I’ve been thinking a lot about gender diversity in the video
game community recently or, rather, the lack thereof. The competitive circles—your
Halos and your Soul Caliburs—are my biggest concern, but this is an issue that
encompasses most aspects of the scene, so it would seem careless to be too specific. Anyway,
first I need to apply some foundations.
I’m going to try to pre-empt the invariable negativity here
and say that this isn’t about blaming any particular group of people for how
male-centric things are; everyone is conservative to a degree. We learn what
constitutes ‘normal’ and then adapt and that’s fine, up to a point. But what if
the ‘normal’ is deeply flawed? It takes a certain amount of conscious thought
and effort to propagate something better. I simply feel like this idea of
progress is worth holding onto, even if it feels laughably optimistic at times.
So, with that said, I’ll be blunt: the vast majority of
gaming communities are wrapped in a passively misogynist demeanour (as well as being
fairly racist and ableist, but these are distinct issues). The reinforcements
pervade through every active voice: from concept and 3D artists, whose
objectifying designs apparently trump any kind of continuity of pragmatism; a
user-base that thinks it’s totally fine to just assume ‘everyone is a man by
default’; and marketing departments that push ‘AAA’ games like they’re Action
Man for Man-Children. If these three things alone were ceased —the most
outstanding examples of accepted widespread misogyny in the industry—we would
find within a short period that video games really aren’t the ‘Other Man’s
World’ they’re so often sold to us as.
It’s no secret that the attitudes around what gaming is (and
what a ‘gamer’ is) result in environments where people feel they have licence
to be hostile and derisive. Hell, to this
‘Aris’ guy it is, quite literally, a licence to sexually harass. I’m not talking
about what could be called ‘the nonsensical hate-stream’ here; that
non-differential and aimless kind of rage is often more absurd than threatening
to the average non-gendered player. It can potentially make an irritating
experience for anyone, but for all of the lashings of hate-spiel a guy might come
to receive while playing a game, he is never going to be made to feel that he
shouldn’t be there because of his gender. The real issue is that—thanks in part
to the ‘everyone is a man’ imperative—the attention towards female players
becomes much more severe, and focussed. Women are often made to feel compelled to
remain silent in online games and not convey their gender, because ‘man’ isn’t
just the default: it’s a casually-enforced standard of ‘normality’, and to
deviate from it actually justifies harassment to some people.
This point is largely rhetorical, but if men are the
default, what does that make women? The harassment and shit-talk is the ugly
forefront (and it is obvious by this point that it is not ‘just children’ who perpetuate
it), but the justifications are laughably callous: things like ‘she should
expect it if she’s so blatantly a girl’ or, ‘you should just not use your
microphone if you can’t deal with it’. So, you can only be treated equally if
you go out of your way to keep your gender to yourself? No one would ever say
this to a guy because he was using an explicitly male name, so what does this
really amount to other than silencing female voices and denying femininity? This
line of thought is what happens when people conflate the average bad manner of
online communities with what one should expect for having the audacity to be openly female. Put simply, treating everyone equally cannot possibly align
with ‘everyone is necessarily a guy until stated otherwise’, but these positions,
apparently, settle down together with disturbing ease.
This
excellent piece explains eloquently how different kinds of privilege can be
hard to perceive. This does not mean that everyone who has never paid thought
to fixing things is at fault: societies are steeped in it. Unless you live in a
sealed culture-proof box, this is normal. And by ‘normal’ I mean ‘something we
are collectively saturated in.’ Still, I feel the need to say flatly this isn’t a
zero-sum game of attributable ‘Privilege Points’ being picked at: trying to
make the culture around video games more gender-inclusive simply serves the
best interests of everyone who enjoys games. Well, maybe it doesn’t serve the
interests of people who hate women? I don’t know, fuck those guys. Explicit boundaries on gender are largely a
thing of the past; no one (who gets taken seriously) says that women flat-out shouldn’t play games. Implicit barriers, though, are very much
alive, and out-dated ideas on gender are not unusual. In fact, they are usual: just look at a magazine or a
music video and try to reach the conclusion that society offers us a balanced
presentation men and women. The threads between different media can’t just be
severed, and I feel that the video game sector is far less independent of the
toxic mainstream than many of its fans might like to believe.
This position often leaves me feeling that all people can
reasonably do is minimise the issues caused to children who grow up with
nothing but subtle (and sometimes very un-subtle)
codes and messages that mediate their gender expression. This coding is a
fundamental presupposition to pretty much any cultural work that involves
humans: in representing a fictional world the author invariably draws upon the environment
around them (as well as other works) to fill in the holes of an initial concept.
The suppositions of ‘useful generalisations’, of generic conventional tropes
and out-dated—but simple and effective—narratives and expressions: these things
cannot be undermined with little effort. The conventions are so ingrained that
even skilled and well-meaning artists are beset by the ease with which their
attempt at a subversive concept can fall into clumsiness; opportunely ‘marketable
traits’, hackneyed dialogue or setting, or maybe just an end so heavy-handed
and fantastic that the audience doesn’t take the ideas seriously.
The point where people will lazily defend the status quo
(and so their own apathy) is, generally, where I get dismayed. Calling out a
person’s recycled ‘jokes’ is sometimes decried as “feeding the trolls” or “white
knighting”, while shameless marketing practices are shrugged off with a cynical
“sex sells” mantra. Put simply: if Sonic fans were able to mount a defence for
SEGA’s choice to give Shadow a gun and a motor-bike—and, sadly, they were—what can’t people defend? There is simply no positive end to these
positions; it’s conservative acceptance masquerading as cunning aloofness.
There is also that oddly defensive slant that it is ‘equally sexist’ for male protagonists to
so often be muscly, chiselled and/or athletic. Well, no, it isn’t. To hold this
view is an example of privilege taken to an extreme. I could point to many
titles, but I may as well stick to competitive games. So, Starcraft: this is not the same as this. Not even close.
Then there’s the fact that—when you step away from just protagonists—male
bodies are represented in just about every light imaginable in video games,
though they are almost never sexualised to the degree that women are. The
conventional approach to design, from narrative to characters, caters
implicitly to some theoretical adolescent man who consults their penis before
every financial transaction. I have never known anyone to whom the level of
sexual content was a contributing factor in their purchase of a game.
I guess what I’m getting at is that any position that
doesn’t accept the idea that it’s easier to be accepted at face-value as a
‘male gamer’ than as a ‘female gamer’ (and that there is something inherently
wrong with that) is ultimately empty. It’s
obstructive to adopt a demeanour of presumed powerlessness that must cede its
judgment to the mighty gods of Commerce & Marketing. It’s untenable to hold
that the enforcement of masculinity is an equally pressing issue for men when
the function of this trope depends on promoting a kind of superiority in
‘manliness’: any inadequacies in the presentation of men are a triviality
against the non-stop objectification and marginalisation of women. I think everyone could benefit from the binary of gender itself being broken down a little, but that's a whole other post. Anyway, that’s
my position: it is never beyond communities and individuals to reform or refine
their standards.
With all that said I’m going to skip back to where I
started: the lack of gender diversity. There’s the sexualisation, the outright
misogynist ‘everyone is a man’ mind-set, and the perceived masculinity of
coordinating and competing to win; the protagonists are almost always male,
while their female counterparts are almost always half-naked. Then there are
the conservative marketing elements that carelessly perpetuate all of this
mundaneness. Given these facts, the perceived infrequency of women as ‘gamers’ does
not seem odd at all, nor down to some sweeping biological disposition: we are
just exceptionally conservative. The only way to change it is to actively consider
it, and to call people out—from developers to players—on their terrible
standards or pitiful demeanours. Gaming has grown to be mechanically and
visually fantastic, but the underlying values and sensibilities are too often regressive
and lazy by comparison. I think we’re entitled to voice our disapproval of
that.
