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I was wondering if anyone would mention her. 
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I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth that Shelley was the first SF writer.
Frankenstein was predated by Voltaire’s Micromegas in 1752, a novel about a visit to Earth by an extraterrestrial from a planet around Sirius, and that was beaten to the post by Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World in 1666, about a woman who travels to another world via a portal at the north pole.
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But Shelley was the first modern SF author. And Frankenstein birthed two genres at once.
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Hang on, you can’t say that it birthed the genre of sci-fi (I’m assuming that’s one of the two genres you’re speaking of) while simultaneously qualifying “first SF author” with “modern”. If she’s only the first modern SF author then Frankenstein can’t be credited as birthing the genre, because that was done by the pre-modern SF authors.
And how exactly are you defining “modern” anyway?
Really? Because as gaming becomes more interesting to me, I’m more than willing to have puerile, sexist, asocial idiots tossed out of any on-line gaming I’m involved in. Moreover, I’ll cheer any efforts to have this done in games I don’t play. Why should asocial 14-year old behaviour be tolerated in any forum that may have non-14 year olds in it.
As well, I’m more than willing to put social pressure on game makers that do cater to the that market segment. I don’t play that many games, but I certainly add my bit of influence to ensure games avoid exploitation of the tropes that may have appealed to me in my youth.
And make no mistake - culture matters. The same culture that excluded non-young men from gaming (even leaving cash on the table when doing so) can (and should) turn around and exclude young men, even if there’s a market there.
I’ve seen this up close (albeit locally) twice in my youth. Once, when I was pushed out of the group because I could not maintain the higher standards of conduct that new members required, the other, when I was older, and could, and thus enjoyed the company of people up the behavioural totem pole at the expense of a few members we would have otherwise tolerated.
(And to be clear, not all young men are incapable of being good company in their youth - just me and mine. I’m generalizing horribly just to avoid disclaimers at every ‘geeky’ and ‘14 year-old’)
Anyway, I certainly applaud the change in gaming culture. However, I’m not going to pretend that it’s not zero-sum. I do want gaming to exclude exactly the sort of low social skill, low status person I was in my youth so that gaming can be enjoyed by everyone else. I do want gaming to stop making the kind of games that would have appealed to me in my youth and face socially opprobrium when they do, so that I can enjoy gaming without rolling my eyes every 10 seconds.
Everyone is free to play alone or within their own social groups without having to mix.
Sorry, no. That’s exactly the argument they use - this is “our social group”. That applied pre-Internet, when I could be geographically isolated from others so I didn’t make their lives miserable. In the Internet age, anyone might stumble into my swamp, and if they’re interested in it, and if I’m incapable of being a decent human being, then it’s time for me to disappear.
(And sure, social interaction with more mature people would have sped up my maturity by a year at the expense of making God knows how many people miserable. Not a welfare-increasing trade-off.)
Of course that’s true. Remember, your skill and value to the company only make the ceiling on what they will pay you. What they actually pay you has nothing directly to do with your skills and value, it’s how much it would cost to replace you.
And more people want to work in gaming. Ergo, lower salaries.
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I am not a gamer, the most recent game I played was Ultima IV on the Apple II.
I read the whole article. While it has its moments and discusses what is a real problem I sincerely deplore, my feeling is that it is very superficial.
For example: I notice that modern, networked, games are mostly about competition. They keep a “hall of fame”, some kind of interactive space where players are ranked by their successes. Many of the games also have a violent play, but also downplay the consequences of killing or injuring someone. It is part of the game, can sometimes be healed with potions or credits and people get extra lives anyway. Last but not least, some popular games reward players who team up against others.
Therefore gameplay teaches players to team up to violently aggress other teams in a virtual environment and also teaches them that the consequences are of little importance. Which is exactly the behaviour we observe in internet social gatherings against women or people of colour perceived as another “team” in another “virtual environment”.
It also seems to me that the same players who attack women or people of colour will also aggress other men for little reason, which is consistent with the above hypothesis that they are simply primed for indiscriminate aggression.
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I play an online game with a number of thugs mouthing off. Over time I’ve assaulted them verbally for racism, bigotry, misogyny etc. I work at it and wait my opportunity - then I debase and mock them in a civil way, with the goal of winning "lol"s and "lmao"s. Merciless mockery.
It works. They shut up, and get fearful in their online community of the potential shame they face if they incur my wrath. Then some of them actually become OK - and I kind of praise them for it and recognise openly the change in their behaviours.
But it is fun tearing them to pieces. Heh.
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It’s not really myth, it’s a valid argument. Frankenstein was arguably the first novel to use speculative science (such as it was in 1818) to thematically explore the consequences of the science itself. It’s rather substantially different from earlier ‘fantastic voyage’ type stories, which of course go back to ancient times.
One could make a different argument that ‘genre’ as such doesn’t really exist until it becomes something of a practice among a group of writers, and not just singular examples of works that exhibit some of the attributes of the genre. But even then, Frankenstein would remain an important precursor without which the genre wouldn’t exist.
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True, but that was not the only place sci-fi was being written.
What a dick. Come on, Gernsback…
Also, fuck you too, Harlan (may god rest your soul, though).
My point wasn’t that misogyny didn’t exist in sci-fi, but that women were there from the start, none the less. Just like we’re kind of everywhere, none the less. The fact that men couldn’t see them and were dicks to ones they did see aren’t really evidence of a lack of women participating in the culture. We got to remember that pretty much all public cultures have historically been coded as masculine spaces (in the west/US at least), but that didn’t mean women weren’t there.
No. There isn’t. Just because 14 year old girls start playing games, doesn’t mean 14 year old boys have to stop.
And you’re blind if you believe that the culture embraced by 14 year old girls is considered “high status” culture! No, it’s not. Also, what @KatjaKat said.
I mean, there is no sci-fi field without Frankenstein, yeah? I mean, maybe, but she’s the first.
Seriously, how many people are STILL reading Micromegas compared to how embedded in our culture Frankenstein is? Or The Blazing World? What matters here is the influence, I’d argue. And also what @Ceran_Swicegood said!
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Not only that but a fairly recent scientific discovery – Galvani’s experiment showing dead frog legs twitching due to an electric spark was in 1780.
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The game industry has long promulgated the idea that working in it is such a privilege that workers should be paying them, which has led to abusive working conditions. Wages are always lower than any job with equivalent skill requirements, including other entertainment industries. The perception is that developers are rolling in money, though. I remember an acquaintance once telling me that his son was interested in game development and, upon seeing a job listing for a game designer, thought the annual salary was the monthly salary (granted, they were looking at UK listing, so it was in pounds and lower British wages, but still). I told him to tell his son that if he wanted to make money, he should learn to be a programmer rather than a game designer - and then get a job outside the game industry.
The really ridiculous thing about #gamertaint is that the developer they were targeting wasn’t even getting paid by the industry - Zoe was making free games then. They were upset that she was making games and they weren’t when literally the only reason that was true was because she was expending the time and effort and they weren’t.
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10 years ago, I was studying applied communication theory and we were theorizing about what gaming would look like in 10 years. Aside from the fact that VR & AR haven’t become more mainstream, we thought there’d be the same splits - casual gamers do casual games, sharpshooters do FPS, fantasy fans do MMOs - but didn’t forsee the societal problems when the 12 year old FPS player becomes a 22 year old FPS player, still living at home, still gaming 8 hours a day, but with 10 years of “how to cyberbully” lessons under his belt.
Now there’s a grandkid playing in those toxic places, and luckily he’s got enough mental acuity and emotional fortitude to quit playing certain mods, maps, or groups that become too swampy. Not all teens have that, and not all teens have a concerned parental unit watching to make sure the toxicity doesn’t stick.
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I used to consider myself somewhat literate in early sf/horror literature, but I’d never even heard of Cavendish until now (I’m…pretty sure I haven’t, at least as of this typing). Voltaire’s work pretty significant, but he didn’t have the same impact Shelley did. Both may have been earlier, but neither had the right audience.
I think most people who cite Shelley as first are also thinking in ordinal terms, which would tend to exclude Cavendish, Voltaire, Kepler, or Lucian because they did not found a genre in the same sense as she. (And that’s all I mean by modern.)
You can’t be first in that sense if there’s nothing that really follows. Earlier, but not first.
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If it was just 14 year old girls, it wouldn’t make enough of an impact - it’s the fact that everyone wants in on gaming. Women and minorities get targeted by the gater’s because their visible, not because they’re the real danger to the community (nobody said the gater’s are smart).
It’s somewhat older adults like me that are the real threat to their community.
So let’s take a 50 year-old playing games, to make this a little less volatile. As I start playing games, my cultural influence will be pushing to make the sort of behaviour that I was prone to in my youth less acceptable. So absolutely, because I’m joining, I’m making the culture less welcoming for my 14-year old self because at that age, I was not capable of being the sort of person I would want to share social time with.
Me joining gaming is absolutely making gaming less of an acceptable club for maladjusted young men. And I’ll be using my influence (such as it is), to discourage the making of games towards that same demographic. After all, why should any game glorify violence and objectify women?
Thank you, I got a good laugh. But if you are 14 year old geek, just about anybody is seen as higher status. Certainly in my two experiences, I was turfed out because I didn’t have the social skills to interact with better adjusted older boys (and no, they didn’t toss me out, I just understood I was embarrassing to my former peers and took the hint). The second did, indeed involve girls, and once again, the socially awkward understood what was up and gradually migrated elsewhere.
And in both cases, the (not computer) games the community revolved around changed with the newer members. They broadened, and the community became less appealing for many of the original members.
There were no tears or great anger - we all understood how things worked and the inevitability of something becoming “mainstream” (well, from 0.01% of the population to 0.1%)
Anyway, I’ve said my piece - and I only say something at all because it feels a bit like gas-lighting to not only destroy someone’s community, but also pretend it’s not happening. My 14-year old self would have accepted that I didn’t meet the standards of behaviour for what my community had become. But I would have quite resented being told that I was still welcome, as long as I wasn’t who I was.
It goes from being “that’s the way the world works” to “it’s all your fault you’re excluded”. Which was correct to a great extent (although I was years away from having the social toolkit to manage reasonable relations), but I’d still have resented.
My point wasn’t to disagree with you, but rather to be illustrative of the point that others were making about the silencing of women within the field.
Also, while Shelley is one of the major early scifi writers, she’s not the first. Cyrano de Bergerac’s “Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon” was published in the 17th century. She’s very likely the first scifi novelist, though.
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Fair enough, a point, I think that is very accurate. Sad thing is that women have contributed much to the field, and likely many talented women ended up doing other things, thanks to shitty men.
We’ve covered that above, I think. The first sci-fi novelist for sure, essentially the origins of sci-fi as a literary genre. Much like the aforementioned Voltaire or Cavendish, I think the emergence of a coherent genre is what Shelly helped develop more than anything.
But as you say, women and people of color (likely people who have already been involved in gaming) are being threatened here.
That’s silly. You’re not threat, which we know because you’re not who they’re lashing out at. They’d likely accept and see you as an authority figure.
And this isn’t just 14 years who can’t cope… this is grown ass adult men often doing this shit.
You’re wrong. All you have to do is look at how undervalued women’s culture is in society.
It’s not just about your experiences.
And yes, I TOO was a 14 year old geek, but since I was a girl, I wasn’t a REAL geek. Pretty much all that you experienced, I did too. So you don’t get to tell me about being a geek in the world and how oppressed you were because you didn’t fit in, as if I don’t get that shit. On top of THAT, I was also a girl, an ugly one. So don’t tell me that you think that it’s worse from your POV, because you don’t give a shit or understand mine. Maybe instead of trying to assume that because you were a geek you had it worse than me, maybe try to understand the experiences of others and empathize a bit.
Also, don’t sit there and tell me that you’re being a social outcast is WORSE than the racism or sexism or homophobia of our society. It’s not. black kids are STILL GETTING SHOT IN THE BACK BY THE COPS while geek culture is at the top of the world. Geek men are worshipped right now.
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An inability to do this explains why so many white male geeks of many varieties are such poor winners. The SF/fantasy/comic-book/RPG geeks basically won the culture wars, the video game geeks have turned what was was once a solitary pastime into a multi-billion-dollar sports industry, the tech geeks are at the pinnacle of the economy, the Ayn-Rand-reading debate club geeks have set the tone for political discourse and neoliberalism as default in this country.
And yet many of them still can’t get past their high-school revenge fantasies aimed at those who didn’t recognise their brilliance and snowflake specialness. The level of immaturity would be laughable and pathetic if it hadn’t prompted them to poison all aspects of society with their nerdy bitterness.
I was a geeky white male high school student once, too, but I’m thankful every day that I went to a school that didn’t turn me into one of these pissy little man-children who think they were the most oppressed people in history and react violently to anyone who dares put forward a more convincing claim to that “honour.”
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They didn’t do all that stuff on their own, though.
What gets to me the most is the idea that toxic jerks are having something of theirs destroyed.
Nothing ever “belonged” to them. They just managed to drive a lot of people away by treating them like utter shit for a long time. In spite of that, enough of us stuck around to grow up and either create on our own, or use our purchasing power and voices to change things.
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