This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from the continued attacks against feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian to Kotaku's decision to block support of independent developers through Patreon. Hey there, everyone. Before we start today, a bit of signal-boosting: Digital Love Child is putting together an ebook collection on gun games and has put out a call for submissions, deadline sometime mid-September. Also, the new videogame StoryBundle is out, containing books by Anna Anthropy and Zoya Street as well as the first six issues of Five Out of Ten magazine. You should get it. Now that that's out there, let's bring it in close and get comfortable today. I have a long one for you and you might need to take a few breaks. I don't often dedicate This Week in Videogame Blogging to a single topic, but in this case it was more or less unavoidable. There were a few articles on other subjects, but they would be drowned out by the conversation which follows below, so I've bookmarked them for next week. Don't worry, nothing's been lost. I also want to note that this edition of the roundup has a general content warning for at least the following: sexual harassment, stalking, rape threats, death threats, and misogynist slurs, with a liberal peppering of ableist slurs thrown in for good measure. Please use your discretion when proceeding. Additional article-specific content warning markers will be noted after relevant links. Tropes vs Anita Sarkeesian If you haven't seen it yet, Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women in Videogames series has released the second in its two-part episode on "women as background decoration." (Additional content warning: graphic sexual violence.) The release of Sarkeesian's video, amidst the ongoing tensions and attacks on women in the industry, has led to Sarkeesian receiving credible death threats on her and her family, forcing her to leave her home. It's also led to quite a bit of discussion elsewhere, mainly on the subject of the sustained harassment against her. At The New Statesman, Ian Steadman takes a couple cues from Sarkeesian's own videos to provide an excellent breakdown in the logical fallacies used to "debunk" and derail the criticisms present in the video series. While not referencing Sarkeesian specifically, this post by former GameSpot critic Carolyn Petit does a good job at countering the argument that games are beyond cultural criticism:
Games are not politically neutral. Neither are mainstream romantic comedies, or action films, or any novel I've ever read. They may sometimes appear politically neutral if the values they reinforce mesh with the value systems of the larger culture, but our culture is not politically neutral, either, and it is not outside of the role of a critic to comment on or raise questions about the political meanings embedded in the works one evaluates. In fact, it is often impossible to review something apolitically, because to not comment on or challenge the political meanings in a work in your review is to give them your tacit endorsement.
At Not Your Mama's Gamer, Jennifer Justice suggests that for a lot of the kneejerk negativity directed at feminist games criticism, something more fundamental is at play:
A lot of the fear I see about feminism comes from the idea that giving in to feminists means giving in to censorship. For some, that fear takes its shape in nonsensical arguments about threats to masculinity or stealing of power from one group to another [...] Those who fear censorship could read my posts as an argument to "clean up" narratives... to remove sources of conflict in order to avoid disturbing female gamers who play these games. But I believe women are made of tougher stuff than that, and most of us want a good story as much as the next gamer. It's not that I want games to be without conflict or to always end with some moralistic theme. I just want more stories.
At The Verge, Adi Robertson also expounds on this theme, in particular the assertion that depictions of women in games can be defended as "realistic":
"Why is it video games need to be politically and societally (sic) correct? The whole point of video games is to escape reality and have fun." If that's the goal, games like Watch Dogs are failing horribly. You know what's not escapism? Having to wonder if any given game (or movie, or book) you pick up is going to include women primarily as prostitutes, murdered girlfriends, vulnerable daughters, and rape victims. [...] Oddly, when someone raises these issues, the people who have been stridently defending their games as "just games" switch to explaining why having women in other roles is unrealistic. A gritty, stylized world built on the corpses of women is defended as a way for gamers to escape from reality, but if someone points out that it makes them uncomfortable, they're told that they're supposed to be uncomfortable.
XO Jane's Lesley Kinzel adds that the attacks only drive home how relevant Sarkeesian's criticisms are:
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