On GIFthorses & Mouths: How GIFs Are Changing Critical Analysis

Though gifs have been around since 1987, the format has achieved a new prominence in the past few years, and has now become an increasingly integral part of online discourse . Given their early history, this is arguably a surprising development. Back in the 1990s, gifs tended to be brightly coloured, often garish pixel animations, and before the end of the decade, their usage had became synonymous with bad web design. Their overuse was partly responsible for the development of the phrase banner blindness, and in 1999, there was even an early Penny Arcade strip, Macromedia FlashDance, satirising the problem:

As more sophisticated image formats were developed, gifs fell out of favour, and though they remained in usage as a source of internet humour throughout the early noughties, it wasn’t until photo-based social media platforms like tumblr began to take off post-2010 that the format started to achieve its current prominence. The widespread availability of simple gif creation tools has also contributed to their ubiquity, as has the fact that, ten years on from the arrival of YouTube, it’s now extremely easy to find high-quality video of just about anything online. Like a literal equivalent to the proverbial Rule 34, if a video exists, it can – and probably will – be giffed, and given the fact that the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee just issued a press release consisting almost entirely of gifs, it seems fair to say that both the medium and practice has gained a traction beyond the subcultural.

But despite the now-common presence of gifs in online news articles and their widespread use as reaction images, very little seems to be being said about the profound, almost radical impact they’re having on our critical analysis of visual media. Gifs are looped videos: perpetually in motion. They show discreet, specific moments of narrative, and while the format is silent, the fact that they can be captioned or subtitled enables the preservation of dialogue. Which means, in essence, that for the first time in the history of visual media studies, we can directly compare multiple sections of multiple videos on the one screen, at the same time, in a loop, without having to wrangle multiple muted video players, assuming that was ever a viable option. Because gifs can be embedded in a piece of text, we can illustrate a digital essay on a given film or TV show by literally showing the reader the scene, or scenes, we’re describing, without requiring that they click away from the page. And because gifs are looped, we never have to stop and rewind: we can immerse ourselves in the subtleties of a given moment – the repeated sweep of a well-executed panning shot, the subtleties of an actor’s microexpressions – without additional technical distractions.

And this is significant: not just because it enables a deeper, more thorough analysis of visual media, but because it makes that analysis both overt and accessible in a way it wasn’t before. A well-constructed gifset is a thing of tremendous beauty, and the more of them I see, the more I’m convinced that we’re in the midst of an academic paradigm shift. It’s not just that gifsets let us contrast the dialogue, cinematography, composition and acting of various visual narratives side-by-side in unprecedented ways, or even the fact that anyone, potentially, can make one; it’s the that this tremendously useful ability is online-only at a time when the vast majority of academic writing, even when digitally accessible, is stuck in static, access-restricted, locked-in formats, despite the fact that most everyone else is using free blogging platforms. Technically, gifs can be inserted into PDFs, but it’s uncommon to try, difficult to achieve, and without the use of particular plugins, the end result won’t work – and as PDFs are seemingly the most common form of academic document, that presents something of an obstacle to their adoption.

Academic publishing, as an institution, is one of the most nakedly dinosauric and profit-driven industries around. Much content is peer-reviewed for free, saving publishers the expense of paying for professional editors. For books, cover designs are frequently minimalist, again saving on production costs, and in the case of journals – and despite the often exorbitant cost of subscribing to their output – contributors are unpaid. While there can be significant differences in practice from discipline to discipline and some notable exceptions regardless, generally speaking, academic publishing takes advantage of its captive audience of students and professors in order to charge sky-high prices for textbooks and journals alike, despite the comparatively low overheads involved in their creation. As such, the innovation of something that’s desperately relevant to academic critical analysis, but which is currently proliferating for free in non-academic formats, not only due to its widespread accessibility and pop cultural origins, but because academic journals haven’t yet moved to include it, is worth investigating further.

Because gifs, I would contend, are relevant to more disciplines than just film studies, which is the obvious one to mention. Arguably their greatest point of utility is their ability to magnify microexpressions: those fleeting, tiny, there-and-gone tics that often betray our deepest reactions to things, and which, for all the volumes they speak in person, can be so easily lost in other formats. While this newfound ability to study the nuanced microexpressions of actors has undeniably added to both our appreciation and interpretation of their performances, it also has significant utility when turned elsewhere. Gifs of politicians, journalists and other prominent figures abound, and are slowly but steadily changing the nature of public discourse. Not only is there something powerful in being able to capture, recycle and disseminate (for instance) Tony Abbott’s lecherous wink during a radio interview with a pension-aged sex-line worker, but distributing gifsets of political interviews or parliamentary sessions has become commonplace even beyond their countries of origin, with the captions sometimes appearing in translation. Though full episodes of The Daily Show aren’t legally available outside the USA, for instance, gifsets of its various sketches and interviews are frequently shown elsewhere, their creation and dissemination falling within the guidelines of fair use, and the same is equally true of other programmes.

That being so, it’s hardly surprising that gifsets have inspired an enormous amount of analysis, meta and commentary online, the vast majority of which exists outside of traditional academic channels. Which isn’t to say that such content lacks either academic merit or rigour, however informal the use of language; rather, it means that academic conversations are no longer happening within purely academic spaces. In fact, given the undeniable presence of both amateur and professional academics on sites like tumblr, whose digital format both enables back-and-forth discourse and the ability to site sources through links, there’s an argument to be made that the internet had lead to the creation of a new type of academic space, one as yet unmediated by academic institutions. The proliferation of gifs is just a small part of this, but as a highly visible facet of the phenomenon, it makes for an interesting point of entry into some of these larger developments.

However academia develops in the coming decades, it would be foolish to underestimate the relevance of the internet and visual media – and of the ability of pop cultural innovations to have academic applications.

 

 

Crowdsourcing Equality

As has been well-documented by now, subconscious bias is a tricky thing. With the best will in the world, it’s still entirely possible to be blindsided by privilege; to make linguistic, social or narrative choices that reinforce negative stereotypes or which disenfranchise others. This is why it’s so important to think critically about the media we consume and the stories we tell, and to listen when others point out patterns in our behaviour – whether culturally or individually – that are indicative of a deeper, more subtle prejudice. Despite the irrevocable fact that humans are creatures of culture, it can be difficult to determine the origins of our default settings, if only because it disquiets us to think that hidden elements might be influencing our decisions. What does free will mean, if our actions are ultimately informed by beliefs we never knew we held? As tempting as it is to think of subconscious bias as a sort of Jedi mind-trick (something that only works on the stupid or weak-willed; which is to say, other people), that’s only a comforting lie. Our brains get up to all sorts of mischief without our conscious supervision – everything from catching a ball to regulating our hormones – so why should our thoughts be sacrosanct?

The intersection of the collective and the personal, therefore, is a fascinating place: the junction at which we as individuals both shape the culture around us and are shaped by it in turn – a symbiotic ecosystem whose halves have merged, oroborous-like, into a whole. Our actions, no matter how unique to us in terms of motivation, don’t happen in a vacuum; but despite its ubiquity, culture as a concept is amorphous. Trying to convince someone that their behaviour has been influenced by external social pressures – particularly if the end result undermines their good intentions – is like nailing smoke to the wall. I know what I meant, people say, and it had nothing to do with that. And if you don’t know what I was thinking, then how can you possibly judge me?

Let me tell you a story. As a child, I was deeply, innately contrary, but in a very specific way: I couldn’t bear to be told, “You’ll like this!” Even at the age of five, it seemed like such a wholly offensive assumption  – the very cheek of it, adults daring to lecture me on my preferences! – that I would instantly resolve, with the stubborn, bodily determination of children, to hate on principle anything that was thusly recommended. By contrast, anything I was told I wouldn’t like because it was too old for me, or that I wouldn’t understand, I made a perverse effort to enjoy: I simply couldn’t bear the idea that anyone else might know me as well as – or better than – I did. Had my parents ever thought to deploy it, reverse psychology doubtless would’ve worked a treat; instead, I ended up fleeing the room with my hands clapped over my ears when my father first tried to read me The Hobbit, so adamant was my refusal to meet his expectations. I’ve grown much less contrary with age, of course, but even so, it’s still an active process: I have to constantly watch myself, and a big part of that is acknowledging that other people’s opinions don’t magically become invalid just because they’re assessing my thought process.

The point being, external criticism is just as important as internal certainty. The two perspectives are a necessary balance, and while being firmly mired in my own brain is a viewpoint unique to me, that doesn’t mean other people can’t make relevant observations about my behaviour – or, more importantly, about my place in a pattern to which my privilege has rendered me oblivious.

Which brings me to the current explosion of websites, memes, Twitter feeds and tumblrs dedicating to crowdsourcing proof of the ubiquity of prejudice. Once upon a time, for instance, if a colleague or acquaintance made a disturbing remark at the pub – such real-world locales being the default point of comparison whenever we start worrying about being held accountable for the things we say online – then there’d be no record of the comment beyond the level of individual memory. At best, we might have written it down as close to verbatim as possible, but then what would happen? Nothing, as there was nowhere to put such information and no reasonable means of distributing it. More likely, we’d vent our outrage by retelling the story to others, but with each iteration, the tale would weaken, eventually becoming little more than an anecdote whose relevance our audience could deny, or whose truthfulness they could question, on the basis of a lack of solid evidence. ‘It was just a one-off,’ they might say – but without the testimony of others to support our claim that the remark was representative of a bigger problem, how could we possibly prove otherwise?

Now, though, people’s prejudicial comments are anything but ephemeral. Everything from status updates to dating profiles is a matter of public record, and even if we go back and try to edit or delete our words, the simple magic of screencapping means that an original copy may still exist. When that sort of data is passed along, there can be no uncertainty as to what was really said, because nothing is being degraded in the transmission. Even in instances where sites are collecting, not screencaps, but personal stories of bias and discrimination, the cumulative effect of seeing so many similar incidents ranged together serves to undermine the suggestion that any one victim was simply overreacting. Thanks to the interconnectedness of the internet, disparate individuals are now uniting to prove that the prejudice they experience is neither all in their heads nor the result of isolated bigotry, but rather part of a wider, more pervasive cultural problem. And where such data is collected en masse, it becomes progressively harder to deny the truth of their experiences: because if our whole reason for doubting specific accounts of prejudice is based on the assumption of an unreliable narrator, then how are we to justify our dismissal of hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of similar cases?

Frustrated by constantly encountering the same sort of sexist abuse online and then being told that the problem was a minor one perpetrated solely by idiot teenage boys, female gamers responded by setting up Fat, Ugly or Slutty and Not In The Kitchen Anymore, two hefty databases of audiofiles, screenshots and in-game videos that stand as collective testament to the scope of their routine harassment. Sick of being told that their experiences of condescension and exclusion from sexist, racist colleagues was only so much thin-skinned paranoia, academics have begun documenting their experiences at sites like Mansplained and What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?, the better to highlight the prevalence of such bias. Tired of seeing female characters drawn in objectifying postures that are, quite literally, anatomically impossible, discerning fans have set up sites like Boobs Don’t Work That Way and Escher Girls to document the problem. In recent days, when Twitter has been inundated with racism in response to topics as varied as the US election results and the recent Red Dawn movie, angry netizens have collectively banded together to take screenshots, collate the data and then name and shame those responsible, as per the modus operandi of sites like Hello There, Racists and Hunger Games Tweets. For street harassment, there’s any number of tumblrs to choose from – which is itself a depressing reflection on just how common a problem it is – along with sites like Hollaback and Catcalled that are trying to combat the issue directly.

There are collective resources for day to day instances of sexism, like About Male Privilege, Everyday Media Sexism and Everyday Sexism; resources for sexual harassment and abuse, like Got Stared At; and Twitter feeds dedicated to weeding out some of the more disturbing quotes from sites like Reddit and various PUA (Pick-Up Artist) message boards. There’s also the utterly heartbreaking Project Unbreakable, which consists of pictures of rape survivors holding up signs bearing chilling quotes from their rapists. From the LGBTQ side of things, there are tumblrs like I’m Not Homophobic, But (two of them, actually); Dear Cis People, which is a collective of messages from trans individuals trying to counter prejudice; and Things My Transphobic Mother Says, which does what it says on the tin. And then, of course, there’s seemingly endless bingo cards: arguments that various communities have heard so many times as to render them both offensively unoriginal and predictive of the ignorance of their interlocutors. Examples include Anti-Comics Feminist Bingo, Sexism In Games Bingo, Racism In SF Bingo, Political Racism Bingo, MRA Bingo, Homo/Biphobic Bingo and GLBT Fiction Bingo – and that’s just for starters.

As demonstrated by the mixed public reaction to the recently established Nice Guys of OK Cupid tumblr (to say nothing of the outrage its existence has provoked among detractors), this new breed of public shaming, whereby ordinary people are publicly mocked for saying bigoted, offensive, or downright creepy things on the internet, tends to be viewed with a combination of schadenfreude, resentful worry and outright rubbernecking – and yet, at the same time, it undeniably fills a relevant need. Because, as demonstrated by the recent exposure of Redditor Michael Brutsch, aka Violentacrez and the concurrent discovery of actual criminal behaviour within his subreddits, there can be a disturbing correlation – though not necessarily causation – between saying horrendous things online about women, POC and LGBTQ persons, and actually threatening, endangering or actively harming such persons through hate speech, stalking or other criminal behaviour. Legally, however, there’s almost no way to take such behaviour as a warning sign and initiative useful preventative strategies: until or unless someone actually ends up hurt – thought of course, psychological suffering is seldom counted – the justice system is useless. Employers and schools, on the other hand, have proven themselves more than willing to sack or discipline staff and students whose online hijinks attract the wrong kind of attention – or, more worryingly, who simply dare to be critical of the institutions to which they belong; while some have even been fired for defending themselves from overt discrimination.

This is hardly an ideal situation, not least because it places the burden of extrajudicial justice into the hands of individuals whose only available form of reprimand – the withdrawal of money or education – is arguably the worst possible reaction to such offenses. Aside from doing nothing to address the root cause of the problem and everything to exacerbate a sense of entitled resentment that the mighty forces of Politically Correct Censorship are reaching out to ruin the lives of ordinary, hard-working people, this sort of trial by media – or rather, trial by institutional response to trial by media – sets a dangerous precedent in allowing organisations unparalleled scope to punish employees, not for their on-job actions, but for who they are as people. And yet, by the same token, we as humans don’t just switch off our bigotry the minute we clock on at work or enter school grounds. If an employee’s online behaviour is saturated with undeniable racism and misogyny – and if that person is employed alongside women and POC – then how can their beliefs in the one sphere not be demonstrably relevant to their actions in the other? If subconscious bias is enough to measurably affect the decisions of even the most well-intentioned people, then how much more damaging might the influence of conscious bias be?

More and more, it seems, we’re crowdsourcing our stories of prejudice – and, as a consequence, policing ourselves and others – out of a sense of desperation. Despite technically being on our side, in the sense that most forms of discrimination on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation are illegal, the legal and judiciary systems are years away from being able to effectively intervene in instances of online harassment, while even the concept of a dedicated mechanism, agency or other such authoritative body designed to step in and address the problem in lieu of random mob justice feels improbable. Eventually, it’s inevitable that both our cultural assumptions and our standard response to online bigotry will evolve, but progress towards that point will be slow and haphazard, and in the mean time, there’s still an obvious problem to be addressed.

Writing several years ago on the decline of traditional print media, technological commentator Clay Shirky drew a comparison between our current state of change and the turmoil that was first produced by the introduction of the printing press. To quote:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

And so it is, I suspect, with the rules that previously governed the separation of our personal, public and working lives. All three spheres overlap in ways they previously didn’t simply because our physical presence in a given space is no longer the most pertinent factor in determining when and how we inhabit it, and under whose aegis. Intuitively, it makes sense to assume that someone who believes women to be inherently submissive will shrink from promoting female employees to positions of dominance, because even were such a person inclined to try and act against their instincts for the sake of corporate equality, we as people aren’t so compartmentalised that the attempt would always meet with success. And yet, what else can we do but try? Nobody is perfect, and the solution to deep-seated bigotry isn’t simply to fire or expel everyone who dares to express the least bit of prejudice; all that does is encourage the use of subtle discrimination, while the underlying problems still remain. In the mean time, though, we have shaming tumblrs and bingo cards and angry, public discussions about the cognitive dissonance necessary to claim that one is a gentleman while simultaneously asserting that sometimes, other people are obliged to have sex with you, because society is yet to construct a viable alternative.

It’s by no means a perfect solution – or even, in fact, a solution at all. Rather, it’s a response to the widespread assumption that there isn’t even a problem to be solved, or which can be solved, or which is demonstrably worth solving. And until we’ve debunked that assumption, there’s nothing else to be done but to keep on amassing data, calling out bigotry and using such tools as are available to us to see what happens next. As Shirky says, it’s a revolution, and until we’ve come out on the other side, there’s simply no way of knowing what will happen. All we can do is watch and wait and learn – and keep on tumblring.

 

Bullying & Goodreads

Little more than a week ago, a website aimed at naming and shaming so-called Goodreads ‘bullies’ suddenly appeared online – called, appropriately enough, Stop the GR Bullies. Run by four concerned ‘readers and bloggers’ writing anonymously under the handles Athena, Peter Pan, Johnny Be Good and Stitch, the site thus far seems bent on punishing the creators of snide, snarky and negative book reviews by posting their handles, real names, locations and photos in one place, together with a warning about their supposed ‘level of toxicity’ and some (ironically) snide, snarky and negative commentary about them as people. There’s a lot here to unpack, but before I get started on why this is a horrifically bad idea, let’s start with some basic context.

As a website, Goodreads itself is something of a chimaera, being in roughly equal parts an online literary database, a social networking platform, a book review site, a promotional tool for bloggers, a promotional tool for authors, and a social forum for readers. This complexity is both its primary attraction and the single biggest source of contention among users, as the crowdsourced nature of much of the information available, in conjunction with the fact that the site itself has no in-house moderators – meaning that the majority of alleged violations of the terms of service must be manually referred to and assessed by Goodreads before they can possibly be removed – means that, to all intents and purposes, the site can and does frequently function like any large, unmoderated forum, viz: wildly. As the TOS is at pains to point out, Goodreads considers itself a third party where user content is concerned. To quote:

We are only acting as a passive conduit for your online distribution and publication of your User Content.

Of particular relevance in this case is the specific type of user content deemed inappropriate by the TOS. To quote again:

You agree not to post User Content that… (v) contains any information or content that we deem to be unlawful, harmful, abusive, racially or ethnically offensive, defamatory, infringing, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, harassing, humiliating to other people (publicly or otherwise), libelous, threatening, profane, or otherwise objectionable.

However, it’s also relevant to note the following caveats (emphasis mine) – namely, that:

Goodreads reserves the right, but is not obligated, to reject and/or remove any User Content that Goodreads believes, in its sole discretion, violates these provisions… 

You understand and acknowledge that you may be exposed to User Content that is inaccurate, offensive, indecent, or objectionable, and you agree that Goodreads shall not be liable for any damages you allege to incur as a result of such User Content. Goodreads may provide tools for you to remove some User Content, but does not guarantee that all or any User Content will be removable.

In other words: even if you can argue compellingly that another member has violated the TOS with regards to user content, Goodreads is under no obligation to agree, to listen, or in fact do anything at all: their commitment is to passive third party provision of a useful service, not to the active moderation of user content, and while that’s certainly their legal right, in practical terms, it means that the onus for modding conversational threads, forums, reviews and everything else rests squarely with the user in question. To quote again:

You are solely responsible for your interactions with other Goodreads Users. We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other Users. Goodreads shall have no liability for your interactions with other Users, or for any User’s action or inaction.

In keeping with the universally applicable logic of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, every online community of sufficient size will inevitably attract trolls, harassment, bullying and all manner of accordant awfulness, with the level of active moderation being literally the only bulwark against anarchy. Not being a regular participant in Goodreads threads or forums – though I am an active user of the site as an author, reviewer and reader – I’m not in a position to comment on how often Goodreads actually steps in to ban abusive members, remove problematic comments or otherwise moderate user content either on demand or of their own volition: all I can note is that legally, they have no obligation to take any action at all. Clearly, though, a number of users feel that the lack of in-house moderation has lead to the creation of a negative, if not actively toxic, environment in some quarters, with the result that some members have now taken it upon themselves to lead a public campaign against those they deem to be the worst offenders.

One more piece of context, before we continue: both within Goodreads itself and throughout the wider book blogging community, the ongoing debate about niceness vs. snark in reviews is intensely relevant to the problem at hand. While the argument itself has many facets – should aspiring writers post negative reviews, or strive to embrace a ‘be nice’ attitude? are authors, editors, agents and publishers within their grounds to reject aspiring writers who’ve written negative reviews of authors they work with or know, or is this a form of discriminatory nepotism? is the primary purpose of book blogging to act as ‘cheerleaders’ for authors, or to give good consumer advice to readers? – what it frequently boils down to is a dispute over judgements of taste. Or, more specifically: at what volume or intensity does the presence of comedic snark in a book review see it go from being a professional opinion to unprofessional abuse?

It’s very much a your mileage may vary question, which is, I suspect, why Goodreads has the policy of passive non-interference that it does. By definition, not everyone is going to agree with a book review, and given that the utility of their service is predicated on people who love (or hate) books being free to discuss them, they’re naturally going to be loathe to police the tone of such conversations too heavily for fear of undermining their own purpose. However, it’s also important to note that, due to the Goodreads site layout, the usual handy metaphors for personal vs public pages – an intensely relevant distinction when it comes to questions of harassment, as it has the effect of dictating which party is the guest/invader, and which the host/native – don’t precisely apply. For instance: on a traditional internet forum, threads are analogous to public spaces, with the default authority resting either exclusively with the in-house moderators or creator/s, or jointly between the two. Abuse is, as elsewhere, defined as either vituperative ad hominem attacks or generic -ism-based slander; however, due to the clear distinction between attacking someone in a public thread and attacking them outside the context of the discussion – which is to say, on their user page, via email or, in instances where it’s not in direct response to something they’ve posted there, on their personal site – we don’t generally upgrade the abuse to bullying or harassment unless it makes that transition. To be clear: this doesn’t excuse abusive behaviour. Nonetheless, there is a relevant and meaningful distinction between saying, ‘I think Author X is a shit writer’ on a public thread, and going to their personal page to say, ‘I think you’re a shit writer’. On Goodreads, however, this distinction is blurred, because while reviews and their attendant conversational threads fall under the governance of the user-reviewer, they’re also attached to the relevant book and its author-governed page; meaning, in essence, that there’s an overlap between the author’s personal space (assuming the author in question is a member of the site) and the reviewer’s.

And, not surprisingly, this can cause major friction, not just between authors and negative reviewers, but between fans of authors and negative reviewers. In some instances, it’s analogous to carrying on a bitchy conversation within earshot of the person you’re talking about, with the added rider that, as this is also a professional space for the author, they’re not allowed to retaliate – or at least, they can do so, but regardless of the provocation, they’ll come off looking the worse. Which leads to fans – and, sometimes, friends – of authors leaping to their defense, often with disastrous results, and sometimes using language that’s on par with anything they’re actually objecting to.

But here’s the thing: any public figure, regardless of whether they’re an author, actor, sportsperson or journalist, must resign themselves to a certain amount of public criticism. Not everyone will like you, your work or even necessarily your profession, and nor will they be under any obligation to protect your sensibilities by being coy about it. A negative review might mean you lose sales, but that’s not a gross unfairness for which the reviewer should be punished, no matter how snarky they are: it is, rather, a legitimate reflection of the fact that, in their personal and professional estimation as a consumer of your work, they don’t believe that other people should buy it. And yes, you’re allowed to feel sad about that, but it’s still going to happen; it’s still going to be legal and normal. At times, your personal and public lives will blur, or else specific criticism will invite others to consider the relationship between your output and your private beliefs – and this will sometimes be relevant to discussions of your work and its themes, as per the fact that Stephanie Meyers’s Mormonism is relevant to the morality used in Twilight (for instance). Sometimes you’ll even be called names or find yourself on the receiving end of ad hominem attacks, where people say you’re a stupid, talentless hack as part of their review, and call into question both your morality and your convictions. And depending on the relevance of those accusations to your work and the problems the reviewer has with it, that can achieve anything from laying bare a deep-seated flaw in your worldview to highlighting nothing so much as the reviewer’s petty, vindictive ignorance.

But it isn’t bullying.

Because bullying is not a synonym for argument, disagreement or pejorative reactions. Bullying is not a synonym for disliking someone, or for thinking their work is rubbish. Bullying is not even a synonym for saying so, publicly and repeatedly, in a place where that person can hear it – although that’s certainly unpleasant. Bullying is when someone with a greater position of power and/or possessed of greater strength repeatedly and purposefully attacks, harasses, belittles and/or otherwise undermines someone in a position of lesser power and/or possessed of lesser strength. In the vast majority of circumstances, bullying trickles down; it does not travel up, and in instances where the author in question is a super-successful megastar, to say they’re being bullied by reviewers is to ignore the fundamental power-dynamics of bullying. Even on the Goodreads system, where authors can see exactly what readers and reviewers think of them, expressing a negative opinion is not the same as bullying, because although the conversation is visible, it’s not directed at the author; they are under no obligation to respond, or even to read it at all. Feeling sad and overwhelmed because people don’t like your book and have said so publicly might constitute a bad day, but it’s not the same as being bullied.

Cyberbullying among teenagers is a real and serious problem characterised by the sending of abusive messages by either single or multiple parties, the spreading of hurtful lies and rumours, the public display of information or images that were intended as private, and the confluence of systematic abuse both in the real world and online. Such attacks are vicious, personal, and often constitute criminal offenses; many have lead to suicide. What recently happened to Anita Sarkeesian was bullying of exactly this kind, where a number of individuals unknown to her engaged in an active attempt to publicly frighten, abuse and slander her – a situation which is demonstrably not the same as some snarky, unpaid reviewers slagging off a book. Similarly, when people leave vile, sexist comments on my blog, that’s not bullying: it’s offensive and abusive, yes, but all the power in the situation belongs to me, because I can delete the comments, ban the commenters, and publicly mock them for their opinions – and just as importantly, my posts are there because I want people to read and react to them. The fact that I’ve invited comment doesn’t mean abusive responses are justified, but it does mean I’m not being attacked or contacted in a vacuum: I have said a thing, and people are responding to it. That is not bullying. Obviously, it’s not impossible for authors to be bullied. An indie or self-published author without the support of an agency/publisher and their attendant legal teams, for instance – or, just as importantly, without hundreds of thousands of supportive fans – could easily be bullied by any sufficiently cruel individual who took it upon themselves to send regular hateful email, spam their site with negative criticism, leave abusive remarks on their personal profiles, and otherwise behave like a grade-A douche. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, because as far as I can make out, everything the Stop the GR Bullies crew objects to has happened either in a review, as part of a public comment thread, in response to a blog post, or in the course of personal conversations on Twitter.

Because – and I cannot stress this enough – simply disliking a book, no matter how publicly or how snarkily, is not the same as bullying. To say that getting a handful of mean reviews is even in the same ballpark as dealing with an ongoing campaign of personal abuse is insulting to everyone involved. If Athena and the Stop the GR Bullies mob had chosen any other word to describe the problem – if they’d stopped at calling it toxic and objected to it on those grounds – then I might be more sympathetic; after all, as stated above, Goodreads is a largely unmoderated site, and that doesn’t always lead to hugs and puppies. But conflating criticism with bullying is a serious problem – not just in this context, but as regards wider issues of social justice. Increasingly, ‘bullying’ is being bastardised into a go-to term to describe the actions of anyone who actively disagrees with you, to the point where some conservative politicians are now describing leftwingers who call them out on sexism and racism as bullies, or else have decided that ‘bully’ is just a meaningless epithet like ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’, which is arguably worse for suggesting that all three concepts are somehow mythical.

Which is why, in short, the Stop the GR Bullies website is an appalling idea on just about every level. Not only does it appropriate some actual bullying tactics – such as attempting to disseminate the real names and locations of its targets to strangers, then implicitly encouraging said strangers to engage in further harassment – while serving to further water down and confuse the actual, meaningful definition of bulling, but as a protest against the perceived abuse of the Goodreads TOS, it’s completely and utterly meaningless, because the whole site constitutes an active violation. Yes, you did read that right – because to quote again from the TOS (emphasis mine):

You agree not to engage in any of the following prohibited activities… (viii) using any information obtained from the Service in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person, or in order to contact, advertise to, solicit, or sell to any Member without their prior explicit consent.

And does Stop the GR Bullies use harassment as a tool? Oh, worse than that: some of what they say is actually libelous. Here’s a screengrab of their description of Kat Kennedy, a GR member and book blogger for Cuddlebuggery:

The inability of the poster, Athena, to distinguish between a reviewer speaking negatively about books in a professional capacity and the outright public slander of a private citizen by another private citizen is breathtaking, to say nothing of the fact that making a hate page is pretty much 101-grade material for how to be an internet bully. The rest of the site is in much the same vein, and where at least the original posters, whatever you think of them, have the excuse of (a) being in personal conversation with friends or (b) acting as reviewers, the site does not: its sole effect, despite its intended purpose, is to be vituperative in terms of language and downright sinister in its commitment to Googlestalking its targets, attempting to put up not only their names and photos, but details of their places of employment and personal circumstances.

I’m never gladdened to hear that some author or other has decided to quit Goodreads because of negative comments, reviews or any other reason. But Goodreads itself is an optional part of the author ecosystem – as, for that matter, is blogging, Tweeting, and every other type of social media. While Goodreads, as far as I know, lacks privacy controls (which is likely another contributing factor to the problem at hand: authors can’t opt out of seeing negative reviews or comments, while reviewers lack the ability to make the comment threads attached to their reviews private, both of which, if introduced as options, might go a long way towards easing the current tensions) other forms of social media do not. A blogger, for instance, has total control over whether or not to allow commenting on particular posts, while Twitter uses can lock their accounts so that only approved individuals can follow them. Anyone fearful of negative comments has the power to screen them out – and if, on the other hand, a reviewer or author blogs publicly with the intention of receiving responses, that doesn’t preclude them from encountering legitimately negative reactions. If someone writes a blog post and asks for comment, it’s not bullying to respond with strong disagreement: in the scientific world, that’s simply known as having an opinion. Similarly, if a comment makes you uncomfortable on your own blog, mod or ban away! It’s why the option exists. But don’t call it bullying when people show up and disagree with you – even if they’ve disagreed with you before – because that’s not what bullying means.

And as for the people who’ve created the website in question: you might want to stop and think about what you’re doing. As much as anyone you’ve taken issue with, you’re in violation of the Goodreads TOS, and hiding behind anonymity while attempting to strip it from others is a hypocrisy that seldom plays well on the internet. If you really want to change the culture at Goodreads, you’d be better off lobbying for the promotion of in-house or site-approved moderators, closed comment threads and a greater delineation of author and reviewer pages rather than engaging in essentially the same behaviour that’s got you so worked up in the first place. This whole situation may well get uglier before it gets better, and under the circumstances, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to want to play nice.

Rape Culture In Gaming: Redux

Slightly more than 24 hours after my post on rape culture in gaming was posted, I moved house, a process which involved disconnecting my internet (the connection at the new place won’t be up again until the 25^th), driving eight hours down from north-east Scotland to south-west England, lugging all our possessions up thirty-eight steps, and then unpacking them while my husband (who did all of the driving and most of the lugging) collapsed in an exhausted heap, in which recumbent posture I joined him several hours later, once the house was (mostly) assembled. The next day – that is, Wednesday – I woke up late, put away our remaining possessions, and then headed out to join the local library, primarily because I like libraries, but also – it must be said – to gain access to their free internet. When last I’d checked, the post had been viewed about fifty times and had two comments, so as I logged on at the library, it didn’t really occur to me that anything might have happened in the less-than-forty hours I’d been offline.

And then I opened my gmail, Twitter, tumblr, and WordPress, and saw that everything had exploded.

I’m still sort of stunned by how much attention the piece has received. Had I been online as the comments started coming in, I would have been replying to them in real-time; and even yesterday, if I’d been on any other computer than one with a user time-limit whose only browser was a version of Internet Explorer so scabrous and ancient that WordPress kept telling me to update it, I might’ve still tried to clear the backlog. But circumstances being what they are, that wasn’t really an option, and so (to cut a long story short) I’ve decided to reply to various points that were raised in comments here. The reason I’m taking the time to explain this decision is that the points in question are objections to my thesis, viz: that rape culture exists in gaming, and while I can’t control what people think, I’d like it to at least be on the record that this isn’t an attempt to stop debate, or to avoid having direct conversations with commenters, or anything like that: it’s just that, as my internet access will be unusually limited for the next week and a half, it seems more expedient to reply en masse rather than individually. However: given the extent to which the original piece has seemingly resonated with people, it might also be of value to have all my extended thoughts on the matter ready and accessible as a single post, rather than scattered disparately throughout a comment-thread.

So, with all that in mind: there seem to be three main objections to the assertion that rape culture exists in gaming, all of which are deserving of attention, and which I’ll respond to  here.

1.’Gaming doesn’t have a rape culture – it’s just that some gamers happen to be terrible people already.’

Let’s say you’re a high school teacher at a school where a lot of the kids, for whatever reason, have serious behavioural and authority issues. Lots of rule-breaking, absenteeism, verbal abuse, violence; that sort of thing. Now, it’s certainly fair to say that you, as a teacher, didn’t create those issues – but how you deal with them still matters. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that your responsibilities are greater towards these students than to those with fewer or no issues. For as long as they remain at your school, it’s within your power to help them – or, conversely, to make them worse, whether through neglect, poor management of their issues, or active endorsement of their most problematic behaviours. And if your attitude is to shrug as though these kids have nothing to do with you, your school or its policies – if you don’t bother to understand or educate them beyond the absolute minimum, or if you selectively decide they don’t really belong to your school because you’d rather they didn’t – then chances are, your actions fall into the latter category. And at that point, if people see your kids wrecking up the joint or behaving badly, then they’re going to consider that you’ve failed in your duty of care; but more to the point, they’re also going to associate the actions of those kids with the culture at your school – and in both cases, they’ll be right to do so.

Or, to put it another way: everyone comes from somewhere, and nobody gets screwed up in a vacuum. Every culture has negative elements to balance out the positive, just as every culture cannot help but impact on its participants. Only very, very rarely do terrible people just spring up from the ground like fully-fledged horror movie psychopaths, absorbing nothing that might contradict their primary urges: the rest of the time, we live in a state of mental give and take. So even if, by some incredible fluke of statistics, every single gamer who acts like a sexist, misogynistic asshole already was one prior to their discovery of gaming, it seems incredibly unrealistic to assume that gaming culture then procedes to exert no influence over those people whatsoever. In some cases, I’d suggest, native sexism and misogyny – to say nothing of general assholishness – are doubtless amplified by exposure to an online culture that’s rife with sexist, racist, homophobic and abusive language, and which graphically sexualises women a default setting. Or, here’s another question: why do so many assholes enjoy gaming? Invariably, assholes crop up in every social context from knitting circles to pro wrestling, but if the contention is that all the terrible sexism and rape culture in gaming comes from people who were already like that beforehand (which presumably excludes anyone who got into gaming as a child, unless we’re saying that adult sexism is genetically predetermined) – and if these assholes are loud and passionate enough to give confused readings about the state of gaming culture as a whole – then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to wonder: what is it about gaming that attracted all these sexist, misogynistic adults in the first place?

More pertinently still, the origin of the bad elements in a culture is irrelevant to the ability of those elements to affect and change that culture. So even if all the asshole gamers were like that before they discovered gaming, that certainly doesn’t prevent them from remaking gaming culture in their own image, or distorting it, or ruining it for other people. Cultures aren’t static: they exist in flux, and it’s extremely important to note that even people who start out with positive values can start to change when faced with a different social paradigm. To quote one of the papers I referenced in the original post, Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace:

“…individuals (married to a woman not employed) whose behaviors were atypical for their gender ideology (e.g., egalitarianism) would shift their ideology in a direction more consistent with their behavior (e.g., a woman’s place is in the home)… when individuals occupy roles inconsistent with their gender attitudes, they adjust their attitudes to match their behaviors. Such results are consistent with findings in psychology that “dissonance” (e.g., Festinger, 1957) results whenever one’s behavior violates some self-standard (e.g., one’s gender ideology) (Stone & Cooper, 2001) and that such dissonance can result in attitude change (Cooper, 2011).”

In a nutshell: when people with egalitarian beliefs regularly engage in non-egalitarian activities, they unconsciously start to adopt less egalitarian attitudes which then translate to a change in their actual beliefs. So: given that the depictions of women in video games is highly sexualised, deeply stereotyped and frequently negative – and given also that sexist insults are commonplace in what are often male-only or male-dominated gaming environments – it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that, regardless of their intentions, some gamers are being coerced into ignoring or supporting sexism and rape culture as normative, simply through prolonged exposure to it as a normative social framework. And like it or not, that does reflect on gaming culture as a whole, because a healthy culture would work the other way, altering the attitudes of sexists for the better rather than changing egalitarians for the worse.

2. ‘Blaming rape culture for gamers who behave badly towards women is like blaming Islam for Muslims who are terrorists – you’re just falling back on negative, blanket stereotypes as a way to demonise a whole culture! Stop tarring us all with the same brush!’

 This is an accusation I take seriously, because I’m not trying to stereotype anyone; nor am I trying to say that gaming culture is some sort of closed ecosystem that can be held wholly and exclusively responsible for its own flaws. As stated in the previous point, everyone comes from somewhere, and these days, it’s comparatively rare for any one person to be the product of just one culture. Our experience of ‘culture’ is more akin to being the smallest nesting doll in a matryoshka set than to being shepherded by a single colossus, and ultimately, gaming is a subculture: a specific, blurrily-defined aspect of something larger that both contains its own subsets and overlaps with other aspects and subcultures. So when I said, in my previous piece, that we’re not wrong to ask about the presence of rape culture in gaming if and when gamers behave in a particular negative way, that’s not the same thing as saying that the most defining and significant aspect of gaming is its relationship with rape culture. There is, I think, a fundamental and important difference between investigating why a representative of a particular group would undertake a particular action in order to understand what relationship, if any, exists between the motive for the action and the logic of the group itself, and assuming – as stereotype does – that any member of that group would naturally perform such an action in accordance with group logic, because the necessary motive is both innately possessed by and requisite for its members. Or, to put it another way: inquiring how a footballer might have been influenced by rape culture is not the same thing as saying that all footballers are necessarily rapists, or that they commit rape because they’re footballers, or are footballers because they’re rapists; it’s just acknowledging that, in some instances, there’s a relevant correlation between our actions and the culture that surrounds us.

Which brings me back to the nesting doll concept of culture: because gaming, as I’ve said, is ultimately only an aspect of wider culture, and wider culture – however you want to define it – has an ongoing problem with sexism, misogyny and violence against women. The accusation of participation in a rape culture is not unique to gaming, and nor have its consequences happened in isolation. Subcultures are no more created in a vacuum than people are, and anyone who concludes that gaming has a problem with rape culture because it’s somehow necessarily and innately rapey is missing the point that wider culture is what gave birth to gaming. The hypersexualisation in games is not a separate issue to the hypersexualisation of women in movies and other media, because sexism and misogyny are pan-cultural problems. As I said earlier, it doesn’t matter where gamers got their sexism before they became gamers – it’s our collective responsibility to not be sexist anywhere, and that means creating a gaming culture where rape threats, misogynistic abuse and casual sexism are not only unwelcome, but actively called out as wrong.

3. ‘But guys cop insults in gaming, too!’

Let’s say you’re walking down the street, and you come across someone who’s clearly just been beaten up – black eye, bloody nose, split lip – and is telling anyone who’ll listen that they suffer such beatings regularly, but that the police refuse to press charges against their assailant, because the attacks aren’t deemed severe enough. Say you stop to talk to this person: if the first words out of your mouth are, ‘But why are you complaining? I got beaten up once, too – it’s just something that happens, and you should learn to deal with it,’ then congratulations! You are officially an asshole.

This is called derailing, a term which is often used to explain why countering complaints of abuse with assertions that the abuse is normative or unimportant is a bad thing to do, but which many people seem to not understand. Abuse is never acceptable, but the fact that you’ve suffered it too doesn’t mean your interlocutor doesn’t have a point, and if someone is telling you about a bad thing that’s happening to them, it’s a catastrophic failure of empathy to instantly change the subject from their pain to yours, particularly if you do so in a way that suggests their pain is lesser or ultimately unimportant. It’s also important to note that not all abuse is the same: that it doesn’t always happen for the same reasons, to the same degree and/or with the same frequency. In the above example, the person with the black eye is being attacked regularly, but nobody is doing anything about it. This is not a comparable situation to being beaten up once; and if, as the metaphor is trying to suggest, the other person is being targeted by a specific type of assailant for a particular reason – such as, for instance, their gender, race, religion or sexual orientation – then this is certainly not the same as you getting into a fight with someone because of an intellectual or competitive disagreement.

So, yes: men get insulted in gaming, too! And that’s definitely an issue. But if you really care about the issue of abuse in gaming, you should listen when someone else is telling you about their experiences, and be open to the fact that maybe, some people have it worse than you. Trying to conflate your own experiences with those of someone else or declare them universal is ultimately a form of silencing – a way of telling the victims to shut up. And if you really want to create an environment where abuse of any kind isn’t tolerated, then this is the last thing you should be doing.

Penny Arcade vs Rape Culture

Trigger warning: rape. 

Penny Arcade is the webcomic that got me into webcomics, which is saying something. The first truly geeky friends I met at school showed it to me almost as a rite of passage, thereby hooking me not only on the strip itself, but webcomics generally. For years, PA held pride of place with all of us: most quoted, most referenced, most likely to be shown to yet more newcomers as an offer of subcultural goodwill. A friend and I once spent an entire all-day Latin seminar staving off boredom by writing PA quotes to each other in a shared notebook; at college, I introduced my hallmates to it and ended up participating in several cardboard tube samurai battles on the front lawn; I still sometimes wear my Div shirt. In fact, my email signature contains a Tycho quote – not from a comic, but from a now-ancient newspost about the Playstation; so ancient, in fact, that I don’t think it’s even online any more, and which was so obscure originally that I’m probably one of the few people who actively remembers it, let alone ascribes it personal relevance.  The quote, which I have memorised, goes like this:

People seemed to prefer this, but only marginally so, the way one might prefer to be stabbed than shot. Optimally, one is neither stabbed nor shot. Optimally, one eats some cake! But there are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe.

You’d have to perform an impressive feat of archaeological psychology in order to understand the relevance of this statement to my sixteen-year-old self; or rather, in order to understand why, of all possible quotes from all possible PA newsposts, it was this one she chose to take to heart. Nonetheless, it’s a line I’ve always liked, because even though it originally appeared in context as a form of poetic sarcasm, it still manages to convey something important about life, the universe and everything, viz: sometimes there are just no good options available.

At the time of the dickwolves controversy – that is to say, slightly less than two years ago – I had never heard of rape culture. So when I saw that PA was being accused of it, my first reaction, rather than to get angry at the strip itself, was to try and get my head around what rape culture actually was. By the time I’d done this, enough time had passed that the furor had died down, which left me in sort of a weird headspace. On the one hand, the dickwolves joke made me uncomfortable even before I encountered criticism of it, and after I’d done so, I thought the critics had a point; on the other, I had a deep-seated trust and affection for all things PA, and as I’d come late to the argument, I didn’t feel much personal impetus to weigh in. Instead, I resolved to become a more critical reader, and to keep my eyes peeled for any future offences.

And then, today happened.

Basically, the trailer for the new Hitman game involves hypersexualised BDSM assassin-nuns being beaten to death by the male protagonist, and a significant proportion of the online gaming community has risen up to point out that this is both textbook rape culture and completely, grossly offensive. So when I saw that PA’s Tycho (aka Jerry Holkins) had followed up their latest strip with an explanatory newspost, I was understandably curious as to what his stance would be.

To quote:

I saw a single still used to promote a Hitman: Absolution trailer, a phalanx of leather-clad Battle-Nuns, and decided to skip it.  I felt like I had probably seen something very similar at some point.  But being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing.  Except I don’t do compulsory, and I also don’t do infantilizing chivalry.  So I don’t do well at these kinds of parties…

It’s fight choreography, and it may set an “erotic” stage but it quickly – and I mean quickly – gives way to a gruesome, life or death, septum obliterating struggle that might be hot for somebody but I suspect that’s a very specific demographic.  Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this; by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.  As spank material, it leaves something to be desired; specifically, spank material.

I think that once a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of “veil” critically speaking.  We can certainly talk about it for a long time if you want to.  But she did pull out a rocket launcher, seriously just right out of there.  It came out.  And then people still wanted to talk about this as though it were some kind of haunted obelisk around which an entire medium whirls.

I don’t understand what it is about the idea of a “medium” that people find so confusing; it’s a conceptual space where works that share certain characteristics may occur.  Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum.  There’s no shortage of games for the broadest possible audience – there isn’t, and grotesque sums are being made seeking the wide part of the curve.  There are also niches, as in any ecology.  You can certainly find things you don’t like, but those things aren’t anti-matter; when they come into contact with things you do like, there is no hot flash which obliterates both.  This totalizing dialogue, where “everything” and “everyone” is this or that, and here are the teams, and morality is a linear abstraction as opposed to its three dimensional reality is a crock of fucking shit.

The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity.  There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized.  It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either.  I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry.  Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.

The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art.  If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over.  That’s not the side you want to be on.  The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work.  The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring.

That’s basically the whole post, right there; and as I read it, I experienced this sort of terrible wrenching in the part of the brain that houses our idealised past, our youthful idols, and all the naive perfection and nostalgia we ascribed to them first at the time and then later in memory. It only lasted a moment, but it was profound, because it irrevocably signals the point at which Jerry Holkins transitioned from being “geeky figurehead I respect” to “stubborn, selectively insensitive ass on the internet” in my personal lexicon. Which isn’t to say that these are forever and always mutually exclusive positions; it was just disappointing as hell, however heralded by his response to the dickwolves incident (or even to the fact that he thought it was acceptable in the first place).

When broken down, his argument basically runs as follows:

• compulsory things are bad – or rather, compulsory outrage linked to what he seems to think of as political correctness is bad;
• he personally doesn’t find the video arousing, so therefore the argument about it being hypsexualised is  moot;
• because the nuns are doing something physically impossible (withdrawing big weapons from skintight clothing), the setting is confirmed as unreal, which means nobody can sensibly complain about anything else it gets wrong;
• any problematic elements that still conceivably exist aren’t representative of gaming culture as a whole, but only of a niche section of games whose existence constitutes a healthy part of the creative ecology;
• complaining about the influence or subject matter of such games is missing the point, because we should all be able to just respect each other’s tastes; and
• bringing any moral or social complaint to the table is not only tantamount to the advocation of censorship, but something people only do when they want to be scandalized, as opposed to actually having a legitimate complaint.

Let’s address these points in order, shall we?

1. Compulsory things are bad – or rather, compulsory outrage linked to what he seems to think of as political correctness is bad.

Disparaging something lots of people care about as ‘compulsory’ and thereby refusing to participate is an act that tends to fall into one of two categories: childish contrition, as per a toddler refusing to eat their vegetables, or hipsterish disdain, as per anyone who refuses to read a book, watch a movie or listen to a song solely on the basis that it’s popular. Applying this attitude to politics – or, more specifically, to problems of inequality – is pretty much the genesis of hipster racism and ironic sexism, which (funnily enough) are both completely indistinguishable from actual racism and sexism. So straight off the bat, anyone who says they refuse to get angry about rape culture because that’s what everyone else is doing – or, to use Tycho’s words, because they “don’t do compulsory” –  has, much like the hipster racist, completely sidestepped the issue of whether bad things are genuinely happening in order to try and look cool. Which, yeah, no.

2. He personally doesn’t find the video arousing, so therefore the argument about it being hypsexualised is  moot.

Every time I hear someone arguing that a particular sexualised or negative representation of women is neither problematic nor offensive because they, personally, don’t find it sexy, I die a little inside. Dear straight men everywhere: case by case, the hypersexualisation of women is not definitionally dependent on your getting a boner. It’s not even necessarily about what you consciously find attractive or erotic. Subconscious bias is a real thing: the images we see, the stories we absorb and the cultural narratives in which we participate all have the power to change our unconscious assumptions about the world. Anyone who thinks that our conscious reactions and preferences are all that matter is missing the point by quite a substantial margin. The Hitman: Absolution trailer isn’t problematic because somehow, magically, the majority of straight men who watch it will feel conscious arousal and/or actively think about hurting women as a result (though doubtless there’s a concerning minority who will); the problem is that the majority of people who watch it, regardless of orientation or gender, will subconsciously absorb the message that violence and sexuality are linked; that images of beautiful dead women are normal; and that there’s nothing sexist or problematic about the image of a man gratuitously killing hypersexualised nuns being used to sell videogames. The argument, in short – that games can’t change us, and that their content doesn’t matter – is one that PA have actively pilloried when reactionary politicians have used it to say that games aren’t art; to argue that games can only change us for the better, however, seems just as ignorant. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too: if games are truly a valid means of cultural expression with the power to effect real change in those who love them, then that means they can impart both negative and positive development; can be dominated by negative or positive trends. Asserting otherwise is an act of willful blindness – and not only because fiction has an actual neurological effect on our brains.

3. Because the nuns are doing something physically impossible (withdrawing big weapons from skintight clothing), the setting is confirmed as unreal, which means nobody can sensibly complain about anything else it gets wrong.

Seriously, this isn’t a point I should need to explain to anyone who regularly grapples with SFF, but as I apparently do:  the presence of unreality in a story no more renders it immune to criticism on the grounds of sexism than it excuses a lack of narrative cohesion, poor writing or offensive stereotypes. The fact that a story isn’t ‘about’ sexism doesn’t prevent it from being sexist, and the presence of one flaw – improbably concealed weapons – certainly doesn’t obviate the presence of others – hideously sexualised violence and dead BDSM nuns. Honestly, I’m not even sure what Tycho meant to convey with this point: that because one visual element of the trailer was problematic or unreal, calling the whole thing out for sexism and rape culture is redundant? That because the game isn’t very good or original, nobody should comment on how offensive the trailer is? Neither of those arguments makes any sense at all, unless your sole purpose in deploying them is to try and argue that accusations of sexism and rape culture are less important than poor visual continuity in a second-rate game.

Oh. Wait.

4. Any problematic elements that still conceivably exist aren’t representative of gaming culture as a whole, but only of a niche section of games whose existence constitutes a healthy part of the creative ecology.

The assertion that sexism and rape culture aren’t part of mainstream gaming culture – or even that they’re problems worth discussing with reference to gaming culture as a whole – is both hugely problematic in its own right and deeply baffling when you consider that not long ago, the PA site was providing coverage about the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment and rape culture in fighting game circles when Aris Bakhtanians said they were fine and necessary aspects of it. And it’s not like PA has traditionally been oblivious to the sexualisation of women in games, online and by geek culture generally –  although they’ve definitely perpetrated sexism as well as criticising it. Or, put it another way: Penny Arcade has been around now since 1998 – that’s the better part of fourteen years – and has been considered a preeminent voice in gaming culture for most of that time. So if I can dip into their archives and, over the course of fifteen-odd minutes, find regular references to sexualised depictions of women in games, sexual insults in gaming and sexual harassment generally, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that sexism in gaming and the hypersexualisation of female characters has been an ongoing issue for at least the past decade. I mean, seriously: it’s one thing to argue that all this bullshit belongs to a niche area of gaming that has nothing to do with the mainstream, and quite another to say so when your own history of creative output  – which itself constitutes your professional livelihood – contradicts you.

5. Complaining about the influence or subject matter of such games is missing the point, because we should all be able to just respect each other’s tastes.

Respecting other people’s tastes is generally a good rule to live by, but acknowledging that some depictions are problematic and actively contribute to problematic cultures is still necessary. More than once, PA has referenced the prevalence of homophobia and homophobic insults in the gaming community; in fact, they’ve arguably taken active steps to destigmatise it. This being so, I can’t understand why, when it comes to the issue of rape culture, the whole issue reverts to this wishy-washy stance that people should be allowed to like what they like. The only possible explanation is either that Tycho just doesn’t see rape culture as an issue in the same way homophobia is, or that somehow, he doesn’t see it as an issue at all – neither of which is exactly encouraging.

6. Bringing any moral or social complaint to the table is not only tantamount to the advocation of censorship, but something people only do when they want to be scandalized, as opposed to actually having a legitimate complaint.

Similar to the above, it would be ludicrous to suggest that attempts to counteract homophobia in gaming represent active censorship in terms of what stories can be told and the destructive presence of a ‘compulsory’ political agenda – by which I mean, the only people suggesting it are themselves homophobes. So why, when it comes to an identical issue of language, bias and prejudice, is PA suddenly fearmongering about how acknowledging the existence of rape culture in games is somehow the same as arguing for the creation of ‘less art’?

Well, I guess Tycho was right about one thing: there are certainly times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. Or at least, our faith in humanity is.

Trail-Gathering

Growing up in the 90s, I learned to use the internet at the same time I was entering adolescence. Arguably, the internet was also entering its teenage years: that awkward, teeming period when modems ceased to be the exclusive perview of geeks and big business and started finding find their way into private homes. After listening to the ludicrous crrrk bing-bong! bing-bong! ksssssshk of 56k dial-up, I’d log in to MSN Chat, check my various Hotmail accounts, surf poetry forums, look at fantasy pictures, type search queries into Yahoo: all the preoccupations of my thirteen-year-old Gen-Y self. Then as now, there were legion free sites and services to join, which I, glorying in the creative freedom of multiple online handles, was only too happy to test-drive, only rarely contributing under my own name. The internet being what it is, many of those sites no longer exist, the accounts I created and any content published thereon long since vanished into the electronic ether. But twelve years later, despite the myriad accounts I’ve let lapse, a handful still remain.

Like salmon returning upstream to spawn, I find myself revisiting these earlier haunts. To my now twentysomething self, they are cringeworthy reminders of my teenage years: that penchant for writing everything in lowercase, the often-bad poetry, the meaningless rants and banal social commentaries. But rather than abandoning these realms altogether, I find myself logging back in, culling the crap and instating new, up-to-date bios. Partly, it’s because of the book: I’ve worked long and hard to become a published author, and am therefore unable to resist shouting my triumph across every available server. It’s also a kind of catharsis, closing off the old efforts my younger self made towards the goal I’ve subsequently achieved: validating her efforts, even though she-then, as distinct from me-now, will never see it. Mostly, though, I feel a kind of allegiance to these places. I owe them the honesty of an up-to-date status, even if it’s only to proclaim the reason for my absence. Call it a strange, personal scrap of netiquette, but I find it disquieting when someone I’m following online in whatever capacity suddenly stops updating without any mention of why. It’s like holding a phone conversation in which the line abruptly goes dead at the other end. To delete the account, rather than locking it into explanatory stasis, would be like pretending the conversation never took place at all.

I still sign up for things and forget about them, of course. Everyone does. By and large, it’s harmless. Either the site is large enough that you can eventually come back and unsubscribe, or small enough that when it dies, there’s nothing left hanging about for unwary friends to find.

Unless, of course, you wrote an ill-informed, poorly constructed rant at age eleven and posted it to a site which, though many years dead, is still Googleable, left to drift eternally through the seas of Internet like some Goddamn Marie Celeste of prepubescent idiocy. Of course.

HarperCollins: Authonomy

Since discovering it yesterday, I’ve been ceaselessly intrigued by Authonomy, an online forum created by HarperCollins. According to boingboing, it’s been up and running since September ’08, and is currently still in beta; nonetheless, there are already hundreds of contributors. The premise is simple: aspiring writers upload their unpublished novels using a shiny new interface, tag the relevant genre/s, and let other site members promote their favourite books. Despite the sophistication of the website, the mechanism itself is nothing new; the real innovation is in holding a monthly top ten, wherein HarperCollins editors will read, comment on and – potentially – publish those books which get the most votes. They’ll also be looking for trendspotters: site members who consistently reccommend good or popular books ahead of the curve, thus strengthening the incentive for writers to spruik work other than their own. In the words of its creators, it’s a search for new talent: filtering the dross through howevermany pairs of eyes and seeing what floats to the top.

Conceptually, it’s a brilliant embodiment of killing two birds with one stone. For the publisher, it decreases the dreaded slushpile: by providing a sanctioned, online outlet for new submissions, they will likely cut down on receipt of unsolicited hardcopy, while simultaneously gaining a free, enthusiastic, slushpile-reading committee. For the aspiring authors, there is a drastically increased chance of receiving feedback or being published, plus a chance to participate in what is, essentially, a mammoth (but extremely well-executed) writing group. And for passive members like myself, there’s the fun of talent-trawling: reading free books, picking the best and pimping them.

Authonomy is such a deviously simple, workable, natural idea that I’m stunned nobody thought of it before; and if HarperCollins really does sign some new talent this way, it could revolutionise the publishing industry, particularly if other companies pick up on the concept. Especially for smaller, more specialised houses, it could be a fantastic way to expand the business without excessive outlay; and thinking of the local Australian market, where there are few dedicated genre publishers, it could help to demonstrate both the presence of new writers and a viable audience for their work. Even more importantly, allowing digital submission erases the barrier of distance: whereas UK-based writers might baulk at submitting hardcopy to a New York firm, there can be no such qualms about uploading to an internationally accessible website run by an internationally recognised publisher.

One of the biggest hindrances as a writer is the dearth of authoritative feedback: without an agent (or even with), it’s frequently impossible to learn why a manuscript was rejected by a given editor, or what might be done to improve it. While amateur criticism is sometimes unhelpful, creating a resource for such is nonetheless positive, especially where levened by the potential for more measured, professional commentary with an eye to commercial success.

In short, I’m excited by Authonomy and what it might achieve – and if its expanding membership is anything to go by, I’m not the only one.

Duty of Care and the Cyberfriends

As a child, there are few things more heady than playing without adult supervision, and few things more crucial to healthy development. It’s a big part of learning to gauge social situations: particularly, the idea that it’s often necessary to behave differently depending on the circumstances. Looked at purely in terms of running around or socialising while adults read in the next room, it’s a sensible – even obvious – assumption. Kids need to be on their own. Should they start picking up bad habits – for instance, acting like hoydens all the time – then parents must rightly step in and explain why this behaviour is inappropriate. The very last resort is banning play itself, or forbidding a child to see certain friends, not just because it’s an extreme measure, but because of the difficulties in enforcing it. 

Now, however, the rise in digital gamespaces has created a phenomenon that many parents are yet to recognise as significant: adolescent participation in virtual and online communities. Time was, punishing bad behaviour by revoking a child’s TV, computer, phone or game-playing privileges was a parental standard: the ace up the adult sleeve. But with so many kids and teenagers relying heavily on new technology for social interaction, blacklisting internet use or taking away consoles has become the equivalent of prohibiting contact with friends. Unintentionally, some parents are upgrading their retaliatory arsenal from standard bombs to nuclear, and are therefore miffed and furious by turns when their child’s reaction seems over the top. The worst-case scenario is, undoubtably, that of Brandon Crisp, a 15-year-old who ran away after being banned from playing X-Box and was later found dead. His father, who’d imposed the ban, is understandably grieved by the tragedy, but has also said that he now understands his son’s reaction.

“I just took away his identity, so I can understand why he got mad and took off. Before, I couldn’t understand why he was taking off for taking his game away,” he said.

It’s a notably drastic example, but one which does, perhaps, exemplify the problem: how do parents withold technological privilege now without simultaneously removing avenues of social contact? It’s a tough question, and one I don’t have an answer to, despite being sympathetic to both positions. It is also, however, something I’ve experienced myself.

When I was about twelve or so, my mother took me to coffee with one of her friends. This friend had a daughter, Michelle, who, apart from being my age, was a born technology geek, and in this respect utterly dissimilar to her mother. The women chatted while I drank my hot chocolate; and then, quite suddenly, my mother’s friend mentioned how angry and irrational Michelle had been acting ever since she banned her from using the internet. Curious, I asked why she’d banned her; the friend replied that Michelle had been leaving a program open that used up their bandwidth. After a short discussion, it became apparent that the program in question was Kazaa, a two-way music download site of the old, pre-iTunes-and-collapse-of-Napster ouevre, and that the bandwidth was being used up because Michelle was allowing other users to download songs from her.

‘So why not just say she can’t use the site?’ I asked, puzzled and a little indignant on Michelle’s behalf. ‘Or that she can’t let other people download songs? Because taking away the internet, I mean, that’s a big thing. That means she can’t check her email, or chat to friends – ‘ both crucial when we were twelve – ‘or anything like that. It’s a big punishment.’ I tried very hard to stress this.

My mother’s friend frowned, shrugged and waved a hand.

‘Oh, but I don’t care about any of that,’ she said, and promptly changed the subject.

In the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big incident, but the injustice of it frustrated me for some time afterwards. The punishment was grossly disproportionate to the crime, and what was worse, Michelle’s mother didn’t seem to care, even after it was explained and even though it explained her daughter’s behaviour. To her, the importance of chat and internet were nil, and so removing them oughtn’t have been a problem: my protest (and, presumably, Michelle’s) was just another sign of unwarranted complaint. Now, of course, I’m free to use teh interwebnologies as I please; Kazaa is long since gone, and I haven’t used Trillian for years. But it makes me wonder: when I have kids of my own, will I understand what’s important to them?

And, more importantly, will I be willing to learn?