Introduction

In 2012, Anita Sarkeesian announced a kickstarter campaign for her new video series which would take a critical eye to video game tropes from an explicitly feminist point of view, titled “tropes vs women in video games”. Chances are, if you’re reading this article, you’ve probably heard about this before, and to be honest, you’re probably sick of hearing about it. I am too. I actually had to give a presentation that started with this very same topic. But it needs to be addressed because the results of the kickstarter campaign were a sort of canary in the coal mine for the over-arching topic of this article, which is How Gaming Culture Maintains Male Dominance.

The kickstarter campaign that Anita launched for her Tropes Vs Women in Video Games series brought with it a very strong wave of harassment towards Anita, which died down for a couple of years until a new wave of harassment began with the “Gamergate” controversy. Gamergate is difficult to talk about for quite a few reasons. The first is that people who were there to see it go down or even participate in it to this day have conflicting explanations of what they think happened or what they think should be taken away from it. The second reason is that it is still controversial to this day and poking at the fire will inevitably cause backlash no matter what perspective I come at it from. The third reason is that, for a lot of people, this is beating a dead horse; most people who know about gamergate, don’t want to talk about it anymore. Indeed, when we frame gamergate in terms of politics, there’s very little left to say that hasn’t already been said loudly and at great length. A lot of people would prefer to just sweep it under the rug altogether for better or for worse. But for sociological analysis, we don’t have that option, because what Gamergate can tell us about the sociological insight into not only gaming culture, but also culture as a whole, is too valuable to dismiss.

So while this particular article isn’t going to be extensively about gamergate, I am going to at times discuss gamergate and the implications that gamergate has on gaming culture. I’m going to link in the description three very good videos on the topic, one by Innuendo Studios, one by Folding Ideas, and one by Noah Gervais, all of which go into Gamergate more extensively and more exclusively than I will here. If you don’t know anything about Gamergate and want to know more, please watch those videos for reference.

So why do I want to begin with discussing Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter campaign in particular? Because that was an instance where a woman was dragged through the mud, harassed, threatened, and bullied in an attempt to prevent her from little more than basic feminist analysis of common video game tropes. It’s entirely possible that she could have been wrong about every last thing she said in her videos. It’s also entirely possible that she could be a “fake gamer” because she entered into gaming culture as a quote unquote “outsider”. She could even have been deliberately trying to ruin games for men by feminizing them. None of this *is* true, but it all could be true and it’d still be irrelevant because the end result, her getting harassed to such a severe degree, is entirely unwarranted.

The fact that large droves of gamers, predominantly men, would go to such extreme lengths as we saw against Anita in 2012 or against both Anita and Zoe Quinn during the Gamergate controversy in 2014, all under the name of protecting some facet of gaming culture, provokes questions about what gaming culture even is, exactly. So before I can get into gaming culture as a bigger picture, I want to first talk about what gaming culture means to me.

Close people in my life and also close followers of my channel know that I’m quite experienced when it comes to gaming. I’ve been playing games my whole life starting from playing Doom when I was 2 years old. I have several consoles and have featured some of these consoles in at least a couple of videos on my channel, and given my videos on Half-life and the Doom series, it’s very easy to spot that I’m more than just a little knowledgeable about games themselves. Close friends also know that I could probably kick your ass when it comes to Rock Band and Guitar Hero, Ninja Gaiden on NES, or old school Doom.

And that highlights, in a positive manner, what gaming culture can be. Gaming culture, for me, helped create a sense of belonging, through childhood experiences of playing games with friends, trading games, renting games, comparing how games played on different consoles, and so on. It was through video games that I was able to get involved with social interactions that I might have otherwise been too awkward to manage. Simply put, gaming culture is what helped me find a community.

I then left the community around 2012 after being tired of putting up with so much harassment. One major thing had changed between the time where I enjoyed gaming culture and the time when I stopped; I started to play games online. Before, gaming culture was confined to small groups of people who I knew very personally, in living rooms or bedrooms or attics or basements. Granted, the settings never particularly shifted, but the introduction of online gaming in my life meant that it was no longer confined to small groups, nor people I knew very personally. Instead, it was, well, seemingly everyone. I’ll get to that “seemingly” bit later, but here I was, faced with the whole world at my disposal, and it only felt natural to do what I had already done – play some games.

For a while, I enjoyed online gaming, especially first person shooter games. I recall very prominent games I played growing up included Team Fortress Classic, Counter-strike, Half-life 2 Deathmatch, Garry’s Mod, Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4. I also continued playing single player and split-screen games throughout that time but as time went on I started to focus more on online gaming.

And I wasn’t very casual about it, I took an active interest in games of various kinds for a long time. I was subscribed to Playstation Underground, PC Gamer, Game Informer, I sat around refreshing pages on Super Smash Bros Brawl’s website waiting to see new characters being announced. I kept up with all of the news going on at E3, I constantly watched reviews, analyses, and top ten lists, and kept up with all of the meta-narratives and myths surrounding games like the Triangle Gate in Halo 2, the “playable master hand” in Super Smash Bros, and all of the theories about the lore of games like Shadow of the Colossus and Half-life 2. If something was happening, I was there.

But I lost interest. I lost interest because it just stopped being fun when all of my friends switched to online too, and the intimate setting of a living room couch with 4 controllers shifted to a near constant sound of trash talking. Trash talking is indeed a part of gaming culture as it is with other subcultures most notably sports culture, but the effect is not equal across the board. For me, it was too much. I’m not saying it was too much to handle, I’m saying it was too much to maintain interest in. I just didn’t enjoy playing games when all it would lead to is trash talking. So eventually, I quit online games, and then shortly after, I quit buying new games as new games continued to become more focused on online play during the time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still play a lot of my old games. My NES is sitting under my desk plugged into my TV as I say this. But I’m no longer a “gamer” in the sense that I no longer identify as a participant in gaming culture. Indeed I still discuss games on my channel on occasion, and I still talk to people who do participate in gaming culture, but I opted out in 2012 and never really came back.

Even though my life is one that explicitly rejects the label of “gamer”, gaming culture is still relevant to my life in some way. It’s relevant in that I used to actively participate in it, I have fond memories of my time involved with gaming culture, and now, in 2017, as a sociology student with a particular interest in sociological issues that affect internet spaces, I can no longer afford to ignore gaming culture like I did for the past 5 years prior. In that sense, I used to be representative of what gaming culture can potentially be, and now I’m an outside observer who has the firsthand experience of my time as an insider.

Let’s talk about another person who is representative of what gaming culture can potentially be. Let’s talk about my own mom. My mom’s early days of gaming stem back all the way to around 1981. She didn’t play games that much past the early 80’s until maybe around 2005 or so? At which point she would play games on a semi-regular basis. As of 2017, however, my mom plays games on a near-constant basis. She told me that she plays games while working, while laying in bed trying to go to sleep, in between driving, while sitting at a restaurant, she plays *constantly*. She definitely plays games more often than I do, and she probably even plays games more often than you do. Even right now as you’re reading this article, my mom is probably playing a game right now. So she’s played games for longer, and for more time, than a vast amount of players. She’s also attended multiple E3s and even used to work for a company that had close ties to Sony and in particular the advertising for the Playstation 2.

My mom also rejects the label of “gamer”. I asked her why, and she said because there’s a lot more that comes with such a label than just playing video games, and that she’s never participated in the culture, so she’s not, in any sense, a “gamer”, or at least doesn’t see herself as one.

Two people with a long history of playing video games, yet neither of us considers ourselves gamers. This is the first major step in what I want to address. The fact that two avid players of video games have a difficult time conceptualizing ourselves as “gamers” demonstrates multiple bigger trends about gaming, and I’m going to discuss as many of them as I can, pulling from personal experience, academic articles, sociological theory, and my own independent research, to try to explain why it is that me and my mom can both end up shying away from the self-perception of being “gamers” while still being avid fans of video games. The short answer, of course, is that gaming is a male-dominated space. So let’s talk about how gaming culture maintains itself as a male-dominated space.

Thesis

Here’s the part where I cut to the chase and alienate a large section of my readers by bluntly stating the thesis of this article – gaming culture pushes marginalized people, particularly women, out of the culture through harassment, bullying, disenfranchisement, creating subcultural norms and values, and mirroring mainstream cultural norms and values that lend themselves well to the domination of both games themselves and the culture surrounding them by men, especially cishet white men, and at the expense of everyone else. It’s a long thesis but this means that gaming culture as well as any participant of the culture, including people like my mother and I who don’t even consider ourselves a part of the culture to begin with, are going to be speaking on terms under the banner of a male-dominated space.

This also means that all participants of the culture will have some degree of resistance against the status quo of the culture, and will also have some degree of maintaining the status quo. The maintenance of the male-dominated status quo of gaming doesn’t just present itself through things like harassment, it also presents itself through the way in which conversations about games are framed, because our perception of games and the culture is skewed by the perspectives of those with privilege in such a way that we inadvertently, as individuals, lend some credence to the privileged perspective even as it’s used to justify harassment, bullying, and disenfranchisement.

What I just said was very wordy, so let me make this a lot simpler – the world of gaming favors men, it favors white people, it favors straight people, it favors cis people, and it favors middle-class and upper-class people. The world of gaming is also framed from the perspective of these privileged groups in such a way that everyone who is involved with the world of gaming is going to, to some degree, see games and gaming culture on similar terms as those privileged groups, including people who do not belong to those groups. We all, collectively, will take for granted base assumptions about gaming and the culture surrounding it that favor the privileged perspective *even if the privileged perspective is wrong*. As such, I want to use this article as an opportunity to examine flaws in the privileged perspective of, in particular, men, whose outlook on what games are, what games should be, and who should be allowed to play them does have a major effect on how gaming culture operates. It’s because they have such a strong effect that gaming is a male-dominated space to begin with.

To undo this issue, to make it so that people like myself or my mom, who are both avid fans of games, can participate in the culture as welcome participants who are seen on equal terms to anyone else, we’ll need to first point out the ways in which the status quo of men controlling the culture operates, including not only the actions of men, but also the cultural dialogues that validate and sometimes even abet both the perspectives of men above others, and the harassment and bullying that we see in extreme cases with something like Gamergate.

It’s worth noting that, while I may pull from a lot of citations and may sound like I know what I’m talking about, this is ultimately about stating my perspective, not meant to dictate my perspective as fact. I believe that my perspective incorporates a lot of facts and a lot of theory to substantiate why it is that I think the things I do, but that isn’t enough to be more than just my perspective. I have my limitations; I’m not an expert in game development, I’m not an expert in psychology or linguistics or sociology, though I do hope to become an expert in sociology some day. I’m also white and able-bodied, so issues pertaining to race and disability are things that I have a lot of limitations in being able to speak on. Going into the future, I would love to hear from people involved in game development, especially women involved in triple A companies, and I would also love to hear more perspectives about issues of racism and ableism in gaming and game culture, so please those who can offer their perspectives, feel free to get in touch with me via twitter. Thank you.

How does a Space Become Male-dominated?

The most important, yet often the most boring step, is the part where I have to discuss where I’m pulling this information from, exactly. Cultural analysis is actually pretty easy to manage, and is usually done through sociological methods like surveys, experiments, field studies, and so on. How I pulled my data for this article is a combination of a survey I conducted, statistics related to the industry, and also analyzing the discourse presented in gaming circles, including common terminology, arguments, and positions put forth by gaming fans. Before I get to the major points I want to make about gaming culture, I first want to have a rundown of a lot of the underlying theory that goes into understanding male-dominated societies and subcultures. I want to discuss how exactly it is that a space becomes male-dominated to begin with.

For the purposes of this article, I looked into academic papers and articles discussing gender norms in social spaces as well as the theory behind how gender norms reproduce themselves in such a way that consistently privileges men. I also was lent two books that I’ve pulled articles and quotes from for the sake of this article, and so thanks to my professor for helping me out, it’s greatly appreciated.

The first book, The Kaleidoscope of Gender, is what I’ll be pulling from quite a bit. Reading 32, “Gendered Organizations in the New Economy”, talks about how workplaces and industries favor men over women.

“At both the top and bottom of the employment pyramid, women continue to lag behind men in terms of pay and authority, despite closing gender gaps in educational attainment and workplace seniority. What accounts for these persistent gender disparities?… gender inequality is tenacious because it is built into the structure of work organizations. Even the very definition of a ‘job’ contains an implicit preference for male workers. Employers prefer to hire people who can loyally devote themselves to the organization. This preference excludes many women, given the likelihood that they hold primary care responsibilities for family members. Consequently, for many employers the ‘ideal worker’ is a man.”

“Organizations supposedly use logical principles to develop job descriptions and determine pay rates… managers often draw on gender stereotypes when undertaking these tasks, privileging qualities associated with men and masculinity that then become reified in organizational hierarchies. Through organizational logic, therefore, gender discourses are embedded in organizations, and gender inequality at work results.”

What these quotes illustrate is that the way that hiring decisions are made, are in a manner that privileges men by idealizing the workers they want to hire in ways that are coded as masculine. Examples could include having to “make tough calls”, which is something that favors men because women are stereotyped as being overly emotional and thus are automatically seen as less likely to make tough calls even if we’re perfectly capable of doing so.

The obvious counterpoint to these ideas is going to be that masculinity is simply better for the job, or that men aren’t actually privileged and that it’s just conjecture. But I have another study, this one a study conducted on trans men in the workplace, and how their experiences with gender in the workplace were shaped by coming out and transitioning.

“Sociological research on the workplace reveals a complex relationship between the gender of an employee and that employee’s opportunities for advancement in both authority and pay. While white-collar men and women with equal qualifications can begin their careers in similar positions in the workplace, men tend to advance vaster, creating a gendered promotion gap. When women are able to advance, they often find themselves barred from attaining access to the highest echelons of the company by the invisible barrier of the ‘glass ceiling’. Even in the so-called women’s professions, such as nursing and teaching, men outpace women in advancement to positions of authority. Similar patterns exist among blue-collar professions, as women often are denied sufficient training for advancement in manual trades, passed over for promotion, or subjected to extreme forms of sexual, racial, and gender harassment that result in women’s attrition. These studies are part of the large body of scholarly research on gender and work finding that white- and blue-collar workplaces are characterized by gender segregation, with women concentrated in lower-paying jobs with little room for advancement.”

So the study recognizes first and foremost that male-dominated professions and industries are a commonality, and that men maintain their privilege and quicker advancement into positions of power even within industries that are not male-dominated. So despite the claims that “women are better at some things, and men are better at others”, the trends do not reflect this in such a way that we should ideally see such a thing as “female-dominated industries.” That simply doesn’t exist – there are either industries where men do well, or industries where men dominate. The article further outlines how trans men’s experiences showcase, to some degree, a smoking gun for how the day-to-day differences between men and women are not a matter of biology or socialization, but of privilege:

“This repetition of well-worn gender ideologies naturalizes workplace gender inequality, making gendered disparities in achievements appear to be offshoots of ‘natural’ differences between men and women, rather than the products of dynamic gendering and gendered practices.”

“These experiences also illustrate that masculinity is not a fixed character type that automatically commands privilege but rather that the relationships between competing hegemonic and marginalized masculinities give men differing abilities to access gendered workplace advantages.”

“Many of the respondents note that they can see clearly, once they become ‘just one of the guys,’ that men succeed in the workplace at higher rates than women because of gender stereotypes that privilege masculinity, not because they have greater skill or ability.”

“Illustrating the authority gap that exists between men and women workers, several of my interviewees reported receiving more respect for their thoughts and opinions post-transition.”

“Transmen also report a positive change in the evaluation of their abilities and competencies after transition.”

“Respondents described situations of being ignored, passed over, purposefully put in harm’s way, and assumed to be incompetent when they were working as women. However, these same individuals, as men, find themselves with more authority and with their ideas, abilities, and attributes evaluated more positively in the workforce.”

“According to the transmen I interviewed, an increase in recognition for hard work was one of the positive changes associated with working as a man.”

“Trans men can find themselves gaining in authority, respect, and reward in the workplace post-transition. Several trans men who are stealth also reported a sense that transition had brought with it economic opportunities that would not have been available to them as women, particularly as masculine women.”

These quotes paint a very clear picture that trans men receive benefits in terms of recognition, respect, authority, promotion, and economics, for being perceived as men regardless if they’ve had a significant change in personality and skill or not. Simply being a man is enough for them to receive benefits, though the study admits that it’s not this immediate thing.

So what does the study have to say about why this is? They bring forth two theories, human capital theory, and gender socialization theory, theories that argue that men either are naturally the most fit for certain jobs, or that we are socialized in such a way that men and women seek out certain jobs according to gender norms. Neither of these are adequate explanations, and the article brings up a third theory – gendered organization theory.

“Gendered organization theory, argues that what is missing from both human capital theory and gender socialization theory is the way in which men’s advantages in the workplace are maintained and reproduced in gender expectations that are embedded in organizations and in interactions between employers, employees, and coworkers.”

“The normalization of these disparities as natural differences obscures the actual operation of men’s advantages… Finally, men’s advantages in the workplace are not a function of simply one process but rather a complex interplay between many factors, such as gender differences in workplace performance evaluation, gendered beliefs about men’s and women’s skills and abilities, and differences between family and child care obligations of men and women workers.”

“A large body of evidence shows that the performance of workers is evaluated differently depending on gender. Men, particularly white men, are viewed as more competent than women workers. When men succeed, their success is seen as stemming from their abilities while women’s success often is attributed to luck. Men are rewarded more than women for offering ideas and opinions and for taking on leadership roles in group settings.”

“Sociological studies have documented that the workplace is not a gender-neutral site that equitably rewards workers based on their individual merits; rather ‘it is a central site for the creation and reproduction of gender differences and gender inequality. Men receive greater workplace advantage than women because of cultural beliefs that associate masculinity with authority, prestige, and instrumentality – characteristics often used to describe ideal ‘leaders’ and ‘managers’.”

“Stereotypes about femininity as expressive and emotional, on the other hand, disadvantage women, as they are assumed to be less capable and less likely to succeed than men with equal (or often lesser) qualifications. These cultural beliefs about gender difference are embedded in workplace structures and interactions, as workers and employers bring gender stereotypes with them to the workplace and, in turn, use these stereotypes to make decisions about hiring, promotions, and rewards. This cultural reproduction of gendered workplace disparities is difficult to disrupt, however, as it operates on the level of ideology and thus is rendered invisible.”

So to summarize all of that, men are automatically seen as more skilled and more fit for jobs, especially higher levels of jobs, and are given better positions in the workplace regardless of if they are more qualified than women or not, which they often aren’t. When women do anything right, negative stereotyping dismisses it as “they got lucky,” and the stereotyping of women as less capable leads to less promotions and less pay.

If this sounds like kindergarten stuff, it’s because it kind of is. The term for the theory behind this is “symbolic interactionism”, which is a theory that asserts that the day-to-day interactions between people set up shared meanings that then help to construct the social order.

Gender inequality is very prominent in many fields, including in gaming, but this isn’t the result of some sort of natural order; rather, it’s the result of a constructed order that maintains the illusion that men are simply more attuned or more valuable to the industry. What this means is that stereotypes about men and women, like the kind we see gaming culture, leads to more barriers to entry for women to become a part of the industry, which leads to more men helming the industry, which leads to further reproduction of gender inequality within the industry. This isn’t a static hierarchy that is established and then stays there, rather it’s one that is continually reproduced as new people get hired and new people get promoted.

Going back to The Kaleidoscope of Gender, the first reading, “Gender as a Social Structure”, by Barbara J. Risman, tries to argue in favor of conceptualizing gender as a social structure, and specifically talks about the gendered organizations of social structures and how they become gendered.

“As long as women and men see themselves as different kinds of people, then women will be unlikely to compare their life options to those of men. Therein lies the power of gender. In a world where sexual anatomy is used to dichotomize human beings into types, the differentiation itself diffuses both claims to and expectations for gender equality. The social structure is not experienced as oppressive if men and women do not see themselves as similarly situated.”

“Status expectations create a cognitive bias toward privilege those of already high status. What produces status distinction, however, is culturally and historically variable. Thus, cognitive bias is one of the causal mechanisms that help to explain the reproduction of gender and race inequality in everyday life.”

These quotes demonstrate that the status quo of gender as a social structure is one in which we’re all taught to differentiate men from women in an essentialized way. The term for this is “othering” and I’ll discuss othering in much more detail in a later section of this article. Because we’re taught to see innate differences between men and women, the stereotypes we use to convey this become ingrained in how we think, which causes us to enact the stereotypes in our day-to-day life. This is how gendered organization theory operates; under the assumption that our everyday interactions help to reproduce inequality.

In Reading 15, “Gender and Power”, by Maria Alexandra Lepowsky, Maria discusses this from a more top-down perspective:

“If they are congruent ideology and practice reinforce one another. And if multiple levels of ideology are in accord social forms are more likely to remain unchallenged and fundamentally unchanged. Where levels of ideology, or ideology and practice, are at odds, the circumstances of social life are more likely to be challenged by those who seek a reordering of social privileges justified according to an alternative interpretation of ideology. When social life embodies these kinds of contradictions, the categories of people in power – aristocrats, the rich, men – spend a great deal of energy maintaining their power. They protect their material resources, subdue the disenfranchised with public or private violence, coercion, and repression, and try to control public and private expressions of ideologies of political and religious power.”

What she means here is that when subordinate groups, such as women, become dissatisfied with their position within the status quo, people with more systemic power will be likely to do anything they can in order to prevent the status quo from changing and risk losing their position. This means that men who fear the influence of women will squash women’s ability to gain any traction by any means they can.

Another study, “Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality,” covers what subordinate groups do when under the thumb of those in power.

“Dropping out’ is another response to inequality that might, though need not always, reproduce it. Individual dropping out – out of school, out of the corporate rat race, out of political involvement – is part of what we are referring to. Certainly the withdrawal of participation by people who are fed up with powerlessness and disrespect has the effect of allowing things to go on as they are.”

So what exactly makes an industry male-dominated? I wish I could say it’s simple, but it’s actually very convoluted. The shortest answer I can provide, apart from reading volumes of studies on the manner, is to say that gender inequality exists within our society, and cultural stereotypes about men and women frame our collective mindsets to automatically view men as better for certain jobs than women, and this causes men to have more power within workplaces, which causes a cycle of reproducing the patterns of privileging men at the expense of women in these industries until these women eventually have to live under much worse circumstances within the field or just drop out entirely.

I would argue that, with the shift in computer science in the 1980’s becoming stereotyped as a masculine hobby, and later a masculine profession, men came to, over a few decades, grow to dominate the field by sometimes deliberately and sometimes subconsciously pushing women *out* of the field. This was allowed to happen simply because our collective cultural biases prevent systemic measures from being taken to mitigate these issues. Simply put, the gaming industry is a male-dominated space because men feel threatened by the presence of women, so they use systemic privilege to weed women out of the field or keep them in low-level positions. This is my hypothesis, and I accept that it’s conjecture, because I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the gaming industry or its history, but I’d love to hear first-hand accounts on the matter so for the sake of future work on the topic, if you’re a part of the gaming industry, especially working for triple A developers, and especially if you’re a woman, and you have insight, feel free to contact me and I can ask questions to help better understand the actual experiences of those in the gaming industry. With that, in Section 4, let’s turn to what fans of gaming have to say.

Survey – What does the data say?

I hosted a survey about video games, the industry, and issues of harassment and representation in gaming. I asked questions like “do you consider yourself a gamer?”, “have you ever experience harassment on the basis of your gender, sexuality, or race”, and “are you satisfied with the current ratio of men to women in the gaming industry?” I posted this survey on twitter and within one day I got over 100 responses. It’s worth noting that, since I posted this on my own twitter, a significant amount of the people responding will inevitably be people who watch my videos or who follow me on twitter, and so this isn’t so much a comprehensive political analysis of everyone in the entire gaming culture, but it is a small sliver of the people who watch my videos in particular.

The ultimate goal with the survey was to gauge how aware regular gaming folks are of the male-dominated culture surrounding games, as well as how they feel about that culture as well as their position within it. I also figured that I would allow people a chance to elaborate on some of their answers so that I could gain some insight into their perspectives and also allow the answers to perhaps point to some ideas that I hadn’t thought of beforehand.

So first off, some of the statistics –

-out of 100 people, 63 were men, 23 were women, and 14 were non-binary.

-61% of respondents said that they play games daily or almost daily, with an additional 25% saying they played at least once a week.

-The most popular genres among the respondents were Shooters/Action games, with 72% of the respondents saying they play action games, RPGs, with 66% of respondents saying they play RPGs, and 51% saying they played “Indie Games”, which I also included the phrase “Walking Simulators” for good measure. The least popular genres were Puzzle Games at 30% and Racing/Sports games at 12%.

-61% of respondents said they do not identify as “gamers”, while 39% said they do identify as gamers.

-80% of respondents said they want to see more women in video games, while 88% said they want to see more women in the gaming industry. Less than 20% of respondents said they were fine with the current gender representation in games or the industry, while only 2 respondents argued that there should be more men in either.

-How often respondents would play online is split about 50/50 between people who play regularly and people who play only once a month or less.

-69% of respondents said they haven’t been harassed because of their gender, sexuality, or race. 17% said they were harassed for their gender, 17% said harassed for sexuality, and 7% said harassed for race.

-50% said that they would feel like they would be harassed more if they were a different gender, race, or sexuality than they are now.

So then what does this data suggest? Well, first off, the gender stats as of 2016 in gaming are estimated to be about 41% women, while the gender stats in my survey show 23% women and 14% non-binary, adding up to about 37% of people in my survey who were not men. Not to lump non-binary people and women together but for the sake of gender dominance, my survey is close to accurate to the statistics I’ve found, but still slanted in favor of men compared to the average. So it’s important to note that this isn’t going to be a wholly representative sample but still is going to be similar enough to the big picture of the gender demographics of gaming.

When it comes to what genres they play most, I decided to incorporate a few different genres, and particularly I wanted to incorporate genres that I expected would have a gender slant, such as Shooters and Action games, which I expected to be played mostly by men, and puzzle games, which I expected to be played mostly by women. The statistics in the Quantic Foundry article “Beyond 50/50: Breaking Down The Percentage of Female Gamers by Genre” show that the genres that have the most women in them tend to be puzzle games, family/farming simulators, and “atmospheric exploration” which, for the sake of my survey, would probably fit under the “walking simulator” label that I used. The least played genres for women in the Quantic Foundry article are shooters, sports, and racing games, which is expected.

My results were fairly similar, with women being more likely to answer indie games/walking simulators and puzzle games, while men were more likely to answer racing/sports games or shooters/action games. Interesting to note that racing and sports games were much much lower than shooters and action games even though both tend to see a lot more men; my best guess for the difference is that the kinds of men who typically play racing and sports games are different from the demographic of my audience. Given that there’s a sort of “jock” undertone to these genres, I’d imagine that these games do better with particularly men who are big on sports and racing already, which I imagine are people who aren’t as actively involved in gaming culture.

Noticeably, puzzle games were the second lowest in terms of popularity, which are also the most successful with women in general. Looking through people’s responses, I found a lot more women mentioning puzzle games as something they play often versus men. My data, of course, will be different from other surveys in small ways but looking through the stats, I do believe that the responses are relatively the same as other data on the matter. Given that men form the largest bulk of my respondents, it’s entirely expected that Shooters and Action games would be particularly high, and puzzle games particularly low.

Now interestingly, even though 61% of respondents said they play games almost daily, 61% of respondents also said that they would not classify themselves as a gamer. Those who answered that they do identify as gamers typically had very mundane answers, such as “I play games, therefore I am a gamer”.

Meanwhile, the answers for why people don’t identify as a “gamer” are very relevant; repeatedly, people brought up not wanting to be defined by a hobby, negative connotations, disassociating with “gamer culture”, and specifically people mentioned harassment a number of times. Even people who answered yes often tried to clarify a disassociation with negative aspects of gaming culture. I saw in relatively similar proportion both men and women describe themselves as “gamers” or refuse the label, so it’s not like all men consider themselves gamers while all women don’t. But the very open reference to stigma on the part of both men and women, both gamers and people who reject the label, shows that, to adopt the label, there is some level of a cultural issue to that has to be reconciled in order to be comfortable with said label.

When I asked respondents how they feel about gender representation in video games, they by and large agreed that we need more women characters in games. A lot of people mentioned equality, some mentioned that it would improve the games, some mentioned that we specifically need better written women characters, a few people mentioned that women need to stop being sexualized or marketed to men in games, and a very common response I saw was to include more women of color, more trans women, and more non-binary people. One particular person mentioned that games with female protagonists are so uncommon that Steam had to add a tag explicitly specifying that a game had a female protagonist, and I thought that observation was worth noting. Keep in mind that most of the respondents were men, so what this tells me is that the demand for changes to gaming to incorporate more women is not just held by a small group of feminist women; it’s held by a lot of gaming fans in general.

Similarly, most respondents agreed that more women need to be involved in developing games. The reasoning was similar; more women means more diversity, which means more kinds of games, which means the medium improves because of a variety of options available to players. Some people mentioned issues of women being barred from the industry due to prejudice or harassment. One particularly enthusiastic respondent said, and I quote, “kill all men”. And that’s… well, alright then.

What I find interesting is the reasoning why people disagreed with the option of more women in the gaming industry. Instead of commenting on that now, I’m going to read a comment that I feel represents the contrary opinion, and then elaborate on this comment later on. Here’s the comment –

“We cant just sit here and pretend that the employees gender is due solely to something like sexism. Gaming is a predominantly male hobby and as such I believe it makes sense that the development industry is male dominated. I could give a fucking shit who’s making the game as long as its good. Man, woman, non-binary I could care less, just make a good game. If women aren’t interested in gammane development at the same percentages of males then dont try and cry sexism in the workplace when its literally just that the majority of females DONT want to work in that field.”

When it comes to questions about harassment, the responses were mostly that they don’t experience harassment, but I noticed a lot of the time, when people said they haven’t experienced harassment for their gender, race, or sexuality, they specifically made it clear that it was a conditional statement; some people mentioned that they were in the closet about their gender or sexuality, others mentioned they simply don’t play games online, others mentioned avoiding playing online games with strangers, refusing to use voice chat, or mentioning that they had heard others being harassed for their gender, sexuality, or race.

Among those who were harassed it was often on the basis of gender, with particularly women, both cis and trans, talking about facing harassment, though there were also some instances of people talking about being harassed for being Asian or black. I won’t share any specific stories from respondents, though some people did share stories, and some of them were heartbreaking, so my heart goes out to the people who have been affected by this stuff.

The broader picture that my survey suggests is that more men play games in general, more men play specific genres while more women play other genres, people of any gender would generally like to see better gender representation in gaming and in the industry, most players would prefer to not be called a “gamer” because of negative connotations, and gender-based, sexuality-based, and race-based harassment is a one-way street with regards to who is being affected. What this means is that simultaneously, the industry, the audience, and thus the culture as a whole is a male-dominated space; but also that just because it is a male-dominated space, doesn’t mean that people by and large prefer it that way.

Certainly some do; I don’t think it’d be possible to be a male-dominated space if everyone in the gaming culture wants it not to be, but the important thing to recognize is that very few people vocally said they prefer that the space be male-dominated. Most people said they’d prefer more women in gaming, and those who didn’t often said that the male-dominated space is circumstantial rather than preferable; in other words, that gaming just so happens to attract more men, rather than that the culture is in any way *better off* if it attracts more men.

Gaming culture is not isolated. It’s a subculture, meaning that it is a product of the mainstream cultural values that we have as a society, especially in America. Gaming culture does not actually need to have a majority of participants preferring male-dominance for male-dominance to take effect. The mainstream culture we live in is one that privileges men and subordinates everyone else. Before we even enter the culture of gaming, we are in part products of the bigger culture in our society, and so we bring that into gaming culture, such that the privileging of men at the expense of everyone else in gaming is both reflective of, and tied into the bigger issue of a patriarchal society.

The reason why I say this is because the privileged perspective of men, especially in a male-dominated space, permeates the culture, and always has consequences for people who lack that privilege. This also means that men both define and control what games, the industry, and the culture can be and should be. It also means that any participant, no matter our gender or sexuality or race, will view gaming to some degree through male-dominated terms. For some of us, this means recognizing the dismal place that marginalized voices have in gaming culture, but it also means that we do, in some ways, unconsciously maintain aspects of the male-dominated lens through which we’re forced to engage with the culture. Let me get back to that quote –

“We cant just sit here and pretend that the employees gender is due solely to something like sexism. Gaming is a predominantly male hobby and as such I believe it makes sense that the development industry is male dominated. I could give a fucking shit who’s making the game as long as its good. Man, woman, non-binary I could care less, just make a good game. If women aren’t interested in gammane development at the same percentages of males then dont try and cry sexism in the workplace when its literally just that the majority of females DONT want to work in that field.”

This respondent particularly noted that the space is male-dominated. I never mentioned “male-dominated” anywhere in the survey, though it may have been implicitly noticeable through the questions I did ask. This respondent argues that it’s okay that it’s male-dominated because women either aren’t good enough or simply don’t care. The rest of my statistics suggest that a large percentage of gaming fans, regardless of gender, disagree. But the respondent said, and I quote, “just make a good game”. In a later section of the article, I’m going to touch on this idea, because as I said before and as I’ll expand upon, what makes a game “good” already has implications about the way in which gaming fans view games and the associated culture through a male-dominated lens.

In Section 3 I already mentioned several excerpts from academic papers that detail the nature of male-domination in cultural spaces, particularly within industries, and how this notion that the current social order within industries is somehow better or more natural is a myth; gendered organization theory puts forth that organizations are set up to maintain male-dominance in a de facto sense though maybe not always in an intentional sense, and the day-to-day interactions of people with systems and with industries leads to the continued maintenance of male-dominance.

Section 3 incorporates a lot of relevant quotes which I won’t repeat here, but I will add in another quote from “Gender as a Social Structure” –

“Even when women and men with feminist identities work in organizations with formally gender-neutral rules, gender inequality is reproduced during everyday interaction. The cultural expectations attached to our sex category, simply being identified as a woman or man, has remained relatively impervious to the feminist forces that have problematized sexist socialization practices and legal discrimination.”

The reason why it is that game fans can, by and large, agree that the industry and games themselves could do with more and better representation of women, while the industry continues to be relatively stagnant with regards to recognizing women’s potential as both employees and consumers, is because the constructed default position of the industry is one of male-dominance, and people unknowingly default to patriarchal assumptions about games and the industry that then continue to privilege men at the expense of women, both as players and as developers. In Section 5, I’ll talk much more about how exactly this happens.

Privilege, Discourse, and Framing

Now that we’ve covered a lot of the overview about what academics and gamers both have to say, we can begin to discuss how male-dominated spaces operate. To understand how male-dominated spaces operate, let’s discuss the relationship between culture, language, privilege, and how these things both actively and passively contribute to misogyny. To understand a culture we need to understand the people in that culture, which means in order to understand games, we need to understand “gamers”. I’ll discuss the implications of the term “gamer” in Section 6, but for now I’m going to use “gaming fans” as a substitute. First, I have to talk about language. This is going to get obnoxiously convoluted but I promise I’ll try to make it easy to understand.

The way that human thought works, as we understand it, sort of requires language. Basically, how we learn to even be people involves learning language. In order to learn, for example, English, first we imitate the sounds of words, then we start to slowly pick up on what they mean and this process continues until we’re no longer just imitating people, but instead speaking of our own accord. Our personalities are shaped by this process as we develop a separate sense of self from others through growing to understand the words that people use around us. In order to even *think at all* the way we do, we first need to learn the words to be able to think that way. We develop the ability for advanced thoughts through understanding the meaning of language and developing the ability to both say words and think them, and understand what doing both means.

If language is the foundation of individual thought, then culture is the foundation of societal thought. If we see a society as just a big collection of people, then culture is the collective personality of that group of people, it’s our society’s collective patterns of thought, behavior, values, rules, laws, norms, and so on. If a society could speak, culture would be the language of that speech.

Even though language can help us expand our knowledge and our perception of the world and is even really necessary to participate in society at all, language also, in both temporary and permanent manners, limits our ability to perceive reality. An example is the phrase “evolution is just a theory”. There are multiple, conflicting definitions of the word “theory”, where in a colloquial sense the word “theory” basically means “an opinion” or “a guess”, and the scientific sense of the word “theory” means “a predictive model or framework for interpreting and testing data”. A theory in a scientific sense is something substantiated by facts, and used to understand why they are facts and how we should anticipate data going into the future. Because people had the colloquial version in their head as the prevailing definition of a “theory”, creationists exploited this misunderstanding to try to imply that scientific theories were, in fact, synonymous with complete guess work. These kinds of things, of course, can be unlearned. I myself am a prime example, as I used to believe that rhetoric back when I was a teenager, until the language barrier was pointed out and resolved by skeptical minded folks.

I’m going to cite a quote from Dale Spender in the introduction to her book “Man Made Language”, a book that discusses the relationship between language and male-dominance. She speaks about language in the intro, quote:

” the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding. Once made, however, these rules have a habit of becoming self-validating and self-perpetuating, regardless of any misapprehensions on which they may have initially been based. Although it is not possible to ‘begin at the beginning’ and to identify the forces which were at work in the construction of these rules to determine whether or not they were accurate or justified, it is possible to analyse the contemporary classification system of our language and to speculate on the origins, and the reasons for these rules, which now play such a vital role in the construction of our world view.” UNQUOTE.

Language and culture are not separate concepts, language is a part of culture, and culture is how language is created and sustained. So if we view language as being able to limit our perception, we should also be willing to examine how culture can do the same thing. A very great example is Santa Claus. Most adults don’t believe in Santa, but many children genuinely do at some point. For any children watching, plug your ears, but Santa Claus isn’t real. The concept is taught to us, and before we learn the concept of Santa Claus, we can never really believe in him. So the act of learning the concept, and simultaneously being taught that he is a real thing and not just a cultural myth we tell children, leads to the idea being constructed in children’s minds that Santa is, in fact, real.

Culture frames Santa to children as a real thing and so children then start to behave in a way that suggests that he’s real. In this sense, culture can shape our behaviors, our thoughts, our beliefs, regardless of whether or not we know it’s happening, and regardless of whether or not the thing shaping our behaviors and beliefs has any substantiated basis. Santa Claus isn’t real, but the cultural language that portrays him as real allows a lot of children to be affected by their false perception, specifically a false perception that was written into their thoughts by the outside force of the culture around them. Interesting side note – I was never raised to believe that Santa Claus was real, so I never had to have the disappointing realization that parents just make him up to get children excited for Christmas.

It’s not even remotely a stretch to see that we as individuals essentially can’t exist without the social interaction required to develop a unique social sense of self. Without the society around us we can’t develop language, which means we can’t grow our understanding to the advanced levels necessary to participate in society. It is only through the process of becoming a member of society that we can meaningfully exist as individuals. As such, while we do eventually develop a unique sense of self with a unique perspective, unique beliefs, unique behaviors and so on, culture plays a large part in shaping our thoughts and beliefs and behaviors towards a certain path, and we will always defy that path in some ways and follow that path in other ways, often times unknowingly.

The reason why I say all of this is because the bigger picture is the framework through which we grow to understand anything at all, and it’s also how we begin the process of understanding what the hell we’re looking at when it comes to any cultural practice or value. As such, we can never fully divorce ourselves from the rest of the picture. We can disassociate from elements of a culture that we belong to, but we are still shaped by a culture even if it’s by contrast.

So let’s bring this back to gaming culture. I don’t consider myself a quote unquote “part of gaming culture”, but that is a disassociation from toxic elements of the culture, I can never fully disassociate from my participation in the culture. See, I did play games growing up, and I still occasionally play games today. I am not a representative of gaming culture as a whole, I’m not indicative of what you might call the “platonic form of the gamer”, but I still engaged in playing games. What this means is that I played with other people, I talked about games with other people, and their interactions with me means that, for them, the social language of gaming was shaped by how they perceived me. In that sense, what it means to be a part of gaming culture, for people who have played games with me, will be shaped by those interactions. This is how, in some small way, I am part of the bigger picture. Similarly, I know people who have never played video games, and who do not participate in the culture, and as outsiders, my perspective on the culture frames for them, in some way, what the culture is.

This is how we as individuals can shape the culture, but in turn, the culture also shapes us. Going back to what I said about how language can actually limit our perception, and how culture can construct false realities, we can recognize how the interaction that people have with gaming culture can, like santa claus from before, shape our understanding of the world around us such that we either don’t see things that are there, or do see things that aren’t. Similarly, just like the mixed up meanings of the word “theory” can create faulty perception, so can the culture and language of gaming. The antidote to this, I believe, is proper assessment and analysis; recognizing where, when, and how these things operate, and more specifically, how these things can create problems, and what to do to resolve them.

A lot of the time, people tend to distance themselves from thinking about wider social trends and their implications, and try to act as though any individual circumstance or behavior is a product of individual choice and responsibility, and while we should be willing to hold individuals accountable, we have to recognize that cultural forces have relevance. Everyone is willing to recognize this sometimes; even anti-feminists, who I’ll always argue are really more akin to conspiracy theorists than an actual legitimate political group, will often appeal to wider social or cultural forces as influences on behavior and thought, but they often do it from a completely unsubstantiated starting point.

So what does this all have to do with male-dominance? Well, you see, the culture in the west at large is a patriarchal culture, because the social language that we develop is one that emphasizes the power and authority of men over everyone else, and this idea is then used as the starting point through which we engage with the culture around us. There’s a pervasive idea in our society of men being stronger, more powerful, smarter, more courageous, more logical, and by extension of all of these things, more naturally fit for holding cultural and systemic power, more deserving, and more inevitably going to retain this power. This becomes ingrained as the natural order when really, it’s the social order. This idea of patriarchy as natural order *is* our Santa Claus, the cultural myth that we collectively sustain through both learning and teaching the myth as though it were a reality.

Pulling from Man Made Language again, here’s another relevant quote:

“It appears to be part of the human condition to attempt to make existence meaningful but we can only make sense of the world if we have rules by which to do it. We need to know what information to select, how to piece it together, and what interpretation to impose upon it, and the rules which each culture evolves for making sense of the world form the basis for these decisions. As we use these rules we confirm their validity, we make them ‘come true’. Our results depend on the programme we begin with; as we pattern, select and interpret on the premise that males are superior – and of course, concomitantly, that females are inferior – we construct a view of the world in which males continue to be seen as superior, and females continue to be seen as inferior, thereby perpetuating the myth and reinforcing the justification for male power.”

The biggest misunderstanding when non-feminists and anti-feminists hear the word “patriarchy” is that they assume that it’s referring to a conspiratorial state of affairs when it really isn’t. Patriarchy is more of a mindset, and the mindset is taught, it’s a culturally ingrained notion of what is seen as an ideal social order. It’s similar, in that sense, to any political system, like feudalism for example.

Feudalism is a now outdated political system but it was, at the time, something that people were raised into and it was conceptualized at the time as being the natural social order or the ideal social order because people were raised under a feudalist mindset. For noblemen, the feudalist mindset was beneficial, because it was one in which they would always be comfortable and secure, but when you recognize the cost to peasants and slaves, feudalism eventually collapsed in on itself with moments like the French revolution being a prime example of such a collapse. Feudalism was both a system and a culture, in the sense that the system was perpetuated by a social mindset and language that framed itself in such a way that feudalism was seen as the best or inevitable option. It’s just the way things were meant to be, or so they thought.

In the modern day, sociopolitical issues are much more complex than that, and instead of viewing things as one over-arching system that dominates all underneath it, it’s better to view things as interweaving systems and cultures that impact one another in various ways. The concept of a “patriarchy” is a reference to the cultural mindset that favors the domination of men and subordination of women, non-binary people, and yes, even sometimes other men.

This is true of US culture, and that’s something that can be easily measured in numerous ways, but it’s also true of gaming culture. Going back to that statistic, 78% of people in the gaming industry are men, which means that statistically, men are favored in the gaming industry, and similarly, women form around 41% of the audience for games so men are favored in the demographics of gaming consumers. This is constructed as being inevitable or natural or acceptable, as some of the respondents to my survey pointed out, but it’s really not, and that’s what I’d like to talk about in much more detail.

Because men dominate both game development and game consumption, what this means is that men play the biggest role in constructing the social language of gaming. Just as I, as an individual, was able to make a small impact on the way that friends of mine might perceive the social experience of gaming, men in the industry and in the audience will have a very large impact in how everyone within gaming perceives the social experience of gaming.

This has many consequences, none of which are very fun. The first is that men will control both the input and output of gaming, meaning that games by and for men will be prioritized, and will also be the measurements through which we meaningfully understand gaming at large, where even though we have such a wide variety of titles as Katamari Damacy, Ico, The Beginner’s Guide, The Witness, Thomas Was Alone, Her Story, What Remains of Edith Finch, and so on, the games that will represent gaming as a whole will inevitably be games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. These are also the games that will make the most money and thus have the highest budget, which then causes the flow of gaming to support producing basically the same types of games over and over again.

The second is that men control the sociopolitical images presented in games, meaning they control things such as gender representation, for a large bulk of the gaming audience. I’ll address this in more detail in Section 8, but what this means is that men control things like, for example, how women are portrayed in games, which in turn affects how people who play these games will perceive some aspect of women or womanhood.

The third is that men dominate the way in which everyone who is a participant in gaming culture will experience both the culture itself and themselves as a part of the culture. An example of this would be, well, just about everyone who I surveyed who disassociated from the label of “gamer”. My mom’s perception of herself as a participant in gaming culture is made extremely distant because she recognizes that the culture is defined by the way that men dominate it.

The fourth is that men control the social space of gaming at large, meaning that men at large will be able to affect, to some degree, who does and does not play games and who is and is not welcome in gaming spaces, which usually means people of color, LGBTQ people, and women.

On that last point, it’s worth noting that in section 3, I covered the study “Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality.” In that study, they discussed 4 processes that help reproduce inequality, including maintaining boundaries, managing emotions, forcing subordinates to adapt to circumstances or drop out. My mother and I are both examples of people dropping out rather than dealing with the bigger issue of having to contend with gaming culture’s masculinized standards. I’d assume this is relatively common for women in the industry and in the market.

But there’s more to it, and “maintaining boundaries” plays a very very *large* role in the reproduction of inequality in the gaming world, because as participants in gaming culture, the social language of gaming that we use helps to sometimes reaffirm the idea of a quote unquote “natural order” of male-dominance within the subculture of gaming. This is because we all become so used to participating in the culture as-is that we pick up on beliefs and behaviors that align with a male-centric perspective. The reality of gaming is framed through the male gaze, and so to pick apart why this is an issue, we first have to piece together what the issue actually is by picking apart how it operates. In Section 6 I’ll discuss precisely that.

What Constitutes a “Game”? What Constitutes a “Gamer”?

“Discourse is more than talk and writing; it is a way of talking and writing. To regulate discourse is to impose a set of formal or informal rules about what can be said, how it can be said, and who can say what to whom… When a form of discourse is established as standard practice, it becomes a powerful tool for reproducing inequality, because it can serve not only to regulate thought and emotion, but also to identify Others and thus to maintain boundaries as well. Those who wish to belong to the dominant group, or who simply want to be heard, may feel compelled to use the master’s linguistic tools.”

So far we’ve discussed a lot, but one thing we haven’t even gotten around to yet is, what even *is* a game, to begin with? This question has gone on for decades now and I honestly don’t feel that the answer is as important as the question is, because the question gets at an underlying issue within gaming culture.

Chris Franklin, the creator of the webseries Errant Signal, made a wonderful video discussing the debate about what is and is not a game, titled “That’s no Game”. I’m going to link it in the description, and he goes into just about anything I would have said about the answer to the question of “what is a game?” I bring up his video specifically because it gets very very close to what I want to talk about without ever quite getting there. See, this article is a feminist critique of gaming culture. Chris’s video was a response to a cultural debate that was not looking at the cultural debate from a feminist angle, and there’s no particular reason why he should come at it from a feminist perspective. I think his video is fine just the way it is and I highly recommend it. So don’t consider what I’m about to say about his video a critique so much as a response.

During the course of his video, he mentions games that are explicitly considered games, and games that are debated as being “not games”. Throughout the course of it, he emphatically states that, yes, Team Fortress 2 is a game. He says the same of Skyrim. By contrast, at one point when he collects a list of games that are considered “not games”, he shows a graphic that includes Animal Crossing, The Walking Dead, The Sims, Farmville, Dys4ia, Proteus, and Nintendogs.

This fascinates me because compare it to the genres that Quantic Foundry discovered tend to do well with women – Animal Crossing, The Sims, and Farmville could all be described as “Family/Farming Simulators”, while The Walking Dead and Dys4ia could easily be considered “Interactive Dramas”, and Proteus is definitely “Atmospheric Exploration”. The only one that’s ambiguous would be Nintendogs, though I’m willing to place it under “family sim” if I’m being generous. In other words, the games that Chris keeps pointing to as games that aren’t “real games” are games that women like.

Again, Chris wasn’t coming at his video from a feminist perspective, but when I watch his video with the feminist perspective in mind and with the statistics in mind, it becomes very clear that the collective definition of what constitutes a “game” within gaming culture has a prerequisite of needing to be appealing to men. You’ll notice also that a lot of the reasoning for what *is* a game that Chris points to is also reasoning that lends itself well to the genres that traditionally do well with men; as Chris points out, gamers argue that games need a win-state to qualify as a game, and shooters, action games, racing games, and sports games, are some of the most definitively win-state based of games; you know when you’ve won a race, or when you’ve won a game of football, or when you’ve blown someone’s head off in a shooter. The absolute win-state in gaming is most prevalent in these genres and I do not think that’s coincidence. I think that, whether consciously or not, the quote unquote “hardcore gamers” try to retroactively define what a game is and is not by denying any quality a game can have that does not explicitly revolve around men’s interests.

And in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. My mom plays games more than I do and probably more than you do, and while she is able to recognize her “match 3” mobile games like candy crush as video games, a lot of women simply don’t recognize it, or they dichotomize it as a separate entity from other kinds of games. My mom told me that she doesn’t have a console, and that disqualifies her from being a gamer. A few survey respondents said precisely the same thing – since they don’t own a console, they don’t consider themselves a “gamer”. This is boundary maintenance playing out in action.

The problem of demoting mobile games to being “non-games” has been a common issue for a pretty long time now, but what I find so telling is that a lot of people who consider themselves gamers answered “I play games, so therefore I am a gamer”. My mom also plays games but she doesn’t consider herself a gamer. It becomes evident, to me at least, that the framing for how to qualify as “someone who plays games” is one that alienates women from the conversation. If you play candy crush on your phone all day every day for years, you’re not a gamer, because you don’t play “real games”. As Chris points out, this limits the scope of what a game can be, but I think that’s kind of the point, because recognizing and validating more feminized genres as legitimate games would pose a risk to the male-dominated culture of games. It would mean more “casuals”.

And this is where we get to an interesting usage of language – the difference between “hardcore gamer” and “casual gamer” is not always explicitly, but is often implicitly, gendered. The concept of “filthy casuals” is a way of denigrating people who don’t play a particular kind of game. That particular kind of game is usually going to be shooters and action games, which, yet again, are the genres that are most dominated by men. By extension, “casuals” are the kinds of people who play games completely oppositional to the “hardcore gaming” style, which, yet again, are the genres that do best with women.

What this means is that the terms are loaded, such that one implies value over another, and also genders those very same values; women are often seen as outsiders of gaming who “invade” gaming and aren’t truly dedicated to gaming. My mom will be seen this way even though she’s been playing games since the early 80’s. I’ll be seen this way even though I’ve been playing games since the mid-90s. The words “hardcore gamer” and “casual gamer” implicitly refer to a form of hegemony versus subordination; “hardcore gamers” are usually men, and “casual gamers” are usually women, and this is asserted both in how the discourse around hardcore vs casual is framed based on genre, and also in the dynamic between masculine modes of gaming versus feminine modes of gaming. To be “hardcore” is to be obsessed with winning, with domination, with superiority.

It is quite literally a construction of hegemonic masculinity, an ideal that, whether they intend it or not, is masculinized. This is, in part, why a lot of survey respondents rejected the label of “gamer”, because “gamer” as a term is tied to a hierarchy, and a lot of people don’t want to participate in that kind of hierarchy. The idea of true gamers living up to a masculine ideal of competitiveness and domination, shows why people find the associations so negative: to call yourself a “gamer” isn’t just to call yourself someone who plays games, but also someone who participate in toxic ideals of masculine expression. Women don’t consider themselves gamers because they don’t participate in that aspect of the culture, and if they ever do, it’s at their own expense most of the time.

The problem is, when we continue to use this language of “hardcore gaming” versus “casual gaming”, we construct a dichotomy that doesn’t need to actually exist. Games can, hypothetically, just be games, but gaming culture renders them in such a way where there is a superior form of gaming and an inferior form of gaming. This construction is explicitly masculinized in such a way where to be superior is to appeal to toxic men. Yes, these games often do appeal to people who are not toxic, as well as people who are not men; I myself play a lot of shooters and action games, and they’re one of my favorite genres. However, when we put these genres on a pedestal and consider them innately superior in some regard to genres that happen to do well with women? We continue the process of alienating feminine perspectives from the culture, and male-dominance continues to be an issue. As such, when we call someone a “casual gamer” or call certain games “casual games”, completely free of any critique of the implications of this terminology, we help to maintain a false dichotomy that validates the toxic mindset that a lot of men bring into gaming culture.

There’s a term and a lot of academic backing for this process; it’s called “othering.” I’ll talk more about “othering” in section 8, but here in section 6 I’d like to share some of the academic reading on the matter. Pulling again from “Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality” –

“The term othering has come to refer to the process whereby a dominant group defines into existence an inferior group. This process entails the invention of categories and of ideas about what marks people as belonging to these categories… The literature suggests that othering can take at least three forms: (1) oppressive othering; (2) implicit othering by the creation of powerful virtual selves; and (3) defensive othering among subordinates. In each case, meanings are created that shape consciousness and behavior, such that inequality is directly or indirectly reproduced.”

“The symbolic tools used to accomplish oppressive othering include not only classification schemes but identity codes, which are the rules of performance and interpretation whereby members of a group know what kind of self is signified by certain words, deeds, and dress. To know the code is to know how to elicit the imputation of possessing a desired kind of self. Oppressive othering entails the creation of identity codes that make it impossible for members of a subjugated group to signify fully creditable selves. A code that treats a male body and Caucasian features as signs of competence peremptorily discredits those with female bodies and African features. Equally insidious are identity codes that define the adaptive or dissident behaviors of subordinates as signs of inferior selves – thus turning acts of resistance into evidence that subordination is deserved and inequality is legitimate.”

The construction of a “hardcore” and “casual” dichotomy is, quite literally, coded language to construct women as being either external to gaming culture or at some level of inferior status within gaming culture. The idea of “creating a powerful virtual self” is manifested in gaming men describing themselves as “hardcore” and denigrating those who are, by implication, “not hardcore.” By being women, by playing games that are seen as women’s games, or by refusing to exist in gaming spaces on “hardcore gamer’s” terms, we become placed as the member of a subjugated group that can never be considered fully creditable. Women’s interests, women’s opinions and perspectives, and women’s role in the culture will always be devalued and this is because of the process of othering, by men, into a position where we have less sway and less say in how the culture operates. We’re here in relatively high numbers, but we aren’t represented. In Section 7, I’ll talk about even more complicated issues of the discourse of gaming.

The Troubling Implications of “Objectivity”

The issue runs even deeper than just the gendering of games and gamers. We also have to deal with the troubling implications of “objectivity” itself. “Objectivity” is a very nebulous term and it can be used in many ways, but over time I’ve become really sickened by the term in general. To call something “objective” is not inherently bad, but in its application it can become way too problematic. It starts with what I believe to be a very fundamental misunderstanding of how objectivity operates.

True, pure, uninhibited “objectivity” does not and cannot exist. The faultiness of human perception and how language and social norms complicate that perception means that we cannot ever have a fact or truth that is unconditional. We can have axioms, which are unconditional in the sense that they are self-affirming, such as the law of identity, which are logic statements that are true regardless of perception, but facts of observation can never be truly devoid of fault in human perception. As such, there is no absolute objectivity, but instead degrees of objectivity. In this sense, objectivity can be seen sort of as a measurement, where something can be more objective or less objective, but nothing can ever be absolutely objective.

For example, it would be entirely subjective of me to say that Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest game of all time. It would be more objective to say that the game was well-received, but a point of contention could be “well-received by who?” It would be even more objective to say that the game was well-received by Eurogamer, who gave the game a 10/10 review score. Still, a point of contention could be made – “why does it matter what Eurogamer thinks?” And this is where we start to see how relevant subjectivity is even in discussions that we believe to be objective; it’s ultimately our own opinions that *assign* value to objective measurements, which prevents them from being absolutely objective, such that the objective ultimately becomes subjective.

There is no reason why you need to care what Eurogamer thinks about Shadow of the Colossus. Using that as an example, an objective, measurable frame of reference for how Shadow of the Colossus has been received critically, does nothing to validate my initial statement that “Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest game of all time”, because to make the jump from “well-received” to “greatest” is to elect “well-received” as though that is the only measurement through which a game can be considered “greatest”.

Ultimately, no matter what argument you use to support your perspective on games, the counter-point is always going to be “I don’t care”. This exact argument will likely be used against me by commentators responding to this article, that I could be right about anything or everything but it doesn’t matter. Pointing back to that comment I quoted earlier, a likely counter-argument to everything I’m saying is that even if I can demonstrate that gaming is male-dominated, it doesn’t matter because men and women both like it better that way. Of course, my survey suggests otherwise, but this gets to why “objectivity” is so difficult to discuss, because objective measurements are used to justify beliefs and opinions, which then creates an imbalance for what objective measurements have the most worth.

In Section 6, I discussed how gamers try to argue that certain games simply aren’t games. Their argument is usually to point to some sort of objective measurement that you can use to identify a game as a game, and then say that games that don’t meet this objective measurement don’t qualify. Of course, they use measurements that happen to correlate heavily with genres that do well with men, and contrast heavily with genres that do well with women. It’s hard to ignore that the so-called “objective standards” that people use to determine which games are games lends itself well to male-dominance by presenting barriers to entry for women into the social space by differentiating games that we play as “not games” to begin with. What’s a bit harder to realize, however, is that the objective standards for what makes a “good game” versus a “bad game” can repeat this same issue.

I’ve always contested arguments of objectivity with regards to the worth of games. I know that I’m likely in the minority on this; even on my survey, 58 of the respondents said that some games are just objectively better than others, while 42 argued otherwise. Respondents who said “no” argued similar arguments that I would argue, such as one person who said that emotional experiences are different for everyone. Respondents who said yes, however, consistently argued for objective measurements that are still subjectively defined, such as “better graphics” or “better controls”. These things are up to each individual player to decide, so it’s ultimately not “objective”. Someone said, for example, “interesting vision”, and how we interpret the vision of a game is subjective in terms of what we think that vision is, and in how interesting we find it. There is no such thing as “objectively interesting” because “interesting” refers to a personal standpoint with regards to something.

Absolutely any objective criteria you can come up with for why a game is “objectively better” than another is one that ultimately is going to be susceptible to counter-arguments. For example, if someone were to say that a game needs to “control well”, then what does that say about art games that deliberately control poorly for an aesthetic or thematic purpose, such as “In a Single Breath”, a game that is deliberately disorienting mechanically. It doesn’t “control well” in a traditional sense but it does what it set out to do. What does it say about Silent Hill, a game that, for many, controls poorly because of outdated controls, while for others, they believe it enhances the horror aspects of the experience?

Meanwhile people can argue that a game is objectively worse if it doesn’t do what it set out to do, but a counter-point can be made about how player interaction with the game can fundamentally change the nature of the game such that it no longer can ever do what it set out to.

Most speedrunners who speedrun Quake would probably say that they love the game, but yet it failed massively in accounting for glitches. That failure on id’s part subsequently led to the development of speedrunning itself, in particular the use of the bunnyhop, a glitch turned into an exploit that was never part of the creators’ original intentions, but became a welcome emergent function of the game for players none-the-less. Is Quake “objectively worse” because of an unintended feature that an entire community was able to spawn from? To argue that you’d have to dismiss the value of the subjective experience as being less important than the objective measurement that you use to qualify what is pretty much exclusively a subjective experience; the worth of a game.

The worth of a game being defined on these “objective” terms always goes back to some sort of developmental feature or some sort of critical reception. But this all is treated as though it exists in a vacuum, when of course, it doesn’t. Most gamers are still men, and most developers are still men. We still belong to a culture largely by men and for men, so when we try to measure the value of the work involved and the reception that results? We’re measuring the worth of games on the values of men. The values of men go into how games are made and they go into how games are perceived, because men are both the market and the sellers. This means that when we try to discuss games on “objective terms”, divorcing the games themselves from the culture that shapes both their intention and their reception, we ignore the gendered issue on how games are evaluated.

Those very same objective terms coincide very well with masculinized norms – to say that it is “objectively better” to have “better graphics” is nonsense because we as individuals define what we mean by “better graphics”. If you try to place an objective measurement, such as poly count or engine or fidelity, you run into a problem; because gaming is made mostly by men and mostly for men, the games that have the highest poly count and engine and fidelity will often be AAA games, and will often be games in the genres that do well with men, such as shooters, action games, racing games, and sports games. In fact, whenever new consoles come out, racing games are some of the first to be produced for the console as a means of showcasing the technology. Most of the budget for graphics, engine, and fidelity are likely going to go towards these games because they have the most sway in the reception of games and consequently, the sales. As such, we’re much less likely to find games with “objectively higher fidelity or more advanced engine specs” from the likes of an “atmospheric exploration” game or a “family/farm sim” game.

I mean, how do you even compare the graphics between a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 and a game like Lumines, on the PSP, a game that my mom would play for hours? You can compare them on subjective standards, such as which one you prefer or which one is nicer to look at or which one you feel does the best job at what it set out to do, or you can use an “objective measurement” like poly count or engine, at which point they are technically comparable in terms of digits, but it’s a meaningless comparison and to then assign a value based on that very same measurement means that, by default, Grand Theft Auto 5 will win.

Are objective measurements bad? In and of themselves no, and there’s certainly a lot of values to objective measurement, the problem is when we try to come up with objective measurements of *value*. To do so requires ignoring the culture surrounding how we frame these measurements, and helps to influence perception within gaming towards favoring standards that stem from a masculinized gaming and social environment.

So called “objective standards” do not exist in a vacuum. The bigger over-arching standards are themselves a result of our cultural values, and those cultural values are not in any way objective. When we frame our conversations on terms that deprive conversations about games from the culture that both influences their creation and their perception, we end up with a situation where the games that are considered “objectively better” are almost always going to be games that continue to put masculine perspectives in a position of privilege.

To undo this, I feel like we need to embrace subjectivity as a worthwhile endeavor rather than trying to force games we admire to fit an “objective standard”. Games have nearly limitless possibilities but the constraints on how we perceive games is filtered through the male-dominated culture that surrounds us, which helps lend credence to the idea that stagnation is the best option. The platonic ideal of a game, as determined by gamers, would be a game that has no bugs, has the most advanced graphical fidelity imaginable, is well-received by all of the critics and audiences alike, and did absolutely everything it set out to do.

Is this a bad ideal? Not necessarily, but it’s an ideal that can’t be removed from its context; think about who exactly the critics and audiences are, think about what games have the most advanced graphical fidelity and the most attention to fixing bugs. These aren’t going to be games like Proteus, they’re going to be games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. If we construct our platonic ideal of games on such standards, we continue to validate the demand that gaming be by men and for men, because these “objective measurements” are ultimately meaningless without that context, and with that context, become a justification for the status quo of how games are made and who they’re made for.

We need to recognize the value of subjective perspectives. This whole “reals before feels” thing is not only a common thing in gaming culture but in culture at large; men are stereotyped as more logical and women as more emotional, and this is a huge false dichotomy. Emotions don’t override logic, and men can be just as emotional as women, while women can be just as logical as men. Subjectivity is denigrated and objectivity valued, but as I’ve said, objectivity kind of doesn’t exist. So really, we’re weighing some subjective standards as being more valuable than others by trying to appeal to logic, when really it’s nothing more than feelings. But feelings are okay, feelings are a good thing when they’re recognized properly and managed. How a game makes you feel, what it provokes you to think about, these things have worth and that worth is hampered by trying to demote them to a lesser status over supposedly objective standards like “graphical fidelity” that ultimately don’t mean anything.

But yet, there’s still even more lying underneath the issues of gaming culture and how it can affect our perception. In Section 8, I’ll discuss how games specifically can change our perception.

How Games Change Perception

Games don’t cause violence. I want to get that right out of the gate – the often accepted narrative that video games play a significant role in the making of violent criminals or mass murderers is just wrong on so many levels. Games also don’t make you a misogynist, or make you a racist, or anything of the sort. But games still do have an effect on people, it’s just that the effect is being poorly understood I feel.

The issue of representation in gaming is more complex than I think a lot of people have ever gotten around to discussing in-depth, at least to my knowledge. We do need more women as characters in video games, but my respondents were right – plenty of them said that we also need better written women characters, and this is also true.

The reason why these things are true is because it feeds into a potentially growing sense of distance from feminine perspectives, where things that aren’t viewed as masculine are seen as unimportant, trivial, not worth consideration, inferior, or even downright bad. By making things mostly about men and things that men like and things that men relate to, it makes it harder for anyone who plays games to grow or learn or develop. The lack of development is not solely the fault of games or gaming culture; it’s pervasive in general.

The idealization of masculinity and devaluing of femininity is present at every level, from the big picture like gender representation in politics, to smaller stuff like workplace interactions and life at school, to even the very tiny differences such as having the only playable character in most games be some sort of relatively attractive, masculine white guy. That tiniest of differences means very little on its own, and in that sense, the issues that games present is not something that they generate but something that they reflect; violent people like the columbine shooters who notoriously played video games, were not compelled by video games to become violent. In fact, there’s reason to believe that mass shooters, who statistically are almost exclusively men, are more likely to be a result of issues relating to gender norms. Video games do not create gender norms, and they do not convince people to believe in gender norms full-stop. Instead, they reflect those gender norms, and that’s an issue because gaming culture is particularly toxic when it comes to its presentation of gender.

Alright, it’s time to wade through some really deep theory stuff. I need to talk about two things: Othering, and Objectified Body Consciousness.

I’ve already discussed othering in section 6, but I’d like to expand on it a bit. In “Gender as a social structure”, Risman says the following –

“We must pay close attention to what men do to preserve their power and privilege… one process involved is when super-ordinate groups effectively ‘other’ those who they want to define as subordinate, creating devalued statuses and expectations for them.”

This manifested itself through the discourse of gaming culture, where women were effectively portrayed as external to the culture by referring to them as “casuals”. But this also manifests in the games themselves; consistently, male protagonists are prevalent among games across multiple genres. The game’s protagonist is meant to be a vessel for the player both literally and figuratively; the protagonist is our arms legs, eyes, ears , and voice for interacting with the game’s world and story. According to a study done by EEDAR, a market data analysis firm, consistently, men are represented well in games of any genre, while female protagonists are only prevalent in “casual” genres, and even so, still less well represented than male protagonists in those same genres. As such, the protagonist, the vessel for the player, is most likely going to be a man, all things considered.

Because the man is constructed as the player character, the man is also constructed as the self; the process of “othering” refers to differentiating a group as external, as “other”. By making a situation in which most player characters are men, and many games don’t even have the option of playing as women, the games help construct women as “other”, as fundamentally different, external, and less important as a result. This has consequences for men, in that men, over the course of years participating in gaming, grow ever so slowly more distant from the experiences and perspectives of women, because the media they consume always prioritizes men’s perspectives, and treats women as supplementary if available at all. It also, of course, has effects on women.

The concept of Objectified Body Consciousness refers to the phenomenon of women experiencing self-consciousness about their bodies in relation to external points of view, particularly, the perspective of men. The term was coined by Dr. Nita Mary McKinley, a professor of Psychology who works at the University of Washington, Tacoma, specializes in gender and gender role development, and takes a particular interest in women’s body experiences in US Culture.

A quote, from McKinley and Janet Hyde’s article “The Objectified Body Consciousness Scale” –

“According to feminist theorists, the feminine body is constructed as an object “to be looked at”. Because of this construction, women learn to view their bodies as if they were outside observers. They internalize cultural body standards so that the standards appear to originate from the self and believe that achieving these standards is possible, even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary.” (Pg 182-183).

The concept of objectified body consciousness is measurable in three ways, according to McKinley and Hyde – body surveillance, internalization of cultural body standards, and beliefs about appearance control. Here’s what they have to say about Body Surveillance, quote –

“The central tenet of OBC is that the feminine body is constructed as an object of male desire and so exists to receive the gaze of the male “other”. Constant self-surveillance, seeing themselves as others see them, is necessary to ensure that women comply with cultural body standards and avoid negative judgments. Women’s relationship to their bodies becomes that of object and external onlooker; they exist as objects to themselves. Women learn to associate body surveillance with self-love, health, and individual achievement. But constant self-surveillance has negative implications for women. Psychological research has demonstrated that when we focus our attention on ourselves and we are aware of standards for behavior, we compare ourselves to that standard and try to reduce any discrepancy. If we cannot reduce the discrepancy, we feel bad. Experimental data also indicate that self-focus can make us more susceptible to influence by other people and reduces our capacity to focus on the outside world.”

A quote on the Internalization of Cultural Standards –

“Cultural body standards provide the ideal to which a woman compares herself when she watches her body. Internalization of cultural body standards makes it appear as though these standards come from within the individual woman and makes the achievement of these standards appear to be a personal choice rather than a product of social pressure. Women themselves want to be “beautiful.” When this desire is constructed as a personal choice, women are more willing to conform than when they believe the standards were externally imposed. However, there are considerable economic and interpersonal pressures on women to achieve a certain body type… Because cultural standards for the feminine body are virtually impossible to realize fully, women who internalize them, connecting achievement of those standards with their identity, may feel shame when they do not measure up. Shame may be a common emotion women feel in relation to their bodies. This shame is not simply negative feelings about the body, but about the self. Bartky argued that the amount of shame a woman experiences toward her body is a measure of the extent to which she has internalized cultural standards.”

A quote on appearance control –

“OBC relies on an underlying assumption that women are responsible for how their bodies look and can, given enough effort, control their appearance and comply with cultural standards. Convincing women that they are responsible for how they look is necessary to make them accept attractiveness as a reasonable standard by which to judge themselves. Constructing the achievement of cultural body standards as a choice encourages the belief that appearance can be controlled… Unfortunately, control beliefs may also encourage negative behaviors, such as restricted eating. Restricted eating can damage health, can actually induce weight gain by changing metabolic processes, and may be the most underrated cause of illness in western society. The inevitable regain of weight that follows food restriction can increase the risk of diabetes, high blood pr