Equality in gaming

[Dog Pants]

RPS, the very outspoken John Walker specifically, has put up a sort of manifesto about why they continue to post about mysoginy in gaming. I strongly suspect I'm preaching to the choir by linking to it here, since being understanding, compassionate human beings is something that underpins the 5punky ethos, but there's no harm in propogating it and giving it publicity. For me it's a bit of a narrow field - I see the problem as being far wider than sexism. Racism and homophobia are also rife in gaming and are equally unacceptable. Anyway, if John can put the effort into highlighting the issues to his audience then so can I.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04 ... utting-up/

[deject]

Great article. I see so many of those comments like "white knight" all the time and it really makes me angry. Any time someone besides the one being attacked directly tries to stand up to bullying, all of the sudden now they're "white knights" and it get under my skin.

[Jimmington]

That looks a long old article, far too long for my painful brain to read at the mo - the main thing I need to know is will they still have the scantily clad dolly birds at the industry shows?

[Dog Pants]

I expect they will, but the point is they shouldn't. They make me uncomfortable anyway.

[deject]

I expect they will, but the point is they shouldn't. They make me uncomfortable anyway.

I always feel sorry for them because that must be a horrible, horrible job. Seems only a step or so up from working at a strip joint or something.

[Dog Pants]

I don't necessarily feel that sorry for them. There are a lot worse jobs out there. I imagine it's boring though. The problem is that they perpetuate the problem, young white male gamers bullying anyone whos doesn't fit their demographic. Don't get me wrong, they (and I accept this is a generalisation, that not all gamers are young white and male, and that not all young white males are dickheads) will abuse anyone, but not being of that demographic immediately gives them an easy target. Objectifying women by putting them in a bikini and having them point at your game is, in the eyes of the internet knob, official validation that women are there to look pretty in games, not to play them. Which is a shame, because I like looking at attractive women but there are too many men who can't differentiate between an attractive woman and a desirable object.

[deject]

I don't necessarily feel that sorry for them. There are a lot worse jobs out there. I imagine it's boring though. The problem is that they perpetuate the problem, young white male gamers bullying anyone whos doesn't fit their demographic. Don't get me wrong, they (and I accept this is a generalisation, that not all gamers are young white and male, and that not all young white males are dickheads) will abuse anyone, but not being of that demographic immediately gives them an easy target. Objectifying women by putting them in a bikini and having them point at your game is, in the eyes of the internet knob, official validation that women are there to look pretty in games, not to play them. Which is a shame, because I like looking at attractive women but there are too many men who can't differentiate between an attractive woman and a desirable object.

Fully agreed.

[Jimmington]

Sorry, lost me with that one my head is still caning though so I may be able to give it another go in the morning, but maybe you can point me in the right direction of what he is saying as I am probably well off tangent.

So is it that there are shedloads of women being knocked back from writing / developing games - or has he got the hump women don't play games. and then get slated for doing so?
If the latter, how does he know how many women play games, do you have to announce when you start playing that you are a girl?
The only "girl" I have known personally to regularly play computer games in the last nigh on 40 years in my social circle was my mum. I would say this demographic shifted when I started to play WoW with a guild because there were a lot of girls in the guild, but I have never met any of them and from what I have seen, WoW seems to be the only thing in their life... but that is a different story.
I personally have never seen any derogatory chat or actions specifically aimed at women in the billion years of gaming - but I don't play online as much as I used to, maybe it is all the rage now.

Agreed there is a lot of racial and homophobic comments out there in gaming land - not sure I would say all of them are budding Adolphs, probably more following the general trend of the gaming populace - but push comes to shove if you are brought up correctly there is no need to resort to name calling. I am not sure why the developers of the games do not just ban certain words from being used ingame - seeing the crazy things they can achieve i am pretty sure a simple word felcher would not be past the realms of impossibility.

I am sure the chap means well, in fact he reminds me very much of the white upperclass anti-nazi bloke my cousin knew years ago with his dedication to someone else's cause, but I guess I am not that sympathetic to it because I have not witnessed it first hand. I certainly don't remember staring at my Barbarian poster for hours on end thinking - "That whore would make the worst gamer in the world." I am pretty sure I was thinking more along the lines of "Why the hell did it not work like when the blokes in Weird Science did it".

Unfortunately, I don't think you are ever going to get away from some men, and by some, i mean a lot, like looking at girls with not a lot of clothes on - and all the while that is the case, be it F1, Superbikes, Gaming Shows, InfoSec, Porn - it is going to be around for a long time. And surely one of the positives of being attractive is being desirable. not sure people would bother otherwise!

[Dog Pants]

His point isn't that there aren't enough women in gaming, it's that those who are are treated badly - from being considered worth less than a man (not unique to gaming) to being outright abused. For me it isn't about women really, it's about prejudice and exclusion, but sexism is the most obvious example. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't there, and filters do get used but that doesn't mean we shouldn't address these prejudices. As I said in the first post, we 5punkers are a pretty intelligent, tolerant bunch and we associate with similarly minded people, so I wouldn't expect us to be able to recall hundreds of examples, but by knowing that it doesn't have to be the norm maybe we can counter some of the negativity when we see it. Maybe some of our members who do fall into these abused demographics have examples. But worst case scenario is that we acknowledge something that doesn't actually happen and no harm is done. And as I said in the last post, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to see people you're attracted to being provocative, but unfortunately there are too many people who see that as justification to treat those people like objects.

[Jimmington]

Ah righto if that's what he means - yeah will have to reiterate that I have never seen anything like that at all. I have seen all the others, pork meatball et al, but never anything directed at women specifically. I am sure there are plenty of things happening out there in online land that I am unaware of, but being the sort of chap I am if I had enough time in my life to dedicate to such a cause, I would rather see some examples and research on it rather than saddle up with the posse on the word of this fella on his soapbox.
I am sure you are right that there are members here who could list examples of being abused for being a girl, being a homosexual or different ethnicity - but it does come back to my question - how would you know what features to pick on?
When I join a game (admittedly quite rare these days) it does not autopopulate the chat channel with "Good looking white Christian male based in South East London", at best it is a username, so my potential tormentors have no idea on what attribute to pick on. Of course they can take potshots on the favourite ones and might strike lucky, but unless I announce who or what I am, I am not sure how I am going to be offended by name calling at random - but then that is just me. Like you say, we are grown up enough not to have to resort to dates and times and I know you are talking about prejudice as a whole - but generally, what games are we talking here regarding sexism? The only one where I could most likely see it is something like WoW where a community builds up and you have slightly more of an idea of who is who, but I am not sure I could place it in a FPS for example - racism seems to be the one of choice for FPS as I have seen many times.

Of course it is sad there is negativity in the world, and without sounding too Miss World, there is a lot of hate out there - not sure how much of it is meant and how much of it is throwaway, but if it offends it offends I guess. Not being a girl (ya ya ya) and having a particularly thick skin I am going to have to step down from this battle and let the more qualified take it on. As a last point, I know a lot of games have swear filters, but how many have racist and homophobic filters in - pretty sure CoD and BF didn't unless they have updated them - but I know WoW only hashes the words - why not just make it impossible to type them at all, as what need is there in game for terms like that?

However if my broken brain has not suffered enough, I have just been informed I have to get up on a stage and speak to Christ knows who next week as I am sponsoring the matchball for Wimbledon. I was concerned he was going to ask me to play at one point....

[Jimmington]

It's OK Mr Obama - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22050548 has decided to join in, in my place!

[Dog Pants]

Just seeing the outrage in the comments of John's posts is evidence enough for me, and apparently it's the industry as much as the players. The crux of it for me, all details aside, is that nobody should feel excluded from gaming because of who they are. Because of things they say, opinions they have, yes. Having an opinion will always exclude you from some circles. And that's not just in how players treat people - the way women are portrayed in many games must surely be distasteful to a lot of people. But the industry respond to the players, and the more people question it when female characters wear armoured bikinis, why faaabulous characters are camp figures of derision, why all the good guys are white and American, then the stronger the message is against these harmful stereotypes. We don't have to go PC mad or become evangelists, making every game playable as any race, gender, sexuality, but just that we don't accept it as established protocol. It can be done: Mass Effect did it pretty well. Shepherd worked equally well as a male or female. Mass Effect 3 had a convincing faaabulous character whose sexuality was merely a point of interest rather than a definition. XCOM gave you troops of various gender and nationality who were all equal (my end-game champion was Colonel Khaled, a Saudi, just because he was the one who fit the bill).

This isn't a specific response to Jim by the way, just addressing points raised.

[Dog Pants]

It's OK Mr Obama - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22050548 has decided to join in, in my place!

Ah! It was a compliment and an off the cuff remark, why should she be offended? It undermines her, that's why. She's successful in her own right, and yet her remarkable achievement is being an attractive woman.

My sister taught me what feminism really is. It's not about man-hating, or about female superiority. It's about equality. The word feminism itself is counter-productive in my opinion because it focuses on the feminine and it's actually about specifically not focusing on gender, or indeed anything else which bears no reference to the matter at hand. It can be misrepresented by the aforementioned man-haters and female supremacists, who are just spouting another form of sexism, and it can be positive discrimination like promoting female staff because you think there should be more promotions for women rather than because the individual is good at the job. It can also be taken too far - clearly not absolutely everything can be equal, but that needs to be accepted as common sense and not dwelled upon.

Fucking hell I'm writing a lot of words on this. I've seen a lot of prejudice in my time, mostly racism, and it brings out the campaigner in me.

[FatherJack]

I'm very surprised at the stat linked to in that article which claims almost 50% of gamers are women (which is roughly the same as the population split) for a couple of reasons.

One is that I don't see it - amongst people I know and when I look around in a game shop. The nature of the friends I have and the industry I work in actually make it more likely that the people will be gamers, because my industry is an IT/web-based one and because I know a lot of my friends through gaming and their partners game with us. That report does include quite a wide definition of 'gamers', which would include my Mum who is addicted to Freecell, but would never go near anything else.

The other reason is that looking at the games out there, the artwork on the boxes and the advertising, even not counting examples of very overt sexism dressed up as machoism, the majority of stuff seems to be targeted at boys. If half their potential audience is really female, why the hell are they hurting their own profits by continuing to do this?

One reason for the discrepancy would be perception, I guess. "Gamer" is not something I list on my CV, in fact I even tend to keep my games-programming abilities a secret in that arena, as all-too-often it can conjure up images to the ill-informed of that (satirical) video of the angry German kid.

Perhaps women don't like to admit they play games, as it might appear boyish or childish. Perhaps they worry their choice of game will be derided, or that this has indeed happened. Perhaps they have met someone like me, who at the mere mention of games responds with such enthusiasm and vigour that often the other party ends up backing away with their hands raised in supplication as if they've just accidentally mentioned the music of Frank Sinatra to Archie the pub bore from the Fast Show.


Back to the article, though - it was more about why they won't shut up about the issues rather than actually raising many, highlighting that shouting down/derailing any discussion about it by saying "I like boobs" or of ridiculously accusing any man trying to discuss the issues as homosexual / trying to impress the ladies doesn't actually bring anything useful to the debate and just reaffirms that misheld view to outsiders of testosterone fuelled-rage.


Stuff I've experienced/heard about from my female gaming friends is largely about other people's attitude towards them. They might not always like the way female characters are rendered provocatively, but mostly overlook it, being more happy that there actually are females as main/playable characters.

Stuff they don't like is how they're asked questions by staff in game shops in a manner which indicates assumptions are being made about their intelligence/experience. "Are you sure you've got the right thing?" "You do know you need the base game to play this?" I never get asked shit like that, but then I'd probably get picked first if someone were asked to 'pick the gamer' from a crowd.

The other, big one is where we can actually do something - and this applies to all forms of bigotry. In multiplayer games, females have always attracted more attention - often unwelcome attention. I've seen the difference myself as I often select female avatars. Abusive comments of sexual nature, badgering for contact details and all the shit mentioned in the article when someone tries to stand up to the bullies and tell them to stop harrassing the target. With the advert of in-game voice it's become much easier to identify female players, such that almost all of my female game-playing friends avoid it, as constantly having to affirm "yes, I am really a girl" gets old very quickly.

It shouldn't be a thing. A woman joining a game shouldn't be some big deal - a rare specimen to be scrutinised and ogled, that only makes them more reticent to join in the fun or reveal their gender. As DP notes, we're all pretty sensible here, but when we see bad stuff happening in online games, we have the opportunity to speak up and say that it's wrong.

The core principle of 5punk is a bunch of mates having a laugh playing games - a kickabout in the park. No one is excluded through their ability, gender or anything else and everyone and their opinions are equally valid. It is perfectly fine to jest about pretty much any subject, even thorny issues - but when comments become personally-targeted against someone because of what they are rather than who they are, to a degree that someone's been made uncomfortable or upset, then I'd see it as a duty to act and say "stop" and I hope if we can expand that 5punky-sphere to the games we play with others that we'll have made a small contribution to what that article is urging: to give a shit.