From the trenches of #GamerGate

EDIT: I thought the argument was over, but it's flared up again, so I've added some more of the arguments below.

Republished from an argument with a friend-of-a-friend on said friend's facebook wall. The person with whom I was arguing professed not to be a member or supporter of GamerGate, but held some very GamerGate-ish views of Anita Sarkeesian, including, in the preceding posts, arguing that the reason she 'attacked' video games was to intentionally draw hate with which to increase her own popularity and victimhood.

My response after the jump:

It's telling that the only reason you seem willing to consider that someone might criticize aspects of the gaming industry, and persevere in the face of honestly horrifying threats of violence, is as an attention-seeking ploy. I suppose that's where the accusation that she's a 'charlatan' comes from. 

The thing is, there is a lot of room for criticism here. Sarteesian's basic thesis is that the way that most video games depict gender dynamics is harmful to BOTH genders - for women, it creates a negative and unwelcoming atmosphere, and for men, it reinforces unhealthy and exclusionary ideas about how men should act and how they should interact with women. You can agree or disagree with her idea that video games CAUSE these things, but the RESULTS of which she speak are undeniable. If the entire charlie-foxtrot that is GamerGate has proven one thing, it is that a huge number of male gamers have no idea how to appropriately interact with women or deal with criticism, and that a huge number of women feel unwelcome in gaming.

To prove her point, all I have to do is point to your statement that 'men love sex and violence'. Not only is this a breathtaking generalization, adequately disproven already by [friend's] reply about many of us being sick of playing the same damn adolescent fantasy over and over again, but you say that like it's just a fact of life rather than a societal construct that men absorb from their friends, their families and - yes - their media, including video games. The blanket idea that 'men love sex and violence' is not an EXCUSE to continue making misogynist video games; it is a PROBLEM that we are trying to SOLVE by making fewer misogynist video games. 

And even if you're right, that Sarkeesian is intentionally provoking controversy to play the victim, shouldn't that tell us something? If the gaming community is so prone to ragefroth and hysterics that it's possible to intentionally and predictably induce this level of insanity just by talking about gender roles in games, isn't that the clearest proof possible that a huge swath of gamers has a major problem with how to interact with women?

People criticize books and movies and theater for the use of gender roles all the time, and nobody gets death threats. Only among gamers is this such a huge crime, and the one thing that the people who criticize Sarkeesian have in common that the people who don't blow up over movie criticism don't is that they all play video games. As such, it's reasonable to wonder what it is about video games that perpetuates this awful antipathy toward women who dare to voice an opinion or attempt to participate in gaming discourse. Which brings us right back to Sarkeesian's argument, which GamerGate - and you - have proven correct more thoroughly than she could have with all the YouTube videos on the internet.

Of course, I was unsuccessful in swaying the gentleman's opinions, because we were having an argument over the goddam internet, and everyone knows how that goes. But this is still probably the best expression of my feelings about GamerGate, Sarkeesian (whose work I know about mostly second-hand) and how the GG and otherwise anti-SJW gaming crowd feel about her.

So there it is, your moment of culture war for the day. Go forth and prosper.

**Added** In response to my statement as well as comments from someone else, the gentleman with the beef against Sarkeesian posited a few other arguments: that gamers have the right to play whatever they want to play, that games with violence and sex are a small minority of games, and that people who don't like them can just play something else. So I responded again:

Nobody is bitching about anybody's RIGHT to play anything. Nobody's door is being broken down by storm troopers confiscating M-rated games, blacklisting developers, or government censorship. Get off your high horse. However, we KNOW that the way men and women are portrayed in media has an affect on how real men and women perceive themselves (first of MANY examples freely available via google: http://guilfordjournals.com/.../10.1521/jscp.1994.13.3.288), and in a $70-billion industry, it is 100% legit to look at whether games are depicting gender in a helpful way or not.

You'd like a shred of evidence: here. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101734983 has the top 10-selling games to date this year through April (and let's be honest. Sarkeesian has always been primarily focused on AAA games, as she should, since those are the ones that actually have enough reach to have a mass cultural impact). Let's take a look: 1) Titanfall - military murdersim with no story to speak of; 2) COD Ghosts - another murdersim with hyperviolent dudes and no noteable women; 3) NBA 2K14 - No women at all, unless they include cheerleaders, and good luck finding a game devoted to a women's professional sports league; 4) The Lego Movie game - Wyldstyle is a decent female character, but she's also the ONLY female character (unless you count unikitty?); 5) Battlefield 4 - see Titanfall and COD; 6) Minecraft - no characters of any gender; 7) GTA V - nuff said; 8) Assassins Creed IV - this is the company that has time to make horses that poop realistically but can't be arsed to create animations for a female protagonist; 9) inFamous Second Son - I've not played it, but I understand that they 1 female team member and a bunch of dudes, which is better than nothing, I guess, and 10) Lego Marvel Super Heroes - of 100+ playable characters, I count 17 women, most of whom primarily serve as girlfriends for more important male characters, and also including fricken Aunt May. 

So, in the top 10 games so far this year, we have 2 games with (singular) strong female characters (being generous and counting inFamous); 1 male-dominated ensemble game, 1 genderless game, 1 male-exclusive sports game, and 5 games (mostly the higher-selling ones) about dudebros killing shit in awesome ways, which either ignore women entirely or subject them to the GTA treatment. So yes. There is real, statistical evidence that the most expensive, heavily-marketed games being created are HEAVILY skewed toward ultraviolent dudebro fantasies. And it is absolutely reasonable for people to look at that fact and wonder if that's maybe not the perfectly best way the industry could be.

As for 'just go play your games and leave our games alone,' there are a couple responses. First of all, some of us do enjoy FPS or open-world crime games but would like to see them do at least a slightly better job of reflecting how actual people think and act. I was a big COD fan back in the day before I got put-off by the increasingly farfetched scenarios they dreamed up to let their white people shoot more brown people, and I'm absolutely allowed to express my desire for the games to change to suit my preferences, just as people can express their desire for the games to let them quick-scope their sniper rifles .029 seconds faster. Second, the more the big studios spend on repetitive murdersims, they less they spend on high-quality products that actually move the industry forward. Indie games are all good and well, but I don't see why only the COD players should get high production values. And third, many players of violent games have not been shy about trying to exclude certain types of games they disapprove of from the industry (see: all the shit Zoe Quinn dealt with when she put DepressionQuest on Greenlight), and I see absolutely zero reason why their preferred video games should be immune to similar criticism.

At this point, unless the friend upon whose wall we are debating chimes in again, I'll probably let it die there. It's good to have the arguments thought out and written out for future disagreements (which is, after all, the point of this blog), but a prolonged debate is better suited to a venue that doesn't ping my friend's notifications every time we do another exchange. And they say etiquette is dead.