The Forgotten Passive Skill of the Video Gaming Scene: Misogyny

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.

A Dry List: Annoying Community, Rayman Origins Demo & Jumping in Action-RPGs And Why We Should Care

I’ve found it hard to sink my teeth into any big games recently (although I maintain an interest in Starcraft 2). This is in the wake of coming to feel a bit disenfranchised with the general mind-set of most gaming communities. I suppose it’s worth noting that this disposition is also present in the community of Starcraft 2, so I’m half-way there already. The toxicity isn’t really explicit unless you’ve taken a prolonged stay in, hm. I guess the online multiplayer of any game.  The ugliest forefronts don’t come to an explicit point often in the professional realms. When they do, it’s condemned by most. This instance with the promotional Street Fighter x Tekken Stream-Show-Thing produced reasonably large shockwaves. But they subsided so quickly: among the broadest channels output was back to the status quo in less than twenty-four hours. I guess there wasn’t any time for the idea of wide-spread misogyny in all major gaming communities. It was more prescient to most that they distance their particular niche from the terrible Fighting-types, and that they do so in the smuggest most self-congratulatory manner they can manage.

Now, I may be a touch cynical, but I would wager that those who are merely concerned about how such an incident reflects on their corner of gaming—whether by blunt comparison or simply as a function of their own distancing gestures—haven’t put too much thought into the subject. Okay, so that’s the mildest way I could put it. Actually it made me wonder if many of these people were consciously horrible, woefully ignorant or just straight-up self-centred. But no matter! This isn’t the kind of thing I’m equipped to deal with so I’ll just... Focus on the good.

Sasha ‘Scarlett’ Hostyn, a transgender woman from Canada, recently made an unprecedented run at a major Starcraft 2 tournament (IPL4). The reason it’s so unfounded is the sheer distance she made through the open bracket. Simply put, she took out high profile players with long records and all the resources they need; the kind of players whose stability as established professional gamers allows them to focus on the one thing that, arguably, matters most to them: their game. On top of smashing a whole bunch of these people that she perhaps wasn’t ‘supposed’ to, she has no sponsorship and no team and was only able to cover travel expenses by winning an online tournament. And the best part (although what I’ve already described pleases me greatly) is that the general community has reacted… well. I can’t really put it any more succinctly than that; the childish stuff was smaller than I expected and the mawkish dismissal was minimal.

So, maybe I can move on and reclaim a little faith from this whole thing. Excellent, I don’t get to say that very often. In fact that may be the first. In any case, I lurched towards my more nostalgia-seeking instincts and grabbed the demo for Rayman Origins.

I don’t know how to feel about what this demo has told me. I’ll start with the music, though: it veers between lovingly cute, appropriately ambient and annoyingly kitschy. I’m really not sure what else can be said; it just isn’t particularly alluring. The gameplay is clearly designed with a co-op slant in mind, but it seems intended to function solidly enough as a single-player experience.  But I don't know to what extent a platformer can reasonably tailor itself around a varying amount of players. I suppose what I’m concerned about is this nagging idea of mitigating the standard stage-to-stage variables; just how tight can it be if it needs to account for the possibility of one-to-four players?  It’s bound to be a loose fit, no matter how finely-spun.

The animation is in the vein of many modern cel-shaded titles. I don’t think it’s worth me describing that it is very pretty. This video gives a worthy impression of the kind of palette (and tone) you can expect. As visually excellent as Origins is, though, I couldn’t help but get the impression of a mechanical system that gives the player a little too much power. Unless the amount of enemies is quadrupled under four-player I just can’t see there being much difficulty, and if there was four times the enemies it would likely turn into something of a visual cluster-fuck.  But it does look very pretty.

I never really took to the idea that seems inherent in so many modern 2D platformers. That is, titles that are distinctly not Rayman Origins. I didn’t like the idea of playing a game that was designed to kill me repeatedly. I enjoyed the original Castlevania, but I feel that its steep difficulty was simply in lieu of things either taken for granted today or entirely thrown out in favour of concision. Like the limitations of cartridge memory, or the implied value of compelling a player to put more time in than might seem reasonable for the volume of content. I guess what I’m getting at is that I appreciated Castlevania for what it achieved with what its developers had. Modern developers don’t even veil their murderous approach. I Want To Be The Guy is a good example: apart from its gratuitous attempts to wrangle me in with its pastiche of familiar music and level design, it clearly wants to kill the player over and over again. Platformers don’t need to do this, but Rayman Origins—whose vague threats of violence against you are adorably cute in comparison, like a malicious kitten—could stand to learn a thing or two from this murderous (but reflective!) new generation.

For one, the imperative to collect arbitrary golden-floaty-things isn’t particularly fun unless they’re made sparse or difficult to get; preferably both. Making them time-consuming to get is not so compelling. Also, if threats to the player are going to be implemented (environment hazards, enemies, spikes, etc.) it’s generally a good idea to not make them so easy to step over that I momentarily wonder if I’ve been tricked into grinding for experience again. I guess I’m caught on the knife-edge of wanting a game to ruthlessly punish me, but to not be so presumptuous about the whole ordeal.

Speaking of which (both grinding and masochistic self-punishment) Phantasy Star Online 2 was announced a little while ago. Judging by the designs they’re going with it seems nostalgia-appeal has not gone out of fashion. I guess I can’t complain when practically every established developer is in on the act. Is it still abusive if everyone does it? No matter. This pretty trailer coincidentally sets itself in the first area of PSO. I guess it only just occurs to me that naming the first major landscape in your fantasy/sci-fi universe simply ‘Forest’ is slightly underwhelming. They’ve had a lot of time to refine the mechanics down, though, so I’m interested. The original PSO managed to make itself compelling with an extremely simple set of commands: it was like Diablo 2 stripped-down and in space with Japanese designs.

I’m not sure where they’re going to take it, but the trailer is pretty explicit about two things: the music and visual styles from the original are something of a priority (it’s nice to have some music that’s half-way original and unique, likewise with stylised designs), and the action elements may have been pushed forwards to a point where you may overcome the ‘numbers game’ mentality. Excellent. Also they’ve added a jump command which, based on the video here, they’re pretty happy about. It's important enough for a massive highlight in the trailer, apparently. That’s worrying if only because it’s precisely the kind of flair that lets me know the video is designed, almost explicitly, for people like me.

The uninformed potential player doesn’t care about the jump command: they see an avatar jumping and instantly put the pieces together, ‘Oh, I can jump in this game.’ They might think that it’s odd to call attention to such a thing unless Sonic Team had developed a somewhat anachronistic fetish for the jump command. But the people who played and enjoyed PSO for an extended period will dwell just a little longer on this point: ‘Ohh, they’re jumping pretty high… That would have been nice twelve years ago. Jump over the little waist-high electric-fence-things.’ I don’t know for certain that this necessitates calling as much attention as they could to the fact that you can jump. If it was my choice I would have to face the fact that it does represent a significant deviation from the original. PSO was pretty much—mechanically, not visually—a 2-dimensional game.  But is ‘jumping’ obscure enough to necessitate a nod as a gameplay feature? Probably not.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I don’t know whether to feel sorry for an obvious mistake that would lead many viewers to think Sonic Team were grasping at straws with their gameplay highlights, or to feel pandered to as one of the few people for whom that flair was specifically designed to be seen by. 

Silly Starcraft Streaming Standard

More Starcraft 2 things abound, but I can’t help that it’s a sweet community. Also, streaming live content is a thing now. Okay, so that is slightly obvious at this point. I struggle to come to grips with our growing means to be awesome sometimes. Here’s another one: did you know that, on average, it’s faster to download a CD than to simply rip the information from a disc? You probably did, but damn. The point, though! It’s a new avenue, and the diversity established so far is nothing short of impressive. So impressive, in fact, that scrambled-word-thoughts seem necessary. 

So, the breadth of streaming tools is wide:  it’s a standard of the internet now. And Team Liquid, dedicated folks that they are, aggregate a great deal of the talent around the Starcraft community. Their list of active players encompasses Brood War, MOBA (LoL, HoN, DotA) gamers, the occasional FPS and those seeking respite in other areas: the Skyrims and flirtatious beta builds of the day have a home here, too. So it’s not just a list of people playing (or casting) Starcraft 2. It is mostly that.

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been surprised by the players’ and commentators’ resourcefulness on these streams. Surprisingly few thrive on skill alone; it’s the most obvious and ubiquitous quality among featured streamers, so raw talent or cultivated skill (more often a mixture) is a strong, but non-differentiating, base.  Former Warcraft 3 professional Kim ‘SaSe’ Hammar garners an impressive amount of viewers with this approach: just a generic music playlist and razor sharp skill. Very simple, but living in Korea is a definite aid to the ‘razor sharp’ part.

Luckily Starcraft 2 gives skill a wide berth: some excel at a passive game, others will strike at any opening they see; players are necessarily reactive, but some prefer to force their enemy’s hand with deviations. There are all kinds.  But I’m going to go ahead and say that differences in style are only small factors when it comes to popularity. Infestors or Mutalisks are fun to see under good control, but these aren’t the things that gave Steve ‘Destiny’ Bonnell or Greg ‘Idra’ Fields their many fans. Tournament results are one simple factor, but I’m of the persuasion that the most popular figures will always ooze personality.

Idra is a good example to go with, though: his successes led to more coverage of his habit of, erm—I’ll say vociferous negativity.  The implications of the community’s indulgence don’t really concern me; to be able to jump on stream and average around ten-thousand viewers within an hour is simply impressive. But Greg is that rare conflux of results and deliciously bitter character. If there was a list of formulae to stream success, Idra’s paradigm would be somewhere near the top: years of practice, a high standing in tournaments, and the maintenance of a blunt, border-line-offensive attitude. He also streams a lot of dub-step playlists, which I guess doesn’t hurt against his overwhelmingly pop-centric peers.

In fact, music is a neat factor when it comes to simple un-narrated play. One caveat first: the reconciliation of musical artists with the services that are running ads (the ‘Twitch.tv’s and the ‘Justin.tv’s of the world) is a monstrous endeavour. I do not envy the people one day tasked with disentangling this realm. That said, as long as the music can’t be depended on (i.e. you aren’t able to rely on an individual artist or song being aired) there seems to be little liability for the moment. Or at least that’s how things work in my naïve head.

So for now, music is simply a nice thing that we are able to have. It isn’t a huge deal to some, but it can definitely make the difference.  Ilyes ‘Stephano’ Satouri makes for a good example; he’s a superb French player, maybe one of the best in the world. But when he streams his chat isn’t flooded with rapturous awe or dumb balance arguments. I mean, there’s some of that, of course. But the majority are expressing their surprise: a classic rock playlist. I’m biased, of course: others could think of Stephano in the same vein as SaSe and I wouldn’t be in any position to criticise them. Music is a golden thing for those who don’t want to put energy into a persona or any kind of narration.

Sean 'Day9' Plott is the opposite of this. Former Brood War player, commentator for Starcraft 2, and a damn fine analytical take. His highly structured (and animated) approach to putting on a stream show attracts an admirable amount of viewers, and the condensed format allows for episodic delivery. So it’s a style that fits both conventional pre-recorded video and a live audience: genius. The abundance of content is staggering. Somewhere in the early four-hundreds (each episode roughly an hour long) I feel like the word ‘practiced’ becomes grossly insufficient. But I could write swathes about just Day9’s achievements; suffice to say his energy and charisma is a huge asset to the community. And no one else really does it like Day9. That’s not to say that there aren’t any other structured, pre-planned streams; just none that focus on replay-analysis and simple story-telling.

I guess it occurs to me far too late that I can’t possibly do justice to this community without going into much more detail, but the depth really is part of the allure. Figures like Incntrol, TLO and Catz deliver such a widely differing set of experiences that it’s tough to zone in on what attracts a large viewership.  One thing seems certain: a player or a commentator needs a platform before they can gather momentum in this place. For every player generating decent ad revenue, a hundred skilled players toil in obscurity.