I suppose I conflated this article the other article I read here today on Google Glass, where they made sure to specifically mention someone’s race for no reason I could discern.
I’m going to disagree. I feel a twinge of discomfort because I feel like somehow I’m being associated with people I have nothing to do with just because of incidental characteristics I have no control over. I don’t want to be erroneously associated with those people. There is some truth there, but I don’t want to be an honorary member of that club because of my race, gender, orientation, or anything else.
It isn’t. I don’t want sympathy, I was using that as a bridge into something I see as a larger issue. The article, and one that was posted here earlier, makes sure that we know that white males are doing something, even when race and gender pretty much had nothing to do with the topic-at-hand. Not standard insular in-group psychology, or not people immersed in a certain culture; but white males specifically. They don’t have to say “all white people are a problem” explicitly. Whiteness, maleness, straightness, or whatnot is only a superficial characteristic to this type of thinking, and thus merely incidental in the broad picture.
Let me see if I understand this. “Ethics in video games journalism” means objecting to reviewers who actually care whether a game is anti-women, anti-trans*, anti-minority, or so on. They need to neglect its artistic message and only look at whether the underlying mechanism is well constructed.
That’s not how things work in other fields of course. If someone released a book or movie promoting the glories of ethnic slavery, no matter how inventive the plot or beautiful the metaphors, you know critics would still pan it for spitting on black people. But sticking up for people like that creates tribalism somehow. Video games journalism should aspire to higher, to not pointing out when people alienate other people.
We should rather include lots of voices that dissent from “so-called progressive” ideals about not excluding people. This is a vision you think we should find appealing for reasons. Am I reading this wrong?
I think that many of the most noisy and annoying people involved currently in GamerGate, aren’t there because of a personal interest on the future of gaming, but because of the hunt for a reaction with total disregards to ethics that is in the core of some channer circles. That is how do you explain how trans people tend to be more attacked than cis people, and how do you explain that empathetical, gamer first, feminist second, game developer Brianna Wu has been more harassed than Leigh Alexander who doesn’t spare a chance to denigrate gamers. The size of the available reaction is what prioritizes harassment targets, in my humble opinion because a large part of GamerGate runs on channer culture. I don’t even endorse the tag actually, but the controversy is here to stay. I was pro-Zoe since the start of the #Quinnspiracy and still am. But I am pro gamer, and I won’t bow my head to your progressive gods.
However, the fact that the controversy was sparked by channers, doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are people that truly care about what games mean, specially non-neurotypical people that culture colonialists like Leigh Alexander try to throw under the bus time after time. Your side doesn’t have clean hands either. Your side can destroy a life to set an example to not to mess with progressives. Your side doesn’t view me as people, but as some sort of mythical bowl of potentially poisoned m&m’s.
So I take with me what can be rescued from the #GamerGate side of the controversy, and search for a pro-gamer faction that has a better ethics stance than the channer side of it.
Great article. It sure is some really offensive irony for accusations of colonialism to be leveled at the colonized when they are just trying to participate in a culture that has historically excluded them.
My side? My “side” is I don’t give a fuck about game journalism as a construct. My reaction would be the same if one group of people who collect Precious Moments figurines started engaging in an all out war of violent intimidation against another group of collectors. If game journalism is more important to you than a person’s right to live a private unharassed life, then you need to straighten your priorities.
Your characterization of the circular firing squad phenomenon is wide off the mark. Criticism, however unwarranted, is not the same as death threats and SWATing. If that is the same to you, then you come from a different and inferior moral universe.
The essay’s critique of the metaphor of colonialism was interesting, but it seemed like it stopped short of making some connections that seem obvious to me. Anti-immigrant racism, in former colonizing nations, often uses this same metaphor, that they are now being colonized. For instance, there’s the heated rhetoric about “no-go zones”, which are supposedly large swathes of European cities where non-Muslims aren’t permitted – which is total fantasy, by the way.
So I’d think that a valid metaphor is the experiences of immigrant communities, and the racist backlash against them.
hmmm, i’m not sure that as a matter of discourse we can really see the anticolonial tendencies in this kind of cultural conflict as “not real anticolonialism”. while i agree with the articles basic thesis, which is that there is nothing colonial about attempts to diversify gaming, i can’t really agree with the idea that colonialism is defined in only territorial terms. i do a lot of work on japan, for example, and its hard to say that things like unequal treaties and political intervention don’t constitute part of a colonial project, much less the exportation of “western” culture as well. an attempt to dominate a cultural or identity space can very much be a colonial project, but the key here is domination: there is nothing dominitive about the attempt to diversify games, despite what some of its detractors may claim.
with that in mind i do think there is something anticolonial in resistance to it. so much anticolonial resistance takes the shape of forming an exclusive body politic in opposition to a colonizer. take, for example, hindi nationalism in india, which mobilizes anticolonial resistance specifically by writing muslims out of a narrative of what it means to be “indian”*. in many ways, we can see the increasingly narrow and strident attempt to assert a gamer identity as a classically anticolonial strategy. what the anticolonial rhetoric amounts to though, is a sleight of hand which attempts to display anyone not “gamer” as exercising hegemonic power, even when its obvious they aren’t. anticolonial rhetoric doesn’t only belong to those with “pure” intentions, and arguing that way more often than not often covers up the way in which anticolonial rehtoric is used as parts of other projects of domination–for example, the use of panasianism in japan to explain the colonization of korea and manchuria.
*it is a bitter irony that so much postcolonial violence is itself a product of the colonial project.
Once again, the issue is what you understand and how you feel about that. This is what I was trying to express earlier, that feeling that way could act as a trigger to try to understand. Try to discern the reason.
A white male google executive explaining how everyone was wrong in how they reacted to google glass. How many times do you think marginalized people have been told by white men that they are reacting the wrong way - that they don’t understand. The reason it was brought up that he was white and male is because he’s the perfect stereotype of a clueless white male who can’t imagine the experience of anyone’s experience but him own.
This is really the constant experience that marginalized people have of white men. And when you try to generalize from marginalized experiences to your own by talking about not grouping people based on ‘accidental characteristics,’ (as if it is the same when people who were born poor think negatively of the rich as when people born rich think negatively of the poor) you are saying that you have figured out the formula for avoiding discrimination that somehow all the people who have been discriminated against have missed.
If a white man doesn’t want to be a clueless white man who doesn’t understand anyone’s experience but his own, then he can work on that. A good first step would be to figure out why people are always saying, “Ugh, there goes another white man telling us how it is.”
I don’t think any right thinking person should want to be a member of a club because of their race, but we all are. You have had a very different life experience as a white man than you would have as a black man, and we can’t wish that away.
Did you join this community just to troll? I notice you made the account today and your only posts are in this topic. Did it make this to reddit and /redpill or something?
I have been following trends about gender and gaming since… lets say about the time of the Aris Bakhtanians fighting tournament scandal. The fact that I dissent from the party line doesn’t make me automatically a troll.
When marginalized voices come to take their seat at the table, there will always be an outcry that they are invaders, colonists, inferior versions of their straight, white male counterparts. But rather than killing artforms, the addition of marginalized voices often helps ensure that they stay alive.
The literary culture may be alive and more vibrant, but young males don’t (statistically) read books anymore. In other words, for better or worse (and it’s for better), making the book community more inclusive has eliminated a community before it, and its previous members have lost a culture.
In other words, there’s a price to pay for inclusiveness, and the most tribal (insecure) members of the gaming community are aware that they’re the one who will pay it. It doesn’t justify their behaviour, but if there is any community willing to fight for their tribe, it’s young males.
(Of course, their mistake was having their cultural activity (video-games) become too popular. You want an exclusive hobby, choose a real niche that is mostly scorned. Thirty years ago, few complained about the absolute horrendous exclusivity of teen-age D&D players (like myself).)
Without siding with any of the gators here, I think there’s a contradictory impulse when feminists present gaming as a toxic culture which has to change, but in the same breath, minimise the extent of these changes because AAA games won’t go away. As if thoughtful game criticism was both much needed and entirely useless.
Surely, AAA games won’t go away anytime soon. But the culture around them is not the same anymore. Game criticism affects the discourse on games, the communities of creators, the criteria to assess games, the definition of the canon and much more. Feminism in games is creating culture. It’s false to say that the digital space is limitless. We are all fighting for the domination of the same castle. I’ve seen many victims of GG declare that the Internet is now part of our lives, and I agree; the same is true for anybody playing games.
Just last week, I don’t know what prompted this, but I heard many women regret the turn taken by the brony fandom, that is to say that even a show for little girls celebrating friendship and feminity was reappropriated by masculinity (I couldn’t agree more). Yes, the show itself hasn’t changed. Little girls are still the primary audience when it airs on TV, and nothing them disturbs their quiet appreciation of it. They do not even know the existence of bronies.
But online, would it be fair to say that there was no power shift? If a woman were to seek a fandom to discuss the show, she would find only male-dominated communities who do not assess the characters on the same basis, who do not produce the same kinds of fan works, and who would project masculine discourse on a feminine-geared product. Would it be fair to advise her to flee to Tumblr, because the digital space is limitless, when in reality it is hostile against her?
The article is well-written nonetheless, but I do think it’s fair to speak of what we witness not as colonisation, but as a culture war. It involves sides, it involves a limited space, and it involves winners and losers.
So, are you really advocating for “regressive” sociopolitical messages? Why is pushing for a fairer and more inclusive society, which doesn’t just cater to white, cisgendered men, and their needs so… bad?
