Sexism among gamers

[Left Voice]

An interesting article about sexism among gamers (and I suppose, much of the internet). Not exactly the most revolutionary of sources, but it takes a unique perspective. Not without its flaws, but interesting to read from somebody who's not an expert in feminism. The extent of sexist attitudes among gamers is strange given that gaming is by no means a male-exclusive pastime - I personally know just as many girls who play games as I do guys.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-18-editors-blog-i-am-sexist

The first step towards equality (on a social, non-revolutionary level) is for people to recognise that they themselves may unwittingly say or do sexist things on a regular basis, without really interpreting these things as sexist. Many people (who may not necessarily be misogynistic) need to come to terms with this and 'unlearn' these attitudes - they are often inescapable in a society that is inherently sexist. But when people are unwilling or unable to recognise their own unintentionally sexist actions and go on the defensive, people try to change the narrative - be it dismissing debates as 'political correctness gone mad' ("it's just a joke!"), dismissing it as a 'non-issue' ("games are just a bit of fun, lighten up!"), or even attacking feminism entirely by ignorantly characterising feminism itself as sexist (9gag on a daily basis).


Either way, it results in the buck being passed, the blame ultimately falling again on women, rather than examining the less explicit examples of sexism in everyday society and in our everyday conversations that are overlooked. These are an actualisation of sexism's deep permeation in society.


It is ironic that so many comments on the article on Eurogamer dismiss this as nonsense, determined to see this as a complete non-issue and 'PC gone mad'. He's talking about you, people!

[OGLemon]

homophobia is also strong in the gaming world. the world in general tbh

[Psycho P and the Freight Train]

Isn't there some kind of phenomenon that basically says that the comments and reactions to discussions about feminism justify feminism itself?

Yeah the gaming community is probably the most sexist medium you can find honestly.

[Left Voice]

I do wonder if gaming and the internet in General is so full of such attitudes because of the anonymity attached to such mediums.

Of course, the point of the article is that there are so many ways that every one of us is sexist in some way - we are raised in a society that reenforces this. This is less of a problem if people recognise this in themselves and attempt to overcome this (even so-called 'minor' issues such as taking the objectification of women for granted in media). The comments on Eurogamer succulently demonstrates the fierce reaction to this, which the even article discusses.

[The Intransigent Faction]

I do wonder if gaming and the internet in General is so full of such attitudes because of the anonymity attached to such mediums.

Anonymity can provide an opportunity for sexist expression, but the deeper and more important question to ask is why anonymity is used for that purpose, and that's where the rest of your post gives answers (institutionalized sexism, etc.).

[Loony Le Fist]

If I got a quarter for every time I heard someone on some online game (FPS, MMORPG, etc) call another person a faggot, pussy, gay, queer, fudgepacker or any number of homophobic slurs (which often imply certain qualities about women, making them misogynistic) in voice or in text, I might not have even become a leftist. :D

[Quail]

I actually really like the way that the guy openly admits that he is sexist. It's kind of a refreshing honesty which I don't think we see very often on the left. People are too afraid of admitting that they have absorbed any of the sexism, homophobia, racism, etc., in wider society, and that's a huge barrier to actually changing anything. If you can't admit a problem exists, you can't do anything about it.

[khad]

I don't know exactly when I realised I was sexist, but I can show you how I notice historical examples of it. Yesterday, for example, I saw some friends talking (https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/479180794574168066) about the "Dastardly" achievement in Red Dead Redemption. Do you remember this one? XboxAchievements.com (http://www.xboxachievements.com/game/red-dead-redemption/achievements/), which I assume scrapes data from Xbox Live and is therefore probably reporting the developer's original wording, describes it thus: "Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train." So the objective is to locate a woman who cannot defend herself against you, tie her up and then kill her by placing her in the path of a train. You cannot gain the achievement by performing this act on a man. I am not a student of Westerns so I cannot comment on its original context (and I bet a proportion of the game's player base that it would be statistically acceptable to round up to 100% are in the same situation), so it's just a contextless act of violence against women that gamifies something that we dimly remember as being associated with a film genre.

Wow, striking that game off my list...

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

I find its something that's not just widely prevalent among gamers but something deeply ingrained in 'gamer culture' to some extent :/ I know a lot of 'serious' gamers and a bunch of them wear this shit almost as a badge of honour because they aren't buying into 'political correctness.' The end result is a community that collectively shits itself when, say, a fighting game has more than about a quarter of th total number of characters female.

[Wuggums47]

I love video games, but an unfortunate consequence of the relative anonymity in a virtual world is that you run in to a lot of sexists, racists, and homophobes. It probably doesn't help much that there are barely any female or LGBTQ main characters, and the female characters in many games are modeled after unrealistic beauty standards.

[Red Commissar]

This is an old thread, but I think a good example of sexism among the gaming community is how the response to Anita Sarkessian's videos were. The article mentions it briefly but I think the whole episode on its own was pretty pitiful, gamers getting an aneurysm over Sarkessian critizing sexist elements in the game because she wasn't a "real gamer". I mean seriously you couldn't go to any gaming news site or forum without someone there complaining about Sarkessian. And that was the least of it- there were threats leveled against Sarkessian, everything from stalking to rape to murder.

All this over a series she started, funded by interested backers, about sexist elements of video games. And she's not the only one- many female developers, journalists, and others report frequent harassment from their peers as well as the broader community.

[PhoenixAsh]

That Dasterdly achievement is supposed to refer to the theme of the old day Western Novels where women were tied on train tracks and then resuced by some hero. Except this one is from the perspective of the bad guy. I know because I was wondering about that one when I played the game. This knowledge by no means makes it less fucked up especially since it is the only achievement which makes this wink to the old western novels.

[lokishelm]

Ive known many female gamers and we get along just like i would with male gamers.

[Sea]

homophobia is also strong in the gaming world. the world in general tbhI have an automated thing that plays songs from Rocky Horror over teamspeak and my name on counterstrike is YourBoyfriend and my spray is an enlarged 5x5 pixel square of a rectum so fuck you all.

[The Intransigent Faction]

PBS Game Show recently did an episode on this issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yvISdKG7Ng

Some valid points, and some lousy ones.

[Fegelnator]

How about we all admit that sexism is to some extent within us all? Remember, even one generalisation about a sex makes you sexist. And well... Groups tend to generalize. We'll always be sexist to some extent and controlling and acknowledging some sexism is probably more realistic than repressing it all.

Yeah. I might get some hate for this.

[Jimmie Higgins]

It's bigger than gamer culture. The neoliberal era in the us has been an attack by the bosses for greater control of everything and part of this is socially demoralizing and disarming people. So legal reforms that were created in the past are rolled back; this allows racist or sexist customs from pre-60s/70s anti-oppression movements can re-emerge or shift to a new iteration among the population; this can be reflected in attitudes in what people think is normal or acceptable, etc.

Gamer culture in general is a subculture based on the shared activity of gaming, but in order to game, you also have to get your games through the market place. even illegally downloaded, it was capitalist production that designed the big-name games. Since the firms are competitive they all try to capture the market. For games, the early market was young males and this is still a valued demographic for entertainment industries. So if you have a genre game competing with similar games, then you might program in extra things that make the game stand out. Historically a cheap way to do this for selling to primarily young men is to titilate them with gratuitous sexual images. Another way is to make the player or viewer feel better about themselves for their activity; if a gamer feel a masculine charge from playing games that utilize "macho" themes (blood and guts, anti-PC attitude, fuck yeah dude) or feels a sense of "brotherhood" or community... Well that that product is embuded with a little pandering edge in the market place. Sex sells and selling is a big part of how giant monopolistic companies compete in an overcrowded but lucrative market like games. It seems like there are more women gaming now than 20 years ago, but I don't know any hard information on that. But I think the way the industry responds to women in the market is to create a subset of cheap-games pandering to women; the result is that women who are bothered by the sexism of gamers who play certain games or sexist messages or images in some games themselves either have to deal with it or play puzzle games or cheap games about princesses designed for a much younger demographic. Or, of course they can speak up about it. This is when it becomes a "problem" or intrusion to the "male gamer culture" and people start bullying or being sexist on forums or whatnot.

Gamers, having made the use of a cultural product a part of their personal identity, feel entitled to reflect these attitudes and feel threatended by any criticism of "their right" to say fucked up macho shit, etc.

The other side of this is the production of cultural products and sexism inside the tech industry. Programming used to be low-paid "women's work". The. When it became a higher paying and more desireable job, it became a heavily male-dominated position and women were pushed out in competition because of various material and cultural reasons (male networking, discouraging of women in science and math fields, etc). The requirements of the job (in terms of making it a profitable purchase of labor power by the owners) along with perceptions of relative growth and mobility in tech industries have created a work culture that is competitive, generally not combative against employers, very "flexible" and where working almost every waking hour at times is considered par for the course. So cultivating or encouraging macho attitudes among workers also has benifits for companies in these fields where "complaining" is weak and feminine, sucking it up drinking 10 red bulls and working all night are "macho". Again, often any female workers are forced to adapt to the work culture or have their horizons for advancement lowered.

So what can you do? Yeah calling out sexist things people say or having men reflecting on themselves are initial things, but really I think it's about the same level as making step number one of baking instructions: "1. Be sure to keep your eyes open while making this cake. Occasional blinking is normal". These are initial things, but there are limited things because they are basically induvidual things whereas sexism is a social problem.

Where there is a work culture dominated by attitudes that excuse or are even favorable to the interests of the bosses, then an alternative work culture needs to be cultivated around needs and interests of the workers there specifically. Women workers, anti-sexist male workers, could begin to organize together within companies. Any anti-sexist organaizing in the workplace would also increase confidence and the sense of entitlement to bring up other issues like working conditions or lack of respect for men as well as women by management. Conversely, in order to be effective, any labor organizing in those industries would also need to take on sexism in the culture and directed at women workers. Workplaces where the gender imbalances and inequalities have been reduced and in that struggle workers were able to win more respect and power in the workplace would also mean that workers who did not like the sexism reflected in the products they were asked to work on, could organize opposition to that as well. They could make it part of labor disputes, or they could join with broader criticisms or anti-sexist organizations from without the company.

[TheFox]

I play a lot of MMORPGS and I've only noticed it on the extremely popular ones. (Guild Wars 2, World of warcraft, Lord of the rings online)
But on things like CoD multiplayer, it's mostly 10 year old children playing. And children these days are f*cking stupid. It's like every generation gets worse and worse. They use homophobic, sexist, and racist terms every time someone beats them.

[Sea]

How about we all admit that sexism is to some extent within us all? Remember, even one generalisation about a sex makes you sexist. And well... Groups tend to generalize.The normal tendency to generalize has little to do with the sexism that exists in our society. Yes, one of the ways that we learn about the world around us is by categorizing it. This is very common in human learning because it allows us to learn about groups of people and things instead of just individuals. The problem with your theory? The sexist outlook is not, despite what you seem to think, gained by merely observing the behavior of a gender and noting common traits. The fact that stereotypes of women are inaccurate and unrealistic falsify your very premise - if these stereotypes were learned by observing and generalizing, they would be far more accurate, because they would be based off the behavior of real people. What's more, behavior never exists in a vacuum anyway!
We'll always be sexist to some extent and controlling and acknowledging some sexism is probably more realistic than repressing it all.And here we can see that your naive error has caused you to fall completely off the deep end. You are basically suggesting that we "embrace the sexism within us". Either you don't realize the implications of your stupidity, or you are justifying sexism. Tell me, which one is it?
And children these days are f*cking stupid. It's like every generation gets worse and worse. They use homophobic, sexist, and racist terms every time someone beats them.Hypocrite! Are you fucking kidding (pun intended) me? People have been saying this for tens of thousands of years. Take your tired ageism and fuck off. Oh, and stop beating children. Thanks.

[Monkey Queen]

In my observation, much of the prejudice and misogyny that one observe in the gamer community proper stems from the fact that women have comparatively little presence in said community. It's not that girls and women aren't gamers, it's that girls and women tend to play cheap online games more than home console games and thus wind up in a different corner of the gaming world that's not considered part of the "official" gamer community, where boys and men tend to play both, often with a certain stress on the latter. I think a significant part of the reason for this is that cheap online games more often lack a default playable character that's male and are are much less likely to revolve around what are stereotypically "male interests" like the home console games tend to.

Home console games almost always set you up as a male character by default and pander to stereotypical "male interests" like war, cowboys, football, gangsterism, etc. You're furthermore often compelled by the game to visit brothels and/or strip clubs or court a non-playable female character. What's more, to be frank, there are typically few female characters in these games at all and fewer are playable. When female characters do appear in a game, it's only so often that they're more clothed than not. All of these things and more tell you that you're not welcome in this world; that this is someone else's territory and you're an uninvited guest there. I noticed some of these things (like that I could rarely pick a girl character to play as) way back when I was in elementary school in the Super NES and Genesis days. Being resilient, that didn't stop me from playing, but I definitely noticed it and was turned off by it. Things that gotten worse since than in some ways, at least vis-a-vis representation of women in the console gaming market. Female characters are more consistently sexualized today in my observation and console games for children are harder to come by because the industry doesn't consider them "real games".

And the fact that only 11% of game industry workers are female (and are overwhelming confined to the low-paying or non-paying bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, where they invariably face sexual harassment on a regular basis) ensures that women's ideas (like designing games that might be more appealing to women and children) are rarely heard or taken seriously in the industry. Men almost exclusively rule the gaming industry, and those who rule the industry do a lot in the way of shaping the culture of the gaming community.

So those are my observations.

[Hermes]

In my observation, much of the prejudice and misogyny that one observe in the gamer community proper stems from the fact that women have comparatively little presence in said community. It's not that girls and women aren't gamers, it's that girls and women tend to play cheap online games more than home console games and thus wind up in a different corner of the gaming world that's not considered part of the "official" gamer community, where boys and men tend to play both, often with a certain stress on the latter. I think a significant part of the reason for this is that cheap online games more often lack a default playable character that's male and are are much less likely to revolve around what are stereotypically "male interests" like the home console games tend to.

Do you have any links to where you found this, or is it just conjecture? I'm not saying you're incorrect, it's just something I'd be interested to see. The only gaming statistics done, by gender, that I've seen, is the one which shows about half of all gamers to be female.

I agree with your other points re: lack of representation both in the industry and the games themselves.

[Monkey Queen]

It's a combination of download charts and personal experience both. I'd love to post links, but having fewer than 20 total posts in the forums as yet, I'm not yet allowed to.

[#FF0000]

words

Yeah and this didn't just happen in a vaccuum. Video games were marketed heavily towards a young, male market from the get-go with overtly sexual advertisement. Video games became a "boy thing" intentionally, because I guess the folks who sold video games thought it would be easier to sell games if they gendered their products and pushed them at a particular audience.

I think the amount of women in the industry changed as well -- back in the 80s there were way, way, way more women involved in the video game industry. This was the case in the tech business in general, actually. "Silicon Valley" only became the boys club it is today about a decade ago or so.

[Monkey Queen]

bad ideas actualized by admins wrote:
I think the amount of women in the industry changed as well -- back in the 80s there were way, way, way more women involved in the video game industry. This was the case in the tech business in general, actually. "Silicon Valley" only became the boys club it is today about a decade ago or so.

That's an interesting thought. I agree that there has been something of an anti-woman change in the industry proper over the years. However, I don't think the difference has been terribly radical. For example, I remember reading that 7% of video games had a female lead character in 1997 or '98, as compared with 4% of more modern games. Both of these figures constitute very low representation, to the point of comparing negatively with the 11% of Hollywood movies that have female protagonists. That's just one way of gauging the extent to which girls and women influence the industry's decisions. My point is that it's not like things were ever just massively better than today when it came to the representation of girls and women in video games.

Here's a typical transformation of a franchise I played back then that I still play today: Mario Kart. Out of eight playable racers, the original Super Mario Kart for the Super NES had only one female: the not-so-inspired Princess Toadstood (or Peach, as she's now called). The latest installment in the franchise, Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U, has 29 playable characters excluding Miis, out of which nine are female. However, of those nine female racers, four are duplications invented for different weight classes: Baby Peach, Baby Daisy, Baby Rosalina, and Pink Gold Peach. Out of the remaining five that aren't duplications, four are tropes: Peach and Daisy are damsels in distress in the main Mario franchise, while Toadette and Wendy O'Koopa are what have been called Ms. Male Characters (characters whose only unique and defining quality is that they're female). Rosalina is the sole genuinely original female racer in the Mario Kart franchise to date. (Maybe that's why she's my favorite.) That's 1 out of 29 characters (again, excluding Miis). By contrast, the same game has 17 genuinely original male racers. But hey, at least it's now theoretically possible to have a four-player race with all females (and without having to use Miis). In the first two Mario Kart games, you couldn't even have a two-player race without one player having to use a male character. I guess that's progress. That very limited progress is the kind of change we've seen among more longstanding, established franchises from the '90s. It's not the main sort of difference we've seen though. Here's the main difference (besides the obvious technological levels I mean) between then and now in the gaming world in my observation:

The main difference I observe between gaming in the early '90s (which is when I started) versus today is that games for major home consoles back then, including the top-sellers, rarely garnered the equivalent of a modern M rating because video games were (thanks to Nintendo) thought of more like Saturday morning cartoons: as something meant for kids, and boys in particular. As that generation of boys grew up though, games "matured" with them in order to retain their interest. One result is that the amount of sexual objectification and overall level of violence against women one finds in top-selling games today is definitely greater than what you'd have found 20 years back, and I mean substantially. The shift away from making games for kids has, in other words, tended to increase the overall level of misogyny one finds in the contents of hit games, or at least hit games for home consoles anyway.