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Video gaming culture part III


Ser Scot A Ellison

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D'you know, this isn't just restricted to FPS or MMOs, at least in my experience-I've been called "cunt", "twat" and been sent rape threats on fucking QuizUp.

Right, which only supports what I've been saying that is stuff is ubiquitous and is not indicative of "gaming culture". It's the online disinhibition effect.

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Right, which only supports what I've been saying that is stuff is ubiquitous and is not indicative of "gaming culture". It's the online disinhibition effect.

Well, no. I've never been randomly cussed at or threatened out of the blue-its always been after defeating someone. Losing to me is what caused these outbursts, as far as I can tell.

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Well, no. I've never been randomly cussed at or threatened out of the blue-its always been after defeating someone. Losing to me is what caused these outbursts, as far as I can tell.

I'm not saying there wouldn't be a catalyst for aggression in an online environment but that this catalyst varies and invariably the response is much more severe due to the online environment. What you're describing wouldn't be specific to games and I doubt anyone would argue that interactions on smart phone apps are really indicative of gaming culture.

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I'm not saying there wouldn't be a catalyst for aggression in an online environment but that this catalyst varies and invariably the response is much more severe due to the online environment. What you're describing wouldn't be specific to games and I doubt anyone would argue that interactions on smart phone apps are really indicative of gaming culture.

So then why is this sort of thing a routine occurrence in the gaming world, and not in film, or music, or art, or any other creative area?

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So then why is this sort of thing a routine occurrence in the gaming world, and not in film, or music, or art, or any other creative area?

Gaming is fundamentally different to those mediums; gaming (broadly and in the sense that this kind of behaviour occurs) is interaction of millions of people through the internet. So obviously that experience is going to be different to a room full of people watching a movie the cinema (online disinhibition effect). BTW all you need to do is look at the kind of shit people say about/to musicians and movie stars on the internet and you'll see that the people associated with those forms of entertainment are just as likely to say horrible stuff on the internet as anyone else. As for art, I think that's fairly obvious.

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According to an actual study 63% of women were harassed during gaming using sexist slurs to the point where they quit playing that game temporarily. 10% reported that they quit playing a game permanently as a result of harassment. The numbers for men for the same question were about 20% and 3% respectively. The survey was around 900 people.

If anyone wants the source I'll dig it up; I'm on my phone this second.

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I don't agree with you on her motives (that she wants it completely removed), and I don't think there are substantial issues with the examples she chose - aside from the Hitman one, once of the criticism I hear around context is missing the point of her argument. Context isn't relevant when the criticism is of it just being used for random grim and gritty flavour. I will concede that it's possible others will also miss her point in a way that context would matter (ie if someone thinks the Dragon Age one is the protagonist talking, they would have a completely wrong impression of the situation, but I'm still classifying them as missing the point) so I'd say perhaps she could make the point more clearly. On the Hitman example I could have sworn she even conceded in the video that you are penalised in game for doing it? That was a couple of months ago though, I haven't rewatched it.

Would you mind clarifying some of this? Particularly the bit where you say "Context isn't relevant when the criticism is of it just being used for random grim and gritty flavor." That part confuses me because, well, context is incredibly relevant. Women as background decoration is a fine trope to explore, but some of Sarkeesian's analysis does ignore the context in which these women--prostitutes for example--appear. They often appear in situations where one would expect prostitutes (or strippers) to appear, and in the context of the game it makes sense for them to show up. And for the Hitman example, I haven't watched Sarkeesian's video in a while but she does not mention you are penalized for killing the strippers: she concentrates mostly on the fact that they are scantily-clad, that you can kill them, that you can drag their bodies around (you can kill and drag about most everyone in Hitman), and she ascribes a value judgment to this. She says that the point of this section is for the "tittilation factor" and "sexual thrill" (paraphrases since the video is not right in front of me, I will come back later and correct if I misremembered) of killing the scantily-clad women and dragging them about. She ignores the fact that you're penalized for killing them, you have no incentive to kill them, they are no different in treatment from any NPC in the game other than the fact they are scantily-clad women in an environment where scantily-clad women abound (a strip club). Similarly, she shows examples from Fallout: New Vegas of prostitutes who you can kill. Which again ignores that you can kill just about anyone in that game, you are never actually asked or required to kill a prostitute, you are penalized (if people see you killing prostitutes, they become violent, and you can become hostile to all members of the faction the prostitutes work for), and there are male prostitutes in very-little clothing as well. So several of the examples she chooses are in games where women are not specific targets for violence--indeed, most of the targets killed in most games are going to be male, or some sort of ambiguously gendered monster--and their status as background decoration, when put into context, makes sense and is not for "mere" titilation.

EDIT: I think part of the problem with gaming culture, and its tendency for verbal harassment, is it's competitive nature. You don't see people shouting each other down with racial epithets and homophobic slurs in a cinema or a book circle because, generally, you aren't directly competing with people (or alongside people against an AI) in those instances. So tempers run hot, and people get very angry when they start to lose, or perceive others as making them lose. This does not excuse the behavior--I am a competitive gamer, and while I have a thick skin, I've also had my jimmies rustled by the general myopic douchebaggery of many communities--but it does explain why its so common, at least in part. Factor in the fact that there is a sense of anonymity and little-to-no consequence for your actions, and you see why people can get so abusive so quickly. Again, not the entire explanation, and not an excuse. As to why they choose gendered and sexualized abuse? Probably because they want to offend people. They know those topics can, and will, hurt others emotionally, and when your goal is precisely that (hurting others emotionally), the tactic becomes clear.

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EDIT: I think part of the problem with gaming culture, and its tendency for verbal harassment, is it's competitive nature. You don't see people shouting each other down with racial epithets and homophobic slurs in a cinema or a book circle because, generally, you aren't directly competing with people (or alongside people against an AI) in those instances. So tempers run hot, and people get very angry when they start to lose, or perceive others as making them lose. This does not excuse the behavior--I am a competitive gamer, and while I have a thick skin, I've also had my jimmies rustled by the general myopic douchebaggery of many communities--but it does explain why its so common, at least in part.

How would you define the term 'gaming culture' that you use?

I'm not sure I agree about the competitive bit (competitiveness leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sexist slurs?) but it did make me wonder about some other environment where men and women compete regularly, to see if I could compare. They're not that easy to come up with. The job market and academia came to mind, but they're really formal settings (and people who are competing within them are not necessarily in touch or even aware of one another). Can someone else come up with an example?

According to an actual study 63% of women were harassed during gaming using sexist slurs to the point where they quit playing that game temporarily. 10% reported that they quit playing a game permanently as a result of harassment. The numbers for men for the same question were about 20% and 3% respectively. The survey was around 900 people.

If anyone wants the source I'll dig it up; I'm on my phone this second.

Also curious. Please link us to the study when you can.

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The behavior might not be special, but the measures needed to curtail said harassment might be pretty different to, say, harassment in the workplace. Since we can all agree harassment is bad, said measures should be identified and, within reason, implemented.

I think the gaming industry is the main responsible in identifying and implementing these measures, as they are the ones making a profit from online gaming and should thus be accountable for the online well-being of their players, but players can also police themselves to some extent, specially within an organized group such as a raiding group or guild. I'm not so I'd go as far as saying they're responsible (unless they're the actual harasser, of course).

I agree, many things can be done. Companies may want to try and enforce harsher punishments for a start.

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Here's the study.



Another bit of interest from that that I didn't mention earlier:




Most of the men who provided additional information on their “yes” response to this question experienced comments that revolved around them not fitting a masculine gender role. These men were often called “fags” and compared to or told that they were women and labeled with stereotypically feminine words


For women, the sexism experienced is about being female. For men, it is about not fitting a standard of masculinity. In short, this sexism is always about “male” being the normative sex and “not male” or “not sufficiently male” being reason for insults, shaming, and bullying. This means that men who fit (or present) a masculine, normative standard are those who are most unlikely to be the victim of sexism.




ETA: I was also wrong about the numbers for harassment - only 10% of men quit temporarily after being harassed, and only 2% quit permanently.


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Can someone else come up with an example?
The thing that I've experienced is in sports. Either in sporting events (where psychologically people are as likely to feel the same elation or sadness of winning or losing as the actual players themselves) or playing co-ed sports. Especially sporting events; between alcohol and anger, you can get into some seriously ugly things.
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How would you define the term 'gaming culture' that you use?

I'm not sure I agree about the competitive bit (competitiveness leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sexist slurs?) but it did make me wonder about some other environment where men and women compete regularly, to see if I could compare. They're not that easy to come up with. The job market and academia came to mind, but they're really formal settings (and people who are competing within them are not necessarily in touch or even aware of one another). Can someone else come up with an example?

By gaming culture, I was responding to earlier posters discussing the apparent culture of harassment in online games, wherein encountering hostility and aggressive behavior (often in the form of gender and/or sexualized insults) is common. Or at least, more common than in many other environments, online and offline. I do not mean to characterize the entirety of gaming culture as that one factor, nor am I saying others are doing that (though I'm sure we could always be more conscious of cultural and subcultural stereotyping) , but simply responding to a phenomenon that I have encountered, and which many others corroborate.

As to competitiveness, I suppose one could disagree, but at least in my experience, competitive environments where people compete directly against each other or alongside each other can lend themselves more easily to abusive language. I've competed as a kickboxer, and I've also played a reasonable amount of online video games (FPS and MMOs, generally) which had a highly competitive player-versus-player element. And in my experience, people who are getting beaten, or conversely people who are beating their opponents by a wide margin, might begin verbally abusing or mocking them. Other triggers include anger at players for screwing up (standing in the fire, or running someone over with a mag-rider), and anger at players for using "cheap" weapons or tactics (noob-tubing in Counter-Strike, feinting in Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, even anger at "OP" classes in MMOs). I don't have any empirical data to back this up, so it's anecdotal and for that I apologize. But, that's what I was trying to say.

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... That part confuses me because, well, context is incredibly relevant. Women as background decoration is a fine trope to explore, but some of Sarkeesian's analysis does ignore the context in which these women--prostitutes for example--appear. They often appear in situations where one would expect prostitutes (or strippers) to appear, and in the context of the game it makes sense for them to show up. ...

I see this kind of thinking a lot when people react to criticism. But it makes sense for there to be strippers! An extreme version of this logic would be something like: It makes sense for the dragon queen to be dressed like a stripper because she's got super-hard skin and doesn't need armor! I think it ties in with a lot of strange concepts people have about the creative process, like the idea of a core directorial 'vision' that's in constant conflict with external forces, or that early, rejected draft ideas represent 'what was originally supposed to be.'

Getting sidetracked. My point is, a game or any piece of media is malleable. You can always ask: why is it this way? why is it not another way? what does it mean that it is this way, and not another way? what message does that send?

So a game has a strip club in it, with female strippers, who can be murdered. We can ask: Why can the strippers be murdered? and come back with, well, anyone can be murdered. So that's fine. But we can go further. We can ask: why are the strippers here right now? A strip club level could take place in a club that's currently not open. We can ask: why does the game's critical path (whether branched or not) take us through an occupied stripper dressing room? Could be all the strippers are out working, on smoke breaks, whatever. You can ask why it's a normative straight club rather than a drag club, a gay club, a kink club portrayed in a way that's not titillating to non-kinky people and not denigrating to kinky people, etc. You can ask why there's a strip club level at all.

It's the last one that I think captures Anita's argument - or my interpretation of her argument - best. It goes like this - you're a game developer who wants to portray a seedy area, or a despicable person. So you go hey, I'll make this dude a gross rapist (as in the DA example) or oh, I guess we need a (hetero) strip club. Because that's the trope.

Tropes are shortcuts for writers/devs. It's a value-neutral word for 'cliché.' Same thing. And they're really important to use because so much of creative media is about balancing familiarity (i.e. tropes) with surprise (creativity, freshness). So a criticism of tropes, like "tropes vs. women" for instance, means something much more specific than "hey guys these games are sexist, these strip clubs and rape dudes are sexist, stop having strippers and rapers." It's a reminder that good storytelling has that element of surprise. It's a reminder that there are other ways to build seedy environments and seedy characters than just pasting sexualized women everywhere because it's what people expect. It's not saying that something's sexist, it's saying that it's both sexist and lazy. Remedy for that isn't expunging sexism from fictional game worlds; it's dropping the laziness, the ubiquity, the homogeneity that makes those things expected and codified.

Problem with Anita's Hitman example and some others was that it leaned on her concept that if a thing is doable in a game, it is in a sense tacitly encouraged. I see that as a very debatable point, and in order to even begin to see it as acceptable you have to be thinking on a level where questions like 'why is this level a strip club and not a dogfighting ring' can be asked. And as we see, a lot of people don't question that far.

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but it did make me wonder about some other environment where men and women compete regularly, to see if I could compare. They're not that easy to come up with. The job market and academia came to mind, but they're really formal settings (and people who are competing within them are not necessarily in touch or even aware of one another). Can someone else come up with an example?

I have no experience with them, but is there such a thing as fantasy sports league forums? Seems like that would provide the inherent competition and anonymous interaction within a vaguely community oriented environment.

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The thing that I've experienced is in sports. Either in sporting events (where psychologically people are as likely to feel the same elation or sadness of winning or losing as the actual players themselves) or playing co-ed sports. Especially sporting events; between alcohol and anger, you can get into some seriously ugly things.

I thought about sports, but they're usually gender differentiated, so maybe not a good example.

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I see this kind of thinking a lot when people react to criticism. But it makes sense for there to be strippers! An extreme version of this logic would be something like: It makes sense for the dragon queen to be dressed like a stripper because she's got super-hard skin and doesn't need armor! I think it ties in with a lot of strange concepts people have about the creative process, like the idea of a core directorial 'vision' that's in constant conflict with external forces, or that early, rejected draft ideas represent 'what was originally supposed to be.'

Getting sidetracked. My point is, a game or any piece of media is malleable. You can always ask: why is it this way? why is it not another way? what does it mean that it is this way, and not another way? what message does that send?

So a game has a strip club in it, with female strippers, who can be murdered. We can ask: Why can the strippers be murdered? and come back with, well, anyone can be murdered. So that's fine. But we can go further. We can ask: why are the strippers here right now? A strip club level could take place in a club that's currently not open. We can ask: why does the game's critical path (whether branched or not) take us through an occupied stripper dressing room? Could be all the strippers are out working, on smoke breaks, whatever. You can ask why it's a normative straight club rather than a drag club, a gay club, a kink club portrayed in a way that's not titillating to non-kinky people and not denigrating to kinky people, etc. You can ask why there's a strip club level at all.

It's the last one that I think captures Anita's argument - or my interpretation of her argument - best. It goes like this - you're a game developer who wants to portray a seedy area, or a despicable person. So you go hey, I'll make this dude a gross rapist (as in the DA example) or oh, I guess we need a (hetero) strip club. Because that's the trope.

Tropes are shortcuts for writers/devs. It's a value-neutral word for 'cliché.' Same thing. And they're really important to use because so much of creative media is about balancing familiarity (i.e. tropes) with surprise (creativity, freshness). So a criticism of tropes, like "tropes vs. women" for instance, means something much more specific than "hey guys these games are sexist, these strip clubs and rape dudes are sexist, stop having strippers and rapers." It's a reminder that good storytelling has that element of surprise. It's a reminder that there are other ways to build seedy environments and seedy characters than just pasting sexualized women everywhere because it's what people expect. It's not saying that something's sexist, it's saying that it's both sexist and lazy. Remedy for that isn't expunging sexism from fictional game worlds; it's dropping the laziness, the ubiquity, the homogeneity that makes those things expected and codified.

Problem with Anita's Hitman example and some others was that it leaned on her concept that if a thing is doable in a game, it is in a sense tacitly encouraged. I see that as a very debatable point, and in order to even begin to see it as acceptable you have to be thinking on a level where questions like 'why is this level a strip club and not a dogfighting ring' can be asked. And as we see, a lot of people don't question that far.

I see where you're coming from, and I agree, it can be symptomatic of lazy writing. As an element of "seediness" or "grittiness," sexualized content does often take center stage. From a western cultural perspective, that makes sense in that sexuality is often something either considered private (and therefore shameful if in public, or indicative of norms "other" than the standard), or criminalized (prostitution), or associated with criminality (strip clubs as fronts for organized crime, for example). Your sentence "remedy for that isn't expunging sexism from fictional game worlds; it's dropping the laziness, the ubiquity, the homogeneity that makes those things expected and codified." is something I would love to see done more often in the gaming world. Hell, I'd like to see it done more in literature, film, and television as well.

Your first paragraph I'm assuming isn't addressed at me in particular since I don't argue for any of those things, so I'll leave it be for now, excepting a few sentences. Suffice it to say, I think there is a difference between "it makes sense for strippers to be here" and "Alexstrasza has super-hard dragon skin, even in her elf form, so she wears a g-string and nipple plates because reasons." One is an environmental and contextual issue: strip clubs are relatively commonplace, the game's narrative make visiting such an area plausible, and strippers are rather likely to be in a strip club. Titilation and sexual objectification need not figure into the equation. The other one is providing rationale for making an important female character, who has no other reason to dress that way (and indeed there are other dragons-in-humanoid-form who wear less sexualized clothing), dress in a highly sexualized manner which appeals primarily to those player characters who find such a thing attractive. There is no greater reason for it other than making that one character sexually appealing to a specific demographic, and it does not make much sense from prior characterizations of that NPC for her to dress in that manner. So it's far more problematic, in my mind, than a strip club in a game.

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Hell, I'd like to see it done more in literature, film, and television as well.
Yeah, that's the thing I was thinking recently


Does anyone freak out when people say that something like Game of Thrones has sexist elements? Or when random TV shows or movies wander through strip clubs, calling that somewhat sexist or catering to the male gaze? The notion that applying the same basic criticisms of all other media to gaming causes these apoplectic reactions is kind of weird.



The only thing I can think is that gamers are either especially sensitive or especially protective of their sexism. Saying something is sexist or pointing out the sexism isn't also implying 'and thus you shouldn't do x'. It's saying, simply, be aware of it. Know that it's there. Maybe support things that do a better job. But you don't (typically) have to stop liking the things, or stop doing the things. It just means be aware of the things.



I personally think that the inherent sexist viewpoints in games aren't particularly problematic - or significantly more problematic than any other entertainment medium. Games often do a much better job of showing nonsexist situations and typical tropes than much other entertainment; some of the biggest games in the world are games with essentially no sexism whatsoever, or very second-order sexism problems (something like Pokemon or Civilization come to mind here). The problem I see is much more with the gamers themselves.


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Perhaps part of the issue is the fact that you play games, rather than viewing or reading them. That gives a sense of interactivity and ownership that might not otherwise be present, and amplifies the extent to which gamers identify with the games they play. Leading, of course, to an amplified sense of protectiveness and sensitivity when games are criticized alongside other forms of art. Gamers may feel that they are being attacked when games are critiqued in this manner, and that sense of "attack" is greater than the one typical viewers of a show or readers of a book might feel. Again, no data to support this other the anecdotal, and my own self-identity as a gamer.


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Maybe; I see a lot of the kind of thing you're describing when their favorite show or characters are criticized on tv shows too. We see it constantly here. It might also be that more gamers are the kind of people to develop unhealthy attachments to their entertainment.

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