No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games

boing
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You’ve been listening to GamerGate talking heads too much.

She is happy about Emily being in Dishonored two and being the main character. Disappointed they didn’t take the chance that they didn’t make a single-lead role game, because she would like to see more women as main characters. We women don’t get that much, even in cinema. How many women main characters can you count that aren’t in romance movies? Very very few. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t think men shouldn’t have their own main characters or hate that they do, that’s doing an Aurini analysis on it. It’s just wow, we’d like to see that. And you have to admit, Bethesda is trying. I didn’t realize at first that they had the male in Fallout and the female in Dishonoured. It’s kind of fair. And cool, and makes me want to play the games more. Not that I didn’t want to anyways, they look wicked awesome.

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My bad, especially given the initial point. I meant eliminate the demographic from its predominant spot in gaming culture. Not wholesale elimination of young men!

As long as we’re looking at a culture where there are safe spaces, and not a culture where there are some isolated unsafe spaces, gaming will be considered unfriendly to women. If we look at a city, and in general we feel that it is unsafe for women to walk alone except for here and here, that city is generally considered a failure. We do accept there’s some odd spots here or there that are unsafe without writing off the whole city.

The fundamental trouble is that gaming was considered one of boy’s safe spaces where they could be unfit company for man or beast. I spent much of my youth playing D&D, and if I would never have inflicted the rank abuse saddled upon young women now, I would certainly have not been particularly friendly to idea of introducing girls into my gaming group. (Hell, I was immature enough to be somewhat non-plussed when it occurred years later in university…)

My wife played WoW for some time, and became “guild Mom” to a raiding guild. Yes, she civilized the guild, and many of the players both young and old were thankful for it. Players who couldn’t handle the idea that they weren’t escaping adult supervision tended to be disinvited by the guild master, who also appreciated the effect of her presence. However, it was an enormous amount of work - essentially “in loco parentis” to 30-40 young men.

That’s not going to be reproduced on a wide-spread basis.

Part of the reason for my post is to point out that there is no easy solution. Increased awareness and draconian enforcement policies may work, but if the gaming economy is based around $100 million dollar social games, then you must have the millions of customers, which includes the millions of (temporarily) socially maladjusted young men. You are selling them the space where it’s safe for them to enjoy the adrenaline rush (along with the discarding of social constraints that go with it) of violent games.

We all want safe spaces where we don’t have to conform to every social norm. Gaming communities were it for many young men, but now that the Internet has combined their influence and voice together, the real estate of their club house has become far too valuable to be allowed to be “boys only”. D&D was insignificant. No one (outside of a few evangelicals) cared. But gaming made the “mistake” of going mainstream, and the very success has also ensured that it must conform to social norms, eventually. The fact that that will eliminate much of its economic and cultural power, is simply a side-effect.

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Totally disagree with you. I’m a 37 year old gamer and have been playing since Zork.

GamerGate started as a harassment effort. Whitewash it all you will, but it did. It says these things about wanting voices to be heard, but it desperately churns to silence certain voices, misinterpreting what is actually said, feeding on it and then stirring people up to keep things going, then complaining that they keep going. It says that women who say they are being harassed (which DOES HAPPEN A LOT) are playing victim.

Ethics in Game Journalism. Seriously, no one even talks about that, they are all talking about Anita Sarkeesian who Sargon says isn’t even a journalist though he spends an enormous amount of time talking about her. How can you even have ethics in Games Journalism when it’s all subjective? All GamerGate has done is give us the effect of anytime a non-violent, non-mainstream game that portrays things differently in some way gets a positive review it gets slapped a label on it of being “collusion” or “sjw.” It is not doing anything to help anyone, you can be sure. The defacto position: This game talks about politics. SJW! This game has a main female character that does not shoot things. SJW! This has gay characters in it, or characters of color. SJW! This reviewer said they loved this game (usually this comes from fanboys who rail about TellTale games and scream about quick-time events) COLLUSION!

How on earth has this stupidity helped anyone? The extreme amount of negativity generated from GamerGate is astounding, and what is worse it’s own members are totally oblivious. Young kids sitting around going on about graphics like oh my god this game sucks the graphics don’t look like the Last of Us. Like they are judging fine wine. Criticizing anything that is outside of their own wants and needs as negative, that doesn’t have women in it with giant bouncing titties as being boring, which means even if you have women with well rounded characters who have giant bouncing titties that they are boring and uninteresting if they DON’T. Trying to get others to torpedo games that they don’t like because well, they don’t like them and are SJW. Yeah, GamerGate’s been a huge blessing for diversification in the game industry and giving developers a voice and everyone a voice. Right.

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Moral panic? What on earth does that even mean? I’m sorry but you seem to be grasping at straws here. Using big words and academic sounding terms won’t make your argument suddenly make sense.

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Having heard some of the people criticising her, a common argument seems to be that she’s very similar to Evangelical Christians in their moral panic about violence and sex in video games. I gave an interpretation of a group of tweets that could be how they are reading her views. I then went on to explain why I don’t agree, mainly because she’s talking about the amount of violence in games and the way that non-violent interactions are not promoted much (and that many games would be better if you did have more non-violent and social options). It’s hard to be nuanced in a tweet that’s taken out of context, but she explains her views more fully in the article I linked to.

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I will also say that tthe disproportionately muscly dudes, their being overly muscular typically only helps them while with gals I think taking off your clothes does not really do that much for you when fighting a battle.

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You may actually want to watch her videos. They do make some people mad, but oh well. To me they’re probably more about awareness. Even if Anita believes in legislation for it, which she never says or seems to imply (to me), that’s really a pipe dream. You don’t legislate morality. But social awareness is a great thing, and causes people to change and see things a different way. To me that’s not a bad thing.

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I had one when I went to college in 1992. :smiley: I was so happy and ecstatic for 56k! I’m sure you can relate. Those were the days.

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+1 for Genre Extinction Event!

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The self-filtering effect goes beyond discouraging women from applying for game dev jobs, though - as I said, working in a game company, I’ve seen a lot of women who wanted to be in game development but got shunted off into the office support/publishing parts, instead. Traditionally it wasn’t easy to get into the industry (now you just start making games), and women were (and are) being disproportionately rebuffed by an industry that has wanted to hire more people like the ones already in it. I’ve long thought it would benefit the industry to hire outside itself as well, but that tends not to work so well in the instances I’ve seen - people from other industries are used to better working conditions than you generally find in the game industry. (Which is also part of how the industry has filtered potential workers - if you don’t feel like it’s a privilege to work in the industry, you probably won’t want to.)

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Yeah, that’s the whole thing about the “disproportionate” characters - the male and female characters aren’t equivalent because it’s two different fantasies going on, both aimed at one particular demographic. The male characters are freakish in ways that make them powerful (and if that also happens to be sexy to someone other than the developers/target audience, it’s irrelevant), the female characters are freakish in ways that make them “sexy” (and that also prevent them from being powerful and which actively work to undermine the games’ narratives if they’re presented as powerful).

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Thermal management. You can overheat quite fast when you don’t remove the waste heat from the heavy physical exertion. Then your battle readiness drops rather hard.

Here, have a wiki.

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I wouldn’t say I was ever an ally in this particular battle. I feel like women and men want very different things from videogames. Both are totally valid parallel experiences, though – I’d never say that “you cannot have experience X because I want experience Y”.

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raises hand (also a lifelong nerd)

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Indeed, Sarkeesian and many others would like to see greater diversity in game activity for AAA titles.

Still doesn’t make her one of the four horsemen of the ban-video-games-apocalypse. :stuck_out_tongue:

I was using those tweets as an example of Sarkeesian not calling for bans etc.

lol … maybe the gif at the end didn’t show up for you?

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I don’t think it’s fair to call it stereotyping when the data supports it:

Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90.5% of the total number of offenders

Is statistical data considered a stereotype? I agree there are the rare few men not into ultraviolence, and the rare few women who are. It’s not impossible, it happens. But the statistics illustrate how rare this is.

I guess I feel like the “romance novel” and “military fiction” sections of bookstores have strong equivalents in the gaming world, and that’s fine.

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/dont-men-read-romance-novels-misogyny-femininity-publishing-books-92921

A 2012 estimate found romance was the single biggest money-making genre, with sales of $1.44 billion a year, almost double the next biggest seller, mystery, at $728.2 million. Given its popularity and centrality, the question shouldn’t be about why women read romance. The question should be: Why don’t men?

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Fair enough, that was what I was trying to get at. Expand the safe spaces and make it clear that abusers will have to leave the spaces while those being attacked are welcomed. With porn, violent games and so on, people can enter that space while being aware of what they’re getting into, but people shouldn’t have to deal with abuse as their price for playing a game in an open space.

It’s not going to be easy, and each community will have to develop ways of dealing with it in their context. On the other hand, part of the work is actually establishing rules that can be generally accepted as a prerequisite for being in the group. Creative punishments perhaps? Everyone is muted until they reach a certain skill level, then they get to communicate with others. Get enough complaints and you’re back to 0 and have to work your way up again.

This is one place where Anita Sarkeesian has been helpful - it’s one thing for people to complain about people saying “Tits or GTFO” in a game, it’s another to see the barrage of insults aimed at someone for the crime of critiquing games from a woman’s perspective. Not all gamers are going to be like this, but there’s a big enough subset that it should be clear to everyone that there’s a problem. Normal gamers will have to do some work to remove the stigma of a toxic culture, and game companies will need to make significant changes to their game design and internal structure in order to open up the industry. That may not happen to an acceptable level, but we’re already seeing non-gaming companies like Reddit and Twitter having to respond to these issues and revise their laissez-faire attitudes toward attacks.

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I’ve watched most of them, and agree with a lot of what she says. It is a shame that a valid discussion about positive and negative aspects of gaming was largely overshadowed by the abuse that she and others received, but in many ways this is the discussion we need to have now. If people can’t take this criticism from a feminist perspective and a large enough number respond negatively, it’s indicative of a significant underlying problem. On the other hand, if people can’t read critiques of what she says without jumping to the conclusion that the writers are Gamergate trollies, I’m not impressed either. I agree that she never calls for violent games to be banned, and would appreciate some more creative storylines. It’s good to see companies like Bethseda making some effort in that regard, and independent games appealing to a wider audience.

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Definitely! Because analysis requires us to isolate it from its context, which changes (or even creates) its meaning. Living systems are basically acausal. Their interactions are defined by feedback loops which can be difficult to predict in causal terms. Traditional social roles partly inform what “crime”, “violence”, and “aggression” mean in the first place. Is a rabbit eating a carrot being violent? Later on, people’s reactions to these scenarios feed back into shaping/reenforcing the traditions. The individual creates society. Society creates the individual.

Experimenters could get closer to empirical data of the kind you refer to by studying generations of people born in isolation. But they don’t, because it would be considered unethical and expensive. And even if they did, the experimenters own gendered socialization would color their results.

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