The only word in that phrase that I feel confident I don’t have to look up is ‘perspective’.

It is with these words that the feminist gamer everyone loves to hate – I forget her name but I’m sure a quick Google could find her if you really have no idea what I’m on about – introduces her “controversial” youtube series of video game tropes versus women. And it is at about the same point that she says those words that a debilitating sadness crawls around your heart and you weep for the world which allows self-important twenty-somethings the opportunity to use the word ‘systemic’ in public without being widely vilified.

Of course, AS has been widely vilified, not for her choice of words but for her choice of subject matter. Criticising art is a noble calling and those who do it right end up filling the annals of history just as much as their poor targets, and we love to read them because they can be just so wonderfully sarcastic and it’s at this point that people would usually stick in a few quotes by Roger Ebert to illustrate what they’re talking about. You already know Roger Ebert and what he has to say about Freddy got Fingered still gives you a bit of a chuckle on otherwise rainy days, so such a tangent is unnecessary. We liked him because he was giving his opinion in an entertaining manner, such that you knew if you were entertained by him you would share his taste and thus know, by reading his reviews, which films to see and which to avoid. Because really, any po-faced individual could stand up in front of you and tell you that going to see something which puts Tom Greene front and centre (instead of off to the side-story where he can actually be quite fun) is an exercise in self-flagellation for even the most humour-impaired among us. But Roger Ebert instead gives you a great quote about barrel-scraping and you go home happy with your money in your pocket.

What the review does not do, however, is paint you the reader as a bad person should you happen to enjoy the film. The review allows you, the reader, the space to enjoy the film if you wish and see it as nonsensical, harmless fun if that’s the way you roll. You don’t get villified for enjoying it and you are allowed to retain your own opinion because really, all a critic does is give you his opinion and allow you to go off and make your own decisions based on it. But in the case of dear old AS things get slightly different.

The first hint comes in that lovely quote at the beginning, the ‘systemic big-picture perspective’ which AS claims to be using to provide her criticism of stuff she feels everyone should be offended by. There are some interesting elements to observe in the language she uses here, and taking them one by one here they are.

Systemic

I had to look this up because I don’t spend much time reading corporate horsecrap. The word means going through everything comprehensively, using a ‘system’ as it were instead of hopping about from place to place as I usually do when I write. There’s a lovely synonym that could have been used here which would have been a whole lot more palatable (‘structured’) but that word doesn’t quite have the academic or scientific weight of a word like ‘systemic’. Which is quite probably why it wasn’t used.

Big-picture

Again, I had to look this up because it really isn’t clear what it means. ‘Big-picture’ is a phrase I usually hear from people who are complaining that I haven’t looked at it, implying that my view is limited and narrow – I’m just looking at the pretty butterfly flapping its wings instead of reeling in horror at the enormous loss of life caused by the ensuing hurricane thousands of kilometres away two weeks later. It’s funny seeing such a buzzword used right next door to the scientific gravitas of ‘systemic’, but it’s there to make AS’s goals clear: she’s going to go through everything and she has a system to do it.

Perspective

Note. Not the perspective of AS herself, but the perspective that is leant through the ‘systemic, big-picture’ approach that she is using. Which, because it is not only structured in nature (‘systemic!’) but so wide-ranging that it takes in everything (‘big picture!’), cannot be subjected to criticism itself because it is so clearly right.

But right or not, what really comes from this description is a sense of ensuing ennui. This is not going to be a fun ride. You the watcher are going to be literally hit over the head repeatedly with a heavy club as a young woman moralizes at you on the evils of treating pixellated representations of women as objects. But that isn’t the worst of it.

What also isn’t the worst of it is that you the watcher are given absolutely no wiggle room. You cannot disagree with anything that AS says because to do so would be to advocate gender violence. You have no choice but to nod along with her conclusions because, remember, they were arrived at by a ‘systemic’ method looking at the ‘big-picture’ and therefore must comprise of nothing but solid fact. If you disagree with something then – oh! Systemic, remember! Big-Picture! She’s looked at everything. There’s not even a gap that Gordon Freeman could crowbar his way through and that’s a fact.

Plus there’s also the fact that she says she’s a feminist.

Which is just, like, facepalm.

Saying you’re a feminist is like saying you’re against Nazis. It’s like saying you believe rape and murder are terrible things. It’s like saying that discrimination based on gender or skin colour or accent or social class or amount of money in pocket is a bad, bad, very bad thing. So bad. Disgusting, in fact. Like, really really really very bad.

And while you’re sitting there thinking but hang on, isn’t being against Nazis, rape and discrimination a good thing, you land on a very important point which is that if you actually have to stand up and TELL people that you’re against rape (or bullying – thank you, Adobe) … there’s something wrong.

So AS’s feminist label is in fact a shield, saying that if you happen to disagree with her then you are also disagreeing with her label. By this logic you are therefore anti-feminist and by THAT logic you must be the sort of person who catcalls women on the street and believes date-rape isn’t all that bad.

Because, you know, in a digital world there’s only two paths to take.

If you’re not with the feminists, you’re against the feminists.

And that’s a phrase that sounds hauntingly familiar.

And funnily enough, since I wrote that, salon.com has come up with an article which does, in fact, accuse the broad church of anti-feminism of terrorism.

But that’s still not the worst of it.

The worst of it is that the three women whose names get thrown around so often in this great big mess … are – and I do apologise in advance for taking such an extreme standpoint here but it needs to be said – kinda mediocre.

Zoe Quinn’s game ‘Depression Quest’ is meant to give the player an inside look on what it’s like to suffer from depression. It is not fun to play. Even for someone who is not clinically depressed, it’s pretty depressing. As you click around the “interactive (non)fiction” (“Non-fiction what? Non-fiction what?”) which is presented in the style of one of the Choose Your Own Adventure books – except that the adventure consists of your partner telling you you’re not yourself and your status bar telling you you hate yourself – very little that you do seems to have any effect. You just get presented with screen after screen of bland text on a bland background, which is all very meaningful and all of that but it’s not terribly inspired and it isn’t much fun and it’s very hard to maintain interest. An excerpt:

It’s a little after noon on a muggy Saturday. Your mother has come over for a surprise visit, claiming loudly that she doesn’t see you enough so she’d decided to invite herself over. As you converse, she walks around your place, and you get the distinct impression that you’re being “inspected.” So what’s going on with you lately, she asks abruptly. Taken somewhat aback by this left-fielder you tell her you’re not sure what she means. She repeats the question, saying that you haven’t seemed like yourself lately – she gestures to the dirty dishes piled in the sink and notes the fact that you haven’t called or visited in a while. Your reticence only seems to spur her on more; she presses you, asking if you’re having problems at work or with Alex, and you’re beginning to feel increasingly battered by her sudden well-meaning but overwhelming inquisition.

Taken somewhat aback at how poorly written this all was, I read this and went, okay, and? But there is no ‘and’ – that is all there is, and that is that the game does, for as long as it takes for you to get sick of it and go and do something, you know, not depressing. Which I guess the fans of DQ would find to be a bit of a left-fielder, if you will, because the only thing the ‘game’ does well is put you in the exact same depressed state of mind that the author says she labours under. Which is all very clever and on a level with chopping someone’s legs off so they can find out what it feels like to be confined to a wheelchair but it’s not what anyone would call riveting entertainment. But of course you can’t say that, because the last thing you want to tell a depressed person is that you think their work was kind of meh. The last thing anyone wants to do in public is criticise a depressed person and tell them their work is crap. You may as well go around killing puppy-sized spiders.

What is it that Brianna Wu does for a living I’m not exactly sure, but I found a link to a homepage of sorts which was so big it made my laptop freeze up for thirty seconds while it downloaded a number of backgrounds showing gun wielding women wearing skin tight costumes. I wondered idly what AS would make of that, but possibly it’s all okay because when you play the game you’re being a skin-tight bodysuit-clad gun wielder instead of them being background. Her work is perhaps the only saving grace in the sphere of feminism versus games, because it shows that really no-one is objecting to renditions of male and female bodies that the average person will never attain, the issue is more subtle than that, the issue is, at the root of it, how these incredible avatars are used.

And then Polygon comes along and spoils it all by getting seriously huffy about the cutscenes in Bayonetta 2 which “leer” at the player’s character. Who, just in case anyone thought she might be a real person, has guns in the heels of her boots.

And then Brianna goes on the offensive and asks – challenges, in fact – the male part of the gaming industry why they haven’t stood up and spoken up about misogyny in the industry. The answer which has evidently escaped her is the same one to answer why moderate Muslims felt no need to speak up against Islamic terrorism; the same answer to why moderate Christians feel no need to speak up about them fine folks what murdered some doctors who performed abortions. Speaking up to say that you, as a person of category X, reject the actions of other people in category X, simply puts you in the same category as those people whose actions you are rejecting.

This angry horde has been allowed to wage its misogynistic war without penalty for too long. It’s time for the video game industry to stop them.

So says Brianna. Not many words have to change before it sounds like George W. in March 2003. (The difference is, of course, that her goals are pure, rather than wallowing in Iraqi oil.)

And nobody wants to be put in the same category as the stereotype of the lone male gamer whose only power is to make anonymous death threats over the internet. Most likely that isn’t even the worst of it, and he’s the sort of person who uses the word “feminazi” in general conversation.

You can’t win.

The worst of it

The worst of it is also, a sticky wicket to tackle.

AS’s videos are not very good.

DQ is not very good.

Brianna Wu had never been heard of (certainly not to the extent she is now) before she publicly told the world that she had been ‘doxxed’.

And yet.

Everyone and their dog has an opinion on how wrong AS is. Everyone’s neighbour’s dog is incensed at how wrong it is that DQ got positively reviewed by someone who knew the author. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about Brianna but that’s okay because she’s kicking up enough dust all by herself, in the Guardian, in the Washington Post, and on MSNBC. I’m even curious now, thanks to all this publicity, to see what Revolution 60 (her game) is all about. I’d never have heard about it else. And AS is racking up the views on youtube even if the best thing about her videos are the graphics during the intro.

If anyone was really out to silence these women and stop their messages being heard, they must now be feeling like a right real dingbat.

I just wish that the part of the net yelling so hard about misogyny in video games wasn’t so mediocre at what they do. If they would just stand up and yell a bit then we could all just compare them to Fox News in peace, and in so doing notice their blithering idiocy.

You can’t criticise video games like you can criticise politics. There are plenty of countries in the world where the idea of a woman being allowed to work independantly (never mind at something she enjoys) is completely out of the question. Our friendly oil reservoirs in Saudi Arabia don’t even allow women to drive, and that’s about the most innocuous thing about them. (An interesting aside is that those countries which are most officially misogynistic are also the most likely to be prude, with some even going so far as to disallow artistic expression all together.) These political stances you can criticse and take down and analyse for their ill-effects on half the population and that is fine and wonderful and true. But start calling out art for trying to use sex to sell itself – and then you start moving into anti-capitalism territory and that’s a whole other can of worms.

It would be an interesting can of worms, though. I’d love to see the sort of death threats Libertarians give.

Video games are an art form just like all the rest. You can give your opinion on art and you can disagree, vehemently, with what it depicts, but that is as far as it goes. You can shout at the mirror for reflecting the world but it isn’t really the fault of the mirror.

But even that, really isn’t the worst of it.

The really, really worst of it

The worst of it is that the best-case result of this is that people become afraid of speaking their minds, and of causing offense.

Funny, I know. But also just as chilling.

I hope that, in eradicating cat calls, fat- and slut-shaming, revenge porn, celeb photo hackers, online bullies and the like, we will all live in a nicer, happier, safer world.

But if the method we choose to get rid of society’s evils is as bland as Feminist Frequency then I wonder what else we’ll lose.

I wonder if we will end up in a world which is as uniform a shade of grey as Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest.

I wonder if we’ll end up with art as mediocre as Anita Sarkeesian’s videos.

I wonder if, by then, we’ll even be able to perceive our own mediocrity.

I wonder, if, Anita Sarkeesian has actually, systemicly, big-pictured her perspective to see the actual big picture.

(You know – the bit of it which doesn’t include Anita Sarkeesian.)

I wonder if someone out there can take down evil using humour, the same way Roger Ebert took down Tom Greene.

I wonder if there’s a way to make feminism fun.

I wonder if we’ll ever forget that the only important thing, the only thing worth doing and the only thing which can make things better than you think they are, is being able to look at your reflection, and laugh.

Stay safe out there, kids. Seek colour. Reject grey.

Further reading

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/freddy-got-fingered-2001

http://twitter.com/Adobe/status/524727259844718592

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/23/gamergate_is_really_about_terrorism_why_bill_maher_should_be_vilifying_the_gaming_community_too/

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-22/spider-the-size-of-a-puppy-killed-by-harvard-scientist

http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/20/rape-and-death-threats-are-terrorizing-female-gamers-why-havent-men-in-tech-spoken-out/

http://www.revolution60.com

http://www.feministfrequency.com/