PixlBit

Please understand that this article is not directed at anyone particular person or persons. I’m not saying that any individual should be charged with the task of championing the cause of women’s equality in geek culture. I merely wanted to point out the possible dangers of adopting a gender neutral dialect, when gender inequalities still evidently preside in both our cultures and societies.

There's a lot going on with gender issues in culture these days, and when it comes to gaming, I think it boils down to two factors:

1: Men and women are different.  Sorry, but it's a biological truth.  No getting around it.

2: A-holes will be A-holes, especially online, and will not change.  Such is the nature of an A-hole.

Put the two together, and this is the kind of crap that happens.  No amount of legislation, censorship, begging, pleading, or attempt at "gender blindness" is going to remedy that.  One of the best ideas I heard for the first time was something that came across on our recent podcast on the issue, in which Sam was being harassed by some jerk, and she gave it right back to him.  Eventually, he just came out looking like, well, the A-hole that he is.  

True, it's not the most politically correct solution here, but honestly, those only work on people that are interested in bettering themselves.  Chances are, if you're sexually harassing someone for fun, you aren't interested in anything more than attention.  It's the verbal equivalent to a street fight.  If you try to resolve it in a civil manner, you're probably just going to get hurt.  Humiliating someone in return for their attempt to humiliate you will probably actually work, provided you do it properly.  Gender equality has only come this far because people are willing to fight for it.  I say, take that approach, and to hell with being nice about it.

I think that could work in some situations, but it would be much more difficult to employ that strategy when your pitted against a whole lobby of people. Simply being a jerk back will not end the cycle indefinitely, and will probably lead to more hate/problems in the future. Not saying it doesn’t have its place and I get you point, that things are never going to be the way we want them to on the internet.

But my point wasn’t that we should try to achieve that, it’s that we shouldn’t delude ourselves into creating an illusion of equality when it’s not there.

To an extent I agree with Angelo. I don't think it can be as civilized and clean as we hope it could be. The human species has evolved tremendously in the last several hundred years not only technologically but in regards to our many civilizations and cultures. The current state of things where women have rights, they aren't property, the sexes fight for either dominance or equality, our convienient tech, our culture, is all we have ever known. People growing up these days forget we are animals, and where we have been, and what the human condition has been in the past. It wasn't long ago we didn't have electricity, we were stabbing each other with pikes, defending our castles by pouring hot tar on people sieging front gates, free to rape and pillage, and forcing all women to do what we say lest they sign their own prison sentence or death sentence. We do equally savage things these days, but the point I'm making is we have always been savages, are still savages, but we are now savages trying to evolve some civilized behavior and the more progressive minds we have are trying to figure out what we need to do next.

Evolution comes over time and has many factors influencing it, but it's not caused by legislation, pleading, or censorship. It's usually cause by blood, death, and sacrifice. A lot of people think things magically got this way, that there's some magical force out there that poofed America into existence, or gave women rights, or freed the slaves. Some people think Rosa Parks was a cow on her period, some think President Lincoln was a "nigger loving traitor", some think the Native Americans deserved the genocide that came their way in order for us to expand. People died to gain the freedoms we observe today. Over thousands of years I'm sure countless billions had dreampt of freedom or equality and never saw a single scrap of it from birth till the moment their brain stopped sending signals and their heart stopped beating. Gaining things has never been civilized and never been pretty, but much has been accomplished. People forget that death and toil were the price of many freedoms, and once people forget that, they don't see anything worth fighting for. They forget how to fight, they forget that freedoms are a privlegde you have to earn and defend, not some magic divine right everybody naturally has.

I want to see sex and race discrimination gone, but that's like wishing for world peace, it's not going to happen the way hippies dream of it. The best we can hope to do is raise our children and breed them to weed out as many racist, sexist, and psychotic impulses we can. Socialize them with people of as many skin pigments, spiritualities (including people like me with no spirituality), philosophies, and people of the opposite sex. Humans aren't naturally born little angels. Kids are cute, and not all kids are monsters, but they are humans, they are animals, and they need to be nurtured and conditioned to learn compassion, empathy, sacrifice, reason, logic, and teamwork among many things. Many parents these days just think all these qualities are born in humans, that they are a given, and don't need to be addressed. Even worse, some parents just don't care about those qualities and have a much more aggressive and less civilized or peaceful demeanor.

Culture and the human condition will evolve regardless, but if we want it to veer in the directions we hope to see it go, we have to fight for it and make sure future generations understand the battle and take up the mantle for themselves one day. Too often we look at the issues of sex and race and think those issues were settled long ago, and people stop caring about them or admitting they exist. They were never "settled". They were fought over, but nothing was settled, the human condition wasn't settled. Our generation in smack dab in the middle of it, and it's messy, it's not a fairy tale and it's not settled. The people who want to better themselves and see things change on a grand scale have an uphill battle. Those other people who have the sexist and racist habits, don't have any incentive to change, especially if they're surrounded by like minded people.

The best we can do is fight for equality and freedoms in every way we can, small or big, and most likely people will suffer and die along the way if history is any indication, and if we are lucky the best we can hope to accomplish is to make life a little easier and more comfortable for future generations hundreds and possibly thousands of years from now. That's our sacrifice, our condition, and what must be done. If evolution veers in the directions we hope it does and we are successful, maybe a few hundred years from now some young people like us will realize it, be thankful for it, and be inspired to fight for themselves. Those future generations hundreds and thousands of years from now will have their own sacrifices to make and issues to debate. It's up to us to lead the way, so when they look through their history vids, texts, and libraries they will see that in the past, people from our generation suffered but still fought for what they believed in, and didn't give in to complacency.

Certainly agree Michael, and like I said to Angelo the point of this article was to explain why we should face these uncomfortable inequalities and confront them. There certainly is no easy solution, and I think a lot of the ideas you discussed in your posts make sense. Raising those that come after us to be more tolerant and accepting of our differences will dramatically help to shape a better world, but that also means we must be willing to acknowledge that those differences exists.

Absolutely Mike. I was doing some reading one time learning about how to be a better designer or be a productive member of a development team, and one of the points the writer made was that everybody in a group will have different ideas, different bias', and everybody will want to be the one to come up with the solution to a problem. However the group will never get anywhere if they can't come to consensus on what the problem is in the first place. The author observed that groups of developers could easily waste months fighting over some issue, giving solutions, and they never even thought to ask what the problem was. The author said that one of the most important things to do in problem solving is so simple and logical, but most people fail to do it, and that is, to ask what the problem is in the first place.

In game design if people play a level and have some gripe with it, many designers will often just start creating solutions and arguing over which idea is best. Once somebody came in, shut them up, and told them to explain what the problem is they had different ideas of what was "wrong". People need to talk about these problems before you can hope to start creating possible solutions.

Thanks Mike, that was an awesome analogy.

That's tricky.  While there really is only one problem here (women are being treated like crap for no good reason) there's multiple causes of it.  It's overwhelming really.  It's almost like playing whack a mole. You smack one in the head, and another source pops up.

Unfortunately, you can't force maturity on people, and at the end of the day, this really is the result of immaturity above all else.  And I'm rambling and probably need to stop responding to this article and get some work done, but I tend to get heated up when we talk about stuff like this.

Yeah, I can get kind of ranty when I'm upset, and this does piss me off.  Here's why:

When I was a kid, being a geek wasn't cool, so I was forced to more or less be on the DL about it.  Back then, the A-holes were the popular kids, who treated us in a similar manner to the ways described by Sam and Chessa on that podcast.  When I was in college though, all that stopped.  The jackasses were gone, people appreciated each other, and I was not only accepted, but popular myself because of who I was.

Now again, I'm ashamed.  It seems like these idiots that everybody despises in High School (and rightfully so) have invaded what I always considered to be my turf.  The last shooter I actually played was Halo 3, and that was just with people I knew.  I automatically muted anybody that I played against that I didn't already know.  I didn't even pick up Gears 3 because I absolutely hate going online anymore and hearing all this crap.  I'll buy it eventually, but I doubt I'll ever play an FPS on Xbox Live again unless it's for review.  Being surrounded by that much outright ignorance and being, even remotely associated with it frankly disgusts me. 

There's so much more to this than even that.  I mean, let's look at how women present themselves when it comes to gamers.  There's good representations to be sure, like Felicia Day, but there's plenty of others that are just like the women referenced in the blog you cited on the first page. This is a big part of the issue too! People can sniff out a fake from a mile away, and when the fakes are so predominantly portrayed by the media, I think it's logical to conclude that some people are convinced that that's all that female gamers are, and are angered because of it! Honestly, nobody likes posers, even if they are cute.  That doesn't justify their treatment of women, but I bet you'd see a difference if they started having real women gamers represent women gamers instead of untalented models.

I think the kind of misrepresentation that you are talking about with female gamers though stems from the media's representation of girls playing games (like G4). A few people who pretend to like something that they don't aren’t to blame for that. The truth is that most people growing up are somewhat disingenuous when they're trying to fit in. It’s part of growing up and part of finding yourself. In all honesty I'm not too worried about poser gamers. If anything it's flattering that gaming is getting to the point where people want to pretend that they play games, though I don't think it really has reached that point yet. But I will say this; I really think the public’s opinion of female gamers is shaped far more media than it is by the individual at this point. Female gamers are not transparent enough to have that widespread impact that the article was referencing. In my opinion that article was much more about her wanting to be the only female gamer in the group, her being territorial of her space, and not wanting to  lose the identifier that made her unique.

As for the undesirables that might come with the growth of our culture, it's true that opening our hobbies to the public will let some assholes in, but I hate to tell you there were already assholes who were geeks long before that. Geeks can be just as superficial, just as mean, and just as snobby as any other culture in America. I’ve met plenty of fellow geeks who have written me off, because I don’t look the part or I haven’t played the same obscure titles that they have. Now I know that some of the bro’s that inhabit today’s current FPS games can be tough to deal with, but I think the good that comes with expanding our culture will far outweigh the negative.

I just wanted to drop this here, since it's related.  If you're concerned about this issue, you might want to check it out.

http://www.pixlbit.com/blog/133/why_igns_continued_success_is_bad_for_gamers