Don’t Tell Me That My Game is Sexist…

This statement was more of a plea than an imperative and it came from an unexpected source. Let me back up a bit and say that I have been playing a bit of Destiny multiplayer this week and I’ve been playing with the same folks because they don’t mind that I suck. They let me play my support role of going in and throwing grenades and slamming the ground to weaken waves while they come in and finish everybody off (not everybody, but my kills are embarrassingly low). Playing with these folks has been a blast. We laugh, cuss, and sing for hours every night. (Yes, sing…make ‘Tacious sing the theme song from M*A*S*H for you) and none of us seem to care how bad I am or how bad this game actually is.

Allow me to digress here a bit and talk about how “bad” this game actually is. The narrative is simultaneously confusing and absent, the maps are repetitive (and I use the plural there loosely as I am sure that we are playing the same map over and over again), the enemies can be ridiculously hard for what the map is leveled at, the bounty rewards suck, and numerous other things that should make me want to delete this game from my hard drive and cures Bungie’s soul. But, it doesn’t playing this game with friends has been insane. I stay up way too late/early every morning and I have been dragging ass every day to prove it. Let me clear things up a bit, when I say that Destiny is a bad game I don’t mean broken, unplayable, bad, but rather just mediocre. Ironically, it’s a mediocre game that just about everyone on my friends list is playing…a lot. 

Back to my original point. When our Fireteam completes a mission or goes back to the Tower to buy upgrades, collect bounties, etc. one of the things that we tend to do to pass the time and entertain ourselves is dance. And by us I mean our avatars (at least that’s what I mean, but I can only speak for myself) and one of the things that I have noticed about the dancing is that the dances of the female avatars are much more sexual in nature. My Awoken female does a very fluid, exotic dancer type move while Alex and Tacious’ human do more contemporary dances. My mind automatically started thinking about looking at the dances across races in the game, but I held back. And then last night while we were upgrading characters before a battle everyone sat their avatars down on the ground and then I noticed it. The sexy sit. In full friggin’ armor female avatar sit like they are riding side saddle! I couldn’t hold it in anymore so I “casually” mentioned it to Alex and Tacious. I was equally shocked and amused by Alex’s response. “Don’t tell me that this game is sexist because I wanna enjoy it.”

We kind of laughed it off and kept playing, but the truth of the matter is, if we didn’t play games because they had sexist (or racist, or homophobic, or transphobic) elements we wouldn’t be playing very much of anything. And I think that this gets to the truth of being both a gamer and a games scholar. We can be critical of the games that we play and still enjoy them. I am critical as hell on most media (it just happens, I can’t turn it off) but I can still enjoy them while recognizing that things need to change. And in the cases where things are just too bad, I let my wallet speak for me and I just don’t buy it. If you’ve listened to the podcast more than a time or two you’ve heard me talk about how I have rage quit a game because of sexism or racism and have sworn to dance on the graves of the developers (ok, I am only mildly exaggerating on that last bit), but overall I see games as I see other kinds of texts. Products of our (imperfect) society. I see real reflections of who we are as human beings and just as I see a need for change in us, I see a need for change in games. And I have yet to rage quit on the human race as a whole either.