Game Changers by Dan Golding

Author:Dan Golding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press

All this isn’t to say that there’s nothing specific and important about what happened in videogames over this period of time. The games world provides one of the keys to understanding the renewed global embrace of feminism. As videogames are relatively new, they’ve been dominated by men for decades rather than centuries; and because games are a highly technological arena, they’re linked to the rise of the online world.

But because videogames have generally been viewed as existing outside the mainstream, as we argued in earlier chapters, critics of sexism in the games community have sometimes felt that they’re fighting a lonely battle.

It’s also meant that many people in games never noticed or were bothered by the disproportionate number of men in their community, or its sexism and male domination, because they already saw themselves as an odd bunch. A common response to flashpoints from game developers and players has been bewilderment. ‘Where did these feminists come from?’ they ask. ‘Why do they care about my medium and my hobby?’ To the bewildered, the first reaction to feminist and other criticisms is often a mixture of negative emotions: guilt, anger, defensiveness.

The sense of abnormality and isolation that the gamer mentality embraced for decades has meant that the seemingly sudden appearance of claims of misogyny might feel like colonisation efforts from ‘outside’, as though their previously perfect world has been intruded on. This only heightens the suspicion that these critics might not be real gamers, anyway, and that they might only be here to transpose a pre-existing favourite media narrative onto the hapless world of games.

Of course, ignorance doesn’t excuse the reprehensible behaviour that we’ve been talking about. There are also those in the community who understand such criticisms, and who choose either to listen respectfully or to respond obnoxiously and divisively. Then there are those who quite clearly care little for videogames, but who are happy to wage war against feminism in any context – the very colonists that some gamers fear – and we’ll come back to these people in later chapters.

Ultimately, it’s important to put the highest-profile instances of harassment and abuse in the games world into context. The flashpoints that we’ve discussed in this chapter didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. A broad and far-reaching progressive shift occurred in videogame culture, one that saw instances of sexism routinely called out, and one that seemingly threatened those who didn’t want their games to change.

‘There’s been no shortage of really brave women in videogame journalism who have to sacrifice a lot just to do what a guy like me can do without a second thought,’ Brendan Keogh tells us. ‘Women who explicitly write about social justice issues, and women who just want to write about videogames while being a woman.’

Looking back at 2011 to 2014, what we also see is a concentrated series of events where the popular playbook for silencing, abusing and harassing progressive critics was formulated and honed. Through ‘Isolated Incidents’ like the harassment of Jennifer Hepler and

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