A Letter from

Outside

#Gamergate

I’m a female gamer and game developer; I’m not an activist. But I am hoping that something changes.

I am not Anita Sarkeesian, nor was I meant to be.

You will never see me on YouTube advocating for games that speak to women, or onstage at a conference decrying busty video game heroines, or returning to my alma mater to encourage female students to join the gaming industry.

I have no qualms with anyone who does — and as a female developer who helps build games, I surely owe a debt of gratitude to those who do — but that path isn’t for me.

In my (somewhat humbler) role in gaming, I work as a developer for a mid-size gaming studio during the day, and play games in the evenings and on weekends—sometimes with friends, but usually alone.

Aside from hearing guys at work discussing it, the Gamergate controversy has barely touched my world. I don’t read the publications in question and honestly don’t care what they write about the games I work on. I’ve never felt especially offended by the violence in the games I play, or their representations of women, or anything else about their content.

Before this controversy exploded, I had watched a few of Anita’s Tropes vs Women videos, and though I could appreciate them on an intellectual level, they just didn’t feel that relevant to my experiences as a female gamer, or my personal frustrations with how I’m treated because of my… woman-ness?

And if I have any concern about Gamergate, it is that: That the participants (on both sides) have skipped straight to arguing about somewhat abstract concepts — representations of femininity, the “gamer identity,” various forms of privilege —and in doing so, missed an opportunity to discuss the very real, very concrete ways it can be shitty to be a female and a gamer.

And I worry that thanks to Gamergate, the battle lines are becoming so hardened that the next time I suggest there’s anything wrong with the way my male colleagues and fellow-gamers treat me, they’ll just stopper their ears and shout, “Hashtag Gamergate! We’ve already discussed this!”

And they’ll be almost right, because Gamergate has discussed topics tangentially related to what I experience. But because it never really covered the issues that affect me and other female gamers most directly, the men I work and play with won’t know what we go through, or how they can make it better.

Frankly, I suspect most of those who’ve written about this controversy, pro and con, don’t know much about the day-to-day life of that elusive creature known as the “female gamer.”

So, let me share a little of my story.

Until about age 12, it was like I didn’t exist.

There was nothing malicious about it. But as an only child and a girl with “boy” interests — video games, but also dinosaurs, superhero comics, and Hotwheels — it wasn’t easy to make friends. Girls thought I was weird and boys didn’t think about me at all.

It was kinda like having the superpower of invisibility, and for the most part, I was okay with it. Maybe I was just making a virtue of necessity, but I came to prefer being alone.

At one point, my mother got me a pet lop rabbit so other girls from the neighborhood would visit, and it worked — they came over — but I would greet them at the door, point them in the direction of the rabbit’s cage, and then retreat to my Sega Genesis in the attic.

I remember very clearly the first time a guy invited me to play a video game.

His name was Jacob, and the game was Metal Gear Solid, for the original Playstation.

We were in 6th grade and, in the manner of aggrieved 6th graders, I wrote a class essay about my mother barring me from purchasing Metal Gear Solid, which was widely-acclaimed but received a “Mature (Ages 17+)” rating.

Despite my choice of topic, the essay was well-received by my teacher, who read it aloud to the class. Jacob rode the same bus as me and invited me over that afternoon — his mother took a more laissez-faire approach to video gaming, and he’d already played MGS through several times.

My trips to Jacob’s house became a regular thing and at some point — Metal Gear Solid is a long game — he became my first boyfriend. I don’t recall having a say in the matter; that we played together two or three times a week cemented the relationship in Jacob’s eyes, and in everyone else’s.

In fact, I think the the most girlfriend-boyfriend thing we ever did was share a Playstation memory card, which made for an acrimonious split some months later, because who gets to keep the game save files?

Despite being mostly platonic, my relationship with Jacob was a useful introduction to men’s tendency to conflate friendship and romance. Thanks to my involvement in a male-dominated industry and my inclination toward male-dominated hobbies like video gaming, it’s now something I’ve had the opportunity to experience over and over —countless times and literally ad nauseam.

I never stopped being a loner. But by high school, the necessity of ever being “alone” was long gone.

My school required all students to join at least three clubs. I of course picked Robotics, the math team, and “Computer Assistants” (basically a student-run IT department for the school, and frequent excuse to skip class).

The math team had a couple other girls, but I was the only girl in Robotics and Computer Assistants. So from day one, I had a reputation for being the girl at the school who liked computers and video games, and I had some contact with practically every guy who liked those things as well.

The invitations to Counter-Strike parties, Magic the Gathering games, and afternoons trading Pokemon flowed. It was weird to me, and I can’t say I entirely minded the attention.

I didn’t hurt that I don’t “look like the kind of girl who plays video games,” as I’m frequently told to this day. It’s intended as a compliment, and while I try to take it as such, I can’t help notice it’s also a marker of my difference from the men around me. Their appearances and attractiveness are never the subject of casual conversation.

Which of course made me wonder then, and makes me wonder still: What’s behind each invitation I get to come play Halo, or Call of Duty, or Dota, or whatever the latest game craze may be?

Is it that the guys know I like gaming or — as there so often has been — is there an ulterior motive? If I say “yes” enough times, will they assume I’m their girlfriend, like Jacob did? And if I’m not thinking the same way, will I be accused of “leading them on” — simply by sitting beside them, holding a controller plugged into the same console?

I’ve lost count of the number of “friend” groups that stopped inviting me over to game after I tried to let down gently some guy in the group.

Was I ever really friends with any of them?

I haven’t lost count of the number of honest-to-god, no-sex-expected, no-questions-asked male gamer friends I’ve had over the years, because the number is so low.

(It’s 5, I think.)

I called Alex my “Scarlet” boyfriend when he and I were alone.

It sounds like a reference to Hester Prynne and The Scarlet Letter, but what I was actually going for was A Study in Scarlet, the original Sherlock Holmes story, in which a young Mormon woman’s life unravels after she dares to marry someone outside the Mormon faith.

I met Alex just before my sophomore year of college, when he interviewed me for a story in our university’s student paper. I was still painfully shy, but he was charming and funny, and though we’re no longer together, I still smile when I remember the email he sent the day after the interview, asking if we could get dinner “off the record.”

I fell hard for Alex, unsurprisingly— he was a genuinely wonderful guy. In our early days together, I could really only see one problem with him: He didn’t play video games or have any ties to any of the gaming or programming groups on campus.

To me, that didn’t matter. But the guys in those groups made up almost my entire social circle, and to some of them, dating Alex — an interloper! — was apparently a real betrayal.

To be clear, since arriving at college, I had never dated any of my male gamer friends, nor had any interest in doing so. It wasn’t like inviting Alex to a gaming party meant I was parading my new beau in front of a group of spited exes. But that, more or less, was how a few of them took it.

I was taken off guard when one of my closer guy friends informed me asses had been chapped when I chose Alex “over” one of my gamer friends.

And it was probably ill-advised to respond by saying that I hadn’t chosen Alex “over” the gamers, because I wasn’t even considering the gamers.

But none of that prepared me for the harassment we received during our illicit, three-year affair.

At the start, sock puppet accounts started posting pornographic images on Alex’s Facebook wall. Then anonymous commenters began leaving angry, harassing comments beneath his articles on the student paper’s website.

At some point, somebody hacked his email account and configured it to forward all incoming messages to a separate account — which Alex didn’t notice for more than a year, since it also left a copy in his inbox. A year of our private messages to each other (and all of Alex’s email to his friends and family) were read by God-knows-who.

There’s no question in my mind this was all done as revenge by guys who I’d played games with and considered friends.

I don’t believe gamers are uniquely capable of this type of harassment. But to me, it was just one more example of the price I pay for being a woman and liking video games.

As I said, Alex and I dated for nearly three years, and might have lasted longer, but for a mistake I made towards the end of college that led to our break up.

A couple days before graduation, I confided in one of my gaming friends what had happened to the relationship.

Once I reached the end of the story, he looked into my tear-streaked face, and laughed, and told me I was better off without Alex.

And in doing so, made clear exactly the magnitude of what I had lost.

Some developers leave their first job for more money, or more responsibility, or to find a bigger challenge elsewhere.

I left because one morning I woke up in bed with my boss.

I can’t tell you exactly how it happened. One of the developers on our “team” was leaving, it was his last day at work, all of us went out for dinner and drinks, one bar led to the next, and suddenly it was Saturday morning and I was in a strange apartment lying unclothed beside my boss.

I don’t blame anyone for that: not myself and not my former boss either. Getting drunk and going home with someone is a part of being young and single, and under most circumstances I would have been fine with it.

Under those particular circumstances, I was mortified.

I was the rare millennial who genuinely enjoyed her first job, and I certainly needed the job to pay my rent and stock my fridge. And overnight it was transformed into something I hated.

Facing my boss every single day, after what had transpired, seemed too terrible to contemplate.

I think there was about a 30 minute lag between returning home from my boss’s apartment, and logging on to my college’s career board to start looking for job #2. It would have been less if I hadn’t spent so long in the shower, trying in vain to scrub away what I had done.

Again, there’s nothing special about “gamer” culture that made that happen. But as a female in the field, being constantly the object of your colleagues’ desires is the reality, and the opportunity to slip-up in irrevocable ways is omnipresent.

My male co-workers don’t face the same pressure, and thank god they don’t; I wouldn’t wish it on them.

But there are ways they can make it better.

I’m not asking for a revolution.

I don’t care whether Kotaku survives this mess or closes shop. I don’t care whether Depression Quest was a brilliant statement or a travesty. I don’t care whether “gamer culture” stays or goes.

I’m not really even sure gamer culture exists, but if it does, it’s been a mixed bag for me. For each of the bad stories shared above, there were good moments too. I’ll always love playing video games and the true male gamer friends I’ve made along the way make up for all the troubles and annoyances I’ve been through, and then some.

Yet there’s a voice in the back of my head —a voice which might not be there, if not for the work of women like Anita Sarkeesian — that tells me I shouldn’t have to go through those troubles and annoyances, even if they’re “worth it” on balance.

There shouldn’t be any balancing; video games are supposed to be purely fun, not fun-mixed-with-sexual harassment and unwanted advances and awkward comments about my appearance.

I thought about ending this letter with a long list of instructions on how male gamers can do better by their female peers, but a long list isn’t really needed.

What’s needed is this: If you’re a male gamer and you know a girl (or woman) who likes to play games too, be her friend. Nothing more, nothing less.

I realize now that at each step of my story, what I needed from my fellow gamers and my colleagues were commonplace acts of friendship: Someone to invite me to their house just for the sake of gaming. Someone to smile and be happy for me because I’d found someone who made me happy. Someone to clap me on the shoulder, tell me I’d had too much to drink, and help me get home safe.

Someone who looked at me and saw a friend. Nothing more, nothing less.

Like I said, I haven’t followed Gamergate that closely and it’s evolved so quickly I’m not 100 percent sure what it’s about.

But, maybe along with everything else, it can be about this story, too.

Sincerely,

Ophelia