**I know trigger warnings are so not the thing these days. But really, this one gets kinda ugly**
Play is free. Fun. Natural—like breathing, the desire to eat (or love), or do other things that are inappropriate to write about in the blog. Except that nothing is really free, play is often not fun, and eating and that other thing have consequences that can actually make the cost prohibitively expensive. Just ask someone who ate themselves into gastric bypass or found themselves underwater without one of those pricey oxygen tanks. So what about play? We see videos of puppies playing together as soon as we they can walk, and we think, oh gee, it’s so beautiful and pure. Then we hear a story of a toddler dying because his parent locked him in a closet for 48 hours while s/he was gaming.
That’s not us though, right? That person was clearly mentally ill and if it hadn’t been games it would’ve been something else. Neglectful people are neglectful people regardless of the medium. But there is a grain of similarity between that parent and all of us who play. Perhaps it’s only as serious as choosing to play over going to a birthday party. Perhaps it’s having your significant other feed you Cheetos as you raid. Maybe it’s neglecting your own health because the precious few moments of time you have to yourself you’d rather be gaming. Or maybe it’s only a dollar, or sixty, or whatever that game cost. There is however no denying that all play has a price, and we pay. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s a little, and sometimes we pay with the things we hold most precious to ourselves, like our respect, our dignity, and our beliefs.
So what is the price we each are willing to pay to play the game? I got in an argument recently with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. She was asking about my dissertation and the work I’d been doing with NYMG and such. I was telling her what it was like to do a big bulk of the research for my dissertation. It was 6 months of hell. I had to find quotes and examples and details of how much the community I love, and in a lot of ways have dedicated my life’s work to, hates me. Not just hates me, fucking hates every molecule of my being—how disturbingly many gamers don’t even see me as a human being worth existence on this earth. I read every dirty, disgusting part of the online gaming community from “I’ll rip open your neck and fuck your gaping hole and cum in your lifeless eyes” to the “go back to the kitchen slut”s that appear on every. single. fucking. forum.
Most people ask me why. Why would I, being an at least somewhat intelligent, respectable woman put myself through that. Of course that one is easy: I love so much about the community. I love the people I’ve made lifelong connections to because of gaming. I just can’t help it. Like some artists wake up every day needing to paint, I need to game. Plus programming and gaming are enormously important fields and will continue to grow. The way women are underrepresented in them is incredibly damaging. But that isn’t what she said. She said something to the effect of “that seems like an awful high price to pay.” Is she right? I could satisfy my needs to game and to help women in the tech sector in other ways. Do I have to expose myself to the worst of the worst? Wouldn’t it be easier to just do some sort of camp helping girls learning gaming or programming or whatever?
The truth is, the awful stuff I read is the price of play, not the price of academically studying what I study. And it’s a price I apparently am willing to pay. I want to play WoW so I put up with constantly getting hit on. I could find another game where there is no social interaction and study that. But I’m not going to. I’ve already decided that I’ll pay that price. I don’t want to play a game in my room, by myself, where I don’t talk to anyone or play with anyone. And so I pay this price. Sam hates playing games with dead kids more than anything in the world, but she’s paid that price. We all play games like Bravely Default, which completely sexualizes underage girls. We put up with misogyny, racism, sexism, rape, homophobia, classism, and on and on. Because, if we didn’t, we couldn’t play. And that’s the price we have all decided we are willing to pay. Kinda fucked up, isn’t it?
