The Male Reaction To The Accusation of Sexism in Video Games

Gabriel Croteau, ID 7163959 11/30/2013

For a long time I didnt really consider myself a feminist or an ally (depending on what definitions you use for what a feminist can or cannot be). Social inequalities of all kinds were important to me, and I certainly accorded a lot of time to thinking about gender. In spite of it all, there was always a resistance to it because I, like many people of my generation, had been successfully convinced by society, media and the trolls that fill out the ruling echelons of society that the word was a bad one, the movements were unsalvageable and our society was the most equal it has ever been. The incident that is the topic of my third section and ostensibly the catalyst of this paper is part of the reason I ardently believe in the importance of feminism. For gamers, the casual sexism that we let slip into our daily language and seemingly lighthearted, anonymous online banter is only the tip of the iceberg for problematic attitudes that have yet to be fully unseated. I wont even pretend that this is a masterpiece of compassion and understanding, that I am the perfect ally and that this paper will even be free of bias and my own brand of bad ideas. What it is and will be is an attempt at understanding something very surreal, and horrifying that is undeniably a part of the culture I claim to be a part of. For the purposes of this text, I will refer to male feminists as feminist allies, although this term can potentially be applied to non-feminist identifying women who have certain ideological goals in common with feminists. Identity politics are complicated.

Geek culture is a new and vibrant force in our culture, a nexus where fandoms and common interests in media meet. In the stereotype of the straight white male geek, these spaces were originally inclusive cachets for the people for whom their particular passion was an escape from an unpleasant or uninteresting life. That identity has come to encompass other kinds of people over time, including women, LGBT people and people of distinct, unassimilated ethnic backgrounds as a consequence of the cosmopolitan environments we increasingly live in and share. Despite the desire for inclusiveness, geek culture reflects sexist attitudes that are damaging both to the artistic value of games produced and the communities that arise around the act of playing them. Attempting to get her feminist game vlog crowdfunded in May of 2012, Anita Sarkeesian became the lightning rod for a vast anonymous harassment campaign and in many ways the poster child for a particular set of attitudes within the gaming community. A sizeable number of fans of video gaming flocked to attack her with hateful messages, while others created vulgar images to insult her in effigy. The storm reached its pinnacle as anonymous netizens rushed to obtain and distribute her personal information, displacing the online campaign to a very physical one. To claim there was no feminist discourse in games before this incident would be incorrect, but the situation would not calm down. Silencing tactics designed to stop the dangerous videos only gave Sarkeesian an avenue to discuss these issues, demonstrating the legitimacy of her arguments and remarkable grace under fire. Money flooded to her Kickstarter, where she exceeded her set goals by several dozen times over and most importantly- the internet suddenly couldnt stop talking about what had happened and why. This particular brand of sexism in gaming culture is a manifestation of wider negative attitudes towards women projected through a hostile group identity which rejects the concept of women being members. This identity encompasses all of gaming (or an arbitrary category of real or

hardcore gaming) which has become entangled with an image of dominant hypermasculinity, where members must indulge in attacks against outsiders and their lesser in order to feel affirmed as a member (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). Lacking the moderating effects of personal social interactions and missing empathy for what should be recognized as human beings due to empowering effects of online anonymity. Publically-available information refutes the belief that women are not participating in video games. According to the ESA Essential Facts publication for 2013, 45% of gamers are women (Entertainment Software Association, 2013). Women permeate all genres and consoles at substantial levels, matching male ownership of casual consoles such as the Nintendo Wii (Earl, 2012) and making up slightly over one-third of owners of a comparatively hardcore console like the Xbox 360 (Soper, 2013). Underrepresentation of womens participation in games may be a consequence of ingrained cultural norms taking time to disengage, but they might also be responsible for the lack of new makers. While Wikipedia has entire categories for male video game developers, it accords a single article for women- a page which mentions an initiative to increase numbers in the industry that is also not notable enough to get its own separate page. Many of them consume (and produce) abundant amounts of game-related content on social media such as Lets Plays (also known as LPs) by Youtube personalities such as PewDiePie and Tobscus, the former of which enjoys a substantial female viewership. In the open forum of the video game market, women are turning out en masse to vote with their dollars and buying games in numbers that defy public perception. Moreover, they visibly attended geek culture events (which inevitably include gaming) such as the San Diego ComicCon, Otakon or DragonCon. The exclusion and derision of participants in these events, usually in the form of slut-shaming cosplayers or declaring them out-group infiltrators trying to enter a male space ignores the sheer

costs of participation and the dedication involved in participating. Even made from cardboard and low-grade cloth, cosplayers invest dozens of working hours to produce passable in addition to the potentially hundreds of dollars in materials and equipment. The hiring of professional models to fill out promotional stands may be responsible for a conflation with cosplayers themselves, who may be harassed simply for attending. When that practice of using these models more recently began to come under fire, it was ultimately both those models hired and fake nerd girls who bore the brunt of the attack, rather than the companies gleefully hiring the former and inviting the latter to attend. PAX, E3 and a number of other strictly gaming conventions, often the grounds for industry professionals to promote their goods, have taken to banning them enmasse only after the reaction. Gaming communities are rarely hotbeds of debate, out of apathy than agreement- while dissent to the status quo of an acceptance of casual misogyny tends to lead to shunning. In such circles, it is often preferable to use silencing tactics in order to prevent (the feminist ally) members from causing a wedge in a community through their rabble-rousing, as the desire for peaceful coexistence leads to the geek inclusion paradox. Common techniques for disassembly involve first attacking the speaker as being boring or there being more pressing issues (games to mind, of course), before eventually the ally themselves. Rarely are arguments themselves touched, as this is too involved a process. In this way, they reinforce the group identity according to their needs by appealing to the concept of being under attack by feminazis, moral guardians or any other outside force that threatens to make games less fun. This is the fundamental fear of the hardcore gaming audience, to which all other fears are ancillary is the possibility: that those games they enjoy no longer being made (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). Feminists and other forces acting in a fashion that suggests an attack on the medium are a symbolic threat, as are people

making games other than the ones they want or desiring games other than the ones they want. Media is no longer necessarily a forum for the exchange of creative ideas for these types, but a zero-sum game with limited capital which must be expended to entertain them. A high percentage of (American) households that contain at least one gamer, with current estimates placing the number of people who play games in one form or another at 58% (Entertainment Software Association, 2013) and that number. Suggestive of a diverse userbase with various interests that it could respond to, the gaming industry instead markets overwhelmingly to young, male white teenagers. It funds primarily games that are supposed to appeal to these markets, primarily tactical military shooters that feed back this self-perception of what a gamer is through their design and marketing platform. Games that attempt to market female protagonists either have difficulty securing funding as game director Jean-Max Moris experienced while trying to sell the idea of Remember Mes biracial (Franco-Moroccan) woman of colour protagonist Nilin (Prell, 2013). Even established game characters with long-running franchises of their own have been the subject a trend of strange patronizing revamps in recent remakes, such as the marketing campaign that followed the new Lara Croft game, inexplicably describing her as needing to be protected by the male player by its creative director (Schreier, 2012). Games with protagonists outside of the very strict lowest-common denominator appearance, ergo white, male and traditionally masculine in Europe and North America, actually see great difficulty in obtaining funds to even be made as a consequence of this severe underestimation in the minds of the gaming public (Kuchera, 2012). Reactions to these are mixed, as noted in particular in the comment sections of particularly lively communities such as Kotaku and The Escapist but for many members of that diverse gaming public there is a desire for richly developed female protagonists, with their own qualities beyond a pale set of boilerplate

attributes. Attempts to create such characters are at times well-intentioned but flawed, such as the new Lara Croft who in spite of controversy over the tone of her early marketing campaign succeeded in conveying a certain amount of depth in her characterization. Anita Sarkeesians case demonstrates the key failings in the male responses to her criticism. A brilliant mastermind who intended to be burned in effigy by thousands of netizens and becoming a martyr for geek feminism on the internet she is not, but there has been a major paradigm shift in how these issues are viewed now. Entire twitter logs of the messages and images sent at her, too numerous and detailed to be engineered fakes now stand in inarguable monument to the actual hostility women are regularly confronted in online spaces. The limits of an incoherent, anonymous rage and the effectiveness of bullying have been demonstrated. The backlash against the harassment campaign and the massive influx of money Anita received has essentially allowed her to work full-time as a personality in a circuit of gaming and media conventions while also producing her videos, ensuring that theres little stopping Tropes Versus Women in Video Games from being made.

Bibliography
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