Baron von Chop

October 20, 2014

Anonymous asked: What are your thoughts on "gamergate"? As a female gamer, has your experience been mostly uneventful or have you run into challenges? How would you compare the gamer culture to comics culture? Or do your interests allow you to avoid negative interactions?

royalboiler:

hchomgoblin-deactivated20160610:
Needless to say, as somebody who played games, and was vocal and enthusiastic about games from a really early age (the first game I played was “Parsec” on a borrowed Commodore 64), I’ve run into plenty of challenges. And “challenges” is a nice, vague word, so I’ll be specific and say that growing up as a girl meant encountering misogyny and gender role assumptions as part and parcel of the experience. Since I was a girl who wanted to assimilate into boy’s culture - or failing that share some portion of what boys enjoyed - there was heavy gating, implicit and explicit, on my degree of participation.
One thing that strikes me, looking back, is that I was excluded no matter what. Whether I stayed quiet and lurked in the background, or stepped up and tried to out-boast or out-play everyone else, my options were either to adopt a proper, passive role, or to have no place whatsoever. No amount of expertise would win me access. My achievements were either a lie, or something I’d cheated to obtain. And while most boys didn’t act like this towards me one-on-one, as soon as they joined the pack it was an immediate dissolve into girls vs. them.
Of course, nobody can be blamed at that age. Kids are just doing what they’re taught, and mimicking what’s around them. I had many (many) moments of idiocy and jerkiness, myself. It’s water under the bridge, at this point. But adults are a different matter. Adults can be expected to acknowledge and consider perspectives beyond their own. Adults can be expected to not shut down an argument as soon as it no longer favours or pleases them. Adults can be expected to act graciously - or at least not with harassment and aggression - when disagreement persists. And when all else fails, adults can be expected to not invent a cast of fictional enemies when they feel threatened by something they aren’t even willing to examine closely.
And those are some of my thoughts about “gamergate”.
As far as comics culture goes, I think there are some similarities and some differences. Certainly there’s a similar pressure to maintain the status quo, and not go around tipping over rocks to see what’s underneath.
Marian is the smart one.

It never occurred to me that the “gate” in “GamerGate” can be taken to mean that there is a “gate” to women being allowed into gaming. I know that wasn’t the intention of the people who came up with the word, but I think it does a much better job of describing what’s going on.

7:12pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZarXRr1TfLER8

(Notes: 354)