What Games Means to Me

I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember. I started on an old Atari 2600 and a pre-windows PC. I remember competing with my mom playing Centipede, I remember playing the old text-based game Adventure, and it's Hall of the Mountain King. For context, I'm only 31 y/o, so I was easily single-digit age when I started gaming. Games have been more a part of my life than anything else, if I'm being truly frank her, even more than my family. It's something that's been a part of my life for over two decades, if not more (memories of my childhood are pretty fuzzy). So, what happens in gaming matters to me.

I think that's why I can't seem to shake the Zoe Quinn thing. As long as I've been gaming I've also been consuming game journalism. I remember back when Gamespot was a fairly rag-tag site that I used to read on a regular basis. I eventually drifted away from it because the reviews weren't lining up with my tastes anymore. No biggie, that happens, at the time (mid 90's, if I remember correctly) gaming was diverging more towards multiplayer that singleplayer experiences, and I've always been a singleplayer kind of gamer. I drifted for awhile without any good professional feedback on games that I found useful, then I stumbled across a site I'm still fond of today: Ars Technica. I like their game reviews, and I've found that my tastes generally align with their reviews. More recently I've expanded that a little to include TotalBiscut's YouTube channel, and I absolutely delight on his game industry commentary. I can easily disagree with TotalBiscut's approach to gaming, and what he does/doesn't like (Dear Esther being the quintessential example), but I absolutely adore how he reviews games, as it gives me a phenomenal amount of information on whether or not I'd like the game.

But, I digress, and probably over-provide context here. I feel that the core idea of the message I want to convey here is what games mean to me. I am a gamer, and I wear that badge with the same level of pride that I do all of the other ones that I assign myself (for anyone who knows me, I've got an ego that's hard to match, so there's a lot of pride in those labels for me).

Over the years my understanding of my medium of choice has evolved. At first it was an entertaining challenge. I remember my first time playing the original X-Com and was totally engrossed with the complexity of the game, and how much I had to juggle at once to be good at it. I loved the challenge, and I still do today. As I started getting educated and more critical of my environment I got inclining of some of the norms in gaming that were rubbing me the wrong way. The most prominent thing is that gaming was popularly thought of as a 'guy' thing. This bothered me, I never considered women to be any worse at gaming than men, as my mom could regularly trounce me at centipede back in the Atari days. I wanted to understand why, so I researched it. Before that I was never very engaged in the online community of gamers, and when I got there I was rather shocked at some (admittedly not all) of what I saw. Misogyny was common, and women were being harassed out of the scene. Can I point to specific examples? Well, kind of, but my memory from that far back is pretty hazy (I think my memory is crap until about ~3 years ago or so, that's for another post though). I do remember one article I read talking about how in competitive gaming, one woman got sexually harassed out of a competition by her male contender, and afterwards the guy who had done the harassing said that such harassment was a 'part of gaming'. I seriously re-considered if I wanted to be a gamer at that point.

But I persist in calling myself a gamer, not because I feel that sexually harassing women is a part of gaming. Heck, the same group can (and often does) mean different things to different people. I do think I share at least one thing in common with the harassing guy: we both love games. For me that's the essence of my identity as a gamer.

So, I had recognized that gaming was a hostile environment to women, and I disliked that. It's a medium that's important to me, and anything important to me I have a desire to share. I shuddered at the thought that I may not be able to share something so important with most of the people in my life (It's always been for me that most of my friends are women). Most of the times I do share that, I get cynical feedback. I remember one instance of sharing the last bits of Brood War with a female friend, and as we were watching the ending cinematic the only thing she could say about the entire thing was to mutter "cyber barbie" about Kerrigan's appearance.

Now, granted, this isn't someone who's been through the Starcraft campaign, so I understood the emotional connections would be absent, but I still felt hurt. Here was a character that I had seen through countless adventures, who I had watched fall to the Zerg and be reborn as the Queen of Blades, who had slain many other characters I had come to adore. This was a character I was emotionally vested in. What I saw at the end of Brood War was the culmination of all those experiences into one dark, dreadful moment. I wanted to share that dread, that sense of loss and sadness. All, it seems, I could share of that was "cyber barbie". My heart sunk, and I think that was the point I stopped sharing my medium with others. It wasn't something that could be understood by someone who wasn't already there.

It's not to say that I didn't understand where my friend was coming from, games do oversexualize women (Dead or Alive, anyone?). I never saw that as an issue specific to gaming as I see the same thing in every other form of media as well. As my college education continued so did my ability to identify and critique it. I absolutely adore Bioware, and I still roll my eyes at their concept of the female figure. Sometimes my objection over portrayal of women in games pushed me to boycott certain franchises. Tomb Raider is the perfect example, I was just so turned off (ironically) by the physical representation of Lara Croft that I just turned away from the franchise entirely, up until the recent reboot.

I was thrilled when Anita Sarkeesian started Feminist Frequency. Finally there was someone bringing that kind of analysis I was already familiar with (academic) to this part of gaming that I'd been critiquing in my mind in an unstructured and subjective way. Now I had an analytical framework to work with! Shortly thereafter started coming the indie game development scene, and some of the games I love the most today that came from it: Kerbal Space Program, Journey, FTL. Journey especially, as that's when I first started to really profoundly identify women's contributions to game development. Before that it was piecemeal, at best. I was seeing perspectives that I never had before, ways of engaging with my favorite medium that were new and refreshing for me. I still remember the first game I played where I felt that women weren't being blatantly objectified: The Longest Journey. As much as old-school point-and-click adventure games infuriate me (Wait, I need to get the deflated rubber ducky float, patch it, inflate it, and combine it with a pair of huge pliers and rope so I can get the key that's sitting in the subway, so I can open the power junction by the theater to distract the cleaning guy and get in the theater? *seriously?!*), I still love them. Call it an acquired taste (-:

Then I saw something I was not expecting: Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, The Big Bang Theory, game advertisements on television and in theaters. Gaming was becoming mainstream. I was thrilled! To thie day I still don't feel like I can really share my experience as a gamer with most people, but that's more to do with me. I was excited that more and more people would be having the experiences that I've had over the past few decades though. Yes, it is 'just a game'. It's also fair to say that games reflect ourselves, especially in the Bioware games (still annoyed about what I can only refer to as 'BioBoobs', though). I played through Mass effect as a good-ish character. I wasn't afraid of being an asshole if I felt it was necessary, or if something/one rubbed me the wrong way (I was a total ass to Verner).

I also saw a step up of the vitriol that was coming from the kinds of gamers with the same attitude as that one guy who sexually harassed his competitor out of the competition. I couldn't help but resignedly sigh and accept that I was probably going to see more of that. I had become comfortable in my identity as a gamer, and moreso because I wasn't *that* kind of gamer. Certainly a degree of pride about that.

Honestly I never really dug myself into the politics of gaming until I started listening to TotalBiscut. Given that I've got a degree in public policy, one would think this is something that would come up for me more frequently. I haven't been to a gaming convention in a long time (full disclosure though, I did volunteer for Arisia 2013), and it's been hard to find a group of gamers that I really connect with well, so I really haven't been connected well enough to know about any of this.

So then I find out about this whole Zoe Quinn thing, and I rally shouldn't be as riled up about it as I am. Ok, yeah, she's something of a screw-up, that's fine. People can be screw-ups, that's just how it happens. I guess what's been spinning around this for me is that some of the things I've been noticing outside of gaming that I've been annoyed with when it comes to a feminist critique, found their way into gaming. As for those 'things I've been annoyed with', see items 5 and 6 in my previous post. Take those and apply them to other fields, it's something I've been noticing and critiquing. I play a dangerous game though, as in these critiques I tend to put some of my friendships at risk, because I do critique very emotionally-laden topics.

And this is where I try to come full circle, I suppose. It traces back to one of my core values: the things that matter the most to us are the ones we should be critiquing the most, otherwise they have no method of improving over time. I am critical of games, as I've mentioned to the point of boycotting a franchise for awhile because of how I disagreed with it's portrayal of women (Tomb Raider). I even wrote a paper that did a critique of how games present relationship options for the player character. I gave Mass Effect some good shit in that thing, and I absolutely love Mass Effect!

Part of it is also that I think I needed a bit of hero-bashing. I'll come straight out and say that Wil Wheaton's been someone I've admired for awhile, especially given that he started his stardom as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: TNG. He's really embraced the geek/nerd/gamer/whatever-you-wanna-call-it culture when he had every reason to turn away from it. I can't agree with his opinions in this matter, and I feel that his opinions reinforce the anti-criticism spirit that's been surrounding the entire Zoe Quinn issue. That's just something, being a person who absolutely loves games as much as I do and who values criticism as a vital part of how games will grow and evolve, that I can't condone.

So, I'm in a weird and very isolating place, again, where I'm not sure exactly how to express what gaming means to me. In a lot of ways, I guess I'm, again, redefining what it means for me to be a gamer. What it'll morph into, I'm not sure. I do know that my values of critiquing the things I care the most about, and the people who work with/create them, will play heavily into it going forward, however.

I guess to give a TL;DR version: I love games, they're meaningful to me, and I value them. That's why I care about our ability to critique them, as well as how they're made, who makes them, and how we as a culture perceive them.

Cheers folks,

- Jason

Update (9/22/14): I've since moved the sites I get news from to The Escapist, GoodGamers.us, Niche Gamer, and Tech Raptor.