#how masculinity is perceived (perpetuated? received? presented?) in video games

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The Dickwolves Controversy: Everything you need to know and why it’s important

Let me first start by saying that I was not initially offended by the original Dickwolves comic. The comic strip created by Penny Arcade’s, Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, titled The Sixth Slave did not trigger any feelings of victimization for me, nor did I initially think someone could be hurt by this comic if it exists in a vacuum. The problem lies in that fact that Penny Arcade and their comic strip do not exist in a vacuum.  Their media is visited by over 3.5 million people per day and is absorbed by a society that does not treat rape as seriously as it ought too. Krahulik and Holkins media is constantly digested by a culture rife with jokes about rape which normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape, thus perpetuate a rape culture. The goal of this paper is to catalogue the events of the Dickwolves controversy, in order to discuss why the comic itself is not the problem. Rather, the problem lies in the hyper-gendered atmosphere of hegemonic masculinity that permeates the digital gaming world in which the comic exists.

Before proceeding with the Dickwolves cases, which Anastasia Salter contends, "highlights how the hyper masculine discourse encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community," let me first present a definition of hegemonic masculinity that I believe encompasses all media:

Hegemonic masculinity is about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social groups in that process. In this sense, it is importantly about the ways in which the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of this process. Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear ‘natural,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘normal.’ The state, through punishment for non-conformity, is crucially involved in this negotiation and enforcement (Donaldson, 645).

The world of digital gaming substantiates hegemonic masculinity through patterns of exclusion toward women, who are continually presented with background roles to support or deter the ultimate completion of a man's heroic quest. While the public identity of gaming originally stemmed from an outsider group mentality, "their in-group dynamics have expanded upon women-hostile concepts of masculinity within the larger social sphere. This discourse, as amplified across social networks and in public online spaces, allows for extreme and virulent lashing out against those who are perceived as others, most notably women"(Salter, 402).  When a prominent female blogger spoke up to say she found a comic strip poking fun at a commonly used gameplay mechanic which made a rape joke to be hurtful, an extreme and virulent lashing out is exactly what she received.

On August 11, 2010, the webcomic and blogging website, Penny Arcade published a comic which features a (white, male) slave begging to be rescued by another character. The slave pleads, "Hero! Please take me with you! Release me from this hell unending! Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves!" The hero then reports to the slave, "I only need to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete." The prisoner objects, "But…." Only to have the hero interrupt him to say, "Hey, pal. Don’t make this weird."

The comic which takes place in a setting that resembles World of Warcraft, drawn by Krahulik and written by Holkins was uploaded, according to Penny Arcade, to comment on the silly conundrum in games like WoW in which you often receive quests to, "kill ten of these bad people" or "save five prisoners." Because the game has millions of players, these quests are effectively undone as soon as you complete one so that other players can do their good deeds too. Additionally, the absurdity of only meeting the quota outlined by the quest does not lend itself to reality. The comic was an effort to, “point out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation" (Gabe, 2013).

Immediately people began to express displeasure with the joke. The most prominent response, written by Shaker Milli A. on Shakerville, the progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, and social justice, cites a myriad of reasons the comic was inappropriate and insensitive. Specifically, Shaker called out Penny Arcade for not providing a warning they were making a joke about rape. Without any warning rape survivors who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder- and who might not necessarily feel like seeing a rape joke mixed in with their usual dose of video-game satire run the risk of being triggered (Myers, 2011). Additional problems that Shaker brings up from the comic include: 1) Rape is not part of the game, so for the slave to explicitly state that he is being raped is meant as a "humorous" exaggeration. 2) A slave being raped is a real thing that happens every day, and is not a humorous subject to joke about. 3)Because rape survivors exist among us, and after being victimized by rapists, they are revictimized by a society that treats even real rape like a joke. They are forced to live in a culture where rape victims are often doubted, mocked, and insulted openly not just in satire (Shaker, 2010).

Shaker further condones the comic because rape jokes can trigger some survivors of sexual violence. Additionally, clarifying that being triggered "does not mean "being upset" or "being offended" or "being angry," or any other euphemism people who roll their eyes long-sufferingly in the direction of trigger warnings tend to imagine it to mean. Being triggered has a very specific meaning that relates to evoking a physical and/or emotional response to a survived trauma" (Shaker, 2010).  Being triggered may forced someone to experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack. Moreover, jokes that normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape, only prove to perpetuate rape culture.

Remarkably, rather than apologize or ignore the blogs post and hand full of offended emails, the authors of the comic with the released a new comic that “reframed the argument (of the critiques), suggesting that the only possible protest to the joke was the idea that it encouraged rape, rather than any underlying message of sexual violence or hostility” (Salter, 406).

The response comic released on August 13, 2010 , featured a bemused-looking Tycho addressing the audience directly announcing that if, "It's possible you read our cartoon, and became a rapist as a direct result. If you're raping someone right now, stop. Apologize. And leave. Go, and rape no more" (Krahulik and Holkins, 2010).

The sarcastic follow-up comic attempts to use the fundamental tools of rape apologia ("you're just humorless; you're oversensitive; you just don't get it") to argue they are not a rape apologist (McEwan, 2010). In a world where the primary means in which rape is normalized is humor, I can not make sense of why Krahulik and Holkins responded in this way.

On the same day of the response comics release, Melissa McEwan added to the Shakerville blog with a post titled, Survivors are So Sensitive. In this post she outlines the strategies that defenders of rape jokes typically employ: 1.) Misrepresenting critics' primary objection as the assertion that rape jokes "create" rapists and/or "cause" rape. 2.) Summarily treating that idea as absurd. 3.) Concluding that critics are thus hypersensitive reactionaries with no legitimate critique. Her outline essentially summarizes the Penny Arcade response, but then goes further to explain why these defense strategies are ludicrous. Starting with misrepresentation of critique as, "your rape joke will directly cause someone to go out and commit a rape." McEwan proclaim that the idea is absurd, which is exactly why it's so appealing to defenders of rape jokes to deliberately misrepresent critics' arguments in such a fashion. Furthermore, "the rape culture is a collection of narratives and beliefs that service the existence of endemic sexual violence in myriad ways, from overt exhortations to commit sexual violence to subtle discouragements against prosecution and conviction for crimes of sexual violence. The rape joke, by virtue of its ubiquity, prominently serves as a tool of normalization and diminishment"(McEwan, 2010). What's more, the comic is making an explicitly hostile mockery of the readers’ right to be offended, which thus fails to foster any legitimate forum for discussion.

The duo continued to create controversy through October 2010, when Krahulik cavalierly drew a dickwolf (a wolf with veiny penises where its legs and tail should be) during their "Make-A-Strip" panel appearance at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Even so, what finally drove Krahulik and Holkin's PAX away from its perception as safe space for everyone, was creation and sale of Team DickWolf T-shirts on their online store. The shirts, which were designed to look like sports fans attire with the words “Penny Expo” and “Dickwolves” flanked across a growling blue wolf’s head, only served to "reinforce the hyper masculine associations of the Dickwolves by adopting a signifier of athletic masculinity"(Salter, 2015). Additionally, considering that the Dickwolves were introduced to society as rapists, the shirts implicitly suggest a team-spirit endorsement of rape as a joke, if not as an outright action (Salter, 2015).

Courtney Stanton, a project manager for Boston-based game developer DINO Interactive, a rape survivor, feminist, and advocate for marginalized groups in the game industry, critiqued the Dickwolves shirt, citing specifically that "the idea of being in a room full of mostly men, where some of those men are wearing it, feels like a threat against me. Penny Arcade has gone out of its way to make sure that the floor of PAX East is no longer a safe space for me"(Myers, 2011). Stanton suggesting that the intention of the shirts was in part to create an atmosphere of hostility at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo declared she would be boycotting PAX East where she had been asked to speak on a panel. Just two days after Stanton's critique the T-shirts were removed from the Penny Arcade store.  Unforeseeably, after the shirts disappeared from the Penny Arcade store Stanton's post went viral and within a few days had hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of hits.

Stanton and other rape survivors were then viciously harassed repeatedly on Twitter, blogs, and forums all over the internet for their role in taking down the t-shirts. Dickwolves advocates created Twitter handles like "@teamrape, @DickWolvington, and @rapefatchicks (that last one using Krahulik's dickwolf drawing from PAX Prime as an icon), and used these accounts to post pictures of mutilated women, to demand that Stanton provide "proof" that she had been raped, and to track down a police station near her house to report her rape for her"(Myers, 2011). These fans of Dickwolves stated that their reason for wanting to wear the t-shirts was the right of free speech. In an interview, Stanton commented on the harassment noting, "it stopped being people who would have read my blog anyway and disagreed with me. It became people who thought that I should be dismembered and all of my limbs should be raped. Which was, literally, a suggestion that I got. And that's where I think the reasonable debate kind of took a dip"(Myers, 2011).

While many members of the community stood fortified behind the cartoonists, doubling down on the idea that they were not specifically trying to alienate women audiences, yet should have the right to make rape jokes, many indeed harassed those who voiced Penny Arcade critiques (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). All the while, Krahulik and Holkins remained silent.

The furthered hostile othering of Stanton and similar female activists in the male-dominated space of gaming was only finally alluded too by Krahulik and Holkins when an unfunny threat on his family convinced him to call out his alleged supporters for their behavior. A tweet comprised on Feb 2, 2011, by Twitter user, @ghostpostin, "A Funney Joke: Go to Mike Krahulik / @cwgabriel's house, Literally Murder His Wife and Child #jokes #funny #murderwolves."

Although, Stanton and similar users had been enduring far worse for months, the tweet finally caused the duo to break their long silence. In a post titled "Okay that's enough," Krahulik wrote:

We have people on both sides of this ridiculous argument making death threats and worse. Kara was certainly upset to see someone mention on Twitter last night that it would be funny to come to my house and murder my wife and children. I know there are people who see themselves as being on our side that have made equally disgusting comments in the other direction. I want to make it very clear that I do not approve of this kind of bullshit (Myers, 2011).

On that same day, Holkins wrote in a long post titled "On the matter of Dickwolves:"

If I haven’t been seen to discuss The Matter Of Dickwolves, this is the reason why.  I’m not entirely certain that a conversation is possible.  This isn’t mere cynicism - this is a fully rational assessment of the situation.  The perspectives in play, the lenses, are too different: one side believes that not according the issue of rape the proper respect fuels a kind of perverse, perpetual engine called rape culture.  There is a vast, specific lexicon and hundreds of tacit assumptions that gird it.  The other side (that’s me, but not just me) believes that when it comes to expression nothing is off the table.  It is the creator’s prerogative to create something - even something grotesque - out of anything they can find. The fact of the matter is that the strip that started all this is about how empty, amoral, and borderline vile electronic heroism actually is.  When I look at it now, it’s hard to imagine the chaos this comic stands at the center of….As I said, so much of this happened because I assumed that a genuine dialogue was impossible.  Maybe I was wrong.  It’s certainly happened before. But I am who I am, in the end; the comics I make are the result of my damage.  I can’t put it any more succinctly than that (Holkins, 2011).

The mistake I think, Holkins and Krahulik, made was that they did not provide any warning that the contents of their comic strip involved a commentary involving rape. Additionally, they were extremely insensitive to rape victims in their response comic, by essentially telling the victims the only plausible justification they could have for getting mad, is that the comic encourages rape, which of course it does not. What the comic and its response does facilitate, however, is a culture where rape is humored, effectively normalizing rape and minimizing it severity.

More specifically, Holkins and Krahulik erred when they failed to exposed/acknowledge the public dialogue created by the Dickwolves supporters. The Dickwolves supporters diminished the role of women within the discussion, by focusing more upon silencing and undermining their objections than actually addressing them. Women who spoke out against Holkins and Krahulik were belittled, verbally assaulted, and harassed from many areas within the gaming public. From the explicit creation of the T-shirt to oppose female voices, who felt threated by it connotations, to the reduction or removal of PAX and other public forums as a safe space for women to participate in public discussions around gaming. Dickwolves supports deliberately continued to reframe the discussion to avoid common ground, so that women, or feminine supporters, were made to feel ostracized and unwelcome within the bounds of spaces owned by dominant public, males. Any perceived transgressions to change the hyper masculine identity of Penny Arcade and its dominance of the space were met with hostility, from death threats to images of mutilated women in an effort to move feminists away from their space.

The rage we see expressed by the threatened individuals and groups seems to be based on at least two factors: sexism (as well as racist, homophobic and ageist) beliefs about the abilities of female players, and fears about the changing nature of the game industry. For the sexist threatened individuals, we need more documentation of the extent of those activities and analysis of what responses or actions tend to mitigate or eliminate their issues. I would call for more traditional research studies that not only document the prevalence of hate speech, but that seek out and investigate those who engage in such practices, to see how and why they do so.

For those individuals that fear the changing nature of the game industry; such as the growth of casual and social games, which are often targeted to women and fear that means that fewer budgets and development teams will be focused on traditional titles and genres such as First Person Shooters and Action games. What is needed here is more in-depth, critical research examining how players understand and utilize: how they make sense of the wider game industry universe, how they conceptualize their choices, and who is controlling those choices.

But you see, any community that is built upon commercial success and shared consumerism cannot afford to alienate members of its general audience. Hardcore gaming identity resists the incursion of casual and female gamers because sexualizing women, harassing, and objectifying them is a form of dominance, and it is a form of dominance that simultaneously shuts women out or makes them less meaningful then men. It isn’t until a greater number of individuals within the hardcore gaming public begin to address their adoption of a hyper masculine discourse that true progress will occur.

This discussion could have been started by Holkins and Krahulik. Because the issue of rape and how it is treated by feminists and non-feminist, to be a feminist issue- would be a great place to start a discourse on the gendering rape issue. Gendering rape inherently confuses the issue and I think Holkins and Krahulik knew this. The rape victim in this comic was intentionally a man, because even Holkins and Krahulik knew that if the slave in the comic was a female, no one would be able to laugh. After all a woman in distress is just meant to be saved, as video games have been teaching us for decades in games like Mario, Legend of Zelda, and so on. The comedy of the comic, however, is rooted in the image of a man in distress, begging to be saved in a world that stems from the kind of anxious, performance-based masculinity that pervades the gaming community as a whole. 

References

Consalvo, M. (2012). Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for Feminist Game Studies Scholars. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. doi:10.7264/N33X84KH

Dill, Karen E., Brian P. Brown, and Michael A. Collins. “Effects of Exposure to Sex-stereotyped Video Game Characters on Tolerance of Sexual Harassment.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44.5 (2008) 1402-1408. EBSCO. Web. 16 Sept. 2015.

Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22.5 (1993): 643–657. Web. 7 Feb. 2013.

“GAMBIT: Hate Speech Project.” GAMBIT: Hate Speech Project. Comparative Media Studies at MIT, 10 Mar. 2011. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.

Hayes, E. TECHTRENDS TECH TRENDS (2005) 49: 23. doi:10.1007/BF02763686

Holkins, Jerry. "On the matter of Dickwolves" Penny Arcade. Web.  3 Feb. 2011. 

Johnson, Lauren. "Women and the Video Gaming Community" THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL OF NORTH HENNEPIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE. Web. Mar. 2016.

Krahulik, Mike. "Some Clarification - Gabe" Penny Arcade. Web.  5 Sept. 2013.

McEwan, Melissa. "Survivors are So Sensitive" Shakesville. Web. 13 Aug. 2010.

Myers, Mady. "Gaming, Rape Culture, and how I stopped reading Penny Arcade" The Phoenix . Web. 7 Mar. 2011.

Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 1 September 2010. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Shaker, Milli A., "Rape is Hilarious, Part 53 in an ongoing series - feminist blog that called them out" Shakesville. Web. 12 Aug.  2010.

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Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital

On May 15, 2012 popular science fiction writer John Scalzi published a post to his blog Whatever entitled Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting That There Is.”

I learned about Scalzi as did many non-fans, through John Schwartz’s admiring New York Times piece published July 6, 2012, which cited two influential and eloquent blog posts he had written that had gone viral: “Being Poor” and “Straight White Male.” (Read “Being Poor.” It will break your heart, as will the hundreds of comments from readers who share their personal narratives of the unique humiliations of poverty. Here’s one: “Being poor is fighting with someone you love because they misplaced a $15 dollar check.”)

As Schwartz writes, Scalzi posts to Whatever almost every day, and the blog gets over 50,000 hits a day. Scalzi covers a huge variety of topics, but these two posts on poverty, race, class, and gender have reached the widest audience and generated the most commentary and controversy because he writes from a position of absolutely unassailable white geek masculinity as a popular science fiction writer. Media fandom has taken on a newfound social currency as an indicator of masculinity in the post-internet age, and producers of sci-fi “canons” such as Scalzi have correspondingly become bigger dogs in the popular culture sphere. Scalzi skillfully deploys the cultural capital he enjoys as a much-admired and widely read science fiction writer as a means to assert a new form of patriarchal power — geek masculinity — and he employs the rhetoric of gaming to solidify his authority with male readers, for whom digital games have become a form of social capital

Scalzi exercises a great deal of thoughtful and expert control over reader participation; he has an elaborate commenting policy, in which he reserves the right to delete or “mallet” posts that he finds offensive, and he has been known to shut down comment threads when they get too long or feel unproductive to him. However, even he expressed surprise at how controversial the “Straight White Male” piece proved to be. He published two follow-ups to the piece responding to the thousands of mostly-angry responses he received specifically from white male readers. In the second of these he wrote that it has “been fun and interesting watching the Intarweebs basically explode over it, especially the subclass of Straight White Males who cannot abide the idea that their lives play out on a fundamentally lower difficulty setting than everyone else’s, and have spun themselves up in tight, angry circles because I dared to suggest that they do.”

The “Straight White Male” piece is short, sweet, and eloquent. It’s easy to see why it went viral. It employs the discourse of video gaming, one assumed to come naturally to “dudes,” Scalzi’s stated intended audience, as a metaphor for explaining how race and gender confer automatic, unasked-for, mechanical advantages on players who are lucky enough to be born white and male. Just like the difficulty level one chooses while playing a game, these advantages gradually become invisible as the player becomes immersed in the game. What does become noticeable are deviations from this norm–when a quest is “too hard” the player may become aware of the difficulty setting that they chose, but otherwise that decision as a decision fades into the background. This is, indeed, how privilege works in “real life.”

The term “game mechanic” doesn’t appear in the piece but it underlies the argument throughout, explaining how points that a player can spend on advantages like “talent,” “wealth,” “charisma,” and “intelligence” are distributed by “the computer,” and that players must “deal with them,” just like they must in real life. This argument makes racism and sexism seem socially neutral, mechanical, structural, and not a personal act of aggression or oppression perpetrated upon one person by another. In short, they are institutional, invisible, “mechanical,” always business, never personal. Indeed, as Scalzi states at the beginning of the piece, his purpose in using gaming as a metaphor for life was to avoid the use of the term “privilege” altogether, since straight white men react badly to it. As he writes, “So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?”

Indeed, Scalzi’s argument is successful because it allows his privileged readers to abstract themselves from the equation and see understand racial and gender privilege not as something that they are “doing,” but rather as a structural benefit that they receive without trying. All gamers understand that the ludic world is above all constructed, in the most literal sense. If a boss or a monster kills you, you cannot take it personally — likewise, if you pick up a rare epic weapon, you cannot really claim credit for having “earned” it since it’s a programmed part of the environment. Scalzi understands above all that his readers cannot tolerate the feeling of being blamed for their privilege. Explaining race and gender as a structural advantage, an aspect of a made environment that was designed to reward some types and punish others, lets white male readers hold themselves blameless for their own advantages.

Many of Scalzi’s critics object that his metaphor isn’t perfect, since some games do let players choose many aspects of their identities, and game mechanics and difficulty settings work differently in different games. Nonetheless, the basic premise — that difficulty settings create a pervasive experience of ease or hardship and affects every aspect of a gamer’s experience, just as do race and gender — certainly help us understand how privilege works in “real life.”

However, the way that this argument works perpetuates the notion that men are automatic members of geek and gamer culture (which many men are not) and that women aren’t. As a man, Scalzi employs the discourse of gaming–leveling, “points,” dump stats–as a technique to appeal, specifically, to straight white men like himself, who “like women.” (And presumably don’t want to see them oppressed; cranky women just aren’t as fun for men to be around!). Heteronormative white masculinity is equated with expert, fan knowledge of gaming mechanics, structures, discourses–what Mia Consalvo has dubbed “gaming capital” in her excellent study of games and cheating. Scalzi employs this language’s value as a system of signification marked as inherently masculine. Gaming discourse becomes a male backchannel.

This technique is very effective because gaming capital is in fact aspirational for many young male players, as much a goal as it is a reality. Masculinity is performed by the display of technical knowledge, and gaming is the most recent iteration of this form of social display. Gaming itself becomes a mark of privilege within symbolic discourse. Even men who have no idea what “dump stats” are hailed by this argument because gaming capital is assumed to be intrinsically masculine. As George Lipsitz, another white male critic of white male privilege, puts it in his writing on the possessive investment in whiteness, the “dump stat” of gaming discourse is difference itself.

In an example of publishing on the lowest difficulty setting, Scalzi’s essay got much more play on the Interwebz than postings on this topic by any female games or science fiction blogger. While digital media and publishing have definitely changed the way that feminist scholars work by giving us more and faster outlets to publish for a public audience, there is no doubt that we are working at the highest difficulty setting. Most of us don’t have 50,000 readers, and are not popular science fiction authors with ties to the television industry: not that most men are either, but some men are, and no women are. Scalzi would be the first person to acknowledge this.

As Scalzi puts it, “the player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.”  Women of color gamers who publicly identify with the culture of gaming find themselves shunned, mocked, and generally treated in ways that are far worse than one could find in almost any other social context. Aisha Tyler, an African American actress who has appeared on television programs like 24, found out what it meant to be perceived as an intruder to “gamer culture.” After she emceed the Ubisoft demo at the Electronic Entertainment Expo more commonly known as E3, the largest and most important gaming industry conference, the backlash against her presence on social media like NeoGAF, YouTube and Twitter started with the terms “annoying fucking bitch” and went on in a similar vein. As Kotaku noted in “Aisha Tyler Rants ‘I’ve Been a Gamer Since Before You Could Read’” The trollery directed at her exemplifies a troubling problem at the core of nerd culture. A hardcore base wants respect and recognition for the merits of whatever they love, be it comics, games or something else. But when someone they perceive as an outsider professes to share this love, the pitchforks come out.

Tyler responded with a beautifully written essay (not a rant!) on her Facebook page. She writes

“I go to E3 each year because I love video games. Because new titles still get me high. Because I still love getting swag. Love wearing my gamer pride on my sleeve. People ask me what console I play. Motherfucker, ALL of them.”

Aisha Tyler’s presence at E3 presenting for Ubisoft constitutes a black, female claim to gaming capital. It is hardcore, to use Scalzi’s term, and immensely threatening. It is abundantly apparent that the more gaming capital becomes identified with white masculinity, the more bitter the battle over its distribution, possession, and circulation will become. As gaming culture becomes more heavily capitalized both economically and symbolically, it becomes both more important for women to gain positions of power as critics, makers, and players, and more likely that it will be denied.

Gaming space is part and parcel of what George Lipsitz calls the “white spatial imaginary,” and the stakes for keeping women and people of color out are the same as they were during redlining, blockbusting, and other techniques to police movement and claims to space in America. As George Lipsitz writes in How Racism Takes Place, “because whiteness rarely speaks its names or admits to its advantages, it requires the construction of devalued and even demonized Blackness to be credible and legitimate. Although the white spatial imaginary originates mainly in appeals to the financial interests of whites rather than to simple fears of otherness, over times it produces a fearful relationship to the specter of Blackness.” (37). Google Books categorizes this book under “Business and Economics.” Word.

Feminist scholars have been at the forefront of giving scholarly legitimation to the existence of virtual community through their ethnographic and theoretical academic writing. T.L. Taylor, Sherry Turkle, Sandy Stone, Lori Kendall, Tom Boellstorff, and Bonnie Nardi have wonderful monographs to this end. Most traditional anthropologists and sociologists were hostile to this idea when these works were published, yet today there is wide agreement that online communities create real affective environments with real economic value. The battle to legitimate online community as an area of study has been won; today we know that online community is real by the sound of keystrokes and game controller buttons as players enter their credit card numbers into their computers or consoles to purchase time in World of Warcraft or Xbox Live. However, though most agree that racism and sexism absolutely permeate game culture and the online and offline communities and narratives that constitute it, few seem to care, and even straight white males like Scalzi who write about it publicly are castigated. (For an antidote to this, Mary Flanagan’s book Critical Play. Seriously).

Though some of his thousands of readers may have violently disagreed with him, Scalzi was read and taken seriously. When a woman of color gamer like Aisha Tyler appears in public to talk about games, she is not taken seriously. She has to defend her credibility as a gamer, something that Scalzi is not asked to do. While commenters argued with his interpretation of how game mechanics worked, nobody claimed that he had never played them, a charge with which Tyler, despite her very public profile as a gamer, had to contend.

It’s one thing to say that women and non-whites are playing “the game of life” in hardcore mode — woman of color feminism has been telling us this for years. (See Grace Hong’s work on the Combahee River Collective in her powerful and rigorous monograph Ruptures of Capital). And even the popular press has taken note of the egregious state of gaming for women and minorities: this August the New York Times published an article entitled “In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real.” I wish that there were both more outrage and more analysis as to the causes, practices, and effects of games in the white spatial imaginary, but I don’t fault the Times. Journalists are good at describing problems more quickly than academics are (though in this case the Times is many years late: even NPR beat them to this story by two years, which is saying something), but they don’t have the luxury of time to devote to deeper and more detailed writing. Journalists are good at bringing public awareness to problems like gaming’s pervasive racism, sexism, and homophobia, but awareness isn’t enough. It’s our job as feminist scholars, teachers, writers, and gamers to document, analyze, and theorize the white patriarchy that is so vigorously resurgent in games while never forgetting who profits here.

—-CITATION—- Nakamura, L. (2012) Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital. Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. doi:10.7264/N37P8W9V