Game Theory: Making Room for the Women

Epic Games, via Associated Press“Gears of War 3.”

Women! You must have heard of them. They're like real gamers, only with little hands and silly, squeaky voices and constant gripes about being marginalized and hypersexualized and threatened with rape in online multiplayer settings.

To me, 2012 felt like the year that gaming culture really began to get to grips with being a mainstream commercial behemoth rather than a niche nerdy backwater. And a big part of that was sometimes agonizing struggles about the role of women in games - making them, playing them and being featured in them.

If there was one thing I had to say far too often this year, it was this: “Games aren't a boys' club anymore.” Next year might be the one in which women finally outnumber men as players. (The split is 47 percent to 53 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, up from 42-58 in 2011 and 40-60 in 2010.) That development has been encouraged by the explosion in popularity of tablet and smartphone games, which have made every commute or evening in front of a TV show another opportunity to whip out Bejeweled or Contre Jour.

Unfortunately this rise in so-called casual play has upset some of those who see themselves as guardians of the true flame. There's been a definite backlash against the idea that women are entering the hallowed citadel, dropping in a few scatter cushions and ending all the fun. Particular ire is reserved for anyone who dares to point out that female characters in g ames are often unsupported in the bra region for no apparent reason; given boring, bland supporting roles; and totally absent.

Take the Hitman: Absolution trailer, released in May, when an ultimately disappointing game was sold in a leering, objectifying way that would have had the “Mad Men” Roger Sterling and Don Draper murmuring “steady on.” It featured a group of sexy assassin nuns, with the camera following their buttocks as closely as a subway groper's hand.

I wrote an article for The New Statesman about the trailer, headlined: “I love you video games, so why do you keep doing this?” A procession of men lined up in the comments to tell me to keep my mouth shut. “Here is a surprise,” one wrote, with more feeling than attention to spelling and grammar. “A lady does not like us (men) looking at ladys bottoms. Please get a clue, this is nothing to do with feminism, sex sells and this game uses sex to sell itself, so please, please get over yourself.” Another had a more simple put-down: “Yet another 5/10 getting irate about sexy women being sexier than she is.”

Every female games journalist gets this, and does it get boring quickly. (Tom Bissell doesn't have to put up with this stuff, I think every time, as I sit on my hands to stop myself from replying.) But that kind of knee-jerk, make-me-a-sandwich comment pales against what can happen if you really kick the hive.

I spent the summer chronicling the abuse directed at the blogger Anita Sarkeesian for starting a Kickstarter project aimed at exploring the way women were depicted in games, and it still terrifies me to think that it could happen, really, to any of us. Angry fumers tried to hack her Twitter and Google accounts; they e-mailed her drawings of her being raped by video game characters; one even created a Flash game where you clicked the mouse and bruises and welts appeared on her face. As she explained in a recent TEDx talk, they effectively “gamified” misogyny: returning to the forums they all frequented to award each other “Internet points” for the worst outrages.

But there was another side to Ms. Sarkeesian's story. Her Kickstarter project far exceeded its fund-rais ing goals. Thousands of people stood up and said to the perpetually incandescent sexists: You are nothing to do with us, or with gaming. And that has been the same throughout the year.

For every depressing piece of news that made me feel that a community I love doesn't want or value me - simply because I'm a woman - there's a flip side. For example I was so disappointed when I heard that the new Lara Croft title would feature her fending off a rape attempt, because it would be “character building.”

Later I heard that the scene had been described in correctly, and that, even better, the writer who would be bringing Lara back was the talented Rhianna Pratchett. Similarly, even though women make up fewer than 1 in 10 people working in game writing or development, there are now some prominent success stories to point to, including Kiki Wolfkill, the executive producer of Halo 4, and Siobhan Reddy, the s tudio director of Media Molecule (the outfit behind Little Big Planet).

Some of the most alienating practices are also being stamped out. The Eurogamer Expo in October announced that it didn't want “booth babes” - scantily clad women hired to pander to the belief that gamers are gaping dudes who can't be interested in anything unless it has joyless breasts draped over it. Meanwhile both Ms. Wolfkill and the 343 Studios leader, Bonnie Ross, made clear during their publicity tour for Halo 4 that they would do everything they could to make Microsoft take seriously the problem of sexist abuse in multiplayer voice chat.

Patricia Hernandez wrote a beautiful piece for Kotaku.com about how, as a rape survivor, she had learned to stop jokingly telling people she had “totally raped them” in the game Gears of War.

Of course this new, grown-up approach won't make everybody happy. There are clearly some players who enjoyed having a part of their lives where they could rant about bitches and kitchens and sandwiches. But they're outnumbered, and they are going to have to learn to play nice.

Game of the Year

Although I enjoyed Fez, Proteus and Johann Sebastian Joust for showing what could be done with the medium, I'm afraid my game of the year is a little more mainstream. Xcom: Enemy Unknown is an update of a 1994 turn-based strategy game, and it has become my go-to title because my boyfriend (who hates the twitchy reactions needed for first-person shooters) can play it alongside me. The idea of making games that are fun for people of different competencies to play together - or even fun to watch - was behind the Borderlands 2 lead designer John Hemingway's ill-advised reference to making a “girlfriend mode” for less experienced players. While I didn't thank him for once again assuming that real gamers are straight men, the point is a good one. I'd love to see more games next year that “conquer the living room.”

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of The New Statesman, a British current-affairs magazine.