Anonymous asked: In your GamerGate post, you said "I’m pretty sure I have the exact opposite vision from them about what video games should be like". What is your vision of what video games should be like and what do you believe GamerGate's vision of what video games should be like is?

I think it’s a great thing that there are people trying to make feminist video games and evaluate video games for how feminist they are and discuss feminism in video games.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no interest in playing feminist video games. In general I find feminist media very offputting; the feminist narratives of womanhood never include anything I am, could be, or might aspire to, so I feel very lonely whenever I engage with feminist media. Plus, declaring a work of media feminist makes my brain mentally switch it from ‘entertainment’ to ‘duty’. I haven’t seen Jupiter Ascending or Mad Max for this reason; I’d probably have liked them, but now my brain has tagged them as Feminist Media I Ought To Watch and so now it doesn’t want to.

But all of that is totally irrelevant. I also don’t like playing LoL, but I think it’s a great thing that there are people who play it and discuss it and write about it. I hate jump scares and so refuse to play Five Nights at Freddy’s, but I think it’s awesome that people are making games like that and talking about games like that. And I think it’s totally reasonable and natural that people are complaining about games not being to their tastes and starting discussion groups about their preferred things and which games those things are present in.

Feminist media criticism is not at all interesting to me. I just think that if anyone wants it to exist, it should exist. And I think that going to a feminist media critic and saying “but why would you want to inject feminism into your video games?” is like me going up to a Five Nights at Freddy’s streamer and saying ‘but why would you want to inject jump scares into your video games?”

People have different preferences. Getting worked up about other people talking about and complaining about and lobbying for their preferences is super silly.

This would be different if there were, like, a powerful jump scares lobby that was trying to make sure every single game released had jump scares in it, and they were gaining ground such that I pretty much couldn’t find a game without jump scares. I think this is what Gamergate thinks is happening with feminism. But they are wrong. It is still really easy to find games, including major mass-market games by big-deal developers, which clearly aren’t feminist. It is still easy to find game reviewers who aren’t feminist. And even if this were false, and every single game developer had recently capitulated to the feminists, Gamergate has spent a lot more of its energy talking about indie games and developers than about the big companies, so even if I accept their premise I believe that their advocacy is badly directed, against the submarket where they’re least likely to make a difference.

“But”, you say, ‘your analogy doesn’t hold, because people who like jump scares don’t try to insist that every game has jump scares, but feminists do talk like they want every game to be feminist.’



Firstly, I think they do this less than you think. They criticize the games that aren’t feminist, but mostly for the benefit of informing their feminist audience ‘you probably won’t like this one’. They applaud the ones that are. They crowdfund more feminist ones. They haven’t, for example, tried to get insufficiently feminist games boycotted or not advertised or made subject to government regulations. If they did any of those things I would oppose them. (If I’m wrong and they have done those things; I condemn this.) As far as I know, everything they have done so far falls under the category of ‘perfectly reasonable lobbying for a thing you feel strongly about’, and I think it’s hard to argue that the result has been disastrous for people who want to write not-feminist games.

The second thing that I understand to be the opinion of many people involved in Gamergate is that games shouldn’t be political. I disagree. I think games should totally be political. My favorite political narratives are a sort of ‘rugged Western/religious/sci-fi/fantasy individualistic haunted men wrestling their demons’ story or a ‘technoptimistic transhumanist liberalism power fantasy’ story and both of those are super political and whether a work of media pulls on those heartstrings of mine is very relevant to whether I’ll enjoy it. It is easy for me to imagine that similarly, feminists care a lot about whether a story is feminist. Good games have stories to them and stories are always and inherently ideological. I think there should be lots and lots of different stories it is acceptable to tell through the medium of video games, like there is for all other media. I think that most, if not all, of those stories will be ideological and that’s great.

The third thing that I disagree with many people involved with Gamergate about is whether the way female characters are presented in some mainstream games make gaming an uncomfortable place to be a woman. I don’t feel that way, but I think that the people saying this is true for them are not lying or attention-seeking or trying for sympathy; they probably actually do feel that way. I also think it costs less than many Gamergaters seem to realize to change this.

Some feminists have a habit of conflating ‘good for women’ with ‘good for feminists’ and ‘welcoming to women’ and ‘welcoming to feminism’. I think it’s important to remember that these are totally different things; the majority of women are not feminists. I have read some Gamergate conversations where the participants seemed to buy into the feminist narrative that the only way to be a welcoming community for women is to be more feminist (and therefore to conclude that it wasn’t worth it), and that narrative is false. Being welcoming to feminists is hard; being welcoming to women doesn’t come free, but most of the time it really is as easy as ‘treat them like everyone else’ .



Although. If I’m making a post about Gamergate it’s probably wise to pepper it with caveats. Making women feel welcome is as easy as treating them like you treat everyone else. But there are some people for whom that’s not their default, and it actually requires a lot of work to get to the point where they’re treating people all the same. I’ve noticed a lot of people who don’t object in principle to ‘treat men and women the same’ but who, in practice, get really worked up by (and spend lots of time yelling at) women who are attention-seeking or annoying, while just ignoring (and not even registering the existence of) men who are attention-seeking or annoying. Or people who have complicated theories that women just are more attention-seeking and annoying than men and so of course on average they’re way more of an asshole to women, it doesn’t mean they’re being sexist.

If you notice that in practice your typical relationship to men and to women is super different, it is more likely that you’re screwing up at the ‘treating everyone the same’ thing than that you’ve discovered something new about human nature.

So, yeah, my ideal video-gaming world has Anita Sarkeesian in it, and everyone who doesn’t want to look at games through her preferred framework ignores her, and it has feminist games and neoreactionary games and religious traditionalist games and Objectivist games and anarchist games in whatever proportions the market will bear, and people can vote with their voices and dollars and ignore the genres they don’t enjoy. Feminists talking about their desire for more feminist games won’t be met with any anger or condemnation, but they’ll join a vibrant marketplace of ideas in which everyone is trying to get more games that are meaningful to them made. People would feel free to say “this sort of narrative/character is important to me and there aren’t enough of them” and no one really would have a strong impulse to argue with them about that, because that sort of thing is honestly way too subjective to be worth arguing over.

I get the impression this is a different video gaming world than most people in Gamergate want, but if I’m wrong, then maybe I and they have more common ground than I realized.