Hey folks,
You may or may not know that last week marked my first week as a professor (yay!). This week classes have begun, and with it my stress meter is off the chart. I haven’t had time to do much gaming. Primarily I’m playing online Settlers of Catan (iPad), Hearthstone, and some Farmville 2 (iPad). I know some really crazy stuff is happening surrounding the Zoe Quinn scandal. Zoe is a video game designer who is being harassed and threatened because of unfounded accusations made by her ex-boyfriend that she exchanged sex for favors in the video game industry.
However, I haven’t had time to give the story as much depth as it deserves. You can find info here: http://www.dailydot.com/geek/zoe-quinn-depression-quest-gaming-sex-scandal/ and anywhere else, really.
While I’m not going to cover this specific incident, I would like to talk briefly about this issue as a whole. How many Heplers, Quinns, and Saarkesians do we need before we admit, en masse, that we have a huge problem here. Was Quinn’s game shitty? Maybe. Is Saarkesian doing work that represents and respects the work of feminists in game studies? Maybe not. However, how good Quinn’s game is or how much Saarkesian sucks is NOT the issue. The issue here is that the response of the video game community to any woman who is unfortunate enough to find herself in the spotlight is violence. Sexual violence, violent threats, DDS attacks. It is relentless, and we have got to change the conversation. It seems highly unlikely that Quinn exchanged sex for positive reviews of her game. Laughable, even. But again, the fact that that question even comes up shows just how fucked up this environment is. While no one would likely say “well, she did exchange sex for positive game reviews so she deserved to be threatened with rape and murder,” engaging that part of the conversation makes you implicit in it. Focusing on whether Saarkesian sucks, rather than talking about the reaction she got, or even worse, talking about how her harassment made her more popular is a complete sidestep of the real issue. I urge anyone looking into the Zoe Quinn issue to focus on the right parts of the story.
For example, see this article focus on “why gamers are revolting” against Quinn. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that conflates two things: harassment/rape/violence and legit feelings in the game community. Can gamers be frustrated? Sure. Is that an excuse to harass women? No. So let’s not push the violent importance of this issue aside to focus on some other issue. One does not necessitate the other, and the fact that so many people think it does, frankly, is disgusting.
