Month: September 2011

Minor Scandal vs. Systemic Sexism

Minor scandal is great for blog entries. It provides a nice easy topic to talk about at a moment when it seems relevant. One interesting scandal of the moment is with Dead Island. A mistakenly released build revealed the original name of a talent. The rename that went uncommented upon was called “Gender Wars.” The talent gives the player character Purna a damage increase against male zombies. The skill was originally called “Feminist Whore.” There was no change of how the skill worked, just the skill’s name. This means that somewhere along the production cycle it was changed to a linguistically more “appropriate” term, but the concept remained in the final build.

The minor scandal element of this is hardly unpredictable: Fan delves into code, finds something and posts it online; gamers generally laugh it off or get angry to not invade their somehow post gendered turf with pc crap; news sources picks it up and spreads it around; companies apologize and bad apples get blamed; more fan anger that their games must remain outside of the realm of politics as well as angry responses against the sexist act; and then two final things happen:

1) scholars jump on the band wagon and point it out again and again as to the state of games as sexist.
2) the rest of the world forgets about it.

This blog post is an attempt to follow Suzanne de Castell and Jen Jenson’s recent keynote at DiGRA 2011. In their keynote they mentioned the Dead Island issue as well as a number of other scandals, but they discussed that scholars have been simply pointing out sexism for the past 20 years without going further. The typical “feminist” response to the Dead Island scandal has been a reiteration of the same actions that have happened for the past 20 years. Instead, Jenson and Castells call for action. They call for people to get to the source, and change it.

The source here is not the game; the source is not the developer; the source is not the people who vociferously protest. Rather, the source is the system. The Dead Island scandal (“Feminist Whore”) is not the problem, it’s simply the crack that has mistakenly rendered the giant realm of sexism (of which sexism is equal to racism, homophobia, nationalism, and many others as a unacceptable alterity where the Other is rejected deeply and quietly within the system). The true scandal is that Gender Wars and 15% damage against men is unquestioned, and that people react by missing that it is the culture that allows the sexist event to happen.

It follows that the solution is not an apology, nor is it to only scream that games or the industry are sexist. There is no easy solution to a pervasive (systemic) element of a culture other than to work against it by changing general attitudes, by pushing women to STEM jobs and game jobs, by supporting alternate types of games, and by changing culture. The best way I can think of doing this is teaching against it, so that is what I will do. However, I will not use this to teach about how certain video games are sexist, nor how there is sexism within the industry. These are both true, obvious, and useless to simply point out. Rather, I will use this to teach how the real issues go unremarked upon even when they are rendered visible. How they are systemic.

Musings about Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a recent novel by Ernest Cline. It’s about a contest to find an easter egg in OASIS, the novel’s uber MMO that has absorbed all MMOs, games, shopping, Internet et cetera. Right before dying, the bachelor, shut-in, and stuck in his childhood in the 80s creator of OASIS created a huge easter egg, and made a contest of solving the easter egg. Whoever won got his fortune, which was the largest in the world by far. It takes the world some 7 years to solve it, and the book is about the solving. It gets almost all of its allure, unabashedly, from 80s pop culture (although this extends to 70s and 90s in parts), and the plot itself is basically about how the crazy megabillionaire’s own nostalgia for his past has affected the rest of the world in their search for the easter egg that will grant them his megabillions. So, that’s the plot, but what’s interesting is the nostalgia.

I use the term ‘nostalgia’ here rather loosely though as it isn’t exactly nostalgia. Or rather, it isn’t nostalgia for everybody. For the author it probably is nostalgia, for the reader it might be, for the diegetic creator of the game it was, but for the players it was entirely second hand. As egg hunters (“gunters”) they’re obsessed with 80s pop culture as it is assumed to be (and in fact is) the key to solving the easter egg. It was never their culture, and this is doubly sad as their own culture, as the book is so quick in its distopia to point out, is dead and escaping in virtual worlds that comprise OASIS. The real world sucks, so they get out, but the virtual worlds (at least the ones visited in the book) are completely filled with 80s nostalgia. They’ve lost their past and present and instead live in somebody else’s past. It’s a bit trippy in some ways. It makes me wonder about whose nostalgia it is now. By ‘now’ I mean now now, outside in the real world where remakes and demakes and minecraft and the SC2 lost viking minigame splash screen are all present.

The other thing I can’t help but think about is the large number of environmentally distopian novels I’ve read recently. While Wendy Chun has written about sci-fi as the never coming future I wonder if that holds with the more scientifically frightening science fiction like Oryx and Crake and Ready Player One that are really all based on the belief that we’re screwed because of a built up fucking over of the planet.