A few weeks ago I made the mistake (as I often do) of getting into a debate about feminism on Facebook. I’m not sure why I do this. By now, I surely should have learned. But when it starts, I’m like a moth drawn to flame. I just can’t stay away.
Somehow, during the course of the conversation, things shifted from feminism in general to feminist gamers—specifically #gamergate.
“Look at Gamergate. A bunch of girls refused to believe that men and women think differently. They wanted to partake in the predominantly male community and claimed that they felt dismissed because of misogyny.
What happened? They joined in on the “fun” and freaked out when male gamers started treating them with the same competitive condescension that guys typically found to be hilarious.”
This, of course, wasn’t particularly surprising. For anyone who followed the craziness of #gamergate, this was a pretty common argument. The fuss was just a bunch of non-gamers who shoved their way into the boys-only club and then got offended when it wasn’t dressed up in pink with pretty ribbons and unicorns. This was….well…not fine, exactly, but expected. I was prepared.
I pulled up my research, my bookmarks, and my personal experience, armed with statistics that proved that women weren’t a small fraction of the gaming population, and they weren’t all new gamers. This wasn’t a “sudden trend.” We’ve been here for a good long while, and I had proof.
….Except that proof didn’t matter.
“lol @ the gammer community stats. Candy crush saga is not a real game but yet, shitty mobile games are still counted in your statistics.”
“I hate arguing with articles from experience because they never make sense. I am more than just a little social for starters… And I was playing Warcraft 1 when it was first released. I am calling 100% bullshit on this. They would have to have hidden a demographic somewhere underground all this time. “
“Go find me ten girls that can go on in great depth about Balder’s Gate, Icewind Dale, System Shock, Black and White, Brigandine and War Craft 1-3, and I will believe 10% of the gaming population are women at best. And that that is a far shot beyond the 4% at best that I had no choice to assume all of these years.”
And here’s what it really comes down to. This isn’t about numbers. It’s about membership….specifically, who gets to say who belongs to the club.
In the introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, Foucault digs into why we (as humans) are so obsessed with classification. We like things that are ordered, with set places and purposes. This is why we like the idea of utopias…everything and everyone works in perfect harmony, because they all have their roles and never deviate from them. But real life isn’t a utopia. It’s messy, and humans are complicated beings with myriad motivations and overlapping roles and interests. As such, it is exceedingly tricky (read: impossible) to come up with nice, neat definitions that fit.
“Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.
…Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names…heterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source. They dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.”
We don’t like it when our boxes get overturned. And so we end up adding qualifications to our lists, because if we narrow our definition enough, it seems like we might actually be able to pin it down. THIS is what a gamer is, and ONLY this.
“Play this game, and then talk to me.”
“I bet you only got interested in this after the new movie.”
“A real fan could answer these questions…”
The qualifications get piled on higher and higher…until enough evidence has been gathered for the challenger to go “SEE! I knew it. I was right. Girls aren’t real gamers.”
Or if, heaven forbid, the the girl in question actually rises to the challenge, she becomes the token member…the exception to the rule. It’s still not enough to prove that the box doesn’t fit.
Never mind that the guys in this conversation were talking to me (a female gamer doing PhD-work as a participant-researcher with gaming). Never mind that I had played the games listed as “qualifications” even though I am by no means the most dedicated gamer of my female gaming friends. Because qualifying wasn’t the point. The point was that it was necessary in the first place.
I will say this once…you don’t get to dictate someone’s identity.
If someone says they are a Christian or a Buddhist or straight or gay or male or female or a bookworm or a gamer…you don’t get to say otherwise. A person’s identity isn’t a club that needs to be joined. It’s not a job that needs to be applied for. It’s who they are. It’s how they frame themselves and form their worldview, and that’s entirely on them. Not you.
There is a difference between the groups you “belong” to and your identity. I have belonged to many choirs. I love to sing. I have been told I kick ass on Rockband (Expert level, baby)…but I don’t identify as a singer. I am a singer in that I use my voice and I enjoy doing so, but it’s not who I am, in the same way that I don’t identify as a chef or a knitter or a fashonista, or a literature major. I enjoy a lot of those things, but they aren’t me.
I do, however, identify as a gamer. A teacher. A daughter. A sister. A caretaker. A techie. An academic. These are all things that I have built my life around. When we claim an identity, we are claiming our values. Our priorities. And one of mine is games.
So let’s get this straight…if you want to have a club or an organization or a forum group, you are welcome to do that. And in that club or organization or forum group, you can post all your requirements for being a member. You can require applications and you can be as strict or as lenient as you want when you process them. You can call it a gaming group, and I guarantee that all the people who join you will be gamers…
But they don’t define gamers. They are not the be-all and end-all of gamers. And I hate to break it to you…but most gamers aren’t going to care about joining your club or proving their merits to your satisfaction. We have better things to do with our time.
So yes. I will be over here playing Farmville in between classes. I will have board game nights with my friends, do fandom roleplay with my online buddies, and headshot the hell out of the Fallen in Destiny. I’m not embarrassed by my interests, the games I love or hate, or what you Gamer-card-wielding folks have to say about it.
I’ve got my own club…and we’re having fun with or without your approval.
7 thoughts on “Error 404…Your Gamer Card is Invalid”
Got linked here from an anti-GG subreddit.
Your first two links are from Facebook’s link tracking thing.
Great article, otherwise. I disagree a bit on identity. Where whiny gamer outrage fails is the matter of stakes. If you’re claiming to be queer or some other group and then advocate strongly against the interest of that group and engage in behavior that would lead others to believe you’re not part of that group, it’s OK to call that out. If you claim to be a convert to Islam and you’ve got a great recipe for BBQ pork, well..
Also if you’re claiming to be a gamer, and claiming that you’re inclusive and loving and kind then relentlessly pursue a campaign of harassment against people who also want gaming to be more inclusive and see flaws in the subculture, I don’t think you’re any of those things. Unfortunately for GamerGate, they’re maing the wrong call here.
Re: Links….shoot. Let me fix that.
I have updated the post, but in case they don’t work, I’ll include them here:
From The Washington Post – http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/17/more-women-play-video-games-than-boys-and-other-surprising-facts-lost-in-the-mess-of-gamergate/
and PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/researchers-find-that-female-pc-gamers-outnumber-males/
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As for identity, yes…stakes do make a difference, particularly when you’re dealing with people with power. This is why it becomes problematic when governments or employers begin limiting or requiring membership based on identity. And people within organizations can certainly argue about whether or not someone is a “real” gamer/christian/muslim/etc.
My point is that organizations and identity are different. From my own faith perspective (Christianity), I would say that Westboro Baptists are not, in fact, Christian and I hate that they are associated with something I hold near and dear to my heart. But that’s the thing….they still identify as Christian. I do not want them to have an influence on church policy (or policy of any kind, really. Please. No.), but my limits and qualifications do not change how they see themselves. Nor should it, I suppose. That’s neither my place nor my right.
Now, if I was involved in organizing something faith-based and someone spouting WB-inspired hate and prejudice tried to join in, I would shut that down immediately. They can go be “Christian” somewhere else. But, whether unfortunate or not, that is the limit of my ability to restrict their participation in my group.
Of course, that doesn’t even begin to get into the can of worms you mentioned, which is the power-dynamics of identity when it comes to marginalized groups. There’s no easy answer, there. So I acknowledge that my argument in problematic, but I framed it this way because I’m specifically addressing people who try to restrict marginalized individuals’ access to their identities, rather than people who sabatoge or damage those identities by “joining” without understanding the heart of those subcultures/groups/organizations/etc. Both are issues, though, so I really don’t want to minimize the flip-side of the coin.
I enjoyed reading your blog post. A friend of mine posts here as well and I read the work here from time to time.
I apologize if I’m simplifying things a bit, but it really seems as if you’ve crafted a strawman of someone elses arguments and done an excellent job of beating them. Specifically, you’ve crafted this idea that gamergate is against girls and women in gaming because of interactions you may have had with a few individuals that support gamergate.
It surprises me that you, as a feminist, don’t seem to see the irony in this. Is this not the same sort of strawman-beating that anti-feminists do when they point at Radfems and TERFs and act like they represent all of Feminism? This is ignoring the associated NotYourShield group of women and minorities that specifically came out to speak against the very notions you’ve posted here. Isn’t this the same dismissive attitude that prompted this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M
Feminism isn’t about the hatred of men even though some feminists do.
Feminism isn’t about oppressing trans people even though some feminists do.
You can’t label a group of people by the actions a minority of them perform.
We’re better than this. You and I both know that gamergate isn’t about reinforcing a boys-club or pushing women out of the games industry. You and I both know that Feminism isn’t about #KillAllMen or transphobia. So why feel the need to misrepresent it as such? This is just needlessly divisive, like MRAs claiming Feminism needs to die before equality can be achieved.
We can do better than this. Please do better than this.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen.
Ayman,
Thank you for your comments, and I definitely get the concerns. I don’t want to create a strawman to attack, because people are infinitely more complex than that…which is really what I wanted to get across in this article. I was specifically speaking to a conversation I just had, but also to conversations that I have been having for years about what is and is not a gamer.
My point was not to beat my opponent, but to argue that no one gets to say how someone identifies except that person. This isn’t exclusive to gamergate or gamers or women. It goes for anyone who wants to say that person is or is not a Christian, or is or is not a scholar or is or is not an “insert identity here.”
You are right that feminism is not about hating men, and I have too many wonderful guys in my life to ever hope for that interpretation, so if that’s what this seemed like, I’m sorry.
However, I do genuinely believe that the #gamergate movement IS largely about pushing women out of the gaming community. This does not mean that everyone in the movement believes this, but the larger activism that the group has engaged with has not been focused on games journalism, but on specific female gamers and journalists in a bizarrely concentrated manner.
I respect and side with anyone who wants higher standards in journalism. I respect and side with anyone who wants to protect those who are not protected equally, whether they are male, female, trans, black, white, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Athiest, straight, gay, bi…whatever. But I do not respect #gamergate as a movement. I can’t support an organization who’s largest achievement is the wholesale attack on female gamers, game developers, and game critics.
Ayman, it seems to me that you’re the one making the assumptions here. Jen is not saying “gamergate means this,” but rather that these discussions have taken place in and around that fracas, and indeed, I’ll add these conversations far predate any related discussion. In fact, the moving goalpost of who isn’t and isn’t a gamer in regard to women claiming the moniker is something this site has covered from time to time for years. There is a long and storied history of this kind of divide in gaming communities. I first wrote about it myself nearly a decade ago, and I was hardly among the first.
#gg may shed more mainstream light on some discussions, but it doesn’t mean they originated there.
Thank you for the great article. Although I am not a hardcore gamer, I still find the hate towards women in this “community” endlessly frustrating. I just don’t want to justify myself everytime I talk about geeky things on the internet, especially gaming. So i tend to stay away from discussions like these, because i feel like shit everytime I do. So thank you for having the patience to fight windmills 😉
Meepit,
Thank you for your comment! I’m really glad you liked it. Hardcore or not doesn’t matter. We can like what we like and we don’t have to justify it for anyone. Game on! 😀