Why I’ll Never Call Myself a Gamer
A brief history of my flirtation with a subculture, one-sided affair with Zoe Quinn and decision to quit gaming before we got too serious.
By Brooke Jackson-Glidden
I’m not a gamer. I’m not really sure I even know what that means.
It’s weird to say that, because video games have always been a part of my life. My first best friend had a GameCube sitting on the television set in his room, and when I was eight I often went to his house to play “Super Smash Brothers Melee.” I had a handful of different consoles: a PlayStation 2, a Gameboy (Advanced and SP, purple and red respectively) and an Xbox. I spent hours rubbing my thumb against controllers, shopping for new stories and characters at the archaic rental stores.
But I stopped playing games right around the time I turned thirteen. My male-dominated friend group started to diminish, and when I played games in my room alone, I noticed I couldn’t find myself in the stories. Maybe it was the young feminist writer in me looking for something unique, or maybe it was my porcelain ego distracting me from my complete lack of hand-eye coordination — either way, when I looked for something to play, I looked for an interesting, relatable story foremost. I spent hours walking through the isles of GameCrazy, trying to find something — anything — with a woman on the cover.
Instead I took home games like “Grand Theft Auto San Andreas,” where the female representation was, in a word, lacking.
Not ideal, I know, but the good news is I could curb-stomp her if I felt so inclined.
Around that time, I decided I would be a feminist instead of a gamer. The titles seemed mutually exclusive, and when you’re a teenager surrounded by sexism, you have to make tough decisions — what am I willing to give up for the sake of my values? What am I willing to excuse? When I had to choose my sexist industry guilty pleasure, I chose hip hop over my consoles.
Okay, so it’s not exactly a mind-boggling realization — video games are sexist. What I learned remarkably recently is that they’re not all sexist. That has a lot to do with a new group of young female gamers not as easily dissuaded who decided to make their own games. One of those developers is a woman named Zoe Quinn.
“So. Do you like video games?”
Dante and I were sitting at a table outside a coffee shop on High Street. It was May in Eugene, Oregon, and I wasn’t sure if this was a date. Dante was a feminist from high school, and we agreed to get coffee after exchanging a long list of think pieces on sexism, rape culture and social justice. Things were going great, and then he just had to spring the big question.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be honest or if I wanted him to like me. So I paused. Can I say, “No, I don’t like video games?” Is that even true?
“… I’m not sure. I used to play them a lot, but I’m not particularly good. They never really seemed to offer me much.”
He laughed, and I expelled a sigh of relief. “I’m not good either,”
he said. “I kind of play games for the stories — wait. Have you played ‘Depression Quest’?”
“Depression Quest,” Zoe Quinn’s most successful game, is a second-person choose-your-own-adventure that gives players the chance to live through the daily life of a depressed protagonist. Psychologically healthy actions, for instance asking for help, were often crossed out in red. You could see them; you could never choose them.
Three hours later, after a long conversation about why I needed to give gaming a second chance, I drove home and debated breaking out the old controller. He had name-dropped so many titles over the course of the date that I wasn’t really sure where to start. I also wasn’t sure I trusted him when he said these were “progressive” games. He was a feminist, there was no denying that, but maybe he was letting this be his exception, the way I did with Kanye and N.W.A. I only remembered the name of “Depression Quest,” possibly because it was the only game he referenced that was free.
I played it in one sitting — it’s a short game — and by the end I was dabbing my eyes and keyboard with a dishrag. “Depression Quest” wasn’t just a game made by a woman, it wasn’t just gender neutral (and possibly, dare I say it, queer?), it was a story I hadn’t played before. My own.
Independent gaming is a completely different world. It’s not Mario; it’s not “Call of Duty.” It’s a sphere of gaming where the idea is more important than the play. It was nothing I had ever encountered.
On our third date, Dante and I sat on his couch and played “Gone Home,” in which a young woman tries to find her queer sister by looking through her empty house. The objective is never particularly clear until you figure it out. One game down, we moved onto “Portal,” a lesson in physics with a sarcastic narrator and, again, a female protagonist. They’re both creative, beautifully designed games with complicated women at the forefront. It stings how frequently the presence of women in a game is described as an “even” — Portal is a good game, even with a female protagonist.
When I went home, I started to feel like maybe I could get back into gaming. I started to play with the idea of buying a new console, getting a Steam account (a gaming software for computers) and getting back into the scene. I followed Zoe Quinn on Twitter, along with a new cast of feminist women to guide me — game journalist Jenn Frank, game developer Brianna Wu, and and one of my favorite pop culture critics, Anita Sarkeesian.
But before I could get too excited, out from the belly of the internet rose something nerdy, something privileged, something evil. I speak, of course, of #GamerGate, and the most pathetic example of thinly-veiled misogyny on Twitter.
If we’re being honest, I don’t even know how to explain #GamerGate. There are hundreds of different blog posts out there that do a far better job than I ever will. The important bit of information is that Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend went on the online message board 4chan and said the developer slept with a games journalist.
Around the same time, Depression Quest was released on Steam. Part of the uproar was attributed to the developer getting unheralded success because her womanhood gave her unwarranted privileges — funding, positive reviews, awards, attention.
Quinn’s alleged cheating and presumed privileges became the fodder for a large-scale attack on feminist game developers, activists, critics, anyone described as “ruining games” — journalist Jenn Frank, activist Mattie Brice and even Quinn’s father and friends. Anonymous hackers began “doxxing” anyone affiliated with Quinn, publishing their addresses, phone numbers and other personal information online. Death and rape threats became the norm. Anita Sarkeesian canceled her visit to Utah State University because of an anonymous email claiming the author would cause “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if Sarkeesian spoke on campus. Frank decided to give up game journalism altogether. Quinn hasn’t slept in her own bed in weeks, couchsurfing to avoid what might be waiting at home.
The deafening noise of angsty nerds has forced a number of the marginalized developers, journalists and critics out of the gaming scene. Even though Quinn will continue making games, she’s suffered in the process. Many other women have been pressured out of the field.
I watched the women I had idolized for a solid two months break down. Women who have been in the community for decades abandoned ship. Women didn’t feel safe leaving their houses. And for what, the chance to work ridiculous hours for shit pay?
Gaming is a bizarre art form. Some of it — a portion I’ve just recently come to know — is inventive, a chance to inject the participant into the product, a way to invite an audience into a new perspective the way non-interactive art simply can’t. Simultaneously, a certain group of its fans claimed the right to define its appropriate boundaries, its appropriate subject matter, its appropriate commentary. This group, the self-appointed Real Gamers, decided what a game can be and can’t be. And they decided to verbally attack anyone who tried to mess with those definitions, a way to preserve the age-old GTA model, their right to kill prostitutes and save damsels.
I’m not a gamer. I don’t even know what that means. If it’s someone who plays games, why are so many of them abusing their own kind? The only people I see using those titles are the 4chan losers, the hate tweeters harassing developers and journalists, the Dorito Kings, the Lords of Petty Abuse.
I’m a feminist first, an advocate always, and for me, it doesn’t matter how beautiful I find Depression Quest, Gone Home or Portal.
Until I feel safe, being a “gamer” is just not worth it.
