How a culture war exploded in the video gaming world

[Cylnar]

by Zaid Jilani
Monday, September 8, 2014
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/08/i_want_a_straight_white_male_gaming_convention_how_a_culture_war_exploded_in_the_video_gaming_world/

Over the past few weeks, the video game community has erupted into a full-blown culture war. On one side are the gaming journalists and developers, circling the wagons around feminist activist Anita Sarkeesian and feminist game developer Zoe Quinn, and on the other side are legions of self-proclaimed "gamers," outraged that the games they love are being criticized. The "#gamergate" conflict has taken many outside of the video gaming bubble by surprise. But as a longtime gamer, I've long expected such a fight to break out. It was pretty much inevitable.  And necessary. Here's why.

The current brouhaha started with Sarkeesian, who has a YouTube series called Feminist Frequency. Feminist Frequency has long tackled what Sarkeesian feels are negative tropes against women in a variety of pop cultural representations – ranging from the LEGO "Boys Club" to the "manic pixie dream girl" in films.

Around a year ago, Sarkeesian released her first series of videos looking at sexist tropes against women in video games. The videos, the result of a Kickstarter fundraising effort, covered territory that should be familiar to just about anyone who has played the most common video games. Anita criticizes, for example, Princess Peach, the perennial Mario Bros. character that in almost every game is kidnapped and then rescued by Mario, Luigi and other male characters. She also offers the same criticism of Princess Zelda in the Zelda series, and many other female characters from Nintendo games. "The Damsel in Distress," she explains about this trope, "is not just a synonym for weak; instead it works by ripping away the power from female characters, even helpful or seemingly capable ones. No matter what we're told about their magical abilities, skills or strengths, they're still ultimately captured or otherwise incapacitated and then must wait for rescue."

In her most recent set of videos, released at the end of August, Sarkeesian looks at "Women As Background Decoration," citing, for example, a "Grand Theft Auto IV" section where  you can slap a bound woman, a level in "God of War III" where you drag along a half-naked woman, and a portion of the recently released game "Watch Dogs," in which you visit a sex slave ring.

To much of the world, these sorts of critiques are common – these days we're taught to be introspective about diversity, inclusion, privilege and power in our workplaces, our homes, our politics. But in video gaming, such discussion is rare. Perhaps that explains why, when faced with Sarkeesian's critique, a loud and angry subset of gamers chose not to put out well-reasoned responses showing where they agreed or disagreed with her, but react in the same manner you might expect a crowd of Tea Partyers, eager to defend themselves against what they view as an attack on their way of life.

So Sarkeesian has been deluged with sexist hate of all stripes, from virtually every gaming community on the Internet. It reached a peak when she actually had to leave her home following particularly detailed threats made on her by a Twitter user who knew her address and parents' names.

For years, I've been a member of the GameFAQS video gaming community. The website holds web boards for thousands of different video gaming titles, as well as walkthroughs, reviews and other gaming content. The boards are the place where all the discussion about Sarkeesian over the years has taken place. Here's a small but representative sample of some of the arguments I've witnessed about Sarkessian and the feminist critiques of video games or sexist gamers:

   -     "She honestly kinda brings this **** on herself."

   -     "Normally I would be disgusted by something like this, but she was essentially the Westboro church of the internet. You paint a target on your head and dare people to shoot it...someone's gonna."

   -     "These people actually went and taunted the whole goddamn Internet, they got what they deserved."

   -     "'Victim'? Please...She's going to milk this for all it's worth. She's gotta keep herself in the spotlight, by any means possible."

   -     "Honestly she should have expected this, I'm not saying it's right but it is 100% expected, there was no way this wouldn't happen. She's attacking something that millions of people care about and are passionate about and enjoy just the way they are.

   -     "The only victims here are the people/hobby she's riding on (so, everyone) with this, yet another, "victim" claim that people like you are actually enabling by defending her and then she can cozily keep her position despite being entirely 100% incompetent

   -     "If the entire internet hates you maybe you should rethink your life."

This isn't to say that the GameFAQS or the Internet gaming community is pro-death threat. There were only a handful of such comments that I saw. And there were eloquent comments from some gamers denouncing the threats or stating that we should be willing to deal with Sarkeesian's critique. But the fact is that the sexist gamers are the ones who feel most strongly about the issue, and are so loud about it you'd think Anita Sarkeesian had personally gone around to every male gamer's home and smashed up their "Call of Duty" discs.

The kind of backlash Sarkeesian has received is also heaped on just about anyone who dares to say that games should have more realistic and diverse representations –for instance, of LGBT, and minorities:

For example, here are some posts from a topic in 2012 about a gay gamer convention:

   -     "Because obviously gay gamers can't coexist with straight gamers therefore they need their own convention."

   -     "The thing is that no one can tell if you're gay... so like why don't they just go to regular conventions?

   -     "l want a straight white male gaming convention."

   -     "You don't have to acknowledge that racism exists. It's obvious that it does. Bringing it up all the time isn't gonna change anything and will just remind people to continue to be racist. Same thing with this gay business.

So it was hardly surprising that a subset of the online gaming community took aim at another target: Zoe Quinn. Quinn is a relatively small-time indie game developer who recently released a free game, "Depression Quest," which attempts to simulate what living with depression is like. One of her ex-boyfriends posted a long rant alleging, among other things, that she had slept with someone from Kotaku (a popular gaming website) to secure positive coverage of her game. Quinn, and Kotaku, were both deluged with hate mail from gamers convinced that they had uncovered corruption in the gaming industry. Thus, #gamergate was born.

This backlash itself provoked its own backlash  — articles and commentary from the gaming press and game developers criticizing the sexist and intolerant "gamer" culture that would drive Anita Sarkeesian out of her home with threats and make thinly sourced insinuations about female game developers like Zoe Quinn. One article that raised particularly wild howls of protest was a Tumblr post by Dan Golding, the director of an indie game festival in Australia. Titled "The End of Gamers," the post criticizes the sexist smears and threats against Quinn and Sarkeesian, and concludes:

   "Today, videogames are for everyone. I mean this in an almost destructive way. Videogames, to read the other side of the same statement, are not for you. You do not get to own videogames. No one gets to own videogames when they are for everyone. They add up to more than any one group.

   On some level, the grim individuals who are self-centred and myopic enough to be upset at the prospect of having their medium taken away from them are absolutely right. They have astutely, and correctly identified what is going on here. Their toys are being taken away, and their treehouses are being boarded up. Videogames now live in the world and there is no going back.

   I am convinced that this marks the end. We are finished here. From now on, there are no more gamers—only players."

Change a few words here and there, and you could almost have an essay by an immigration activist instructing Tea Partyers to get over the fact that America will no longer be a white nation, or a gay rights icon proclaiming that the United States will one day soon have full marriage equality and Pat Robertson needs to learn to deal.

But there's another element at play here that doesn't exist in the great culture wars over immigration, gay rights or other leading social wedge issues. Video gamers as a group are not a powerful elite the same way other "threatened" groups in the country are. In fact, their hobby is itself often viewed as a refuge of loners.

My feeling is that the bunker mentality that gamers have adopted in response to the critiques from Golding and others is, at least partly, understandable. Gamers have spent their lives being told their lifestyle is marginal, the refuge of nerds who couldn't get a date to prom. Now, gamers feel that the one space where they could say they were on top – in the online worlds of "Call of Duty," conventions like DragonCon and  ComicCon, and  LAN parties the world over – is being flooded with opinions from people who previously wanted little to do with them.

In light of the attacks on Quinn and Sarkeesian, developers and journalists alike have been vociferously critical of "gamers," not doing too much to distinguish between the majority of gamers and the loud, angry, sexist members of the community. Virtually every established gaming and tech website, from ArsTechnica to Gamasutra (which wrote that "gamers are over"), to the Verge to the Escapist, has published lengthy critiques of gaming. One of the writers of the upcoming "Far Cry 4″ tweeted: "If you are against social justice, you are going to hate some of the things we wrote for Far Cry 4." One of the creative directors of the Saints Row series admitted that Sarkeesian's critique of his games was accurate and called for change. This has provoked the #gamergate crowd to create a boycott list, which includes virtually every single well-established gaming news website and the developers speaking up against sexism and intolerance. The Reddit community r/KotakuInAction is one of the organizing points.

The sad thing is that even if you don't believe that there is serious sexism in the gaming community, gamers do actually have serious reasons to be skeptical of their gaming press and developers. Game companies are nickel-and-diming consumers like never before, cutting out large sections of their games and selling them for full price while selling those add-ons for exorbitant fees. Meanwhile, Zoe Quinn may not be a real scandal, but game publishers and journalists who review games have gotten far too cozy – witness how Ubisoft gave an entire audience of journalists free tablets as they prepared to review its (in my opinion) fairly average game "Watch Dogs."

As if there wasn't enough hostility between gamer culture, feminists and the industry, one additional group joined the fracas: traditional right-wing activists. Christina Hoff Sommers, an American Enterprise Institute fellow who has made a name for herself as a professional anti-feminist, writing a book about the "War Against Boys," and denying the gender pay gap, joined in the debate with tweets such as: "Term 'rape culture' is sexist. Implicates average guy in a horrible crime. Call people out who use it. It's a form of gender profiling" and "Most gamers seem to support equality feminism. What they reject is today's male-bashing, propaganda-driven, female chauvinism. #GamerGate." Breitbart London's Milo Yiannopoulos, fresh from blaming Jennifer Lawrence for her own photographs being stolen, tweeted with #GamerGate that advocates for tolerance are "often the most spiteful, hateful, intolerant people around."

With the entry of Breitbart and AEI, the pseudo-culture war was complete – with a massive civil war between "gamer" culture and traditional conservatives on one side and virtually the entire industry itself and feminist activists on the other.

But what's been lost in all this is that there actually has been a movement in video games to tell more dynamic and positive stories featuring women, LGBT characters, racial minorities and other nontraditional demographics. And these games aren't just the fringe. "The Last of Us," for example, has numerous prominent realistic female characters, including a lesbian teenage character who as a lead (SPOILERS) at one point has to save her much older male compatriot from ruthless gangsters; it has won more "game of the year" titles than any other game ever released, and sold over 7 million copies.

After the series "Tomb Raider" decided to downsize its heroine's ridiculous bosom and created a less sexist and more realistic portrayal, in a game where she heroically saves her colleagues from vicious and violent men, the game sold around 6 million copies and has a sequel greenlighted.

Indie games like "Papers, Please," which include social justice-related themes such as combating authoritarianism and creating a fair immigration system, sold more than half a million copies; following the #GamerGate civil war, developers from across the industry have signed a sort of peace letter calling on all sides to agree that "everyone, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion has the right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened. It is the diversity of our community that allows games to flourish."

What all this shows is that gaming is far from the male-dominated sausage-fest that some of its critics and proponents claim it to be. It is diversifying and drawing in a wider pool of both developer talent and player base. However, we still live in a world where stellar developer Naughty Dog has to boast that 14 percent of its staff aren't men, and where the gaming industry sees fit to use women as props at its largest annual trade show. And it's a world where gamers are often marginalized and mocked by those who don't regularly play video games, where the late Roger Ebert once wrote a long essay proclaiming that video games "can never be art," and that they are instead "pathetic" when compared to the works of great poets, novelists and filmmakers.

As someone who's spent his life gaming, and who cares deeply about social justice, I believe that the two can coexist – that we can have games that portray women and minorities in inoffensive ways, and those games can still be incredibly fun, and that all gamers won't be tarred with a broad brush because of the brash actions of a few. But it starts by recognizing that there are problems in parts of gamer culture, that games are improving, that we do deserve a better gaming press. If we can come to terms with all that, then we can all game on, in a way that respects everyone involved.

[Tessera]

You wanna know what I think..?

No..?

Well I'm gonna tell ya's anyway...

I think the silly little cunts need to shut the fuck up and get back in the kitchen
where they belong. And if I want their opinion, then I'll give it to them.

That's what I think.

[Cylnar]

I think the silly little cunts need to shut the fuck up and get back in the kitchen
where they belong. And if I want their opinion, then I'll give it to them.

Wow...

And to think I didn't even post this in The Dark Side area of the forum.

[Tessera]

Lemmee tell you a secret, Cylnar...

Women have as much "equality" as men have been willing to give them.

And if the day ever comes when men get tired of pushy, whiny, ungrateful women... then you can rest assured
that we'll take that imaginary "equality" away from women again. Think about it. Women didn't get those little
privileges on their own. Women got them because men begrudgingly GAVE those privileges to women. Fact.

Keep pissing us off, ladies, and we'll take those privileges away ten times faster than we gave them to ya's.
You can bet your sweet, plump, adorable asses on it. Giggle if you must, but I'm already seeing signs of it
beginning to happen. The attacks upon women and women's rights by the Republican party are only the
tip of the iceberg, kittens.

In which case, women will end up exactly where I said they should be: back in the kitchen, where they belong,
instead of running amok on the internet and whining about sexism in video games. Gimme a fucking break.

[Kapnobatai]

I guess your last girlfriend hurt you really bad Tess 

[Cat]

It isn't sexism, it people getting pissed off on cunts who keep trying to fuck up the games industry even more by trying putting in PC crap and corruption.

[Cylnar]

Other people are allowed to have opinions, even ones that disagree with your own.

Even if you disagree in general, perhaps they have at least a small point.

I think we can all agree that even the most annoying "cunts" do not deserve death threats for expressing an opinion.

Remember that we are NOT in the Dark Side here. Let's have a lively debate but try to keep nastiness to a minimum. :police:

[Ratcatcher]

I was going to post a wall of text in reply to that, then realized that, as a marginalized loner & nerd, the only relevant part (to me) is this:

opinions from people who previously wanted little to do with them.

You know what, that goes both ways.

[Tessera]

Couild you expound upon that a bit..? Ratcatcher..?

...

Oh... and to Kapnobatai: my last girlfriend was a super-hot ultra-babe (truly), who is many years younger than I am. Around here, we used to call her "Tessgirl."

And she loved to let me tie her up and smack her around. No, I'm not kidding -- she gets off on being dominated. The only reason we broke up is because I moved from New York to California, but she didn't want to leave New York.

So much for theories.  

[Kapnobatai]

-Combat Starts
-Kapnobatai casts "Trolling rank 1" on Tessera
-Tessera blocks all damage with "Shield of Minor Troll Defense (+5 trolling resist)"
-Kapnobatai  backs away
-Combat Ends



On topic, I saw some Sarkeesian's video couple months ago. Since video had 50% dislikes I was expecting to see her talk about how men suck, how women  are better in everything...bla bla bla all that crap. But she did not talk about that, she doesn't hate men or talk against them. She talks about how female characters are mostly portrayed as weak damsels in distress or a sex object and calls for a more stronger/serious development for a female characters. I agree with her. I usually pick female toon in game if I can, and I like to see some strong female characters as well.
Was bit disappointed in the end of the vid... I wanted to hate the vid but at the end there was nothing to hate :c

Latest sexism in game that bothered me a bit was in Risen 3. Character Patty from Risen 2 was really nicely done, both her looks and personality.
In Risen 2 she is energetic, sarcastic and she teases you all the time. This is her look in Risen 2:
http://www.risen.cz/images/risen2/npc/patty.png
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/970x546/2012/05/Risen_2_Tops_downsampled_4.jpg
And here is Patty in Risen 3:
http://i.imgur.com/QMlZAnV.jpg
She is now just generic hoe. Her personality is also watered down and boring in Risen 3.

[Ratcatcher]

The very short version:

I'm a "Gamer", I've been one for close to 40 years.

Now that "playing video games" is mainstream, the same people that laughed at my way of life/hobby for all those years think that, not only does their opinion on the subject matters, but its the right one?

... no, just no.

[Cat]

Thunderf00t (Atheist on youtube who has made several videos critical of feminism) is starting to get shit form these people.

Twitter: Criticize Anita... you're GONE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTSQbLt9DS8

According to twitter, it looks like Anita Sarkeesian was directly responsible for me being banned from twitter.

And here a good video about how the sexism issue is being to use deflect attention form the corruption issue in gaming news.

GAMERGATE! Gamer's fight back! Guest video by TheInvestigamer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCExXie1XB4

[Cylnar]

I watched the Investigamer guest video on The Amazing Atheist's channel. Basically it says mostly the same stuff Tessera and others have been saying for years - that "gaming journalists" and "mainstream" gaming sites that serve ads and clickbait and suck on the corporate tit - are whores whose opinions can be bought and thus cannot be relied upon...and that young people (the Investigamer, like TAA himself, looks to be in his late 20s) are just now discovering this fact, which older and wiser souls have strongly suspected for years, even without concrete proof of discussions in secret chatrooms and such - and feeling betrayed, as well they should.

What the video does not do is provide sufficient justification for the virulent misogynistic harassment of Anita Sarkeesian for daring to express an opinion, with several good points about the treatment of female characters in video games, both historically (I don't even think she brought up the old Custer's Last Stand arcade game, which, if I remember correctly, featured a pixelated rape of a Native woman by the game's "hero" as a "reward screen" for winning) and more recently in "gems" such as the Grand Theft Auto series, even if she engaged in "cherry-picking" by not listing (the few) games that featured more positive and/or nuanced portrayals of women.

Instead the Investigamer casts aspersions on reports that Sarkeesian was driven from her home by death threats, while presenting no evidence that this was not so (4chan's /b/tard community, for example, has no problems ethically or logistically with doxxing and harassing people they don't like, and it only takes one unhinged fuckwit with a gun and a home address of some "cunt" he hates for her viewpoint to create a bloody clusterfuck and do for male gamers what Eliot Rodger did for MRAs and PUAs not long ago). He also starts the video by repeating the slut-shaming accusation that Zoe Quinn slept with a game journalist to get a positive review on one of her games (an accusation originally made by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend, let's not forget) and basically assuming it's true in every particular, because an ex would never lie about the actions or motivations of a girl who dumped him, after all.

I know little about Quinn and care less, but can we quit with the slut-shaming already?

I already knew gaming journalists and most gaming sites not named tessmage.com are corrupt, untrustworthy and generally shitty.

I thought Sarkeesian brought up some interesting points even though I did not really agree with her conclusion that the gaming industry was a vast misogynist wasteland (it's more a vast corporate cookie-cutter pander-to-the-lowest-common-denominator wasteland...and until T&A stops selling things, T&A will sell things). I do think gamers did far more to prove Sarkeesian's point than Sarkeesian herself did. :laugh:

Time for boys to grow into men, and realize that if a woman (or anyone) has an opinion that you don't like, you can just...not rise to the bait. Let Sarkeesian's videos, or Quinn's games, languish with a few thousand views/plays and/or a comments section composed of the feminist echo chamber and maybe some evangelists begging all the harlots to close their legs, give up their sinful ways and turn to Jeebus before it's too late. :angel:

[Tessera]

I watched the Investigamer guest video on The Amazing Atheist's channel. Basically it says mostly the same stuff Tessera and others have been saying for years - that "gaming journalists" and "mainstream" gaming sites that serve ads and clickbait and suck on the corporate tit - are whores whose opinions can be bought and thus cannot be relied upon...and that young people (the Investigamer, like TAA himself, looks to be in his late 20s) are just now discovering this fact, which older and wiser souls have strongly suspected for years, even without concrete proof of discussions in secret chatrooms and such - and feeling betrayed, as well they should.

The term is "payola" and it's been going on for a very, very long time.

It used to be the scourge of the recording industry. That's when the term was first coined... way back in the 1950's. Record companies were paying cash to radio DJ's, in exchange for repeated airplay of whatever music the record company was trying to push. Many of the "hit singles" of that era were actually bought and paid for in advance. Pretty shitty, eh..?

But today, it affects pretty much every single form of mainstream entertainment. Movie reviews, video game reviews, music... hell, you name it. Everything is up for sale these days. The bottom line is this: anyone who accepts advertising can not be relied upon to give an honest review of ANYTHING, otherwise they risk pissing off their advertisers.

Commercial gaming sites are 100% supported by companies who choose to advertise on those web sites. Well now... exactly who would be interested in advertising on a big commercial gaming site..? Game publishers -- that's who. So then, just do the math. None of those sites are going to come out and say things like "The latest release from EA is a total piece of shit," because EA will stop advertising on their site the very next day. You can bet on it.

Now, while this may not be exactly the same as the payola scandals of the past, where cash was paid under the table in exchange for a good review, or more airplay, or whatever... on an operative level, it works out to be exactly the same. Commercial gaming sites give glowing reviews to shitty games, in exchange for continued advertising on their sites by the publishers of said games.

Commercial gaming reviews are all bullshit. That's a fact. Every single one of them is dishonest. And if you see a bad review of a particular game on a big commercial gaming site, then you can bet your assets that it's because the publisher of said game does not do any significant amount of advertising on that site.

So whattya gotta do to be named the "Game Of The Year..?" Just spend more money than your rivals... that's what.

[perez007usa]

We are on a roll here.

[Cylnar]

It's time for all these young people who populate corporate gaming sites to wake the fuck up and realize such sites will never serve their wants and needs for unbiased, unvarnished facts and opinions about the video game industry. They're SO FUCKING SHOCKED!!! that there may be some corruption among people who get paid to push video gaming and sell video gaming culture, and whose sites depend on ad income from the very same industry, and yet they have yet to realize that this will NEVER change as long as there is a huge, dripping corporate teat to suck on for sycophants and boosters, as long as they tell everyone the latest AAA game is the BEST MOST AWESOME LIFE-CHANGING GAME EVENT ever produced and they have to drop their $60 to get it RIGHT THE FUCK NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!

And honest sites like this one languish in the cobwebbed corners of the Internet, ignored by the very masses that would benefit from truly unvarnished opinions and discussion with no conflict of interest...the very same conflict of interest they're now bemoaning at those self-same censored, highly-moderated corporate sites that lock threads and delete comments, leaving them with nowhere to vent their ire other than to sublimate it in blind trollish rage at some hapless female(s) who dared say something negative about the same industry they themselves are angry at...

Amazing. And sad. And unfortunately not surprising. Humans are social animals with a strong herd instinct, who want to hang out at the biggest, shiniest and flashiest place with the most other sheep milling around, ingesting the same swill as all their "friends". Not even realizing that as long as they continue to lap up the toxic garbage they are fed, nothing will ever change.

Sites like this one are the last of a dying breed, thanks to the shortsighted stupidity and ignorance of the masses of naive youngsters and lack of uber-kewl bells and whistles to draw the sheeple to the trough...

[Cat]

I even stopped listening to a lot of reviewers and Vlogs on the internet due to a number of reasons:

1. They don't cover anything interesting for the most part anymore
or
2. They all cover similar topics or have a similar review or vlog style to one another.
or
3. The overly long gimmicky,sketch, and storyline filled review show/vlog a lot of them do as gotten old.

And on sites like youtube a good interesting show usually only gets a view count of 1,000- 10,000, while crappy gimmicks get millions of views for the most part.

[PrairieEagle]

I've begun a fun little game with myself where I take my favorite game and I imagine the main character or some important characters to suddenly have their genders reversed. Fable, Tomb Raider, DmC, and so on. I've found that it doesn't really make me like the characters even more or any less. The games were written by people to make a good story, so why does does it matter that there is sexism if thats what the writer wants in his fantasy land?