Welcome to the first installment of “what the hell is wrong with people, I mean really,what the hell Saturday.”
Today we’re going to look at a couple of recent controversies in the world of gaming. And by “controversies” I mean “women daring to get involved in the gaming industry and getting harassed by misogynistic assholes.”
First up, let’s look at the tale of a woman who’s now facing an angry internet mob because she drew a picture of the video game character Mega Man … as a woman.
A little backstory: The video game makers Comcept recently raised roughly a million bucks on Kickstarter to fund a game intended as a sort of sequel, at least in spirit, to the old Mega Man games. And they hired a woman named Dina Abou Kara as a community manager to handle their forums and other social media.
There was just one little problem: when the folks at Comcept announced her hiring, they also posted a picture she’d drawn of Mega Man, imagined as a woman. Aghast at the very notion of such a gender switch — though Dina wasn’t even involved in the actual making of the new game — the “community” collectively lost its shit.
As Ian Miles Cheong notes on Gameran,
Finding fault with her presentation, these persons decided to pry into Dina’s personal life by combing through her Twitter account for other transgressions against the human race, and found that she had written tweets supportive of feminism and linked to one of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos. …
These vocal individuals went so far as to produce a video “calling out” Dina’s past with “dirt” on her—because sympathising with the feminist cause is indeed enough to demonize someone according to these people. The vocal, well informed fans have since been calling for her resignation from the developer. At this point, these individuals have flooded the game’s development forums, and are trying to hold the game hostage by asking for refunds.
One user, a Mr. Nicholas Day, wrote: “This is a bad idea guys. I don’t want any anita sarkeesian feminism all up in my megaman reboot. I don’t want a sjw [social justice warrior] monitoring the forum, deciding who has good opinions and who has bad ones.”
So, yeah.
And while we’re speaking of douchey gamer assholery, there’s a whole other tale of harassment developing. An indie game developer named Zoë Quinn made a game called Depression Quest, and, a couple of days ago, she posted it to Valve’s Greenlight service, hoping that Valve would pick it up and sell it.
Instead, angry dudes attacked her as a “cunt” and an “attention whore” who could never truly understand depression because “all females are sluts and have no right to be depressed.” And then, she says, some dude or dudes started making obscene phone calls to her.
Here’s her eloquent response:
I'm not going anywhere, assholes. I hope my games about love & empathy & vulnerability piss you off.
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) December 12, 2013
Check her Twitter for updates and more examples of the shit she’s been dealing with. FOR MAKING A GAME ABOUT DEPRESSION WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY BEING A WOMAN.
The Mary Sue has more about both stories.
I’ve been a gamer all my life, and I’ve – most of the time – been extremely lucky, in that I’ve been able to encounter male gamers who are willing to let themselves be impressed by what I can do. Yeah, I’m capable, and I’m a chick, and I’ll help you win – it’s that simple. I also have a number of friends who are gamers and, being my friends, they’re super cool and hence I never see any of the ‘but girls gaming!?!?! BAWWWWWWW!’ nonsense that takes place in the gaming community at large going on amongst my friends. For that, I’m very grateful.
For the most part, if I play anything, I’ll do single-player stuff that’s got co-op (like Saints Row 4, for instance – I’m also madly in love with Path of Exile at the moment) but for which co-op isn’t the main thrust (ugh, don’t get me started on Call of Dookie and the like), just so I can avoid the testosterone fests. PVP anything is usually totally out of the question.
What irks me is the notion that women play games so they can get ‘free stuff’ from other players (very common thinking when it comes to MMOs – it’s sort of like the “WE KILLED THE MAMMOTH FOR YOU,” but in game form). I mean, I *suppose* that there’s a very tiny handful of women out there who might do that sort of thing, but in my experience, women don’t get into a particular game without being fully aware of the challenges they’ll have to face (I’m talking actual skill, not dealing with asshats), otherwise, they wouldn’t keep playing – so the thought of them having to beg for handouts from other players seems a little bit backwards, imo.
Those women gamers that look for handouts, lots of them turn out to be men using female characters.
It kills me. It just kills me. These guys do not own gaming. They make gaming a hostile landscape, which is the exact opposite of what gaming is for. It’s like when a white supremacist plays punk or metal–it’s taking something I love and using it for evil.
On another note, who wants to bet they’d be totally okay if a dude drew Samus Aran as a man? Or if a guy drew Mighty No. 9 as a girl with huge breasts and skimped-down version of her suit?
Andrew – that video was awesome…”I don’t understand those words in that order”. That pretty much sums up MRA arguments….or any arguments based on bigotry, really.
yes, this is the kind of thing that makes me say, yeah, i play games, but i’m not a gamer. because i have no interest in that community anymore. and it sure as hell does not want me.
also, i think that my sisters and i were very fortunate in that our parents never discouraged playing games. they never gave any indication that it was not something girls should do. in fact, we often played computer games together, as a family. (which i loved doing, though i know some people wouldn’t be able to stand it). one person might be playing, the rest of us giving encouragment or advice, and so on. and these were games like ultima, and civilization, or various puzzle and adventure games.
gaming has never been a male only space.
Yeah, I know several female gamers as well (including me, although I don’t play many games these days). I’m glad that my little sister’s parents, despite being very conservative, don’t tell my little sisters that they’re not allowed to play games. Of course they aren’t allowed to play games full of gore, but it’s not a gender-specific prohibition.
Strange thing is, there already IS a video game out there about depression, “The Cat Lady.” It’s even highly feminist in it’s design; it stars a female character who is over 30 (she’s 40,) both main characters are female (passes the Bechdel Test easily,) and has great character development.
So why didn’t the community go ballistic over this one? Probably because the game was still created by a man (R. Michalski.) This shocked me, honestly, as playing the game had me swearing up and down that it had to have been written by a woman.
BTW, this game is a horror game, so it does have violence and disturbing imagery if you want to check it out. You can find it at Good Old Games (GoG.com) or it’s official website.
I’ve been playing video games since kindergarten. In high school I used to do gaming a lot more socially, but I had a lot of bad experiences with territorial assholes or guys who did not understand boundaries. When I got to college, I was afraid to seek out a new group of gaming friends without the established safe circle I had in high school. It’s only this year as a senior that I gave my college’s gaming club a try. It turns out that the president is a huge feminist.
On the other hand, I’ve also encountered my first-ever real-life MRA at this club, too. Ugh.
In my family I’m definitely the gaming kid (well, gaming 24 year old). My brother does play some call of duty clones, but when it comes to variety and frequency of game play… Well, my dad wins actually, but I’m a close second.
@Salacious: They could also be saying that the only cause for depression they can think of would be if someone can’t get partnered sex whenever they want. Oh, to be so privileged as to have never experienced greater sadness than that…
On Dina Abou Kara: This knee-jerk reaction some of these gamers have to women in the industry these days is getting out of hand. If she DID have some sort of influence on the story and the gameplay, this would still be utterly ridiculous. To these insufferable assholes I would like to say – Oh, woe is you, someone with a vagina who doesn’t want to be treated like that’s the only thing important about her worked on your game! Woe is you, the game doesn’t cater as much to your preferences/likes/sexuality because it’s got a wider, more inclusive audience to please! Woe is you, you don’t get to pretend you’re the center of the universe anymore!
Most of us learn that there are other people on the planet who deserve nice things too when we’re, you know, EIGHT, but who knows, maybe you’re a late bloomer.
What a joke.
That’s a nice piece of fan art.
Ah, i see its time for me to ruin some more mens lives by playing some more Skyrim tonight!
i love the game, but seriously, those dungeons are super creepy….. and ZOMG there are so many dragons to run into! i should have named my character Dragonbait she’s stumbled into so many dragons.
And speaking of dragons, who has seen the Hobbit so far?
Haven’t seen Hobbit but I hear that they did terrible things with Tauriel.
quick question for anyone who’s seen the hobbit: who gets more screen time, Beorn the bear man or Legolas?
I watched like 1 minute of this video so far, but it was pretty funny. It’s a bunch of men responding to Anita by saying “What about the MEEENNNZZZ?!?!?”
I watched the first Hobbit, and I loved it. Then again, I was also heavily intoxicated while watching it. So I have no reliable way of guessing whether the new one is any good.
Yup, Tamariel was not what i wanted to see. Especially as they had to modify the story to put her there, just for that.
Legolas by far. And i have no idea why he’s there at all.
pillowinhell, the key to dealing with dragons in skyrim is to find the closest mammoth, and let it duke it out with the dragon instead. i’m not sure why mammoths aren’t ruling the world in that game, they can sure kick the crap out of dragons.
wait, it was men who hunted the mammoths, and dragons attack mammoths in skyrim… that means dragons are men! and you’re supposed to kill all the dragons in that game… skyrim is misandry!
OMG don’t tell AVFM! We must keep our evil feminist skyrim plot to ourselves.
does that make the Dovakin a gender traitor?
Gamers are the shittiest subculture I had the displeasure of associating with. They put this emotional investment on their favorite products, and react to criticism of them like it’s a personal insult.
Even one of my best friends flipped his shit at Anita’s videos and called me “brainwashed” for defending them.
Strangely I haven’t seen any mammoths yet, bit I’ve run into at least a dozen dragons and three camps of giants.
My solution as level eight is to let the city guards kill the dragon and then absorb the soul.
Anyways, the Bro culture in video games can die in a fire. I’ve been gaming since computers were first capable of running programs to play games with.
Dovahkiin is a mangina. “Unrelenting Misandry.”
That comment about women having “no right” to be depressed (damned females colonizing another male space, amirite bros?) was pretty rancid, but the comment next to it about how a text-based game “took no skill to make” is pretty hilarious. I guess that explains the quality of writing in most video games these days, huh?