Jumping Right In Front Of My Face

One of the reasons I often find my thoughts returning to GamerGate has to do with the fact that I was running a “games and gender” focused blog for a few years. I shut it down shortly before GamerGate happened, saying that I was throwing my hands in the air and pronouncing the intersection of videogames and gender to be a mere facet of a convoluted thought system I really didn’t care to explain, defend, study, or understand. 

It all had to do with an incident where some woman in an online chat group was having an apparent meltdown following what she described as bullying by male gamers. After asking a few questions, and provoking a few outbursts while doing that, the story came out. She was in an online multiplayer game. Some other gamers came up to her avatar, surrounded her, and had their avatars jump up and down. 

If they were saying anything, she couldn’t hear it as she played with chat disabled. There’s no physical contact in an MMO, you can walk right through people, so it’s not like they were harming her. She could have walked right through their jumping avatars. Or teleported her character to a new location, or entered a dungeon, or switched to a different character. 

I was trying to get to the bottom of this, because games and gender was supposedly my forte, and I wanted to see if I could help her – perhaps file a report against the assaulting players. Except … they hadn’t really done anything, but when I said that, she turned furious.

“They were jumping right in front of my face!!!!!”

And then a man who was in the chat said something like “there there, baby.”

And she turned to him and said “it was awful! Jumping right in front of my face!!!”

“You’ve been through a lot, baby,” he said, comfortingly.

“It was terrible,” she agreed, and I could almost see her falling into his arms as my clueless ass realized this was some kind of stupid mating dance that I’d stumbled across. Not an instance of misogynist oppression. For all I knew, the jumping avatars were his buddies and he’d asked them to annoy this computer-skills-lacking woman as an icebreaker. So he could take advantage of her lack of skills, maybe. And she was eating it up in that particular “desperate for male attention” sort of way that leads one to conclude she might possibly also be looking for people to take advantage of. 

That was the point in time when I declared that games and gender were both subjects way outside my scope of knowledge. I folded up my blog and proceeded to delete it, and that was well in advance of GamerGate. So I dodged a bullet as far as the resulting online wars. Since then I’ve positioned myself as an Absolute Neutral, in classic roleplayer terminology. I’m a gamer, and I’m a woman. I’m familiar with both of these things. 

From my game familiarity, I know there are a lot of women players. Some present themselves as men or only stick with friends and family. Some are sex workers looking for naïve men, large quantities of which are present in MMOs. Some are lonely ladies in search of romance, whether real or roleplay. Some just like games. Some were dragged in by their husbands-boyfriends-kids and developed a fondness. 

There are also a lot of gamers who are sexist bro types. A lot of the women I know, who do not play games, are convinced that this is the predominant type of gamer. And here comes a distracting side anecdote.

I’m also a major music fan. Recently the same article was linked by several of my friends and groups. The article concerned racist behavior by a handful of people involved with a music genre. 

When my music fan group linked it, an intelligent nuance discussion resulted, in which fans from all different races participated and contributed. This group normally posts about music, travel and fashion – happy things. 

When my writers’ group – which has lately become a repository for long, catastrophizing copypasta about politics – the reception was a lot different. “That whole genre is bad!” “Being a fan of anything is bad!” “People who waste their time on frivolous pastimes like music instead of politics are bad!” 

Since both groups are mostly women in the same age range, I started looking at differences, and the main one I noted was that the music people were priming each other with happy posts – songs, smiling girls displaying their outfits, invitations to gatherings. The writing people were wringing their hands over various flavors of impending doom. 

They were in that “jumping right in front of my face!!!” headspace, being absolute and judgmental, and infuriated, and absolutely nothing was likely to sway them. 

I’ve seen that same dynamic happen in a great many discussions ever since. People who operate like sentient beings when they’re not under emotional strain can turn into enraged robots, dividing the world into good and bad. All it takes is a steady flow of outrage posts. 

People who didn’t give a rat’s patootie about videogames before GamerGate suddenly read inflammatory material and decided “games are bad.” And people who had been on the losing side of outraged politically correct mobs, meanwhile, flocked to the offended gamers side and presented their own counter-theories like “feminism is bad.” 

And here we are today, stuck in some kind of bad parody of dialecticism that has ratcheted us down into a mosh pit of reactive contrarianism. Measles outbreaks while people are yelling “medicine is bad.” A censorship debate that has veered from “all censorship is bad” to “all books are bad” (seriously rotten time in history to decide you want to write fiction, let me tell you). 

I’ve been stubbornly resisting it on Facebook, hanging out with a cadre of non-spammy types who post good stuff – the album they’re listening to, a picture of their lunch, their trip to the park with their kid and how the leaves looked that day. All my other social media accounts are exclusively dedicated to music fandom. I even have an Instagram for the coat I wear to concerts, because I decorate it with a new patch for each one – sort of an inclusive old-lady version of the punk/metal battle jackets I used to wear in my youth. 

I kinda sorta maybe want to write more fiction. I also kinda sorta maybe want to make a quilt, and embroider some guitar straps, and refine my “in case of total economic collapse” busking set. I’ve got a remarkable singing voice now that my throat is mostly healed, kind of a mean old swamp witch type of sound, like someone who would be doing battle with Stevie Nicks. Although I have nothing against Stevie Nicks and in fact am going to see her in October. 

I think the thing that’s holding me back from making art is the same thing that made me wrap up my games and gender blog. The realization that everything these days gets transformed into a highly polarized issue, thickly layered with other peoples’ emotional experiences. 

For example, I can get behind a feminism that says “women don’t have to get married” and “women can get an education.” I can’t get behind one that leverages those ideas into “women who get teased because they’re new players have been subjected to horrific structural discrimination.” Or the kind of feminism that surfaced in one of my groups where someone declared that it was misogynist to tell a woman she’s wrong. 

As far as the question of who even is a woman, similar things happen as people react and reduce their arguments to polarities like “bodies are a social construct” and “we should imprison women who won’t wear pink.” 

My feminism, if you can call it that, these days runs to a narrow aspect of Korean feminism that I thought sounded intriguing. In Korean feminism there’s a list of things one should avoid doing with men, such as dating them, but there’s also a deliberate focus on building nonsexual friendships with other women.

This hit me like a bolt of lightning, probably because I come from a culture that is sexist in different ways, where the idea of women forming social bonds outside their immediate communities and families is not typically encouraged. So I’ve been participating in music fandoms with the aim of making women friends to enjoy music with. 

And I’ve been retreating from groups set up ostensibly to support activities, like creative writing, that end up being hunting grounds for sexual predators, or captive audiences for cosplay leaders, or potential consumers, or political sycophants. 

One of the things that fascinated me about being a gamer was the way groups functioned once people were mostly equalized in a virtual world where you can’t make snap judgments about people based on their clothes, appearance, accent, et cetera. One griefer can turn the experience into an agonizing stressful waste of time, but one good leader can transform an awkward pack into a winning team. 

And yeah, that one woman having a fit about cartoon characters jumping right in front of her face wasn’t really behaving in a charismatic and influential way, but she chased me right out of the subject of games and gender, because I decided there were so many emotions attached to the subject that it was useless to write about them from a limited context like videogames. The same problems that surface in games also surface in real life. If I’m in a culture where a woman overstates a threat as a way to look seductive in a mating context, talking about the reality of the threat is pointless. The reality has become the performance, not the inspiration for it, at least according to prevalent ways of thinking. 

I mean, I could draw parallels to the current battle over immigration. One side has women doing distress displays, and people acting protective. The other has nerds minimizing concerns, like my coldblooded refusal to appreciate the distress performance at face value. Everyone polarized and slinging poo at each other like monkeys in the zoo, while trying to prove they love/hate immigrants more than all the rest. Communication breakdown, for complex psychosocialsexual reasons. 

I had a beautiful live music experience last week, and my brain is still awash in happiness chemicals. I’m  even less inclined than usual to engage with polarizing rhetoric. I’m mostly in agreement with Pope Leo, I’ve noticed Bill Gates yelling at Elon Musk, and I’m feeling reassured that there are other people out there who are more interested in compassion than cruelty. I hope they prevail. 

Right now I’m reflecting back on the unwinnable games and gender war and thanking my spidey sense that I stepped out of that particular battle before things deteriorated sharply.

Images help SEO so I'm posting this photo of yarn for no other discernable reason