This week, a critic of sexism in video games tweeted that she’d been threatened, severely enough that she notified law enforcement and left her home. And her experience has prompted some to ask whether gaming culture is dying — or changing into something new.
Anita Sarkeesian is the creator of a series of videos called “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” in which she examines games through a feminist lens, critiquing, for instance, what she sees as gratuitous sexualized violence against female characters. Here’s how Adi Robertson of The Verge describes the videos and their reception in certain gaming circles:
“The videos — which are essentially subjective cultural criticism — come with transcripts and lists of the games mentioned, making it possible to check them and critique her analysis, which can be reasonably disagreed with in places.
“Obviously, this is not what’s actually happened. Since the project launched on Kickstarter way back in 2012, the gaming community has been treated to an incessant, deeply paranoid campaign against Tropes vs. Women generally and Sarkeesian personally.”
Ms. Sarkeesian posted her latest video, which deals with female characters as “background decoration,” abused or killed simply to make games feel darker or more vivid, on Monday. And late Tuesday night, Ms. Sarkeesian tweeted, “Some very scary threats have been made against me and my family. Contacting authorities now.” She later added, “Authorities have been notified. Staying with friends tonight. I’m not giving up. But this harassment of women in tech must stop!”
Ms. Robertson writes that those who threaten Ms. Sarkeesian have “inexorably linked criticism of her work, valid or not, with semi-delusional vigilantism, and arguably propelled Tropes vs. Women to its current level of visibility. If a major plank of your platform is that misogyny is a lie propagated by Sarkeesian and other ‘social justice warriors,’ it might help to not constantly prove it wrong.”
For those unfamiliar with the term “social justice warriors,” Allegra Ringo does some explication at Vice. For certain segments of the gaming world, she writes, the term refers to “people who, according to Urbandictionary, engage in ‘social justice arguments on the internet… in an effort to raise their own personal reputation.’ In other words, SJWs don’t hold strong principles, but they pretend to.” Ms. Ringo takes issue with this formulation: “It’s awfully convenient to have a term at the ready to dismiss women who bring up sexism, as in, ‘You don’t really care. As an SJW, you’re just taking up this cause to make yourself look good!’ ”
To some extent, the “social justice warrior” may dovetail with the “fake geek girl” — the notion that women pretend to be interested in sci-fi or fantasy to get attention. Both recall the much-discussed question of authenticity in enthusiast communities — of whether an obsession with rooting out fakers can harm these communities by making them insular and unwelcoming.
Emma M. Woolley takes up this question at The Globe and Mail:
“Some fancy themselves ‘real gamers.’ They like dictating what a ‘real game’ is and they want every other kind of game (and gamer) to go away and leave them alone, forever. This elitist, gatekeeping culture is populated and enforced mostly by young men, and this group has been courted by game developers for decades.”
She discusses the treatment of Ms. Sarkeesian and of the game developer Zoe Quinn, who has also been targeted, and concludes:
“Gaming’s most pervasive issue isn’t corruption, but the people who’ve taken ownership of something that isn’t solely theirs to begin with. In trying their damnedest to limit the appeal of the medium and use online harassment to achieve their goals, this group of toxic trolls are proving themselves to be gaming’s biggest problem.”
Dan Golding goes further. On his blog, he argues that the exclusivity of what he calls the “gamer identity” has essentially destroyed it:
“When, over the last decade, the playing of videogames moved beyond the niche, the gamer identity remained fairly uniformly stagnant and immobile. Gamer identity was simply not fluid enough to apply to a broad spectrum of people. It could not meaningfully contain, for example, ‘Candy Crush’ players, ‘Proteus’ players, and ‘Call of Duty’ players simultaneously. When videogames changed, the gamer identity did not stretch, and so it has been broken.”
He sees what’s happening to Ms. Sarkeesian as “the viciousness that accompanies the death of an identity.” More women than teenage boys are now playing games, he writes, and “a palpable progressive shift” is changing video-game culture for the better. And, he argues, those gamers who define themselves by whom their community excludes are now lashing out. But, he says, they’re losing:
“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.”
Leigh Alexander sounds a similar note at Gamasutra. She writes that the economics of games are changing:
“We still think angry young men are the primary demographic for commercial video games — yet average software revenues from the commercial space have contracted massively year on year, with only a few
sterling brands enjoying predictable success.
“It’s clear that most of the people who drove those revenues in the past have grown up —
either out of games, or into more fertile spaces, where small and diverse titles can flourish, where communities can quickly spring up around creativity, self-expression and mutual support, rather than consumerism.”
The result: “Traditional ‘gaming’ is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug.” And in its place, she argues, is something more diverse and inclusive:
“Developers and writers alike want games about more things, and games by more people. We want — and we are getting, and will keep getting — tragicomedy, vignette, musicals, dream worlds, family tales, ethnographies, abstract art. We will get this, because we’re creating culture now. We are refusing to let anyone feel prohibited from participating.”
To hear her and Mr. Golding tell it, gaming culture is moving in a new direction — and those who are invested in its old, exclusionary ways may find themselves left behind.