If that is your understanding of Gamergate, then I don’t think your understanding is reflecting the reality of it.
Something that started in a jilted lover’s rant that evolved into a concentrated hate campaign using “ethics in games journalism” as a deflection from the horrific harassment of a few specific women cannot be truly said to be “a cry for gaming press to more fairly represent social issues” in any realistic capacity.
If there is a cry to be made for gaming press to more fairly represent social issues, Gamergate is not that cry.
As far as I’m concerned, I welcome the reminder that gamers are ordinary people and not all gaming communities are full of people trying to keep women out of gaming. To be honest, I’d agree with @Elsa_K’s assessment that the sister does not seem very informed. She has a general sense of being excluded, which is definitely a problem, but it’s all very vague and makes unfounded universal statements that are true in some cases, but certainly not in others.
“They have to become one of two types. There’s the one gamer boys think is really hot, and they want her around, and they want to play games with her. But they’re still going to make her uncomfortable and say really explicit shit… The other type,” she says, “is the ‘weird’ gamer girl who sits alone in the cafeteria with her DS while the gamer dudes call her fat and ugly. Both girls get put down by guys. And anyway, gamer boys try to own gaming. They claim it as theirs, as a boy thing. They automatically think girls are doing it for attention. No girl wins.”
I describe games like Journey, Transistor, Life is Strange, and Portal to her: games with female protagonists, created by women, resistant to dominant norms of sex and violence. “I don’t see commercials for those, though,” she demurs. “I see those Kate Upton commercials instead.”
I’m not denying that it’s important to be aware of the sexism in gaming, but it isn’t a bad thing to do the same thing as @Elsa_K and Juliet and point out the games and communities that are already out there. As people have often said, female gamers are not even in the minority and there are many games that could interest her. Maybe the “no girl wins” statement was actually referring to her own experience of bullying in her school, in which case it may well be valid. When it comes to one of the last paragraphs, where she wants free non-violent games on her phone and browser, she couldn’t be more wrong. Nobody has ever had as much access to free smartphone and browser games as they do now. Adult women have never played games as much as they do now. Making and distributing these games has never been easier than it is now. Gamergate is a big deal and there are many social problems keeping women from having a full seat at the table, but it isn’t some universal that stops everyone from participating.
Yet, we’re told again and again, that we need to make more room for men, who already have a full seat at the table. When do problems of sexism get taken seriously and not dismissed, because some women have a partial seat at the table?
I’m certainly not going to suggest that we shouldn’t take this seriously or that men need a bigger share; these are valid criticisms of the current situation and need to be addressed as part of our support for women in gaming. However, they are not really what I’m arguing against at all, so I don’t see what your comment is trying to refute. There are games and gaming communities out there that she could enjoy being part of, which are not just for kids and not about violence or sex, some of which are made by women. Telling girls about them and supporting them will mean that more games like them are made.
I’m glad you want to support women and girls in gaming. However, the original post by @Elsa_K suggested that they didn’t see a problem, so there isn’t really a problem. It gets awfully tiring to hear people say this. It’s being patted on the head and condescended to.
Plus, isn’t part of the problem gendering of games in the first place… assuming that women want to play one kind of game, while men like another. If women want to play GTA, or first person shooters, and they experience harassment while doing it, that’s a problem, and saying “well, if you played girl’s games, like you’re supposed to, you wouldn’t be told to show us your boobs.” Well, no one should have to put up with that in the first, place, right?
The problem with gamergate was that they actively attacked and harassed women from day one, not that they had a different point of view from some of the women making critical assessments of video games. @Elsa_K is defending it, despite that reality.
So what’s the etiquette for sending buddy invites?
2- Don’t send porn… wait until I get to know you better first. Interestingly, most of the porn or pics I currently have are from female gamers… though I have to wonder a bit if there is a new trend in males pretending to be lesbians in order to harass females without the specter of misogynistic male harassment of women being added to their resume.
I’m actually glad the article described those, not because I was glad to see them, but because I only just saw them this past week and was wondering WTF was up with them. (We rarely watch TV where we’ll see commercials and guess I’ve just been lucky enough to not see them on twitter.) They came up for me as a “watch an ad, get in game benefit” for one of my Android games. Frankly they made me absolutely positive that I want nothing to do with the game in question and left me asking “Why can’t she be her own damned hero?” (Although I also suspect that I’m far from the first person to ask this.)
Yeah, once was really too many times for me to see those.
The lack of diversity thing is a fairly big part of it, coming from a white male guy who likes playing around with games. I like to toy around with story although it’s usually a huge pain to actually implement, but in addition to that I’m always pretty nervous about diversity in my stories (related to the appropriation thing before,) because I haven’t had that experience and it just turns into a mine field. You go too far one way and it’s whitewashing, too far the other and it’s tokenism, slip too far either way and the character’s fucked.
Obviously the answer to this is research, but that still gets in the way of diversity if I need to do a bunch of research to get each character right; least I’m slowly building up a repertoire, but a truly diverse cast is going to take years to write well for one person.
I wasn’t trying to suggest it was a gender issue, just saying I understand what it’s like to want games I enjoy playing only to reach out for them and find a great lack (though I do own Endless Space and Endless Legend, both of which were put out by Amplitude Studios in the last 3 years, so it’s not like no new 4X games are being made these days).
Though why isn’t there money to be made from 4X games? Did people really just stop playing them a few decades ago in some sort of great Genre Extinction Event, or were things subtly shifting even then? Because to me it seems like it’s a bit of a Catch 22 situation where there’s “no money” in 4X because it’s not marketed for, but without marketing people don’t know they exist and don’t buy them. Rinse and repeat.
Not that I’m saying 4X will ever be as popular as something as simple to pick up and put down as most shooters, I don’t think it was ever to that level, but where’s the cut-off point for a game to generate “enough profit” to be viable?
I’ve been trying to get back into games lately and this is so true. My choices seem to be barbarian or space marine. I feel like AAA games have gotten worse. I miss the old Baldur’s Gate style of RPG with parties and inventory management. Mass Effect cut close to that and I consider it a spiritual successor in many ways, but a lot of games fail to inspire me in any way. I’m an adult. I have a shitty job and grown-up problems, believe me I welcome the distraction of a good game.
You said you can understand the gamergate reaction to critical analysis of games, right? But in this case much of gamergates anger has been aimed at women and girls, and especially those who bring a feminist analysis to gaming - as if they are the same as jocks picking on them or the mainstream culture making fun of them. At times, violently so.
But women and girls have long been interested in these genres of art/culture and are often marginalized twice because of it - from mainstream culture for liking this stuff in the first place, and then by some men or boys who think this culture is exclusively theirs (no girls allowed thinking).
Fair enough, but there has been a huge amount of people using that AS justification. Perhaps you can understand where I’m coming from, too.
Sorry if I dared to speak my mind. But considering that I too grew up nerdy and marginalized (and being told over and over and over I was worthless because I wasn’t pretty), I’m kind of sick of being discounted YET AGAIN by people who assume my gender means I don’t understand geek culture.
As a creative cishetmiddleclasswhitemale, I can sympathize. The common refrain of write what you know has been useful to me. For instance, I can’t really know what it’s like to be a woman who is victimized by sexual abuse - so I’m not going to write a rape scene. On the other hand, I know what it’s like to be in love, so perhaps I’ll write a rommance, and then the genders of the participants aren’t nearly as relevant as their love is (presuming I’m setting this in our typical fictional fantastic game-worlds - setting it in the 1940’s during WWII, for instance, that might get more…nuanced).
It’s also important to write good characters who are engaging regardless of their possible minority qualities. The fact that a woman character I’d write is an interesting and nuanced character might help eclipse the stereotypes that sneak their way in (you know, maybe she gets damnsel’d for a minute, but if she’s shown to be an egotistical princess who imagines herself as the most important thing in the lives of her subjects, of COURSE she’d expect to get rescued, expect others to get dirty - she uses people like that).
Most important I think is to take the criticism of the audiences seriously. There are oceans of haterade on the internet, but if there’s a black guy out there that thinks my depiction of a black guy is a little hackneyed and racist, I’m going to at least pay attention to his criticism long enough to take a good hard look at it. He might not be totally on-point, but he also didn’t just manufacture this experience, and it’s important to see how he arrived at his conclusion, especially if it wasn’t intended by me and it detracted from his experience. That’s part of why a diversity in development is important - a group of cishetmiddleclasswhitemales are suffering critically from a cultural myopia. The more diverse inputs you get, the less vulnerable your creative output will be to these problems (unintentional as they may often be).
Not for nothin’: try Pillars of Eternity. It is the best successor to that style of play I’ve seen, and it’s not nearly got the love it deserves.
And the problem of clumsily written characters is compounded if you only ever have one female character, or black character, or trans character, or non-straight character. Suddenly they have to be the sole posterchild for their otherness, and whatever they do tends to assume a certain gravitas.
If you have a couple, some of that is defused.
Oh, and as for writing what you know, I have seen excellently written fantasy on what elves and dragons do. The imagination is mighty. For a good portrayal of life as someone othered by society, though, one advice that keeps returning is to consult with someone with first-hand experience, and to listen. Personally I’d be happy for a slightly unrealistic but fun character that feels like a facet of myself, though. Being in there, imperfectly, beats having to play another damn white gruff guy, again. I’d much rather play, say, Alucard from SOTN, even if he’s not all that fleshed out, or nuanced. Variety may in some cases be more important than precision, and I think there’s certainly a space for lighthearted games that do not really dwell on issues of discrimination.
as you’ve been 