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Ross Burgess, the Patriarchy and the Playstation.Pdf Burgess 1 Ross Burgess Professor Daniel Woody UCWR 110 6 December 2016 The Patriarchy and the PlayStation: A Look at Misogyny in Video Game Culture One of my earliest childhood memories is playing the original Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System with my little sister. For hours, we would try and rescue Mario’s princess only to discover she was in another castle. The video game system was a gift to both of us from our grandmother, but as we grew older my sister’s interests turned towards literature. In contrast, I became a video game enthusiast who sometimes veered into the fanatic territory. Throughout my adolescence, I gamed on a Super Nintendo, then a PlayStation, and by my teenage years I spent hours with my PlayStation 2. Video games were a part of my identity, but I had only a vague idea about American society’s debate regarding the dangers of video games. I have a fuzzy memory of getting thrown out of my friend James’ house because I had brought over a copy of the game Mortal Kombat. James’ mother passed by the den at the exact moment that our match ended with a gory decapitation by way of a vicious uppercut. The next thing I knew the television blinked off, our playdate was over, and we would have to play Mortal Kombat at my house going forward. I wasn’t aware of the controversy regarding violence in video games until my aunt refused to buy me Grand Theft Auto for Christmas. Bluntly she told me that it was a game where the goal was having sex with and then killing prostitutes. My aunt had seen a report on cable news insinuating the game would turn me into the next Columbine Burgess 2 shooter. At first I was shocked, then angered, and finally curious. Our family discussion about one video game had sparked a desire to learn more about the cultural implications of my hobby. The debate over whether violent video games create violent video gamers has taken on some of the same binary research qualities like those concerning gun control or abortion. Some academics convincingly argue that playing violent games increase aggression among gamers (Huesmann 2010; Carnagey, Craig, and Bushman 2007). Equally sound research on the other side of the argument refutes the idea that violent games create violent gamers (Greitemeyer, and Osswald 2010; Tear, and Nielsen 2013). Going into the research process I knew my bias against the idea that violent video games produced violent people. I remember secretly playing the ultra- violent video game Doom with my dad as a kid, but when I enrolled in the Army I chose to be a medic so I could help people regardless of who they were or what uniform they wore. I saw myself as a well-adjusted male gamer with no predilections for anti-social behavior. Selfishly I sought out research that confirmed my own biases. Then I came across a study that indicated that although violent video games didn’t create violent gamers, they did stress out female gamers. Per Ferguson, Christopher, et al, “Although gaming among young females is increasing, girls continue to tend to choose fewer violent games than boys. Thus, girls may have found the violent game to be more frustrating and a poorer match for their interests, thus increasing stress” (53). After analyzing this study, I realized I may have been blind to my male privilege. I had to consider is there a component of gaming culture that disenfranchises women, or worse a culture of misogyny? There is research that gaming culture encourages prosocial behavior. The authors of one study proposed that video games had a civic-promoting impact and could encourage political engagement (Dalisay et al. 1414). Although the research by Francis Dalisay, et al. make a convincing argument that video game culture can promote civic virtue, the experiences by Drs. Burgess 3 Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw demonstrate the presence of aggressive and pervasive misogyny at the core of video game culture. Further research demonstrates this toxic and dangerous misogyny present in video game culture demonstrably marginalizes minorities, women, and LGTBQ persons in both virtual and real world spaces. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw are two feminist scholars who wanted to investigate the social media phenomenon known as GamerGate. GamerGate began in 2014 when “a programmer named Eron Gjoni wrote a series of blog posts about the end of his relationship with indie game developer Zoe Quinn. Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with a video game journalist named Nathan Grayson . allegedly in exchange for positive reviews of her game Depression Quest” (Dockterman). The blog gossip spread like wildfire. GamerGate became a twitter topic, fodder for blogs, and became an obsession for a certain subset of gamers. Straight white males saw the Zoe Quinn controversy as the opening salvo in a war on their “culture”. American culture had begun to embrace diversity under the Obama administration. Increasingly video game developers, protagonists, and gamers were becoming female, minority, and not heterosexual. Many “traditional” gamers saw diversity as a threat “Some of those involved in #GamerGate consider women, minorities and others' calls for wider representation in gaming as an attack on gamers, who are predominantly young, white and male (Dockterman). Chess and Shaw saw GamerGate as meriting further research and decided to host a multi-discipline symposium to better understand GamerGate. Though both women were researchers of feminism in video games they wanted an honest and open conversation. To facilitate this worthwhile discussion, they decided to host a “fishbowl” discussion. Burgess 4 In their own words, “The Fishbowl format is one that does not privilege a single voice of authority, but rather, allows for a larger group conversation. This format, we felt, might engender a more open discussion about not only issues we saw in the game industry but also issues in academia that limit research on diversity and games” (Chess and Shaw 211). As a part of a bigger conference called the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), the “fishbowl” met positive attendance and reception. Academics from different disciplines used the opportunity to positively talk about identity, race, gender, sexuality, and how these themes fit within video game culture. Chess and Shaw set up a Google doc for attendees to share their thoughts, questions, and answers. When the DiGRA ended, the women left the Google docs public in case anyone wanted to use it for further research. What the women didn’t expect was the document opening a portal for targeted harassment by the misanthropic gamers behind GamerGate. A month after DiGRA ended Chess noticed someone had been editing the doc, “On September 1, 2014 we began getting emails that indicated someone was commenting on our Google Doc . .One edit simply replaced ‘‘identity and diversity in game culture’’ with the word ‘‘penis.’’ Another deleted the title entirely and replaced it with ‘‘I fuck kids- op.’’ That version also altered nearly every paraphrasing of participants’ comments to include something about ‘‘sucking cock.” (Chess and Shaw 211). For Chess and Shaw, the defacing of their Google Doc was the beginning of a strange campaign of targeted harassment. The women began receiving ugly emails, abusive tweets, and strangely were the subject of a series of YouTube videos linking them to a government mind control project. Fortunately, the women did not receive the death threats received by many of the feminists targeted by GamerGate. Gamers tend to be very clannish and protective of our hobby, but no one deserves to maligned for critiquing the video game culture. Ironically Chess and Shaw saw their harassment as another opportunity for further Burgess 5 research on the intersection of feminism and video games. The research by these women and others indicate that the harassment exhibited by GamerGate has its roots in the toxic masculinity present in the fiber of video game culture. Video game development has traditionally been a male-dominated field, like the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Males make up most video game consumers, but every year more women are both gamers and game developers. For some, the response to this increasing diversity is to retreat into “hypermasculinity”. Hypermasculinity is “a psychological term coined to describe the exaggeration of masculine cultural stereotypes within subcultures” (Salter and Blodgett 402). An example of hypermasculinity in the video game culture is the “Dickwolves” controversy on the gaming website Penny Arcade. In summary, a popular gaming webcomic made an insensitive joke concerning a fictional wolf that existed to solely rape players. Male and female readers rightfully complained that rape is not a fodder for jokes and the joke was deleted. For some, this deletion was another attack on traditional gaming culture. Protesters made pro “Dickwolves” shirts, protests both virtual and physical occurred, and the Penny Arcade website nearly shut down. The entire debacle has the same roots in the same brand of toxic masculinity as the GamerGate protesters. These male gamers are not interested in having their viewpoints challenged or engaging in meaningful discussion “A continuing challenge for the debaters during the Dickwolves episode was finding a common point of dialogue…. The commonality of rape references in the dialect of gamers is associated with the dominance of hypermasculine rhetoric within the space. In January 2011, an archive emerged dedicated to the hostility of male players to those identified as women. The archive was called Fat, Ugly or Slutty” (Salter and Blodgett 410). Women on the Penny Arcade website were not fellow gamers or even human beings. To the male users, they were either objects of sexual Burgess 6 desire or scorn.
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