29convergencemag.ca Winter 2015

The world of video games is vast. From block and candy puzzles, to first person shooter battlefields, to sandbox worlds with the opportunity to explore what seem like endless landscapes, to a simple interactive image of a woman’s face on which every click is a blow until the image becomes increasingly battered and bruised to the final moment – the screen turns red.

Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, was an online game created in response to one woman’s wish to create a series of short videos involving criticisms and analyses about sexism, misogyny and representations of women in video games.

Anita Sarkeesian has been the subject of news internationally, the winner of many awards within the games industry, the heart of discussions around misogyny in video games and the centre of waves of online harassment, including rape and death threats, all since her Kickstarter campaign launched in May 2012.

Over the two years following, women in

the games industry, especially supporters of Sarkeesian, would continue to face harassment from many gamers online, what Sarkeesian says can best be described as a cyber-mob. This cyber-mob would become more organized and more powerful, and finally resurface in August 2014 as a movement known as “GamerGate” or “#GamerGate.”

Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter campaign raised $150,000 for her video series, significantly surpassing her original goal of $6,000. as a result of the massive amounts of continued online harassment and its news coverage.

“Whether it’s a cyber-mob or a handful of hateful comments, the end result is maintaining and reinforcing and normalizing a culture of sexism where men who harass are supported by their peers and are rewarded for their sexist attitudes and behaviours and where women are silenced, marginalized and excluded from full participation,” she said in a 2012 TEDx talk.

Are Games Sexist?While representation of women in

video games is a fairly new area of media criticism and academic analysis, it would be extremely difficult to argue that the majority of triple A games’ portrayal of women is not misogynistic.

“It is no secret that the video game industry boasts some of the most sexually objectified, stereotyped and downright oppressive portrayals of women in any medium,” Sarkeesian said at the same TEDx talk.

Ross Orlando holds a bachelors degree

in sociology and now writes for a small gaming blog called Those Gaming Nerds. For his final year research methods two-part course he conducted a research study that looked at the top ten ranked console games from each year for the past five years, 2009 to 2013.

“Out of the 50 games I looked at in my study, only five of them had female lead protagonists. Out of those five, three were hyper-sexualized,” he said.

The female characters in games that weren’t main protagonists “were often side characters who were kind of background dressing or didn’t really have much to do besides cater to the player whenever the player would need them to do something,” said Orlando.

Although Orlando acknowledges that the study was somewhat limited in scope, he said he believes it shed light on the reality of under- and mis-representation in video games.

Grand Theft Auto V was a much-anticipated game released in September 2013. The game boasts three male playable protagonists the player can freely select and play within the sandbox world of Los Santos.

Paul Verhoeven, an Australian radio-host, writer, game critic, comedian, and self-proclaimed “professional nerd” spoke at a TEDx in Australia earlier this year. He said the player can choose what clothes to wear, which car to steal, how to drive that car, who to kill, how to kill them and so on. The possibilities seem endless.

“But you cannot choose not to be a sexist prick,” he said.

Verhoeven refers to one reviewer, Carloyn Petit, formerly of GameSpot.

Your Princess is in Another Castle!

Sorry Mario!#GamerGate and the targeting of women who dare to speak out about gender representation in video games.By Kate Richards

convergencemag.ca 30

com, who gave the game a score of nine out of ten but called the game politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic.

“Yes, these are exaggerations of misogynistic undercurrents in our own society, but not satirical ones. With nothing in the narrative to underscore how insane and wrong this is, all the game does is reinforce and celebrate sexism. The beauty of cruising in the sun-kissed Los Santos hills while listening to ‘Higher Love’ by Steve Winwood turns sour really quick when a voice comes on the radio that talks about using a woman as a urinal,” reads her review called City of Angels and Demons.

She was met with waves of online harassment, including an online petition to have her fired from Gamespot.

There are hundreds of examples of misogyny and sexism in video games, many of which Sarkeesian intelligently examines in her video blog site, Feminist

Frequency. But the simple fact that many games present women as overly-sexualized, unplayable characters that act as background decoration in games themselves is only the beginning of what has caused severe toxicity on all sides of the gaming industry.

In August of this year, one indie game developer, Zoe Quinn, became involved in a massive online harassment fiasco in regards to her game Depression Quest. Quinn and Depression Quest were the sparks that ignited the fire that is #GamerGate, or what will also be referred to as GG.

The waves of hatred sprung out of a blog-post by an angry ex-boyfriend of Quinn’s, accusing her of having a romantic relationship with someone who reviewed her game. Outcry ensued within the GG community regarding the low level of ethics within gaming journalism.

It has since been proven that the review written by the journalist Quinn allegedly had a relationship with doesn’t exist, and never did. He never wrote it.

The hate continued, Quinn faced rape and death threats, had her personal information doxed (put in a public online document) and chose to flee her home out of fear.

The gaming media chose not to cover the Quinn case under the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of

Ethics’ section “minimize harm.” Soon a new hash tag, #Quinnspiracy popped up, under which memebers of the GG “movement” claimed the lack of coverage was a conspiracy within games coverage.

Although GG continued to claim their uprising was to protest a lack of ethics in games journalism and claimed their movement had nothing to do with Quinn, her name, along with other game developers including Brianna Wu, kept popping up next to “#GamerGate” on Twitter and 8chan (GG’s main message board), beside hateful, abusive comments towards them, similar phone calls to their personal residences and the specific addresses of those residences.

“I definitely believe there are some (members) of GamerGate who want better ethics in games journalism,” said Carly Smith, a freelance writer for the renowned online gaming magazine, The Escapist, who covered some aspects of

the GG movement.“There are also a lot of GamerGaters

who are using that hashtag to send hate to people and it’s hard to separate those two because it is just a hashtag,” she continued.

But the problem with GG’s argument about poor ethics in games journalism is that it falls flat on a poorly built platform.

“What’s proof to me that that argument is invalid is that I think there are problems within games journalism and with the games industry, but the problems that are there aren’t what (GGers) are focusing on,” said Emma Vossen, an editor and writer at First Person Scholar, an academic-run games culture web publication out of the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute.

Not to mention the fact that the majority of women targeted are not journalists but game developers and media and culture critics.

Christopher Grant is the Editor-In-Chief of Polygon, a widely known games site in the gaming community that focuses not only on games themselves, but the developers and culture surrounding them. In an op-ed letter from the editor published on Oct. 17, he writes that Polygon refrained from condemning #GamerGate because when inclusion in a cyber-mob is only ten keystrokes away it’s “impossible” to nail down what exactly

that mob’s wishes are.“So we didn’t,” he wrote. “We were,

and I specifically was, paralyzed by indecision… For many of our staff, myself included, GamerGate presented enough of a perceived danger that we were scared for ourselves and our families.”

Polygon was accused of corruption by those using the GamerGate hashtag because their review of Bayonetta 2 “had the audacity to treat it like a cultural artifact and not simply a toy.” GG attempted to convince Nintendo to expel Polygon for having the audacity to do so.

When Carly Smith finished writing a piece about the terrorist threat at Utah University where Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a presentation, she had a similarly disturbing thought.

The terrorist threat involved e-mails sent to the university threatening a “Montreal Massacre” style of attack on Sarkeesian and anyone attending the event. The threat made the front page of the New York Times the following day.

“There was one night when I actually sat down and thought, ‘What is my plan if somebody does actually issue me a death threat or leak my personal address with ill intentions? What do I do?’”

Sarkeesian had to cancel the event as the laws in Utah state that concealed weapons are legal.

It’s natural for any journalist to sit down and write a report about a terrorist threat in order to inform the public. That’s the job. But there is a level of fear that one will face severe backlash even in reporting the facts of an event that’s come out of the GG movement.

“I think that for anyone outside of games, looking in on (GamerGate) who can see the big picture because they’re not so close to it and don’t take it personally, it is so obvious it’s not about games journalism,” Vossen said. “It’s about these women whose voices are being silenced.”

Going back to Carolyn Petit’s review of GTAV, evidence of another GG demand is evident.

Petit identifies as transgendered. One comment underneath the petition from “Eric Gurderman” of San Francisco reads, “Carl (Carolyn as it wants to be called) is constantly putting his personal opinion and political views in game reviews… He, Carl, has a mental illness that impedes him from doing his job and so he should be fired.”

Transphobic remarks aside, it seems the argument isn’t only whether there is or isn’t misogyny and sexism in many popular video games because the simple answer is “yes.” The argument is whether these issues should be considered when writing about, or developing games.

Winter 2015

“It’s not about games journalism, it’s about these women whose voices

are being silenced.”

#GamerGate

Harassment

Why is this happening?

31

As the Gurderman comment on the “Fire Carolyn Petit” petition indicates, there are gamers out there who believe the answer to the above question is no.

Adam Cilevitz is a Master’s student in the University of Waterloo’s English Language and Literature department. He is studying under the Alternative Digital Media stream and focuses on sound in video games.

Cilevitz has been an avid gamer since he was six years old and remembers blowing on his Nintendo cartridges to make his games work properly. Having an undergrad degree in film and English, he’s always analyzed games the same way a book or film would be analyzed.

“I wouldn’t have gone into English if I hadn’t realized how much I loved storytelling and I always argue that games can tell a good story,” he said.

Cilevitz has followed the GamerGate movement closely and said he believes that GGers refuse to believe that gaming and game design can be an art form or cultural artifact.

“It’s this kind of stubbornness among GGers to feel like a game isn’t an art form or a form of narrative-making and I feel like that’s what is holding back a lot of these GGers. They’re refusing to understand that we have to move past the boom-boom-bang of action games,” he said.

Quinn’s Depression Quest is an example of a game that moves past the boom-boom-bang. The text-adventure (or interactive fiction) game makes a strong commentary about what it’s like to live with depression and allows the player to make choices based on what the average person suffering depression would face in their daily routine.

Many believe that this is another reason she faced so much backlash and that GGers fear the fate of “their” games is being threatened by women who want to feel more inclusive in the industry.

“I think the idea that games like Depression Quest is threatening is ridiculous,” said Vossen. “The fact that these games exist doesn’t mean that games like Call of Duty won’t anymore. That will never happen.”

Others believe some GGers feel so connected to the games they love that by criticizing representation of women and gender in games or calling them sexist is a personal attack.

“Games make you think ‘I’m a powerful person, I’m controlling this story,’” said Cilevitz. “I feel like this is a slippery slope because I think (GGers) aren’t realizing that this is an illusion of authority and an illusion of ego (since) games are heavily designed.”

Orlando said he thinks GGers are overly privileged. “I think (being open to fair representation in video games) is something that GamerGaters need to grow up and deal with,” he said.

But some games academics believe a disconnect between game development and game theory might account for the industry’s level of inclusion continually falling by the wayside.

In an e-mail from Rob Robson, Humber College’s game development program coordinator, he told Convergence that the program focuses only on game development and doesn’t look into game design or sociological aspects of games.

He also mentioned that the program “runs about 10 per cent women in games and about 20 per cent women in computer programming.” He said he has no real explanation for this “other than most women perceive the field as something they do not want to go into.”

Not surprising.These statistics are actually high

compared to the ones the Boston Globe reported early last year: women account for 11 per cent of game designers and three per cent of game developers.

Vossen is unsure how GamerGate will effect women in the gaming industry but thinks it could go one of two ways.

“I’m not sure whether it will be a good thing where attention was drawn in a big

way to how huge an issue this is within the games industry,” she said. “Or if the effect will be that women are even more terrified to enter the industry than they were before.”

Vossen says that one thing she wants to see, especially in the media outlets that covered GamerGate, are profile pieces on the women who do work in the games industry and their successes.

“In a way all these huge pieces on GamerGate may be talking about the way women are harassed in the games industry but they’re still (over)shadowing the work that these women are actually doing,” she says.

UW’s Games Institute’s weekly online publication, First Person Scholar (which Vossen writes and edits for) hopes to bridge the gap between slow-to-publish scholarly journals about gaming and the informal, decentralized blog-type commentaries in an attempt to stem conversations between game developers and games scholars. Or what Steve Wilcox, the Editor-In-Chief of FPS, calls

middle-state publishing or feed-forward scholarship.

“We need middle-state publications because by not participating in directing the discussion on games, we invariably perpetuate a set of ideals, values, and even a form of scholarship that misrepresents our role as players as passive consumers and our role as scholars as passive commentators,” writes Wilcox in his commentary Feed-Forward Scholarship.

“(Games scholars) would be better off as a part of the production of games rather than observers of a diminished industry that doesn’t represent our values or critical opinions,” his commentary reads.

First Person Scholar is a publication then, that proposes to attempt to make games better through critical analysis and communication with developers, perhaps making itself a target of GGers who want “their” games to stay the same.

It’s no surprise that First Person Scholar has already been mentioned in a public “doc” by GG.

In the public watch list, it is stated that since certain names in the games industry, which GG has already determined are “guilty,” have been mentioned in the article or show up in the comments section after it, the publication may also be guilty of “collusion” with those same people or game developers.

This statement is taken directly from the doc:

“With this we see that the author and the discussant of the articles noted are citing each other to establish a justification for the publication of the article. With this we can infer that the authors of these papers are probably colluding together to legitimize the content of their published papers within academia…”

Vossen sums this up nicely when she writes, “conferences where academics and like-minded industry professionals come together are considered Communist ‘hot-beds’ and large corporations are considered vestiges of pure intention,” in her article Smoky-Room Communist Meetings on FPS.

Chris Grant ended his editor’s letter for Polygon with a poignant, hard-hitting message that illustrates the toxicity that currently is the games industry:

“No need to jump at shadows of conspiracy or collusion, GamerGaters; you’ve already unearthed the most damaging force in video games today.”

convergencemag.ca Winter 2015

“Most women perceive the field as something they do not want to go

into.”

What Now?