174. Gamergate Revisited

I realize I'm late to the party, but I think it is time I weighed in on the whole Gamergate cultural event of 2014 and its aftermath.

2014 was a busy year for me. I was designing and shepherding World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships to market, and also Chris Taylor’s mega MMORTS before it got cancelled. This meant I was living in Minsk, Saint Petersburg, and spending a lot of time in Seattle. It was one of the busiest years of my life. So while I was aware of Gamergate, I didn’t have the time to give an expert opinion on the events.

Given that it is still affecting us today, and stirring up talk of “Gamergate 2.0” controversies, I think it is important that I weigh in. Especially now that I’m an “authority” and I feel like I have a fairly objective view on a situation that has so polarized our community that objectivity seems to be lacking.

The Algorithm pushed this video under my nose today, so I felt like that was a good starting point to work from. It even had a screenshot from Gamasutra from 2012. I was a senior writer at Gamasutra from 2012 to 2018, and that’s where most people know me from. I surely would have read that article at the time, and the author’s name looks familiar so they probably wrote other articles too.

The controversy seems to have its roots going back to 2012 with a well funded academic group in Canada called Feminists in Games (FiG). Even the term Feminism has become a very polarizing concept in recent years. Here I use it in a neutral fashion, without political context, because that’s literally the focus and name of the group involved.

I do have an opinion on Feminism, perhaps strong opinions, so let me disclose those first before I get into my analysis. My readers can decide if I have a disqualifying bias. My great grandmother Dorothy Newkirk and her sister Emma were world famous swimmers at a time when women were not allowed to compete against men.

This was a photo taken of Dorothy in 1896. Women were not allowed to wear men’s swimsuits back then, they were required to wear full length dresses in the water which prevented swimming. Dorothy and Emma were quite rebellious and fought for the right of women to wear what they wanted. This made them OG feminists. They didn’t want special treatment, they just wanted to swim like men did. You can see she still wore full leggings in the water to protect her modesty!

Emma and Dorothy also swam from Santa Monica Beach to Catalina on multiple occasions. With zero help or escort. AI tells me that some woman did it in 1952 with help, and was the first. This is 100% false. My ancestors were the first, unless a Native managed the feat. I could not be more proud of them. The women on my mother’s side were total bad asses, even by today’s standards. They didn’t need to brag about it, they were world famous and travelled all over the USA doing stunts, back before we had aircraft.

They just wanted equal rights, not necessarily equal treatment. They were punished for their misdeeds and accepted this as the price they had to pay, like any good activist. There was zero entitlement there.

Now today when I run into people who describe themselves as “Feminists”, I often run into three problems:

1. They want equal opportunities but not equal responsibilities

2. They want parity, not equality of opportunity.

3. They have a strong sense of entitlement.

I don’t consider these people Feminists. I hold Feminists and Feminism in high regard. But I haven’t met a Feminist in decades. What I keep running into is what I would describe as “Opportunists”. So here I’m going to be somewhat critical of the people who instigated Gamergate, but not because they are Feminists. I don’t consider them Feminists at all, I put them in the “Opportunist” category.

I would also point out that when I was asked by the UCLA women’s track team to be their trainer, which involved me putting my hands on 50+ elite female athletes every day, the community knew that it was my honor to serve. I am the archetype of a strong man that serves/supports strong women. That’s not the vibe I get when I review the historical record of Gamergate.

This isn’t a gender issue. These people aren’t obnoxious because they are women. It feels like every third paper I’m complaining about some asshole in the interactive media space. Usually men. That’s not because they are men, that’s because they are assholes. The vast majority of people in game development are very sweet people, though they often have limited social skills. That goes with spending most of your time with computers instead of other people.

The problem is that the assholes tend to float to the top, because of Externalized Power which I talked about in my last three papers. That happens in game development. A lot. It also happens to occur in academia. Perhaps a bit less often but it’s certainly not rare.

Okay I will dive into the key issues here, hopefully the “Feminism” component is properly defined already.

Ideology

I am of the opinion that it is never okay to push your ideology on other people without their consent. That’s why I torpedoed Ronald Reagan’s School Prayer initiative, just a year after working so hard to get him elected. I wrote in depth about Ideology in Gaming previously. This is a huge minefield topic. With authority comes Power and Responsibility. That Responsibility means that sometimes I have to step on some mines in order to merit the authority that has been trusted in me.

So while I think it’s great to encourage women to get into game development, and even empower them to be successful, giving them an unfair advantage over non female competitors is getting into murky (“Affirmative Action”) territory. Bullying people into accepting your ideology is not murky territory. That’s straight up unethical.

I’m a huge advocate of making games for women, I’ve been advocating for this for over a decade. Because of this desire on my part, I’ve done the actual work of researching and designing games that I think will be high performing in meeting the needs of female gamers of all ages. That doesn’t come with any entitlement on my part that my designs should be favored in the market in any way other than by consumer demand.

You want to put relatable female characters in games? Fine. My great grandmother Dorothy is relatable. She’s not an Instagram model. She’s not an anime character with the exaggerated body of a woman and the face of a 10 year old. A movie about Dorothy would probably be a huge hit. But a game with a character that looks like Dorothy would probably be a flop. I doubt in the modern age there is really enough consumer demand for heroes that look like my great grandmother.

While I’m at it, I have to say that equality of opportunity and parity are not the same thing. Dorothy destroyed every man that dared compete against her. But even at UCLA the fastest woman on our team would likely get beat by the slowest man on the team. Men and women with equivalent training don’t have physical strength parity. Women are more flexible so they do great at sports that favor flexibility like dance and gymnastics. But if you have a petite 50kg female character in a game wielding a 50kg sword that is bigger than she is, that’s not relatable. It’s not even heroic. Heroism comes from starting with little and working your ass off to achieve the impossible. Dorothy is an example of a heroic character. That only works in games, stories, or movies if you spend the time doing character development so that the audience/consumer appreciates the character and their struggles. If they just start with super human abilities, that’s not heroic.

Likewise, trying to replace men in combat games with women is … mostly fantasy. Have you ever watched a top notch woman fight in the ring (any style) against a trained male opponent? It’s a bloodbath. You want a fantasy, fine. But that’s not going to achieve your goal of relatability. It’s not going to convince society that women are as good at fighting as men are. Sure, give them a gun and have them blow 100 people away. Is that what you want? Will that lead to gender equality? Will that normalize violence against men?

Social and Economic Factors

While there are similar numbers of female and male gamers, male gamers tend to play more hours. I’ve written many articles explaining that biologically our species only needs one male for every three women, like with other large mammals. Men are built so that they can keep multiple women fully supplied with all of their reproductive needs. Now that we have agriculture and men don’t die at higher rates from hunting and fighting mishaps, we have an excess of men. A lot of them distract themselves from their lack of sexual opportunities by playing computer games.

Women have the same problem in society, but at much lower rates. Thus the number of involuntarily celibate women is about half as much as it is for men. Being male and involuntarily celibate will get you branded as a domestic terrorist by misandrists. Late night talk show hosts make jokes about how being a game developer is the instant kiss of celibacy. There is some truth to this. When I tried to date in Canada one woman called me a “Neckbeard” when she found out I was a game developer. I had to look it up. She got intensely aggressive towards me and started threatening me. Then she contacted her friends and they all started threatening me. I had to report them and get them banned.

Men put up with this societal blacklisting out of passion for gaming. Women don’t have much need or desire to be put in such situations. I think trying to paint game development as a glamourous occupation for women but not for men is a dead end social engineering project. Women have more ability to take advantage of Extrinsic Power opportunities than men do, and I’ve suggested this is why they are hired at 17% higher rates. But this doesn’t apply in game development because there is already such a gender imbalance that their ability to take advantage of Extrinsic Power is going to be limited.

Yes we should be making more games for women. I tried that with my company Arrivant, but it didn’t get funded. Investors wanted me to make another Roblox to take advantage of children, and that was off brand for me. They had no interest in games for women. So yes, we should do that. We should fund that. The tech to do this already exists. But that tech involves increasing the availability and safety of social interactions in games. That’s not something legacy designers know how to do. That’s next paradigm tech and I don’t expect it to get funded until we convert to the next paradigm.

Replacing men with women in games is not going to make women play them. The data backs this up. Making female characters less attractive is not going to get more people to play your game. The opposite is true. Making games less violent and more social WILL get more women to play, but that’s not getting funded. Ultimately it isn’t game developers that make games, it’s investors. The Feminists in Games group doesn’t understand the industry despite claiming they are academics. Maybe they should start where any proper academic would start: surveying people in the industry to develop expertise first.

That expertise should be acquired PRIOR to trying to tell others what to do, especially if you are in academia. There is a reason why academics aren’t particularly sought after in game development. Game dev is seen as a very hands on skill, like plumbing. There is a serious lack of scientific knowledge in game dev, and this has been a concern of mine since 2005 when I tried to expand the academic field of game economics. That didn’t work due to unspecified discrimination against me from academia. Thus until academia gets serious about game dev, game dev isn’t going to take academia seriously.

Beyond that, if you take a position, you invite opposition. If some misandrists mouth off, that’s going to bring all the misogynists out to play and vice versa. I have zero tolerance for that crap, if it happens in my game I will break out the ban hammer for all involved. But on social media, that stuff sells. Maximum engagement. So it’s promoted on social media and the result is that it spills over into games and general society. It’s a very troubling situation that I talk about in my Gender Wars paper and elsewhere.

My parting shot is that ideology is increasingly being weaponized and funded in game dev. Since no one is protecting consumers, they have organised for their own defence. I fully support this. Calling these conflicts “Gamergate 2.0” has some relevance only in that gamers are resisting attempts to force ideology on them. If it keeps happening, gamers will keep resisting. That doesn’t make gamers bad people. It makes them a threatened consumer group. You don’t see this happening in other industries. Interactive media is two-way so it gives the developer the ability to influence the consumer in real time. Weaponizing this privilege is outrageous in my opinion and nothing good will come of it other than regulation.