Today, I shared this story that Julie (and some of my other friends) posted on Facebook.
Here’s what I said, for the odd reader who isn’t my FB friend but is interested in what I have to say:
We really need to make a decision as people who present and gather to talk about games and technology and gender and race and sexuality. We are in the profound minority, at least of “power” and “influence” in tech. So we need to NOT let things like this happen. First of all, I wish we lived in a world where Anita didn’t face things like this, but I think we all know given the current political climate we totally DO live in a world where stuff like this is going to happen. The old adage is true: A person is smart, but people are stupid. But we have a deeper problem. We can’t create a space that we assert is a safe space (like a conference or a classroom) and then let a block of threatening people form.
Reserve the first three rows of a talk like this and at least stop a harasser from bringing his friends to mob the stage. Sure, he has the “right” to be there, but he’s not respecting the speaker’s right to comfort, so I think it’s completely fair that he be forced to utilize the venue in a way that is consistent with making everyone feel safe and respected.
Of course if I’d been there I might have just moved a chair over in front of him and sat down then seen if he had the nerve to move the huge angry man sitting in front of him. Something tells me he probably wouldn’t, and if he complained, he’d lose his precious “right to be here” argument.
I don’t think I said enough there, so I wanted to expand a bit on this.
I use Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and other women who were attacked as part of Gamergate in one of my “every semester” game lectures. I start the discussion by making my students look at photos of all four women, because I think the largest problem we have these days with women in gaming is that due to places like 4Chan and the meme-lovin’ nature of gamer chat (and the misogynist norming of how gamers behave), people don’t think these are real human beings with lives and loved ones and careers and feelings who love games and love their work and eat cold pizza and such. They’re people.
I’m not going to pretend that American culture isn’t circling the toilet. After an era of “liberal” dominance wherein really nothing changed and we just poked at the wound until it bled openly and gave us Trumpmerica, we are experiencing a violent backlash. Terrorism is rampant. Racism is the norm. Women are losing rights, gender — which, make no mistake, has always been fucking fluid and complex– is under binary attack. We live in an era of ill will, where even the good folks do things like calling their opponents “garbage humans.” We are in a bad, bad place.
I study games. I teach people to make and write games, and I look at game culture, at competitive gaming, at collaborative gaming, at identity. I also live in a world where I’m lucky (or cursed, but I guess lucky) to pass for white even though I’m not. Most people think of me as Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, a Kevin Smith with no weed, the proverbial Dante Hicks who wasn’t even supposed to be here today. I occupy a weird space, webbed between a number of academic disciplines as a scholar who is almost an anti-intellectual due to my desire to utilize logic and common sense, a person with the audacity to claim that my culture isn’t a museum exhibit and that I might, after 40 years of life, have interesting things to say that don’t directly cite and lean on the ideas of a upper-class to rich white dude from Europe.
Games represent an interesting space. At their best, gamers truly are democratic. The ideal gamer, if we could cherry-pick, is just interested in play and in enjoying the complexities of the game being played, with no regard for gender, race or sexual orientation. The ideal gamer, however, is drowning in a sea of hormonal testosterone. And that has a traumatic negative impact, though there are also some pluses (which I’ll hit later).
Let’s start with what is bad. This is something I saw in Computers & Writing, though when I verbalized it there, many people became incredibly uncomfortable. But technology is a white dudes club. Women got in. In places. White women. But if you’re not well-off and white, tech in general is blind to your existence. But scholars in tech are proud of themselves for letting some women in, so they get very uncomfortable when you point to their whiversity.
This is doubly true for games, which even more than tech in general has been dominated by the belief that financially well-off white males 12-18 are the total of the audience. Only studies show that isn’t the case. In fact, the most recent numbers indicate that the largest group of gamers– the largest individual group– are women in their 20s-30s. Games isn’t a boy’s club, but it sure acts like it is.
And with that comes a Lord of the Flies aesthetic. Gamers fall into one of three camps, based on my research:
- Gamers who love to game and just want to play and have fun. They’re apolitical at their core, though most of them have political leanings they’ll discuss if you ask. They just don’t think of games as the place for that.
- Extroverted, friendly gamers who actually make an effort to embrace new people and want to see diversity, want to see interesting new content and to play with many different people. These are social gamers who add you to their friend’s list after a game. They chat while they’re playing with or against you.
- Then there’s the stereotype, the rude boy, the angry profanity spitting homophobic anti-social “tilter” who talks about his balls, about raping your face, calls you any and every homophobic slur he can think of, and thinks of this as an acceptable culture. This is the guy who, if you were playing pick-up basketball, would see you miss a shot and yell “you faggot!” but think that was totally funny and cool and that it didn’t offend you.
The third set isn’t the largest set of gamers. But it’s the loudest. And it’s also the one that sets the norms. So there are things that are just considered “okay” or “normal” that absolutely are not in any way okay or normal or safe.
Let me give you three examples from my research, only one of which I think I’ve written about at any length. Together, though, they illustrate the damage that this culture does.
The first is from the guild I spent my year or so researching. They were, for the most part, people who fit category two on my list above. They were kind hearted and friendly, bringing in new people and treating them with respect even when the new people didn’t always do the same. One of them, though, was a total “dudebro” as I would call him with the other participants. He didn’t like me all that much at first (I was a nerd who was looking at them like an experiment in his eyes). But one night, I played better than him and saved him more than once. We made major progress. He screamed– yes, screamed– into the VoIP chat “I fucking love you, dude! I want to rape your fucking face so hard right now.”
This struck me as a little rough. I was told later, by his close friend (another of our participants) that this was just his way of telling me I was “in” his circle. He loved to talk trash, but apparently he’d only talk radically inappropriate sexually lewd trash to people he considered his valued friends. So, yay, a really homophobic participant in my research wanted to drive his genitals into my face. That this was socially normed to my group is evidence that the gaming world needs a little help.
A second example: I like to role-play. I have a toon, which I’ve written about a couple of times, that is female that I role-play, in character, as a woman. I was using her to lead a dungeon group once during my research and someone got mad at one of the other participants (the person who got mad was a random person we got grouped with by the computer). This angry person said a number of terrible things. I told this person, still RPing, that I wasn’t going to finish the dungeon if he had such an attitude. He then went into a familiar form of online trolling on me, claiming he could figure out where I lived by my IP address (not at all true in WoW, by the way– he was just talking a big game) and that he was going to come to my house and rape me while my family watched. He said this to my female-RPed frail blood elf, not knowing he was threatening a 30-something, six-foot-two, 350 pound man who at one point in his life could come off the line so fast that he could plant a quarterback in a second flat. It wasn’t a true sense of danger, but it was alarming to me that this person on the other end seemed okay with this reaction, and also that the person was so quick to believe that a role-played character was precisely what he saw on the screen. I also hope he enjoyed the ban he received when I reported all of his comments to Blizzard.
The final example is of a time I was playing with a married couple that were in our guild and none of the others, also running random dungeons and fishing for supplies we’d need to raid. These two had a newborn as well as a three-year-old, so it wasn’t uncommon for them to leave the machine for a second or so. They also played in the same room, at the same table. So on occasion, if one of them was doing something critical in the game and one of the children needed them, the other would go into follow-mode and switch machines. This meant that we could be chatting on VoIP with someone and they’d know that the healer, for example, was female. But she’d have to go — look out, stereotypical gamer, I’m about to say something you might find gross– breast feed, and since I was tanking, I’d need to be healed but could get by without her husband’s damage in the fight. So he’d slide over to her laptop and heal me.
One time when this happened, two of the random players we picked up started making horrible sexist comments about how bad the woman was playing, how only a shitty girl could do such a bad job of keeping me healed, etc.
Three things:
- That was an encounter where I usually died anyway. We were learning the content.
- *I* messed up. I messed up hard. I even said, into my headset, “oh crap, I messed up,” because I taunted something that I didn’t need to have in the encounter and, to make it worse, when I repositioned the boss, the new thing was behind me.
- The person healing me was actually the husband who had switched chairs while these other two men were complaining–about his wife. They were telling him how good he was and how he shouldn’t play with her if she was going to heal so poorly. They completely missed that his toon wasn’t moving at all.
He didn’t bother to tell them. We just left the group and found two new random people. We went on with our night.
I asked him why he didn’t bother to fight with them, and he said he was used to it, and that it wasn’t worth his energy.
And he was right, I suppose. But that he felt that way is another sign that things are not going how they should.
I want to finish this post by saying something I told my class last semester. We had a more intense than usual discussion of Gamergate because one male student too me to task for “being anti-man” which I always find funny because I AM a man. But after this student came at me, a female student in class interjected and shared some fiery, heartfelt counterarguments based on her experiences. She was bubbling with anger, but she was speaking words of truth.
When she was done, I told my students this. It’s what I think all of the world needs to know and realize.
Most male gamers are not bad people. I base this on having been a gamer my whole life and having researched them and spent time with them in every capacity possible. Right now I work in a department that is all male, and all white with the exception of a couple of international folks. But this is also the group I’ve worked in that most critically understands race and gender and cares about what I have to say about it, far more than the “super liberal” diverse English departments I’ve worked in before. Most men who work in gaming want equal pay for women, want to see and hear diverse content, want their games to not be flat and for people to feel welcome. Games as art are meant to engage people and channel emotion. Games as a business are meant to sell to a wide audience. Both of those things require understanding diversity.
But the overwhelming narrative and the loudest portion of the game scene– from the players to the makers to the sellers– is misogynistic and homophobic, white and upper-middle-class. It’s rude and snarky and tries to excuse its behavior by saying “oh, we just do that. We say ‘nigga’ so it’s cool, we don’t mean it like that. We use the word rape to mean we beat people so it’s cool.” That’s NOT cool, and that’s not okay.
So students ask me… what can they do? Well, they can work to make games that aren’t like that, and they can work to support games that destabilize that world. But what we can do, what we really must do, is the thing that Americans don’t do. We have to engage. If you’re a white male in a game and someone insults a woman in chat, you have to call them out. You have to tell them no, we don’t just do that. No, that’s not okay. No, you don’t use the word rape. No, you don’t threaten someone’s life. No, the person who missed twenty of their thirty shots isn’t “gay.” It isn’t enough to say “most of us aren’t like that.” Because if we let even one of us be like that, we lose. We have to say “this is our thing, and you don’t get to run roughshod over it.”
That’s the only way we fix it. Even if sometimes we want to participate in that culture, even if it’s easier to do that. I mean I’m not perfect. I do it, trying to be ironic, sometimes among my closest friends when I know I’m safe. But I shouldn’t, and I try as hard as I can not to. And I try as hard as I can to call it out. But this world makes me angry and sometimes I have to be sarcastic and use its own rhetoric back at it. I’m not proud. I need to be better. I need to be above reproach if I want to tell others to fight the norms.
Normalizing hate isn’t okay. And one look at what our President and our national political climate has caused should prove that to all of you.
If you let people do it, it doesn’t matter if you’re participating or not. You’re affirming it, and you’re the problem, too.
We all need to be better.