Feminism: How-To Guide for Misogynist Gamers

[Content Note: Misogyny]

Step 1: Create an environment where skilled female gamers are subjected to brutal abuse.

When Miranda Pakozdi entered the Cross Assault video game tournament this year, she knew she had a slim chance of winning the $25,000 prize. But she was ready to compete, and promised fans watching online that she would train just as hard as, if not harder than, anyone else.

Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her.

Ms. Pakozdi, 25, an experienced gamer, has said she always expects a certain amount of trash talk. But as the only woman on the team, this was too much, especially from her coach, she said. It was after she overheard Mr. Bakhtanians defending sexual harassment as part of “the fighting game community” that she forfeited the game.

Step 2: Foster the misogynistic impression that unskilled female gamers are unskilled due to an innate lack of talent rather than a reasonable unwillingness to spend time in a misogynistic environment.

The skill tree is called Best Friends Forever, what lead designer John Hemingway dubbed the "girlfriend mode".

"The design team was looking at the concept art and thought, you know what, this is actually the cutest character we've ever had. I want to make, for the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to understand the game and to play the game? That's what our attempt with the Best Friends Forever skill tree is."

One of the first skills available in the BFF tree is called Close Enough. This means your bullets that hit walls or other objects, that is, miss their target, have a chance to ricochet off towards the enemy.

"Can't aim? That's not a problem," Hemingway said.

Step 3: Persistently defend misogynistic actions as not misogynistic, using sweeping hyperbolic language that indicates the complete impossibility! of male sexism and the total likelihood! of female retribution in the face of same, because that totally happens all the time in Real Life. Bonus points if the defense comes from a man who is unlikely to have experienced misogyny first-hand at all, let alone from his dudebro sexist buddies. Insist that factual articles about sexist statements are a lot of tempest in a pot of tea.

You may have noticed Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford speaking out against the "girlfriend mode" nickname on Twitter. [...]

"Borderlands 2 does NOT have a girlfriend mode," Pitchford stated on Twitter. "Anyone that says otherwise is misinformed or trying to stir up something that isn't there. [...]

Pitchford didn't deny that Hemingway had said "girlfriend mode". Instead, he labelled the term a "personal anecdote" that had been spun by the media.

"There is no universe where Hemingway is a sexist," Pitchford added. "All the women at Gearbox would beat his and anyone else's ass."

Step 4: Dig deeper to make it absolutely clear that you don't know what misogyny is, couldn't identify it from a hole in the ground, and adamantly don't want to be informed about it because knowledge might make your delicious male privilege taste less nomtastic.

42 comments:

tanookie766 said...

De-lurking to just say wow... This whole thing is such a blatant example of misogyny that I don't even understand how someone could possibly not see it. But gaming culture is, unfortunately, so steeped in casual misogyny that I bet the developers didn't think twice about nicknaming the skill tree "girlfriend mode" and go so far as to advertise it as such. It's a shame because the idea of a skill tree designed to help those who aren't good at FPSs be able to play with their friends, family or partners is actually really good. I (a dude) personally suck at FPS games since I find first person view disorienting and generally have bad reflexes and the FPS genre has a pretty high learning curve these days, especially online multiplayer.

Another thing, am I the only person who thinks there's a connection between the sneering condescension with which gaming culture sees casual games and the fact that these type of games are generally associated with female players?

Asha said...

And I've had people ask why I don't do multiplayer. >_< *shudder*

depizan said...

It's a shame because the idea of a skill tree designed to help those who aren't good at FPSs be able to play with their friends, family or partners is actually really good.

Yes. Yes, it is. I have one friend who's very good at most types of video games, but the poor guy is surrounded by people who are mediocre to terrible at most types of video games. Games having a mode that would allow the rest of us to play with him would make everyone very happy. (Especially as he hates MMOs - for reasons I've actually come to understand - and most of us suck at, well, everything else.)

Drop the sneering and sexism and add some type of trainee/novice/just here for the fun mode to FPS games (and, well, pretty much all other games while we're at it) and all but the asshole contingent would be pleased.

Another thing, am I the only person who thinks there's a connection between the sneering condescension with which gaming culture sees casual games and the fact that these type of games are generally associated with female players?

Nope. I'm fairly certain that's the source of the problem. A certain, highly unpleasant segment of the gaming world really wants it to be a men only club, for reasons I don't really care about. I think the fact that it's almost impossible to define either "casual game" or "casual gamer" in a way that really makes sense is the dead giveaway that it's not really about "casual" vs "hardcore" (equally undefinable) and more about "them" vs "us."

Ana Mardoll said...

I think the fact that it's almost impossible to define either "casual game" or "casual gamer" in a way that really makes sense is the dead giveaway that it's not really about "casual" vs "hardcore" (equally undefinable) and more about "them" vs "us."

Yep. I've yet to hear a meaningful definition of Hardcore Games versus Casual Games other than "I'll know it when I see it", which is unusably subjective in my opinion. I've been playing games since NES and Genesis and SNES; there's no reasonable way to call me a "casual" gamer unless you default to "not MANLY games" and then define "manly" games as "anything Ana doesn't play, whatsoever that may happen to be".

Tautological, really.

And while I like the idea of a skill tree for easy-play, it rankles that they've (apparently) only implemented this on a character that presents as cis-female. Easy-play trees and hard-play trees should be available on all the characters, or else we're just going to see the further ghettoization of cis-female avatars.

depizan said...

there's no reasonable way to call me a "casual" gamer unless you default to "not MANLY games" and then define "manly" games as "anything Ana doesn't play, whatsoever that may happen to be".

And that's exactly how it usually gets defined. Well, not using you specifically, but... Hell, they even do that with the casual playstyle in MMOs, whatever the frak that is. For a "casual" gamer, I've sure racked up a lot of hours on the MMOs I've played. I just don't care for the end game hamster wheel or (usually) PvP - which are deemed what hardcore players do because. And, no, there isn't an actual because there. I'd say PvP takes some skill, but I do halfway decent at it when I do it, and I'm not really putting out much effort so, either I'm naturally talented, or PvPers just want people to think it takes skillz. The end game hamster wheel takes no more skill than the rest of the game. Just boring repetition of boring dungeons until one's brain hops out one's ear and runs away.

No, wait, there is actually one thing that can be used to define hardcore MMO playing - you do things that let you, to be crude, wave your epeen about. Except, of course, what's worthy of epeenage has, again, been defined in the same sort of circular way. (PvP gear, end game gear, but not, generally, exploration related shinies, vanity pets, social shinies, even if all of the above may take equivalent amounts of effort and/or skill.)

depizan said...

And while I like the idea of a skill tree for easy-play, it rankles that they've (apparently) only implemented this on a character that presents as cis-female.

Oh dear. Yeah, that's all kinds of not okay. I'd want to see the games set up with easy/hard modes or easy/hard trees, period. The point should be to allow more people to play, not to be sexist asses.

DavidCheatham said...

I think the fact that it's almost impossible to define either "casual game" or "casual gamer" in a way that really makes sense is the dead giveaway that it's not really about "casual" vs "hardcore" (equally undefinable) and more about "them" vs "us."

I've always been confused about that, myself. Mainly because I'm a big adventure game fan, and somehow those got dismissed as 'casual' games too.

I once had a theory that what people _really_ meant by hardcore was 'twitch' game. And 'casual games' didn't require the same level of hand-eye coordination, or at least were more forgiving of errors of that. (This theory was helped by that being a Broken Base in adventure games...some purists insist that no adventure game should be timing sensitive at all, others do not.)

But there are plenty of games that don't seem to be regarded as casual that don't require twitch skills. For example, Fallout 3 and New Vegas have VATS, which lets you play those RPGs as essentially a tabletop RPG, in that it's your character's skills at shooting, and not yours, that determine how well you do. Other RPGs, especially DnD-based ones, clearly intend you to pause for each turn of a fight to do your actions, and often even auto-pause at the start.

Likewise, puzzle games seem to all be considered casual. I once heard someone refer to Tetris as a casual game once. Whereas Tetris is, obviously, twitch-requiring, and unforgiving of mistakes. (And Tetris competitions are _very_ hardcore in the general sense of the word. They just tend to be outside America.) Likewise, anything on a phone seems to be 'casual'.

So my theory fell apart, and now I have no idea what anyone means anymore. It seems to be 'who gets to sit at the cool table' rules..the kids already sitting there vote people in and out. Which is fine...if there wants to be some sort of culture that is 'hardcore gamer' and has specific norms and whatnot, whatever.

But they don't get to define everyone else as 'casual' though, and we shouldn't play along as if they're the 'real' video gamer culture and speak for all video gamers. Video gamer culture is anyone who plays and talks about and is interested in video games.

Nor does it mean outsiders can't criticize problems like sexism and whatnot in their 'hardcore' culture. Their 'our bigotry is grandfathered in' claim is nonsense. Video gamer culture doesn't date from 1932. Video gamer culture as a whole didn't really exist before the internet. (There were some magazines that predate it...but I'm welling to bet such behavior wasn't approved of in those magazines.)


Incidentally, when coding on things like custom-built DVRs and settop boxes running things like XBMC (Stuff that generally only computer-skilled people set up.), and someone proposes a change, part of the question to be asked is 'How SO-friendly is that?', which means, 'While the person who will set this up would understand that concept, this does not mean everyone who _uses_ it will. How does this work for someone who their normal interaction with a TV is, at most, a DVD menu or a Tivo?'.

But there's a reason it's called 'significant other friendly' instead of 'girlfriend friendly' or 'wife friendly'. I suspect that occasionally sexist terminology is used...and because computer programming in general does not approve of that, people are made aware that's not acceptable. Whereas that _does_ appear to be acceptable in parts of gaming culture.

Smilodon said...

One of the only two video games I play is mass effect, and a large portion of that is because I heard that ME3 had "narrative" mode - so I could just play out the story. I started with ME2, since that was what we had in the house, and discovered that even "casual" mode is simple enough that I could play it without being able to both move Shepard's viewpoint and body at the same time, let alone to shoot while I was doing it. This filled the video-game owning boy of the house with delight, because he firmly believes that regardless of gender, more people should play video games and had been trying to lure me in for a while.

So I really appriciate what the game makers here were trying to do, in opening up the game for non-traditional gamers. But it seems like this was done in the most patronizing way possible. In Mass Effect, I was sold it as "We have a mode for people who are more interested in the story than in shooting." I never felt like my choice of priotizing the story was considered less worthy, or more feminine.

depizan said...

There's another advantage to using SO-friendly - it could also stand for "standard operator," as in non-techie.

As for gamer culture, it's got the same weird issues that geek culture as a whole has. There's this streak of real misogynistic nastiness that runs through it that I cannot for the life of me figure out. I mean, I can come up with theories, but mostly it seems to boil down to being asshats for the sake of being asshats. But I've never really understood dude-only spaces, be they geek related or ancient gentleman's clubs. (Women-only spaces, I understand, at least if we're talking in a safe-space kind of sense. Same with any other not-in-power group needing a safe-space.)

But, just as geek culture in general needs to go "those asshats are not us," so, too, should gamer culture. Those asshats do not speak for gamers.

Ana Mardoll said...

Yep. Heck, even the Penny Arcade guys (iirc) have pointed out that sometimes you just want to get on with the story and not have to wade through a boss with an arbitrarily long health bar.

DavidCheatham said...

This filled the video-game owning boy of the house with delight, because he firmly believes that regardless of gender, more people should play video games and had been trying to lure me in for a while.

I firmly believe that everyone should try to experience every form of story-telling out there at least once. I'd like to see this in schools instead of 'Literature': 'Here's how a story is told in a book, here is how one is told in a comic book, here is how one is told in a TV show, here is how one is told in a ballet, here is how one is told in a video game...' Currently, students just get books, short stories, and 'plays'. (Except not actual plays, just scripts, which are no more 'plays' than typewriters are 'books'.)

Incidentally, there is a genre of video games, with a plot and everything, that require no more dexterity than using a computer: Adventure Games. A few of them _do_ have action sequences, many don't, but luckily there are a lot of adventure game fans that don't like those sequences, so they get mentioned in any review.

DavidCheatham said...

As for gamer culture, it's got the same weird issues that geek culture as a whole has. There's this streak of real misogynistic nastiness that runs through it that I cannot for the life of me figure out.

Oh, that one's easy to figure out. Enough geeks had poor enough social skills that they had trouble interacting with teenage girls, and so, of course, that must be all women's fault.

Note I'm not saying 'all' or even 'most' geeks have poor social skills. I hate that stereotype, and its not true. And there are plenty of harmless people with poor social skills on top of that.

But it takes a _surprisingly_ small percentage of people saying misogynistic stuff, and no one pushing back, before a culture ends up in a bad place. And the lower percentage of women means the women aren't the ones pushing back. (This is a sort of self-causing problem. The attitude gets rid of the women, so the women aren't around to help get rid of the attitude. Not that it's their job.)

Luckily, this attitude has mostly been forced out of the _professional_ 'techies', the programmers and engineers and IT guys and whatnot. (Because HR frowns on sexual harassment and sexual discrimination lawsuits.). And that pushes back into the 'hobby programming' group, the open source groups, many of which are professional programmers taking a busman's holiday. And colleges have stepped in to fight this also.

But the people who are 'techies', like video gamers, and yet don't have jobs or degrees in the industry, keep it echoing around in their groups.

Thousand said...

These entries are mildly despair-inducing. I seriously think that online gamer 'culture' is usually poisonous at the best of times, but this stuff is really, really bad.

On the whole "girlfriend mode" thing - that actually seems like a suboptimal way to implement something like that. A skill tree that made up for inadequate gamer skill seems on the surface like a good idea, but there're major problems easily evident at a second glance. If all the classes and skill trees were balanced or close to balanced, and the skills were as powerful as they are in Borderlands 1, then players who are good at the game are basically getting a number of skill points and attendant advantages over the inexperienced player for free, and they still get major advantages over them in terms of knowing how to play as well. Why not do something like the following: have a difficulty bar that scales how much damage you do and take, how much autoaim helps you (on consoles), how aggressively and accurately AI opponents focus on you, etc. And implement that bar as a separately configured option for each player. That way the players can each get full access to the skill tree and all be playing the same game and have the same ability to choose interesting and fun abilities, and the skilled player can still be challenged while the less skilled has a chance. In a game like Borderlands, where Diabloesque loot collection is a huge part of the game, maybe have the harder end of the bar give a slightly better chance of dropping rare items or whatever to incentivize it's use by the skilled players.

Ana Mardoll said...

I was wondering something similar; it's going to make online play SO much fun. *eyeroll*

Player 1: "You're using the EASY class!"
Player 2: "No, but I'm only using the hard skill tree..."
Player 3: "LOL, I'M NOT!!" *teamkill commences*

Joy to end all joys.

Ana Mardoll said...

Luckily, this attitude has mostly been forced out of the _professional_ 'techies', the programmers and engineers and IT guys and whatnot.

David, I let this slide the first time you said it, but this is twice now, so no. I am a professional engineer. Meaning I have an actual engineering degree and I work with actual programmers all day long as One Of Them in a highly respected, very professional, and extremely large (and thoroughly HR-ed) company. I am also a woman. There is no other way to say this but in all caps:

YOU ARE NOT A WOMAN AND THEREFORE CANNOT ACCURATELY GAUGE THE LEVEL OF MISOGYNY IN A CULTURE. THAT WAS IN FACT A POINT MADE IN THE POST ABOVE.

More germane to the topic, this is my reaction to what you just posted:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHA. *gasp*

Yeah. No. I wish. But no.

In future, *please* remember that telling women which professions are most misogynistic and which are not is "mansplaining". I know it's nice for white people to think they know how racist their buddies are, or for men to think that if their man-friends are sexist around them, they must not be sexist around women, but that's a huge fallacy that people *have* to get over because it's a major obstacle to actually rooting this stuff out. And it's annoying as fuck, for the record.

Thank you.

Ana Mardoll said...

But there's a reason it's called 'significant other friendly' instead of 'girlfriend friendly' or 'wife friendly'. I suspect that occasionally sexist terminology is used...and because computer programming in general does not approve of that, people are made aware that's not acceptable.

Also, I leave you with this: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/14955.html

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

I await on tenterhooks the explanation that Microsoft isn't representative of the "computer programming in general" community.

Amaryllis said...

This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to understand the game and to play the game?

And this is why "they" will never really succeed as a third-person-indefinite pronoun. At least, not with me. I swear, I read that and wondered why "they" were producing this game if "they" were so bad at making this kind of game. It took me three re-reads before I realized that "they" were-- was? -- the hypothetical girlfriend and not the Borderlands developers.

Other than that, I don't play computer games, so I got nothing. But lord do these people sound annoying.

VMink said...

Back in the IPX/SPX days, and even now to some extent with hexadecimal MAC addresses, there came to be a standard set of "words" to use as such addresses. (IPX/SPX used a nine-character hexadecimal address for each computer on a LAN.) There's actually quite a few words you could use. As odd as it sounds, this is the first I heard of 'B00B135' and 'BIGB00B5' but then again, I learned my networking stuff before leetspeek got remotely popular, so maybe that had something to do with it? Anyway, the three I remember best were BEEF, BADBEEF, and BADBABE. Looking at 'B00B135,' I feel almost Puritan with using 'BA:BE:BA:BE:BA:BE' as a fake MAC address. =P (In my defense, 'BE:EF:BE:EF:BE:EF' was already taken on our intranet. And made me hungry.)

Silver Adept said...

There's some way of expressing my contempt for the gaming/geek community that perpetuates the misogyny and claims that women can't join the club, but I think everything in my toolkit has nasty -ist problems with it. (Adventure games occasionally do this, too - Space Quest II used TITS as an acceptable alternative password. The in-game one gathered from the puzzle was ROT1 from it.)

Have I mentioned that I am not very good at fighters of any stripe and some FPS games? I would welcome having a mode that allowed me to play without having to learn complex controller combinations. Some games allow this, others actively discourage it, and some think they've got it, only to find out that their predetermined combinations aren't as good as the ones for the twitchy crowd. Its like modes that allowed people who aren't able to process the frames and figure out the timing on individual frames to compete fairly with those who do.

I want speed control. As well as awesome skill trees that allow everyone to play to their preferred style.

DavidCheatham said...

David, I let this slide the first time you said it, but this is twice now, so no. I am a professional engineer. Meaning I have an actual engineering degree and I work with actual programmers all day long as One Of Them in a highly respected, very professional, and extremely large (and thoroughly HR-ed) company. I am also a woman.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply there wasn't sexism at all. There is plenty of it. In fact, I believe studies still show that women are avoiding the field for that reason. I wasn't trying to compare to other industries, I was trying to compare 'business culture (including IT)' to 'video gamer culture'.

I made a mistake in my post, by failing to explain what 'attitude' I meant doesn't exist in IT. I meant 'the attitude that saying _anything_ is acceptable', which is what you get when no one ever pushes back. (I don't edit, I get mile long posts, I do edit, I edit out the actual thing I'm talking about.)

There is a limit to the amount of possible open misogyny in business. The current limit is much too high, but there is some point where it turns into lawsuits and public relations nightmares, and corporations know that.

The situation described above that happened to Pakozdi is already causing corporations to back away from 'gamer culture'...and some of them were backing away before this.

Corporations do not want to deal with sexism, which means they ignore sexism until it interferes with their bottom line.

But sometimes it _does_ interfere with that. Even in IT. Corporations _have_ fired people over sexism. They _have_ been sued for allowing sexual harassment. They _do_ have policies. None of those are ideal, many of them aren't any good at all, and some of them are just ass-covering, but they exist, and present some sort of limit. Too high a limit, but it is there.

Employees know there's some stuff that they can't say or do. (At least don't say it where women can hear.)

But no video gamer has even been kicked out of video gamer culture for misogyny. The sky's the limit.

Crappy boundaries are crappy, but are a hell of a lot better than literally no boundaries at all. If unchecked, bigotry expands to fill all available space, and turns the place into a world where it's acceptable to ask women to take off their shirts, on camera. (I won't say that will _always_ get people fired, but it's not something I'd bet against.)

DavidCheatham said...

I await on tenterhooks the explanation that Microsoft isn't representative of the "computer programming in general" community.

And is the idea that the Linux kernel development isn't representative of the "computer programming in general" community? Because they didn't approve.(1)

And _Microsoft_ is the entity that, in this case, apologized because a programmer of theirs had put something sexist in code that had their name on it. 'Microsoft' didn't write the code. Microsoft ends up with the copyrights on the code, but each patch is just one guy writing it. And no one at MS besides him 'approved' this, because MS does not approve Linux kernel patches before they are sent out. (Unless they're radically changed how that works. Last I heard, each patch was basically written and sent out by an individual employee.)

I don't understand how my statement 'The industry does not in general approve of sexist terminology' is countered by an example of someone using sexist terminology and people in the industry disapproving of it and the party whose name was on it (But probably had no knowledge of it beyond the one employee.) issuing an apology.

1) Meanwhile, and I know you were being sarcastic and this doesn't actually matter, but Microsoft's relationship with the Linux kernel _isn't_ representative of computer programming in general, and is rather contradictory. In the past, one hand of MS has attempted to strangle Linux at the exact same time the other hand was writing code for it. Linux was, for a bit, MS's mortal enemy, and I remember the shock and confusion when kernel patches from emails addresses @microsoft.com first started showing up during that! (If this hadn't so clearly had MS's name on it, and had happened 10 years ago, the first thought in people's mind would be 'MS is trying to sabotage us!'.)

Ana Mardoll said...

David, you are goalpost moving *again* and frankly it's getting old. This is not a debate team for you to go back and explain that, no really, you meant X when you said Y. Retreating to a more defensible position and insisting that you meant that all along is exceedingly poor form.

You said that sexist ATTITUDES have been rooted out of professional technical industries. That is blatantly false BECAUSE I, A WOMAN, SAY SO. Your opinion as a male? DOES NOT FUCKING COUNT. At all. Period. That was the whole point of the post. And now that I've pointed that out, you are arguing with me, which would be the definition of "digging deeper". You're trying to justify what you said by saying that (a) in some places, HR has made it harder to openly display such attitudes and (b) Microsoft doesn't count because Linux. This later point is particularly facepalmy because -- as you noted -- it doesn't take a majority of bad attitudes. You're basically arguing against yourself at this point, in order to argue that you can't possibly be wrong.

I'm tired and fed up with you making sweeping statements and then when being called on it saying, "No, that's not what I meant, here is my more easily defensible position, *retreat* *retreat*, and therefore I am still right and you are still wrong". Please learn to either say "gosh, my bad" or -- better yet -- stop making sweeping statements about things you legitimately Do Not Know About.

It's not like anyone even asked, that I can see, "What does a Man think about Sexist Attitudes in the Programming Disciplines!?" so I'm not even sure why you felt compelled to tell us. And, for fuck's sake, I -- A WOMAN -- am telling you that Microsoft's behavior TOWARDS WOMEN (not male Linux users because THIS IS STILL A CONVERSATION ABOUT WOMEN, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WOULD LIKE IT NOT TO BE) *IS* representative of the programming community. I know because I AM A PART OF THAT COMMUNITY AND I AM A WOMAN.

And you are arguing with me.

You are arguing with a woman engineer about her experiences with sexism in her community.

Stellar. Thank you for telling me how men treat me in my world and my job day after day for years on end. I APPRECIATE YOUR INSIGHT INTO MY LIFE.

Here is a spoon. Please stop arguing with me and move on out of this thread before I close it or ban you or both. I'm tired of childish debate team tactics and goalpost moving and argument revisionism.

Dav said...

David, I left my C.S. major because, in part, of ongoing persistent harassment. Sure, sure, that was awhile ago. It was university and not a company. But I feel much safer as a woman gamer than I did as a future professional programmer. In other words: the discrimination may look different and take different forms, but that doesn't mean it's less extensive or troubling. More to the point, it's not something you can easily judge as someone who hasn't experienced it. For obvious reasons, companies *are* interested in cutting back on some of the more overt instances of sexual harassment. Obviously, I can't speak to the current environment at for women programmers. But I can comment on the hostility of men who were being trained to enter the field just a handful of years ago, and I'd bet every last cent I have that they carried those feelings with them into the workplace.

Also, "computer programming" and "gaming culture" overlap a LOT. There are a lot of computer programmers who go home and game, and a lot of computer programmers who write games.

JonathanPelikan said...

If it's like the original Borderlands, there is no friendly fire, to my knowledge. Although the soldier class in the last one could fire healing bullets to help you. That was lots of fun to try and headcanon.
"Ooh, your gun shoots medicine... it's intimidatin'."

Also, wondering when the Soldier realized he could do this.

"Okay, guys, look. I have an idea. You're going to have to trust me on this."

Ana Mardoll said...

TW: Harassment Stories

David, I left my C.S. major because, in part, of ongoing persistent harassment. Sure, sure, that was awhile ago. It was university and not a company.

*sigh* I just spent two years in a group of 40+ engineers. A group where management actively and deliberately ran off 4 out of 5 women (and 5 women in 40 engineers was a small number for our company to start with, and this had been going on long before I came into the group -- at least a decade), and there was nothing any of us could do about it. Plausible deniability and all that. And out of 35+ male engineers there, most of whom were on close, friendly speaking terms with me, only one of them even *noticed* this enough to say something to me. And he most definitely doesn't fit the SWD demographic. I have SO many stories about that place, that I wouldn't know where to begin. It's a stroke of luck that one of my women friends managed to get me out; I was having stress rashes over it.

The group I was in after that, I worked for a man who used to openly tell the entire floor how "lazy" and "stupid" my black female coworker was. (She was neither, and her hair was literally falling out from the stress of dealing with this guy.) When I complained about his hostile environment, I was literally told my management to find a different job. When my Husband (who was not my husband at the time) deliberately created a paper trail in a performance review about the behavior, management called him in for a Talking To. That posting, I had heart palpitations and literal nightmares about going to work.

And, again, this is a HUGE company, a very big slice of the programming company pie. So ... yeah.

In anyone is genuinely curious about the differences between an unmoderated culture (gaming) and a moderated culture (professions), it's REALLY complicated. Unmoderated cultures at least tend to allow (a) dreadful asshole to show their stripes immediately, allowing women to avoid them, and (b) women usually have the fludity to create their own groups. (See safe space MMO guilds, and the like.)

Moderated cultures tend to push the sexism below the surface, which SOUNDS GREAT until you realize that women still experience it CONSTANTLY and because it's not as overt, everyone insists that it's not a problem. And too many men think that HR makes things better, when I've ONLY ever seen HR and management make things worse, either because they're genuinely part of the problem or because of the "bad media is bad policy" silencing tactics that so effectively shields SWDs from any consequences to their actions, no matter how bad and blatant they may be. And in moderated communities, it's usually very VERY hard for women to band together to protect themselves.

EdinburghEye said...

HR absolutely makes it worse.

The HR department's remit is to make sure the company is all right. They take their instructions from senior management.

If the employee doing the sexist harassment is regarded as more important to the company than the woman (or women) complaining about the employee, and it is unlikely to be HR who make the decisions about who is more important, then the women are going to be found ways out of the company. The main difference HR's involvement makes is that HR make it unlikely that a senior manager will act unlawfully to get rid of an inconvenient employee - which means the employee so targeted will have less means of getting compensation if they're kicked out for complaining about sexist behaviour.

Am I speaking from personal experience as a woman working as a professional tech and with male professional techies? Of course I am.

(Being in a union makes a difference, if you have a good union rep, because a good union rep is looking out for you, not for the company.)

Ana Mardoll said...

That has been my experience too, that HR is really about discriminating against women in LEGAL ways. Which, yay. *eyeroll*

Really, this whole derail is particularly rage-larious because the people quoted in the OP *are* techies. Borderlands isn't being produced by a couple of bedroom programmers slash avid gamers. We're talking about a lead designer and the company president of a major software company.

SO, YES, PARDON ME FOR BEING SKEPTICAL OF THE IDEA THAT "TECHIES" AREN'T SEXIST. LOL LOL LOL.

Will Wildman said...

(Except not actual plays, just scripts, which are no more 'plays' than typewriters are 'books'.)

This is excellent.

Smilodon said...

In terms of "adventure games", I am STILL trying to beat Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Text-Based Adventure Game. Every couple of years I take a crack at it again. (It's offered free on the BBC website, if anyone else wants to try.) I keep getting stuck on the Heart of Gold, and I refuse to cheat to figure out how to advance the plot.

I agree that video games are approaching a point where they have compelling stories, although I'd argue that there are very few that are as good as good literature or plays. Likely it's just a problem of quantity - it's relatively easy and cheap to produce a book, and has been done for thousands of years, but it's only recently that we've started producing video games, and they require expensive teams of people to build.

I like the story-telling aspects of video games, and I like problem solving. I just don't have a lot of manual dexterity, and I get enough of the "repeat task over and over with hope of reward" at work. The main difference with Mass Effect that made me start playing was that I was so compelled by the story, (I was convinced to play by Boy saying "No, I will not replay the game so you can watch the scenes you missed) and I felt like labelling it "Narrative Mode" instead of "Easy Mode" was their way of saying "This is an equally valid way to experience the game."

depizan said...

Even where I work, HR should be renamed to "Ass Covering." At least it would be honest.

Will Wildman said...

"Okay, guys, look. I have an idea. You're going to have to trust me on this."

The same is true of the Trooper in The Old Republic, which I had somehow not considered up to this point in terms of how people would feel about it or how malfunctions might go. Has a platoon ever been at the end of its last stand and then had enemy troops ambush them over the west hill and accidentally restore them to perfect health because the enemy cannons were set to paramedic mode?

Will Wildman said...

The 'like' button seems like the wrong way to indicate my appreciation for stories like these - I work in a majority-female industry, in a company that's 50/50 right up through the top management, and most of our client companies have majority-female staff as well. It's easy for me to lose perspective without people who speak out about what it's like in other professions and other companies.

Ana Mardoll said...

Thank you. It's not something that is always safe to share online; I'm already considering taking some of it down because too many people in Real Life follow my blog, and I'm not sure it's worth losing my job over making a point. So I think I will scrub it now, but thank you.

Ana Mardoll said...

Good post on the OP topic by Cuppycake:

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=9037

EdinburghEye said...

Smilodon: In terms of "adventure games", I am STILL trying to beat Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Text-Based Adventure Game. Every couple of years I take a crack at it again. (It's offered free on the BBC website, if anyone else wants to try.) I keep getting stuck on the Heart of Gold, and I refuse to cheat to figure out how to advance the plot. <./I>

Ooooh.

Oh, another distraction from work and/or blogging, just what I needed!

Thank you.

depizan: Even where I work, HR should be renamed to "Ass Covering." At least it would be honest.

Yeah.

Will Wildman said...

Is this the Hitchhiker's Guide game that Douglas Adams once described as 'user-mendacious'? Because I only know that one by snippet and rumour, but it sounded like it could crush a person's spirit like a rhinoceros on a wicker chair.

Dav said...

Yeah, it's not fair, even by the standards of the era (which were mean). Super, incredibly unfair.

Launcifer said...

@ Will Wildman: Yeah, if it's the one the BBC had on its website a few years back. Amongst many other NintendoHard tricks, It uses a fourth (?) version of the story that's deliberately close enough to one of the others to sucker you into making the wrong moves, which either result in a game over or else make the game unwinnable (there's a limit on the number of "moves", I think). I tried it a couple of times, realised what was going on and wandered off, never to return.

Generally, eugh. Now those wanted posters in one of the Borderlands downloadables make so much sense. Still, at least I can safely scrub Gearbox from my mental list of developers whose games I'll buy.

Smilodon said...

Yep, it's the same one. A few of the scenes are move-limited, although most of them aren't. It's hard, but often in a snarky kind of way that I find amusing.

SPOILER:
For example, iirc, in one of the scenes where you're stuck in the dark, the correct answer is "Turn on the light".

Launcifer said...

Yeah, that one's right at the beginning, IIRC. I remember spending or ever physically trying to move around and look for the light switch. Boy was that ever fun :P.

Dragoness Eclectic said...

And this is the reason I very rarely admit my gender inside online games. I also don't use voice communications with people I don't know. Fortunately, in classic MMORPGs, the gender of your toon isn't a giveaway, because I play guys and girls both, and a lot of guys play girls because of 3rd-person chase-camera perspective leads to "If I have to look at my character's ass all the time, let it be an ass I enjoy looking at". Though there was always one moron on the forums who insisted that people who play opposite-gendered characters on the RP server shouldn't be allowed to, because one couldn't possibly get into the head of the opposite gender and roleplay it... unless your own gender orientation was suspect. The usual response was "Someone tried to cyber a girl that was really a guy for the zillionth time? QQ more."

I always considered myself a "casual gamer", but I was a "casual" in a hardcore, low-griefage PVP MMORPG who eventually participated in all the major raids, so maybe not so much. It's been my experience that the PVPers, especially in open PVP where trash-talking is allowed, are the worst of the foul-mouthed, sexist, whiny little brats in onlne games. I chalk it up to them being mostly young teenage boys trying to prove they have testosterone, but, sadly, there's adults that behave like that, too. I guarantee you that the most obnoxious ones are also the ones that whine the most when they lose, and their screw-ups are always someone else's fault, according to them.

Inquisitive Raven said...

There's something really non-obvious that you need to do before the Vogons show up if you want to finish with the Heart of Gold. Since you don't want to cheat, I'll leave it at that.

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