TLF: I’m a Feminist Gamer…

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So yesterday this post of mine went up over at The Learned Fangirl: “I’m a Feminist Gamer and I’m Over Anita Sarkeesian.” Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project and the backlash that she received for it were hot topics on the internet and this blog for a while, and at first I was a fan of hers. I thought it was great that she was doing and saying the things that she was because they needed to be said. I’m still glad she did – and those things still need to be said, discussed, and considered in the gaming industry and community.

But, as I explain at TLF, I’m getting to be a bit done with a lot of where the conversation has (not) gone. Rehashing wrongs committed against women and minority populations in gaming communities, while perhaps therapeutic for those involved and thus valuable, is not the conversation that the industry at large needs to be having. I’m also dubious about the kind of knee-jerk, boiled-down feminism that Sarkeesian’s tweets and posts often seem to evince. I’m hoping she does more with her series than the kind of simplified analysis I’ve seen so far, but I’m not holding my breath.

Rescue Me!

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Today’s classroom game brought to you by my Critical Thinking and Methods of Inquiry class, with whom I will be conducting more trials of games in the classroom. Last week we played a disaster-simulation game with two decks of cards as a means of discussing how human error can impact the success or failure of a system. I found it on a classroom game wiki here.

The game plays as follows. One group – the larger group – plays the role of the victims, the other, the rescuers. With some experimentation, we learned that two or three rescuers out of twenty is about the right ratio for a good, high-stress game situation. The victim group is each dealt a card. They can keep the card or just remember it. They then go stand in the middle of the room. Every 30 seconds or so, I flip over a different card from the victim deck and call out the suit on the card. Victims matching that suit have to sit (if standing) or “die” (if sitting). Victims can be rescued while sitting or standing.

The rescuers have their own deck of cards. They have to match the number (but not the suit) of the victims. They can carry three cards at a time. They can ask about those numbers only. The victims can only answer “yes” or “no.” Once a rescuer has used a card, it is discarded. They may also choose to discard cards. Discarded cards cannot be brought back into play.

The goal, of course, is to rescue all the victims. You can put a time limit on it, if you wish. If you have more than one group, the goal can be altered so that each group’s goal is to rescue more victims than the others. We went through the game two or three times per class.

The first time, the rescuers are not given the opportunity to consult about their strategy. The second (or third) time, they can.

Interestingly, we discovered that the rescuers who didn’t consult were actually overall more successful than their thoughtful friends. Why? Systems theory. People make mistakes. They don’t think of potential consequences. They forget rules. For instance, one of our rescuer groups flipped through their deck until they each had different numbers, then rushed about trying to save victims. The problem with this strategy is that they were discarding duplicate numbers… but some of the victims had duplicates (because there are four of each number in the deck). This meant that the rescuers actually cycled through their deck before they successfully managed to rescue all the victims.

We did learn, though, that a triage-style approach seemed to work best – aim for the people sitting on the floor first, then go to those who are standing. But it was also important that the rescuers not focus only on the sitters… because of the chance that I would seat and then kill the other victims (or that they would miss those numbers, like the over-planning rescuers) before they got there.

We also discovered that chance plays a huge role in success or failure. One group lost because the first two cards I flipped were clubs, so all the victims with clubs “died” almost instantly. No matter how quickly the rescuers had worked, they would not have been able to save those victims. Success and failure don’t always rely on the human factor – or on leadership. In a couple of instances, the rescuers had a clear leader. In one of them (the one with the most thought-out plan), this was actually a bad thing. In the other, the rescuers were successful because their leader was making good snap decisions instead of adhering to a flawed plan.

There was very little that was terribly shocking about the process, although I was a little surprised to note that – in this case, anyway – instinct proved better than forethought. Since we only played through five times, though, I imagine that might be a bit misleading.

But the part my students liked the best was tweaking the game itself. They wanted to try it with more frequent “kill” cards, with less time, with fewer rescuers. In fact, every modification they made was to make the game harder, not easier. And that told me something very important about games… and about learning. Students – and, I think, most people – actually want to be challenged. We might not say so, we might not even think so, but ultimately we thrive under challenging conditions. We do our best work when it matters, not when we have all the time in the world and no consequences.

This isn’t a new revelation. Jane McGonigal makes the same argument in Reality is Broken. Our lives, as they exist day-to-day, are often mundane and monotonous. They aren’t interesting, they don’t challenge us, and the work we do doesn’t matter in a real, tangible, visible way. In games, choices matter, and we can see our progress clearly in the advancement of the game – or we can see why we aren’t progressing, make the necessary corrections, and then succeed. It’s one of the reasons that gamification has become increasingly popular – because it shows us that we aren’t just beating our heads against the proverbial walls, that what we do matters (even if only in achievement points), and it makes us feel good about overcoming a challenge, however small. Because the little things matter.

Speaking Out

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So I’ve been swamped with personal and work-related business and haven’t posted here in a little bit… but also because I had a piece out for consideration with the “real media,” and wanted to hold off on repeating myself too much more until I knew whether it would be appearing in public or not.

It is. The Christian Science Monitor picked it up and has posted it today: “Stop blaming video games for America’s gun violence.” (Their title, not mine. I like cute titles. News sites do not. It’s a genre thing.) It’s a discussion that’s got a lot of attention today: Daniel Greenberg has a piece in The Atlantic offering support for the same position, a Louisville news site, on the other hand, attempts to leave the proverbial door open on that question, and over on DiabloInc, a poster asks fellow players if they view gaming as catharsis or “anger management.”

So now I sit back and hope that the internet is nicer to me than they were to Anita Sarkeesian. I have the feeling that most of them are going to be on my side (at least the ones that went after Sarkeesian will be), but there’s always a sense of trepidation when you broadcast yourself on public channels as opposed to these small, semi-private ones.

The whole experience has been interesting. I post here, and get a few friends to like it or share it,  and I post over at The Learned Fangirl from time to time, but even though they certainly have a broader reader-base than my little blog does, neither venue is anything like the CSM. So this is a little scary for me. I’m talking, loudly and on top of a very real media soapbox, about something highly controversial that not even my mother would agree with (no, really, my mother thinks I’m wrong – I wasn’t allowed videogames growing up, and especially not ones that included guns). I’m pretty sure I’m in the right here, but that doesn’t mean there might not be repercussions. And repercussions can be scary.

So I’m hoping that the internet is kinder to me than it has been to a lot of people. I’m hoping it will be reasonable (“hoping,” not “counting on”), and I’m hoping that tonight’s State of the Union will be similarly reasonable. I’m hoping that we aren’t entering a new 1980s-era age of paranoia and implicit censorship. I’m hoping that we’re able, as a society, to recognize the value in dissent of all kinds, in free speech, but also temper that with the acknowledgment that we need to base our treasured opinions in study and fact rather than paranoia and knee-jerk reactions.

An ‘Actual’ Post

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I keep waiting for the furor around the supposed link between violence and videogames to dissipate, like most of our society’s other bizarre fantasies and fads, but for some reason, this one seems to be clinging more tenaciously than most. It’s not that I expect everyone to come to the sudden realization that games are not responsible for mass shootings, but, rather, that I expect the media and public figures to stop talking about it – thus allowing it to slip back into the subconscious of the nation.

But it isn’t. Instead, senators who have never in their lives played a game – or, in some cases, probably even sent an email without an assistant doing the typing and sending – continue to speak out publicly about how videogames are dangerous to society. Today, Kotaku posted a story whose title struck me as both sad and funny: “Video Games Are ‘A Bigger Problem Than Guns,’ Says Actual U.S. Senator.”

The title, in particular, makes me think that Kotaku’s writing staff is just as surprised as I am that people are still harping on this topic. The fact that the title contains the word “Actual” says a couple things to me. First, that Kotaku’s Jason Schreier is getting annoyed at the ignorance being displayed by the people discussing this issue. Second, that up until this point, Schreier had some small modicum of respect left for the US Senate. And that’s really where this story becomes sad.

As a nation, we look to the US Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Executive Branch to make reasonable, logical decisions about our laws for the good of the nation. And when members of those esteemed bodies start behaving like idiots, they undermine not only our opinions of them personally, but of the entirety of the institution.Schreier says, “Once again, this is an actual U.S. senator. An actual senator from the United States. That was elected to an office. This is a person who has a significant amount of power in this country, and he believes that video games are a bigger problem than guns.”

In this case, it’s bad enough that Joe Biden is “playing along” (pun intended) with calls from the NRA to investigate the ostensible link between violence and videogames (because I’ve killed SO many actual people with an Xbox controller… as opposed to an actual firearm…). But at least he’s willing to forestall his conclusions, saying that he wants to find out the facts first. Sure, the implication is that the entertainment/videogame industry are concealing those facts, but at least he’s willing to talk about facts instead of scaremongering… if we put aside the fact (as Schreier points out) that there are twenty-five years of facts already.

But Lamar Alexander is a completely different story. Alexander claims that videogames are… sorry, “video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”

I don’t even… First, “games” is a plural, not a singular, and my not-so-inner grammarian is having fits because a US Senator apparently can’t use proper verb forms. But more importantly, videogames are not problematic because they “affect people.” Yes, videogames “affect people.” So do novels, films, television shows, radio programs, and public speeches. So does art. In fact, art is designed to “affect people.” So are videogames. And they’re designed to “affect people” because they are a commentary on and product of the society out of which they arise. They demonstrate and seek to “affect” our value systems and our understandings of ourselves and others. And at their best, they want to “affect” us to become better people, a stronger society, a more cohesive and yet diverse community. At their worst, they are entertainment – color and sound on a screen that responds to the press of a button or key that temporarily makes us feel happy or sad, frustration or fiero.

Guns “affect people,” too. With bullets that move at speeds around 1,400 feet per second and with the capacity (in a small handgun) to cause internal bleeding, cardiac arrest, extreme pain, and death. They can be used to protect our lives and those of our loved ones, our nations, and our ideologies, yes, but they can also be used to steal our wallets, our dignity, our innocence, and our lives.

Tell me, senator, do you really think that games “affect” those who play them more than guns “affect” the people who are shot by them?

Speaking from Ignorance

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Something interesting about the recent outcry against violent videogames is the fact that – as pointed out in Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World, and by any number of game journalists, scholars, and developers, including Kotaku’s Stephen Totillo – the people speaking out most strongly against them don’t play videogames. They’ve maybe watched an hour or two of someone else playing the game and taken that experience as symptomatic of what they believe must cause violent behaviors. My personal favorite came from Ralph Nader’s response to Obama’s inaugural address, reported on Gameranx: that videogames are functionally “electronic child molesters.”

Aside from Nader, who is clearly unclear on the definitions of either “videogames” or “child molester,” I – sort of – understand where they might be coming from. I know that I say things while playing (particularly multiplayer) that in any other context would be considered rude, crude, and rather threatening (“Die, you bastard,” is a frequent pejorative). The tenseness of shoulders, the leaning-forward pose, the seeming (and sometimes genuine) rage all seem to indicate an increase in violent tendencies. Except that they don’t, in the same way that the vast majority of sports fans (who exhibit similar physiological responses) aren’t incited to violence by watching a game.

Nor are they incited to molest children, a behavior that not only is unrelated to violent videogame content, but isn’t actually included in any videogame I’ve ever played or heard of (although I’m sure some villain did it in something). From this point on, I’m going to ignore Nader’s commentary, even though it makes me ragingly livid and is one of the most egregious examples of hyperbolic mud-slinging I’ve ever seen. But back to addressing those people who are at least well-intentioned, if ignorant, as opposed to those who are so clearly out in left field that they may well have departed the surface of the planet.

In fact, the simulated violence found in videogames can be cathartic, and it can also – in the right game – produce an anti-violence response. Dishonored, for instance, is a game about assassination. It involves hordes of plague rats that devour the living and the dead (and you can summon them!). But you are also presented with the choice in the game to play “non-lethal.” To not kill ANYONE. In fact, you get an achievement for it. With every “assassination,” you always have a choice to not kill your target – and you can sneak about and avoid killing anyone else, too. Or you can play “high-chaos” and kill everyone… but that produces consequences. More disease. More rats. More things that want to kill you in return. Which tells me that the game is subtly encouraging an anti-violence ethos even as it allows you to play violently.

Other games – like Mass Effect – grant you Paragon points for making the more “ethical” choice (although they’ve tweaked that in ME2 and ME3 to be less about good and evil and more about “style” so that Shepard pretty much has to be good). Others, like Bioshock, have “good” and “bad” endings, based on the decisions the player makes (often whether to kill people or not). And even Grand Theft Auto contains the occasional character who expresses feelings of discontentment and guilt for robbing people, stealing cars, and shooting innocents.

In short, most games actually encourage the players to internalize an ethos that is decidedly non-violent, particularly against innocents. While it might be okay to shoot the enemy (or zombies, or weird insectoid aliens), it’s not okay to shoot the civilians. So while watching Gears of War for ten minutes might give the non-gamer “insight” into the frequency of gunshots and the spatter of alien gore, it doesn’t actually tell them about the total experience the gamer has by the end of the game – which is to say, doesn’t see the narrative of war-weariness that permeates the series and leaves the player fairly exhausted at the end of extensive play.

So my invitation – to anyone who believes games are causing violent behavior – is to play one, start to finish, and then see what they think. Maybe they’ll change their minds, maybe they won’t, but instead of making sweeping claims about videogames rotting the brains of the proverbial children, they would be able to experience what gamers experience. To understand before they criticize. And while I realize that some of the people who speak out against videogames now would continue to do so even after playing, I’m okay with that because at least then they’re speaking from experience instead of ignorance.

Winning at Life

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I’ve posted about the process of gamification before, but an article from GamesRadar today reminded me just how prevalent it really is… ironic, really, considering my current obsession with Fitocracy and the fact that I deliberately chose to do 100 burpees and 100 push-ups this morning to earn 500 achievement Quest points on a fitness website, rather than because of my desire to be in better shape.

But that’s part of the point of Fitocracy (which is fantastic) – they know full well that people, especially gamers, are more likely to do something they should do anyway if it has immediate and track-able rewards. And if they can brag about it – which they can on Fitocracy, at least to other people on Fitocracy (probably the only people in the world who care). The process of tracking Quests and Leveling Up in Fitocracy keeps you interested in doing more Quests, which introduce you to new exercises or elevate the level of intensity… ultimately helping you with your fitness goals. While it’s probably true that it would be objectively “better” if we were able to self-motivate without an app or website giving us “points” for doing exercise, it’s a completely harmless, somewhat social way of providing positive feedback for being healthy (assuming no one is lying about what they did just to get the points) – and that’s great.

GamesRadar decided to grant achievement points for something even more ordinary – just plain living. They start off with 1 point for being born, and another 25 if you make it to your first birthday… 5 for walking, 10 for talking, and so on. Two of my favorites are 3 for falling off your bike (you also got 7 for learning how to ride it) and 5 for failing a test… which I love because sometimes failing is actually important and needs to be rewarded. I think there are probably a few things missing, like joining the priesthood or becoming a CEO or getting a PhD, and I understand why (since most people won’t do one of those, much less all of them), but it is a little disappointing to not be able to earn points for something you worked really, really hard at.

And that last bit is the primary difference between living and earning “points.” And here’s the thing. When I play games, most of the time I’m not interested in 1000-pointing the achievements list. I want to complete the game and do a couple of cool things that don’t require an excess of effort. I’m not obsessed with earning all achievements just to earn them. But I do want to do a couple of really cool ones because I can, just like I wanted to do 100 burpees just to prove I can earn those 200 Quest points on Fitocracy. But there are so many other things that I do just because I want to do them – not because they earn me “points.”

And that’s what living is about – yes, points and rewards can provide that extra little kick in the pants to get us going on something that we kinda want to do but need someone to give us a slightly better reason than the ones we already have. It’s why people work out better with a trainer yelling at them, why kids will do chores for stickers or candy, and why many businesses implemented the merit-based raise system ages ago. It’s what capitalism is all about. And I’m all about gamification. I think it’s great to provide extra incentives for self-improvement, whether fiscally, physically, or intellectually.

What I don’t like about it, though, is that I’m afraid that it will go too far, that points will become the primary rather than a secondary motivator. It’s something I see with some of my students – they want the points (the grade), not the experience (the learning). And it’s not entirely their fault – we’ve come to value the achievements (the diploma and transcript) above the skills, and that, to me, has disaster written all over it. Because then people will exploit the system in whatever way they can just to have those achievements on their record – and they won’t actually be equipped to play the game on their own without a cheat helping them to find their way through the levels.

What I want to see is a mix of the two – gamification to give that little kick to the small things, and life to be worthwhile enough that we don’t need the kick to do the big ones. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get any points for that PhD – it doesn’t need incentivizing because it has intrinsic value for the experience, not the paper that’s somewhere in my apartment collecting dust. Because the achievement doesn’t matter even a fraction as much as the XP I earned on the way.

Regulate Guns, Not Games

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As it turns out, my first post of 2013 is going to follow up on my last one from 2012, on the knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook claiming that school shootings are at least partly the consequence of violent videogames. This morning, Jeanine Celestin-Greer posted on Gamasutra about what she terms “violence against violent videogames.” In short, Celestin-Greer is concerned about videogames going the way of the Salem Witches – hung from the nearest large tree because someone panicked after eating bad rye.

Gamasutra reports that the IGDA (International Game Developers’ Association) responded to the call for research into the violence ostensibly produced by videogames spearheaded by Joe Biden – in essence, Gamesindustry International reports, agreeing to open-minded research into both the positive and negative impacts of gaming.They’re willing to play along, at least for now, in the name of appeasing the masses, but only because they know that legitimate, balanced research will show (as it has already shown) that games are not the root of the problem.

Celestin-Greer points out that people like to muddle along under the happy delusion that our world is not violent, and then when something tragic happens, they bemoan the decline of civilization and “try to understand why the world is ‘suddenly’ so evil and depraved.” The world has always had its evil. It has always been violent. We didn’t see mass genocide on the scale that we do now in the 1600s not because they didn’t have violent videogames (in fact, back then they made the argument that the theater, which we now consider a bastion of high culture, was causing violence in the streets), but because they didn’t have assault weapons and dirty bombs.

Celestin-Greer also makes the argument that there are plenty of people who play violent videogames who are not violent people – herself and (I hope) myself included. I have no interest in even owning a gun, much less killing anyone with it, but you can nevertheless find me playing first-person shooters on a fairly regular basis. Celestin-Greer observes that “people had also said that because the killer had Liked Mountain Dew, drinking Mountain Dew created murderers,” a fallacy equally as absurd, but – somehow – less likely to be believed.

Why? Put simply, because of something called cultural lag. The majority of people objecting to the influence of violent videogames are people who don’t play them. They’re people like my mom (whom I adore, but who doesn’t play games and still thinks that violent ones can cause violence), or like well-meaning senators and vice presidents who are calling for the videogame industry to “do something” about the violence in their games.

But no one is calling for the film industry or the television industry or the novel industry to do something about the violence rampant in their products. Murder mysteries, action flicks, and shows like 24 contain just as much if not more violence than your average videogame. Sure, they’re passive commodities rather than participatory ones, but they’re nevertheless violent. So why aren’t they targeted? Because we’ve grown used to them. When they were new, people were just as convinced that violent tv and movies were causing the degradation of society. Just like Stephen Gosson in the sixteenth century thought that going to a play was going to turn people into “Sodomits, or worse.”

And this is saying nothing about the fact that the nations with the largest ratios of violent crime, domestic abuse, and actual genocide are developing or third-world – and believe me, they aren’t playing violent videogames. Human nature is violent, and when unregulated, it will always be violent. Our instincts of hunting and survival make us that way, and the elimination of videogames is not going to change that. Celestin-Greer cites sports as an example of acculturated violence – and games are just another part of that.

Does that mean that all parents should allow their 5-year-old to play Call of Duty? Of course not, and Celestin-Greer agrees. Parents should regulate what their kids are playing in the same way that they should regulate what the kids are watching. But that doesn’t make the games inherently violence-inducing. They’re just another form of media, with the same cultural value and impact as any other type. We, as a society, just haven’t gotten used to them on the same scale: cultural lag.

Celestin-Greer makes some good points, but she’s not just defending games for her own audience, who are themselves likely to be gamers and already on her side of the debate. She’s trying to spur a movement. To cause gamers to speak out in defense of their violent games – although she very validly suggests that they need to do so reasonably: “Every time games are targeted, we need to always be there calmly proving them wrong.” And to a degree, since she inspired me to write this post, it’s working. But I don’t have the same level of concern she does that games will be banned or so strictly regulated that they might as well be banned.

First, the games industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. A triple-A title makes as much as a movie, maybe more, and the games that sell the best are the ones that people claim cause violence: Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War. There’s too much money and far too many jobs at stake for first-person shooters to go the way of the dodo. Second, cultural lag. We’ve gone through this same type of reaction to every introduced form of media from ballads onward. We’ll get over it. Should we make an effort to introduce ourselves to the factual studies that demonstrate that violent videogames have no impact on our drive to shoot real live humans? Of course. But we don’t need to froth ourselves into a panic that we’ll never be able to play them again.

What we need to do is just move forward. Lag with catch up with us, the industry will innovate, and it will become even more evident than it is now that games are not the source of the problem. People are. Parents need to regulate what their kids are seeing and playing; adults in general need to take responsibility for their actions; nations need to see that global conflict and the violent propaganda that valorizes it contributes to small-scale domestic violence; lawmakers need to recognize that abuse within families is just as problematic as (and probably contributes to) lone gunmen. Maybe gun regulation or restriction is part of that answer. Maybe it isn’t. But the problems are to be found within a society that condones actual violence, not in one that uses fictive violence as an escapist outlet.

Peace On Earth, Not so Much Goodwill

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Given the time of year, this seems an appropriate topic heading. And an appropriate topic, if a controversial one. In the wake of what happened at Sandy Hook, many people have expressed not only their condolences to the families affected, but have advocated for non-violence, gun control, and increased security of schools.

But some people have brought out the now-traditional strawman of violent videogames as the impetus for crimes like this one and the shooting at Columbine. On December 19th, TIME notes, “Senator Jay Rockefeller introduced a bill calling on the National Academy of Sciences to ‘study’ video game violence on children.” Fortunately, Christopher Ferguson (the author of the TIME piece) knows better. He refers to a recent study that demonstrates that, in fact, higher rates of videogame play actually seem to correlate to lower rates of gun violence, overall. While correlation is not causation, it certainly seems to indicate that videogame play does not cause increased incidence of violence. These findings have been insisted upon by gamers, developers, and even scholars (including Exodus to the Virtual World author Edward Castronova) for years.

But that’s not really the point I want to get at here, just the background to it.

On December 21st, two days after Senator Rockefeller’s proposal, Antwand Pearman held a “Day of Cease Fire for Online Shooters” in commemoration of the Sandy Hook victims. The point of this Cease Fire, Pearman says, is that “We are simply making a statement that we as Gamers are not going to sit back and ignore the lives that were lost. Instead we will embace [sic] the families with our love and support.” The Cease Fire was covered by GamerFitNation, Kotaku, Forbes, and others (listed on the Facebook page linked to above).

The Kotaku article includes the following note, as well:

The other note I got was from the publicity-loving anti-gaming ex-lawyer Jack Thompson, a guy who only makes it into the news when they are violent deaths (or when he’s being dis-barred). He believes games train kids to kill. He hadn’t e-mailed me since October, when he was trying to shame Best Buy into no longer selling Mature-rated video games.

Thompson wrote: “You people at Kotaku have blood on your hands. You have facilitated the infestation of an entire generation of young men who have now come of age, like this sociopath in Connecticut, who were raised on violent video games and who see the killing scenarios therein as a means of solving their problems.

“I warned you at Kotaku that a day like this would come, and now it has come. Congratulations. Hand sanitizers won’t ever room the blood on your greedy little hands. Jack Thompson, Miami”

Obviously, Thompson agrees with Senator Rockefeller. But, despite calling for a “Cease Fire,” Pearman does not. He did not call for the Cease Fire because he believes that violent videogames had any impact on the shooting. He called for it as a sign of respect for the families involved. He wanted to do something to show that he felt sympathy for them. A Cease Fire seemed – I imagine – a logical action to demonstrate that there is too much real violence in the real world. Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo quotes Pearman:

“When I thought of this cease fire I saw it as a means for gamers to come together and show their love and support the families. The one thing we can’t get in this world is peace. War will always rage on but in the virtual world we have an opportunity to be better. This isn’t something for the media it’s for the families and us.

“So what if people stop playing shooters for a day? It will be forgotten the next day. The point is that in that silence you’ll have time to listen to something you haven’t heard in a long time. Something you have been too busy to hear. Too social to notice and that’s…your Heart.”

But Pearman is wrong. First, his actions have not been forgotten. Perhaps in a week or a month or a year they will be, but both the positive and the negative will continue to resonate. The positive is obvious – showing respect and expressing sympathy with the people most impacted by a tragedy. The negative may be less so, but is all the more nefarious for its subtlety.

Mike Rougeau, also with Kotaku, followed up on the story with a report about one gamer who refused to cease firing. That gamer – Isaiah-TriForce Johnson, and yes, Rougeau tells us, that is his real name – believes that a Cease Fire plays into the irrational fears of people like Rockefeller and Thompson:

“I’ve been around gaming for a very, very long time and I’ve watched the media butcher video games and blame video games for a whole bunch of stuff that has nothing to really do with us, or the manufacturers, or the developers, the producers, the inventors — it has nothing to do with us,” he told me.

“The reason I think that the online ceasefire is a bad idea is because, as I said before, the media will take anything that we say and they will manipulate it,” he continued. “I think the media would take that and use it against him.”

And I see his point. Rougeau says that “when you fly a flag half-mast, you’re not blaming the flag. A moment of silence is not an accusation aimed at speaking,” and that may be true. However, no one is angry at flags to begin with. But when you have an industry – or, let’s say, a minority group – that people already fear or hate, then any action that might even obliquely align that group with negativity becomes a springboard for increased bias. For instance, early modern witch trials. Women were already marginalized, and when women became associated with witches, they became increasingly marginalized, even though the object of the trials was “witchcraft” and not “women.”

Now Rougeau is right that Pearman’s intentions are good, but Cease Fire will not be read by the “pundits and politicians who would use games as a scapegoat” as gamers saying, “we don’t care what you say about us. We’re going to show respect, and we’re going to do it our way.” It’s going to be read however they want it to be – that games are negative, and that they have the power to influence us into making irrational decisions about violent behavior.

My reaction is essentially summed up by one commenter, username PillBinge:

I actually think TriForce holds an intellectual persona (and actual intellect) that gamers should put forth. I have my views and I think they’re rock-solid, but that doesn’t mean people want to listen to me. In fact, arguing often comes down to how the two sides view each other as people, not the views.

“You and I both know Antwand means good,” TriForce said. “But we are in a very tense position in the nation right now. We’re really walking on egg shells, and anything we do or say will be used against us.”

I say let them try.

The first quote is very reassuring. But the Let them try part is a little worrisome. Don’t invoke someone else’s anger just because you’re right. Progress isn’t about stopping and fighting and antagonizing, it’s about moving forward and over obstacles.

In essence, thumbing our noses at “pundits and politicians” like teenagers is not going to get us anywhere. Thompson was not willing to listen to Totilo’s (admittedly self-reported) reasonable dialogue about evidence, and others like him are going to be equally recalcitrant about seeing Pearman’s actions as anything other than a tacit admission of guilt. We need to speak and act like adults, not call out “pundits and politicians” to a mud-slinging fight.

But I’m also not going to say that a Cease Fire is a bad idea. I think Pearman is both within his rights and a noble person for arranging a memorial like Cease Fire. I also think TriForce is right to be leery of participating – or, at the very least – leering of not speaking up about what Cease Fire is really intended to mean. It isn’t a call to arms for some sort of gamer rights, and it isn’t an admission of guilt – it’s a call for gamers to have their own version of a moment of silence, and that should be a good thing. I’m just afraid it isn’t going to play out that way.

Ins and Outs

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So about the last thing I expected in my in-box this morning was a response to yesterday’s post from Zoya at The Border House, and I have the feeling that Todd (who had inspired the original post from me) probably had a similar reaction. Now I think that Zoya’s point is actually a good one – How do we know for sure that Taric is gay? Isn’t it just as problematic to assume someone’s sexuality from markers and clues that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality? Absolutely, agree 100%. And this is an important conversation that needs to be had.

The only real issue I have with it is that Taric is not a real person, he’s an iconographic representation of something, and the motivations that we’re looking at should not be ascribed to him, but to the developers who designed and implemented him. We aren’t trying to “out” Taric (if he even happens to be in the closet), we’re trying to convince Riot to come out of the doorway in between “maybe he is… maybe he isn’t… we’re not telling,” because, as Todd argued on his twitter account, “In this wink-and-a-nod mode where everything is illicit and rumored and strange. That rhetoric is the same rhetoric that forced me and many…others into the closet in our lifetime, just as much as the expectation that we conform to stereotypes would. I don’t want that.”

At The Border House, Zoya says that “I’m not against coming out, but I am against the assumption that everybody will or should manage their social lives and personal identities in the same way. And even though I don’t play LoL, this call for an apparently feminine male character to come out as gay is deeply troubling to me as a genderqueer person.” She makes the very valid point that assuming that Taric is gay based solely on gender cues is fallacious, and it is, but when we’re dealing with media and (especially, unfortunately) games, those cues are important. Now I think it would be a really interesting move for Riot to have intentionally created Taric with his pink legwarmers and love for sparkles as a straight man, or an asexual man, or an identified-female.

So, first of all, maybe Taric is not gay. Maybe he loves women almost as much as he loves gems. Maybe he doesn’t identify as a guy. Maybe he just doesn’t know yet. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain his gender expression in terms that fit your worldview.

Or maybe he is gay, and he doesn’t feel the need to navigate the complex network of social connections between the League and the LGBT community through the rather culturally-specific rite of passage of coming out. Maybe Taric belongs to a culture where coming out isn’t the best option for him or for his family. Perhaps his privacy is very important to maintaining his connection with the community he grew up in. It doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t doing his bit to break down homophobia in that community, but the challenges might not be navigable by the same means that they are in your culture.

Maybe Zoya’s right. Maybe Riot is really much more complex and thoughtful about gender and sexuality than we’re giving them credit for. Maybe they just didn’t think about it and have a designer who likes sparkles and pink legwarmers. Maybe they want to make the point that we shouldn’t ask questions about sexuality because it is fundamentally unimportant to Taric’s role in the game. Honestly, though, I don’t think Riot thought about any of that, and I’m pretty sure that that’s the point Todd was getting at.

For the sake of full disclosure, I don’t play League of Legends, and I don’t really have a founded opinion on whether Taric is gay, straight, bi, asexual, questioning, or not even human at all (hence my use of “so if he is” in the original post, because I really don’t know). That said, I’m inclined to think that Todd is probably right, and that Riot created a character they “decided” was gay, but left his sexuality ambiguous (his description reads, “Taric is tight-lipped about his life outside the League and prefers his privacy”) to avoid fan backlash. And if that is the pattern we’re seeing here, then it is a problem, and should be talked about.

For instance, Todd’s response makes the equally valid point that while there’s no particular need for Taric, as a fictional individual, to be gay, it is important for media producers like Riot to include characters who – if they are, in fact, gay – are not reticent to own their sexuality. Not because people should feel obligated to do the same, but because of another point that Zoya made: “If there was someone like me on British TV, I would have a much easier time explaining my identity to my mother.” It’s important for people of all types to appear in our media as open, accepted, and equally competent as everyone else.

The assumption that Taric is gay – which, as I understand it, is held by much of the LoL community – may be problematic because of what it says about the way we read gender and sexuality codes, but that’s exactly why Riot should be open about Taric’s sexuality, whatever it is.The problem isn’t that Taric isn’t openly gay, nor that he likes sparkles, but because they’re pointedly refusing to talk about it while nevertheless including elements that our society automatically codes as homosexual:

Valoran’s media, for some reason, has taken a great interest in his personal life. While open about his life as a champion and gracious in all things, Taric is tight-lipped about his life outside the League and prefers his privacy.

The inclusion of a sly comment that hints at something nefarious, illicit, or otherwise “hush-hush” is dangerous because it allows for certain assumptions to be made based on the established pattern of closteting and bigotry that exists in our society. If that’s not what’s happening, Riot has the responsibility to make that clear so that no one – gay, straight, asexual, genderqueer – feels as though they need to remain silent. Can they? Sure. But they don’t need to because their sexuality or gender identity isn’t condemnable. If Taric is okay being whatever he is – and liking gems and pink legwarmers – then they can feel okay about being whatever they are.