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I have to back up and getting a running start for this one, and ask the question “why do we game?” Because our motivations for gaming and liking the games that we do like may tell us about ourselves. I could be a much different gamer than I am: I prefer games that engage me intellectually over games that merely stimulate me visually, I enjoy twitchy games that have a sense of construction to them, I enjoy games that offer multiplayer co-op or low-key competition over high-stakes, high-adrenaline vs. mode. I don’t really respond to violence in games unless it’s comical: I’ve never responded to a spectacular head-splatter with awe when I could kill a guy by throwing a dead guy at him, or right-clicking on a chicken to make it explode.

I don’t feel that games influence our behavior, but I do feel that games have an ability to reflect who we are. Our decision to buy Game A over Game B is a construction of our choices and preferences at several levels. Someone who enjoys 3-round fighters may want to purchase every 3-round fighter published, but when it comes down to a limited budget, they will have to exercise some preference over which fighter they pick up. It may be that they would rather pick up the fighter that is as realistic as possible, or they may prefer to spend their money on the fighter that has the cooler attacks or bloodier deaths. It’s hard to dissect the motivations for that choice with much granularity. The game is just as likely to be a reflection of a person’s actual violent tendencies as it is simple wish-fulfillment or harmless escapism. And people may like different games for different reasons. Guitar Hero is probably the epitome of a wish-fulfillment game — I don’t know if there’s a gamer alive who doesn’t secretly have a notion of them rocking out to crowds of screaming fans when they get a 100-note streak for the first time. But just because I secretly wish I were the bassist for the next Awesome Indie Rock Band whenever I back up a friend on “Reptilia” doesn’t mean that I secretly wish I were a sullen emo immortal when I play Lost Odyssey or a member of The Rank chasing after certain doom in Castle Crashers. Attempting an even finer fillet of motivations based the statement “I play Soul Calibur” to determine the player’s views of race and/or gender would be pointless without getting into more detail about what they like about the game.

This is what frequently brings us trolls — pointing out that a person’s motivations for playing a particular game like Resident Evil 5 or Grand Theft Auto may not be simple escapism, and may in fact be a reflection of actual wish-fulfillment tends to get gamer’s hackles up. Pointing out that games can in fact provide wish-fulfillment or reflect real predispositions or attitudes in a less-than-positive way usually results in a reaction not unfamiliar to this blog. Tricky waters to navigate, indeed… but then ugly will find an out, so that’s always an easy way to tell if someone is playing a game for escapist reasons or because they’ve been ejected from the playground that is intellectual and moral honesty. Do they find themselves on the ass-end of a banning at gaming sites that actually have standards? Chances are they’re not playing games for simple escapism.

But the sometimes drawing a simple Motivation A to Game B line really is that easy. (more…)

Alexandr pointed me towards this story of the murder of Melissa Batten, a developer for the XBox team.

According to a Seattle Times report, Batten had obtained a protection order against her estranged husband on July 21, reporting that he had called her more than 30 times over July 19 and 20 and also broken into her Microsoft workplace on July 16, where he was apprehended by security guards. But her greatest concern stemmed from his ownership of a handgun, which she discovered on June 5.

“The biggest incident which clouds all his subsequent behavior occurred on June 5. He had, unbeknownst to me, obtained a gun,” she wrote in her request for a protection order. The couple were still living together at the time of the discovery, she said, which took place when she confronted him over an extramarital affair. Batten said that her husband “brandished the gun from the back waistband of his jeans and pointed it at me.”

Her husband killed himself after he murdered her.

It is hardly unsurprising that most of the comments on the gaming sites like Kotaku would dismiss this as an act of isolated nuttiness, even as others used it as a opportunity to ask why the U.S. has such a high instance of murder-suicides. But I shouldn’t just target the gamer community, they’re only reflecting a larger public consensus to tutt-tutt and look the other way when something like this happens.

But here’s the thing about murder-suicides. (more…)

Tomorrow is the 43rd anniversary of the historic Surpreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut, which established that women have the right to privacy, and the right to control their fertility, by allowing them the right to birth control.

That’s right, birth control. Roe v. Wade would not clarify a woman’s right to privacy as it pertained to the ability to terminate a pregnancy until 8 years later, (not that you shouldn’t celebrate that decision, as well). It wasn’t that long ago that women were not legally guaranteed the right to take birth control pills or purchase condoms. Since Griswold, the vast majority of women have made use of contraception both outside of and within marriage in order to control their fertility so that they can enjoy sexual relations with men without fearing the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy. As a result, family violence rates have declined (people are less likely to abuse kids they wanted) and maternal death rates plummeted. Women were able to complete their educations and enter the work force, leading to a more robust economy. And to top it off, they still had babies, and the fear that all civilization would end proved premature. Truly, there has not been anything so important not only to the advancement of women’s rights; but also to the economic empowerment of entire generations of people; as the ability to privately and safely control her fertility has been used by women to decide when and with whom to have children.

So you can imagine how pissed off I am that The American Life League (one of the largest “pro-life” organizations in the country) is taking the anniversary of this wonderful ruling to stage a protest the pill day. According to the American Life League, The Pill Kills! (more…)

Big ol’ hattip to Amanda.

My score isn’t that great, although I avoid some of the bad stuff on technicalities, like not wearing hose or nailpolish or aprons, and saving all of my flirting at parties for women.

It’s nice to know that my ability to play the trombone is considered a merit.

I love #s 11 and 12 on the Merit… “takes care of all the religious stuff for the household and lets her husband sleep in.”

So I’m sure most of you have heard about the Open Source Boob Project. As my linking indicates, most other awesome feminist bloggers have done a great job of breaking this one down for me.

For those who need the abbreviated version, a dude at Penguicon decided to liken the open source movement to the need to grope boobs. Because just like software, women should stop selling their bodies and making completely arbitrary rules about what people can and cannot do with or to their bodies (like bitches should have any say on that matter!), and instead just trade them around for people to make their own adjustments and tweaks to for the betterment of the community.

Except he didn’t say it exactly like that.

So the upshot of the con was that women walked around with buttons indicating whether or not it was acceptable for a complete stranger to come up and ask to grope them. Be mindful: there was no reciprocity–while I’m sure there were plenty of man-boobs at the convention as well, there was no “touch my ass” or “grab my sack” button that a man could wear. And this was all so that the poor scarred psyches of the male geeks could be stroked and petted because they had such traumatic high school experiences, unlike the geek girls, who I’m sure were all voted Homecoming queen and head cheerleader.

The Ferrett has updated his post to whine about how this whole thing is being blown out of proportion and it’s the perfect example of how you can take a bunch of cool women and extrapolate out and us bitches who object to the idea that the only important thing about a woman would be a button on her chest indicating whether or not you could grope said chest are just ruining it for the other women.

Except he didn’t say it exactly like that.

Instead, we get a contrite declaration that the project needs to be suspended:

And the chances that the Project would get fucked up, making con spaces more amenable to hordes of stalkers and mouthbreathers who will grope and maul women, are pretty damn big. Hell, it’s already made women feel less safe by me mentioning it, and that makes me feel like shit. As it should.

Call me cynical, but after a bunch of women wrote in the thread about how they were seriously considering never attending a con again because they didn’t want to be sexually assaulted by some over-privileged dipshit male, I get the feeling that his apology was driven more by the fear that the ladyflesh would go in short supply and he wouldn’t be able to ogle beautiful girls in incredibly skimpy blue princess outfits. And what a tragedy that would be for the poor men… it would be like high school all over again.

God I feel bad for any woman who attended that con who was a rape survivor.

Related reading: From the ‘Me’ generation to the ‘Mine’ generation.

A very sad story out of York, Pennsylvania: A 2-year-old girl died after being beaten with a video game controller by her mother’s boyfriend.

Already, many gamers are getting the “omgthey’regoingtooutlawvideogamesbecauseofthis” panics. Which is an extremely selfish, fucked-up response to the story–but none less than I would have come to expect from the community.

I’ve blogged about how feminism means less child abuse and death before, and I stand by those statements. And something tells me that the mom who didn’t intervene was probably doing so out of self-preservation, so the fact that she’s being charged as well isn’t passing the sniff-test so far.

But there are two important things going on here that gamers need to understand: This sort of “horrific” news story is nothing to be surprised at in a world where women and children are considered “property” to a man, and in a culture that hates and degrades women it’s not just the outliers who feel that they are allowed, entitled, and even encourage to physically abuse their partners and children.

More importantly: in a culture where a patriarchal structure based on misogyny sees a horrific crime that is beyond the pale of “normal” misogyny, every attempt will be made to prevent the blame for this crime coming back to the patriarchal, misogynistic structure that fostered the crime. Hence, gamers are (understandably) worried that this will fuel yet another backlash against games, when they know that games did not make this man murder his girlfriend’s daughter any more than dogs made David Berkowitz kill people.

These sorts of crimes will sadly not end anytime soon. So long as a child is beaten or killed in a household that even contains a console, the media will find a way to link that killing to videogames because words like ‘misogyny,’ ’sexism,’ and ‘patriarchy’ are forbidden in mainstream journalism. Our culture always goes out of its way to write off violence against women and children as anything but a systemic problem as a result of a culture that degrades women.

Update: I realize I didn’t make a good link back to the title of the post. What I’m trying to say here is: We all know that videogames are being scapegoated. But whenever someone offers up a scapegoat, it’s because they’re trying to avoid taking responsibility for the real culprit. The Media-with-a-capital-M has made millions off of the objectification of women (from using half-naked women to sell cheeseburgers to titilating rape-porn on prime-time TV). People raised in our culture are bombarded constantly with the message that women and children are “less than.” Some of us overcome that programming, some don’t, and it expresses it in varying degrees of violence against women and children… sometimes horrifically as we have seen here. These things keep happening — they are not just tidy isolated incidents that can be swept under the rug, and so the media is looking for something to blame and they’re chosing videogames. If gamers join us when we cry “bullshit,” we stand stronger together for it. But if we really want these things to stop and not just give the media time to find another scapegoat (and they will), we have to hold their nose in the real culprit… a culprit they themselves are likely responsible for.

Trolls be aware: I have zero sense of humor about women and children being beaten and killed and will not indulge you in comments.

During my daily checkup of my news feeds, I expect to get a handful of “videogames are horrible!” op-ed pieces thrown into my search terms. It’s just how it happens. When I saw that WorldNetDaily (an extremely right-wing conserva-rag) had an article entitled Violent Video Games Free Speech? I admit I was intrigued enough to give it a click — because WingNutDaily is often a treasuretrove of misinformed hysterics that can in fact be entertaining. Imagine my delight, then, when I see that the article’s author was none other than Phyllis Schlafly–the bloodless nightstalker who helped engineer the defeat of the ERA and spends her weeks drawing a paycheck telling other women that they shouldn’t draw a paycheck!

Alas, Schlafly is not offering us anything new in her screed. She ignores the fact that there is a ratings system in place to protect kids from buying inappropriate games, she ignores the fact that you can get violence just as meaty in the theater, although she’s much more honest and open about how the Bible and “high literature” should be the only things protected under the First Amendment: (more…)

Oh my stars. Here I come off of one General Feminism post just to turn around and launch into another.

Science Daily reports on a new study that’s been released to explain why it is that women’s feeble lady-brains are just not capable of loving videogames with the same depth that men do. (more…)

I won’t lie to you — Amanda’s recent post about the feminism being the root cause of male underachievement, with videogames being the escape pod for harried men has me absolutely green with envy. This level of writing is why I’m vying for head pom-pom girl in the Amanda fanclub.

Amidst the skewering of the various bullshit theories put forth by antifeminists leaping forth to explain how feminism is to blame for whatever problem happens to be in their brain, there are some very important points Amanda makes that are worth highlighting and elaborating upon: (more…)

Lou Kesten of the A.P. rounds up a week’s news in videogames and there are a couple of items in there that perfectly illustrate something that’s been on my mind the last few days. (more…)