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Press release:
June 4th, Kraków, Poland
With over 1,300 detailed survey responses and professional[...]
Video games aren’t a boy thing anymore, and there’s no such thing as a “boys club” within the gaming industry. Those are the first two truth’s you’ll hear about gaming, and how it’s related to your youth. The rest, as you’ll soon discover by the end of this article, are present in your everyday life. You just never realized it until now. After the launch of Gamergate, there’s been a consistent and unrelenting attack on gaming journalism, and professional ethics within the industry. It’s been a long run in an attempt to clean up the mess created by profit over objectivity and professional courtesy.
To better understand how this has come about, we need to reflect inward and travel back a bit in time. When you were little what was your first experience with gaming? For me it was a Gameboy, I snuck it into school, and would play in between lessons leveling up my Pokémon. I would enjoy battling during lunch period or trading as I walked home using that damned link cable that would never work properly. When it got dark I hid under my covers with a flashlight to keep playing, or angled it because the glare from the sun messed up my vision. I battled both boys and girls on the playground and formed friendships.
By the time I was in high school and the Gameboy Advance SP came around we were on consoles and looked forward to the Xbox 360, as well as Blu-ray on the PlayStation 3. We still jammed in the arcade using our skills learned at the pizza place or laundromat to play Street Fighter and hand out ass whooping’s to a newer generation who hadn’t mastered the combos we learned. With a new way of trading and playing online we connected and made friends on a global scale. We played Yu-Gi-Oh, and met girls at the mall in Manga shops and discovered that gaming in lan parties and WOW guilds could be co-ed.
As awkward as it was, we even married some of those same girls who shared our geekiness and love of comics and games. We learned Japanese, and even met people who lived around the corner from us. We made enemies and formed teams from the most unlikely of people. If it was ever an issue of skill we settled it online with witnesses and grit.
Then when we were handed social media to tie in with our gaming, and it went to hell. Gaming journalism decided to become bold and exploit their own opinions for profit. They generated “clickbait” articles to earn cash for impressions on their sites. They sold positive reviews to the highest bidder. Kotaku, Gawker, and even Polygon began to produce pieces that had nothing to do with gaming. Once we grew tired of it and wanted to play games again we realized another blow to the passion we had: Feminism and gaming.
The narrative that men exploit women for profit in games is false. If you don’t believe me look at the demographic research behind some of your favorite games. The target audience for handheld consoles is pre-teens to teenagers. Pokémon was 10+, but now its E for everyone. We see so much marketing poured into gaming and journalism it’s ridiculous. But it has never singled out women as the whore for its pimping.
Equality and video games are already hand in hand. However, many don’t see it due to their own ignorance. Having Feminism come in as if it were a law enforcer was the worst thing we realized in our love of games. Something comes to mind when I realize the similarities. The old PlayStation slogan: Live in your world, Play in ours. Feminist critics such as Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Felicia Day, and even Zoe Quinn believe in that slogan. For the wrong reasons. To them they believe in the theory that games, the gaming industry and even gaming journalism is an imaginary boys club.
This lead to many of the aforementioned sites tailoring, and creating articles based upon the approval of said critics, and the like. We saw games such as Bayonetta 2, Lollipop Chainsaw, and even Grand theft Auto V get slammed for sexual themes, and skin being shown. To us we just saw decent games that were fun and interesting. This, among other factors, led to the consumer revolt known as Gamergate and has become a cultural phenomenon in itself.
Is the “Bayonetta” series really sexists?
Gamergate was born from a culture based mindset that games don’t need to have a gender, or a classification. If you don’t like the game’s content, don’t buy it or play it. Simple right? Not exatly. We’re being told that we need to have parameters set for gaming. That game developers need to hire a certain amount of women to fill their ranks to encourage gender equality for women in tech. To those, id like to say: Point out a company that’s gender exclusive, and prove how its track record is sexist. They can’t because it doesn’t exist.
If someone has the skills to do the job, they’ll be hired and paid. If not they won’t. I’d ask those same critics, how many males do you have on staff in your studio, blog, or web series? Do they make the same amount as women? Less? I’ve comprised a small list of women from prominent companies that actually make the cut, and help spread diversity without being overbearing.
Ubisoft
The Frag Dolls—an all-female gaming team composed of Ubisoft employees
Jade Richmond—Manager of Ubisoft Toronto
Pauline Jacquey—Managing Director
Naughty Dog/ EA
Amy Henning—Writer/ Creative Director for Uncharted, Star Wars Battlefront (2015)
Unity Technologies Every Play
Kristen Duvall—Business Development Director
EA Mobile
Chelsea Howe—Creative Director
Gameinformer Magazine
Cathy Preston—Publisher
343 Studios
Bonnie Ross—Corporate Vice President
There are five prominent examples of women in tech, who are diverse, paid well, and produce many of the same games the critics of gamergate detest. It may come as a shock to some, but many of these women do play violent games. Halo, Call of Duty, even Grand Theft Auto. Games that people like Anita Sarkeesian claim promotes violence against women, and promotes the idea of a damsel in distress theory. That handheld games like Nintendogs don’t count because there’s no difficulty in the title, or Bayonetta 2 promotes women being a sex object.
Super Princess Peach, Cooking Mama, Style Savvy and even Kim Kardashian (mobile), have been played by men and enjoyed. Perspective and background are what play a major role in what many deem “girl games.” You could relate this to society now where we’ll see women love jewelry and shopping and men stand around looking bored. There’s no interest in it. But why? It’s because we didn’t grow up with it. Many of us love the idea of a beautiful woman dolled up and walking toward us, but we don’t want to experience the process that goes into the creation of that beauty we enjoy so fondly.
Now let’s take the opposite perspective. We’re in a Gamestop buying new controllers, and games and even a system. Women are just as bored as us in this situation. Why? The same idea implies, with a slant. Women want a guy who’s independent and interesting with a big brain. Someone who’s creative and spontaneous, not a gamer. Their idea of a male gamer is sitting, junk food and odd smells. This is the stereotype painted by media and pop culture. They don’t understand the male camaraderie that comes from leveling up or trading games. We could equate this to their trading makeup or trying on one another’s clothes. This leads us to the very topics critics of Gamergate speak upon.
Ms. Kahn obviously didn’t research her topic very thoroughly, as a simple trip to the Google Play store, or even the APP store showed that Cooking Mama has a mobile game. There’s also the feminist friendly Revolution 60 on the APP store as well. What isn’t abundantly clear is just how games didn’t grow up with us, and vise verse. If you played games, and visited stores that sold them you stayed current as time passed by right?
We have a lot of women in the gaming industry that are given free PSN and Xbox Live accounts yearly, that sit and collect dust. Yet we hear that when they went to E3 they didn’t feel welcome even though they have been in the industry for 30+ years. If you feel excluded, push yourself in. Make an independent title with a solid team that stands out so much people will go: “Hey, isn’t that so and so that made that one game?” If people in the music industry felt the same way, we’d never hear new music or see fresh faces. Gaming must be current and freshly renewed. Reinvented even, at times or it could die.
If you don’t stay consistent, and you sporadically played games then it wasn’t your true passion. When I worked at Gamestop, we were taught the different “Classes of Gamer,” but never that females weren’t gamers. I understood as I stood behind the register to ask probing questions to get to the heart of the matter:
What kind of systems do you own?
What game genres do you like?
What was the last game you played?
These all lead to the right answer the shopper is seeking. Had the author’s sister been asked these, and had answers they would have certainly pointed her in the right direction for the game she sought. You can’t yield change without effort, and that’s a solid fact. No one will ever walk into a Gamestop and not either pick up a gameinformer to see what’s coming out, or browse their selection to see what’s new.
“Power to the players”
Gamestop’s culture pressures the associate to push used games over new, so the customer can return them within 7 days for a refund or find something else. The idea of gaming is freedom, and that’s something you can’t ignore. So if games never grew with Ms. Kahn or her sister, it’s because they never intended for them to do so. Using someone as young as Kahn did for the interview wasn’t such a good tactic. While it would appear she offered valid points, we must remember she is still a teenager. At such a sensitive age, they don’t really get the complete experience of knowing just how life works with differences and similarities for males and females. Once life experience is established and obtained, the mind can filter what it experiences into the different categories for further enlightenment. And that’s how we can change games into more than entertainment value.
So what is your thoughts on this subject? Let us know what you think in the comment section!
Source:
boingboing
fortune
***Disclaimer***
This is a personal opinion of the writer, and it doesn’t necessarily represent the other writers (nor The Gaming Ground´s) opinions.
Kenay Peterson
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @TheDark_Mage
More by Kenay Peterson:
Tags: #GamerGate, Boing boing, Gawker, Kotaku, No girl wins, Polygon
