Around the Sphere: Getting Serious About Games

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Ah it’s been a lovely week or so around the sphere reading all the various responses to Anita Sarkeesian’s video series while also keeping up with the various “events” in gaming.  I don’t know why, but it seems that so far in 2013 gamers are getting serious even more than before about games, finally …specifically, the content of them. It’s about time! Where to begin?

Stubborn wondered last week about the use of “Adult” themes in games. Specifically, he wrote an opinion piece about the use of so-called adult content in video games in agreement with Anita. He has a problem with gratuitous use of sex and violence which attempts to masquerade as “adult theme”. I commented in agreement as well because it goes to another related issue of how games are rated by the ESRB/PEGI. The non-sensical application of ratings is largely based on how much money a company will lose if they rate the game for adults. As I stated on his blog, the result is that the Adult rating is reserved pretty much for porn. This makes it impossible for customers to make an informed decision about the content of games. But more than that, it’s a ploy designed to give the impression of sophistication, as Anita put it, even though the content is quite juvenile.

Spinks gave some good commentary to CCP’s latest revelation that only 4% of their player base are women. I replied that I think those numbers are far from true, even though the survey itself may be an accurate reflection of player responses. She believes that the gaming culture surrounding the Sci-Fi genre “edges out the women who would otherwise enjoy it.” I couldn’t agree more and Liore over at Herding Cats also harps on this point with a short list of reasons.. It’s one of those vicious cycles: Women don’t announce themselves, men claim women don’t play, and it’s concluded that women don’t like it. The greater question to me isn’t why women don’t like Sci-Fi, but how do developers manage to craft a game to target men.

Syl emphasized this pointwith some well-known scientific findings on human psychology. As Anita explained it, tropes reinforce negative cultural beliefs. Syl’s point was that exposure to subtle repetition is the little discussed mechanism that makes this possible. It’s through repetition of imagery and messages within our games which makes us vulnerable to harmful cultural messages. It takes conscious criticism of the subtexts of the content in our games to examine our habits. Gamers are not exempt from this.

In my delinquency, I missed the opportunity to make comment on Klepsacovic’s post titled “Do Not Mistake Caste for Hatred” a little over a week ago. In that article, Klep talked about the treatment of women as a different class of citizens. I’m not sure I agree with the nuance in terms when he examines the meaning of the word hate and it’s use. If  person says “I hate you” they mean to say they are hostile towards you or dislike you strongly. Therefore, if a person says “I hate women” this is a very accurate statement in that they have hostility towards women when they step outside of their “caste”. I don’t think it’s important to discriminate between full-time, all-the-time hatred of women and mere conditional hate. I don’t think this is a meaningful distinction in terms since the consequences are just the same. Even to say that someone hates something about women as a group is dislike for the group. In other words it’s nonsensical to say I hate that squirrels have tails, but I like squirrels. This distinction just isn’t meaningful, but it’s entirely possible I didn’t grasp what Klep meant to imply. I welcome clarity on this point.

 

Man to Man: Video Games are for __?__

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Don’t let the title fool you: this is not intended strictly for men. It is, however, a question or two guys ask on the subject of sexism in gaming. Maybe I can make a trend of this by periodically publishing those questions and getting readers and bloggers to help answer them.

Today, here’s my inspirational question taken from a commenter on the question of target audiences for certain games:

I know it is degrading and objectifying but… I still like beautiful semi nude women and not really beautiful semi nude men. What can I do? Should I fell guilty to like that in my entertainment? After all, I want the entertainment that I pay for to entertain ME. Not anybody else. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Don’t force my entertainment to follow to your tastes, if you don’t like my entertainment, buy entertainment to suit your needs. After all, there’s a huge industry of pornography for gay men that I don’t consume but I’m very happy it exists because they are happy with their thing I am happy with mine and we can all happily coexist. – Commenter on the Hawken Riveter posters

You can’t request co-existence while also asserting that you only care about your own entertainment. That’s not co-existing. Co-anything requires a certain amount of respect and understanding that it’s not about you, it’s about us.

I don’t think you should feel bad about what you like, generally speaking. We all have preferences. But you should understand why you prefer some things. It’s definitely not good enough to just like something without evaluating it’s quality or value. In this case, you have confessed that some of the imagery you enjoy is degrading and objectifying for women. You tell us: is this a good thing?

When we’re not even considering the things we do, then we can’t possibly evaluate or care about the consequences until it’s often too late.

Can you still appreciate art that’s not directed at you? Must you make it all about you? Can you derive joy from someone else’s even while wanting the experience for yourself? I think all of this tells us that our egocentric view of entertainment is depriving us from actually enjoying it for it’s own sake. There might be something wrong with that, but you be the judge.

A fellow commenter followed up with this gem:

But I still believe Hawken was targeted at men. It’s not only the mechs. It’s the mechs, the guns, the sci-fi setting, the scantily clad women, the competitiveness. Sure, there will be girls who love the game, but they are the minority.

We can also agree that My Little Pony is the exception rather than the norm. I don’t see too many guys watching Strawberry Shortcake or Rainbow Brite.

There’s kind of a catch-22 going on. Women usually don’t like sci-fi stuff because it’s not targeted at them, and content producers don’t target sci-fi stuff at women because they usually don’t like it.

How do we know when a game is targeted at men? Well this guy sums it for us: guns, sexualized women, competitive and sci-fi. So eloquent.

What’s really troubling about this is that we can safely assume this is the general mindset of many game developers when trying to create games that appeal to men. Look at how shallow this paints us. I mean, do we (men) enjoy being thought of as childlike, simple-minded, uncooperative, and violent? I certainly don’t.

This process of picking attributes to make games for men happens before the outcries of sexism, which these same men are very angry to deny. It’s not even possible to believe games are targeted at men, name the things implemented precisely to exclude women, and then conclude that sexism in the industry isn’t as bad as people make it. At some point, the man who believes any or all of these statements has to accept the fact that sexism is embedded in the culture and he’s not been immune. He’s what I’ll call a benevolent sexist. We’ve all been there because we all live here; don’t lash out or be upset about it. Just try to understand it so we can get rid of it.

Is there a way to target a game strictly at men or women without being sexist? Maybe, but to what end? What game are people making these days in which it’s in their best economic interest to exclude women? I’m not trying to say that games should only be made out of economic interest. I’m saying many are made almost exclusively for economic interest and they don’t benefit at all from this kind of marketing. They effectively lose half the market. Are developers being irrational? You know, sexism is irrational …perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised?

As the woman informed the commenter, she exists and loves Hawken and sci-fi. It’s pretty ignorant to make statements that it’s made for men, and yet that might have been the motive of Meteor Entertainment during creation. How many women are hiding in your games, allowing you to trick yourself into believing they are men in order to not be harassed or treated like a unicorn? Probably half the players you encounter, since women make up more than half the human race. This in turn allows men to console themselves that the myth is true, that it must be since the women aren’t announcing themselves more often. It’s insulting to believe that men must be comforted by myths in order to justify their maleness. It’s degrading to assume that I need to know the sex of the player I’m gaming with in order to enjoy the experience.

So, what are your thoughts? Do our game developers make these kinds of assumptions that the commenter above does when making games? What are the qualities a game must have to appeal to men or women separately? What are some scenarios in which targeting a game at one sex and not another a good idea? Finally, how can we get fellow gamers to understand that it’s not guilt feminists want you to feel about your sexual preferences?

Man in the Box: A Response to Tropes vs. Women

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I always knew I’d be inspired to respond to Anita Sarkeesian’s new video series exploring tropes versus women in video games and so the latest video has prompted me into action. Honestly, I expect that many bloggers will write about it as each new episode is published and I think it’s a good conversation starter if there is such a thing for the sensitive subject matter. So far, two episodes have aired and I can tell she spent a lot of time writing and re-writing the content. It’s very thoughtful and careful, and she’s officially played more games with these kinds of tropes than I have now. I have to applaud her stamina for enduring some quite horrible games in order to understand just one more thing that makes them bad!

But anyway …onto my  response thus far to Tropes vs Women. This isn’t an opposing viewpoint to Anita’s series, but hopefully a complimentary one. Instead of just focusing on the misogyny of games (and their protagonists) I want to instead comment on why these tropes about women damage men as much as they damage women. I don’t want to start an oppression war here, but I think it’s important to emphasize that the reason feminists are of no particular gender is because the point I’m making here is not only widely recognized, but accepted as a key component in the struggle for equality. The point is this: the reason feminism is important is not just because it brings awareness and challenge to the oppression of women, but because it shows us the brutality of men and the entire system.

I’ve spent time thinking and writing about the power fantasies of men in video games a lot the past year. I’ve said what I can in my analysis about sexualization of women and empowerment of men. But what do the tropes about women say about men? After playing games for years, I have to admit they aren’t very flattering for us either. For every woman brutalized in a video game, the men watching are also brutalized; it’s like watching images of ourselves destroying our own world in a quest to prove we are real men. As society teaches us, real men don’t fail in their duties as guardians and owners and these duties are exercised in the form of violence. When we manage to fail, the appropriate next step is to purge the stain from our honor through blood and violence. My point is that it’s no coincidence our entertainment is chock full of it. In 2013, this is beyond outdated thinking and yet it still dominates our lives …all of our lives, male and female.

I will daresay most men reading this know full well that if you are physically challenged by someone, the proper response in American culture is to try to invoke a sense of fear in that person. It is like the promise of violence if said person does not back down from the challenge. I think this state of mind says more than words about what this primal (read: base), brutal mindset says about us. Again, it isn’t flattering at all.

Yes, these tropes do concrete damage to women; the violence of their everyday lives is undeniable. But what women endure as victims, men also endure psychologically. It all paints us as something slightly less than human, perhaps even as an object ourselves. When I see male heroes in games emotionally immune to the surrounding violence, I see in them the damage tropes do to me, because the abuse of women is supposed to be inspired and empower my heroic quest, but it only diminishes me. It’s not just empathy, but solidarity, a realization that the fate of women (all people, even) is my own. That is my reason for writing and speaking as I do on the topic because I see my fate as invested in its resolution.

The latest video discusses some really good points we can keep in mind as we discuss the tropes versus women. Of course, any of these points can be applied to any marginalized group and still be useful to the discussion. Anita addressed the following:

  1. “Mature” content in games is trickery designed to make players believe their games are more sophisticated.
  2. Misogyny. Women as the punchline (such as GTA3) during game play.
  3. Women as sacrificial (“kill me to save the world/ before I turn into a monster/ to end suffering” etc …)
  4. Violence used to bring women back to their senses because they have lost control of themselves, men kill them out of altruism, for their own good.
  5. Justifying the violence: “Incidental narrative circumstances” used to explain it away. “Just because a particular event might make sense within the internal logic of a fictional narrative, that doesn’t in and of itself justify its use. Games don’t exist in a vacuum and therefore can’t be divorced from the larger cultural context of the real world.”
  6. Most game developers aren’t giving much thought to what they’re making; the cultural messages are unintentional.
  7. The power of violent imagery reinforces culture through repetition of the images.
  8. Feelings of weakness and guilt invoked for failing in patriarchal duty; this is really about a perceived loss of masculinity, regained only by performing violence upon others.
  9. Exploring death and grief in more authentic ways is a good solution, instead of superficially through extreme violence. Stop building game narratives on the corpses of females.

So, then, why do the male protagonists actually need these tropes in order to provide an interesting narrative that justifies the game? Are game designers just being unbelievably lazy? Closet misogynist? How do these facilitate and interesting and entertaining game?

As men we should view this as content which is damaging to us if we want to really engage the issue of misogyny in games. It’s not enough to just dislike this stuff while we purchase and play the game.  It’s certainly not enough to simply side with women on the issue. This content places us within a very rigid and often unrealistic box in which we accept the narrative (even celebrate it) at the expense of women. It is a box in which men are defined by the mythological weaknesses of women. The abuse, exploitation, and violence towards women in-game is there to serve the narrative of the male. Don’t you find this insulting to men? That we can’t be bothered to care about anything unless a woman is involved/abused/killed/etc? Our investment in this issue can’t solely be that we object to it because it damages women; it has to also be because we recognize its damage to ourselves.

Portraying the male sex as dangerous and violent has serious implications in our culture. Shouldn’t our games take the issue a bit more seriously?


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