The Art of Defense through Obliviousness

I’ll confess, I wasn’t born caring about other people as much as I do today. Not to boast, either; I try to be kind when I can but I still sometimes make mistakes, talk over people, and forget to monitor my language in social settings. In high school, though, I was a different person entirely--different name, different gender, and a very different stance on how I should treat other people. Looking back, its shocking how cruel I was to my queer classmates, punching down verbally at the only people I was above in the high school pecking order. Ironic, since less than a year later I’d realize that I was trans and a lesbian, making me queerer than anyone I’d maligned.

I realized how far I'd come when I took History and Culture of Games. Of course, I've never met anyone in GSAS who wasn't already familiar with the pop history of video games--Pong, Mario, and Master Chief. That shared interest misled me into thinking we all thought alike, and that the class would be a relatively uncontroversial tour of computer hardware and more corporate game projects we'd all already heard of.

In the second week of the semester my expectations were seriously challenged. We all went out to the gymnasium instead of our usual room, which was a much shorter walk than the normal trek clear across campus. The exercise took place in one of the upstairs rooms, probably usually used for conferences, but we separated it out into a faux city and modeled the idea of privilege through the medium of craft supplies and masking-tape land allocation, with my own group being at the top of the heap. It was an interesting experience, especially when I learned afterwards that our group was made up of the students the professors saw as social minorities. Being singled out as trans for a good reason was pleasant, only a year after coming out.

What came after was less nice. We broke up to debrief, sitting around in a circle, and I was grouped with a classmate I thought might be a good friend. Here she’ll be called Laura--not her real name. I'd sat next to her in the first class, and seen her working on her drawings of potential game characters and neat landscapes. She seemed friendly enough, interested in the class, and with how few women were in our program I figured it was good to stick together.

We all took our seats, her almost across from me and one or two seats from the TA who was leading us. After an awkward moment of quiet, the TA spoke, "Alright, before we debrief, let's just introduce ourselves and give our preferred pronouns." My stomach turned, and I silently glanced around the group to see if anyone else was nervous. I was far from passing, and all I could hope was that the others would respect my preference when my voice and face failed to communicate my womanhood. We began; the TA said she used she/they pronouns, which was a nice surprise that nobody else would repeat.

Then their eyes fell on me. "Uh, I'm Lucy and I use she/her pronouns," I said, feeling my deep voice grate at the back of my throat. Nobody spoke out, though, and we continued.

When we got to Laura though, she took just the opposite tack I had. She was all confidence as she gave her name, and then: "Well, I don't really do the whole 'pronouns' thing. I'm a girl." She took the air right out of the room, and I waited for someone to respond. Then we moved on, and I kept waiting until I had the chance to complain to a friend over lunch, because nobody else cared enough to engage. That was the first time I realized how differently we saw things--and how the game development community got so backwards in the first place.

It wouldn’t be the last. All throughout that semester, as we learned about the history of games and how they reflected the cultures that produced them, she continued to obstinately go against the grain. Her stance was that we couldn’t judge a developer by their work, but by their intent--certainly, Rockstar had never intended to make Grand Theft Auto mirror racist stereotypes, and Sid Meier hadn’t started coding Civilization to make people love imperialism. I took just as vocal a stance against her, arguing that creating something made you responsible for its societal impacts. We spent a semester at each other’s throats, and I doubt either of us learned much.

What I worry about, though, isn’t her. She’s one person, and one day she’ll probably make the same slow climb toward respecting others that I had to a year before meeting her. The other people in the class concern me more. How many of them stand with me, and the professors? Are tomorrow’s game developers going to be responsible creators, or seek to evade critique behind the veil of their hidden intentions?

Since then, I’ve met many other students in the GSAS program, and most of them are a lot more on the progressive wavelength. I can joke about being trans without anyone taking it too seriously, and when I’m drafted to write a character the question of “how gay can I make them” meets with a resounding “as gay as you can!” from my creative director. At the same time, some developers have disappointed me, presenting pitches and stories that reflect a lack of consideration for social impact, or any real experience with oppression. My heart goes out to any mentally ill people that have to contend with the stereotypes that end up in some of these people’s games.

Things are worse in the larger community. Just this year, the news broke about Ubisoft, one of the largest game developers and publishers in the world, rejecting the idea of a female-lead game without any more reason than the CEO’s whim--the same CEO who took his coworkers to strip clubs when celebrating big successes. Even when they aren’t engaging in actively bad behavior, developers seek to shield themselves from responsibility. Activision, another publisher, claims that their Call of Duty games are “apolitical” despite them containing depictions of terrorism, spying, and war crimes carried out by American troops. Why? They want to sell their shooter games to men and boys--mostly white--who don’t like thinking about any politics but those they agree with.

Somehow, video games can whip those people into a frenzy like nothing else; anyone who tries to critique the politics of games or, even worse, include people from minority groups in their games’ stories is subject to the same scrutiny, dismissal, and vitriol as Laura sent toward the TA that day. It gets much worse than classroom arguments, though. Some games, like Maddy Thorson’s Celeste, have been the target of internet hate for as little as obliquely implying the protagonist may be trans. Game critics like Anita Saarkesian have faced threats of death and sexual violence, and some of these men have built careers around spreading hate for her and her allies. Ironically, Laura didn’t see the situation Saarkesian was in as “that bad” when we discussed it in class.

So, what do we do about people like Laura, whether in game development or game communities? For a start, we can’t ignore them, which seems to be the current standard. Nothing made me feel less like I wanted to be a GSAS student than seeing nobody call out Laura’s transphobia that day, and having few friends when I argued in favor of our teacher and the nascent field of game scholarship in class. Obviously not everyone has to be half as vociferous as me, but it’s much easier to deal with harassment when you’re not dealing with it alone.

I don’t think being argued with would’ve changed how terrible I was as a teenager, at least not right in that moment, but it would’ve prevented others from being harmed as a result of my own closed-mindedness. If nobody’s willing to fight back, the harassment isn’t going to stop until the harassers get what they want--people like me being out of the game industry.