Watch The Game Community Miss the Point on the Temkin Thing

The woman who accused Max Temkin of rape has posted her statement.

And the Cards-Against-Humanity-aware portion of the internet has broken down into two primary groups: the people who support Magz and the people who support Temkin. The positions are pretty much either you believe Magz that Temkin raped her, or you support Temkin because he’s a nice guy who made a cool game and should be innocent unless proven guilty.

(So, first off, the latter position is about as ridiculous as saying your First Amendment rights have been violated when you get banned from someone’s forum. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a legal principle. No one’s suing anyone here, and that principle doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to say that something happened unless you have proof that will stand up in court.)

As is all too sadly characteristic of games’ and geekdom’s treatment of any issue touching on gender, very few people seem to be able to talk about the actual issue at hand.

Let me say something that’s going to sound harsh: As a woman in games, I don’t care about the details of what happened between Temkin and Magz eight years ago. I care as a person, because regardless of what went down, it’s clearly caused a significant amount of pain. But as a woman in games, those details are irrelevant to me. We can’t know exactly what happened. It’s possible one of them is lying. And it’s possible both of them are telling the truth as they see it.

However, we can know how Temkin handled being accused of sexual assault, because he helpfully put it in writing for us and published it. And we can see how gamers and geeks and games industry people have reacted, because they helpfully put many of their responses in writing and published them too.

Here’s what I care about as a woman in games, as a woman in a community that does not exactly have a good track record when it comes to how it treats women: a woman came forward and accused a games industry person of sexual assault. He posted a response that was full of dismissiveness, condescension, and veiled threats. People rallied to his side because they like the game he made and/or like him.

You guys, you can like Max Temkin and still think his response was problematic. You can like his game and still think his response was problematic. You can believe that he did nothing wrong eight years ago, and still think his response is problematic. You can like him, like his game, not have an opinion on what happened eight years ago because why would you have to decide who must be telling the truth, and still think his response is problematic.

As a woman in games, I care about how the community reacts when a woman (or anyone, but let’s not kid ourselves about the gender issues at play here) comes forward says she was sexually assaulted. I especially care when the person she’s accusing is one of our own, because that’s when people’s true colors show.

The idea that one of these people must be lying, and you must take a side on which one that is, and the most important thing is getting to the truth of what happened between two college students eight years ago, is pretty illustrative of the way the community forces these questions into unhelpful binaries. (Let’s nitpick the details about exactly how much it would have cost Ubisoft to put in a playable female character! Let’s determine what would be historically accurate for women’s roles… in a fantasy world that never existed!)

As long as we force everyone to argue over tangential details, real conversations about these issues can’t happen.

Here’s the issue:

A woman said that a well-known figure in the tabletop games community sexually assaulted her years ago. That figure posted a response that a lot of people see as a bad example of how to handle this stuff, and as a silencing tactic. And a lot of people jumped in to insist that because they like Max Temkin, he couldn’t possibly have done what she says he did.

That immediate call to take sides, the support of the silencing response, the insistence that because someone is one of us they couldn’t have done anything bad, and all that geek passion directed into the sides-taking (not to mention the requisite dose of MRA grossness) is exactly what makes geekdom such a fraught and hostile environment for women who experience harassment or assault.

Temkin may or may not be a great person. He may or may not have believed he was doing something consensual eight years ago. That’s not the issue.

The issue is the way he responded.