Thoughts on Rise of Zinesters Chapter 1
I got to read two chapters of Anna Anthropy’s wonderful Rise of the Videogame Zinesters and it put to works a lot of the fears I’ve had about breaking into the video gaming industry.
As a kid I played lots of video games — but only ones that were “safe” for girls, like Rock Band, Sim City, or Club Penguin. MMOs and First Person Shooters were never an option because I was told they weren’t for me. Not in words, so much, but by who I knew had played them.
Anthropy described perfectly the cyclical nature of game development by white boys for white boys that I know is what keeps me out. I seriously considered a program at Riot before I found out about their track record of harassment and an abysmal 20% female employee demographic. And I know, just as Anthropy mentioned, that people tend to only create honest stories from what they know. I could try and tell a tale of a Latina woman’s experience as best I can, but my version of her story will never be as real or as honest as if told by a Latina woman herself. Which is why in a male-dominated development environment, it’s not just that women are relegated to mostly service roles, or as eye-candy, as Anthropy mentions. It’s also that the male characters at the focus of popular games are fascinating developed characters with complex backstories and motivations. It’s not enough to have female characters — as players, we can see where the effort and honesty lies.
Anthropy brought up an interesting metric that surprised me: measuring the maturity of an art form by the number of marginalized cultures represented. I personally feel like television is an extremely developed medium and still has a long way to go in terms of diversity (especially in the critically acclaimed space) but the idea of evaluating art in this way is a unique lens. I think the visibility of marginalized cultures in an art medium represents more the accessibility of that medium than anything else — an accessible medium can be tinkered with and developed by people without the privilege of already being part of a well-defined artist community. Maybe those two things are the same, maturity and accessibility. Though I think graffiti is one possible counterexample — as accessible as it is, the stigma and connotation of the art form might be preventing us from pushing the bounds of what street art could be.
I was also extremely intrigued by Anthropy’s analogy of new games taking the form of Youtube — self-published content. Youtube has undoubtedly transformed the way digital media, advertising, and marketing work. There’s another similarity here that I don’t think Anthropy made clear that I think is interesting. Youtube popularized short form content such as videos under ten minutes long. Now, short videos are the norm for communicating everything from complex news topics to what a celebrity eats for breakfast. Video games, as created by big publishers, are quite long — Anthropy’s example was a game that advertised 70+ hours of gameplay. If democratizing game development (by making it accessible to all) is going to be a lot like Youtube, then I think games will get shorter to fit larger audiences, just as Anthropy predicted. As games get shorter they will be more effective communicators, getting across a message or a theme in a concise and impactful way. That also includes methods of interaction. Anthropy made an interesting connection between physical console game controllers and the barrier to play that I think will get taken care of by having developers with fewer preconceived gaming notions at the steering wheel. I’ve definitely heard in my daily life that everyone knows how to use an xbox controller and at the same time known that it isn’t be true.
Anthropy closed the first chapter on the idea that games are going to be the predominant art form of the 21st century. I think this might already be true. The games of today are nothing like the games of 20 years ago. They will continue to change and evolve as new platforms and new developers break into a space that was once closed. And even if the money continues to flow where it always has, people will find a way to share the stories they want to tell and connect to the messages they need to hear.
