[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre: GAMES AND REPRESENTATION

Thu Apr 16 01:48:49 AEST 2015

Hello everyone,

Brenda, thx so v. much for this post as it astutely connects the dots and the ricocheting influences of the virtual and certain realities - both within the directives of perceived and constructed market demographics of gaming and its refracted exteriors.  My own experience as both an academic and director/producer of digital realms ( not gaming ) bears witness to this as well as to the both covert and overt underpinnings of militarism and the ever-circulating re-inscriptions of patriarchal imperatives.  And, with full disclosure, I actually do not have any real nor sustained interest in playing games ... but I am grateful for this discussion.

Being a child of the 60's/70s, it took me a v. long time to to actually fully acknowledge how terrifying this current loaded scenario could play out, as what I was witnessing was antithetical to my experience and expectations.    Gaming is but one exemplar of the digital realm in which this "gamer gate" scenario has been and continues to be playing out.   This sensibility is also concretizing itself ( pardon the pun ) in the "makers world" - which is also proving to be more of a unilateral, gender specific, discipline specific, class-specific world than one might presuppose from all of the representations of craftiness that are abounding.   

Obviously, the handmaid's tale is not a reality to which we aspire.  It is critical that we collectively begin to implement measures such as those" 4 directions for defusing this terrible moment" and all that moment portends.  Its an important start and one that transposes /transfers agency, as opposed to re-inhabiting the role ( at best) of the "pom-pom"girl ... a relatively wholesome gender role to which even Sheryl Sandberg readily admits being sited.

I admit to having a degree of trepidation in reading " What if, rather than running away, we engage these folks in conversation? What happens if we show compassion? There us good anecdotal evidence that this can work. It is worth a try. "  as it appears to be an idealist, Ghandian approach that I sincerely hope could work .  That said, I have serious reservations.  We are confronting the machinations and dynamics of long-standing power .... and in consideration of the Alamo scenario iterated below .... conversation and compassion seems to be only part of the strategies that need to be implemented.

Again, many thanks to you all for the discussion and your practices.

Chris

On Apr 14, 2015, at 10:18 PM, Brenda Laurel wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Here are some of my thoughts about the aspect of GamerGate that has to do with harassment and violence against women in online spaces and increasingly in the real world, especially for more public defenders of women's equal rights in gaming communities. Now I am going to talk straight, not as an academic but as an observer of culture and politics. 
> 
> Men have always held video games as their personal space. Since its inception, the domain of video games has been entirely vertically integrated. They were made by men who worked for men to be played by men and sold in male-only spaces like electronics shops and later by video game stores (I am talking now about the evolution of AAA gams). Women were largely not customers (except for the women who played text adventure games who just did it anyway). Contrary to market logic, the owners of these institutions did not see women as customers. Females were early on identified as people who did nor play video games (as drawn from my experiences with Atari, Sony, Activision, and Epyx).
> 
> Now I want  you to think for a moment about the men who are attempting to circumvent Roe v. Wade, for example, and to cling to such notions as "welfare queens", although today they have had to come up with different signifiers for their war against women. These men want to instantiate in law their hegemonic imperative. Are they so different from men who play video games? We live now in an incredibly polarized and divisive culture. It is no accident that some segment of men online subscribe to these views. 
> 
> There is enhanced aggression against women's rights all across the board, from support for abortion rights and people in poverty to assaults on day care and preschool education. This, I hope, is the last gasp of several generations of men who have thought this way. They are not the majority but they control the majority.
> 
> Now think about men with poor educations and a degree of poverty. They are not participating in the culture as equals. They see themselves as downtrodden. They see rights for women as yet another degradation of their masculine status - and it is the easiest one to strike out against, even if you are a congressman. So they do. The web of civility on which a healthy government and society depend is broken. It is OK to lie to the press. It is OK to lie about what your legislation actually intends (witness the various unrelated "riders" to recent legislation that specifically attack women's rights). These guys have nobody else to feel better than, except women, and to a lesser extent, minorities. They've been most successfully vitriolic against the LGBTQ community (and I am right in there with the B and the Q), but recent quick gains in popular acceptance of gays and gay marriage have put them in a conundrum. Who can we feel better than?
> 
> Women. And that they should invade the secret inner sanctum of masculinity as an active place (unlike team sports, which are an affiliative space), women are on the radar as invaders and enemies. It is easier now to hate (deny agency to) women than it is even to LGBTQ folks or brown and black people. We are the easy target for people who need to think they're better than SOMEBODY. 
> 
> So I observe that the major actors in this recent surge of violence against women online are those men who feel dispossessed of their hegemonic rights. (Religious fundamentalism comes into play as an excuse.) There is no one left to beat up except us. And the population of men involved in online games is great enough for this to matter.
> 
> I don't have a solution. We may all find ourselves living "The Handmaid's Tale" by 2030. But I think there are at least 4 possible directions for defusing this terrible moment. (1) TRUE NAMES. Regardless of screen names, multiplayer games and other environments must insist on TRUE NAMES at registration. Player names (e.g., HelloKitty42) can be separate as long as they are connected to a true name. (2) PANIC BUTTONS. We did this with Purple Moon all those years ago. If someone is harassing you, hit the panic button on your screen, which does a screen capture and can lead back to the aggressor. (3) MODEL CIVILITY. It is often said that video games influence the culture in various ways, e.g., training soldiers for battle as a gamer rather than as seeing its consequences (a loss of life). If that is true, what happens if we create interactive worlds that model civility? Is it really the case that video games can influence as well as reflect culture? (4) ENGAGE WITH THE OTHER. This is my Negotiate Button. What if, rather than running away, we engage these folks in conversation? What happens if we show compassion? There us good anecdotal evidence that this can work. It is worth a try. 
> 
> Hope is an active verb.
> _______________________________________________ 
> Brenda Laurel, PhD                                                    www.tauzero.com
> Adjunct Professor, Computational Media                office +1 831 429 2417 
> Research Associate, Digital Arts & New Media
> UC Santa Cruz
> home office   +1 408 741 5865                               mobile +1 408 656 6598
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Apr 14, 2015, at 3:51 PM, Aubrey Anable <aubrey.anable at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Shira—Thank you for putting some necessary pressure on the discourse of being maligned. I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement to the many good points made by Jen and Brenda.
>> 
>> I do think it’s important to celebrate the more diverse gaming landscape that has developed over the past few years--in terms of whose playing and whose designing games. My comments here have mostly been about my frustrations with some blind spots in academic approaches to analyzing and understanding games. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I would like to suggest that the problems we have all been identifying--in the industry, the culture, and in scholarly approaches--are connected.
>> 
>> For example, I think it is a problem that most game design programs in North American universities are closely affiliated with Computer Science. Computer Science departments have a big gender problem in terms of being unable—for complex reasons—to attract and retain women in the field. If these are the programs that feed into the gaming industry, we are still a long way off from increasing the numbers of women in programming jobs. At the same time, courses in “game studies” from a humanities or a social scientific approach are taught elsewhere on campus, often with little or no direct connection with what’s going on over in Computer Science. This is a problem that affects who goes to work in the industry, what kind of work they do in the industry, and deepens the divide between ways of knowing and understanding video games in the broader culture.
>> 
>> And by the way, Brenda, I would love to hear your thoughts on the deeper reasons behind GamerGate, as I’m sure others would.
>> 
>> Aubrey Anable
>> Cinema Studies Institute 
>> University of Toronto
>> 2 Sussex Ave.
>> Toronto, ON
>> M5S 1J5
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

 									      R  O  B  B  I  N  S

The information contained in this electronic mail message (including any attachments)
is confidential information
that may be covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 USC Sections 2510-2521,
intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above,
and may be privileged information.

If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.

If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify me and delete the original message. Thank you.

If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.

If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify me and delete the original message. Thank you.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20150415/b12494c2/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-1.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 11144 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20150415/b12494c2/attachment.tiff>