“Just imagine building a gaming community which is explicitly welcoming to people typically excluded from such places. Imagine trying to make it not a niche, but an acknowledged part of the mainstream culture. Now imagine what happens when you have to tell people, constantly, that when they say X or make joke Y, they’re helping create an environment that excludes certain groups you don’t want to exclude—groups that, let’s remember, half of the community hates and fears.

That’s just going to go swimmingly.”

It made me chuckle, in that rueful, cynical way. We’re trying so hard at Iris to create a forum where people who are excluded from mainstream gaming can feel welcome - and safe - and it’s an uphill jog almost every day. Our core users are feminists, for the most part, and we have lots of anti-racist activists and queer activists, and people who blog very eloquently against all sorts of isms - and we still have a near-constant repetition of the “when you say X or make joke Y, you’re helping create an environment that excludes certain groups” conversation going on.

Personally, I feel like it’s very worthwhile. But oh, is it tiring. And we’re still very much in the niche position. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if we had a lot of truly mainstream gamers trying to converse on our forums.

So, anyway. I don’t really have anything substantive to add to what you’re talking about here. Just that your post made me think, and I wanted to share a couple of those thoughts.

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Chris, that’s a good point. I think the indie tabletop scene has some things going for it, though, even as it grows. For one thing, we’re talking about this stuff now, and some fairly influential people are really on-board with these kinds of issues. The indie scene is becoming less homosocial, too, which is good in a bunch of ways.

And also, it’s just so much harder to be a total ass when someone sitting across from you, at the same table, tells you that you’re hurting them. Talking about trust and power dynamics makes us more aware of them, and that’s really helpful.

Which doesn’t mean these issues aren’t going to come up, and aren’t going to come up more as the community grows. White supremacy exists in the overculture, and it exists in, say, the feminist movement, and hell, it exists in racial liberation movements. Likewise patriarchal power structures. I think the best we can hope for is that we have the tools to deal with these issues as they come up, and the will to really use them. I’m optimistic.

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EmCee,

Right, because saying I have no reason to be part of a social community where half the members hate people like me is exactly like saying I can only live in a feminist, egalitarian utopia.

I suppose it’s easier to say, “hey, society in general is fucked up, too!” than it is to try to understand why gamer culture is so much more fucked up.

And I like how you state without evidence that it’s impossible to separate the medium from the subculture, even though that very separation has been The Trend in gaming over the past five years. I suppose it’s fair though, given how small, homosocial, and demographically locked the booker (people who read books), televisioner (people who watch television), and internetter (people who use the Internet) subcultures remain.

You can’t.

My point is that the gamer culture is made up of a plethora of groups - both good and bad. If you want the good, you have to take the bad. That’s how it works. In real life, and the virtual one. Exclusion will not keep the bad people out - they will figure out how to insinuate themselves into the new culture and corrupt it from within.

Good luck trying to make a nice dream world where nothing bad every happens to anyone or bad people can intrude. Because no matter where you go, or what society you enter, there will always be that half that is horrible and could destroy it from within.

I’m in agreeance with you 100%.

The big red line I’ve noticed in gamer communities, is that while many of the “good” gamers who are willing to empathize with the cause, in words at least, are rarely willing to do anything to actually counteract the assholes. That is, “I’m good because I didn’t act like a dick, but I won’t check anyone else for doing so”. Ultimately, wishful thinking support is no support at all and ultimately boils down to assent.

When even the “sympathetic” parties are unwilling to engage in change, there is no chance of a shift.

On another note, I think while the current indie tabletop community has been in better balance, I wonder how much that can really hold should it grow? As long as we’re in a sexist society, growth means at some point the usual sexist folks will outnumber the anti-sexists. Even with education as a core value, since you need only look at activist groups suffering from the very oppressions they seek to overcome- equality is an easy word to say, but privilege is often too high a price to pay.

Given my personal experiences with the community on race issues, I’ve pretty much come to the same conclusions as you- gamerdom is built on flawed foundations, we gotta build something new from the ground up.

I’m not admonishing you. I’m not saying you should do more. I’m saying that this culture, one that you apparently identify with, is worthless to me. I’m saying that it has serious problems and not enough redeeming features to be worth fixing. It doesn’t really matter how many people within the community are to blame, and how many are just resigned. The environment is how it is.

I am not blaming you or any other particular person. I know there are a lot of good people who identify as gamers. They may even be in the majority. And yet, somehow, their attitudes fail to build the community standards. Whatever desires they have to see more inclusiveness get lost in a sea of misogyny and fag jokes.

It’s not exactly hard to see how this cycle continues. Just imagine building a gaming community which is explicitly welcoming to people typically excluded from such places. Imagine trying to make it not a niche, but an acknowledged part of the mainstream culture. Now imagine what happens when you have to tell people, constantly, that when they say X or make joke Y, they’re helping create an environment that excludes certain groups you don’t want to exclude—groups that, let’s remember, half of the community hates and fears.

That’s just going to go swimmingly.

Could willing members of the gamer community do something about this? Yes. Of course. Despite ridiculous arguments to the contrary, it is absolutely possible to build communities on the Internet, complete with the construction of social norms. It’s likewise possible to change those norms, by resisting them, by finding others who want to resist them. This is hard, of course, because it involves being socially ostracized and—in this context—basically getting called a fag a lot.

I genuinely don’t believe that anyone is under an obligation to do that. And, in fact, the point of my post is that I don’t see why we should bother. Working on insulating the industry from the culture? Yes. Working on insulating the medium from the culture? Yes, absolutely. Working on changing the culture? I just don’t see the percentage in that.

I’m from Nebraska, and every day, out in public, I hear people call other people - these are direct quotes - “fags,” “whores,” “ni**ers,” etc. all in the dergotatory sense. These are the same people who participate in regular communities all over the city and the state. They are church-goers, parents, leaders, regulars, musicians, and so on. I’ve seen it in cities in other parts of the country. I’ve seen it in cities in other parts of the world. It extends waaaay past the gaming community.

The gamer community is not “unique” in this regard. The problem does not exist exclusively in the gamer community. If anything, I blame the predecessors of video games - radio, movies and TV. Before those, I blame printed media and demonstrations. Before that, I blame the fact that people willing participated in gatherings and groups that perpetuated the stereotypes and actively oppressed people. It’s been 200 years in the US, and a lot longer in the rest of the world, and we’re just beginning to treat women as equal workers in regular workplaces.

It took us somewhere around 2/3’s of human development to finally stop sexist, racist, homosexual, and other types of discrimination in normal work environments. It’s still practiced in the normal circles of human interaction, on the basest levels. The online gamer community has been around for - at maximum - 15 years. It’s a relatively new society with new rules, new expectations, and new axioms. It actually forces people that would not normally interact to be in proximity with each other. It brings idiots together with the problem people.

Problem is, again, you generalize the entirety of the gamer community. It’s not the entirety of the gamer community - it’s probably at best half the community. The problem is the morons and the pigs are the most visible - those are the people you see. And you blame us for their actions. Actions we cannot control, except to avoid them and try to work towards our own more controlled communities. The problem is the better half of the gamer community has absolutely no way to control the problem. None whatsoever. There are no ramifications for being a sexist dick on the Internet, and rarely can anyone do anyting about it. There’s no authority there. And there never will be, because the Internet is not constructed - not built - to police itself. The very thing that makes the Internet great is the same thing that allows these things to happen. In fact, over-sensativity makes things ten times worse on the Internet, because people feed off the hurt and the pain and the power trips that can be had by stirring groups like femisists, environmentalists, gay rights activists, etc.

I have absolutely no issues with women being a part of that. I enjoy interacting with them, actually, as they tend to be politer and more intelligent. Although I don’t know what you want me to do about it. Admonish the magazines? I don’t read those things or go to those sites already. The people who should be admonishing those places are the people who are directly involved, and they won’t do a damn thing about it, because it’s free PR and the hype created has only ingrained the behavior even more. By trying to ADMONISH the Internet, you only make it worse.

A lot, lot worse. And the good people have be grouped into the little “UR BAD BAD BAD PEOPLE” rants that every over-sensative group has. Which makes us even more insensitive to the plight. How am I supposed to care about this issue if all you people do is admonish me and people like me when we did nothing wrong.

Ubisoft’s marketing might or might not be problematic. (In either case, it was hardly done in a vacuum—the photo that every has their panties in a bunch over? That photo was set up by a magazine, not by Ubi, not by anyone in the office.) All of which is utterly beside the point. People are welcome to think that Raymond is getting a disproportionate share of the spotlight. They’re welcome to think that the game’s crap; they’re welcome to give her and her team a hard time; they’re welcome to critique Ubisoft’s marketing and whatever participation they think she had in it.

They are also, I suppose, free to write personal, sexualized, hateful material in these “critiques.” They’re free to make comments that they would never make of a male game developer—implied rape threats, creepy stalker fantasies. They’re free to assume that because she’s attractive, she obviously cannot be intelligent.

They are free to do these latter things, but doing them makes them assholes (or worse). This makes them Part of the Problem ™, where the problem in this case is the alienation of women from game development and the hardcore community. When a lot of people in the community participate, there’s clearly something wrong with the community culture. When the best response one gets out of the community is a resigned sort of, “enh,” that leads me to believe that the culture sees this as perfectly acceptable.

And that’s a serious problem.

(Well, unless you’re white, straight, and male, and don’t particularly care about anyone else. In which case, bully for you, more free servers or whatever.)

There do exist some people who identify as gamers who aren’t homophobic, don’t objectify women, etc. There were some people in the Antebellum South who weren’t racist. The existence of either doesn’t speak to the structure of the community. It doesn’t tell us how the tropes and practices of the community encourage or dampen these tendencies, insofar as they exist.

It’s an extremely rare occurrence to go on X-Box Live and not get called a fag, or see someone get called a fag. Likewise WoW. Likewise the comments threads at any number of mainstream gaming sites. Insults against women are even more common. These aren’t merely imported insults, either—gamer culture has developed a misogynistic and homophobic lexicon of its very own. The people making those comments to xxxGayBoyxxx up there? They’re perfectly normal, in this community.

So when I say gamer culture is broken, that’s what I mean.

It’s not just that people are assholes on the Internet. Believe it or not, there exist places online where this doesn’t happen. Even quite large communities exist which just don’t have nearly as strong an undertow of misogyny and homophobia.

It’s simply incorrect to believe that the problems in the community are perpetuated by just a bunch of individuals acting like assholes. It is a bunch of individuals, and they are assholes, but the problems run much deeper.