Videogames, Sexism and Idiots

For a while now I wanted to write a little about GamerGate and Feminist Frequency, but I was not inspired and time passed.

However, I have seen some post recently that still talk about it, and I though I should finally write about it even if a lot of time has passed and it is no longer in the news.

So, for those who do not know, in a  summarized version: a while ago Zoë Quinn, a girl that has developed videogames, left her boyfriend. The guy was bitter and made a false claim saying that she had slept with some reporter in exchange for favourable reviews. That's it. That's the whole original story.

Of course, the situation quickly worsened when, all of a sudden, lots of self-proclaimed "Gamers" (usually guys, but I guess maybe some women joined this as well) started to say this was shameful, that she had slept with a guy for a good review showed she was a bad person/slut/etc., that the reporter was immoral, that these practices were immoral, that she should be punished, etc. Things got to the point of death threats to her, and brutal harassment. They stalled calling this "GamerGate", imitating the "Watergate" scandal name format. (People keep calling scandals "somethinggate", as if "Watergate" was referring to some water scandal or "gate" meant scandal, when it is just a hotel name and it is stupid to use "somethingate", but oh well....)

The thing here is that there has been lots of other cases of confirmed corruption in videogame reviews, but nobody made such a fuss about integrity and other topics when it was big publishers and big magazines. So the whole complains were less about integrity and more about the one blamed being a woman,, who did a video game not very mainstream.

Then lots of these "Gamers" started to complain also about how feminist women, progressives and other such groups were trying to change videogames for the worse,  and started to threaten other women related to games development. They also threatened a feminist activist, Anita Sarkeesian, that had started an online video series where she talked about sexism in videogames. The "Gamers" accused Queen, other women and Sarkeesian of trying to ruin videogames and such other things.

Feminist Frequency, the website that Sarkeesian has, explains with examples, videos and interesting facts why games are sexist sometimes, and proposes changes in games stories and game play,  sometimes, to try and change that, while recognising that a game can still be fun to play if it has these issues. Some of the points raised may be questionable or debatable,, and she may be wrong in some aspects, but plenty of times it manages to make valid points and the videos tend to make you think about certain sexism that is given for granted in games. 

People reacted as if she was personally raping each one of their relatives.

The whole thing is ridiculous and shows that a worrisome amount of gamers do not understand games, women, or higher thought processes (I'm amazed they don't suffocate the moment they try to play and breathe at the same time, since clearly their brains cannot handle such complexities). Some people said that the complain was against political correctness, ethics in reporters and other higher goals, but the reality is that most complains were hysterical fits against games not meant for or done by white heterosexual males. 

In Zoë games and Saarkesian videos somehow "Gamers" got threatened by the idea that games could be something else than ultramasculine action games. This also matches the idea of a lot of publishers that, unless the main character is male and white, white males won't relate to them and won't buy the game (even when white males are not, by far, all the people that buy and play such games).

It is funny, but most games that are very masculine, I find them kind of....gay. Nothing wrong with that, but I find it funny that a lot of these "Gamers" would find it offensive if they heard that, for example, Gears of War seems really gay. As an heterosexual male, I don't see the point of controlling a muscled warrior around. It is usually also boring and uninteresting, unless the character has some depth on it, or some funny trait. But by preference I'd rather control other type of characters. For sure I  prefer a female character because I like their appearance, but it is much more than that.

I know how to be a white heterosexual male because I am one, and I do not need games where I control white heterosexual males to feel empathy towards them. Games allow you to play at being someone else, so I'd rather embrace this opportunity by being something else and relating to that.

I'd rather be a teenage girl of unclear sexuality, like in Life is Strange. I'd rather be a murderous female human-alien hybrid with complex motivations, like Kerrigan in Starcraft. I like to play as a female special ops. soldier like in Dino Crisis. I prefer to be represented as a renegade female Sheppard than a goodie-two-shoes male one in Mass Effect (I played both ways and the other one is more interesting). I'd take Claire over Chris Redfield anytime in Resident Evil. I would even argue that Master Chief and Cortana (don't be fooled, plenty of times you play as both in one body) are much more interesting than just Master Chief.

Sure, maybe some of these games are still very sexist in some aspects, but by just putting yourself in the position  of a female, they already do something slightly different than a lot of other games.

Hell, opening the scope to race and species, I'd prefer to be anything apart from the typical, boring, white heterosexual male. I'd rather be a Dark Elf, a Zerg,  an Asari, a Quarian, a Geth Platform, an Orc, part of the Chaos, a Gene Stealer, a Monster, a Zombie, a Dungeon Master....

THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT OF GAMES!

Going on and talking about game play.  I am happy with destruction and slaughter, and some days that's what I want, but I love a good implementation of time control and conversation-based puzzles and stories, or platformers where the simplest game mechanic gets new spins. I love scary games where you cannot kill the thing that follows you,  and games where the puzzle solutions are not evident but still (usually) logical.

And continuing with the story, I love games where the traditional tropes are not used. Games where the damsel does not need rescuing, or games where your actions are not always good and nice, games where you may be the villain, games that question the "you must" approach. Games that punish you for playing. Games that mess with your mind and your feelings.

Games are full of potential, and capable of amazing diversity. And to create such diversity,  we need diverse minds and people changing the shape of games, developing games and analysing games. 

Complaining that women should not complain when they are not represented in them or treated as objects,  complaining that the traditional "rescue the damsel" works fine and doesn't need to change, complaining that some games now are trying to explore game plays that you find boring because you're not killing things while playing, complaining that games should appeal to your sexual tastes, complaining that games can be ruined by increasing diversity and possibilities....it is not just missing the point. 

It is missing it so hard that you shot yourself in the head instead (which could explain your clearly diminished cognitive abilities).

Power and Choice

Nowadays at work I have managed to get into a position a little higher than before. This is normal once you acquire experience. Once you have experience, there's plenty that does not surprise you, and you have more solutions to things, so people ask you more and more and depend more on you than before.

This gives you a certain power. They say power corrupts, and well, there's some truth...it is not that it corrupts so much as that it is fun to use power. For example, knowing a second language is a great power. It allows you to expand your communications and meet new people. So it is fun to have this power. Once you have it, you want to use it.

In the IT world, depending on the complexity of the company, one of the great ways of having power is when you can influence what is being done at several levels. In the end, most IT is based on a guy somewhere doing code, and this guy usually has the ultimate power of screwing the whole thing or making it work fine. Companies should remember to treat this guy VERY well, but they don't always do.

However, apart from this guy, there's usually a big list of other people deciding on what the guy will need to do and how the code will be used. Currently I'm one of these people, and hell, it feels nice....

It feels nice to get the extra attention, to be consulted and considered. Very often in big companies your voice gets lost in the middle of the mess that they are, so it is nice to reach a position where you can be heard, even if just a little.

It is amazing to finally be able to influence monolithic things, and see them change slightly. It feels nice. And I understand that it is easy to get addicted and want more. Not only to influence, but to direct and manage.

However, of course, not all is just fun. As the movie said, power comes with responsibility. You need to use it wisely. And part of having power in a company means that you have power over other people, and choices to make. Power to have to ask someone to come on Saturday. Power to tell off someone if they did a bad job, Power to keep everyone working one extra hour because it is needed. And this part sucks, of course...

We all create a narrative in our lives. We imagine ourselves in our story, and we tell ourselves stories about it. We play parts, we follow patterns that we detect in real life.

Recently, I had a person on my team fired. Not really fired fired, but he did not pass the selection period. He did not do anything wrong. He was not someone who got upset, or complained too much, or someone lazy. He was just...not smart enough.

It would have been easier if he had been a bad person. We had one of those too, in another team, and firing him was not a problem. But this guy in my team was just not good for this job, nothing else. So in any stories, this is the part for the bastard,the bad guy, the boss that fires the innocent worker.

Life is never that simple, but still, it's a shame I had to fire him.

With power should come also a higher awareness of consequences, Anything that I needed this guy to do I would have ended up doing myself, which means I would have had double the work. I was not willing to go through that, so I made my choice.

After all, obtaining power is giving you the possibility for more choices, and some of them are the hard ones....

Life Is Strange

A few weeks ago, while checking a list of recommended games on Steam I came across Life Is Strange.

I watched the trailer, and it seemed to me like a very interesting premise. I researched a little more, and I though the idea was really awesome, so I decided to buy it, and I would recommend anyone to do so too.

In the game, you are a young 18-years old girl studying in some academy in a small town. Because of a confrontation, you discover you can go back in time for a couple of minutes, giving you the ability to change actions and conversation, and to obtain clues and knowledge to use after rewinding time.

This is the basic premise, and then you need to explore this world with the small town and the academy, investigating certain dark occurrences and a disappearance.

From the start, the game gave me a very strong "Twin Peaks" atmosphere. The setting is quite similar, a small town with power plays, secrets and some supernatural occurrences. You can even find a "Fire walk with me" graffiti at some moment, so this similarity is done on purpose. The atmosphere becomes quite mysterious and interesting thanks to that.

At the same time, the calm indie soundtrack makes you feel relaxed and sad, slowing down the pace and making you sometimes to just sit and observe the scenery. You want to read and observer every little detail of each of the places you can visit, to make sure you don't miss a thing. The process is incredibly immersive, and you get easily lost in this world.

The time-travel skill is really useful, and there are several nice puzzles where you need to play with the ability to extract information, or fix an action that caused unexpected effects (like breaking something by accident). Lots of actions show a small butterfly afterwards, indicating to you that the action will have consequences. Most of the time those key actions are based on conversations, about what you decide to tell or do with someone. And there's way too many to easily control them, so plenty of times you set for a certain course and hope for the best.

Of course here a big point is that you know you're in a game, so sometimes some action may seem weird if you would be in real life. Since you're in the narrative of the game, where you are extra aware of being in a story that follows certain tropes, you need to guess if sometimes the game is playing a trope straight with you or is trying to subvert it (or if it is trying to make you think they subverted it when they played it straight actually), so it is quite a fun mental exercise of deciding which action will have the best outcome in such a story, the usual "I know you know I know you know", and trying to guess in which step we need to stop. Hopefully you can always rewind and see the direct outcomes, but the ripples these create are hard to predict.

The game comes in episodes, and last episode (episode 5) has not come out yet and is expected in October. I finished the first 2 episodes and I'm in the middle of the third, delaying it a little bit so I don't need to wait for the 5th one.I don't want to get caught in a cliffhanger or very tense situation, waiting to see the final outcome of everything....

The story turns very serious quite fast and punches you in the gut repeatedly, reminding you that it was your choices the ones that created this situation. It is clearly dramatic, and we still don't know how it will end, but even with time-travelling, the situation you put yourself in is quite complicated and hard to solve....

I will say that it is true that every single thing you do may affect greatly the outcome of the game, and that some plot points that I have seen would not have been possible using other choices. The game itself does not have hard puzzles, but the overall puzzle of making the best choice selection is not an easy one, and it makes you obsess about past actions while considering things very carefully.

I believe it is a very innovative game (even if other games have done the time-travel thing already), also in the aspect of characters used and the story it tells. Not many games really commit to the idea that your choice matters, triggering completely different outcomes based on that and in this way creating not a single story, but the possibility for thousands.

This game was recommended by Feminist Frequency because of its use of female characters, and I was appalled to know some publishers wanted to convert the main character into a boy. The story works perfectly as it is because it is a girl, and I cannot understand how some people, in this day an age, still believe such a game cannot work. However, I want to dedicate another post about these topics, soon...

For the moment, I'll just finish saying that this is an amazing game that will suck you into its world, and you need to give it a try, it is totally worth it.

At Independence's Doors

Again, elections are coming, and again it seems like a nice moment to make a post.

Last elections were to decide government in cities around Spain. In Barcelona and Madrid these went very, very well, and the next mayors of both cities were people from the left, with good ideas and that have been implementing good and reasonable policies since then.

I was not able to vote last time. Living abroad means that you're never fully sure of what you need to do and when do you need to do it. When we arrived to Rio, I registered myself with the Spanish consulate (which is conveniently located 10 minutes away from our house on foot), but I was unsure if I needed to do some paperwork. Since for Barcelona's elections I did not receive anything, I believed I had failed to register to vote.

For this elections I wanted to make sure, and I was told I could inscribe myself during august. However, then I heard inscriptions closed at the end of July. Feeling again left out by the idiotic Spanish system for voters abroad (made on purpose so we don't vote), one day checking the mail I found out I had received the paper to ask for the voter for these elections. So I did my paperwork correctly this time, and now I'm waiting for another letter that I will use to vote. I may not receive it, since the system is in place to increase mistakes and late deliveries, but at least I have a chance.

During Barcelona's elections, I was sure about what to vote. Barcelona en Comu(a coalition that includes Podemos, IcV and other leftist parties), I believed, offered the best chance to finally move things around and produce some important changes to improve politics and make Barcelona a better city. I could not vote, but I'm really proud of the fact that they won enough votes to rule the city...through pacts and negotiations, but that is not something bad, that should be the norm everywhere. If I could vote for them in Barcelona again, I would do so without doubts.

For the current elections I had some doubts for a very long time. Plenty of times I keep getting doubts about independence, since I do believe Spain is currently a political cesspit but I also believe that maybe we should fight to convert it to something else. And I know I would never vote CIU, since they are corrupt to the bone. They may believe in independence, but more likely than not they want to make their own country just to make some new laws for their rich friends. ERC showed too much willingness to pact with CIU for a leftist party, and that worried me. PP and Ciutadans will always be out of the question, those are parties for people who would enjoy to go back to the 1950s with Franco. PSC is lost completely because depends too much from central PSOE, and they are dissolving between the new parties around them, without clear ideas. This basically leaved me with the options of ERC, CUP, IcV and Podemos.

However, several things have happened that have made it really easy for me to decide. First thing is that CIU, which is made of CDC and Unio, separated. Unio is the part more to the right in CIU, so the fact that they are separated now is really good, because it reduces strength in the Catalan right parties. These parties have been ruling for way too long, they have too many "friends" in charge of big companies and there's plenty of cases of corruption and of laws that reduce rights. CIU is the main responsible for budget cuts in education and healthcare. Sure, Spain is not giving funds to Catalunya, but before you cut these two things there's plenty of other points that could be reduced, like government salaries, help to private healthcare and education (The public ones are the ones being cut brutally while help to private companies is mantained),  and plenty of other things. Unio alone will never get my vote either, they are slightly less dictatorial and disgusting than PP and Ciutadans, but just slightly.

Then, CDC convinced ERC and other organizations to join forces in a single party for independence. This allowed CDC to cover their corruption cases and all their problems under the mantle of independence. Even if I support independence, I will never vote for them because they are forgiving CDC some things that are just unforgivable, and need to be remembered.  However, I will not make the mistake that Podemos and IcV did: They joined forces as well (which is fine), but then started attacking the new independence party focusing on the fact that CDC is there. This is way too simplistic, and follows central Spain's idea that independence is something CDC has invented and people have been tricked into believing. This theory ignores centuries of repression and hard work from the Spanish government to eliminate Catalunya's institutions and culture while sucking it dry of money without investing back. This is not something you can just ignore, and simplifying the message is idiotic. Also, while the principles behind Podemos are quite good and I would still vote them in Spanish general elections, their leaders have done some stupid mistakes lately. Sometimes people fail to understand that one person being stupid does not imply that the whole party needs to be dismissed as stupid, and as I said I would vote them also in Barcelona. But in Catalunya's case they don't understand the region, which has positioned me in favour of independence (unilaterally declared).

Therefore, I'm left with CUP. CUP is a party from the left, in favour of more democracy and social policies. They fight corruption. They believe in referendums and consulting people about important issues. They also want Catalunya's independence. And they have understood quite well, by not joining ERC and CDC, that even if independence is the main point of their program, it is not good to achieve it t any cost. They will support it, but they will not be constrained by joining forces with CDC. And if they feel they need to vote against CDC and ERC because these two parties are doing wrong things, I believe they will do so.

And the point is, after the latest issues, if CDC and ERC's coalition, together with CUP, get enough votes to add up to a majority of parliament members in Catalunya, they will declare independence. Just like that.

And then hell will break loose.

And it is about time for that.