Growing Pains

This post was originally published at SecondQuest.vg on November 4, 2011

The other week, in response to the BlizzCon homophobia incident, I wrote the following:

In the time that has passed since the writing of that article, Blizzard has accepted responsibility and given an honest apology; Denis Farr and Leigh Alexander have both written excellent articles dealing with, respectively, homophobia and sexism; and some commenters at Kotaku have made me look like a naive idiot by basically showing that developers may be kind of justified in viewing us this way.

Because I am a grown man who recognizes that the world is populated by people of different sexes, ethnicities, orientations, etc., I’m not the audience for either piece. Farr’s focuses on some of his personal experiences with homophobia, discrimination, and sexual abuse in an attempt to provide a concrete depiction of the victims of homophobic language; Alexander’s discusses her ambivalence about the fact that she’s called a “female games journalist”, with particular emphasis on the first word. Well, duh, was my knee-jerk reaction to both articles, and that’s not just because I’m a gay man who’s had his own experiences with homophobia, or because I’ve talked to enough female gamer friends to know that such a status brings with it some extremely complex issues. It’s because, well, like I said--I live in the world. Hang out here long enough and you’ll realize that everyone’s got their own unique makeup and that focusing on categories like “gay” or “black” or whatever is reductive and ultimately useless. That shrugging smugly, singing a chorus of “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q--and how happy am I that we as a society are more or less over that fucking play!--and doing nothing to curb one’s prejudices isn’t enough.

But based on the reaction of the commenters at Kotaku, these articles are necessary. Because both received a fairly extreme backlash, one which implies that Kotaku’s readership, if it is aware that the identity of “gamer” is a multifaceted one, is openly hostile to that diversity.

In the day or so following the publication of his post, Farr was fairly active on his Twitter account mentioning different hateful comments his article received. One tweet in particular stuck in my head:

And my first instinct is to laugh at this--to think of the poor overweight acne’d virgin who reads Farr’s article from the darkness of his mom’s basement, seethes, thinks how dare he try to take away my God-given right to use that word, this’ll show him, and copies and pastes FAG over and over as many times as the comment box will allow, and sits back and laughs about how he utterly destroyed a writer he does not know and will likely never meet.

But that’s the old stereotype, isn’t it, the pale nerd, wired on Mountain Dew and Cheetos--the one hilariously depicted in the World of Warcraft episode of South Park. I have no way of knowing the commenter’s motivation or lifestyle. The commenter might even be George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher himself on a break between WoW sessions. Trolling depends on anonymity, after all. Particularly when it’s a quick cut-and-paste job as this is, it’s done as a way of getting a cheap laugh out of hurting someone, as a small burst of sadism. And yes, when these comments come in volume, particularly in response to something as searingly personal as Farr’s article, it can be distressing. Stereotyping the commenter is kind of a defense mechanism--a way of attributing it to someone so pathetically powerless as to be harmless. But ultimately, trolling comments like these are done just to upset and get a rise out of someone--the kind of stuff that got old when we were in high school. With time and a good support network of friends and family, we can develop the emotional resources to dismiss them as either people who are 14 years old--or who have the mindset of one.

What truly bothers me are comments like the following, written in response to Alexander’s piece:

The amount of ignorance displayed in this comment is astounding--so much so that I had to read it several times to make sure it wasn’t intended ironically. He doesn’t understand that the boys’ club nature of games helps to ensure that many women simply don’t want to join in. Women, by and large, will not want to flock to a medium which is filled with adolescent male power fantasies, where male characters are hyperaggressive and female ones are unrealistically-proportioned submissive sex objects. Why would they? These images literally tell women this isn’t for you. And one seriously doubts that, if his proposed solution of women demanding, for example, realistic character designs, that he’d be particularly happy with the change. Let’s face it: This comment was written in response to an article written with the theme, Treat me with the same respect you’d treat anyone else.

Or in response to Farr:

This goes beyond homophobia. This is a wish to have queerness completely erased from existence. It’s an inability to handle the concept that there are people out there who are different. It is a conspiracy of silencing. These are themes I see over and over in the comments. Shut up. Get out of my community. Because, in the eyes of people like this, women and gays simply don’t belong. These commenters see Kotaku as a boys’ club. I find it bitterly ironic that another theme which keeps getting repeated is bashing Farr and Alexander for being offended. Because that’s really what these commenters are feeling--offense. They feel offended at the notion that they have to change their language or their attitudes. That there’s anything wrong with their behavior. Another common theme is, what does this have to do with videogames. Because, somehow, a gamer describing his experiences with discrimination in an attempt to explain to gamers why homophobic language at a games industry event is a bad thing is somehow less relevant than, to pick a random example, an unfocused ramble by Owen Good, a man with a degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, about what it’s like to have a credit card.

I could catalogue all day. I would love to catalogue all of the negative comments. To display them prominently. What a pity that they’re all under usernames! That we don’t see their real names, that we can’t shame them. Because they should feel ashamed. But in going through the comments to do so, I noticed some other themes. Take this comment in response to Farr’s piece:

Or this, to Alexander’s:

I’m not of the mindset that attitudes like these last two comments are uncommon or hopelessly naive--going through the comments of both articles, you’ll find plenty of support for these writers. There are enough people who say, well, what are you gonna do, that’s just how XBox Live is, of course it’s going to be filled with horny dudes who objectify women and make fun of gay people. But while that may be the way it is, there is such a thing as agency in this world.

In the negative comments I see an element of fear. For every whine about how faggot doesn’t reeeeeally mean gay and how it’s a generic insult and how dare you tell me differently, I detect terror over the responsibility of empathy towards others, of the realization that the world is not made for you. For every joke that of course there’s no problem with reducing women in any games industry position to a pair of tits I notice a worry that, perhaps, women aren’t simply easily-obtainable objects but actual people with agency and the capacity to reject. There is a palpable resistance to change. That the videogame community is the one place where they can relax and say anything sexist or homophobic or racist or whatever, anything that comes into their heads, and that the presence of figures like Farr and Alexander is a threat to that safe space.

I do not wish to reassure them.

Gaming is changing. The Wii, casual games, the internet, smartphones--all of these are taking gaming from the confines of a small contingent of dedicated nerds into everyone’s hands, and we have to evolve with the times. We have to recognize that, just as the world is a diverse place, gaming is as well. And that while I am fully in support of freedom of speech, it must be tempered with responsibility.

I want these commenters scared. I want them to mourn their glory days when they could say anything they pleased without fear of reprisal. For the days when women were just a set of tits they could ogle.

I want them to grow the fuck up or get the hell out of our community. Because let’s face it. It’s not theirs anymore. The identity of “gamer” belongs to anyone who holds a controller and loves the medium. Not to any particular gender, ethnicity, orientation, or any other category.

It’s time these people caught up to the rest of the world.