Open Letter to Game Designers: Don't Make Me Be That Bitch (or, Boobies!)

Wednesday night I went to my first real game industry event, a local chapter "mixer" for the International Game Developers Association. For being there only a couple of hours, I learned a great deal about the local industry. First, there almost isn't one; it's not cost-effective to retain game design staff at New York metro area prices. Second, while the locals in the biz are pretty solidly male and well-educated, they are also more racially diverse than I might have expected.

Like I said, they're male. Heaven knows I don't mind the imbalance, for an abundance of reasons not worth mentioning here. But by the end of the evening, the whole roomful of them seemed even more hesitant to make eye contact with me than programmers usually are, and a handful of them felt the need to apologize.

Most of the games exhibited that evening were puzzle or handheld games: small in their scope, but excellent quality for what they were. The final two games of the evening were XBox offerings: a pretty, thematically quirky but otherwise uncompelling platformer called Psychonauts, and then there was Outlaw Golf 2, featuring Summer, Autumn, Clem, and Goober. (I know it requires Windows Media Player, but believe me, you don't get the full effect until you see the pole-dancing.)

After a good five minutes of half-bared-boobie-wagging (in one case, the lower half -- I'm sorry, even Ween's excellent album Chocolate and Cheese couldn't make the appeal of that style clear to me) and lesbian simulations only a male gaze could love, the mood in the room was mixed. A few guys were hooting and hollering; a few were visibly embarassed. I was standing next to Greg Costikyan, who was in the latter category; we shared some snide comments.

Behind us, Jason Della Rocca (head of the IGDA) piped up with a question about the gender breakdown of the game's audience. "Uh... it's a very complicated system with... matrixes and..." mumbled the guy running the demo, and took the next question amid laughter and groans. Then Jason repeated the question, getting a similar response, at which point I made an audible sarcastic comment (in fluent Val) about how there really weren't enough boobies in the game to satisfy me, and could they please give us more boobies, please, um, more boobies. ?

The boobies weren't the only thing. Clem and Goober are just the white trash stereotypes their names imply, with all the trappings of roadkill, moonshine, inbreeding, lost teeth, and overalls employed in rather innovative ways within the golf setting. And then there's El Suave, and then there's Mistress Suki, and then there's the hippies, and need I go on. It's a cheap, shorthand bunch of crappy window dressing for a dull sport which isn't made any more interesting for it.

Still, I was pleased that Jason actually brought the gender divide up, so I approached him afterwards to tell him so. I found him on the defensive even as I complimented him. He tries to get designers to think about sexism and racism, he said, but it's also his job to defend them from censorship. After all, he said, we have to protect free speech.

Who was trying to censor them? I was one of about six women in a room full of guys. I was noisily expressing my distaste in a public forum, and I daresay I wasn't the only one feeling that way. I'm not about to go to the ESRB and tell them there's a new game coming down the pipe which is SO AWASH IN MORAL TURPITUDE it requires a totally NEW AND DRACONIAN RATING to reflect how UTTERLY REPULSIVE it is. Yes, an "H" rating. For "HAS BOOBIES WATCH OUT!!!!1"

And please, let's not dignify this game's window dressing by calling it free speech. Let's be perfectly frank, here. What you are doing is satisfying a market. South Park plays with many of these stereotypes and does some useful work. Your boobies don't cause any cognitive dissonance -- they aren't there to do any work; they're just standing around looking pretty (or grotesque, really. If I had boobies that weird-looking, I'd be inclined to hide them in paper bags, or else find an expert on geodesic domes to give me the odds the lumps would go into remission). You know damn well there are hundreds of cases within the United States right now in which free speech and free thought are fighting a very ugly losing battle; please don't disrespect the people going through that. Your boobies have an eight-hundred-pound gorilla supporting their distribution.

Look, don't make me be That Bitch. I experimented with being a humorless second-wave feminist in college and found it restrictive. I got my sense of humor and my magnanimity back and boy, let me tell you, I don't ever want to lose them again. But I'm going to lose it if I have to work with you and you're putting out all this random-boobies nonsense. And you want me working with you, because I hold the secret to the killer app for twelve-year-old girls.

I am here to make better video games. I really, really hate being put in a position where just because of my gender, it's my job to be the one who says look, this is demeaning and dumb. (Actually, I'm here to communicate to you why there are people out there who find Clem and Goober insulting... but that's a story for my masters' thesis.)

You guys know already how dumb this shit is. I saw you all around me making faces that told me the same. Here I'm finally getting a look at the guys who make the content that Ms. and the NAACP and Jim Goad complain about, and it frustrates the hell out of me. I have seen the results of crappy, heavily-stereotyped content at the ground level; I have worked with third graders who can quote whole scenes from Scary Movie. And I wonder why guys like you have jobs creating media content when I can't seem to get a break.

You look like guys who come from a similar place as I do; if I got you talking I'm sure you'd mostly support wage equity and a reasonable division of labor in the home and women's control of their sexuality and reproduction. And you might shrug and say the decisions on the content come from somewhere else, somewhere higher up.

Guys, the buck has to stop somewhere.

And sure, probably it's not the IGDA's job to police the content its members are producing, so if I gave Jason a hard time it was probably unwarranted. But the producers absolutely ought to be thinking about their role in perpetuating this kind of crap. You can't blame it on people drooling in front of the TV anymore, guys. The medium reinforcing the backward-ass ideas some kids have now is video games. It's you.

Posted by Gus at February 24, 2005 11:58 PM | TrackBack