#GamerGate, Part 2

Now that I've covered the issue of media ethics, I turn my attention to what, for the rest of the world, is making #GamerGate infamous - that is, its treatment of women.

This, itself, is in two parts: a fear of a changing games culture and vicious attacks on women themselves.

Again, most of the people involved are not directly attacking women.  A very small subset of the Internet has focused its energies on this task and is brutally efficient in doing so.  Case in point: Felicia Day posted on the subject and had her personal information leaked within an hour. 

This constitutes a brutal attack because it seems to be done with the specific intent of giving people a way of harassing her that goes far beyond the Internet and into real life.  Internet harassment is difficult enough, but it seems even more dangerous when real-life information is obtained - in the former case, attacks can be so painful that they drive a person to suicide, but in the latter case stalkers can literally wind up on a person's doorstep and kill them. 

And more than that, it is an attempt at intimidation, literally telling the person, "I know where you live," as if the person releasing the data and making the intimidation will actually follow through and attempt to attack their victim at home.  It is, in the modern vernacular, terrorism, in that it uses terror as a weapon.

Ironically, perhaps, it was that very fear that Day proclaimed she would no longer be subject to, that she did not appreciate what the fear did to her, and what the attacks did to her community. 

As the time article notes: Chris Kluwe - who admittedly is not as famous to gamers as Day, but is, nevertheless, famous - did not get attacked in the same way.  The attacks are reserved for women, because the intent to cause fear is reserved for women, and that's all because women are seen as weaker and more able to be controlled through fear.  That is part and parcel of misogyny culture. 

We've been controlling (or attempting to control) women through fear for thousands of years.  Case in point: while some men have experienced street harassment (sexual harassment from random strangers), a vast majority of women have.

I would argue that in any situation where we (all humans) have the ability to hold power over another human being, we're tempted to do so.  Societal bonds (including laws and ideological instructions from churches and schools) can help to limit the extent to which we do, but they can also exacerbate the problem.  What misogyny culture means is that those bonds exist in our culture to structure our interactions in such a way that the idea of women as being weaker and the idea that it's OK to exert power over weaker gender forces are empowered and codified.    In our society, it's not only OK but good to be a man, which doesn't mean to possess a penis, but does mean to be physically stronger than everyone else and to exert your power willingly over everyone else and not be ashamed of it.  It's the essence of Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, in all the heroes of Ayn Rand's shitty stories and Terry Badkind's shittier stories, in all Fox News interviewers, and in the ideas that I've been writing against since the beginning of this blog: that those who are powerful deserve their power and should use it, and those who are not powerful do not deserve a voice.  It's what Colbert mocks by co-opting that dominating interview personality.

That's the light side of misogyny, if you will - I don't mean the good side, I mean the fluffy side, the easy-to-take side, the attractive-to-some side.  We can almost all of us agree that beating women is bad, but we can't seem to agree that creating a culture conducive to the beating of women is bad, and that's because that culture is attractive to so many.

And it lurks most easily in the dark corners of the Internet, where people laugh about misogyny and talk to others who share their beliefs, their anger at their own subjugation to greater powers building off one another to form a perfect storm of hate and resentment of another social group.  Don't get me wrong - this happens on the left, too, but fortunately our cognitive dissonance over that hate helps to constantly deflate the balloon.

Ok... let's get back to the other part of the #GamerGate debate that I said still regards misogyny - game culture.  One of the great concerns of #GamerGate is that games culture is changing.

First of all, I don't believe that's true.  A quick glance around modern games proves that with few exceptions, women character models are still crafted off the law of inverse armor coverage - that while armor suits for men are better if they're bigger, armor suits for women need to show as much skin as possible to be effective.  The only MMO game I can think of in the past 7 years, at least, that hasn't followed that rule is Lord of the Rings Online, which covers women just as much as men (and has perhaps the largest female-to-male ratio of any MMO as a result). 

But let's examine the problem a little more closely.  First of all, games culture didn't start as the highly-misogynistic dynasty it would later become.  Lara Croft could not exist in the early games culture for many reasons, not the least of which being that graphics weren't up to snuff.  But most of the earliest games were puzzle or limited competition games that gave not one crap about the gender of the players.  Ironically, the emergence of Facebook gaming has actually gotten us back to our earliest games culture, rather than subverting the games culture. 

Zork was relatively gender-neutral, for instance.  Pong (1972) certainly was.  Pac-Man (1980) was gender-irrelevant until they made Ms. Pac-Man (1982) as an attempt toward inclusivity, simply by sticking a bow on the top of Pac-man. 

As soon as games could be usurped by misogyny culture, however, they were.  The first pornographic games were already rolling out by 1981, and even titans of porn like Playboy have added their moniker to games. Of course, we all know that sex sells, and soon game makers were putting sexy women on everything.  There is no logical reason, for instance, why Lara Croft would have increasingly-large bra sizes over the years, and skimpier outfits, other than to attract men who would enjoy watching her breasts bounce.

But perhaps this isn't the "games culture" that these protestors are referring to.  Perhaps they mean, instead, the games culture that produces domination games.

Remember that being the dominant, "I can do anything I want" person is a highly socially-masculine role.  This type of character was popular in movies and literature already, as in the case of the gunslingers of Old West novels and movies.  For more in-depth explanation of that, check out my article about Firefly.  This ideology, in basic, says that a good man with a gun can stop an entire invading horde of bad guys.  If the games stopped the moment you got shot, then perhaps they would be more representative of real life - but instead, since they allow for saving the game and trying again, they create an effectively-immortal main character whose job is simply to unleash destruction on those he or she perceives as evil. 

They allow the players to step into that fantasy and unleash destruction on others, as well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of First Person Shooters (FPSs).  FPSs have been around since 1973, but it wasn't until Wolfenstein 3D (1992), and shortly thereafter Doom (1993), that the genre really took off.  I knew it would be a popular medium when I first learned about Dennis Fong (Thresh) winning a Ferrari in a Quake tournament in 1997. 

Side note: I've dueled Fong exactly once.  He's every bit as good as you'd expect based on that tournament win.  I died, a lot.  But I killed him a few times, too.  Not enough to win by a long shot.

I say that because I, too, was a member of this culture.  I'd like to think I still am.  FPSs can allow their players to live out a fantasy of murderous rampages, but for those of stouter psychologies, they are simply fun and competitive sports. 

And the FPS genre hasn't gone anywhere.  It is, perhaps, more popular today than ever before. 

FPSs are, traditionally, masculine games.  They represent that culturally-masculine mindset very well.  But they can also be traditionally feminine games, as with Quake's old Capture The Flag mode, which allowed users to participate on a team.  Some players would take point and have the most damaging bonuses to allow them to strike hard and fast.  Some players would guard the base and have the most defensive bonuses to let them stay alive while incoming enemies stormed the place to grab the flag.  Everyone had a role to play.  Today's shooters are similar - online play pits teams against each other, and while it's possible to hop in a game or on a team where the roles don't matter and everyone's job is to simply shoot at everything, there are also team matches where teams are prebuilt and members still have important roles to fill. 

They are no longer strictly stereotypically-masculine ideals.  They've evolved, offering roles for everyone, regardless of how they identify.

And that's important, because these changes didn't scare anyone into thinking that gaming culture was changing in some horrible way - it simply changed, slowly but surely, and people either changed with it or got out of the way.  And this popularity of modern shooters has occurred simultaneously with other gaming advancements such as Candy Crush and Farmville and, yes, Depression Quest. These games have proven for years that traditional gaming can still be going strong while newer non-traditional gaming styles can well up from needs the world didn't even know it had yet, and no one has to be threatened by that.

I have no doubt that there will remain websites devoted to the more traditional games.  I have no doubt that some news sources will talk about newer games. 

So no - the idea that the culture is changing is bullshit, covering up a fear of being emasculated by other changing elements of the culture at large.