#1reasonwhy

So I posted about this in the random gaming thoughts thread, but I think this deserves its own topic.

For those of you who don't know, #1reasonwhy is a twitter hashtag that's developed into a bit of a phenomenon. Women in the games industry are using it to share stories of sexism they've experienced, and since there are quite a few industry people on this board I figured that we could have an interesting discussion on this issue.

Here's an excellent article about how this all started, and there's a collection of some of the tweets that have been made.

Reading the current discussion in the Brad Wardell thread, I was just thinking we could do with a thread for general sexism stories.

I was following some of those tweets yesterday and the blatant sexism of certain tweeters just sickens me. #1reasonwhy

On the plus side, I found some interesting blogs and articles from female developers that I wouldn't have otherwise, so yay?

This was the #1reasonwhy I retweeted yesterday:

#1reasontobe is to help developers and publishers dodge bullets like this one. ow.ly/fDO0a

— Keith Neilson (@mandrill) November 28, 2012

It's a link to a short piece by a bioware writer, not really about sexual discrimination, but about one reason you should actively want a substantial female perspective on your team.

Edit: Why is there a huge gap before the embedded tweet? It doesn't show like that when I do a message preview.

I saw that. The fact that Bioware actually has female writers on their games really shows. They're one of the few companies that consistently provides the option to play as a woman, and I never feel like their games assume that I'm a guy, which is a problem I've often had. That's the kind of thing that creates customer loyalty. Anything that Bioware puts out, I'll buy (within reason).

This. Also, what I meant by having trust in a game designer in that Lara Croft thread. The City Elf origin of Dragon Age was the first that I tried, and it sure gave me pause. But since this was a Bioware title and David Gaider's to boot, I trusted them enough to keep playing, and indeed found the situation handled well. With most other developers, I wouldn't have been so sure that "let's have her get raped for a traumatic origin story" wouldn't have seemed like a good idea to the boy's club, and likely stopped right then and returned the game.

I'm still kind of disappointed every time I try to present a feminist stand in an industry context and get both blatant sexism and "why are you accusing me" type responses. I would have hoped we were, by and large, exactly the leftist liberal elite that would be all over these sentiments! Of course, since I am a sensitive and inclusive type, being presented with these alternate responses makes me question my own stance. As an aside, I invite my peers to review my efforts in the Chaos Engine.

I mentioned in the original Tomb Raider thread that I felt a little conflicted, and I think I've narrowed down my objection. Basically, Lara Croft the character is now an established personality in my head. I know who she is and how she thinks and behaves, and this "early Lara" story is very much at odds with that character. If this was a whole new character I would be prepared to give Rhianna Pratchett the benefit of the doubt, but just like Other M I can't reconcile this interpretation with my current understanding of the character. Even worse, because this is an undermining variance it feels like an exploitation to me. It has connotations of "dragging down" a successful counter-culture feminist figure to a male stereotypical position. I don't mean to say it literally is doing that, or it set out to do that, but that's what it feels like and that's pretty much why I don't like it.

I suspect that Bioware writing team would have rejected the infamous scene exactly as discussed in the linked blog post too.

I don't doubt for a moment that women can also write things that are tone-deaf - about their own gender even - but does the fact that the lead writer on 'Tomb Raider' is a woman change your view on this? And that she has form writing strong female characters?

Since he mentions her by name in paragraph 2 I'm guessing that he knows.

Did Caya write this mysterious second paragraph in invisible ink?

She logged in to my account to post it, I think.

I must admit that I never played anything by her, might have tried Mirror's Edge but not my cuppa game. Regardless, simply having the right plumbing isn't much of a qualification in and of itself, no more than not having it disqualifies you - see David Gaider, male. Being willing to challenge your perceptions and (often internalized) prejudices is. Still, in a mixed male/female team there's an excellent chance, as Mox Jet (henceforth referred to as my secret male alter ego) correctly stated, that this scene would have raised a red flag and been nixed, as it should have - simply because while some women are indeed "tone-deaf" the law of averages dictates that it's unlikely all of them would be such in any given team.

Sexism and misogyny in all their forms make me depressed and angry like nothing else because... I just don't understand. Where does this mindset come from? Why do people cling to it so strongly? What is it about women that creates this kind of reaction in some people? I mean... I don't know, I get that gender roles and relations are complicated, but I just don't understand the hostility that comes out of this. People's feelings are being hurt, people's careers are being stymied, a terrible precedent is being set for future generations... why is it so hard to stop?

Men get pissed off because they can't stick their dicks in our vaginas any time they want to.

I want to highlight another response I see about 50/50 with blatant misogyny, which is to react angrily assuming that any general statement about sexism in an industry the man in question works in is in fact a direct accusation against that person. I say "I think we need to address the issue of sexism in the video games industry, we need to consider our recruiting practices and working environments and advertising and-" and then I get "HOW DARE YOU SAY I AM SEXIST?!" back. These days I generally don't engage in that kind of knee-jerk, just talk around them, but it always strikes me as weirdly defensive.

And another, which is making the QT3 thread on this topic infuriating for me to read, is a shrug and a well, whaddyagonnado? Or "sure some people are probably sexist but I'm not and nobody I know is so what?" Or "is this even a real problem or is it just women blowing harmless things out of proportion? Here are hypothetical scenarios I have dreamed up to explain away specific examples of sexism, because my mind cannot conceive of men being wrong."

It is, as previously stated, infuriatingly head-in-the-sand.

You missed "if the woman doesn't make a big stink about it and possibly have someone arrested at the time it happens she has no business complaining about it later." Sheesh.

Yes, of course. The victim is entirely responsible for changing their situation. Never mind the perpetrators and the entire culture that enables them.

There's a reason I and most of the other female posters stopped posting on QT3, you know. :)

I have a lot to say about this. I have little to no first-hand experience, but this is a huge deal to me, I have a reason for it, and I have every intention of joining this conversation here. But right now I'm fighting with someone on Twitter about this very thing and it's taking all of my non-work concentration.

This cannot die. This #1reasonwhy cannot go away. It cannot get ignored in a week when someone releases a new trailer and everyone forgets. We cannot forget. This can't stay the way it is.

We know, though I don't know how you can all stand to exist in this most toxic of forums. *eye roll*

There's two groups - the ones that flat out view it as us versus them and believe that it's a zero-sum game where for the other side to "win" then their side must by definition "lose" something, and the ones for which this most certainly always comes down to being "someone else's problem" because it's not something that would ever actually affect them directly. Those are the people casually participating in the culture that quietly enables this to continue. It's the same mindset that I run into when I tell people I'm not eating Chick-Fil-A and explain why and they agree the behavior is bad and they say don't condone it, but it boils down to being "someone else's problem" and not enough to make them go through the effort of not eating a fucking chicken sandwich. Because it's status quo, so it can't be all that bad because otherwise someone else would have done something about it by now.

I have absolutely no idea what I thought I was accomplishing responding to StGabe, but it's hard for me to leave the last word on this shit at that, as though there's no response and "so what?" is a reasonable end-all solution. Or that women need to start calling the cops to arrest the game industry culture, because certainly if it were all that bad it'd have to be illegal.

Oops, I think my brain had assumed you were replying to Mox Jet as the post was directly above. Apologies.

What does that ever accomplish?

And you are AWESOME. I feel like starting a whole thread where I can just gush about you.

My 8 year old daughter told me the other day that she didn't understand why the 10 year old was playing Sid Meier's Pirates! because it was a "boy" game. "Nonsense!" I say.

Then when my 10 year old was playing the game and doing the dancing stuff I remembered that the various governors' daughters you can marry in the game came in a variety of flavors from "very plain" to "beautiful" or some such so I asked her whether the daughter she was dancing with was the better variety.

"No she's just plain" my daughter said.

There's something really wrong when I unconsciously want to know whether the virtual dance partner is hot or not and my daughter already "understands" that hot is better than not.

Daughter #1 was right. A "boy" game indeed.

:_(

There are plenty of Barbie games, magic unicorn games and fashion games. Get with the program!

@MattWBowyer is me.

The fight is over -- responded to a Forbes article that went straight up my spine, and fought/discussed with the writer on Twitter for quite a while. I'll put thoughts together, right now I'm honestly drained from it.

Nerd defense mechanisms are, somehow, even more infuriating to me than anything. Because, goddammit, I still cling to this idea that we, as a culture of nerds and geeks, should fucking know better. It's the same reason I get so mad at asshole nerds who are into the dumbest shit imaginable, and then shit on other people for liking something equally as ridiculous. Guess what, nerdlingers? EVERYTHING YOU LIKE IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

I was as stereotypical a nerd kid as you could possibly imagine. Fat, braces, glasses, useless at sports, bullied relentlessly for years, obsessed with sci-fi and D&D. (I've always half-jokingly said that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll saved my life, because luckily for me my nerd obsessions eventually grew to encompass weed and punk rock. You can't be a basement-dwelling nerd AND go see awesome fucking rock shows. If I wanted that raw thrill that I got from seeing crazy people play ear-bleedingly awesome music on a stage, I had to put myself out there.) So why am I not a sexist fucking jerk?

Well, for one thing, I've always had tons of female friends. And not in the sense of girls I hung out with because I was waiting for them to notice how awesome I am and suddenly fuck me (although I had plenty of those as well), I mean girls that I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with. Partially because, when you grow up in a small town like I did, you don't get to be super picky about where you find friendships. I couldn't care less about sports, so if I wanted to talk about how awesome last night's Twin Peaks was or whatever, girls were a lot more open to that stuff than guys were. But also I understood that the shit I got from the jocko assholes in my life was just a tiny fraction of the nonsense girls put up with every single goddamned day. These dickbags who think there isn't a problem with sexism would be the most strident feminists possible if fate had put them on the other side of the chromosome fence.

So, yeah, nerd sexism is like a horrible Venn diagram of childhood trauma, white male privilege that they don't recognize or understand, and good old fashioned blinders.

Blinders full of women, no doubt.

This might be an issue of presentation. No matter the topic, and guilty of it or not, no one wants to feel like they're being accused of anything, or told they're wrong, or told they're doing something poorly, or anything like that. If you walk up to the head of an HR department and you put it the way you did up there, they're going to take that as an accusation that their department does not currently consider those things. Especially if that isn't an area for which you're responsible and they feel like you're an outside telling them they're doing their job wrong. Dealing with people requires a bit more tact and circumspection.

Or maybe you don't actually have the conversation as presented above. But as written I'd be put on the defensive too. And I'd be defensive regardless of the topic.

Interesting. I would actually stand by the quote I wrote, I don't think saying that is problematic because of my use of "we" and "video games industry" there - that's a pretty vague statement I'm making, and I think it's unreasonably thin-skinned to respond defensively to that. I presume it's "recruiting practices" that sets you off? I should clarify I'm thinking of group scenarios here, I'm not leaning my head round HR's door to shout this at our recruiter. Say, we're all in the pub and I start that discussion and HR pipes up to object? I think I'm OK there. What do other people think? Am I in the wrong here?

I was about to repeat my injoke llama snark but chased down the deja vu the words were causing me. The occasional statements about being so honored to have women posting always struck me as even more telling than the whole bruises-easily thing (which likewise will have my face eternally palmed). Because it shouldn't be an honor any more than your board's posters breathing oxygen is an honor.

Non-QT3-kicking, it's a hopeful sign that people actually talking about this kind of thing. I have a niece (well, honorary; one of those deals where the friends are practically family already and I've been Uncle Drastic to the spawns since all their kids were born), and it breaks my heart to really think about the kind of boundless stupid sexist bullshit she'll have to deal with as she grows up. The games industry is a tiny slice of the world, but any lessening that may come about is a good thing.

The "MattyBow" Thread?