Rape, gender and gaming

I'm diverging from my "gun" blog to talk about one of the biggest problems seen in gaming culture today. Namely, the overwhelmingly heteronormative cisgendered male experience and the difficulty that other perspectives have in getting taken seriously.

I'm a gamer. Tabletop, board, pen-and-paper, video, whatever. If it's a game I'm usually in. I love games and at one point even ran a video game development company (it tanked, I'm not very good as a CEO, I fear). One of my favourite things about gaming (video and role-playing in particular) is the ability to put your actual self o -hold and explore other potential selves. Especially with roleplaying games, you can be anything that your mind can conceive of. It's a powerful thing.

Video games give you a limited ability to engage in this kind of fantastical what-if - mainly because the you-protagonist is already defined for you. And that you-protagonist is almost invariable straight, white, and male. In games as far ranging as The Legend of Zelda,  God of War, and Halo, the protagonist is very much a white male (Leaving aside the argument that Link from LoZ is actually Hyrulian - his skin tone is within a few shades of mine). Super Mario Bros? While males. Mass Effect was hailed for its character chooser, allowing you to customze your character, to the point of playing someone of Mediterranean or African descent or even *gasp* A WOMAN. However, if you go the FemShep route, the romantic sublots don't change. You can still choose to get your mack on with A) Ashley the Human Marine, B) Lianna the Asari Scientist, or C) Nobody. You can either be straight or a woman in Mass Effect, but you can't be both.

From my own personal experience, my second ME character was a FemShep, and while fiddling with the "Randomize" button a combination came up that made her look almost EXACTLY like a real-life friend of mine. This pleased me at first, because it was a real kick in the pants to see my friend roaming the countryside, blasting baddies into their component atoms. Then I remembered that before long, romance would start to bloom - and the thought of guiding my friend's clone through same-sex interactions actually made me really uncomfortable. I deleted the character and have never run another FemShep.

 One of my very favourite games is 2008's Mirror's Edge, a brilliantly done first-person parkour/free-running game featuring the delightfully ethnically-non-specific Faith as our protagonist. I like this game for a number of reasons, including the fact that the game can be beaten without having to engage the computer opponents in combat (there's even an achievement for finishing the game without firing a single shot from the guns you can gank from the police), and that Faith's gender isn't a gigantic plot point. 

Presenting a not-white-straight-male perspective in gaming has really been difficult. I won't go too much into it, for two reasons: 1) The sheer recalcitrance of gaming culture at large to accept other perspectives makes me fucking sick, and 2) I could never to a better job of it than Anita Sarkeesian, whose "Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs Women" series at Feminist Frequency is an amazingly eye-opening and candid bit of journalism.

Mama Bear pointed me at a blog post by game design house FullBright, about why they're declining to participate in PAX's Indie Megabooth. Boiled down to its essence, FullBright has decided that statements made by Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade (the folks that produce the Penny Arcade webcomic and also host gaming mega-con Penny Arcade Expo) put Penny Arcade's morals at odds with FullBright's corporate ethics. Namely, Mike and Jerry have had come under fire for statements made about rape and rape culture, and people who are trans and/or genderqueer.

I support FullBright's decision. It's their brand, their product and they need to make sure that the people that they are associating with that brand align with what they find to be moral. The Penny Arcade crowd has fallen afoul of that, and thus the choice was made to not participate.

It makes me sad that this is the current state of affairs. For many years, Penny Arcade was a driving force for presenting gamers as a diverse and respectable group. In direct response to being called all sorts of terrible names by anti-video-game crusader and nutball lawyer Jack Thompson, the PA guys formed a charity called Child's Play, and its mission is to donate games and other entertainment items to children's hospitals the world over. It's one of my very favourite charities, and I'm honoured to have been able to work with them.

For years, Mike and Jerry have worked to show the world how awesome gaming and gamers can be, but they've hit some major bumps along the way (for example, they fucked up bad with the Dickwolves debacle). More recently, I've seen a major shift in tone and instead of being starry-eyed futurists that are all agog with the potential of gaming, the guys have instead turned into onion-on-belt old fogeys. Where there used to be cheeky wink-and-a-smile snark we now see some very real "I don't understand what these damn kids are doing, so they're obviously wrong. and probably dumb. STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE" commentary. There have also been some really negative responses to the transgender crowd. That's not the PA that I knew and loved, and I'm sad to see where it seems to be headed.

The genderfail stuff is really appalling to me, because that is something that has been very much against the official policy of Penny Arcade and PAX. For a number of years, I was a PAX Enforcer (one of their volunteer convention staff). In 2008, PAX was held concurrently in the Seattle Convention Center with Gender Odyssey, a convention by and for "transgender and non-gender-conforming people." PAX's policy on the other convention was very clear: Break Wheaton's Law and you get 86'd. As an Area Manager that year, I personally tossed two PAX attendees out for violating the rules. No appeals, no second chances. Out. To contrast that with some of Mike's public statements is jarring and hard to square in my mind. To be fair, Mike responded to the criticisms (and did so admirably well) but I think he still doesn't quite get it. There's a reason he draws the pictures and leaved the words to Jerry - written language is not his bag.

The gamer stereotype runs to two different forms: The socially maladjusted geek living in his parents' basement who spends all of his time immersed as other people, and the hyper-aggressive young man playing first-person shooters and spewing insults over voice chat. The truth is, while those two groups DO exist, they're not truly representative of gamers. The fastest growing segments of gaming are women, casual gamers, and older people. Gamers are actually an incredibly diverse bunch, with all kinds of different and wonderful variation. I know more gamers who are NOT straight-white-male, but the industry tends to act like these people don't exist. The culture, as well, works to disenfranchise these groups; some of the things being said to gay and/or female gamers is completely horrifying.

There are a growing number of games that explore the possibilities of alternate-perspective protagonists (and aren't just male fantasy wish fulfillment). The aforementioned Mirror's Edge, Rockstar Game's Bully, the upcoming Gone Home. All take and modify the "standard" protagonist in some way. Bully is a fascinating game to me, though I have yet to play it. Rockstar is more known for giving us the "Grand Theft Auto" open-world games that glorify sex and violence - sometimes at the same time, in the case of having sex with a prostitute in GTA3, then killing her to get your money back. Bully, however, drops the player into the role of a troubled young hooligan starting out at a new school. It retains the open world nature of the GTA series, but there are serious in-game consequences for preying upon powerless victims. Additionally, the romance tree is pretty open, the player is free to woo and smooch girls or boys, as desired.

I think that the rise of indie gaming markets will help bring about the cultural revolution that we need to combat these hurtful stereotypes and cultural norms. I look forward to the day when the introduction of a game with a strong female lead who isn't just a generic male hero with boobs doesn't make the news (and generate the controversy) that it does today.

Because, like Wil Wheaton says, "Don't Be a Dick"