Team Valkyrie FTW

If you’re a gamer, you’ve been there: you want to share a game so desperately with someone else, you want to play together, to enjoy it together, but they just suck. Maybe it’s just this game, maybe it’s most games, but you want to play this awesome title and you want to share this with them, and they just can’t keep up. And sometimes maybe you wish there was a way for them to be able to play this game without either of you throwing the controller in rage. If only there was a setting or a mode for that…

Quoth John Hemingway:

I want to make, for the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters.

You may be expecting me to rail against Hemingway on this point, to call him out on flagrant sexism, to perhaps throw rocks at the BLT team. But I’m not going to do that, because honestly, that’s not the problem, and that’s not the point.

Instead I want to focus on a very telling bit of wording in that quote: “for the lack of a better term.”

Gaming and geek culture in general has a specific self-identity, that it is largely comprised of white, straight dudes who behave in stereotypical male ways. Challenge instead of acceptance. Confrontation instead of cooperation. Domination instead of community. This is celebrated as what is Good and True about gaming, and others need not apply. This may not be the dominant part of the community — it’s certainly not in the people I hang out with, though I have met these assholes before — but it’s an image which is there, and which has stuck.

What comes along with this a casual misogyny, revealed by the constant derision of things which are more stereotypically feminine, by the assumption that women cannot bring as much to the table as men can when it comes to gaming. It is revealed by phrases like “girlfriend mode.” It is revealed by the fact that (a) everybody understands what is meant by that phrase, and (b) the developer can’t seem to think of a better way to communicate the idea. There is an implication here that women don’t play games, and when they do, they are the girlfriend of a man who does.

Daniel Nye Griffiths described this very succinctly by saying, “‘girlfriend mode’ is just another note in an unwelcoming chorus.” It’s another straw being delicately placed across the camel’s back, nestled into the ever-growing pile of casual insults which only serve to remind women that while they are welcome, they will never be truly welcome.

Can’t think of a better term to describe making a game less difficult? How about “Easy Mode”? Is that a completely new phrase to gaming? Howsabout “Newbie Mode”? Or maybe “Freshman Mode”?

I could do this all day. There are tonnes of ways to indicate a lack of skill that don’t imply gender.

The point is, it’s so ingrained in gaming culture that women are only present as significant others, and when they are present they are never going to be as good as and certainly never better than the men they are with, that this is the kind of phrase that gets tossed around. Is “girlfriend mode” an explosive phrase all on its own? Not really. But it’s just one more way in which men show women what they truly think of us. It’s a symptom of a bigger disease.

Yes it’s a casual slip, but that fact is important. This is what happens when barriers are down, and language goes unscreened. This shit is so ingrained, so ever-present, that it becomes inescapable.

On Wednesday night I went to the Women in Games event at Zynga. It was pretty awesome, I got to talk to some incredibly smart and talented people in the industry, and hear some really sharp women talk about their experiences. The panel was a joy to listen to, in particular Brenda Garno, who is totally fabulous and knows all my feels about being a lady in a male-dominated environment.

But something cropped up in the panel discussion, and it came up a few times, and it’s one of those things that irks me that we do: saying sexism “doesn’t exist” in the spaces we occupy, then go on to say “oh wait except for this one example I have.”

“I never notice sexism. People treat me the same. Oh except that I get asked a lot if I’m in marketing.”

“I’m one of the guys, you know? I’m not like other girls, so they respect me.”

“There’s less sexism in games than anywhere else, I think. Oh but I get treated like armcandy a lot.”

“I don’t dress nice because I don’t want guys to get certain opinions of me, you know?”

This is pretty common, and it makes me sad. And there are a few problems in statements like these. Saying sexism doesn’t exist because it’s never happened to you (that you can recall) is like saying Australia doesn’t exist because you’ve never been there.

I think a lot of this comes down to having to refine the definition of sexism. Once upon a time, sexism was smacking your secretary’s ass and telling her to get some coffee, sweetheart. Sexism was telling a woman to her face that she was being let go because shouldn’t she be at home with the kids anyway? It was telling a woman she couldn’t do something because her ovaries would get in the way.

This sort of behaviour is unacceptable now. But you know what’s totally acceptable? Assuming every woman at a gaming convention is there to be looked at by men and judged on their fuckability, rather than assuming the nicely-dressed woman standing at the booth might actually be responsible for developing the game she’s selling. If a woman is attractive, it’s acceptable to dismiss her, to say she only got to where she is based on looks alone. The shit that gets spewed forth in the comments pages on Kotaku is acceptable. How do I know all this is acceptable? Because it keeps happening, and nobody’s really putting a stop to this shit.

So that’s one point. Sexism is more subtle, harder to spot, and easier to dismiss. But there’s another problem here, one that irks me ever so much: why does a woman have to be “one of the guys” to be accepted?

There was a comment made which was such a clear-cut example of internalized misogyny that I had to bite my hand to keep from laughing out loud. “I’m not like other girls. I’m one of the guys.”

Here’s the thing: being “one of the guys” is totally cool. Being a woman whose personality is dominated by typically masculine traits is totally cool. I’m really glad that it’s acceptable for women to behave that way.

What I’m not okay with is deriding women who act typically feminine. And I’m less-okay with the traits that were described as belonging to “most other girls”: catty back-biting, passive-aggressive comments, obsession with appearance… basically a MRA laundry list of why women suck. I shouldn’t have to state the obvious, but I’m going to: these traits exist among both men and women (seriously, meet the men in my office, oh the catty gossip). Singling out women as being the ones who posses this trait unfairly maligns an entire gender, all because you can’t think past the latest romcom you just watched.

But what about other typically feminine traits? Nurturing? Building? Concern with appearance? How are these bad things? Why are we celebrating eschewing these traits in favor of conquering and destruction? How about a little balance?

It’s difficult to argue sexism doesn’t exist when the panelists themselves are making the sexist comments.

And lest I sound like I’m harping on games, let me be clear: this problem is everywhere. I have had to rescue women from creepy-ass men at professional scifi/fantasy literature conventions (professional conventions), only to have them turn around and say “There’s no sexism in SFF.” This shit happens errywhere. It’s simply easier to deny the problem than face it.

The point was raised that things are so much better now than they were ten or twenty years ago. And I agree. They are. Totally better. Loads better. Alls I’m saying is, let’s not rest on our laurels. Let’s keep pushing this.

Tracy Hurley has a Kickstarter up that wants to get more fantasy art out into the world. The best part is that she wants it to be filled with people of all colors and genders!

From Tracy:

Prismatic Art Collection is a free library of art representing heroes of all backgrounds. In geek culture, there are plenty of Lukes, but not enough Landos or Leias. We want to change that.

That’s so awesome everyone, like really awesome. It’s the kind of awesome that makes me overlook that we live in a world where that kind of thing needs to be deemed awesome and not just a standard practice.

So far they have roughly half the money they need for their intended goal and they still have a little over a month to reach it. If they reach it they’ll have art work available for any enterprising role-playing game maker to use for their game. This can happen folks, we can have cool, diverse fantasy art work and have it appear in games or just anywhere we want it to be.

The project doesn’t just stop there, if they can get even more cash they can add more pieces with different classes and fantasy races as well. If you are a fan of fantasy art, then why not go over and give a dollar?

Tracy is starting something cool and I hope others are inspired to do the same and we get more artwork that looks like it has characters from all over the world and not just Europe. This is a great idea to help show that the fans of fantasy art aren’t just white males, but are all over the map and go beyond men. I want to see some awesome magic people, help me out. Thanks Tracy.

So the Escapist has recently posted two articles about racism in gaming. The first, by Bob Chapman, talks about the racist origins of a popular setting in some adventure games: The Lost City. This trope comes from a time when people viewed ancient civilizations from places such as Africa as mysterious, because the white people at the time couldn’t believe that the black people of the past could ever be so advanced. So obviously many of these were civilizations were built by magical white people of the past. Like Atlantis.

I’m glad Chapman brings this up because if there’s one thing that sets me off is the idea of how aliens or magic creatures had to be the cause of ancient technology we didn’t think was available because we think that the people (mostly from non-white places) were too primitive.

Then we get the second article by Shamus Young, who brings up the lack of non-white male video game protagonists. I like his set up for it because he says while these things annoy him, it’s not what the article was about. The thing that bothered him was the video games industry’s response when people say their should be more diverse: “Gamers need to have a character they can relate to.” This is what gets him, and I agree.

This sort of statement is dumb as hell, and racist. Young says this pushes the blame of racism on the gaming audience, and that the blame still belongs to the industry. The part that gets me most is the “relate to” line. It’s dismissive of every non-white-male human out there, telling them to buck up and play a straight white man. Because everyone can relate to being a white man, right?