(As a note in advance: I had to put this article up without getting my proofreader to check it through. So, if there seems to have been a step down in quality, that's why!)
Before anyone starts preparing the insults: I'm a guy who, while not a regular gamer these days, has grown up with gamer culture meaning a lot to him. So no, I'm not an angry female feminist (yes, there IS such a thing as a male feminist) who is ranting about something they don't understand: I get gamer culture very well, yet I'm still going to stand up and say that gaming is still a male dominated market with room to change (arguably, for the better). Being a male gamer does not prevent me from recognising issues with a medium that is aimed for people like myself, you know!
But yeah, in connection with my previous article relating where I feel GamerGate's more noble purpose is correct, albeit misguided and arguably a bit misinformed, I'm going to try to spin the coin about the issue Anita Sarkeesian frequently discusses and explain where I feel she is correct with what she comments about, but also why her voice is not necessarily the most correct voice out there.
One of the things which nobody is going to deny is that the most high profile games of the video games media that get released every year do tend to have certain features to them. Most of them tend to be additions to long established franchises and most of them tend to be the type of game that would appeal more to men than they do to women. At the risk of offending a few readers, you're far more likely to find something which appeals to men will usually contain either scantily clad women and/or a large amount of killing enemies in various bloody ways (the only real case where that isn't true being horror stuff, but, since horror as a medium usually contains a large amount of blood these days anyway, that's not necessarily a huge break from the typical track record). This is not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but, on average, you're more likely to see a man wanting to watch something like
The Expendables over something like
Bridget Jones' Diary (heck, I've done that in the past and I'm hardly Mr. Macho by any measure...I would joke that I'm more like Mr. Nacho, but I'm not sure that describing myself as a type of food which most people get to share by dipping it into various sauces really works for the point I want to use it for, despite that being probably one of the best puns I've come up with in a good while!).
I don't think anyone can completely explain why this is, as anyone attempting to say that it's down purely to the amount of testosterone people have will inevitably have to explain why there are highly masculine men who have a lot of interests which are stereotypically feminine in nature (and which has no transferable skills to their masculinity: I know ballet is actually INCREDIBLY physically demanding to do properly, which is why it is actually required if you want to be a professional in American football, and I know that most people in the army know how to sew because they are responsible for maintaining their uniforms, but I'm on about examples of incredibly masculine men who are fans of romantic films, shopping and stuff like that), but my personal suspicion is that it's partially down to a combination of social conventions being imposed on people as they grow up (to give you an example, most cartoons aimed at young children will usually still have a target gender: I've watched the entirety of
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (and consider myself a brony, albeit not one who is involved in the fandom connected to the show) and I would still say that a very valid case could be made that it is a show that is still primarily aimed at young girls, albeit one that remembers that being aimed at young girls does not give it an excuse to close everyone else out of the show!). There are other factors connected to it, of course, but, by reinforcing the stereotypes of each gender early in most people's lives, you do kind of get the idea that it's harder to mentally break out from accepting them as the norm just because you're so used to seeing them being reinforced all of the time. At the risk of sounding like I hate society and believing in anarchy (I don't hate society in the slightest, I just don't like the unpleasant sides of it in the slightest and tend to take a dim view on having to accept something as the truth just because it's what I live in), I can't help thinking that some of the ugly sides of society can be traced to people getting completely the wrong idea about things due to misunderstanding some of the important lessons they should have been taught growing up or, possibly even worse, getting the wrong lessons taught to them. The example I like to use is that, if you grow up in a society like that of North Korea (which I think calling a dictatorship would be an understatement), a culture like that of the UK (where you can think what you want to think and have the right to vote for what you want) is going to seem naturally weird and alien just because it's not the culture you've grown up in, and, as such, it's impossible to say that one culture is necessarily worse than another: it's just different. This cannot be a comment that will win over people who are opposed to dictatorships in all sorts, but, ultimately, the only way one could understand which culture is the best would be to completely separate oneself from ALL societies and judge each one on their merits and failures, without a viewpoint that comes from having been inside a single society for your entire life. Knowledge is power, but the right way to combat ignorance is through education and unbiased facts, not hatred and distorted truths.
Hmm...that's another advantage of honest and uncorrupt journalism that I really should have put in my last article, isn't it?
Anyway, digression aside, the point to remember is that most male gamers will have usually come into gaming after years of being used to the ideals of what society deems manly, which means that it can be very difficult for most men to completely understand why a woman with a feminist agenda looking into gaming culture would have a lot of reasons to express concern. Even if she is distorting her facts a bit (like Anita Sarkeesian arguably is), many of the points she makes have some basis in reality, and it is only by letting yourself put aside your ability to view gaming from inside the medium and look at it like an outsider, as Sarkeesian is, that you can spot some very concerning trends in gaming, not least of which is the fact that, as much as most gamers would like to claim otherwise, gaming spends most of its time among the bigger titles not appealing to a female audience. You do get titles which are gender neutral in their appeal, like
Animal Crossing, but, among the hardcore gaming crowd, the trend is mostly to have triple A games aiming towards a male audience.
But why is this such a prevalent issue among gaming? After all, it's 2014 (coming up to 2015 in less than three months): surely getting a triple A game out there which appeals towards a female audience and only a female audience should not be like trying to pull teeth from the gaming industry?
Well, here's the big problem: there are very few female games developers (although the number of female games developers has been on the increase in recent years, for which I am personally very grateful), and there is still a large number of people (not just in gaming, but in writing in general) who simply do not know how to write a character properly who is a realistic depiction of their gender, sexual identity, religious identity and racial identity without actually being part of the same group as the character they wish to write. Throw in those two factors together and you can already start to see why gaming tends to relegate women to the roles of eye candy and damsels in distress. Getting a female main character in a triple A game in a brand new IP who is realistically written, not conventionally beautiful to the point of making most supermodels look like they're trying too hard and does not succumb to ANY stereotypes which women in video games seem to have to get given to constitute a character is very unlikely to happen, even assuming a game would be made BY a triple A company with a female main character outside of
Tomb Raider.
On top of that, due to the patriarchal nature of most societies (which still hasn't been completely combatted, I should point out), there is still a bit of an inbreed sense among a distressingly large number of men that a woman intruding on a man's domain cannot be a woman to be trusted (I'm sure most people will know the "no girls allowed" and "no boys allowed" signs that most young kids put up on the rooms to their bedroom doors...well, put this on a larger scale and you pretty much get the idea of how gaming culture seems to work), which puts even more pressure on most female games developers to do well, as she has to prove that she is both an excellent games developer in her own right AND is able to do it well enough to disprove sceptics claiming that a woman doesn't understand gaming.
And this, on top of the fact that the anonymity the internet provides makes it very easy for people to harass other people, basically puts all female developers under three times as much pressure as her male counterpart would be put under, if not more than that due to the fact that a anonymous person determined to harass someone via the internet could do so with very little difficulty and that a product which fails will nearly always have the blame pinned on the female developer by overzealous gamers, even if she is working among a group of developers and all of the ideas which gamers disliked were ideas that she could prove that she did not agree with and never wanted to implement in the product at all.
Yet all of this does not ultimately answer the important question that I've been hinting at: why is gaming still a male dominated market?
Well, let us do some basic maths just now. If you want to become a games developer on a big project, you usually have to have started out on smaller projects which have been very successful. At best, you're going to have had to make two or three smaller projects before you've been able to move on to the bigger project (the first to get your name out there, the second and third to prove that you know what you're doing with a smaller project and are capable of making a bigger project likely to work), which is likely to take you about a year's worth of development per game if you want to do it right. But, before that, you'd need to have been able to enter a smaller company (unless you're starting one up yourself), which usually requires you to have been able to prove your ability to make simple games (and probably got a degree in games development). On top of THAT, you need to actually know what you need to do to make a game, which can mean you'll have had to start learning the tools of the trade in your childhood and teenage years. So, at absolute earliest, to be a developer working in a triple A industry, you're likely to be in your late 20's, if not early 30's. So most of the people who are games developers today likely were playing games on the Sega Genesis (or the Sega Mega Drive) as a kid in the late 80's, with most of them probably able to claim to have remembered the excitement of getting a Nintendo Entertainment System (early to mid-80's). So, unless you join a really big indie team and happen to be really lucky to join it just as they start to move on to making a big project, you're very unlikely to be a games developer in a big company who can claim that the oldest console they ever played upon as a kid was the PlayStation (heck, that first came out in Europe when I was 2 years old and I'm 21 now!), which basically means that, if you wanted to be a well known female developer, the earliest you'd probably have to have started making fully released games would have been back in the early 2000's...or a bit after the PlayStation 2 came out, a console which was NOTORIOUSLY tough to develop games for. On top of that, video gaming culture was, if possible, even worse about how male dominated it was back then than it is now, so I imagine that most of the female developers we have today either were constantly unlucky with getting out of the underground games development scene or simply weren't around then. Because of this, it's only fairly recently that female developers working for large companies have really started to be noticeable (although, in fairness, I've been out of gaming for a while now, so I might have missed the sudden influx of them and it's only now that I'm vaguely resembling getting back into it that I'm going "When did we get female games developers?").
And that means that it's only recently that gaming seems to have really opened up in general, not just to women. Thanks in part to the rise of casual gaming and independently released games onto the internet, gaming has been a more acceptable thing among the general public and it's much easier to get into gaming these days. You don't really need a games library for a computer or a console to be a gamer today: just type "free online games" into google and you'll find a load of them to play. And some of them are actually pretty good, if you ask me: I particularly enjoy playing
Territory War in my free time and would like to play
N more when I get a proper computer to play it on!
But that means that most of the gamers who are becoming the games developers of tomorrow are at best just getting into their first gaming companies now, which means that the potential for change by having a large number of female developers in the underground gaming scene is going to take a bit more time before it actually means something.
And, while that's happening, we've got the games industry afraid of change. I'm not going to paraphrase Jim Sterling (of Jimquisition, if you've not heard of him), but I will say that he has discussed in a few videos that a lot of games publishers are not confident enough to have a female protagonist for a game to put their full weight behind the game's promotion due to the belief that it won't sell as well (if you want to see the most relevant one, then click
here...and remember that this video came out a bit after Anita Sarkeesian's first video (which came out on the 7th of March 2013), as it came out on the 25th of March 2013! While he did cover Anita Sarkeesian before then (in
this video, which came out on the 10th of September 2012), the video most relevant to my thoughts on this is actually related to Jennifer Hepler, which was released on the 19th of August 2013 and can be watched
here). Which falls apart a bit when you realise that, by not promoting it properly, they make it less likely to be noticed than if they'd have put their full weight behind it and, as a result, end up sabotaging their own game's release and, as such, contribute to the belief that games with female protagonists don't sell, but I'll leave the angry rants about stupid moves in the video games industry to Jim Sterling, as he does them far better than I can do them. The point of the matter is that, where change would matter the most in the games industry, there is a reluctance to take a risk, which basically means that, in the eyes of the mainstream, there's been no proper reason to believe gamers saying that the gaming industry has changed because, in the eyes of the mainstream, the ONLY game with a strong female protagonist who isn't objectified to some level is
Tomb Raider...and most people would have been put off the game due to the advertising for the game implying that Lara was going to be raped, which doesn't exactly win women over to wanting to play the game!
This article has taken a while to write, so I feel no shame in admitting that, between starting writing this article and this point, I had a discussion with a friend of mine in a local pub and, while chatting, I raised a point which I really wish I'd have made in a previous post: because both sides are making valid points that are worth discussing, yet everyone who has an opinion on the topics is determined to tear the other side to pieces, we're ironically proving that, to the mainstream, gaming simply isn't mature enough yet to be taken seriously. Like it or not, gaming has practically become mainstream now thanks to games like
Farmville, but, by constantly arguing and trying to ignore the big issues in favour of death threats, insults and favouritism for whatever system we consider the definitive gaming system, gamers are actually sending the message to non-gamers that gaming simply isn't ready to be treated as a serious medium. When these opinions and controversies are reaching the eyes of a non-gaming crowd more than the actual games themselves, we're proving Anita Sarkeesian right in that we cannot have a serious discussion about gaming without it becoming a flame war of epic proportions. Games like
Call Of Duty are not going to go away just because a more balanced way of telling stories becomes more acceptable: those games have been popular for that long that they're practically pillars of the gaming community and nobody is going to be stupid enough to demand they stop being made in much the same way that nobody is going to stop brainless action films like
The Expendables from being made just because a feminist takes offence to them: there's a far larger audience who will enjoy them than can be influenced by a feminist explaining why those things are not fair representations of women. What CAN be gained from a more balanced portrayal of people of all walks of life is things like more varied stories, better written characters and possibly even more interesting and unusual games that blur the lines between what is a game for men and what is a game for women.
And I would absolutely love to see those types of games being made and being popular. This is not to say that I think games like
Assassin's Creed,
Call Of Duty and
Metal Gear Solid are terrible games that should be forgotten (in fact, I actually have a fairly high opinion of the
Assassin's Creed series, even
Assassin's Creed 3!), but when every high profile game released seems to be mining off of nostalgia and not trying to be a completely new IP, you do have to question whether gaming needs a good kick in the backside to finally wake up and accept that it's no longer fine to just make new versions of games that are old enough to be allowed to order a beer in the pub, and that Anita Sarkeesian could well be that voice, as misguided and untrustworthy a voice as one could argue she is.
So why are people so opposed to something that, on many levels, would actually make gaming BETTER if it were allowed to happen? Anita Sarkeesian isn't calling for the death of all gaming at all, like Jack Thompson was, she is explaining why gaming is a medium which can be argued as being off putting to women if looked at from a certain perspective. I get that some people will not want change out of fear of the unknown, and I respect that fact, but to argue in favour of keeping something the same when it seems like it has stagnated in the eyes of the mainstream is not the way to make gaming be taken seriously: that is a sign that gaming refuses to accept change.
Which, again, proves Anita Sarkeesian right, in a way.
Look, Sarkeesian might be an untrustworthy source of information on so many levels to anyone already familiar with gaming, but it cannot be denied that she manages to point out the issues with gaming that someone who is not familiar with it would have also spotted and, as such, she has ultimately proven that gaming DOES need to change. Not because gaming has stagnated in the eyes of the mainstream, not because gaming is a medium which is not naturally going to appeal to most women, not even because refusing to accept change is hurting the gaming industry more than most change could: because, by becoming better and being able to be taken more seriously as a medium, we prove that gaming is not just the realm of immature teenagers and men who do not want women intruding their space, but that gaming, much like the film industry, is a serious creative industry with some amazing potential that, when allowed to spread its wings, can make for an incredibly rewarding section of work.
And that's why we need to accept that gaming is not a medium most women will want to get into and change to make gaming a medium capable of being taken seriously by the mainstream.
Because, by doing so, we make gaming better for everyone.
So let us be better than those who criticise gaming by accepting their criticisms (especially if we've been saying the same thing for a long time that they're saying to us now), taking them on board, doing something about it to respond to their criticisms and showing that we're not opposed to changing fort he better, not reaching for the flamethrowers and roasting everyone else alive just for daring to criticise the video games industry, whether an outsider to it or not.
...Wait, I was supposed to be saying why Anita Sarkeesian isn't the best voice to listen to, wasn't I? Well, her questionable research methods do not make her a voice to really trust and she has hardly managed to make herself out to be the voice of reason on the topics she discusses for various reasons...but, at the same time, you could make the same case for a lot of people when discussing something: most people will deliberately only raise points that support their point and do their best to avoid raising points that hurt their case, often by trying to make the points which hurt their case seem either unimportant or not truthful. I personally try to avoid doing this, as I don't necessarily want to win an argument so much as try to find the truth and, if I do win an argument, it isn't because I've done so through manipulating the truth and facts to suit the argument I want to make and discredited the other person's viewpoint. If you will, I prefer to be the honest voice of reason when I can and try to look at things from as many viewpoints as I can to allow me to find my own opinion, which also means that I can be surprisingly good at playing devil's advocate when I need to. This is why I personally cannot stand people who hold that their opinion is the only one in the world and will act like any disagreement with their opinion is an insult to them, because it is the same kind of thought process that, when attached to purposes of INCREDIBLY poor morality, can result in decisions that lead to events like the holocaust. While I will admit that there were other factors that lead to that event, the basic point still stands: if you are so committed towards one thing that you will not listen to a person pointing out why what you're committed to isn't flawless, at best, you make far more enemies than you do allies and, at worst, not only do you make everyone else your enemy, but what you go on to do causes far more harm than it does good and you have no way of stopping what you've started once it actually gets any momentum. This is arguably why it can take me a long time to say something on a serious topic, but also why my contribution is nearly always like that of a voice of reason: I take the time to consider everything that I can connected to the serious discussion, acknowledge all points on all sides that I am in agreement with (even if I then have to provide a long explanation as to why I consider my agreement only a case of agreement with the long term aims and not with the actual point itself) and explain my disagreement with the other points in as polite a way as I can and with an acknowledgement of the importance of the point to other people despite my disagreement with it. This does mean that I rarely talk about serious stuff, but, when I do, I tend to provide something resembling a definitive statement.
...I really hope I've not done that with this article and my last one related to ethics in journalism. As much as I'd love to be able to be attributed to being the reason everyone stopped taking those things too seriously if it were to happen, that was not the point of either of these articles. What I have wanted to do is to give my take on both sides to explain why I feel both sides have valid reasons to be supported, but why I personally cannot consider myself a supporter of either side. The point of these two articles has been to encourage civil conversation on both issues, regardless of which sides you support and which you dislike.
So let's have those discussions, without the bile and hatred that have become so popular whenever both issues crop up. If gaming is really the mature medium it wants to be, let us all put aside the anger that comes so easily to us whenever either side is mentioned and take the time to discuss the issues civilly. Who knows, maybe something valuable might be formed through a polite discussion related to both issues...
