Gamergate, or how I learned to start worrying and hate the comments

I've written before on sexism in gaming, specifically Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity, but I've not mentioned Gamergate. As a casual gaming commentator, this feels remiss; like a home design pundit refusing to at least acknowledge the statement of an indoor pachydermal installation.

I'm not going to go into background detail, as anyone reading this journal almost certainly knows them, but just in brief: Gamergate is a movement within the gaming community dedicated - they say - to the purity of gaming journalism and the elimination of the corruption created by certain female game designers and critics determines to use sex to foist a gynocentric agenda on the holy, phallocentric temple of gaming. In reality, it is a campaign of toxic hatred targeting female critics and designers, ranging from passive-aggressive comments to actual death threats.

I find the whole thing to be upsetting, not just because people like Zoe Quinn (the designer of the indie game Depression Quest) and Anita Sarkeesian (of the Youtube channel Feminist Frequency and, specifically, the critical video essays Tropes vs Women in video games) have been subjected to such a vicious tide of vitriol and hate, but because it reveals a level of toxicity which I would not have thought possible. The sustained death threats are bad enough, or the threats of rape, but what truly shocks me, after a decade and a half of regular internet access, is that there are people on the internet, people who purport to represent a community of which I am a peripheral member, who actually believe that they are right and righteous in threatening children.

Not long ago, Sarkeesian cancelled a speaking engagement at the University of Utah after a graphic threat was made to perpetrate 'the worst school shooting in history' if the engagement went ahead.

What the actual fuck is that?

I'm not going to start on the Utah Police and their refusal to conduct weapon searches of people entering an institute of higher education which had been threatened with a massacre, because I would probably never stop. In the same way, I'm not going to talk about rape threats, because it would end up as a meaningless spew of expressions of horror and disbelief. I will, however, reiterate my utter horror that there is anyone in the world that thinks that this is in any way something that is not just okay, but right, and that there is a substantial body of gamers who support them to one degree or another.

Now, in fairness (because I like to be fair, possibly to the point of fault, although not to the point, you may notice, of actually putting any links to Gamergate sites; I'm fair, but I absolutely have a side in this*,) the incident created some schism in Gamergate itself, because apparently some of them are able to see that there is a degree of evil that isn't legitimate protest against journalistic corruption (although the lower level hate-speech really should have tipped them off, but internet comments are a natural breeding ground for complete idiocy) I am still disappointed that it hasn't ended it completely; that the sane end of the spectrum haven't looked at this, or the other death threats, and said: "Well, fuck; we're part of something pretty damned vile here, aren't we?"

Gamergate, in short, has actively and materially damaged my faith in human nature.

*In Gamergate terms, this makes me a 'white knight' hoping that backing the feminazi agenda will get me laid. If I believed that the world as a whole was as misogynistic as Gamergate, such that merely expressing this opinion made me irresistible catnip to any woman not completely ground down by hate, I would be too mired in depression to ever have sex again.

I'm a privileged middle class white European male; ask me how

Both of these men are too damned pretty to be cast as the
'everyman', but that's not why one of them would be
overlooked by a Hollywood producer.

So, I was reading an article by a successful author, as I sometimes do, and also as I sometimes do, I recognised a close analogue to something in my own experience; something that suddenly felt worth talking about.

This is the article, by Kameron Hurley: It's called Why I Stopped Writing About White People; which is an attention getter if nothing else. I won't summarise it, because it's short enough that I should just let you read it yourself.

Okay? I'll try not to just repeat what she said.

If I had any serious money, I would belong to the single most privileged chunk of modern, global society. I'm middle class (I shop in Waitrose and buy their Essential range parmesan cheese), white (well, somewhere between a quarter and an eighth Indian, but barely enough to get stopped at airports), European (English, God help me) straight male (not very macho, but definitely Y-carrying, hetero/cis and happy that way). Okay, I'm a polyamorous gamer, but that's small potatoes.

I say this not as an excuse, but as background for the fact that as a matter of habit, I used to, as Hurley describes, write about white people all the time. It was the natural thing for me to do; I was surrounded by white people. It might have been different if I'd lived in London, but I didn't want to live or go to university in London; I don't like cities. Instead I went to Cambridge (I know, I know; hateful aren't I), which is not exactly a hotbed of racial integration (less from deliberate racism than from the inherent racism which derives from the continuing entanglement of race with the British class system.)

There was a UFO church guy - I forget his name just at the moment; 1960s or 70s era, big hair and porn 'stache - who claimed to have been taken on a spaceship where the aliens created beautiful women of all types for him to make love to. Now, that's creepy as fuck, but also inherently racist, because the types he described were blonde, red-head, brunette, black and Asian; because black and Asian have no subdivisions. Now, I reckon that guy was always going to be a creepy bastard, but it's a fact that you define and discriminate the world based on experience. If there's only one black kid in the class, then that's a defining physical characteristic.

Greater integration at the school stage would not only lead to greater understanding between different cultures and races, it would also do wonders for our creative writing skills, because when your inner and proximal friendship groups include a spectrum of humanity, the rather lazy descriptor 'black' ceases to be of use. For me, that level of awareness only really came when I was teaching in a school which had pupils from Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Mongolia, to name but a few, as well as a housed Romany family whose daughter was the palest thing I had ever seen.

This is probably why it was during my teaching career that I looked back over one of my old science fiction projects - an epic bit of world-building that I have yet to set a satisfactory story in - and realised that almost all of the historical figures I'd written up were white. I was kind of horrified by what I written. There was a multinational Mars mission with two non-Europeans, and one of them was a white American.

So, I changed it, and at first it felt pretty token, and I was more or less sure I'd be discarding the project in shame in the very near future. But then I started thinking about the wider effect. Without planning it, I'd changed one of the pivotal families in the setting to half-black, half-white, made French the dominant language of the Martian working class and begun to derive entirely new categories of class and race based on origin rather than ethnicity. I even took a good long look at the aliens and started to move them away from planets of hats towards more rounded and fully-realised cultures. I'm a trained archaeologist, for fuck's sake; I have no excuse for sloppy culture-building.

At about the same time, I started revising some other stuff, addressing the sexism inherent in just about any mythic base (there are precious few major queens in myth and legend, and most of them don't end well). It was a time of much reflection and consideration.

These days, I'm a lot more careful. I confess, I get jittery about writing other cultures if I don't have the time to research them thoroughly, but I'm also aware that playing it safe (by sticking to 'what I know') is both creatively limiting and intrinsically racist.

Besides, if I wanted to 'write what I know', I wouldn't write fantasy and science fiction in the first place.

Sensible Foundations - Eponine and the Female Avatar 'Problem'*

Here we come, Walkin' down the street...**

A friend linked this article relating to the forthcoming Assassin's Creed: Unity. It concerns the fact that, as the promotion image suggests, the game's four-player co-op mode is - unlike the multiplayer modes of the previous releases - a complete sausage fest, and that the reason given for this is that creating and animating a set of female avatars would have overtaxed the development team (or rather, teams).

I admit, I am - like the interviewer - unconvinced.

So, why does this matter? Many would point out that there are an increasing number of games with female protagonists, so what does it matter if this one doesn't have any? Firstly, there are still more games with male protagonists than with female, and this disparity really ought to be less than it is. Nonetheless, where a game is focused on the story of a single, defined character, be that character male or female, I see no particular problem with that.

The issue arises in co-op and multiplayer games in which a larger cast of varied and less defined avatars omits 50% of the populace. It's done in large part because of a persistent and increasingly inaccurate perception that men play games and want male avatars, and it also feeds into that perception. Whenever a defined character is replaced by a more general one, the player will tend to identify more closely with their avatar; without a story of their own, the main character becomes us, especially if we're group chatting with our buddies instead of speaking in the character's voice. This means that the absence of female avatars will tend to alienate women - and men, for that matter - who would prefer to play as a female character, bolstering the misapprehension that 'girls don't want to play this kind of game'.

Of course, what makes it more of a disappointment is that the multiplayer modes of past AC games have always featured a range of female characters to play.

Now, cards on the table, I am not a game developer or a programmer, so it is entirely possible that I will be catastrophically wrong about something in the rest of this post; if so, please let me know and I am happy to alter my text and opinions to better fit reality. However, from my place in the peanut gallery, these are my thoughts on the claim that it is too much work to include female avatars.

Bullshit.

What is it that makes animating a female avatar so different to animating either a male avatar or a female background character (because they'll be there, unless the entire great nation of France has suffered a devastating outbreak of lady flu in the AC universe, in which case the fall of the monarchy would, you'd think, be taking a serious back seat) that the workload is doubled by their inclusion? Why is adding female co-op avatars so much harder than the female multiplayer avatars of previous games? The developers quote changes to the costumes, but it's hard to see why; practical combat garb is much the same for either sex, and you would hope that a female assassin would think to wear sufficiently sensible foundation garments and shoes as not to need much in the way of jiggle physics.

And in fairness to Ubisoft, past AC games have been jiggle free, and the multiplayer avatars have worn at worst low kitten heels, so the challenges of animating Sugar Kane, revolutionary shit-kicker don't arise.

In fact, you know what you want your badass lady French revolutionary to look like?

It's now canon for me that Eponine faked her death to join
the Assassins.

Seriously, even if you feel it behooves you to have your female avatars look like Samantha Barks, the differences in costume can be kept to a minimum by having them look like Samantha Barks.

Speaking of revolutionaries, this discussion isn't really complete without mention of Brink. Heavily marketed on the basis of its vast customisability, not one of its 102,247,681,536,000,000 avatar element combinations uses a female base model. As in AC: Unity, the revolution will not be feminised, and worse, as in the case of Brink, in which there are no additional avatars for allies, enemies and crowd characters, it seems that when the chips are down, 50% of the human race just vanishes.

* I say 'problem' in quotes to indicate my skepticism that including female avatars is a major problem, rather than that the absence of female avatars is a non-problem.
** Yes, I know; Little Green Bag would have been more apt, but using The Monkees was funnier.