In October of 1982, a little known video game developer published Custer’s Revenge, an unlicensed title for the Atari 2600 game console. The gameplay featured a pixilated General George Armstrong Custer, complete with cavalry hat and enormous erection, as he dodged arrows on his way from one end of the game map to the other, where there was an Indian princess tied to a pole whom he would then rape.
Outcry over the game’s content came from Native American groups, women’s rights advocates, and parents. It generated a slew of headlines, protests, and lawsuits, including even Atari attempting to sue developer Mystique. Yet the controversy helped the game sell 80,000 copies, generating a $3.9 million windfall for a game built around the sadistic rape of a captive woman.
Thankfully, rumors of a remake proved false.
Custer’s Revenge eventually became a tiny footnote in gaming’s past. And even though Mystique folded shortly after the game’s release, it set a disturbing precedent for the role of women in video games. Crude 1980s graphics or not, it is these types of precedents that weigh heavily on the mind of gamer culture commentator Anita Sarkeesian.
Anita Sarkeesian
When it comes to video games and social science, few characters are as polarizing as Anita Sarkeesian. But it wasn’t until approximately three months ago, when she uploaded her crowdfunded tour de force “Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” that she drew the enmity of, well, seemingly everyone.
For over three years, Sarkeesian has tackled a wide range of feminist related issues under the banner of her YouTube channel Feminist Frequency, criticizing not just video game developers, but movies, TV shows, novels, corporations, and other such institutions, about how women are used and portrayed in the media. Like a lot of other YouTube pundits, Sarkeesian’s work went largely unnoticed by the mainstream until her appearance at the TEDxWomen conference last year helped highlight her “Damsel in Distress” series, it’s Kickstarter campaign, and the harassment she experienced in the wake of her Kickstarter’s success, not to mention after uploading part 1 of the series this past March.
But Sarkeesian is no stranger to controversy or harassment. Before her mainstream exposure, gamers and media hounds had long caught on to her YouTube series, and despite her exasperated testimony that she was a gamer-girl at heart, her views on game culture’s well-documented misogynistic tendencies made her the whipping boy for every pallid, smart-mouthed gamer yutz from here to Hanoi.
Unlike fellow pro-gamer girl groups like the Frag Dolls or Team Unicorn, Sarkeesian’s approach to bridging the feminist divide in gaming culture is purely academic. In the pitch video to her Kickstarter campaign, she boasted that her series would be “well-researched, with in-depth analysis,” thorough in its mission to expose the root cause of misogyny in contemporary gaming.
Sarkeesian’s “proof” of her gamer-girl cred.
Sarkeesian’s main argument in part 1 of her Damsel in Distress series is that video games have overused a degrading and disrespectful stereotype of women as powerless and helpless victims often in need of rescue. Add in the condition of usually being the object of all’s desires, the female characters in video games are reduced to being the possessions of whatever males currently have them.
Sarkeesian, to her credit, provides an overwhelming amount of examples to back up her claim, even indicting the Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda franchises as archetypal cornerstones of this modern misogynistic paradigm. Though she is forgiving of older games and the infancy of their storytelling, she becomes less tolerant of it as game development moves into the 21st century, and hostile towards the tropes’ continued usage, especially when modern tastes demand edgier content, thus relying more and more on the victimization of women.
She is further incensed by how this victimization takes on increasingly grotesque tones, citing ad nauseam in part 2 how female characters in video games are routinely kidnapped, held hostage, mutilated, and in some cases raped and murdered, more often than not, as a means to spur male protagonists to action. Sarkeesian’s evidence is compelling, and sympathetic audiences will be inclined to agree, even if made to feel guilty for having just rescued Princess Peach from Bowser’s reptilian grasp yet again.
But it was that exact same need for guilt that motivated the internet backlash that has dogged Sarkeesian ever since she uploaded part 1 of “Damsel in Distress”. Gamers are an opinionated lot and, similar to any hobbyist, get royally pissed when you tell them that their preferred passion is not only maligning a vast segment of humanity, but makes them a bad person for participating in it.
Sarkeesian’s point of view outraged even the most liberal of gamers, even women, many of whom took to YouTube to respond, declining to sexualize gaming in such a way, arguing that Sarkeesian was not being fair to the whole range of games available. And they were right. Sarkeesian’s view stems largely from her education at California State University Northridge, and York University in her native Canada. It is a by-the-numbers academic script that any time women are not in control of any given situation, they are victims instead.
And like any good media pundit, Sarkeesian elects to ignore all contrary evidence to her claim. Even her brief lip service to games like Mirror’s Edge (2008) and Beyond Good and Evil (2003), which both feature female protagonists, are quickly overridden in favor of reviling post-modern gaming’s anti-woman themes. But her claims rapidly dry up in view of exactly how influential female characters have been in the world of gaming.
Left: Faith, from Mirror’s Edge. Right: Jade, from Beyond Good & Evil
For one thing, Sarkeesian ignores the prolific and wildly popular genre of role-playing games, mostly because those titles tend to incorporate strong female characters as a matter of routine. Squaresoft’s seminal 1997 classic Final Fantasy VII incorporated not one, but two strong female characters into its narrative, Tifa Lockhart and Aeris Gainsborough. Like a lot of RPGs, Final Fantasy VII is centered on one particular character, Cloud Stryfe, and the support characters and their relationships to him help move the story forward.
Sarkeesian might argue that Tifa and Aeris are merely waypoints to Cloud’s progression, but in Final Fantasy VII, Tifa and Aeris are not background characters; they are inseparable to the plot. Not only that, each character’s background and story is explored in depth. To say that they were marginalized in any way is akin to saying James Michener didn’t put enough detail in his books. It is absurd.
Aeris (l) and Tifa (r) from Final Fantasy VII
Sarkeesian’s argument also dissolves in the face of a game like Dragon Age: Origins whose female protagonists include sorceress Morrigan and the bard Liliana. The player may also play the game as a woman, so if a female gamer elected to play a female character, the detail put into fleshing out Morrigan and Liliana’s background stories reflects this option, conscious of developing female characters as realistically as possible.
Despite Sarkeesian’s protests to the contrary, game developers are more cognizant these days of how women should be portrayed, and while they may fall back on old reliable tropes to reach their core audience of male gamers, games like RPGs, both of the single-player and the Massively Multiplayer Online varieties are reaching out to women and reaping the profits. The writing, and the ability to choose your own gender, offer incredible new depth to storytelling.
Liliana (l) and Morrigan (r) from Dragon Age: Origins
And therein lies the great criticism of Sarkeesian: She isn’t really criticizing video games but is actually criticizing storytelling. Her outrage at overused tropes does not expose a misogynistic flaw but instead highlights how many modern games are boring, predictable, aimed at pre-teen boys, quick to titillate, and willing to sacrifice any semblance of thought-out content in favor of huge explosions and boobs.
Consider what a video game is: It is actually not the interactive medium Sarkeesian wants it to be; Douglas Rushkoff dispensed with that notion in his essay “The Information Arms Race” back in 1999. Video games are simply another form of storytelling, one that comes with a prescribed way for the player to interact with the game’s environment, and a deliberate, immutable path to the game’s conclusion.
Most games come with only one form of interaction. In action games, it is usually some form of violence. This restricts the developer in terms of what kind of story they can tell. And what the gamer community routinely pointed out to Sarkeesian was that if the only way to move the story forward was to mete out some form of violence, then simple tropes of power, revenge, lust, hate, despair, and madness, were easy ways to move such themes forward, given the games’ structure around dealing several metric tons worth of cans of whoop-ass.
Sarkeesian might call these “male power fantasies” but Bayonetta, Heavenly Sword, and Lollipop Chainsaw are all enormously popular among female gamers. Sarkeesian points out that certain indie games explore these same themes without resorting to violence and misogyny, but that isn’t the real crux of her problem.
L to R: Bayonetta, Nariko from Heavenly Sword, and Juliet from Lollipop Chainsaw
Unfortunately for Sarkeesian, her main antagonist is actually the video game industry, and they are not driven by ideology, but by profit. Game developers can change the way in which players interact with the game world, but they fear losing their core audience and the support of the game publisher. Games that appeal to men sell better than games that appeal to women, or at least this is the crutch the games industry relies on. Moreover, games that would appeal to women often appeal to men too, especially if a plucky dame needs to get out of some ridiculous trouble.
Sarkeesian is just as quick to turn her back on, and minimize, positive contributions to feminine advances in gaming as she is to demonize the most egregious of titles and developers. This is due to the variation of feminism she subscribes to, and it is a woefully outdated one as far as academicians go. She has argued in her written work that characters like Faith from Mirror’s Edge or Jade from Beyond Good and Evil are not actually female, but are instead male characters tucked into female forms, as they aspire to “traditionally” masculine ideals, such as stoicism, stunted emotions, and violence. She adds that embracing these characteristics too fully removes all aspects of femininity from the character. To compensate, these impostor female characters are often written with other “traditionally” feminine qualities, and ultimately portrayed as unstable or naive. Again, Sarkeesian’s evidence is compelling, as there are many characters that fit this mold.
But modern feminism rejects such notions. The idea that women would not deign to, nor aspire to, occupations or actions typically done by men, nevermind excel at them, not only denigrates men and the value of their work, but infantilizes women’s abilities and further serves to segregate gender roles in popular culture. In other words, a woman is equally badass at wielding an AR-15 as she is taking pictures. Or raising children. Or running a Fortune 100 company. Or winning athletic competitions. These games, those with female protagonists, serve to inspire and perpetuate that precise fact.
Now, world circumstances are likely the product of male influence and interference, but since several thousand years of social evolution cannot be undone, the best we can do is allow women, and the female characters we invent, to make their own decisions. Sarkeesian’s “female but really male” doctrine strips all of that away, attempting to redefine women on her terms, not theirs. By subtracting all roles of masculine origin, restricting and limiting the number of options for female roles, Sarkeesian actually commits the same act that men did for thousands of years: she’s telling women what to do. She may have earned almost $160k from her Kickstarter campaign, but her supporters probably didn’t expect getting told off would be an additional perk.
Sarkeesian is also cagey when it comes to what she thinks are acceptable portrayals of behavior by women in video games. Often, her videos are quick to blame the parties who get women wrong in their video games and movies, but she rarely offers insight into what she wants or thinks is acceptable. However, we get a glimpse of her ideas in her video about the Hunger Games film, wherein she describes Katniss Everdeen’s elaborate funerary rites for fellow tribute Rue as a near perfect example of truly feminine behavior in an action movie, then lambasts the character for hardly acknowledging Foxface’s sudden passing minutes later.
Scene from The Hunger Games
Of course, in the story, Katniss didn’t develop a relationship with Foxface at all, whereas Rue was a close friend. Katniss’ dismissal of Foxface’s death was about as realistic as one could imagine. But Sarkeesian doesn’t like it, designating it a critical lapse in portraying the character as feminine. Given that children are not routinely put into televised death matches, it is hard to imagine what would be an appropriate response. Seeing a hardened Katniss dismiss the death of an unfriendly rival sounds logical, if not feminine. It does not feel inaccurate, nor make Katniss any less feminine at least for it.
In the realm of science-fiction/fantasy stories and video games, assessing accurate female responses to alien invasions, mutant holocausts, wayward necromancers, shadow cabinet conspiracies, celestial conflagrations, haywire robot armies, and even your standard zombie apocalypse, are really a matter of conjecture. All we can do is guess. Maybe we can make educated guesses, but they’re still guesses. Sarkeesian’s “female but really male” thesis is a panacea that allows her to dismiss any work she disapproves of, without having to explain really why. “Well, a woman just wouldn’t behave like that,” might be a convenient answer for her, though not all women would agree.
Sarkeesian goes to great lengths in part 2 of “Damsel in Distress” to emphasize that despite the unreality of the situations in which male protagonists must use violence to either restore women “to their senses” or at least complete the game’s narrative, these situations must have a real world effect, even if that effect is only cumulative through the number of games a person plays over the years. Given the fact that the nature of games presents no other option, what it is Sarkeesian actually expects of such a low-brow and horribly repetitive genre as the action/adventure video game remains a mystery.
But that begs a real world question as to how influential such titles actually are. Despite critical reviews, only a handful of the games she mentions were best-sellers. Sarkeesian was kind enough to provide a partial list of the games she used, and of the 28 games she listed in part 2’s credits, only 9 actually made either the US or Japan’s top 100 for the year of their release, and only three of those cracked the top 10. Not even the critically acclaimed Dead Space cracked the top 100 sales chart for its year, a game whose fan base inspired not one but two feature length animated movies. Their influence can’t be as far-reaching as Sarkeesian thinks when one of her despicable examples, Inversion, sold only 40 thousand copies globally. By contrast, Final Fantasy VII sold over 9 million copies worldwide in 1997, or Dragon Age: Origins, which placed at #32 for the year of 2009, with over 1.6 million copies sold worldwide.
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Regardless of how pervasive such female-friendly games may be, the overwhelming number of male-centric games would, in Sarkeesian’s view, dissolve their contribution. Given the propensity of advertising in this country, that notion seems impossible to dismiss. After all, publisher EA routinely uses the male version of Commander Shepard in the promotional material for their Mass Effect franchise. Such things play a key role in Sarkeesian’s thesis. Despite her admission in “Damsel in Distress” that, “We are not a monkey-see, monkey-do” society, Sarkeesian’s entire thesis, in fact her entire career as a cultural commentator, rests on proving a direct correlation between real-life violence against women worldwide and video games. If her schtick was simply to point out that game developers harp these boring, overused tropes to sell games, most people would nod and agree. But by moralizing it, by saying that these games not only hold women back but criminalize all the people who play them, suddenly her position is saleable.
If Sarkeesian herself is to have any relevance, she has to sell this doctrine as a moral imperative, that grievous harm is coming to women in the form of video games. Her argument is exactly the same as the age-old one that tried to demonize the violence in video games as the cause of excessive violence in the real world less than 20 years ago. It’s far too broad a stroke with which to paint a reasonable argument, considering that the video games that exploit female characters sell so poorly, while games that provide a more balanced and fair interpretation of female characters are more likely to be best-sellers. Clearly the novelty of Custer’s Revenge has worn off. Sarkeesian doesn’t give the gaming public enough credit.
However, despite whatever Anita Sarkeesian has to say about video games, and despite however you may feel about her position, violence against women, both in the real world and in gamer culture, is very, horrifyingly real. But if Sarkeesian wants to be truly relevant, instead of examining where the boys’ club of video gamedom came from, she should look at where it’s going: the cult of first-person shooter war games.
For the past 20 years, beginning with arcade titles like Operation: Wolf, to underground hits such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom in the early 90s, and culminating in the global smash Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the FPS genre has fed a war culture in video gaming, not to mention its anti-woman and misogynistic tendencies, more so than any other game genre out there. While most of these games do not necessarily promote violence against women, the combat scenarios these games simulate, especially the online player-vs.-player death matches, promote a brutal kill-or-be-killed mentality, encourage players to value power, reward success in the form of “kills,” and give them license to hate and despise the weak and feeble, regardless of whether the dead are male or female.
L to R: Operation: Wolf, Doom, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
In contrast to Sarkeesian’s broader, and harder to prove, suggestion that the tropes are the cause of violence against women, the data correlating FPS war game simulators and real world harassment of women is starkly real. One need look no further than Fat, Ugly, or Slutty, a website dedicated to capturing and logging instances of sexual harassment on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service and other networks. And Fat, Ugly, or Slutty’s database is replete with instances from all sorts of games. Spend more than 30 seconds on the site and you have to wonder exactly what these perverts expect to happen when they proposition women on such a service. They have to be either A) desperate and stupid, or B) desperate, stupid, and psychotic – the latter being the going reality, given the number of examples. As Becky Chambers, a writer for online ‘zine The Mary Sue, remarked, “All too often, being a woman online — especially in public multiplayer gaming — means questioning whether or not you should have a gender-specific screenname. It means considering the option of pretending to be a man, just to avoid trouble. It means hesitating before putting on your headset, for fear that the slightest sound of your voice might spur someone to call you a bitch or ask to see your tits. This is not a reality that men share.”
One of the tamer examples found in Fat, Ugly, or Slutty’s database.
Despite the number of examples though, Xbox Live and other networks’ managers routinely ignore complaints of sexual harassment. Even though most services expressly condemn sexual harassment as a violation of the End User License Agreement, many users are not punished or expelled from the service, despite repeat violations. Management often doesn’t see fit to suspend or cancel accounts from paying subscribers, but failing to enforce the terms of their own EULA practically gives online perverts permission to harass others again and again. Now, one could argue that any system designed to reign in harassers could just as easily be exploited to target other individuals unnecessarily for any number of reasons. However, that hardly justifies doing nothing in light of how pervasive the problem really is. The sexual violence and harassment Sarkeesian warns about in her “Damsel in Distress” series is happening in these games’ chat rooms and communication channels, and the reality of online sexual harassment in the gaming world is too dangerous to ignore, both as a visceral, real-time threat, and the anti-woman culture it is ushering into the new millennium.
But Sarkeesian doesn’t go after these groups though because, like every other pundit on YouTube, she has something to sell, and she can’t sell that idea to her audience of college freshmen taking their first Women’s Studies course in between rounds of Call of Duty on the college LAN. Not to mention that with FPS games dominating the market, and game networks and internet service providers making huge bucks supplying bandwidth, the idea of taking on such a gargantuan enterprise probably makes Sarkeesian’s blood run cold.
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But that also doesn’t mean we can dismiss her. Sarkeesian’s greatest accomplishment, whether she meant to do this or not, has been to point out that as consumers and interpreters of the games we play, our standards for storytelling and entertainment are abysmally low. Sarkeesian was absolutely correct about one thing: things do not have to be this way. Violence does not have to be the de facto style of gameplay for the vast majority of story-based games that incorporate female characters. More recently, games like Heavy Rain (2010) only use action as a secondary or tertiary way of moving the story forward. The gaming public needs to be exposed to more forms of storytelling than simply using violence, and learn how to enjoy them. In that sense, everyone benefits, not just female gamers. Game developers need only summon the courage to shed their old, bad habits, and create not just one or two conspicuous games per year that shirk predictable storytelling and gameplay, but foster whole new genres of story-based games that reflect what can really be done with the entertainment medium of the 21st century.
Heavy Rain has been described as an “interactive film” rather than a video game.
Sarkeesian can’t prove that game violence and overused tropes are the cause of violence against women in the real world. Her willful ignorance of contrary evidence betrays her image as a reasonable academic; she is no more reasonable than Rush Limbaugh. She’s a saleswoman on a mission. However, Sarkeesian is not the demon her detractors make her out to be, and she is undeserving of the treatment she gets. With part 3 of “Damsel in Distress” on the horizon, Sarkeesian is important to our national debate on women and video games because she is rather loudly raising profound issues that the industry itself is hesitant to touch. And for that, we need her more than ever.
A professor of English, Todd Bowes is also a freelance writer and musician from Providence, RI. He’s toured the country playing rock music, and his award-winning fiction has been read all over the globe.
I do think that it’s worth noting that the response to her initial Kickstarter included someone making a rather graphic “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” game. Considering that response, I can’t really blame her for seeing some sort of link between sexism in games and real-life violence against women, even though her arguments are really stretching things as you’ve pointed out.
One great example of a feminist video game that I’m surprised you didn’t bring up: Portal. The player character’s a girl, and GLaDOS/Caroline is easily one of the most interesting and funny characters in gaming. And it’s a huge hit!
Thanks Reuben. I don’t condone any of the misogynistic violence that’s been hurled Sarkeesian’s way. And there clearly is a link between sexism and real-life violence, but I don’t know if video games are the main offender, and certainly not to the extent Sarkeesian wants them to be.
I never played Portal myself, so I don’t know much about it. Judging from what I’ve seen, having the player character be an unnamed girl was more of a style choice rather than a story choice, so I don’t know how relevant it would be to my argument here. GLaDOS, I think, is worth more exploration though.
I wouldn’t suggest putting too much stock into the “misogynistic” game that came out to Anita. That was still free speech where they were criticizing Anita and the game can be found through various links.
Also, it seems that Anita created the controversy for her own get rich quick scheme:
Of course it’s free speech. It’s still horrible.
Horrible? Clicking on a picture to make bruise decals show up on the screen is horrible? It’s funny, Stephen King throws a child under a moving truck in his book Pet Sematary, and no one ever cried foul. A game where you can assassinate JFK yourself exists, and guess what, no one cares. But somehow, a game with a picture of a pop critic that is in vogue, with the vaguest of beating mechanics (click the screen!), yes, that’s horrible!
You know, beating up anita’s picture in a game, is pretty much the same as Anita shooting Randy Pitchford (Gearbox’s CEO) 3 times with a gold-plated Borderlands pistol. Anita found it acceptable. Link:
http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/58161053721/spider-man-recruits-the-help-of-anita-sarkeesian-to
To me they are both negligible, I’ve seen far worse (non-negligible) things done pertaining other public figures (sex tapes!). But if you take issue with one, you should take issue with both, and so should Anita. Don’t tell me you detect the fictional aspects in one and not the other.
There’s only one fundamental difference: The game intended to make a point.
http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/63/55/63557bcb13420d2d65d372ec934cc152.jpg?itok=ZAife8Zp
https://storify.com/WiTOpoli/why-is-this-conversation-necessary-ben-spurr
But right or wrong, doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, this is what separates authoritarian ideologs (and the lemmings following them) from the freethinkers, critical thinkers, and generally, honest people. The former (authoritarian ideologs) will invariably violate free speech and censor (silence) any dissenting opinions as quick as they can find an excuse to do so.
Can you imagine being governed by people like that? It would be like living in North Korea, or in Portugal prior to 1974. That is what I find horrible.
Skaruts: How the hell does Anita violate free speech? Not allowing comments on Youtube videos? So fucking what? You can comment on her shit everywhere else on the internet. Is every webpage that doesn’t allow comments violating your free speech rights?
Let me re-phrase what I said “The former (authoritarian ideologs) will invariably violate free speech BY CENSORING (silencing) any dissenting opinions as quick as they can find an excuse to do so.”
I capitalized the letters just to highlight my alterations. It’s still essentially the same statement as before, but maybe now you understand it.
Skaruts: I understood your sentence before. But Anita’s not a censor, so you’re not making any sense.
Not allowing comments in her videos, not allowing her public speeches to be filmed, not engaging in absolutely any conversations with anyone with a different opinion, not even caring about different opinions and inciting that attitude on her tweeter followers, etc.
All those are forms of censorship. Anyone who has something useful to say to her, just can’t. She isn’t listening at all. She isn’t transparent (not even a little bit).
One youtuber I was listening a few days ago pointed out that even Gail Dines, which is just as disgusting as Anita, even she speaks out openly and engages in debates and all that sort of important stuff.
Anita doesn’t allow for any of that. And I have to wonder if she’s afraid someone will ask her some question she hasn’t prepared an answer for, prior to the “show”, just like it happened when she was on CNN.
So, the discussion with Anita is: Anita talks. That’s it, one sided. We – the one’s debunking her – have all been censored out.
For that reason our only hope is to reach her followers. But most of them aren’t listening either.
That’s not censorship. Is it fair of her? Maybe not. But she has a right to be one-sided and she has a right to not want to listen to you just as much as you have a right to talk. You’re not entitled to a platform with her. She might ignore some criticism of her (frankly given how obnoxious and hateful a lot of of the criticism of her is, it’s understandable why she’d want to ignore it, though it’s unfortunate if it means she’s ignoring good points from those like the writer of this article who have fairer criticisms), but she’s not calling for criticism to be removed from the internet or the world.
She certainly has all the right to do any of that. Everyone and anyone does. It’s just something that doesn’t sit well with someone who’s trying to affect the public opinion. It strikes as dishonest and manipulative. A person who is making a proposition and doesn’t openly discuss it, is very likely to have something to hide.
Especially, given what is known about her conduct and the content of her videos, turning off her comments sounds like a way of preventing people from sharing videos with dissenting opinions on her comments, and preventing her followers from interacting with her opposition. It kind of makes sense, since that would be THE place where both sides would meet en masse.
I know this may sound a bit like a conspiracy, but this is one of the possibilities one may think of after going through a lot of information about her. (also, like I mentioned before, I’ve seen this happening before, always on the side of the dishonest or bigoted or fundamentalists or blind followers). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone on the side of reason avoid a two-way discussion (except when things heat up or when everyone’s off-topic or something else that makes people turn their backs on it – in which case I don’t blame anyone on either side from leaving).
And quite frankly, her criticism has been pretty much civilized. I’ve watched a video just a while ago and someone actually mentioned that. Quote:
“Isn’t it interesting that even though comments and ratings are here on this video are up, that people still can talk quite rational about Anita Sarkeesian… so maybe there are other reasons why she avoids that on her channel… ” – by Drudenfusz (From the comments on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRlFIcmEnBE)
And this is what I’ve been encountering everywhere I go, pretty much. Surely there’s been the occasional troll, but considering that I can’t remember the last one I saw, that’s not out of the ordinary.
The death/rape threats and the beat-em-up game serving as a kind of threat are far from civilized. They aren’t the majority of the criticism of course but I’d say there was enough to consider things “heated up.”
Thanks Jay. I appreciate you taking the time to post that video, but it’s material is old and I had already addressed a lot of those points in my article. However, I will say that I watched a lot of videos responding to Sarkeesian and one of the gripes I have with the responses is that they take her to task over things that are not relevant to her actual ideas, such as her Kickstarter campaign, her refusal to allow comments on her videos, and other such trivial things. I do agree her research methods need improvement, but that’s a minor gripe compared to how she presents the bulk of her ideas. She’s less an academic and more of a pundit like Sean Hannity or the Huffington Post, and should be considered as such.
Regarding the beat-em-up game, Sarkeesian wouldn’t be the first media pundit to concoct a fake controversy in order to gain attention to her cause, I just find it unlikely in her case. Did she goad the internet community by posting on 4chan? Yeah, probably. But there are more constructive ways of dealing with Sarkeesian’s ideas than punching out her digital facsimile like a petulant child. If the only justification for such a thing was free speech, that isn’t really an argument; it’s just an excuse to be a hateful asshole.
Agreed. I only posted this because of the historic references. The problem is, just recently, she’s posted a violent fanfic calling for the murder of Randy Pitchford which she liked. It’s one of the many blatant hypocritical stances that Anita has chosen to adopt in her crusade against video games as art.
I do have to note that I can’t say I agree about some of the things Anita does. We have various ways to tell stories whether it’s stories of expression through Minecraft or stories of teamwork in TF2. I could make the argument that perhaps the hierachical structure of Microsoft allows for the sexism and harassment of women in games and the proliferation of trolls in games like Call of Duty.
But something else of note is that women are in the gaming world, but they play different games from men.
http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Elsa/fun-facts-about-females-255351.phtml
From what it appears, women play games like the Sims and Farmville. These are games with no specific gender given to them. With the $160,000, it would make a lot more sense to commission a study to try to find out what games girls actually play. The fact remains that certain characters resonate with people as you said. Also, her argument also falls flat in regards to actual misogyny. I recall that when Other M was large, people called out Sakamoto for his portrayal of Samus that people didn’t feel was correct, particularly after the Prime series showed her in a new light.
In regards to the critics, I’m aware that some have tried humor, some have tried academic debunkings and there’s been valid points by the critics. As someone entering the debate somewhat late, I have to say that I’ve found that deducing what happened has been a nightmare compared to who is right or wrong. But the problem with Anita’s arguments are too numerous to ignore. Yes, there can be more female characters. But if they’re just as flat as Marcus Fenix, what’s the point?
I like good characters. Samus and Chell as silent protagonists made me notice their environments more. Having a sexy Bayonetta showed me a woman that flaunted what she had. Showing a demure Yuna who fought to save her world allowed me to see a woman that can be quiet and shy but also have the strength to save said world.
I doubt that Anita understands that unfortunately. Still, these are great female characters who have been around for quite some time, some damseled, some not. I just don’t see how her notion that a rescue plot is sexist actually has merit considering how much it’s used for the men in the Nintendo franchise as well as the women.
“But there are more constructive ways of dealing with Sarkeesian’s ideas than punching out her digital facsimile like a petulant child.”
Agreed. However, its clear that the paranoia for Sarkesiam more or less originates from 3 points:
1)Previous experience that gamers (assuming that the majority of people posting on the Kickstarter were, in fact, gamers at all. We dont have solid proof since comments in YT are anonymous, after all) had with “Social Justice Crusaders” like Jack Thompson and Fredric Wertham. That last one almost destroyed the Comic Industry with fake evidence, despite the fact that he was in a position of power to see the truth by himself: http://io9.com/5985199/how-one-mans-lies-almost-destroyed-the-comics-industry (Once again, i am working under the assumption that they are gamers AND nerds who like comics to know such event in the first place)
2) The fact that she (or someone posing as her, or one of her fans who wanted to “help”) really posted on 4Chan are the 2 most prominent events that fuel the backlash against Anita:
http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/139813364
3)Games being the punching bag for every political party is WELL know among gamers. From the days since the NightTrap “controversy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0MgAdX_k4), School shootings being “influenced” by games and the NRA ramblings about Black & White Morality (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DisFlR_LxYs), and like that one time where Ralph Nader says Videogames are electronic child molesters (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPO0zeRauPc). Gamers are being CONSTANTLY being hit with this kind of nonsense all the time that it drains their mental state. Its not surprising to see these people react with hatred towards such ignorant claims with violent outburst after many many years.
Anita seemed to have found the perfect timing to “strike” (so to speak) and crossed the all those points. People reacted in the same way someone with a Pavlovian trigger. They immediately went “This is OBVIOUSLY another of those fake crusaders that want to cash in on the unpopularity and mistrust of games. Lets stop it!” without a second glance. Can’t really blame them since their previous experiences about these people being full of shit were true without a shadow of a doubt, so why would this time be different? because its a woman saying it? why would shitty claims be exclusive to males?
But all this problem could have been adverted if people simply pointed out in an objective manner that the majority of the comments in the video are inoffensive and were criticism, unlike the few rape threats and stupid comments that all Youtubers get when leaving the comment section free for all. By simply looking at all the comments it could have been solved, but sadly the comment section was closed and all the comments are gone forever.
Fortunatelly, the person that posted that TemplarGamer and BillTheManFromKentucky video in this comment section allowed me to find another of his videos with a .RAR with all the comments of the Kickstarter, preserved as evidence in the description box:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXRggb9JpnY
Its the only way to know properly if she had the “organized harassment” that she keeps claiming on every interview. I mean sure, there is the 4Chan evidence, but one can never know if they actually cared enough to visit the video. For all we know the “harassers” could be just Sock Puppets Accounts created by Anita or her fans JUST to be used as “evidence” for her campaign.
By the way, how long it took for people to call you a misogynist JUST for voicing your well justified opinion?
Um, Jack Thompson and Frederick Wertham were completely different than Anita Sarkeesian. Jack Thompson actively advocates censorship. Sarkeesian criticizes (and she criticizes pretty much everything, not just games), sometimes with good reason, sometimes without, but isn’t advocating censorship. People who think criticism=censorship are not only irritating (and also incredibly immature; see all the whining and even death/rape threats that occur whenever a critic dares give an AAA title a lower-than-hoped-for score, even when said critic’s review is positive), they’re hurting games as an artform, because all artforms warrant thoughtful criticism. Not all critics are going to be good, but the vast majority aren’t trying to censor anything.
This article really highlights my exact problem with Sarkeesian–her cause is worthy, but her research is half-assed which is something that absolutely cannot be sacrificed when approaching the issue of misogyny within the gaming subculture. How the hell are you going to prove a point if your information is inaccurate (i.e. Bayonetta review)? All she’s done is discredit herself and her worthy cause.
She really needs a partner or two to help refine her work to where it’s actually relevant to the gaming audience. Women have been damn near half the consumer base from almost the beginning–and she’s alienating most of us by her basing characters/games pass or fail grade by her outdated definition of femininity!
Thanks Violet. I feel the same way. When she’s really on top of her game, I find her videos pretty compelling, even if I don’t buy it. But when she drops the ball, like her opinions on Bayonetta as you mentioned, she drops it like a rock. It’s frustrating, but at least the topic is out there and she’s forcing people to confront it.
Thanks Heaven Smile, especially for taking the time to post all those clips. While games and gamers are often unfairly targeted by censorship advocates, as Reuben pointed out, Sarkeesian isn’t one of them. More to the point, gamers aren’t doing themselves any justice if their reaction to being criticized is violence or the threat of violence, even if in a digital form. Sure, those threatening rape or worse may have been in the minority of her critics, but it’s no less damaging to the whole of their cause. There’s no justification for such comments, threats, or beat ‘em up games, even if there were only a few. Of course Sarkeesian would spin whatever she got; she’s a pundit. That’s what they do. I’m as annoyed and frustrated like many a gamer by Sarkeesian’s position towards gaming, but I prefer this kind of response.
And, since you asked, I’ve never been called a misogynist as a result of my article. Even my friends who disagree with more or less everything I have to say would not call me a misogynist, probably because there’s nothing misogynistic in what I wrote here. Anyway, I appreciate your reading of it.
Me. Bowes,
It is difficult to take your comments seriously when you make claims such as Sarkeesian ‘no more reasonable than Rush Limbaugh’. It’s made still more difficult when your rejection of her criticisms of sexist portrayals in gaming is to point out a small minority of games that actually do a solid job of portraying authentic female characters. You laid down your Dragon Age and Final Fantasy cards on the table (though of course there is sexism there as well-just as an example Morrigan’s would need about three times as much clothing to be even half as clothed as any of the male characters). Alright, all well and good. Now are those games the rule or the exception? I think we both know the answer to that. According to your own figures, DA was #32 five years ago. Using fingers we need three and a half people to reach that spot on the charts. This, then, is your silver bullet? *How many* Final Fantasy games did it take to get to one with (supposedly) authentic unobjectionable female portrayals?
And where on Earth in any of her work does Sarkeesian insist that there is a clear, dangerous link between sexist portrayals in games and sexual violence towards women? If she’s made such a claim jt should be simple to reference directly, yes?
But perhaps a tie with your blithely hyperbolic equivalence to Limbaugh is when you toss off ‘yeah, probably she did’ in reference to instigating 4chan response to her work. What’s the basis for your casual ‘yeah, probably’? Someone as rational an objective as you attempt to position yourself in your piece would be able to admit that it’s very difficult if not impossible for us to know one way or another if she did. Setting aside that objectivity so plainly serves to showcase, well, a rather substantial bias.
Rakeesh, thanks for your insightful comments. I apologize for the delayed response. This article fell off my radar for a while until the recent #Gamergate controversy generated some new interest.
As to your questions, the limitations of writing a blog post kept me from including detailed footnotes. I really hadn’t expected the reaction this article got, considering The LFB’s readership, at the time, was fairly small, and continues to be as far as I know. “Thesis XII” this ain’t. More specifically, Sarkeesian makes a fairly solid claim that violence in games links to sexual violence in real life, or at least she believes so, in episode 2 of her series, which I think I mentioned in my essay. Nevermind that there’s no point to what she’s doing if she _doesn’t_ believe that. I don’t think people would react as strongly as they have if that weren’t the kind of stakes on the table.
Also, I saw her posts (if they were really her) on 4chan as part of a marketing tactic, which is part-and-parcel to me equivocating her with the likes of Limbaugh. Both are selling an ideology and though they operate on different fronts and at vastly different levels of finance and promotion (Limbaugh does have a lengthier history), in their roles as pundits and pushers of their preferred ideology, they must pander to their audience. Sarkeesian, being much more internet savvy, would probably see 4chan as a good vehicle for promoting her work, albeit at the risk of, well, what she inevitably got. Still, I don’t find her any less guilty of being a pundit in that regard, so the comparison is legitimate. That’s just part of the business of what she’s selling. She just has a remarkably different point of view than Limbaugh’s.
Regarding Dragon Age and Final Fantasy, the evolution of female characters in games, and especially RPGs, has always been an ongoing process, and will continue to be. Of course it took a long time for us to get to FFVII, especially when you look at the arc of gaming history, but we did get there, and we continue to improve as we go along. RPGs have been a remarkable touchstone in the development of female characterizations in gaming, and even if FFVII isn’t the best example, it is certainly one of the most prominent. Dragon Age’s numbers serve as a snapshot of where we were, and where we might go, especially since that franchise is still going strong, with sequels and films on the horizon, it says a lot about what we really care about in games. And Morrigan is a great character. There’s nothing wrong with a character being sexy. And if realism in games is what your after, then I suggest you stop gaming. There’s no amount of armor that can prepare you for battle with a dragon, were one to exist. But if her outfit really offended a player, they could always have changed it in game. Still, those are limitations imposed by the game itself and the technology, not necessarily the storytelling.
As for bias, well, I never said I was unbiased. In fact, in my role as a journalist in this case, it would be impossible for me not to have bias. Moreover, all journalists are biased, and to believe otherwise is simply foolish. Hunter S. Thompson dismissed objectivity first and foremost, and he was right. So accusing me of bias is just redundant. It’s like accusing water of being liquid. Anyway, thanks again!
Skaruts,
(For some reason the site isn’t letting me reply directly to you. Apologies for the format.)
“Horrible? Clicking on a picture to make bruise decals show up on the screen is horrible? It’s funny, Stephen King throws a child under a moving truck in his book Pet Sematary, and no one ever cried foul. A game where you can assassinate JFK yourself exists, and guess what, no one cares. But somehow, a game with a picture of a pop critic that is in vogue, with the vaguest of beating mechanics (click the screen!), yes, that’s horrible!”
A few pretty serious problems with this line of reasoning. Pet Semetary is a fictional horror novel, in which bad things happen. That’s not really the same thing as objecting to someone’s politics or ideas and saying, “Hey, it would be funny to play a game where you beat the crap out of them!” You have to actually connect these two things rather than state them without presenting an argument. By your reasoning, someone could create artificial child pornography that was highly explicit and then say ‘But Romeo and Juliet!’ and you would be using exactly the same metric-fiction in one, fiction in another. And if you object to such an incendiary comparison, please bear in mind you were the one who brought up North Korea.
Furthermore, some people *do* care about games like you describe. It’s just that ‘caring’ is a more nuanced thing than ‘should it be allowed’ or ‘should the government prohibit it’.
As for the fanfiction link, again you have a tortured comparison. For one thing she only says “I think I kinda like it”, and she doesn’t even say what part she likes exactly. It’s a lengthy submission with lots of shit going on, apparently. Spider Man, gearbox, interdimensional travel, I only scrolled through but it’s a mish mash. But let’s for the sake of argument (the argument you haven’t actually made) say that she does, explicitly, endorse the scene you mention.
That still wouldn’t quite be the same as creating a game whose sole purpose was to enact fictitious violence against a woman because you were incensed about her ideas about discrimination against and violence towards women.
“To me they are both negligible, I’ve seen far worse (non-negligible) things done pertaining other public figures (sex tapes!). But if you take issue with one, you should take issue with both, and so should Anita. Don’t tell me you detect the fictional aspects in one and not the other.”
Still another invalid comparison. Sex tapes are either released illicitly-as in, someone not in the tapes or without permission releases them. Or they are released with knowledge of those in them. In neither case is it the same thing as the beating women game, or even the gearbox gun fanfiction story. Furthermore, sex tapes aren’t generally fiction. They’re generally, you know, video recordings of sex between two or more people.
“There’s only one fundamental difference: The game intended to make a point.”
Sure, it intended to make a point. That point was that Sarkeesian needs to shut up, bitch, about her points and stay out of gaming. I mean, even the ‘point’ was laughable. Refuses to address any criticism? She does all the time. That she doesn’t in one particular venue-especially when that venue is literally stuffed full of rape threats, death threats, and misogyny (Youtube) is not the same thing. It was ‘addressing an imbalance’? Are we supposed to actually believe that was the intent, rather than anger? The author was upset that men get beat up in games more than women, so he took a stand? Give me a break. He used a specific person he was angry with. That’s not a broad political stand, that’s spite. She claims it’s sexist to criticize her anywhere, period, on behalf of her womanhood? That’s simply a lie. She doesn’t claim that. The ‘point’ you claimed that video was making, Sakruts, was simply a lie.
“But right or wrong, doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, this is what separates authoritarian ideologs (and the lemmings following them) from the freethinkers, critical thinkers, and generally, honest people. The former (authoritarian ideologs) will invariably violate free speech and censor (silence) any dissenting opinions as quick as they can find an excuse to do so.”
Here’s where you take this train and run it right off the tracks. As others have mentioned, she hasn’t violated freedom of speech. She simply hasn’t. If you really want to talk about it, you need to familiarize yourself with what the concept ‘freedom of speech’ actually means. She hasn’t attempted to censor any dissenting opinions, either-she literally can’t. Here we are! Rife with dissent! Instead she prohibits ALL commentary in certain venues, positive and negative. If your point held up on its own grounds, she would only be permitting positive commentary, not barring all of it. As for ‘as soon as she finds and excuse’-well. By all means, open up your Facebook or your personal website to any commentary, and after you reach a few thousand remarks of people wanting to either kill or rape you themselves, or hoping someone else does, then we can talk about ‘excuses’.
Forgive me if I don’t feel like addressing your argumentative gymnastics there.
(I know you’ll think I’m running away – whatever)
I’m just going to point my finger at the time where you stumbled more artistically: You told me that there’s a fundamental difference between Pet Sematary and the Beat Up game, but you forgot that fundamental difference when you mentioned facebook right at the end.
Thank you for this article Todd. Unlike a lot of the vitriolic articles online, this piece really helped put things in perspective for me. Really well written and thought out.
Thanks gravityonme. Apologies for the delayed response. For a long time, this piece was not a part of my active engagements, but the recent #Gamergate controversy has created some more interest in it. I’m glad that people are warming to the idea that Sarkeesian can be critiqued intelligently without resorting to threats or violence. I think what’s really important is to acknowledge that her position is important and legitimate, even if fundamentally flawed, or wrong.
Extremely well written. It’s nice to know it’s possible to criticize Sarkeesian’s ideas without resorting to misogyny and threats, as so many seem to do.
Thanks Daryl. Back in the day, academics used to criticize each other all the time like this: with respect and admiration, which I have for Ms. Sarkeesian, even if I don’t agree with her. I sincerely hope the internet calms the hell down and allows her to continue her work in peace. I’m very curious about the evolution of her ideas, and am thankful for every person warming to the concept of intelligent discourse on this topic.
After watching the Colbert interview, I’ve been trying to piece together how I feel about Anita Sarkeesian and the whole gamergate debacle; Bowes sums up my feelings quite nicely: she’s no demon like the whole online community seems to be saying and the threats against her are reprehensible in every single aspect, but her argument is anything but perfect. I’ve seen clips from “Tropes vs Women in Video Games,” but I’ve never sat through an entire episode; perhaps it’s time to give it another look.
Free speech doesn’t prohibit private owners from regulating what we find inappropriate on our property. You made your points already. Talking about rape/death threats like they’re “no big deal” crosses a line beyond our standards of civility. Goodbye. Consider yourself functionally banned.
Nice try, with the ad hominem attacks and the offensive “professional victim” accusations and saying she’s “a bully with an extremist ideological agenda who picks on some of the most marginalised and misunderstood people in society – young male gamers like my little brother!”
I’m sorry, I laughed SO, SO hard reading that. Games are mainstream. Young male gamers are far from the most marginalized people.
I am so embarrassed that this site’s second-biggest claim to fame is now being linked to by Nero as part of one of his hateful GamerGate screeds. As a friend of Brianna Wu, the pain this GooberGoat nonsense has caused these past four months (FOUR! HOW THE HELL IS THIS LASTING FOUR MONTHS!?!) is unbearable when it’s not utterly hilarious. Don’t expect many of your comments to stay up.