Before I attended the first week DMS 448 I thought the course would focus more on the history of games as my naïve self never really saw games as something with a huge cultural significance. Games have always been a past time for me, a way to just pass time. It has been almost two weeks now and boy was I wrong. Since the beginning of the first class, I quickly realized my initial thoughts were totally wrong as I learned more about the cultural impact and straight discrimination in the video game industry and culture as a whole. We analyzed passages from Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex”, the events gamergate, and what happened to both Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

Although Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” has little to do with gaming culture in general, the message in the passage explain many of the issues that arise in the gaming industry. According to Lorde, society has sort of created a “mythical norm” usually described as a “white thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” (116). After looking into my past gaming history, I have found that many of my games followed this mythical norm where the hero is usually someone who fits that exact description. One example of such a game is Fire Emblem: The Blazing Sword where the story follows three main characters. Although one of the main character’s, Lynn, is a female and doesn’t follow the mythical norm, her story is quickly overshadowed by the other two characters, Hector and Eliwood who are the exact definitions of the mythical norm.

This type of discrimination against women are also seen in other popular game series such as The Legend of Zelda series as well as the Super Mario series. What both of these games have in common are a male hero saving a damsel in distress. This common trope has become ingrained in game culture as well as the gaming industry. Anita Sarkeesian was one of the few women who spoke out against sexism in the gaming industry on her YouTube channel Feminist Frequency. However, it wasn’t well received or respected as she faced a ton of backlash, rape threats, sexual assault, and doxing.  Unfortunately, other women have faced similar backlash for speaking out against sexism in the gaming industry such as Zoe Quinn.

Zoe Quinn was a game developer who was caught up in an internet controversy called Gamergate. In her book Crash Override Zoe she details her story and the events of gamergate. Her story begins when her ex-boyfriend posted on an online blog about how Zoe was sleeping with game reviewers to get good ratings for her game Depression Quest. These rumors quickly turned into a virulent harassment campaign against Zoe. Many people threatened her as well as her family. There was one paragraph that Zoe wrote in her book that spoke to me and it was:

“You might have heard stories about the darker side of the internet— hackers, hordes of anonymous people attacking an unlucky target, private nude photos made public by vengeful exes—but to you they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. You’re not famous. You don’t go around picking fights with anyone online. Who would even think to mess with you?” (8)

I was honestly extremely surprised about many of the events of gamergate. In fact, I’m still confused why it turned into such a huge hate campaign since it was, as Zoe put it, “just a breakup between two nerds” (11). However, the stories of both Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn show the sexism in the gaming industry where women are seen as a group that doesn’t belong. It was inspiring to see how despite the amount of backlash and harassment they received, they stood strong and continued to fight not only for themselves but others who looked up to them. They’ve already made a huge impact in the gaming and online world with the creation of the Zoe Quinn’s Crash Override Network as well as the continuation of Anita Sarkeesian’s project: Tropes V.S Women. For the rest of this semester, I will definitely need to reassess my thoughts and past belief of games but for now, I’ll end off on an inspirational quote by Zoe herself:

“…although what was done to me was heinous, those responsible for obliterating my old life have overlooked one important thing: I’m better at games than they are.”

(Quinn 13)