This is a very fair question.
There’s no doubt that I am on the feminist side here (a brief aside to Mythago, out of 13 items in my post, 8 criticize Gamergate exclusively – I’m far from a “both sides are equally wrong” position. But nor am I going to take a “my tribe is 100% right and their tribe is 100% scum” position, because that’s not the reality I observe. End of aside.) When it comes to arguments on the substance, both regarding misogynistic harassment and regarding including observations about gender, race, and other social justice issues in reviews of games, I think feminists are clearly on the right side, and I’ve said so and will go on saying so.
But there are other substantive issues involved here. The feminists who seem the most involved in fighting #gamergate, that I’ve encountered, are on Twitter and Tumblr – And a disturbing number of Twitter/Tumblr feminists use insults like “neckbeard” and “fedora” a lot.
Neckbeard is especially problematic, I think, because it has become so linked to anti-fat canards that I don’t think the two are separable (and I’ve once lost my patience for it). But there are also big problems with words like “fedora” used the way that some Tumblr/Twitter feminists use them.
To quote a post from Thing of Things:
I’m not talking about all feminists- outside certain circles of the internet, most of the feminists I know would be like “what’s a neckbeard? I’ve never even heard that.” But inside the gamergate wars, it’s common enough so that I – as someone who identifies in many ways with “neckbeards” et al – feel like I’m getting stung a lot. It certainly won’t make me a gamergater, but it does make me feel that in some substantive ways, a lot of the anti-gamergate crowd is not on my side.
* * *
Of course, measured by the exact same ruler (and ignoring for a moment the legions of other things I disagree with them about), gamergaters aren’t on my side either. Already on this thread, a pro-gamergate poster (whose comment wasn’t approved) has posted to helpfully inform me that I am stupid and fat and don’t have a girlfriend, and so on. This pathetic genre of attack is something I’ve seen numerous times from MRAs, gamergaters, and anti-feminists.
* * *
Lirael continues:
I feel a bit like I’m talking to someone who says “there’s nothing wrong with me giving away my beloved dog’s puppies to responsible owners, is there?” I’d answer, of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But then the person says “okay, therefore, you can’t object to puppy mills.”
I’m not saying you’d favor puppy mills (of course you wouldn’t). I’m just trying to say, the scale and level of organization of an activity matters, and I don’t think it’s possible to have a reasonable discussion of this if you’re unwilling to acknowledge that. Just as an individual selling a puppy is not the same thing as a puppy mill, an individual choosing not to buy a product is not the same as a large-scale, organized boycott.
So it’s fine with me if a conservative Christian decides not to watch “The Ellen Show” because he doesn’t like Ellen’s politics, or if a liberal decides not to watch “Duck Dynasty” for a similar reason. And of course it’s also fine if they talk about what they’re doing to their friends. But I think it would be wrong for either of those folks to raise what they’re doing to the level of a large-scale organized boycott, as gamergate has done. Because large-scale organized boycotts are actually a very powerful weapon.
You asked me if I think all boycotts are wrong. No, I don’t. For instance, I’m totally in favor of boycotts to change business practices – so if a business has a policy of not hiring lgbt people, I’m all for boycotting them until they give in and change their policy.
But I think that boycotts that are intended to punish people for publicly stating their political opinions are wrong. I think that freedom of speech, broadly understood, includes being against using either economic or physical coercion to make people shut up. And threatening someone’s livelihood is a form of economic coercion.
So that’s my view, in a nutshell. I’m not saying anyone is obliged to buy anything, or to not talk about why they’re not buying. But the use of large-scale, organized boycotts to punish disliked speech is not the same thing as my personal choice not to shop at WalMart, and using economic coercion to shut people up (rather than persuading them) is not the right way to bring about change. IMO.
Hi, Mookie — I’m not singling out video games. They’re just what shows up, in the form of GG recently, in all my feeds, making themselves and their culture unavoidable. I haven’t listened to rap since the late 80s and my media intake is in no way representative of popular culture, hasn’t been for a long time. Stupid, violent, racist, sexist, and otherwise ghastly movies and TV shows are highly avoidable for me. (And for my kid, who may be the only sixth-grader in the country who’s got Norman Lear and Newton as heroes.) Gamergate and other emanations from reddit and chans and the gaming world, no.
Games do teach. It’s video games that made me part of the first generation of young pilots to whom IFR was natural: make the needle go here, make the needle go there, mind the other gauges, not a prob. The military is well aware of their training use long before the kids show up in recruitment centers. Younger kids who have absorbed “don’t hurt; don’t kill” have to actively overcome that training to enjoy games that do involve hurting and killing other people and animals: they know they aren’t supposed to do these things, that they aren’t good for people and animals, and they don’t want to do them. So I think the norms in these games are probably quite important, more important the bigger a part they are of people’s lives, and maybe they’re uniquely important in games, because games involve doing, participating.
To say, “there’s no point in focusing in one area when it’s everywhere” is, I think, to say “you can’t do anything,” and that’s usually wrong.
I don’t object at all to people within gaming trying to make the things they care about more humane, and I’m not at all dismissive of that. But do I want to read endless screeds about whether yet another archetypal 2D character is slightly more or less sexist in doing [list of hackneyed things]? No. Really no. Particularly not when it comes with litanies of four thousand other such characters and badly-made stories for context and comparison. I’m also uninterested in whether someone I don’t know cheated on her boyfriend, whom I also don’t know. (I’m not really all that interested in whether people I do know are cheating on their spouses unless I’ve trusted them to take care of important things for me, and then what I’m concerned about is that they’re liars. Otherwise I don’t see it as being my business.)
As for gameplaying in adulthood…you know, I just don’t know many middle-aged adults for whom this is a big part of their lives. They don’t have time. By the time you’re done working, doing whatever it is you do with kids or other family (including taking care of aging relatives), keeping your house from falling down, chores, maybe trying to get some exercise, night classes, doing community stuff, attempting to maintain a sex life with your partner…that’s it, that’s the show. If your life’s pretty together, you might play some league game, be able to make practices and games regularly, or be part of some gaming group. But that stage of life has enough moving parts that “pretty together” doesn’t last long; other priorities come up, people drop out. Saying “I don’t know many middle-aged adults” etc. doesn’t mean “such people don’t exist”. Obviously they do. Somebody has to play Candy Crush. I just mean that this is not a ubiquitous sort of thing, as it is for young people.
@mythago: I’m not a gamer. I played games when I was younger, like any kid. But the games you played and your memories of them are different from mine — I didn’t play, and had no interest in, Mortal Kombat, and actually I didn’t much like Frogger, specifically because I didn’t think frog-squashing all that hilarious. But I didn’t have to play it; there were plenty of other games to play, including the pinball machines in my grandparents’ basement and the obstacle-course games on my Atari. Not to mention Tetris and Simon and the ever-popular and unfortunately named Pong. So the sort of violence and sexism you describe were, in my world, highly avoidable. (My favorite game was actually backgammon, and enough people knew how to play that I never had trouble finding a game.) D&D was the most violent it got (I really don’t object to blowing 2D asteroids into smithereens) but even then it was some pretty abstracted violence. You weren’t watching realistically-rendered people being blown up, dismembered, etc., and your big act of violence against monsters involved rolling dice and adding. This is on the level of “you sank my battleship!” and “Accident!” And the only obvious example of sexism I can think of in any of the games I played was the insulting bow/lipstick business in Ms. Pac-Man. I think you would agree that this is qualitatively different from what goes on in contemporary shooter games.
I can’t remember a single video-game journalism story that’s turned up on any of my feeds, in the last few years, that didn’t feature screenshots of tremendous violence or heavy weaponry or some hypersexualized babe. And my kid’s ipad came stocked with games involving hi-larious cartoon violence. None of this stuff was part of my…15 years? of playing games, video or not.
desipis, pulling from a couple of your comments:
I can think of at least two really obvious reasons why sexism in games and violence in games wouldn’t impact someone’s real life in the same way:
– Randomly shooting people is not a part of your everyday life (so introducing it would be a big change). Interacting with women *is* part of your everyday life.
– Outside of fictional media, society doesn’t approve of random acts of extreme violence. It does, sometimes, approve of poor treatment of women, by which I mean there are sometimes social rewards instead of social punishments for treating women poorly. (I think the ubiquity of violence in media has its own problems and second-order effects, but it’s not as simple as “video games make people more likely to go on a shooting rampage.”)
To put it another way: advertising has been shown to work, at least some of the time. You can’t make someone go from hating McDonald’s to liking McDonald’s just with an ad. But if someone already likes McDonald’s, you can influence them to go there more often.
I can’t find a way of reading this argument that doesn’t imply that the actual content of a massive form of media is less important than the journalistic criticism read by some of its consumers. Is there a meaning I’m not getting, or do you think that what you’re calling politics only matters in criticism, and not in the actual content?
@Louise de Rênal’s Left Shoulder: I have to say, a lot of your comments come off to me as “Few adults with real-life stuff to do pursue this hobby, so I’m going to present it as a thing for ‘kids’ and be dismissive of it.” You know what? Lots of people established in adulthood, with jobs and spouses and kids, have hobbies. Indeed, I don’t think I know any who don’t. My mom and stepdad were high-level amateur cyclists for many years until my stepdad’s injury, and my mom does Ironman triathlons. A bunch of my friends study circus arts/acrobatics. A bunch of my friends are LARPers (players of live-action roleplaying games). A bunch of them obsessively knit and crochet. A bunch of them are into various pop-culture fandoms and do things like write fanfic and make fanvids. And yes, a bunch of them play video games. These are all hobbies, and all perfectly reasonable things for adults with jobs and spouses and kids to do as hobbies.
@Ampersand: I agree that the “neckbeard” thing (took me ages to figure out what a neckbeard was), and other common characterizations of misogynistic men as not-conventionally-attractive (often expressed in terms of fatphobia, classism, ableism, or comments about genital size), are a real problem. And most of the people I see doing it are, indeed, online feminists (who have a strong presence on Twitter and Tumblr). I can definitely understand why seeing a bunch of people saying stuff like that would make those people uncomfortable to be around. But most of the people I see challenging and opposing this behavior are also online feminists. And I don’t think this behavior came out of people opposing Gamergate – I’ve been seeing some online feminists saying this crap, and other online feminists challenging it, for years now – it’s a “We really need to get our shit together” topic for online feminism, rather than specifically Gamergate criticism. Gamergate just happens to be something that’s drawn in a lot of online feminists.
After your explanation, I’m much clearer where you stand on boycotts, and I agree that boycotts are powerful tools (and can have some very destructive side effects, even when clearly just – I just wrote something about that). I think where I disagree with you is that I also think boycotts can be (are not necessarily always) legit if a company’s figureheads/top execs espouse views that you think are harmful, because those people are the ones who are ostensibly supposed to embody a company’s values, and they also have a lot of power over the people below them in the institution. Or, if a company is actually providing an platform, that isn’t some all-views-welcome public discussion platform, for those views.
An example of a boycott campaign along these lines that I participated in a few years back: The newsletter of the local police union was regularly publishing content, particularly content written by the newsletter’s editor, that, shall we say, was barely distinguishable from what you’d see on Stormfront. A bunch of activists started contacting the companies advertising in the newsletter, providing quotes from the newsletter and asking the companies to pull their ads. About 20% did. That boycott seemed obviously justified to me and still does, because we were asking advertisers to boycott an institution that was publishing racist, sexist, homophobic, fatphobic, etc, content in its official publication, not asking them to boycott it because there are some rank-and-file cops who believe or say such things.
I was also fine with the Mozilla/Eich boycott – it falls into my “figureheads and top execs are a special case because of their role and power” category – but I already know you and I didn’t agree on that. In the case of GG my understanding, which could be mistaken, was that their boycotts also fell into that category. If they’re boycotting, say, Intel, because some Intel hardware engineer was arguing with Gamergaters on the Internet or speaking at a feminist conference, then yeah, different situation.
@Louise de Rênal’s Left Shoulder: I’m finding this discussion frustrating because you are making broad statements about How It Used To Was, and when countered, you appear to say that your personal experience was different, and that your personal experience is what defines the bounds of reality here. I mean, if we should not be discussing violence and sexism in games of the past because one could avoid those games in favor of Tetris or Monopoly, then we shouldn’t be discussing games of today, because you now have thousands of equivalents of non-violent, non-sexist video games available; one never need play GTA or its equivalents.
And in fact that’s exactly what people arguing against “SJWs” and “politics” in games are saying: Shut up and go play your girly puzzle games and leave our games alone. Or, less aggressively: if you don’t like the sexism and racism in many popular games, then don’t play them, but for the love of Crom don’t complain about them or try to change them.
As to adults playing games….well, I don’t understand TV-watching on a regular basis, either, and I don’t really have time for it – like you, I tend more to hang out on online blogs. But my personal non-watching has little to do with what the rest of the world is doing, or how important that is culturally. Millions of people watch Game of Thrones, or The Walking Dead, for example, squeezed in around the business of adult life; that makes discussions of it relevant, regardless of whether I personally watch TV, or the adults around me watch TV, or whether I think TV is kind of a silly waste of time.
I’m very interested to hear what response you get back from SPLC. I, too, have been baffled about what seems like a complete lack of interest from law enforcement. It feels very much like the same “eh, that’d be paperwork, suck it up, ladies” indifference law enforcement had towards domestic violence a while back.
What are some of these games? (It’s a serious question — when I was a kid, I played the usual NES and Sega games that most kids my age played, plus Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego and stuff like that on the computer, but one of my favorites was one that a friend had on her computer — King’s Quest IV. She also had some other King’s Quest games, but that one was by far our favorite, since the main character was a girl. I haven’t really played video games in years — I’ve got a Wii, and mostly use it for Rock Band, or some of the dance games when I’m feeling OK, and a couple of others now and then — but I’m still really into fantasy in terms of books and movies and TV shows, and something reminded me of King’s Quest recently, and I thought, “I used to have fun with that game. I wonder what there is now that’s similar — a fantasy-type game with a female main character.” And I looked a bit, and found almost nothing. I just tried googling again, and found Fantasy Life, and also found that this is a really difficult thing to google without having to wade through tons of “Sexiest Video Game Women” lists.)
Er, that’s definitely not what my experience was like as the sole girl/woman in my gaming group in high school & college. Nor how I was treated when I went to a con and asked some high-profile artists “why are your drawings of women always naked when they’re supposed to be wearing functional clothing for adventure? Could you also draw some women wearing stuff that actually works?”
Mookie:
Great! Can you tell that to the GG people?
I suspect their response might be something like:
Diddums.
I could be wrong on both counts, but I interpret Mookie’s use of “diddums” to mean “ditto” [“If there’s some random people saying things you don’t like just avoid them”], and I interpret desipis’s use of it/understanding of Mookie’s use to be “tough luck” or similar.
I mean, it’s exactly the kind of response I would expect from most Gamergaters (“If you don’t like the things I’m saying, don’t read them, but if I don’t like the things you’re saying, I will try to prevent you from saying them”), but it’s not exactly a defense of them.
My interpretation of the “point” of the Gamergate movement/what they mean by “ethics in journalism”–and desipis has only further convinced me of this–is that Gamergater’s goal is to suppress feminist/anti-racist/etc. criticism of videogames; that they consider this goal ethical and such criticism unethical; that basically their entire goal is to suppress certain kinds of speech. There’s plenty of misogyny mixed into particular incidents, but the main common thread tying it all together is “certain types of criticism of video games are morally wrong”. [Criticism like “the changes between Civ 4 and Civ 5 have dramatically worsened the game” are still good, I guess?]
Gaming is their escape from the bullshit of day to day life and it’s going to be tireing to have that escape constantly invaded by people trying to put their political opinons in your face.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could just escape into games without being reminded by the character choices that the males are considered the default human being. Also, Exhibit A for Ampersand’s Point 13.
Very briefly, some non-violent games I play or have played:
Covet Fashion, which is basically competitive paper dolls with real clothing brands. Do not play if you have a low tolerance for being advertised at or the generalized problems with the fashion industry.
Time management casual games of which I guess the definitional one is diner dash, but I prefer Ranch Rush and Sally’s Spa which I find very calming.
Puzzle games like slice it on the phone (where you use spatial reasoning to figure out how to make shapes into other shapes), various sudoku programs
There’s a racing game I like called real racing for the iPad.no violence, no characters.
Social games that I play with friends online. Word games: hangman, words with friends (scrabble), word scramble (boggle). Drawing game: Art with friends (pictionary)
On the wii, I play the updated supr Mario because my husband and I can be mutually ridiculous and nostalgic. Up to four players. Violence against cartoon monsters.
I don’t play portal, but it’s a great choice! Great dialogue and story! First person spatial reasoning, though, which I can’t do. I watch husband do it.
Guitar hero.
A new ipad game called Monument Valley lets players walk through Escher paintings. Beautifully, beautifully done.
The old infocom games a are still out there. As are all the Roberta Williams (she did kings quest) games. You can buy them at places like, um, I can’t remember right now. Either someone will note it like ben or I’ll come back and do it when I can look it up.
I play the *hell* out of the sims.
I have a tolerance for violence in games with high fantasy settings. Like Diablo or hearthstone where you’re killing demons in stylized ways. And soul caliber which has no after effects of violence and lots of people in silly costumes. And final fantasy which is usually bloodless.
For games I haven’t played, see things like flow, flower, journey, braid, okami, all lovely and somewhat abstract
I’d hand in my adult card now, but I’m not sure I ever earned one.
I can’t edit the above comment–ignore my note about Diablo, hearthstone, soul caliber etc. they all have degrees of misogyny and mostly some racism too (especially Diablo. So racist. Shame on you, blizzard, because otherwise that game is fun, and it’s not like the fixes would have been hard.)
@Ruchama, it depends on what kind of games you’re looking for, what platform you’re playing on, what your tolerance is for violence, and so on.
Fantasy-ish (swords, quests, dragons, etc., are all good); something that involves some kind of longer storyline, not just a five-minute game; computer (Mac) or Wii; some violence is OK but not too graphic, and absolutely no sexual violence.
Harlequin,
Sure, in theory a particular video game could influence behaviour one way or another. However, McDonald’s spends millions of dollars to ensure their advertisements actually attract customers rather than repell them. Absent research into a particular game to determine their impact it’s pure speculation as to whether that game will have a positive or negative impact on how people treat women (or on any other aspect of behaviour).
I don’t believe those messages are consistently part of the ‘actual content’. I’m sure there are some people who spend their energy to creatively interpret some sort of messages from a game, but then those people can’t exactly fault the game for the fact that they percieve those messages as being present.
closetpuritan:
Escape away.
Ruchama- consider Child of Light. It’s a side scrolling RPG set in a fantasy world. Female protagonist. Primary target audience is young- maybe 10 to 15? It doesn’t require significant skills obtained through prior experience in similar games, and the turn based combat system can be played in short bursts if you’re so inclined (e.g. it doesn’t penalize you for playing for 15 minutes here and there, instead of in long stretches). It is kind of twee though, and may be saccharine to some players. Look up a video of it to determine if it is to taste. Or check the demo on Steam.
A longer note on the combat system- it is semi turn based. A child can play the game on regular and take advantage only of the standard turn based options. A skilled adult can play on higher difficulties, and exploit the system to it’s limits. This is what stops the game from being “just” a children’s game.
There are a lot of “extras” marketed with this game. Unfortunately, since the publisher is one of the more money hungry ones (Ubisoft…), some of these extras are darn near pointless. They give you things that you will get during the game, and that you don’t need to buy with real money. If you consider the extras, the only one that’s worthwhile is the Golem’s Plight, as it adds another optional character to your team.
I think this is a reasonable recommendation for someone interested in playing a modern game who hasn’t been gaming in a while. It fits all of your criteria, and has no particular downsides or gameplay problems.
I can think of at least two really obvious reasons why sexism in games and violence in games wouldn’t impact someone’s real life in the same way:
– Randomly shooting people is not a part of your everyday life (so introducing it would be a big change). Interacting with women *is* part of your everyday life.
I have to say, I’m getting further and further out from feminist games criticism because, well, I’m not sure I buy this.
Like, the last GTA game I played was Vice City, and here’s the thing; that whole “have sex with hookers and kill them to get your money back” thing was probably the most meaningful interaction you have with female NPCs in that game.
Which means that the same argument about how violence is so far removed from a person’s normal life that they process it differently applies to most of the sexist stuff in the game; even visiting a hooker is socially frowned upon, let alone killing them.
You can visit a strip club in the game, but with the primitive graphics of the time there’s kind of no reason to; it isn’t fun.
The parts of the game that would tend to reinforce unconscious and/or socially acceptable sexism are also the least satisfying parts of the game, and it seems to me that they’re therefore also the parts of the game that are least likely to reinforce behavior.
The Gamergate thing I don’t understand to this day is why people feel attached to the label.
Like, I’m sorry, this is something that started a few months ago not as a movement to reform journalism, but as a movement to harass a specific woman for cheating on her boyfriend.
The origins are both disgusting and very recent.
To quote from the article Darren at 13 posted,
what happens when a writer much bigger than me decides to slander me? what response am I supposed to give when I feel unfairly represented or even discriminated against?
Well, for starters, don’t take on the mantle of a campaign that was started to harass a random woman for sexual infidelity.
Like, look, I hate President Obama. I think he’s just an awful, awful man. I can only assume that the KKK hates the guy too. That doesn’t mean I’m on the same side as the KKK. I’m sure as hell not going to join the KKK and try to reform it into a harmless group that engages in well-thought-out political criticism of Presidential over-reach and illegal wars.
Now, obviously, there are lunatics out there who will hear the sentence “I hate President Obama” and immediately decide that I’m just another racist republican who owns a white hood.
That doesn’t mean that I have to identify as a racist republican, and I think there are damn good reasons I shouldn’t even if everybody else in the world calls me one, among them my own mental health and ability to have an identity that isn’t created entirely by other people.
And, not just that, but there are strategic reasons not to do it too; there are a lot of people who would otherwise listen to my criticisms of the President who will immediately abandon me if I choose to call myself a racist.
By attaching yourself to such a reviled group you radicalize your opponents and give people on the fence a reason to ignore you.
Which means you ought to have a very good reason to stick with that group, and I just don’t see what it is in the case of Gamergate.
I should probably add- some of your criteria may limit you a bit. It sounds like you’re only interested in games with both narrative elements and identifiable protagonists. Of the top ten new releases on the Steam front page, a cursory look suggests that 7 out of the 10 items in the front page list lack identifiable protagonists (for example, one game is a military history wargame focusing on the Blitzkrieg, the “protagonists” are the countries, not specific named people). Of the remainder, two out of three have female protagonists.
Your criteria would seemingly rule out a game like X-Com. In that game, the point of view character is never shown and never speaks, so his/her gender is indeterminate. The team that works for you consists of three named characters, two male and one female, and then a ton of procedurally generated soldiers who are equally distributed between male and female. These soldiers are in large part the protagonists of the story, but the nature of their personal stories is organically generated in a way that is hard to explain without spending a lot more time on this comment than is appropriate. Suffice to say, the game should definitely qualify as non-sexist, but it wouldn’t meet the criteria you’re using.
…it’s also not a fantasy game, and features the permanent violent death of characters you may grow to really care about. So it probably wouldn’t qualify for other reasons. But to the extent that you’re looking for non-sexist games, this type of game ought to qualify, but technically would not given the criteria you’ve listed.
closetpuritan:
I think you’re off the mark here. Here’s my recollection of the events of last year.
A) Some gamers wanted to discuss an issue that intially spread due to its salacious nature but they felt relevant to their community in a broder way (corruption/jouralism/etc). That issue was actively suppressed by many of the sites where they regularly dicussed other things related to that community.
B) There may have been some legitimate reasons for attempting to suppress these discussions but the effect was to silence a group of people on an issue where they felt certain people may have done wrong in a way that would harm the community. Whether or not anyone did anything wrong, the appearance of justice is an important part of justice itself, and in this respect there was a critical failure.
C) A key aspect of this failure was the perception that certain parties were especially protected from public criticism by feminist politics because of their gender.
D) There was a reflexive, chaotic, grassroots campaign under the hashtag to get the topic wider noteritety to force it to be discussed. This is the point where the hashtag and associated videos come into it.
E) A number of games media publications when on the attack and used the rhetoric “gamers are dead” to falsely assert that those people bothered by the enough by points above to get involved were:
a) Just a bunch of sexist, racist white dudes.
b) Collectively conducting a campaign of violent threats to get their way.
This is the rhetorical equivlant of calling feminists a bunch of hairy legged, bra burning man-haters.
F) It’s my understanding that it’s these false assertions, not the various political views, that are the driver of the economic coercion. Although expressing perceptions on a movement could be part of the freedom of speech issue in Ampersand’s point 12, I think that “economic coercion against people telling harmful lies about us” is quite different to “economic coercion against people who have a different political opinion to us”. That said, I’m still not personally convinved its a constructive approach to solving the issues.
G) Ampersand’s point 6 about choosing a different name for the movement is somewhat problematic. It’s suggesting that people in the movement accept the criticisms of things that those people never considered part of the movement in the first place, and that were largely part of a campaign to discredit the movement. You’re asking the movement for capitualtion on one of the core reasons for the movement in the first place.
49. desipis
Whether or not anyone did anything wrong, the appearance of justice is an important part of justice itself, and in this respect there was a critical failure.
Whoa, slow down there chief, let’s stop for a moment and look back.
How does this view square with the idea of adopting a movement designed not to fight for diversity of journalistic opinion, but specifically to harass a woman over sexual infidelities?
How does siding with legitimately awful people contribute to “the appearance of justice”?
You may not care that the movement started as a gross harrassment campaign before growing into something semi-defensible, but like you say, the appearance of justice is an important part of justice itself, and in this respect there has been a continuing critical failure on the part of gamergate.
It’s suggesting that people in the movement accept the criticisms of things that those people never considered part of the movement in the first place, and that were largely part of a campaign to discredit the movement. You’re asking the movement for capitualtion on one of the core reasons for the movement in the first place.
Is this a gamergate supporter talking about feminist journalists? Or is it a feminist journalist talking about gamergate supporters? The world may never know.
The semantic content of a self assumed name literally exists for the purpose of enabling people to make assumptions about those who use it. The “gamergate” in [gamergate]r is the accusations that were made against Zoe Quinn. If “gamergate”rs have a problem with people associating them with the thing that makes up nine of the ten letters in their name, they can feel free to resign from the set of language-using hominids.
Orangutans are endangered, perhaps they’re hiring.
@mythago –
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t discuss violence/sexism in games of the past. My broad statement about How It Used To Was boils down to this. In the wayback, here’s what I had to do to avoid violent/sexist/racist gaming culture: nothing. Literally nothing. I wasn’t seeking it out, it turned up in none of the games I played, and it didn’t poop itself out the screen and land in my lap. It didn’t show up in TV ads while I was watching political comedy shows. It didn’t turn up as part of journalism. In fact I’m sure I have no idea what even existed there, because I wasn’t interested and it kept to itself. Now? Unavoidable. It shows up at dinner. It’s in my facebook trending feed. It’s all over my twitter feed, with or without Brianna there. It’s here. It’s on other fora that I’d specifically gone to for things other than gaming. I have no reason at all to know what these games look and sound like, and yet I do, even though my point of contact with popular culture is seriously tiny. Is that a significant change in the culture, yes, I think it is.
I get the feeling we’re at cross-purposes, here, and that you’re really really intent on my admitting that the games landscape of 30-40 years ago was as violent and misogynistic as it was today. But I really don’t see that it was. You talk about D&D being about “killing monsters and taking their stuff” — well, that would’ve depended on the kinds of DMs you knew, no? My DMs were interested in diplomacy, myth, folklore, comparative government, alliance-building, that sort of thing. And that was reflected in the worlds and the games. (It’s also why I liked DS9 so much – not only were there some terrific actors, the geopolitics were great. Wasn’t surprised to find out that whatshisname, the main writer, had a background in government.) I remember we did have one player who just wanted to have a lot of ass jokes and killing, and we eventually threw him out because he was disruptive.
I suppose the way to find out is to compare units sold & gametime then and now, with some way to measure the relative violence/misogyny/racism in the games. Maybe someone’s already done that.
About “go play your girly games someplace else”…my understanding of GG is that it’s about two things:
1. Industry workplace conditions. That it’s impossible, as a woman designing games, to show up and not be part of some repulsive fantasy, not be treated horribly. And that’s a labor issue, not a content issue.
2. The unmitigated gall of women producing games that are less repulsive because how dare they try to play in the treehouse.
In other words, it’s a large industry that wants to behave like it’s someone’s club. Only it isn’t. And again, the commitment to fantasy seems to be distracting people from using very real tools for making change happen. Laws exist. Lawyers exist. Courtrooms exist. Legit journalists exist. State and federal legislators exist. Go go go. This was the whole fucking point of second-wave feminism, to go where there is actual power and use it. I haven’t got a lot of patience for people who insist on behaving like this all has to be hashed out between P.E. and social studies on formspring when real-world tools exist for forcing change. All that campus-rape loudness and administrative scurrying and Lewin-shutting-down is happening because of lawyers, Joe Biden, and law. You can’t be afraid to use it, and you can’t be afraid to lose, come back, and swing again.
I don’t know what SPLC Mark will do, btw. The whole “manosphere” thing was a big surprise to him in ’12, and I haven’t heard back from him yet about the idea that they need a couple of lawyers specializing in online issues. He’s quite responsive, though. If you feel strongly about it, please drop him a line, can’t hurt.
@Lirael – sure, lots of middle-aged adults have hobbies. They just aren’t usually gaming, and they usually do multiple-duty in people’s lives. Bike clubs and sporting events give you exercise (look, ma, no gym) and a reason to go outside, and a bit of social life — all the better if it’s with your spouse. Crafty groups are also conversation groups where people get to know each others’ families and become part of each others’ social safety net, offering to help with kids, transportation, projects, etc. So — again, not saying it doesn’t happen. And I’m just guessing at why more people in my age band aren’t gaming. I really would guess, though, that for most, the life and stakes outside the games are much more interesting than those inside the games — and it’s not like they’ve got time to kill.
And okay, because now you’ve got me curious, I went looking for stats. The ones that come up everywhere are ESA’s, but I assume industry PR stats are bullshit unless shown otherwise. So then there’s Nielsen, which is telling us more or less what we thought: while lots and lots of people of all ages play games, the industry mainstay, the serious hobbyist who accounts for a whopping percentage of gameplay time, is a 24-year-old guy. And the sales are in shooter, action, and sports games, with RPG/adventure/family games looking pretty tiny overall. (The writer suggests that the loss of console dominance may help change all that; we’ll see.)
I really don’t find this surprising because if there’s someone under the age of 70 who’s likely to have time on his or her hands, it’s a young guy. (There was an arguable study that showed up in NYT recently about what non-working-for-money men and women do all day: women spend a lot of time taking care of other people and doing housework and community stuff; guys spend a lot of time sleeping and sitting in front of screens.)
Speaking of which, I have to go hang up some laundry. I think this is also about the extent of my own interest in talking about video games unless we come back around to the legal issues.
Christopher:
You seem to be making factual claims that I don’t agree with and am also sceptical about the evidentiary basis for those claims. How have you come to the conclusion that the movement was designed to harass certain women? I’m not sure you could say that a hashtag rapidly and spontaneously adopted was designed to do anything. All you can do is look at the way the majority of people were using it. I haven’t seen anything to lead me to believe that a majority of people were using it to harass anyone let along certain women.
@ Louise de Rênal’s Left Shoulder
With no particular judgement on the bulk of your statement, you’re wrong about the demographics of video game players. Video game players are by and large adults in their 30s with a fairly even gender split. Here’s an article about this. Here’s the study that the article was based on.
Now, as hobbies go, video games are a younger one, certainly compared to — say — card games or bird watching. But video games are not, and haven’t been for a long time, primarily the domain of teenage boys.
I realize that this is an aside from your main point, but this is something I often see repeated and it’s simply not true.
yrs–
–Ben
Hi, Ben – yes, I know, that’s the ESA study. But ESA is an industry PR/lobbying outfit, and I’ll go first to any reputable source that’s not an industry sales pitch. I don’t know why ESA’s decided they need to spin the picture away from the 20something guy, but if you follow that Nielsen link above, you’ll see criticisms of ESA’s conclusions. The main point is that while lots of people play, the people who are devoting serious time to games and doing the buying, the hardcore hobbyists, are still young guys. I tried to view the Nielsen webinar they pull stats from, but haven’t been able to yet.
And again, the commitment to fantasy seems to be distracting people from using very real tools for making change happen. Laws exist. Lawyers exist. Courtrooms exist. Legit journalists exist. State and federal legislators exist. Go go go.
Did you intend this to be as condescending as it sounds? That’s a genuine question, not snark. Because it’s sounding like to one of those conversations where we’re discussing workplace harassment or discrimination, and an antifeminist barges in and says ‘maybe you should quit just whining about it and do something about it like complain to HR or a lawyer’.
This stuff is showing up because we’re saturated in information – not because old-timey games were nicer, which is how you started this conversation.
Okay.
mythago, I’m not going to deal in feminist/antifeminist. I’m not here as part of anybody’s army and I don’t keep a wallet full of ally badges, I think it’s bad practice. Also, while I don’t mean any condescension, I’m not in charge of your ears, and frankly you’ve come back to every single post I’ve made on this comment thread dissatisfied that it’s not a custom fit with your experience and views. So this is my last response. Hear however you please.
While there are many situations in which hiring a lawyer does bupkes or can be dangerous, there are situations within GG that do call for lawyers and using existing law, rather than waiting politely for police to shrug and decide they’re not going to do anything. There are also legal funds to be built and targets to choose. The only way that I have ever seen systemic discrimination and workplace hostility stop is through the courts. If you make it expensive enough not to change, they change. Pissily, but they change. I think the alternatives to lawsuits really will be either to suck it up or go off somewhere else away from the industry and DIY. To hang around and plead and educate and hope that a very large and profitable industry will change its ways out of goodness, when it’s busy putting out misogyny and racism and brutality…no, this doesn’t look promising to me.
I appreciate that most people have never sued anyone and find the whole prospect frightening. But I do think it’s necessary if the police are letting credible threats of violence go, particularly when we’re not talking about lone impoverished women.
desipis:
b) Collectively conducting a campaign of violent threats to get their way.
You could argue that they were overly-broad in lumping in all gamergaters, but yeah, there were gamergaters that were doing that, so I don’t have much sympathy for people who are “angry” because those are “lies” and want to use a boycott to shut magazines down for reporting/commenting on actual events. I mean, what, they’re not supposed to talk about actual events because it might make some of the other gamergaters look bad? Should the media have a blackout about any looting or rioting in the wake of a protest because it will make the other protesters look bad?
And I didn’t mention it at first because I figured it was obvious, but just to be clear on my thinking, not only will (some) Gamergaters harass people merely for expressing fear of them (Felicia Day) or making fun of them (Brianna Wu), they will also harass people (Anita Sarkeesian) for criticizing games from a feminist perspective, not as part of a gaming magazine or anything, simply on their own YouTube channels, blogs, etc. That is why it is anti-free speech. As well as the bomb threats, etc. that I’ve already alluded to. Some gamergaters and their apologists have claimed that such people must be 3rd parties on neither side trying to cause trouble, or even that the targets of these threats have created the threats themselves, but I think that’s pure conspiracy theories. They don’t have any real evidence and use similar thinking to “9-11 was an inside job” or “the moon landing was fake”.
Another one percent is the occasional game from Japan that pretends gay people don’t exist.
I agree with your description, Patrick, except I’m kind of confused by this. Do they pretend they don’t exist in some other way than never mentioning them? If not, has that become unusual in American games? (I mostly play JRPGs, and usually the games I play are at least 5 years old.)
I watch some anime, wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but one of the recent anime series that I’ve watched, Tiger & Bunny, has a gay character (a highly stereotypical gay character, but…) and I remember Sailor Moon had gay characters in a children’s show back when it was rare to have gay characters in adult shows in America. My impression is that media depictions in Japan of gay characters haven’t changed much during the period that they were changing rapidly in America, though.
@closetpuritan- The typical western culture game that permits player selected romance options or marriage for the main character will include same sex options. The typical Japanese culture game that does the same thing will not. At least, that’s the stereotype.
Western-culture examples would be Skyrim, anything from Bioware, etc. This is fairly standard issue at this point- I can’t think of any counter examples.
Meanwhile there’s been at least one game from Japan where they initially permitted same-sex options, then announced that this was a bug, and disabled it by adding code preventing your character from having a same sex partner.
@Patrick Huh. I hadn’t heard the term ‘culture game’ before and am not turning up anything with Google or on Urban Dictionary. I had heard something about Skyrim allowing gay marriage as well as Dragon Age and I think Mass Effect having gay romance options, but good to know that it’s become near-universal, in games where the player character can choose among different characters for romance options [I’m assuming that’s the context here?], for there to be same-sex options.
Which reminds me: Ruchama, have you ever played any Harvest Moon or Rune Factory games for Wii? (The ones I’ve played are Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility and Rune Factory: Frontier.) They’re farming-themed but also have fantasy elements, and stuff that you need to find to solve a problem in the game that might appeal to a King’s Quest fan. Rune Factory also has some not-very-violent violence: the monster-thingies get “sent to their home realm” or something due to a special magic treatment on your weapons.
Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility let you choose whether to be male or female; Rune Factory: Frontier did not. Both games allow you to marry and start a family, but neither have a same-sex marriage option.
Also, did you ever play the later games, like King’s Quest 7? That one had two female protagonists (the game is divided into chapters, and you alternate) and I still come across people talking about how great it was. I think I maybe liked 6 a little better, but that one has a male protagonist, and it’s in a sorta Arabian Nights setting, so there could be a bunch of Orientalism in it that I didn’t pick up on at the time.
I wasn’t using “culture game” as a term of art. I was just using it as a short form for “game designed by people from a particular culture with members of that culture as the primary, or one of the primary, intended audiences.”
Yes- the context is games where a player-created character chooses among romantic options, rather than games with a designer written character with a scripted romantic subplot.
The interesting implication of this cultural variance is that PC gamers will encounter a lot less exclusion of homosexuality in their games, in comparison to console gamers.
OK, thanks for clarifying.