I've been having a pretty interesting discussion about criticism, feminism, and videogames on Youtube, and I felt a need to preserve it, so I'm copying the conversation here. What I find interesting about this conversation is that as it has gone on, the anger and immediacy of the conversation has worn off, and we've managed to find some common ground.
I haven't written much about feminism or representation in videogames here, but it is a subject that is close to my heart. At least part of my posting of this was prompted by FilmCritHulk's excellent and amazingly empathetic essay here: http://badassdigest.com/2014/10/27/film-crit-hulk-smash-on-despair-gamergate-and-quitting-the-hulk/ . I want to try to bring to bear some of his calm demeanor in my own discussions -- especially around touchy subjects like GamerGate and feminism. I have these kinds of conversations all the time, so I felt the need to time-capsule this one up as an example. This is not an example of someone winning an internet argument. This is not me bragging about how good I am at arguing on the internet. This is just an example of two people managing to reach some amount of common ground.
This conversation is in response to the ExtraCredits & IdeaChannel collab video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
Fair warning: this is a really long internet argument that turns into a really long internet discussion.
InternetGuy: Up until now, I had dismissed everything people had said to imply that Extra Credits and their fanbase are misandric...up until, of course, they showed 'everything is misogyny' bitch.
Me: Are you arguing that, because Anita disagrees with you, she should not have a platform where she speak critically and encourage analysis and critical thinking about games?
InternetGuy: Do your research kid. That's not at all what this is about.
Me (in response to someone else who I'm quoting): "why don't you go out there and start educating game developers in creative storytelling then? Or advocating creative storytelling in games overall?"
I do. I'm a game developer. The point is not that games cause misogyny in young men, but that a lot of the tropes we fall back on are because of misogyny in young men. (edit -- I overapplied the word misogyny here. I meant to allude to the dismissive attitude boys and young men often have for girls and women as a group)
"Tropes are used as a crutch by writers/story tellers who can't do better." Yes, but I want and expect people to do better than this. We can do better than this. Theres' no excuse for this lazy writing we put up with in so many games. That's what it is; not evil, just lazy.
InternetGuy: I'm not going to consider the argument about someone lying to be something they are not in order to get monetary support. So, the fact that she is not a gamer puts her in a questionable position as a critic. Or do you just go around voting for Politicians who lie about identity labels (if you are even old enough to vote that is). She can have a platform to speak, nobody's arguing that. But her arguments are not to be taken seriously if the entire premise of said arguments are already utter bullshit.
This next thing is an absolute no no. She should not be someone influencing mainstream gaming if she is a non-gamer who lies about being a non-gamer. Forget that her arguments are way beyond flawed; why should an industry pander towards her if her view points derived from her life experiences do not represent what the majority of us want? Tell me, what other industry is this happening/has this happened on? 'I don't watch baseball, I don't know the rules and I've never grabbed a bat. Uhhhh.....excuse me? Why are the teams not sexually mixed? Female Softball League? No! Fuck your sexual dimorphism bullshit studies made by the patriarchy. You're gonna have females playing on the Yankees right now!' This is what she looks like wanting to influence games.
If you'd rather talk about games then sure. Do that. But don't pretend you know what's going on with GamerGate if you're not full into it like other people are. Or if you're going to do it anyway at least do some research. About the tropes thing, you might want to consider no longer following Anita if that is your goal, as you two don't share similar objectives if that's what you want of games. Either way, regardless of what EC says, you can't escape tropes. And which ones are negative and positive are more often than not neutral or objective characteristics.
InternetGuy (cont'd): Nobody has a problem with people who criticize against lazy writing. Fuck, even I can sympathize with someone who sees lazy writing as a problem; which is an opinion I don't share since I think lazy writing being popular is an omnipresent thing you can't do much about. But I digress. This is what people have a problem with: 'Videogames present downright misogynist ideas about women'. This delusion which is something a lot of the people who are out of the loop seem to blindly and massively 100% agree with. It's not even satire. In her eyes, and her viewers, videogames are women-hating and they feel there is a need to push an agenda to end the patriarchy. I can't help but respect her from a business stand point though. She sure knows how to siphon the money out of suckers.
Me: Who gets to decide whether or not Anita is or is not a gamer? How is it even possible to lie about this?
Is it a matter of how much she plays? I'm certain she plays more games than I do and I freaking work in videogames. (I'm lucky if I get 4 hours a week of gaming, but playing and critiquing games is her full-time job).
Is it that she doesn't care enough about games? I mean, clearly she cares about them quite dearly -- seeing as she has devoted the last year and a half of her life to criticism of them.
The only criterion I see applied is that her opinions do not represent the majority of current gamers (as we perceive them). And that's fine... but is that really a good criterion by which to judge whether someone is or is not a gamer? Am I not a gamer because I agree with a certain amount of what she says? How do we measure this?
Additionally, why would we only want current gamers to have influence over mainstream games? That would basically assure that we have an echo chamber devoid of new ideas. Who will help us see longstanding failures if not outsiders? At one point Nintendo was an outsider -- they're a hanafuda company, , what business do they have telling mainstream gaming to change? At one point Sony was an outsider -- they're a music company, what business do they have telling mainstream gaming to change?. At one point Microsoft was an outsider -- they're a business computing company, what business do they have telling mainstream gaming to change?
I'm not really saying Anita or any feminist critic is as significant as all that, but it's important to acknowledge that at no point in the history of gaming has an outsider opinion ever really made the industry worse. People are too good at disregarding bad advice. On the contrary, outsider opinions have done a lot to make gaming as good as it is today.
I'm happy to acknowledge that she doesn't seem like she learned how to criticize games specifically before she started her series. Her terminology is weird and disjointed. She clearly has a background in media studies more generally, mostly focussing on film and literature.
That said, it's not like gaming criticism terminology is very well tied down. If you want to do some reading on the subject, check out Tom Bissell's book "Why Video Games Matter". It's from 2010, but it shows well how soft all of this is. He's a writer and games journalist who would go on to be write for Gears of War (after this book was published). He knows better than almost anyone just how nebulous all this is. Anita isn't invading and she isn't an outsider, because there are no borders :/ She as a media critic knows just as little about critiquing interactive media as any of us. We're all flying by the seat of our pants.
You're absolutely welcome to disagree with her points, but you'll help the industry more if you argue against her argument, rather than trying to say that her arguments are trash because of who she is or isn't.
(Also, to your allusions to impropriety on her part on raising as much kickstarter money as she did, $160,000 may sound like a lot, but it's been supporting >4 people (anita, a co-writer, editor, animator, and people to capture footage) for a year and a half now. They're not getting rich here.)
InternetGuy: Well, I was making a comment replying bit by bit to your long ass comment on my laptop when I accidentally clicked on 'cancel' just when I was approaching 3/4 of the way there. Won't be writing it again, but it boils down to me thinking that you haven't really looked into this thoroughly (which is strange since you are already taking sides). Anyway, you want data on why people picture her as a liar? Go to Flying Turkey YT channel and then come back with your view on what he has to say. I promise a decent reply next time but right now I am really not feeling like remembering/writing all that again.
Me: Ah, sorry for the silence. I couldn't find this comment thread for a while (Google really should make this more searchable).
I went and watched all the Flying Turkeys YT videos. I get that this guy doesn't like her and that he has reasons for not liking her or trusting her, but I don't understand what bearing that has on any discussion of the ideas she proposes. You can't lie an idea. Ideas are useful or not regardless of how trustworthy or experienced the source is. Even if she doesn't meet someone's definition of gamer, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether her ideas are useful or applicable or true (by the way, my definition of gamer is someone who cares enough about games to call themselves a gamer -- a very low bar, I know, but it's not like "gamer" is some exclusive club that needs protecting).
Flying Turkeys even says himself in his first video that any personal grievances he has with Anita have nothing to do with her arguments and are not a meaningful way to critique those arguments. If we were arguing over whether or not Anita is a nice person, this would be admissible evidence -- but we're not, and it's not. Nothing about Anita matters at all actually. Nothing about any person in this debate matters at all. This is a contest of ideas.
I don't care about Anita being right. I don't care about you being wrong. I don't need to 'win'. All I want is for games to be interesting and engaging for as many people as possible. That is all that matters to me. That's why I chose to work in games. Do you share this goal? Would you like to talk about how to achieve this goal?
InternetGuy: It's okay. Google+ isn't my friend either (that comment that got erased was a pretty long one so you can know how I feel). All in all, I'm glad you are actually civilized and aren't steering the wheel to avoid points in a conversation. Maybe I'll try to summarize how I feel about how she has presented herself to the public and then her arguments themselves.
When I suggested you watched Flying Turkey's videos I specifically was suggesting the video where he has Anita video taped saying 'I don't like games. Video games are gross.' since one of the basis you had were that her being a gamer was something immeasurable. However, there we have a confession of her saying she's not a gamer around 1 year prior to her kickstarter campaign. Is it at all possible she got interested in video games throughout the next year? Absolutely. But in the case of Anita the gamer tag did something more for her than just represent her as a 'gamer'. It gave her a perceived credibility for the medium she was discussing. Keep in mind also that she says she's been playing video games her entire life in the kickstarter video and interview videos that came out around that time, which both came out before Flying Turkeys' video on Anita. See the glaring contradiction? That's what makes me have suspicions for her as a person and her purposes. It's not a way for me to attack her arguments.
As for her arguments themselves, I overall agree she should be able to say this kind of thing. Like Roger Ebert had the right to say video games were not art. Like Jack Thompson had the right to say video games directly correlate to violence. I may not personally agree with most of what she says but I am pretty neutral about it. Except for some instances here and there where she doesn't do her research well at all and ends up painting the wrong picture of a game (Hitman; Women as background decoration video) or pretty much most of her tweet where she's trying to spread a panicking or attacks people by proxy without addressing their arguments (her tweets suggesting school shootings are correlated to male representation on the media and her tweets on Christina Hoff Sommers). That's just some of the examples that come to my mind.
Yes please. I have wanted to represent my country on the media all my life . Look at my profile picture and cover. Wouldn't you want to see that in a cartoon? I know that I won't achieve this goal alone, but that won't excuse machiavelic means for obtaining that goal. Protesting about making a Marvel black protagonist wouldn't have helped. Dwayne Mcduffie (one of my heroes) sat down and made Static Shock, which later on became a tv show. He also made a series of comic books to represent minorities. He was awesome. But what I'm trying to get at is that although representation in the media should definitely a talking point, it shouldn't be taken to an extreme the way Anita does it, by calling everything that isn't part of her ideology misogyny. We all have ideologies, but we can't pretend to make everyone else share those.
In my opinion,the correct course of action is to sit down and create things that represent those ideologies; and if we do not have the ability to do that, then there's always people who create that do share those ideologies (like you). And I think that's more positively influential than stirring up controversy (though controversy can be done right through satire). Anyway, at this point I'm just rambling so I'll shut up.
Me: I'm glad our conversation has gotten to this point. :)
Fair warning: I ended up talking about Anita again more than I meant to, feel free to skip over this one if you like. I'll pick up talking about how to make good games in the next comment.
I still don't think Anita has misrepresented herself when she says she's a gamer. Based on things she's said and the footage from Flying Turkeys, this is how I think this transpired:
Much like any kid, I'm sure she played and loved videogames until she was around 11 or 12. School's rough at that age, and a lot of finding yourself that happens then. It wouldn't surprise me if she stopped playing many videogames then like so many of us give up things we had previously liked. She goes through high school and college not really dealing with videogames, instead focussing on media studies (especially movies) and feminism.
At this point she doesn't consider herself a gamer, games are something she left behind and, from her perspective look like they've left her behind. In the years she's not been playing games, we've seen more games be more masculine (assuming she stopped playing most games by 2000). When she looks back at the hobby she once enjoyed back on the SNES, she sees it's not meant for her anymore. This opinion is reinforced by years of feminism and media studies and the snark that comes with being in your early twenties. Anyway, that's where I think the "too many dicks on the dancefloor" video came from.
Then she graduates and does a bunch of media journalism and feminist critique online. I'm sure she has a bunch of friends who are still into games who tell her she's wrong to cast off videogames as a whole. They bring up the rising indie scene, Portal, and Mirrors Edge. Anita decides that she should give more attention to gaming (after all, she already covers a lot of geek media, it's a glaring omission from her portfolio). She starts doing preliminary research and starts a kickstarter for what would be a small one-off series about some videogames. That kickstarter blows up in a ridiculous way, and Anita sees that there are a lot of people who want to see feminist media criticism applied to games (and a lot of people who don't), and so she doubles down on her geek/gamer persona (a persona that probably would have hurt her credibility as a feminist and media critic in other circles).
When people critique her for her lack of experience in games, they're mostly right. She tries to hide her inexperience because she doesn't want her opinion to be marginalized and ignored. She sees herself as having to represent all those people who gave to her kickstarter. She knows she isn't the ideal spokesperson (almost all of us know that, actually), but she is the one in the best position to do this kind of work. Hers is one voice among many thousands of people talking about games on youtube (most of whom are not talking about feminism or talking against it), so it makes sense she would be defensive of any authority she can bring to bear in her critique of games and gamer culture.
Anyway, she's not my ideal critic. I think she structures her arguments too negatively and makes unnecessary enemies doing so. Her videos clearly come from a media studies background rather than a modern youtube "edutainment" background like Extra Credits, Idea Channel, CGPGrey, Crash Course, Veritasium, Numberphile, etc. as demonstrated by her thesis-adherent style of argument and her detached interaction with the social side of her videos. Because of this, they have a feeling of implied superiority and authority which is fine in college, but inappropriate for youtube.
Her lack of experience with games and with game design is obvious to a lot of us. The most glaring example for me is the game design idea she proposed at the end of her damsel videos. The game she describes has a movie-style narrative arc, not a game-style arc of mechanical competency (also, it is so un-subtle as to be comical). If the backlash against her was less intense, I would feel more okay voicing my problems with her presentation. Unfortunately, that's not the world as I find it. Instead people threaten to rape and shoot her and those around her which makes the idea of a reasoned critique ludicrous (small irony: ludicrous comes from the latin root "ludum" or "ludicrum" which means "game").
I've gone on too long about this -- especially since this has very little bearing on our broader conversation on what critique is appropriate or applicable to games. This is just me following through on a philosophy I have on taking people at their word when they say something about themselves. Life's too short to spend so much of it paranoid that someone's lying to you about something that only they, in their heart of hearts, can know if it's true.
InternetGuy: Your proposition for how the chronology of how she grew up as a gamer (which we must assume since Anita gives very vague statements and beats around the bush more than a raccoon when talking about this) is fair enough in my opinion. My bias and what I've seen about her wants to interrupt and say:'She lied about w, x and y thing; why wouldn't she lie about z thing?', but in the end I can't deny it is both entirely possible and even likely that things happened that way.
I also understand she probably didn't expect her kickstarter to be so successful. Hell, I don't even know how it would affect content that I would make (hypothetically) if I made a kickstarter. But I think her way of arguing points pre-kickstarter and post-kickstarter is pretty much the same: Persuasive, Speech 101 College Thesis-supporting kind of arguing. Come up with a Thesis, look for evidence and stick with that thesis no matter what. When a critic should be doing the complete opposite: Looking at the facts, considering an idea from every point possible and changing/evolving your thesis if need it be. This is one of the main things that keep me from calling her a critic. Her ideas and talking points have been the same for as long as Feminist Frequency has existed. It's absolutely crazy, but a lot of colleges (mine included) teach this way. It's even considered as the top, ideal way to make an argument (an idea I seriously frown towards) so her way of debating doesn't come out of the blue or is an evilly devised plot to spread propaganda (even if that may be one of the effects).
Backlash against her does happen. But this is something many refuse to face: Everyone faces backlash. Jack Thompson did. Roger Ebert did. And both of them voiced the fact that they got death threats and uncountable insults. However, no one showed any sympathy to either of them even though they have the same exact right as Anita. One of them (Roger Ebert) even went out of his way to address and even directly respond to people who were bringing up fair and legit criticism to his ideas. I think that is worth some respect and says a lot about both why exactly it is that people defend Anita and what the media has done to manipulate the way people feel about Anita being insulted by spotlighting harassment as it happens to depict it as blind misogyny. (be careful with that cancel button; I've been copying my stuff so it doesn't get deleted if I accidentally click it but no one is safe).
Me: (I also copy my stuff periodically to make sure I don't lose all of it :) )
So I went looking more into Dwayne Mcduffle. I loved Static Shock growing up and I did not know who this guy was! His involvement explains why there was a rumored crossover planned between Static and the Teen Titans, as well as the actual crossovers between Static and JLU. Cool stuff! It's too bad he didn't live longer, I'd love to see what else he would have done.
I agree that the ideal way for this to happen is for more female creators to be making games, and luckily there are! Kellee Santiago started thatgamecompany with Jenova Chen and produced Braid, Flow, Flower, The Unfinished Swan, Journey, Dear Esther, Monaco, and Gone Home. None of these are explicitly 'girl' games, but they cover a lot of narrative ground that most mainstream games don't (and, personal anecdote, I feel better recommending these games to people who are not yet gamers while a lot of AAA games are vaguely embarrassing to recommend).
Here's why I think we need some amount of public call for feminism in games. Dwayne Mcduffle got his big break in the early 90s -- a time we remember as being ridiculously drenched with "political correctness". Sappy and forced as it seems to us now, I worry that people like Dwayne would not have gotten the chance to created had public sentiment not made some inroads before he got there. He also came after the (vaguely awkward) integration of some earlier black heroes in comics.
Consider for a moment what heroes he would have seen as a kid reading comics and what pressures the comic creators at the time were facing. Black Panther was created in 1966 (4 years after Dwayne was born), right in the middle of a bunch of civil rights activism. Falcon came 3 years later, then Green Lantern was black in 1971, and Power Man in 72, Storm in 75, and Black Lightning, Black Vulcan, Bumblebee, Iron Man/War Machine, and Cyborg between 77 and 80. By the time Dwayne was 18, there were a whole bunch of black heroes in comics -- most of whom were invented and written initially by white guys who had been in the industry for years. This is purely speculation on my part, but I think this gesture of inclusiveness on the part of comic creators at the time contributed to Dwayne's interest in comics as entertainment and eventually as a career (a career that included two of my favorite cartoons ever, and probably influenced me to pursue my own professional path in animation and comics -- even though I eventually drifted into games).
I hope that feminism today has some similar effect to the civil rights movements of the 60s (though, I don't think it is nearly as bombastic as all that -- it's not like I'm fighting to destroy separate but equal or Jim Crow up in here). I want to show current game developers that there is a market demand for positive depictions of women, and games that are more inclusive generally. I'd like those developers to make small tweaks to the products they're currently working on to make them more inclusive -- maybe hiring writers of different backgrounds, maybe having different/additional hero characters, maybe exploring different themes in the gameplay, or different representations of NPCs in the environment or in side missions. I hope this encourages more people who didn't previously like games to become gamers and eventually make games of their own.
Anyway. That's why I want people to keep talking about feminism in addition to making games.
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