This week, we discussed the normalities that have been brought about by the first person shooter, and the roles that female characters have played in video games in the modern era. To begin, the First Person Shooter genre has become somewhat bloated in the past decade as the genre finds new popularity due in part to new releases, such as “Valorant”, and with the battle royale genre creating buzz as well. This genre can be quite diverse in its content and create fun, new worlds to explore, such as with “Overwatch”, “Team Fortress 2”, and the “Borderlands” series, but the most popular of the genre are the gritty and realistic takes, such as “Call of Duty” and “Battlefield”, with developers and advertisements claiming that the games are as close as you can get to real armed combat. However, this rhetoric is somewhat harmful to its own audience, as it paints an unrealistic picture of warfare and somewhat glorifies the armed combat of the military. While the army or navy have never officially endorsed any of these games, they do like to use the idea of  “You like the games so much, why don’t you come live the dream?” in their marketing quite a lot. I know from experience that recruiters will try to use any kind of persuasion that they can to try and get you to sign up, and this massive outlet does nothing but benefit their cause. The popularity of gritty, realistic shooters also reinforces the false and testosterone fueled idea that “women do not belong in combat”. These games have very few female characters, if any, and usually put their female characters into side roles or more passive roles, such as healer. This idea once again reinforces the idea that “women do not belong in gaming environments” and can make the female audience feel isolated in the community. Games such as “Overwatch” break these “realistic” norms by putting female characters in every role, from healer to tank. Another topic that was touched in the discussion of female representation in video games was the topic of oversexualizing characters. During the 80’s and 90’s, women in games were treated more like prizes or goals rather than characters. However, as time progressed, we began to see more female leading roles, such as with the “Metroid” and “Tomb Raider” series of games. Specifically, when we discussed “Super Smash Bros.” we talked about how the members of the community usually stray away from talking about the female characters in a sexual way, but rather simply talk about how they play and how to play the game to the best of their ability. The Smash community is very competitive yet friendly in nature, so it makes since that this banter of females is kept to a minimum. However, if all communities treated their games like this, wouldn’t that be nice?

This week we discussed how harmful rhetorics, such as with the Alt-Right movement, can be spread in gaming communities, as well as what impact user generated content has on video games. While we discussed social justice in video games and its many benefits last week, we explored the opposite side of this discussion this week. Many movements begin on the internet and in video games due to how quickly information and word of mouth can spread, in addition to the amount of impressionable users in virtual worlds on the internet, such as “Fortnite”. A common ground is found in these games, in adoration of the game, and is used to the advantage of people who want to push their beliefs onto others. For example, if a rumor is started that the lead developer of a game hates a mechanic that many players love and is looking to change it, many players would get upset and rally for the game to stay the same. This vulnerability is exploited by those who want to push their own political beliefs, and helps further the agenda of whomever wants to take advantage of impressionable or young players. An example of this is with the satirical presidential candidate, Ace Watkins, who touts himself as “The first gamer president”. While many political candidates scapegoat violent video games as the cause for domestic terrorism, violence in schools, and crime, Ace Watkins joyfully posts on his Twitter about political and gaming issues, such as that healthcare should receive more funding, and that loot boxes “should at least tell you the drop rate before you open them”. While this example is humorous, it shows the potency that a community as large as the gaming community can have on the political climate, as Ace Watkins started to surpass the follower count of actual politicians in mere days after his tweets first began. This issue of video games being politicized ties in loosely to the topic of User Generated content, as some use the creative functions of games such as “Minecraft” or “Fortnite” to push their agendas further in subtle ways, such as by making a large shrine to Ben Shapiro in “Minecraft” or putting “MAGA caps” in “Garry’s Mod”. While these cases are minimal and most are satirical in nature, the free speech and use of self generated content can be used in this context. In most cases, user generated content can range from elaborate and masterful creations, such as the building of world scale replicas of Disney World in “Minecraft”, or the weird and wacky, such as with Pickle Rick character mods in “Grand Theft Auto”. Creative outlets such as extensive editors and modding tools allow for players to send any message they want to other like minded players around the world, whether these messages be lighthearted or loaded with political statements and calls for change. The gaming space has certainly become vastly different with the introduction of online multiplayer and modding, allowing for anyone to spin their own stories and find their own voices in the worlds made by developers.

This week we discussed Social Justice in video games, as well as Feminist and Queer spaces in the gaming industry. This week touched on several topics we have discussed before, such as the feminist and queer movements in gaming, but also discussed the hacking scene, as well as social justice as a whole in the industry. To begin, social justice has become a topic that has been widely shunned by the gaming community. Like I have discussed before, the majority of the gaming community is seen as a “boys club” of sorts, seemingly made up by predominantly white males, and the thought of social justice in video games sickens the extremists of the community.  These thoughts have been reinforced due to many factors, such as marketing strategies of the 90’s, stereotyping of genders and races, antaginization of difference, among other things we as a class have looked at in the past weeks of the semester. However, as the video game industry expands, so does its audience. Finding a happy medium that can appeal to everyone is incredibly difficult when it comes to gameplay, but designing characters and crafting stories can be much more complex. Fighting for social justice through video games can be like walking through a mine field when it comes to the internet. Like I stated before, extremists of the gaming community are incredibly negative in reception when it comes to social justice in “their” video games. For example, when designing the new character “Neeko” for “League of Legends”, the designers at Riot Games decided they would try something a bit different when writing her character. “Neeko” became the first character in the game’s history to be originally written as an LGBTQ character. While other characters, such as “Varus”, were rewritten over the game’s history, changing their origins, “Neeko” was released with the message of acceptance of sexuality. Her in game voice lines allude to this part of her character, but never explicitly state “this character is LGBTQ”. However, a small group of fans of the game were furious that “Riot ruined their game” by adding the character. Forum posts on 4chan stated things such as “I didn’t pay for a game to get sappy messages of tolerance shoved down my throat.” (Reminder: “League of Legends” is a free game which never requires payment, unless the player chooses to buy exclusive event passes or cosmetics.) It always seems that on the internet, the negative messages of hate outweigh the positive messages of approval or praise. However, the gaming industry is becoming more tolerant as a whole, with audiences broadening, female and queer game designers showing the world their breakthrough titles, and the gaming workspace diversifying. As social justice evolves, so does the gaming industry.

The argument that “casual gamers aren’t real gamers” has existed ever since the rise of laid back titles targeted towards wider audiences, such as with mobile games, or Facebook games such as “Farmville” or “Candy Crush”. It has even led to harassment from “real” or “hardcore” gamers, who believe that anyone who hasn’t played a 60 hour RPG or clocked hundreds of hours in a first person shooter. To be completely honest, if anyone considers themselves a gamer, then that is okay with me. I don’t care about anyone’s play preferences or what they enjoy playing the most, as long as they enjoy playing video games, they are a gamer in my eyes. To say that some games “Aren’t real games” is baffling to me, as if the game about a guy with a spiky head of hair and an 8 foot long sword is “more hardcore” than the game about doing chores in a town full of cute animals. For example, I will use the subject of my dad. While my dad doesn’t consider himself a gamer, he consumes and enjoys video games from time to time, with some of his favorites being “Mario Kart Wii”, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2”, and “Clash Royale”. These games are all vastly different from each other, but he still enjoys them either way. He doesn’t consider himself a gamer however, and that’s completely fine. To make the argument that he IS in fact a gamer would seem pointless in his eyes, because he simply doesn’t care that much for games, other than these three games he has connected with in my lifetime. The games were a bonding experience for us, and they will always have a place in my heart, as well as his. This situation can be reversed in many instances, with people considering themselves to be gamers, but are shunned because the games they play aren’t “hardcore” enough. This is usually a sexist argument against women of the community, who are harassed by men who believe “they’re just lying to get attention”. This “gatekeeping” is unfortunately very common in the community, with conversations usually leading to things like “Oh, you’re a gamer? If that’s true, then answer all of my specific trivia questions about gaming.” I still don’t understand this argument, as everyone has different tastes, you can’t expect someone who plays a lot of Nintendo games to know XBox and Microsoft trivia. As a matter of fact, I believe that any game that is considered to be “casual” can be played in a hardcore fashion. Take the speedrunning community for example, taking a game that was never meant to be played in such a way that has been closely studied, broken, and reinvented by a group of dedicated players. From “Super Mario 64” to “Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom”, games are given whole new meaning of “hardcore”. The “casual games” versus “hardcore games” argument has always been a strange subject to me, as being a gamer all comes down to personal opinion. We shouldn’t judge what kind of games people enjoy, we should just be excited that people are engaging in the community in the first place.

This week, we talked about Transgender games and transgender people in gaming. This was exemplified through the use of the game “Dys4ia” by Anna Anthropy. This game was something I was familiar with, as we played it last semester as well. It tells the story of Anna Anthropy’s struggles with the beginning of her transition, and all of the “bullshit” that came with it. However, this game was designed not to be broad blanketed depiction of transgender, but rather a personal journey, as stated clearly in the beginning of the game by Anthropy. The game was meant to display “just one person’s story”, as a message to other transgender people, saying that you shouldn’t give up on who you truly are, even if it all seems so difficult. While the game does feel quite personal, the broad overarching messages still break through, helping those who may feel uncomfortable in their own skin feel more comfortable in working towards their best lives. One big topic the game covers is the watching eyes of the world around transgender people, making them feel out of place, whether that be through words, looks, or actions. The metaphor Anthropy uses for this is the strange shape trying to fit through the hole in the wall, which is shown at the beginning and end of the game, with the first instance of the shape being impossible to fit through the wall, while the last instance shows the shape flashing and morphing into different forms. Whereas Anthropy once felt like she didn’t fit in, she now is unsure of the future. Deflecting rude comments and dodging the eye of the public was just the beginning, yet the journey ahead becomes much more hopeful as time goes on. It is a beautiful message of finding the beauty within yourself and pursuing your happiness as a transgender person. While this is one person’s story, the gaming world can be quite harsh and stereotypical when it comes to the transgender community. The video we watched early in the semester exemplified this, as developers use the transgender community as the butt of jokes, making offensive depictions in their games or making villainous characters queer or transgender. “Dys4ia” is one game developer’s answer back to all the hate and suppression, calling for a new age of hope for transgender gamers.

This week focused in on player two, but not the player two in the obvious sense, like the Luigi to player one’s Mario. This “Player Two” refers to the women of the gaming world, or the demographic that has been shadowed by gaming being marketed to mainly men and boys for many years. While in the 80’s and 90’s advertising was pointed towards boys, girls got “pink games” to satisfy their gaming tastes, with games like “Barbie” for the NES. “Pink Video Games” have been a thing for as long as I can remember, and were always given to my sister to play while I played “Smash Bros” or “Sonic Heroes”. It never occurred to me back then that games like this were purely designed to capture a certain (neglected) audience, but looking back, the crappy “Mary Kate and Ashley” tie-in games never seemed to have a lot of effort put in. As my sister abandoned games made for girls, I would pick them up to see what they were all about. A classic staple of “pink” games was the dress up mode or minigame. It seemed to be in almost every girl game, along with some having a subplot about wooing boys or fawning over crushes. I wondered, even back then, why these mechanics kept popping up in those games, as every other game I played was completely varied and they all had something that made them stand out between all the rest. “Pink” video games melded together in my mind, to this day I can’t remember the names of some of the games my sister played (which subsequently led to me playing them).  As time goes on, games have started to appeal to wider audiences, but the stereotypes of “girl gamers” have never gone away. With women being harassed in online spaces such as online multiplayer games, being told to leave because “this game isn’t for them” is downright abhorrent, but the “stigma” was set by the market years ago. However, modern game developers have begun to develop games directed towards females, made by females, and coded by females that can be enjoyed by everyone, leaving no one behind. Females having a place in one of the fastest growing industries has been a long time coming, and we saw a very enjoyable game this week with a female protagonist, “Life is Strange”. It seems this game has a story based on the high school life of a teenage girl, yet makes this story inviting and engaging to all audiences, straying away from the “pink” game label and making a compelling mechanic and story for males and females. It is important to remember your audience when creating a game, but pandering to an audience is certainly not the way to do it. Games like “Life is Strange” pave the way towards a better and more inclusive future, where the audience of a game isn’t judged by outsiders or ridiculed by the broader community for its differences. Games should bring us together, after all, and not make us butt heads.

Inequality of gender has been a problem in our society for centuries. It is no surprise that this inequality has carried over to the microchasm of game developers and designers, and while it can be subtle in some instances, it is jarringly obvious in other situations. Take the example of Riot Games getting caught propagating a workplace of gender discrimination, or this week’s example of “Dead Island” and the ‘FeministWhorePurna’ fiasco.  The developer’s space can segmented due to these stereotypes and prejudices in the gaming community itself, making the offices of a game studio a “boys club”. The “FeministWhorePurna” scandal was one such instance where women were treated as the butt of a joke on the internal development team, with this controversial code being hidden inside the game’s program by a coder who must have thought that ‘no one will see this, plus it’s funny to leave in’. What baffles me about this is that there are multiple steps a game must take to be shipped in its final form, yet this line of code was never taken out internally, and was discovered by dataminers. Surely there was more than ONE person who checked the game’s code internally, unless this heinous joke was snuck in secretly by a coder, right? This isn’t the first instance of game designers leaving jokes in their code, as coders of the “Crash Bandicoot” series infamously left dirty names for enemies in the game’s code, knowing that kids would never be able to find these internal names in the code, thus no one would get offended. It was only after several years that dataminers discovered the real names for some of the scientist enemies in the game, with the first game starting with names such as “obj.ass” and “obj.assbanger”, and making the names dirtier as “Crash Bandicoot 2” entered development, with some scientist enemies being named “obj.motherf**ker”. As long as coding jokes aren’t meant to offend, they are fine, but jokes like this, especially in a live service game of the 2010’s, are unacceptable. This mentality of the “boys club” also exists in the world of politics, putting down those who believe in feminism. This can be seen with the “Code is Political” article from this week, as the primarily white, republican, male demographic of the gaming industry puts down the women who create games and programming languages alongside their male counterparts. Truthfully, I believe that equality in the technological workplace is much overdue. Females should be treated with respect, and not as the butt of the joke.

This week started off with playing “World of Warcraft”, which drops you into an open world full of magic and wonder to explore and fight to your heart’s content. However, the first thing the game asks you to do is create a character. The custom character is a huge part of many games, whether they be RPG’s, Action oriented games, Fighting games, or other wise. Developers add the “create a character” function to give players the freedom to express themselves in their worlds, and that was major part of what we discussed in class with the Shaw and Brett pieces. World of Warcraft, for example, has a character creator which gives the player options between several races and classes to choose. While the possibilities of race and class combinations are endless, the character creator itself is a bit limiting. Firstly, there is a small pool of hair styles and clothes for players to start with, no matter which race is picked. In addition, physiques are strictly locked between “Male” and “Female”, which is the bulk of Brett’s piece on limitation and restriction in the game. In most other character creators, sliders are built into the game, in order to make the character look any way you want, and that does mean ANY way you want. You can make the character look like yourself, no matter your gender or body type, or make your character a strange randomization, whichever you like. This should be the point of character builders, giving the player true freedom. In addition, we talked about emotionally investing into characters in games, and putting ourselves in their shoes in one way or another. Whether it be sympathizing with a character or pretending to be the character, everyone attaches themselves to their favorite characters for a reason or another. As for the pyschology of this, everyone has come from different backgrounds and connect with different playstyles. The idea of a “main” comes from attaching to a character, and can tell you a lot about a person, just based on who they play in a fighting game or RPG. When it comes to the characters I play, I have found I always gravitate towards the goofy characters, or the “joke” characters that were put in the game for people to laugh at. For as long as I can remember, I have loved playing King Dedede in Kirby games and in the Smash Bros. series due to his nature and due to Kirby being one of my favorite game series. A big blue penguin that can fly, throw spiked balls named “Gordos”, and lauds himself as a king, only for Kirby to trounce his spotlight every time? Sure, I’ll play as that guy. Some gravitate towards the macho characters, such as Cloud from “Final Fantasy” or Snake from “Metal Gear Solid”, but I have always adored the weird characters in games. Perhaps it’s because, due to my personality, I think it’s funny to beat people as characters that should never be taken seriously, or maybe it’s because I have found myself to be the outcast in real life, and my escape is with these goofballs. Either way, I love to embrace the weird. Claptrap in Borderlands, Murky in Heroes of The Storm, the yordles, such as Veigar and Tristana, in League of Legends. Ever since beating “Luigi’s Mansion” years ago for the first time, it seems I’ve always rooted for the second banana. It’s something that I would be interested in researching more, and why people love the characters they do. As for me, I find my sanctuary in slimy fish babies and little blue sorcerers who “ARE evil, stop laughing”.

This week pertained mostly to the representation of the LGBTQ community in the video game industry, and what is good and bad representation in video games. On top of this, we also discussed gender roles and representation as a whole in the video game world. These discussions led us to the Netflix series “The Guild”, which is a show lampooning the gaming community, with many “colorful” characters on the show. All of the characters on this show fill a certain stereotype of people in the gaming community, such as recluses who hate confrontation, men who are womanizers, young men in high school or college, middle aged men who live their lives off of others, people who are addicted to gaming, people who neglect aspects of their real lives in order to play, the list goes on and on. While this show is more of a comedic take on the world outside of gaming, it shows the controversies and negative attitudes it can bring into the gaming world itself. This then led us into looking at the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, which catalogues games, series of games, and instances in games that pertain to the LGBTQ community. While I have looked at this website before, it seems that the archive has become much more expansive, whether that be due to user submissions or more findings by the founders of the website itself. It was interesting to look into games that were not previously on the archive, and how some games represent the community. For example, I’ve been playing a lot of “League of Legends” in the past semester after my friends got me into the game. When I saw the game listed in the archive, I was somewhat confused at first. In my 6 months of playing the game, I have never seen any explicit LGBTQ content while playing the game. However, content made outside of the game, such as with comics and animations, reveals more about the backgrounds and lore of the game’s “champions”. For example, while it is never explicitly stated that the champion “Neeko” is a part of the LGBTQ community, some hidden voice lines vaguely hint at this, while developers announced outside of the game that Neeko is in fact the first openly lesbian character. In addition, on the LGBTQ archive, the champion Varus was listed as being a LGBTQ reference. I was quite confused, as there is no mention of Varus’ backstory in game, nor is there any alluding to his identity. However, his backstory which was built up by the comics and outside media confirm this champion’s inclusion in the LGBTQ community. When it comes to representation in video games, I believe that a character should feel like a real person, rather than a canvas which developers can find a story for later. A good example of what I find to be bad representation in video games comes from Overwatch. In 2019, three years after the game’s release, Blizzard announced through a comic that Soldier 76 was gay. This felt very ingenuous to players, as it felt like “they made the character gay just because they could”. The LGBTQ community shouldn’t be treated as a stereotyped minority which developers can slap onto a character “just because they feel like it”. Writing a character should be like creating a human, these traits and characteristics are a part of them, not a status symbol.