Why I am speaking up for women in games

Of course. I was speaking more about the Giant Bomb community than the staff. I know a large number of threats have come from GB users, but you've still chosen to come here and have a conversation, and I think that says a lot.

Not that I am trying to say isn't worse for you or women in general, but this experience is fairly common regardless of your gender. You will always ALWAYS encounter ass holes no matter what game you play, and so it's usually best to mute everyone else who seems like their being purposefully douche-y or just do what I do majority of the time and play with friends.

Hi Brianna, everyone..

I'm really enjoying how this has remained civil. I think both sides of the issue have valid points and it's OK to agree to disagree which I appreciate Brianna and the others taking that stance on some of the prickly subjects.

Having said that, I think..as a man and a husband...sometimes you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes. I think women like Brianna just want someone to acknowledge that their is an issue in the games industry. I mean who else are they going to turn to, the 'management' who is responsible for the glass ceilings aren't going to listen. All they have to turn to is the public in hopes things may change from the bottom up or at grass roots. This exists for all women in many professions, it's a fact of life...I just think some people just handle these outcries in an immature manner(threats). The internet has to grow up.

I do believe that some women misrepresent the efforts Brianna tries to make(they can be jerks too), but don't lump her and others all in one group. Just like we don't like to be lumped in with the psycho's who make the death threats. We should be inviting to many viewpoints and genders... and let the jerks who truly are the jerks(woman and man) take a hike.

What I've realized this week is that women in this field need hope.

I am a very flawed human being. Personally, I am uncomfortable with all the women that write me and tell me I'm a hero. I'm not a hero - I am completely fed up with seeing women in this industry bullied. And I'm not going to settle for any more excuses.

I have a Jack Bauer level of anger right now at this situation.

If me taking the heat from Kotaku, Twitter and 8chan gives women hope? It is my absolute pleasure.

I have an issue that I have been trying to mentally resolve for a long time now, it relates to women in gaming and recent events but is also much broader. First off let me say that I fully believe in men and women being treated equally well inside and outside the video game industry and that the internet harassment is horrible. Giant Bomb and the gaming media speaking out about it is absolutely the right thing to do and should have happened long ago. I hope that my post is relevant to the spirit of the thread, if not I apologize for going off topic.

The problem I am having and have been having for a long time now is that I find it extremely hard to support many of the voices in the women's movement who are calling for change. I generally agree with the messages they are presenting, but the tone and attitude that many convey is very hard for me to accept. Basically I am a straight white man and many of the voices I see calling out for fair treatment in the video games industry and feminist voices in general come off as extremely antagonistic and vengeful. The message that I am receiving from people like Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian and feminist articles on sites like Jezebel and where ever else my Facebook friends post from is that straight white men are the cause of all these problems women are having and that straight white men are responsible for everything bad that happens to women.

I have a problem with that because these messages all appear to be attacking me personally, saying "You are causing these bad things by existing and you should feel bad for causing them." I try to be a decent person online and offline, I don't harass people over twitter or message boards, I don't say terrible slurs about women I meet in real life and I try to speak out about things like internet harassment and vote for equality every change I get. Beyond that I don't know what to do but there are all these feminist voices telling me I am a bad person and need to change my ways and stop oppressing women. I am unable to directly support these people because their underlying message is horribly insulting and I am not about to begin self flagellation to gain their approval.

So my question in all this is how do I approach women's issues when most of the voices I hear championing these issues seem to be intensely angry at me simply for being alive? If the messaging was more inclusive I would probably be actively supporting these people, but as things are I often tune them out because the message is so consistently negative. Are there voices for change that do not hold men at fault for the problems women face? If not, how am I supposed to support good treatment of women when those I see calling for it are treating men badly?

@anonymous_jesse:

Its a built in defense to their actions, 'I dontated to a charity, therefore I am not sexist and if you don't agree with me, then you hate charity'. Also if you are talking specifically about Mike 'based lawyer' Cernovich, read what he has posted to twitter in the past.

With respect, this is what women call a "tone argument." One of the biggest barriers women in tech face when trying to talk with men about problems is their tendency to focus on our tone. It's a double standard of communication we're held to, and a massive distraction. It's a form of unconscious bias than limits dialogue.

I am at a computer typing calmly and rationally. Believe me - you have not seen me confrontational. Also, I don't care if you find me confrontational.

Here's a little secret about the world. Being very nice and patient doesn't change things.

I want to thank you for being as vocal as you are and for not backing down. You're an absolute inspiration and complete badass and I'm really glad there are people like you speaking up. Isometric is now a part of my podcast routine and I look forward to playing Revolution 60 once it's out on PC.

Wanting video games to be considered art has basically been an attempt to validate the time we spend with video games. Growing up while playing games as kids, parents/teachers/politicians/adults in general have been telling us we have been wasting our time. Having games recognized as art is a way to rebuke that claim and justify our time and money invested into the hobby, not just to others but also to ourselves.

But the thing is, feminist critique doesn't really make games look good, and making games look good was the whole point of the "games as art" stuff. Gamers didn't fully understand what it was they were asking for, so now many of them are upset.

The ones who don't want the responsibility are often the ones best suited for it.

Alright, I'm going to say this here:

"We likewise claim the right to delete any comment and lock or delete any thread on these forums at any time."

That's from the forum rules. The instant the mods feel that this conversation is going off-track, however they define that, they have the license to lock it. We've already deleted a few choice comments.

We've been overnight-locking high-traffic threads about these kinds of things all week and will continue to do so if the moderation staff needs time to recharge. Many of them have been putting in full-time hours on this stuff, including over the course of this weekend, and given that this is Sunday night, I'm giving them the license to not have to choose to F5 this thread all night looking for trolls or shitposters.

I don't mean to say this to have a chilling effect on the conversation, but at some point the practical desire to keep my moderators' sanity intact overrides our ability to monitor all posts at all times.

i wasn't talking about you. I was talking about some of the comments I've seen on Twitter and Youtube about the subject.

Being very nice doesn't change things, but being nice does change the way people see the comunicator and the message, as does patience and perseverance. You can't force anyone to change their convictions. If you push them too hard you'll probably make them enemies.

Change needs both MLKs and Malcolm Xs to succeed. Very few systemic situations have been improved due to the actions of either one peaceful communicator or one aggressive leader. Both are needed.

They aren't a charity, they are a for-profit company, they say so as much here.

What happens is that IF their product makes a profit, they donate a portion of those profits to charity. This is not the same as being a charity.

Do you agree with Anita Sarkeesian's tweets regarding Bayonetta?

@rorie: You and the mods have been doing a great job Rorie. I'm not going to claim to be the keeper of the Internet lore, but I've never seen a site unlock a topic after a cool down period so the discussion can continue rationally. If that was an experiment, I'd say it's a big success, and I think asking for some down time for your and the mods' sanity is more than fair. Rorie, everyone, look under your seat. It's a puppy. Everyone's earned a puppy.

@spacekatgal: Hi Brianna.

I admit that I joined this forum just to talk to you because I think this is a very interesting and important discussion to have.

I would like to ask you a question or two which is definitely about the topic of speaking up for women in games, but I'm unsure whether you'd be comfortable in talking to someone who is not part of the GiantBomb community, or whether other GiantBomb users might have an issue with a newcomer doing with that.

Would it be okay if I asked you just one or two polite questions? If so please let me know. If you do not respond, I will just continue reading the other responses in this thread.

Thanks for reading

Man this whole GamerGate thing reminds me of Occupy Wallstreet. There is a potentially real interesting thing to be discussed, but their message is so unclear, I don't really know what the discourse is about or what they're trying to accomplish. Gamergate, like Occupy, also lacks a leader; and without a leader the "movement" is susceptible to having any old yahoo hop in and hijack the message so long as they're louder, which is exactly what happened with Gamer Gate sadly.

Also, the only thing I have to say about women is that I have always thought of them as people.

I just wanted to say thank you for continuing this dialogue with the community. As much as I love Giant Bomb (like to an almost obsessive degree sometimes) I find myself wishing they'd be a little more direct when it comes to dealing with these issues. It's one of the only off-putting things about the site to me, which I still find better than... well... just about all of the other games content on the internet. Uh, I don't really have much else to add, but I just wanted to say keep fighting the good fight. 5-10 years ago I was a total piece of garbage when it came to issues like this, it took seeing the life experiences of women around me and realizing how much bullshit just about every single woman has to deal with on a day to day basis to really wake me up and change my ways (I'll also give the assist to super feminist punk bands that took years of the lyrics bouncing off of my dumb head before they finally clicked and when they did it was like seeing the world through a completely different lens). I used to scoff when people would drum up the rally cry for the importance of women's voices (and minorities too tbh - games journo is white bread as hell) but now I totally understand it, agree with it and definitely appreciate the added perspectives when I can get them.

When you're on the other side of that dividing line, though, I think it's all really hard to process any of the concepts until you have the life experiences that start breaking down those walls. Too many people think that there already is "equality" so it all just seems silly. That's not to sympathize with GGers, but I could see myself 10 years ago getting wrapped up in something like that. Now the idea is appalling. I like to think that a lot of these people are just young and have no perspective. It doesn't at all make their actions okay (especially not the more serious threats - obviously never ever okay!), but I hope that at least the more reasonable GGers of the lot might have that same awakening that I had at some point and be a good ally moving forward.

The thing is, they were already your enemy. Their convictions were already in opposition to your's, so it doesn't matter if they like you or not, or how they perceive your message. They were already against you. When your are trying to change something, your goal isn't to persuade the people who already disagree with you, it's to get the people who are indecisive and unmotivated on your side, and the dispassionate rational doesn't do that. It may be fun for chewing the fat around the salon, but it doesn't change laws and overthrow regimes.

@spacekatgal: Keep doing what you're doing, because it's working, as evidenced by this thread. If this situation is ever going to improve, everyone who talks about games on the internet needs to be aware of these problems and be judicious about excising those elements of the gaming community who would rather those conversations not happen. When Patrick came to GB in 2011 and started writing about sexist marketing campaigns and the problematic portrayal of women, a significant proportion of this community got angry about politics invading their video games. A lot of those people are still here but the majority of them are now engaging in the discussion and shutting down those people who don't think it's a conversation worth having.

From my perspective, the people who are attacking you would rather you and others like you not to talk about these issues, therefore we shouldn't give them what they want. In the process, consumers and companies alike might actually start addressing these issues.

Thanks for sharing, but to make it out that men are treated better than women in the industry (by the consumer, aka gamers) comes off as, to use a word Jeff used recently, farcical. Since I started paying attention to the industry farther than a gaming magazine, you see that reviewers (of all genders), YouTubers (of all genders), pundits (of all genders), and fellow gamers (of all genders) have received equal harassment and death threats over the decade +. Remember when Jack Thompson received a steady flow of death threats? Yeah, no one cared then. In fact, the industry largely laughed at him and victim blamed him til the sun came down. The gaming media/mainstream media has only covered the death threats of women they agree with, which is a shame. To show people that the gaming media truly cares about equality they need to speak for everyone, and that includes when men receive death threats. To make this out like an "us and them" battle where only media are harassed does no one good and makes it seem like you have a biased agenda.

We need more diverse voices in the industry, and I feel like some of what you've done has potentially scared those voices and potentially kept them from ever considering entering the business. Your narrative has been "gamers will send you death threats if you're a woman", so why would they ever consider it? We need to do more to foster creativity, education, and interest across every demographic. From 2009 to 2014 the percentage of game developers who were female went from 11% to 22%, and I can only assume that number is going to greatly increase considering the ease of access to game development tools.

To loosely quote Boogie, to think that gamers care about the genitals of who makes there game is ridiculous. No one gets upset when they find out the maker of their game is a woman, man, gay straight, etc. update: To assume that shows a bias more than anything else. If I am not mistaken plenty of Twitch users (male) have been the victim of swatting, which wasn't really widely reported. I think we need equal and fair coverage of all these things:

I don't know. I think it's neat that someone with a voice much louder than mine is speaking out against a lot of stuff that has made me uncomfortable here at GB. I really enjoy some of the content here, but stuff like the origin of "<>" is awful. People are still saying terrible things about Leigh regarding that bombcast (seriously, just look at the comments on the clip- or don't. Yeah, just don't.). Also, I don't understand the fear of "Giant Bomb transforming into Kotaku or Polygon". Does that mean hiring women or something crazy like that? (oh man that joke just made me sad)

Anyway! Thank you Brianna, especially for taking the time to chat to the GB community. Now I'm going to listen to that song that was written for Isometric because it's been in my head all day anyway! <3

Thank you Rorie and mods too!

@giraffeking: Your right at this point there is no real evidence. I wish someone with credibility had reported on this when all this began. This article is explains TFYC point of view. http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fine-young-capitalists

@spacekatgal: I don't think it's video game culture. Think of all the people and kids out there who go about their daily lives...play games..aren't even aware of this entire discussion. Complete strangers would think it's cool that you are a developer. Heck, as an engineer myself..I think it's awesome. Don't let recent events darken your thoughts about that..we are all people, we like games. It's just a handful of nasty people have used these events as a means to misbehave and the nature of the internet allows them to do so without protections to people like yourself. I'm not saying misogyny doesn't exist, it does. Be a happy warrior.

@courage_wolf: This is what is called male privilege. It's a huge barrier in addressing these issues.

It's perfectly normal to feel weird, defensive, incredulous and angry when someone is telling you that you're causing problems. In fact, men tell me this every day. But, solving the issues at hand is worth a little of your personal discomfort.

We are all infected with this stuff. I, myself, am still growing and learning about feminism. We all have a part to play in waking up and doing better.

@rorie: I think everyone involved here is being mostly civil.

@spacekatgal: Thank you for standing up for yourself. I met my fiancé on this site and have seen her become less active and outspoken in her gaming as time has gone on. Multiplayer is practically a non-option for her and even innocuous comments on gaming forums like "I don't find Zac Efron that attractive" get her called a bitch (I wish that wasn't an actual anecdote). I hate that our shared hobby is completely benign for me, and potentially demeaning, harassing, and frightening for her.

She may not be interested in becoming a game developer (anymore), but even as just a female gamer, I'm glad that there are women like you fighting to make it a more welcoming environment for her and others like her.

@spacekatgal: I think you're being courageous and I love your perspective on things. I'm really sorry to see this ugly beast of GG cause so much damage. I hate to think that in this day and age, that a woman could be scared away from doing any job in the Western world. This is a hard dose of reality for those of us who'd hoped most of this was behind us.

One place I'd disagree though is, I think it's a little harsh to criticize GB for not having women on staff, given how small they are. I think they could stand to have more women on staff, but I do wonder if there are a lot of women with the caliber of writing and personality that they're looking for. I think they're certainly out there, but maybe they're not quite so numerous as we'd like to see.

I'm a little unsure of how to express my feelings on this subject, but if it's true that women in gaming feel terrified to just speak their minds then damn that hits hard.

The central idea that has guided my identification as a feminist has always been freedom. It has been my belief that a society doesn't need a 50/50 split in all areas of human endeavor for any one of those areas not to be sexist but that society needs to foster an attitude that anyone can pursue whatever they want on a individual basis without any fear of consequences (social, economic,ect.) for pursuing that endeavor.

I still believe that so-called "core" gaming will not likely have a 50/50 demographic split without people changing the definition of what that is, which is just the semantic moving around of words, and that is okay, romance novels aren't going to have a 50/50 demographic either. But for there to be a feeling that there is a backlash for merely being a female who enjoys games means that there is a socially exclusive attitude towards that pastime keeping people out who, if not for that backlash, would rather be in. To me this creates a denial of individualism and self-expression that restricts people to gender-roles rather than encouraging people to be themselves. It creates a barrier to entry that some women by their courage or other personality traits might overcome but deters those without those traits regardless of their passion for the medium.

We have deleted comments that you may not have seen, including from a few one-post accounts clearly made to cause trouble. Given that it's late on a Sunday night, I'm not going to ask the mods to F5 this all night. We've locked many topic threads this week to let the moderators take a break, and given some of the deletions we've made I doubt we'll be able to leave this open overnight.

Sorry. We'll give it another 15 minutes. We'll open it up again in the morning when more moderators are around to keep an eye on it.

I think what many of the disgruntled people over this issue don't realize is that just because more women might be making more games with a better focus on the female perspective doesn't mean that violent FPSes and chainmail bikini fantasies aren't going to just disappear. Honestly, it just means more people making more games. Hell, there's nothing stopping women from making some more shooty chainmail bikini fantasies. Who wouldn't want that?

@rorie: Keep up the good work! Thanks for indulging us as much as you do.

Well they can convince people of the truth behind their position, instead of rallying their supporters for a fight to the death against their perceived enemies. There are no real enemies either, just people with diffrent convictions. They can be loud but they don't need to be confrontational.

@kalmia64: I agree with this.

I have to say, Leigh, Anita, Zoe, all these women that are vilified by male gamers? I really hate seeing them attacked so much. They are all very talented, very smart women. And the tendency to find one thing they've said, take it out of context and to attack them viciously seems unfair to me.

These women have the guts to stand up and try to change a whole industry. Have you ever tried to do that? They deserve a little slack.

Hey Brianna, thanks for making a thread. I consider myself a feminist, and I'm as anti-gamergate as you can get. I'm an aspiring game developer and I pay attention to these issues very closely but I tend to subscribe to the concept of "shut up and listen" when it comes to women's issues. I wanted to make a comment on twitter but I didn't feel safe, so again I'm glad you made this, but I feel like the complaints being levied against the GB staff by people like Elizabeth Simins and Maddie Myers feel kind of unfair. (Thanks, but too little too late, this is your guys' fault, this is Dan Ryckert's fault, etc).

Like, Patrick and Alex have been talking about GG for a long time publicly. Everyone was still saying ah, Giant Bomb is still ignoring it along with Polygon, Gamespot, etc. Which made me suspect that people really just want Jeff to make a statement. Which is fair, I understand what Jeff represents and his words carry weight. He's been sort of preoccupied lately also. But then he finally does make a statement, and then (at least the 2 women I mentioned earlier) are upset because just because Jeff was preoccupied, the rest of the staff still could have said something, they waited too long, blah blah blah. Like, hey homie, they were.

I dunno. I'm not interested in getting into a long debate because I think ultimately we're on the same side and I just don't have the attention span to debate 5 paragraphs at a time on message boards anymore. I just feel its kinda unfair. If I was in Jeff's spot I'd feel pretty frustrated right now. What do you think?

Thank you for posting this topic, this stuff is something we all need to acknowledge and try to change for the better. I wish I could get my nephews to grow up and show the slightest bit of empathy, even just for their mother and sister, but they would rather keep on blaming all their problems on "whores".

@sammo21: Of course she has a biased agenda. She and her friends have received numerous death threats due to the fact that a) she is critcising the gaming industry (which is healthy) and b) she's a woman. Yes, men have received death threats over the years too. Have those death threats been concentrated into a two-month period in conjunction with a movement started and perpetuated by some of the people sending them? No.
You're making a false equivalency. Even if the volume of harassment was the same for men (which it isn't), none of it is to do with the fact that they are a) criticising the gaming industry and b) men.

Also, Boogie is wrong. I play games and I appreciate it when games reflect multiple perspectives as a result of being developed by men, women, gay men, gay women and transgenders. The notion that people don't care where a game comes from or who worked on it is utterly facile when it comes from people who also think games should be appreciated as art.

Just my last words. I don't think I'm pro GG. They don't really have an aim and with the hijacking of a few people sending death threats, it's all just kind of toxic.

About woman in games, and more diversity, that's what I want too. Gone Home was great and I would love to see more main characters not be white dudes. I will say that the Pre-Sequal I think handles this badly. There's a character in that, that's sole train is being gay and I think that's the wrong way to go about it.

Also I don't like the current crop of woman who seem to be the head of the spear of this movement. Leigh Alexander has always rubbed me wrong, and the gamers are dead article was so spiteful, it kind of turned me off and Anita Sarkeesian video's are kind of weak. For a medium that is full of msygonic things you don't have to twist things to set them to your point of few.

Saying all that, in this current environment it's like I can't say these things without coming across as a woman hating guy. Oh well, the sooner this GG stuff is dead, the sooner we can discuss it civilly again.

@mechakirby: I don't agree. But, I mean - I really feel strongly about Samantha. I'd love to hear more about why you feel that way.

I guess the only applicable qualifier to that would be that maybe things that are uncomfortable or possibly offensive to a large swath of people might need to tone it down.

I'm just a straight dude who plays mostly open world games and racing games so I really am bad at arguing about what feminism is or might be, but there's always those weird time when my girlfriend walks by a game I'm playing and goes "Th...that's...uh kind of weird." Dragon's Crown did that. I'd just like video games to not make people uncomfortable!

Edit: And I'd also like women to not be harassed out of the gaming work force! Fuck those people who do that shit I am sorry you've had to go though that Spacekatgal

@spacekatgal: I'd like to thank you for bringing up the existence of sex-positive feminism, it really annoys me when people don't acknowledge that there are a wide variety of opinions within the movement.

I disagree with you about how to communicate to those on the fence about an issue but I guess that's a matter of tactics and without enough proof, which I just don't have enough time to dig through and make a solid historical case, we'll just have to keep believing what we believe.

@spacekatgal: No I haven't! I barely had the guts to ask my programming professor to not call me "lovely young lady"! I admire you guys so much. I hope I can do a fraction of what you guys have done in games for STEM.

Who would actually think criticism was ever analogous to universal praise? If there's only ever one outcome to a critique, then its worthless.

I think most mature, rational adults would see games being taken seriously and critiqued as such as a positive, even if individual games might be considered offensive crap.

Alright, as I promised to do fifteen minutes ago, I'm locking this. We don't have the moderation resources to F5 this all night. We'll unlock it in the morning when we do.

And, to be clear, the moderators have my express permission to lock any other thread that they feel is problematic until such time comes that enough moderators are on to deal with them.