It’s a Good Life

Everything we do is to make our audiences feel like they’re the most important person in the whole world. And that’s a real good thing.


Good morning, internet! Boy, it’s a good day today. Real good.

We had a little bit of “drama” over the past few weeks, but that’s all over with now, and we can go back to normal. We can go back to talking about progress, and inclusivity, and making sure that everybody’s voice gets heard.

Some people, like Elizabeth Sampat, get sad and angry about the whole thing, and that’s not good at all. Getting angry isn’t objective. Getting angry just helps the bad people, and we don’t want to be like the bad people.

Sampat can remind us all that it’s been seven years since people tried to wish Jade Raymond into the cornfield, and we could get all gloomy about how the situation hasn’t gotten any better. But isn’t it more constructive to think about all the good things we’ve done? For my part: I’ve said multiple times — out loud, even — that I don’t believe anyone should be harassed, and I’ve also bravely retweeted at least two messages from other people on the topic, even though I knew it was risky because some people might consider them “feminist.”

Devin Faraci said a real bad thing when he was talking about the people regularly gathering together to harass and threaten physical violence on other people and he actually compared them to terrorists! But things are good now, because he did what he should’ve been doing all along, which is being sympathetic and trying to understand the people perpetuating the harassment.

Leigh Alexander got so hostile and dismissive, and we don’t like it when women condescend to us. She actually said that people who identify as “gamers” are irrelevant. She said that the “obtuse shitslingers” and “wailing hyper-consumers” aren’t her audience, and they didn’t have to be ours. And oh boy did a lot of real smart people have a lot to say in response to the issues she raised! This is a really complicated issue with a lot of “facets,” so they made sure to flood the comments with criticism of her tone.

We don’t need to fight when there’s plenty of good stuff being done, too! There are lots of people working on games sites who took the completely non-misogynistic concerns of journalist integrity seriously. They said of course they condemn intrusive, demeaning, sexist harassment of women in gaming, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask questions about who it is and isn’t appropriate for a woman game developer to have sex with. That resulted in real change in the industry: a prominent site about video games will still run the steady stream of press releases from corporate video game publishers, but writers can no longer contribute to smaller independent projects and developers they want to support, because that would be collusion. It’s like what David Auerbach on Slate tells the angry young male gamers to help them get through this tough time: “people are listening, and your concerns are legitimate.”

And also a bunch of 4channers contributed to a charity promoting women in game development! That’s a real, real good thing, and there’s been no shortage of writers and bloggers giving them credit for it. Even if it started with the goal of spiting a woman developer, how could anyone say these guys have a problem with women? They created an imaginary woman who fit the image they all agreed to, who shared their interests and ideals, and who they could use as an avatar to represent them and speak through! If you’re going to be so uptight as to have a problem with that, I suppose next you’re going to say that Weird Science wasn’t an empowering work of new-wave feminism.

This is just a huge, complicated issue and it’s not going to change. If we want everyone to have an equal voice, we just have to accept that occasionally, someone’s going to get wished into the cornfield for using her voice to say something that’s not nice.

Everything in games is fine. Don’t listen to the very bad, bad woman spreading lies about video games. She says “it’s possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic aspects” but then goes on to take completely out of context a scene in which the player character literally uses a woman as a doorstop and

Fuck it, I can’t even be sarcastic anymore. This is bullshit.

Justice in Moderation

I’ve always liked to see myself as progressive, moderate, and skeptical. Of course I believe that women should have equality in voice, representation, and depiction. And of course I absolutely condemn attempts to harass, threaten, or even demean women. That all goes without saying.

But I also never wanted to be so wrapped up in self-righteousness that I lost any sense of objectivity. Whenever I read anything that seems too didactic, too simple-minded, too black-and-white, I start asking, “what’s the catch?” Of course I condemn those sexist assholes, and they don’t speak for me. But I’ve always believed it’s important to rise above the trolls and circular arguments, and talk about things like rational adults.

As it turns out, that was pretty much bullshit, since by letting it “go without saying,” by keeping silent and calling it “moderation,” I was by definition letting the sexist assholes speak for me.

Earlier it sounded like I was just giving Devin Faraci shit for his essay, but I absolutely can’t fault his sincerity or his intent. After all, a few days ago I was trying to do the same thing. I’d been seeing all the reports of harassment, and I started wondering out loud what kind of mentality causes socially awkward nerds to become such violent bullies. I was saying that obviously, there are some irredeemable assholes motivated entirely by misogyny. But what about the non-trolls who feel so powerless they’ve convinced themselves that they’re the ones who are under attack?

A friend pointed out, simply: “I wouldn’t call them non-trolls.” And it was as if a lightning bolt finally struck through all the layers of rationalization and self-assurance I’d built up, and all the pieces started to fall into place. I realized that I was giving all of my sympathy to the people who deserved it the least, and all my skepticism and criticism to the people who deserved it least. Any second spent trying to figure out what makes these assholes tick is a second that’d be better spent trying to actually help the people who are being targeted by them.

It simply doesn’t matter what motivates these assholes — whether they’re seriously damaged psychologically, or they’re self-important “free-thinkers,” or they’re doing it “for the lulz.” You’ll see a lot of dismissals along the lines of “it’s not personal,” or “it’s just a game to them,” or “misogyny isn’t really the problem; it’s rooted in power/bullying/anonymity/whatever.” As if it’s somehow better if a person says, “Sure, I was part of the crowd targeting this person and her friends and family with rape threats, death threats, hacking attempts, a deluge of demeaning and critical messages on every social network, and YouTube videos, but I was doing it ironically.” The reality is that they are, demonstrably, provably, causing serious problems for people who don’t deserve it. And no one deserves it.

Looking through the harassing tweets that some women (and occasionally men) get, you see the same pattern over and over again: blatantly fake sock puppet accounts and compromised accounts, all repeating the same shit over and over again, most making sure to mention that it’s a huge, orchestrated groundswell. Unlike Sand People, but just like the One Million Moms, these people have to keep inflating their numbers, saying “We Are Legion.” Obviously, on some level it’s to help them justify it to themselves. But it’s also intended to isolate their targets. To make their targets feel alone and think there’s nothing any of us can do to stop the horde.

The least that we can do is put that shit to rest. Don’t just assume that everybody understands these assholes are a vocal minority; prove it. I know I’ve seen the lists of “Social Justice Warriors to Avoid,” and I’ve pointed and laughed, and I’ve said “Ha ha this just tells me who I should support you silly misogynists lol!” What we all should have been doing is seeing it as a condemnation. Not just “why aren’t I on that list?” but “how did we ever give these clowns the impression that they could fit us all on one page?”

Privilege Check and Mate

In my case, it’s because I’m really, really smart. I don’t want to brag, you guys, but I can see complexities and angles and hidden agendas that no one else on the internet can. Show me two extremes, and I can find problems with each of them. I don’t want to identify with either extreme; I want to see through all the angles and champion the truth. I’m like Yojimbo.

Here’s an example of how smart I am: for months I’ve been thinking about a blog post that’s going to drop a truth bomb smack in the middle of the internet and convince everybody to get along. The elevator pitch: I think “white male privilege” is bullshit. The concept behind it is absolutely, totally, 100% real; you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that. But the things that people are calling “privileges” are actually injustices; they’re not special advantages but things that all people should have. The term “privilege” is outdated. It’s deliberately provocative, intended to make people feel uncomfortable to shock them into awareness. When the concept of civil rights was unfamiliar enough to be a “movement,” it made sense. Now, though, people spend so much time explaining what “privilege” means that the connotations of the word have outweighed its usefulness. It’s become counter-productive and divisive.

A few times, I’ve tested the waters for my groundbreaking theory by going online and saying “‘White male privilege’ is bullshit.” Here are the responses I’ve gotten:

  1. On Facebook, a young woman said “oh no when I use the word ‘privilege’ I mean this…” and linked to an essay about the subject. One of the key lines in that essay was, “Inclusivity can make some people feel uncomfortable.”
  2. Another young woman on Facebook said “I don’t know why guys just can’t get the f over ‘privilege.’ Nobody’s saying that you didn’t have to work hard for what you have.”
  3. On Twitter, some asshole looking to pick a fight said I was “whining” about how bad I had it and said “oh you poor baby” before calling me a c-word. (Obviously, she didn’t actually say “c-word.” I know it makes me sound like the villain from Misery, but no matter what I can’t say that word).

Can you see the breakdown there, the decades-long chain of misunderstanding? I’d guess at least 51% of you can see the problem right away.

The problem is that I can go online and say something deliberately provocative, and I can count the amount of push-back I got on one hand. And two of those were even people trying to help!

You could make a solidly convincing case that I’m just not famous or popular enough for anybody to notice or care. Except even on the occasions where I’ve gotten a “signal boost” from somebody famous, I still haven’t gotten any significant harassment. Once a blog post I wrote started a brief conversation on Twitter with Rhianna Pratchett. I got a few responses, some critical, some just “THIS!” followed by a link. I checked out her Twitter replies, though, and she was getting tons of criticism. Over something that I wrote.

The nature of the “criticism” is different, too. When a guy gets attacked, they almost always attack his ideas. When a woman gets attacked, they attack her.

Even when I thought “I get it,” I still didn’t quite get it. Even while acknowledging that I don’t have to suffer the same type of bullshit that a lot of other people have to go through, I still wanted to argue that the problem that needed to be addressed was that we were being made to feel uncomfortable.

Not All Mean

But white men get harassment, too. And suffer through the same injustices and tragedies and hardships that every human being has to go through. It genuinely is petty to use the phrase “winning the genetic lottery,” and it genuinely is unproductive to sling that a guy who doesn’t feel as if he’s been giving the magic bullet that will solve all of his problems.

Which is why it can seem like the whole backlash and meme-ification of “Not All Men!” is petty and vindictive. Sure, when someone drops “Not all men” into a conversation, or says “Men get it too!”, it can seem like an attempt to derail an argument with a pedantic counter-example, as if the whole argument were invalid. But I’ve often thought, instead of making fun of it and turning it into a hashtag, wouldn’t it be better to acknowledge the intent behind it? To see that it’s an attempt at empathy, and not condescension? Instead of just saying, “You don’t understand how bad I have it, and you’ll never understand,” wouldn’t it be better to say, “No, I don’t understand that, but I can relate in this way, because I’ve had a similar problem?”

I believe the main problem there — and it’s not necessarily a fair one — is false equivalence. Even if it’s intended to be empathetic, it’s still floated out there as if it were a counter-argument, a correction. It will never not come across as, “What you’re saying is bad, but my having to feel defensive is every bit as a bad!” It puts all the weight on “Well, I’m not like that!” and leaves all the work for the other person to decipher the intent.

Again, it assumes that we’re coming into the conversation from an equal place, we’re all on the same side after all, so we can start discussing all the finer points and subtleties that the “extremists” keep missing while they scream at each other. But we’re not coming from the same place. In my case, at least, there’s never been a lack of awareness that we’re not coming from the same place. I’ve just never acknowledged just how many assumptions I’ve made without realizing it. Yes, I probably have a lot more in common with a woman in her late 30s who likes video games, than I do with the vast majority of white men. But that just means I can assume we’re on the same page when we’re talking about Final Fantasy, not when we’re talking about being a woman on the internet. Or anywhere else.

I spent about a year working on a project whose lead was a young woman unquestionably well-suited to that position: organized, driven but able to delegate, etc. Still, people would come up and ask me questions as if I had any clue as to what was going on. And when I’d point to her and say, “She’s the boss,” they’d act surprised. Whenever I’ve read novels and screenplays that describe how a character can convey an entire sentence with just an expression, I’ve always dismissed it as lazy writing. But I’d swear to God one guy gave me a look that said, “Seriously? You’re that p-whipped?” And even when there wasn’t a nasty intent behind it, she’d still get tons of dismissive comments. One of the security guys called her “princess” every single time we went through the gate. It annoyed the hell out of me, but she just shrugged it off. I was describing that situation to a co-worker at my current job, and she just kind of laughed (good-naturedly!) as my naivety. What I would take as absolutely intolerable, she recognized as pretty much a day-to-day occurance.

We’ve got options: we can acknowledge that, and then move forward, keeping it as a constant reminder that we should listen as much as we talk. We can feel guilty about it, and despair that there’s nothing we can do about it except sympathize. Or we can interpret it as an attack, and get angry and defensive.

I’m Not Sure I Like Your Tone

Defensiveness is the mind-killer. It is the little-death that tricks us into believing that apathy is action. It creates an immediate problem that we think is solvable — clearly, if everyone could just understand how this offends me and people like me, we could all get along — while ignoring the systematic, longer-running problem that’s driving all of our assumptions. It lets us believe that by not siding with the “extremes,” we’re standing firm on the center path to equality, even though we’ve seen time and time again that the “center path” inherently favors white dudes.

That’s why a guy who goes by “Total Biscuit” can post a call for everybody to calm down and not “pick sides”, and be completely sincere as far as I can tell, and still have so many people yelling at him. (Including me). It’s just one big false equivalence after the other. He says that “social justice warrior” and “men’s rights activist” are just two meaningless insults that people keep throwing around in an attempt to dismiss and over-simplify each other’s viewpoint, but neither one actually exists. Well, I hate to break it to you, “Biscuit”, but Men’s Rights Activists absolutely exist. They’re a lunatic fringe — that Washington Post article is astoundingly even-handed and even sympathetic, but still doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge that they’re preaching bullshit — but not only are they real, their “men are the victims” bullshit is the basis for all of the harassment going on. Equating it to “a feminist yelled at me that one time so feminism is extremist dogma” isn’t just misguided, it’s demonstrably false.

Not to mention: “SJW” and “MRA” aren’t even the same kind of term. “MRA” is the euphemism these assholes use to describe themselves. If we were going to pick a pejorative term to sling at them, we’d just call them for what they are: misogynists.

He’s also wrong when he says that the term “SJW” is meaningless. It’s actually a very useful shorthand, like “white knight” and “politically correct”. You can use it to instantly determine a person’s worldview and motivations. Just never the way it’s intended, because it says nothing about the speaker’s target but everything you need to know about the speaker.

One of my proudest and most hilarious achievements is when I had a guy on Twitter call me a “white knight” for something I’d written, saying that I was only criticizing GTA 5 because I wanted to get women to sleep with me. Once the laughter had died down, it was clear that the guy couldn’t even conceive why someone would say something in favor of women for any reason other than because he wanted sex. What else are women good for, after all? And the “social justice warriors” are only speaking out about diversity because they want to be seen as heroes and champions; why else would anyone speak out on this except out of self-interest? And why would anybody try to be more conscious of being inclusive and respectful? It can’t really be a desire to be “correct,” but as a shallow acknowledgement of some political agenda.

Just about the only thing I’d agree with Mr. Biscuit about: there aren’t “two sides” here. That absolutely doesn’t mean that it’s a complex, multi-faceted issue. It just means that there aren’t two equal and opposing sides. There’s the fact that women are entitled to equal voice and equal representation writing, making, and playing video games. That’s it.

And again — video games. I moved cross-country and devoted my entire career to video games, and I still can’t believe the kind of self-obsessed lunatic that would make such a big deal about them.

Ready Manchild One

Anyone who says that there’s more going on here is just wrong. Whether they’re intentionally misleading you, or looking for an excuse to keep on doing nothing, or just confused, it doesn’t matter. And entertaining them as if they have a valid point isn’t being moderate or objective; it’s picking a side. Their side.

I’d always said that by giving any attention to the “trolls,” you’re just giving them a voice they didn’t deserve. I was wrong. Ignoring them gives them a voice they didn’t deserve. Someone on Twitter made a pretty good analogy: if you leave the weeds alone, they’ll eventually grow to choke out an entire garden. Instead of leaving all the work to the targets of abuse, harassment, and discrimination to just “deal with it,” we need to make more of an effort ourselves to go through periodically and get rid of the weeds. Saying “trolls gonna troll, ain’t no stoppin’ it!” is worse than ineffectual; it just gives up what is literally the least we could to help, which is to show our support.

Andreas Zecher started an “open letter to the gaming community”, and he had to close it off after getting 2500 signatures in about a day. Is that going to fix the problem? Of course not, but at least it’s a start. And it’s a hell of a lot better than giving all our attention to the assholes.

If you engage one of these clowns — and I really can’t recommend it to anyone — you’ll see how quickly all their supposedly high-minded concerns fall apart into childish selfishness. We do need to identify where it comes from, not to give them sympathy and ease their fears, and sure as hell not to “let them know their concerns are legitimate.” We need to know where it comes from so we can all identify exactly how we’re all complicit. I can only point fingers at 4chan, or ‘gaming journalism,” or wicked games publishers, or “argumentative” activists, or the targets themselves, for so long before I’ve only got one person left to point at.

My friend Matt Dessem had an insightful theory that seems obvious in retrospect: video games and comics deal primarily in power fantasies, so of course they’re going to attract an audience that feels powerless. He equated the situation to the GOP spending so much time courting the Tea Party, and then acting surprised when it turned out so many of them were unrepentant racists and misogynists.

We can’t act surprised that the video game audience is so hostile and paranoid, completely losing their shit at the sight of anything they don’t like or find even remotely challenging. We spend all of our time telling each of them that he’s the most important person in the whole world. Even in games that aren’t explicitly about saving the universe, the entire medium of interactive entertainment is inherently a power fantasy: this entire world exists because of you, things only happen because you make them happen.

When a bunch of people were calling video games “murder simulators,” I thought we all agreed that it was only okay because players could separate fantasy from reality. But we’ve taken the premise that each (male, usually white) player is the most important person in the universe, and we’ve extended it to the real world. Publishers have always said “give the people what they want,” but as the budgets have increased, there’s been even less room for anything resembling challenging content or artistic expression. Game criticism — actual game criticism, and not just reviews — has spent years focused on player agency on the assumption that, essentially, artistic intent is for linear media, and games are different.

I’ve seen writers for game sites — who should know better — insist that if enough readers are interested in something, it’s worth addressing. That’s not even theoretically wrong; we’ve seen how wrong it is. We’ve seen exactly what happens when “journalists” forget their responsibility and instead start to believe their role is simply to parrot back everything they hear in the name of “objectivity.” It’s what makes revenue-focused “news” sources give equal time to climate change deniers.

None of this is a new or earth-shattering observation. It’s not even the first time I’ve realized it. I just never had to consider how important it was, because I was complaining about echo chambers from within the safety of my own echo chamber.

A Decent Actress, I Guess

As I’ve watched the harassment of women happen with increasing regularity, I keep thinking back to one event: a panel at Wondercon with the cast of one of the Resident Evil movies.

Nerd conventions are generally great for “high functioning” nerds like myself; we get a safe space to go and gawk and pretend that we’re somehow cooler and better-adjusted than everyone else. And the horrible but perversely thrilling highlight is always the celebrity panel, when they open the microphone up to Q&A from the audience. For the socially awkward, it’s kind of like watching other people fire-walk: we don’t have to go across the hot coals ourselves, but we can marvel at it and wait for something to go horribly wrong.

At this panel, the thing that went horribly wrong was this: a dude came up to the microphone and decided it’d be the perfect time to sack up and finally let actress Ali Larter know how he felt about her ruining the show Heroes. He said, “I mean, you’re a decent actress, I guess” but how did she feel knowing that her character was “pretty much universally” considered the thing that ruined the series? Her face was projected up on the huge screen in front of everybody, so we could all see her “what the hell is happening right now?!” expression as this brave young man fearlessly spoke up in complete anonymity out of the darkness.

But then a magical thing happened: the crowd started booing, and it got louder until it shut that asshole up and drove him away from the microphone. They didn’t say, “Well, he’s just speaking his mind; he’s not actually making any actionable threats.” They didn’t say, “Eh, it’s a nerd convention. This kind of thing is bound to happen.” They didn’t say, “We’ll just let the convention moderators take care of it.” They didn’t say, “She’s an actress; she’s going to have to get a thicker skin if she wants to survive for long.” They didn’t say, “This is representative of the inherent power struggle in which people of lower social standing ‘punch up’ against the established higher social class.” They didn’t say, “He’s just socially awkward and is probably motivated by years of being bullied himself.”

They just said “boo” enough times to make it clear that this shit was completely unacceptable. And because the camera stayed fixed on Ms. Larter, you could see her expression change from surprise at being attacked to one of relief that she was finally getting shown some support. During a later question, she started with, “Sorry, I just can’t believe how mean that guy was!” and got a laugh, which broke the tension.

Notice that I said they booed him off the stage. I spent the whole time standing in a dark corner at the back of the auditorium, just thinking about how horribly awkward the whole thing was and how uncomfortable it made me feel. Ever since, I’ve wished that I’d joined in.