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carnival posts, fandom & feminism, linkspam, no one lies on the intarweb, people on my flist are smrt, the ability to quote substitutes for wit, totally not a fan

Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction & Fantasy Part I: Women, Gaming, and You!

Welcome to the Regrettably Late Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy! I apologise for the lateness of my post - when Ragnell said "This is a lot of work!", I don't think I quite believed her as much as I should have. But I can't pretend it hasn't been a great experience, and I want to make a point of thanking Ragnell for letting me host, and The Hathor Legacy (via I Read The Internets) for pointing out that there was a need for a host this month. It's totally something I would do again - next year. Late next year.

My focus this month has been on gaming, and there's no way to talk about women in gaming without talking about what happened to Jade Raymond. For those who haven't seen it yet, I'm talking about the attacks on Ms Raymond, producer of the recently-released game Assassin's Creed. Scott Jennings at Broken Toys sums up everything with pictures and a summary in his post Clearly We Do Not Deserve Nice Things And/Or People. Basically, though, Ms Raymond is a well-spoken conventionally attractive young woman who is the producer of a major game in an industry that is, quite frankly, incredibly unfriendly to women who play games, let alone design them. Since, as producer of the game, she was part of the PR push, this apparently made her "fair game" to disturbingly stalker-ish articles, comments, a "fan"-site, and all sorts of written abuse about wanting to sexually assault her and speculation that she's just some dumb broad who's taking all the credit because she's a hot chick and it sells. (Read more about this aspect of the situation in Jervo's Jade Raymond and Creepy Gaming Journalism at MovieTome.)

This, of course, lead to someone making a disgusting little comic that puts her in her underwear and shows her giving blow jobs to guys in an effort to get them to buy her game. It's pretty disgusting.

But see, it's all a joke! And totally the same thing happens to guys in the industry all the time! I can totally remember the last time Bioware put out a game and the men involved in producing it had their faces photo-shopped over images of male porn stars! Really!


Sanya at Eating Bees takes on the various versions of "but it's not sexism!" in her post I May Have Been Wrong About Our Wee Industry, while Feminste's guest-poster Holly gives a pretty good run down of the timeline of events in The Trouble With Jade. Mighty Pony Girl at Feminist Gamers talks about this in terms of a generation of gamers who are growing up thinking that women in games are all about the T&A (as well as all about pleasing them) in From the 'Me' Generation to the 'Mine' Generation , while Luke at Shrub Blog not only pulls apart the arguments made about how this is All Jade's Fault Damn It, but calls on Male Gamers to get out there and remind people that there are still gamers out there who don't view women as T&A in For Male Gamers and Readers, Something Embarrassing.

I do recommend all the links, but if you chose only one with lots of text, read Jane in Game Girl Advance, Jade Raymond Is For Real:

But it's wrong. Of course it's wrong. And it's all nastily tied up with sexism, with the nature of celebrity, the cowardly losers on the internet, and exploitative marketing practices that have always sold products by slapping a pretty face - real or digital - on the game boxes. And part of me wants also to speak out against that.</p>

I don't have an answer. I can be suspicious of Ubisoft's motives, but after all, they are just trying to sell product, just like everyone else. And I can also be disappointed that the press chooses to focus on Jade Raymond and feature her face prominently on pictorials not because they are interested in promoting women in games, but because they want to sell magazines or adspace on websites. What I don't understand is why the supposed fans of games react so vilely to the notion that a woman - a very pretty woman - has helped to create what may be one of the biggest games of the year.

Are they so small that they are threatened by this? Do they really think that a woman could have gotten to the kind of position that Jade achieved simply on her clear skin tone and nice figure? Do they really think that the executives behind the games they supposedly love are so moronic to allow that to happen?

So, are women working in the industry of building these games we like to play all treated in such awful ways? I don't know - I suspect, much like with the men, a lot of it depends on where they're working, at what level, and the general corporate attitude towards women. Tekanji, who has recently been accepted to the prestigious HAL school in Osaka, Japan, talks about the experiences of another woman in design school, and how the system there is designed with "white, single, male" in mind. In Lisa's Story: A Look At What Might Have Been, she says:

Lisa is someone who has a lot to offer the industry. In fact, she fits the demographic of a large and growing market (see articles like this and this).Her forty years of experiences growing up as a woman playing games gives her an insight into a significant, but still under-acknowledged, portion of the market. In addition to that, there are many jobs in the industry, as noted above, that have a work model desirable for the non-traditional worker because of things such as flex time.

So assuming the “boot camp” style of teaching was, in part, to weed people out, is Lisa really the kind of student that the industry can afford to have drop out? Her differences are what should make her valuable, not what make her unable to continue in a program that she worked so hard to get into. How is the industry going to properly be able to grow if the only ones who can get through gamer college are the young white men with no outside obligations and those few others who can emulate them enough to get by?

The post is followed up soon afterwards with The Privilege of Attending School, where Tekanji continues to talk about the issues facing non-traditional students in school where failure is considered to indicate that someone "just doesn't care enough".

The result of treating the young white middle- to upper-class male as“normal” is that it creates an environment that makes it harder for people who don’t fit that demographic to succeed. Not through any malice, but rather because of a lack of understanding of whythe problem is occurring. Like Guildhall Student, people chalk it up to not having enough “love”, “commitment” or “talent”, or otherwise individualize it instead of looking at what’s going on beneath the surface.

Also highly relevant to discussions of women working in the industry is the phenomenon of "Pink Panels" - panels focusing specifically on women in the industry or "what women want". Sanya at Eating Bees takes this on in A Man's World My Ass:

This, y’all, is why I don’t attend pink panels, pink conferences,pink hoe-downs, or any other Yay Girl Power horseshit that this industry sees fit to shovel out in our periodic bursts of self-flagellation. The battle for respect is lost the minute you stand up to demand it - or admit in any way that you need to do more to achieve what someone else achieves by being born.

For one thing, it is a giant waste of time preaching to the converted, and the handful of industry leaders who bother attending Pink Panels are already convinced of the value a woman’s perspective can bring to design and implementation. The men who need to be convinced that women have something unique to contribute are attending general conference panels that appeal to their interests. I accomplish a hundred times more for my gender by speaking on one of those panels - not as a woman, but as someone with a unique perspective.

GreyPawn rebuts this in Quiet Examples:

Those “pink panels”, while undoubtedly a novelty and patronizing are still about awareness and in some limited capacity empowerment. There’s a reason the majority of developers in the industry are white males and that diversity in this field is a running joke. Changing common perceptions is all about speaking out, and speaking out often. Quiet examples and non-participation is fine and dandy if you are comfortable with the perpetual marginalization of your given difference, and are certainly admirable by any measure. But in order to see actual change happen, you have to have unity, awareness, and activism. You can’t just look at your difference and say, oh well, I’m being treated differently for it, so I’m just going to ignore it. You should not only obviate it, but celebrate it. The alternative is passive acceptance of a system constructed to keep you at the bottom.

Speaking of "pink".

So, out in the open: I'm a girl gamer. I still identify as such, even though I haven't played in almost a year, and have been basically avoiding the industry in general for some time. I miss gaming. I loved my gaming group. I loved the people in it. But wow, did I ever start to loathe the industry in general. It exhausted me. It still exhausts me, and Feministing's The Market Catches On To Girl Gamers kinda sums up why, even if it is focusing on console games.


For myself, role playing started informally with Let's Pretend and formally with tagging after my older brother to D&D games when I was 8, and as an adult I've had a love-hate relationship with the entire concept. At the moment, I'm very leery about getting back into role playing, but luckily there have been some great posts about table top and internet RPG's that have had me wanting to get back involved, if for no other reason than reminding me that gamers, for the most part, are really great people.

ladylakira (a friend I used to LARP with, back in the day, and is still very active in the LARPing community I left when I moved away) writes about Feminism and Gaming in her post I is Feminism-ing:

Women's degradation/lower status is deliberately brought to the foreground to emphasize disparity between the sexes, but men's roles and ramifications for falling outside of those roles are not consideredunless the man takes on a woman's role. For settings where there is sexism, anybody can name how women are treated badly and what their status is - there is almost never any discussion of how a mancan fall outside of an approved role and how a man can be ostracised/punished for it, even though that happened. Know another reason why I love Dogs in the Vineyard? It has a long list of the roles men and women were supposed to follow. Women were supposed to take care of children, do long hours of boring menial work, be terrified of guns,and never flinch at the sight of blood. Men were supposed to not be afraid of anything, do long hours of backbreaking labour and be a steward for his family (which did not mean "lord it over his chattel"but was a job for which he was held responsible if anything went wrong, on peril of his life sometimes, if the Dogs got to him and thought it was necessary). Men have roles in DitV, and are held accountable in ways women weren't (women could be afraid, for instance,and that was understandable) when they fall out of them, and that is cool. So, I guess my point is if you're going to make a display of the sexism in the setting, you should be prepared to answer the question"So how do the men get beat up too?"

Over at The Hathor Legacy, Melpomene writes about playing an historically-based Harry Potter RPG in a world where racism, sexism and homophobia don't "properly" exist in her ruminations on being an Anti-Racist Historian reflecting on Gaming:

But, unlike Dumbledore and JK Rowling’s “straight til proven otherwise” handling of sexuality, they’re open to the possibility of same-sex affection, a possibility unimpaired by such things as homophobia and the legal, social, and physical constraints facing queer women. It’s a beautiful world, where two maybe-bi tweens can jokingly ask each other to the Halloween ball, blithely ignoring things like race and social censure. But seriously, what does it mean to play a character of ambiguous sexuality on the cusp of the British feminist movement? We’replaying in the 1970s. It will be another thirty years until the British government makes it illegal to engage in work-place discrimination based on sexuality. The Act of 1533, the law used to condemn Oscar Wilde for buggery, had just been taken off the books in1967. We’re fantasizing on multiple levels.

And, in the latest issue of Cerise: The Gaming Magazine for Women (This month's issue is "Let's Talk About Sex" - how can you not want to check it all out?), Robyn Fleming interviews Shelly Mazzanoble, author of the book Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress, a book I must confess to having serious reservations about. The interview itself, however, makes me think I'd get along well with Ms Mazzanoble in my gaming group - we seem to have a similar sense of humour! [I should mention that Robyn Fleming is on my lj flist as revena, although we don't know each other offline. I think she's fabulous!]

RF: There’s a lot of focus on making D&D more appealing to “girly-girl” types in Confessions – can you explain a little bit about why you think this is important?

SM: My intention was to appeal to all women who have the slightest interest in D&D—girly-girls, girls who like video games but who had never heard of D&D, my friends . . . my mom! I ama girly-girl so that part of me can’t help but seep through. But that’s also just one part of who I am. I volunteer for women’s organizations and animal shelters. I’m a homeowner. I enjoy rearranging my 401K plan almost as much as I do my closets. Almost.

Learning D&D can be information overload so I wanted to outline the basics in an entertaining, less daunting way. I figured comparing daily spells to M&M intake is more entertaining than explaining the game theory behind it.

Sure I said those things in my game about having a designer haversack and getting our food rations at Costco but that was all very tongue in cheek. I know there wasn’t a Cheesecake Factory back in the Middle Ages. Come on! They couldn’t possibly have had enough variety of cheesecake to warrant one.

Moving over to online gaming, Alec at Castles in the Air and odanu at Feminist Gamers both take on the characters of William and Donna in World of Warcrackcraft.

Odanu's only slightly tongue-in-cheek review of William and Donna talks about the various fan-reactions to the two non-player characters in the game, and dissects them from a feminist perspective:

Donna perpetually chases William around town because he stole her“dolly” and won’t give it back. William perpetually taunts Donna and teases her about it and refuses to give it back. Player responses from the Google search fall into four basic categories. 1) Kill them both, they’re annoying, 2) Ooh, how cute, they’ll probably grow up and fall in love, 3) Someone needs to get that doll from William and give it back to Donna and 4) Gee, I hope Donna catches him and beats the%(*$@$^ out of him, (or the less violent version: “Donna needs to snatch her dolly back from William”).

While Alec's You can't /ignore NPC's talks about the reactions to both Donna and William in-game and parental reactions to child misbehaviour off-line:

The “boys will be boys” flavor that colors William’s behavior disturbs me deeply. When I see parents of young boys treat their male children’s misbehavior this way (and I’ve started to see it a lot, now that my daughter is two and interacts more and more with other children), I feel a bit of creeping despair. “Free to Be You and Me came out thirty-seven years ago!” I think. “Why do we still have Tender Sweet Young Things? And the very different Williamon that hopeful (if cheesy) album wanted a doll to nurture and love. Stormwind’s William is a petty sadist who wants a doll only to hurt Donna.”

To more general online-gaming, October's Xfire Debate Club was Women and Gaming, where Colette Bennet, Amber Dalton, Robyn Fleming, Jasmin Kassner, Helen Kennedy and Lesley Smith all discussed their various perceptions of how women and gender are treated in the anonymous world of on-line gaming:

[uwe]helen kennedy: Is there more pressure to somehow need to be even better than male colleagues or other male players just to get accepted
[Cerise] Robyn: but, yeah, I think there's pressure
Lesley Smith: Oh yeah
[uwe]helen kennedy: Have any of you experienced this directly as players or professionals?
[Cerise] Robyn: and also pressure to be the "right" kind of female player, depending on which sort of group one is trying to get along with
DestructoidColette: Personally for me there isn't, because I don't play competitively. I can say as a journalist sometimes there is an air of judgement from other journalists, but it isn't frequent in comparison to the ugly treatment some competitive female gamers face
Apocalyptica: I truly believe that after a certain age of 14-15, females do develop they own taste which is not formed by their parents no more. So some will be comepetitive some not, just like boys. I believe the difference lies more in culture as in gender
[uwe]helen kennedy: interesting Robyn, can you say more about what the 'right' kind of female player might be in different contexts?
[Cerise] Robyn: sometimes there's pressure to be "one of the guys", and not remind your fellow players that you -are- a woman
[Cerise] Robyn: and other times, the pressure is to be cute or sexy, or to play the damsel in distress, etc.
[uwe]helen kennedy: Apocalyptica & others.. what are the elements of 'culture' are particularly problematic?
Apocalyptica: But don't you think the pressure is just to be good. I mean when you are competitive does it really matter if your male or female? isn't just the drive to be the best what counts?
DestructoidColette: I think the image of women in games versus women who play games in real life is always an issue
[Cerise] Robyn: Apocalyptica, I think that -ought- to be the prevailing pressure, sure
DestructoidColette: women are still being heavily objectified in most games. Whether we like it or not, it has an impact on how we are viewed in general
[Cerise] Robyn: I definitely agree, Colette.
Lesley Smith: Exactly, I agree too.
Apocalyptica: For instance I find that in america girl tend to be more like girl as in europe for instance . Especially northern europe, where most people just wanna be people. When you sit in front of a computer you only need a mouse and a keyboard Stuff like physical strength, gender etc. don't matter at all

Did I mention the whole pink thing? I think I did mention the whole pink thing, and I gotta admit: the whole pink thing irritates me. There's nothing wrong with pink, but wow, does having everything sold to me as Girl Gamer coming at me in pink irritate me. In light of the news that women prefer "casual" online gaming, Yehuda talks about The disconnect between Casual Game Sites and the Women Who Play Them:

There's nothing inherently wrong with any type of game, whether it's combative, world-building, roleplaying, or makeup. But there's something seriously wrong with casual gaming sites - whose majority of players are women - if the builders think that "games for girls" means the following: {several screen caps of very pink gaming sites}

To wrap things up in our links about specifically on-line gaming, I want to just point to this post by Mighty Ponygirl at Feminist Gamers, Men Afraid To Admit They Like Casual Gaming, because of this great end to it:

While women are still the primary purchasers of casual games, men account for half of the playtime of casual games. This dovetails in an interesting way with studies that have shown that while women don’t necessarily purchase non-casual games, they do in fact play them a lot more than marketers initially thought,so really, all of the assumptions you could make about how gender determines videogame preference just makes an ass of u and mption.

From online gaming to console games, Cerise this month also hosted Gamer vs Gamer: The Virtue of Reality, where Mara Pulsen and Regina Buenaobra post opposing viewpoints on the appearance of women in console games. Says Pulsen:

Big boobs, round thighs, and the battle-kini are probably here to stay,so long as the game industry is primarily made by men for the consumption of other men. I think the casual gaming movement, though,is finally breaching the befuddlement of game industry executives as to what women–real, ordinary women, not just grrrrl gamers like me–might like to play. Still, as much as the gravity-defying perkiness of most videogame heroines makes me roll my eyes, I have more important things to worry about. I just strap on my goggles and my ten-year-old boy self has transported into someone else’s brain. It’s really weird in here.

And Buenaobra responds with:

In her article “Virtue of Reality,” Poulsen on one hand evinces distaste for female characters clad in attire intended to titillate male gamers, yet also acts as an apologist for the practice. She believes that, in spending a lot of time questioning why women are portrayed the way they are in games, we lose sight of the big picture –namely that games are not reality. She argues that games are “meant to emulate a life you could never have” and that they are an escape from reality, not a mirror. Apologists for the status quo use this argument to defend how women are portrayed in video games.

[Read the whole thing - it's written in standard debate form with Pulsen's original post, Buenaobra's rebuttal and then Pulsen's response to the rebuttal.]

This debate is most interesting in light of the response to what Activision/Neversoft did in their new game, Guitar Hero 3, and the "re-imaging" of Judy Nails. Plasma Rit at Girl in the Machine breaks it down to us (with pics!) in her post We're Not Gonna Take It, Activision:

Judy seems to have been attacked by a bear--just look at her! Her shirt's all torn up and falling off, and you can see her bra, which is oddly pink and doesn't match her shirt at all. Maybe she just threw something on while she was trying to get away. Poor girl.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with looking sexy--it's when it's so obviously for men only that it shuts out players like me. In looks, we lose our hardass rocker and get eye candy for men instead. Combine the shredded-in-the-right-places clothing and the infuriating boob physics, Activision has basically slapped a "For Boys Only" sign on Judy.

Jane at Game Girl Advance also talks about Judy Nails in My Guitar Heroes and Heroines, as well as a discussion about who she thinks should be part of the game:

Anyways, I have to admit that while I love playing the Guitar Hero series, I have never really listened to heavy metal or classic rock, so none of those dudes were really my personal guitar heroes. Slash?Carlos fucking Santana? WTF? Who cares? When I was learning guitar back, oh, a decade or so ago, I was inspired by my own heroes - and heroines, because frankly, the whole Guitar Hero series is missing some serious diversity there. Most of the musicians I swooned over as role models are women.

qem_chibati posts over on Insane Journal about her recent experiences as a play-tester for First Person Shooter Games in Where is my Hot Female Scientist Zombie: That is the Question:

The study's aims are difficult to say, but considering the questions, I believe it was about identification with characters and immersion and what people look in a FPS game for.

One of the topics that was brought up by some of the other girls, is that they would have identified more with the character and they thought that there would of been improvement in the game if they could have chosen a female character to which the guy had thoughts "but everyone knows female characters can't" that I informed him, he should be very cautious about if he wanted to finish them off. ...

Mighty Ponygirl's post seems like a great response to that, as she tells us about a game that maybe, just maybe, is opening up the genre a bit in her discussion of Portal: The latest, greatest women's game?:

The game is a first-person shooter style, so you don’t really see the person holding the gun often, but you will occasionally see a glimpse of yourself across the room as you head into a portal, and it’s a pleasant surprise to see that you’re playing as a woman. And you’re not actually playing as some dental-floss wearing hottie. No makeup, no six-inch heels (you’re wearing some gear on your legs to protect your legs from some of the more extreme acrobatics–but they ain’t pretty). A prison-orange jumpsuit with an undershirt underneath, and hair tied sensibly back and not floating around your head like a friggin’ mermaid. (Valve has done good by us before by giving us Alyx Vance,another character who understands the utter impracticality of attempting to adhere to traditional beauty standards when there’s serious work to be done).

And, just because a game is old, doesn't mean we aren't still talking about it. Moira at Feminist Gamers talks about the disposable girl that is Aeris in FFVII in Oh! The humanity!:

Let’s parse this a little, shall we? Aeris is a Nice Girl. She’s pretty. Not very strong physically, but she’s great with the magic, and the first healer the party gets. Very traditionally feminine,especially by video game standards. She gets impaled, penetrated by, Sephiroth’s Big Fucking Sword, not that anyone’s compensating for anything. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it’s a penis. Then she comes back as the deus ex machina that saves the world, but she doesn’t come back as herself, just this magical force that stops Meteor from killing everything.

[I'll admit it, every time I read "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it's a penis", I start giggling, but the whole post is an interesting discussion about the roles of disposable girls in video games. Being that "You Touched My Stuff" in movies is an irritating genre to me, I really liked this article.]


PC Gaming is not dead yet, and there are some great things out there in it.

Sadly, NeverWinter Nights is apparently not one of them. [In interest of full disclosure, I lived in Edmonton for several years, and I do know people who worked or still work for Bioware.] Thene at Aaru-Tuesday tells us about it in always Christmas and:

I've just got done replaying Neverwinter Nights and it's pretty stunning how much cock-soothing there is thrown in there - everyone from both the two female henchmen to many minor NPCs to one of the major villains is at it. I'm fond enough of Aarin Gend, but after trying it in gamer drag, he feels like famine. Solanas was right; a female PC is asexual, desireless, but a female NPC is an object, a fucktoy. [We will forgive NWN, but only because of Valen. Valen!]

But, all is not lost, as BomberGirl at Girl in the Machine tells us about a game that gets it right in Grand Adventures in Cyrondiil:

During my adventures throughout Cyrodiil, I have happily encountered none of the major sexist stereotypes that often plague fantasy settings. There is an abundance of female characters with wonderfully varying personalities. I've happily yet to encounter a sultry gypsy,whiny damsel, or mourning widow. Instead, women are knights, guild leaders, countesses, guards, bandits, mothers, vintners, alchemists,pirates, the list goes on and on. Just like in real life, women are(gasp!) just as diverse as men.

To wrap up the section on gaming, I do want to call attention to the series that Alec at Castle in the Air is writing about women gamers. I've already linked to Alec once above, but his other posts are very interesting, as well:

What Women Want From Games, More on Games for Girls, and A Hostile Play Environment.


And that draws us to the end of the Gaming Section of this month's Carnival. Please stand by for Part II, which includes discussion on Comics, the Media, and interviews with two women whose interaction with Fandom & Feminism have hit the media and changed, in some ways, how we talk about issues in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Thanks for reading so far, and please check back soon for Part II! and feel free to move on to Part II These Things We Love, and How We Interact With Them, and Part III Reviews, Reactions, and Recommended Further Reading.