By Alli Thrasher

Yesterday The Oatmeal ran a comic about the differences between online gameplay experiences between the genders. In it, Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, depicts his own experience playing a few rounds of Left 4 Dead online. In the panel below, he showcases the ease with which a clueless girl gamer accidentally trashes her teammates and receives pleasantries and accolades for her faults:

Naturally the comic sparked outrage across the interwebs. The piece drew ire from gamers across the board, largely for its totally flawed portrayal of the realities of online gaming. At first, Inman seemed to miss the point, responding with a pseudo apology post in which he wrote, “a terrible female gamer gets away with more than a terrible male gamer.”

Cuppycake, Lead editor of The Borderhouse Blog, summed up, perfectly, why the above statements are not only erroneous, but also evidence of the privileged perspectives that make gaming often unwelcome for women: “You know what actually sucks about being a woman who games? Being harassed because of my gender…When I make a mistake in games, it’s because I’m a woman trying to play games. When you make a mistake, you just suck at the game and made a mistake.”

After receiving, and obviously digesting, further messages and tweets about the comic and the follow up post, Inman made a huge step in rectifying the situation by not only making a large donation to The Women Against Abuse Foundation, but also noting that he really and truly effed up: “I’m a guy and I barely talk into my mic, so I’ll concede that my view of things is probably very skewed.”

I commend Inman for skewing away from the typical mansplaining of “stop being so sensitive” that often accompanies the response to pieces like his comic. That he recognized his position as privileged and went even further to show that he came around to understanding what the problem with the post was is HUGE. The entire situation, however, brings to light, again, the true realities of online harrassment in the video games community.

As part of his apology post, Inman asks readers, “Outside of steam, it sounds like it’s still pretty horrible for women to play games. Is this true?” Yes, Mr. Inman, it is.

Need proof? Check out http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ or http://www.notinthekitchenanymore.com/ And guess what? The above include posts from all over the sphere of gaming – Steam, XBLA, and beyond. While I’m very aware that trashtalking is the nature of friendly competition, for women gamers (or gay or lesbian gamers, or gay gamers, or well basically anyone who doesn’t immediately present as a white straight male), our mere presence online opens us up to language that goes well beyond trashtalking. I’ve gotten cursed out playing Uno. And it’s not just “idiotic 13 year olds” doing the harassing. Research proves that the average gamer is 37 years old and that eighty-two percent of gamers are 18 years of age or older. Speaking from personal experience, the worst harassment I ever received as a gamer or community manager came from a man in his early 30s who had a job, a long time girlfriend, and most definitely did not live in his basement.

Truth be told, I’m thankful that the whole debacle occurred for a number of reasons. First, and foremost, it’s HUGE that a very public, internet celebrity, like the Oatmeal creator, can have his eyes opened to the experiences and realities of other gamers. Second, the reaction, to Inman’s original post, highlights again, that a sizeable portion of the gamer community is very aware of, and not cool with, the unfriendly nature of online gameplay. Finally, it provides an opportunity for all gamers to proactively look at how they address harassment when they witness it.

I think all gamers are invested in their play experiences being fun, productive, and straight up awesome. Moreover I think we all want the spheres we play in and the communities we participate in to be welcome places. So what do we do about all of this? Simple, report, call people out, and refuse to accept that violent sexist language is part of our culture or experience. If you’re a guy playing online and you hear someone trash talking, call them out. Feel free to say, “hey, that’s not cool.” Better yet, feel free to report and block them. Refuse to play with them. If you’re a moderator for an online community, enforce guidelines regarding hate speech. Educate members of your community about how their language can alienate other players. Don’t be afraid to use the banhammer.

And finally, if you’re a woman playing online, don’t stay silent on your end of the headset. I know this is tougher—who likes opening themselves up for abuse? But it’s high time that we stop hiding. Women make up over 40% of the gaming population – we’re a huge part of this community and we should not let ourselves be made invisible. So turn on your voice chat, ladies, and let the folks on the other end know that you’re there, you’re playing, and you’re not going away.

Kickstarter, the company that allows entrepreneurs (often artists) to raise the funding they need to support their projects through small donations, has achieved a lot of positive press for the things it’s given life to, from the second season of Jane Espenson’s web series Husbands to Womanthology, the collection of comics by women. While it’s great to see donors embrace daring, progressive projects, it seems that Kickstarter may not have policies that match up to its promise.

Artist Rachel Marone reports that, after a project she created was spammed by her long-term cyberstalker and she let her other donors know what the spammer’s motivations were, Kickstarter suspended the project, and banned and then unbanned her on the grounds that the notification was a violation of Kickstarter rules. When Marone’s manager wrote in to the company to ask for an explanation, Kickstarter’s Daniella Jaeger wrote this less than charming response: “If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.” Because clearly this is happening as a result of Rachel’s carelessness, or negligence, or lack of respect for the system.

One of the reasons that Kickstarter ought to be so special is that it offers people who have been excluded from conventional funding, whether because their projects aren’t the kind of thing that studios and networks are interested in airing because they’re too daring and unconventional a la Husbands, or because artists themselves have trouble cracking conventional funding sources. Stalking victims can, through no fault of their own, end up in the latter category. Stalkers harass their victims by contacting them directly, but they can also make life harder for them in general. Stalkers spread rumors about their victims. They contact their victim’s employers and try to discredit them, suggesting that their victims are crazy, unreliable, unprofessional, disloyal. If the stalker is more powerful than the victim, or more established, it can work. In an industry like entertainment, where employment is project-based rather than long-term, that kind of thing can be devastating.

Now, one of the risks of Kickstarter, of course, is that people will end up providing funding to unreliable donees or projects that aren’t actually viable. And providing a method of feedback for donors is important. But if Kickstarter’s brand is all about helping small donors fund worthy projects that major donors are dumb enough to miss out on, they should be concerned with making sure that their own system doesn’t replicate the pitfalls of conventional funders, and empower the same old abusable hierarchies.

Alli Thresher, a video game designer at Harmonix, has a fantastic meditation up at XOJane on how booth babes change the dynamics at conventions. She argues that the presence of women who are hired purely to be attractive—even in cases where they’re knowledgeable about the products and franchises they’re selling—underrates women’s expertise and passion for gaming and sets up situations where women who are conventions for other purposes are at greater risk for sexual harassment because they’re assumed to be booth babes and therefore sexually available:

At last year’s PAX East I spoke to TWO women whose companies were using them as “booth babes” (literally advertising, “take photos with our booth babes”). One of them told me that she was actually the company’s office manager and she had been invited to the convention specifically to dress up and help the company subvert the policy.**

To PAX’s credit, they have been known to reprimand companies who do this sort of thing and have even, in some cases, escorted groups of babes and their product from the con. But still, how uncool to be asked, by your boss, to wear a tube top and miniskirt and pose for pictures with strangers? (The booth in question was run by a community outlet and not a development studio). I certainly don’t blame the women hired to work as booth babes for the bad behavior of a few select assholes I’ve encountered.*** I do, however, blame the culture and attitudes that promote their use.

As Lesley pointed out in her GDC diaries, when the bulk of the women one sees in a male dominated space are there as nothing more than human props or marketing tools, it’s easy to make the leap that all women staffing booths are there for the same purpose. For women like me, who are present to discuss the games we’ve worked on, this provides several challenges and also makes the convention floor an unwelcome space for us.

Thresher also makes what I think is a critically important point, and one that I’ve reiterated in other contexts: that treating men as if they’re dumb creatures who can’t process anything besides boobs and couldn’t possibly enjoy talking to an actual woman is awfully condescending. Thresher writes that for a number of male commentators, interactions with women who are presented to them strictly for visual consumption have been disappointing because they’re at conventions to talk about games and gaming. Seeing awesome cosplayers, or getting your picture taken with an attractive woman, may be part of the convention experience. But it’s a promotional device that doesn’t actually get to the core of why people come to conventions, which is to get more information about products that they love and to have conversations with other people who are as invested as they are in those products and experiences. The lowest common denominator, whether you’re setting up a stall at a convention, or marketing a movie like John Carter as if its core demographic still thinks girls have cooties, is not always actually the most profitable and engaged one.

Dr. Nerdlove has a predictably good post up about the latest big video game controversy. In Cross Assault, a fighting game competition, one of the team coaches, Aris Bakhtanians insisted that “sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community.” When a member of his own team, Miranda Pakozdi, disagreed with him, he began harassing her so deeply and repeatedly that she started forfeiting matches. As Dr. Nerdlove writes:

Five days with Bakhtanians, that shining example of humanity making constant and seemingly unending offensive comments about her looks. About her body. About wanting to watch her pee, sleep, wanting to fuck her and pimp her out. Listening to him scream “Bitch” over and over again with all of the joy of a five-year old who’s figured out that naughty words make his parents react, then scream “RAPE THAT BITCH!” when a female character is taken down.

Going by tweets, which she later took down, Pakozdi intmated that the only reason she was sticking around was because of a contract that required her to be there for the entire week. So not only is she dealing with a creeper making rape jokes over and over again.. she’s legally stuck with him. She literally is not allowed to leave, at the risk of violating her contract with the competition. She’s effectively trapped in there with him.

It would be interesting to know, given that the players are bound by contracts, if the competition, which has cash prizes and is being broadcast, includes a sexual harassment policy. Freelancers aren’t protected by Title VII the way that employees are, so Pakozdi probably doesn’t have legal recourse, which is too bad. It would be really delightful to see someone like Bakhtanians, who says things like “What is unacceptable about that? There’s nothing unacceptable about that. These are people, we’re in America, man, this isn’t North Korea. We can say what we want,” on a witness stand in front of a whole bunch of jurors. But, if like many comics and gaming conventions, Cross Assault just hasn’t bothered to set up a sexual harassment policy, that would be an unfortunate validation of creeps like Bakhtanians who are so deeply invested in harassing women that they want to establish it as part of their official culture. The gaming and comics communities are full of decent, wonderful people of both genders—and it would be great to see a more organized push for established and enforced sexual harassment policies in all the forums where geeks gather.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of House of Lies.

I thought it was smart of House of Lies to move beyond Marty a bit this week to start fleshing out the other characters. But the way it happened reaffirmed for me that the show should really be an hour rather than a half-hour, given how surprising some of the character reveals were, and how little we still know about Clyde and Doug other than a semi-generic bullying story.

First, take Jeannie. We’ve had essentially no sense of her personal life at all before it’s suddenly revealed that hey! she’s engaged!, her future mother-in-law is a drunk, and her fiance is a semi-conventional but very rich dude. It doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising that Jeannie is resisting introducing him to, as he puts it as they head off for their respective engagements, “these guys I share you with every week,” given that they’re jerks. But it does suggest that there’s a totally different Jeannie than the relatively restrained one we’re seeing as part of the team. The show’s version of introducing us to that side of her is to have Jeannie moon over a bad cafe musician in San Francisco all night, and then go to bed with him. It might be a meaningful sequence if we had any sense of Jeannie’s relationship to her boyfriend-now-future-husband and why she might be anxious about the engagement (given her behavior at the end of the episode, she appears to be hiding his very existence from Marty and company). I’m more inclined to believe Jeannie when she tells her hookup “You, this, tonight, and your penis, and your mediocre weed, they don’t have anything to do with my real life,” than I am to believe the musician who is psychoanalyzing her. But something’s up, and we don’t have the context to be able to think about it in a meaningful way*.

Speaking of context, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the dynamic between Clyde and Doug. Honestly at this point, Clyde may be the character I least enjoy watching on television, and as y’all know, I watch a lot of television. The hookup points schtick is sort of gross on its own, and given that we’re getting the impression that’s what Clyde lives for, that it may be the sole substance of his personality other than humiliating his friends on airplanes and giving terrible advice about “being Clooney,” he’s not a person I want to spend any time with whatsoever.

Doug, on the other hand, has some interesting things going on. His over-identification with Harvard is understandably irritating to his coworkers, but it’s at least an indication of some deeper need. And I appreciated the way he clumsily tried to step up with Roscoe tonight, whether asking if he needed to be watched going to the bathroom, hitting up food trucks with him, or solving his “case.” “There was a kid who was handsome, not in the classic sense but smart, but handsome, and smart, genius-level, and there was this other kid who tortured him,” Doug tells Roscoe. “He really just tortured him. And the kid’s mom was like ‘Stop all the crying, doug.’ But then this kid realized that the other kids were just jealous. That’s all. Jealous of his awesome awesomeness. He went on to be super-awesome. And today that kid is Justin Bieber. True story.” It’s a nice little moment, and it made me want to get some more details about Doug’s backstory. He deserves more than tics and a Harvard-seal-embossed briefcase.

Then, there’s Marty, who’s stuck with the client from hell, abandoned by his father, who’s left him “off to speak to a bunch of swooning Jungian analysts in Taos,” and feeling angry at his unreachable ex, who is”dependable, that is, in her psychosis.” He does badly with Roscoe in San Francisco, pawning him off on the team and feeding him out of vending machines, and I wish the show hadn’t pulled a punch by letting him off the hook for it, and having Roscoe over his bully problem by the time Marty got around to paying his son a little attention. I’d honestly watch a family show about Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe with a dose of Roscoe’s mother on the side, and even though I know this show is not that, I can’t help but treasure the moments when we see glimmer of the real pain, and fear, and love they’re all experiencing together. There’s something genuinely tragic about Marty’s rant on the phone to Monica that “You know what he understands now? He understands that life is unsteady, and full of regret and recrimination. You have let our son down because you are not there.” But like so many other things in House of Lies, this would be better if Monica was an actual person, if Marty had to take real responsibility, if we could spend time with the story of his mother’s death instead of some fraud-committing former-hacker twerp.

Thank goodness ABC’s humiliating Work It premiered to ratings worse than the now-canceled show it replaced. It still doesn’t restore my faith in humanity that the so-called comedy beat Parenthood, but I’m narrowly relieved that it’s not an instant hit. Work It made me sadder than anything I’ve watched in a long time, sad enough that it’s proved difficult for me to muster up the same level of outrage as some of my colleagues.

It makes me sad that anyone would feel so vulnerable that they’d start darkly speculating bars, as a friend of main characters Lee and Angel, that “It’s not a recession, it’s a mancession. Women are taking over the workforce. Soon, they’ll start getting rid of men. They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves…Not the kind of sex you like, Angel. Just kissing, and cuddling, and listening.” It’s not just that the mancession has been manifestly debunked, and men are doing better in the recovery of women. It’s the idea that people feel that lost and angry, that the idea that for women to succeed men have to lose, and lose badly, still has currency. It makes me sad to think that there are women anywhere who are waiting for men to buy them things but are doing for self because “none of them have any money.” It makes me sad to think that men and women know so little about each other that women find car maintenance mysterious and men think that the essence of femininity is nibbling on lettuce. And while I don’t normally like to complain about television networks being out of touch, because it’s not like market research doesn’t exist, it makes me profoundly sad that anyone, anywhere, would look at this show and think that audiences would see themselves in it.

Work It‘s approach to revelation via gender-switching is particularly grating given that Up All Night is doing the same thing, with vastly more tenderness and perceptiveness. It’s particularly ugly to see Lee pretend to have been sexually harassed at his old job, telling his new potential boss at the pharmaceutical sales company where he goes to work that “The guys were always sassing me, or patting my fanny, or ogling my teats.” In pretending to understand female experience, he’s demonstrating his ignorance of it in a way that minimizes sexual harassment, making it cutesy and adorable. The same thing happens when he goes to the taco shop where Angel works to try to convince him to join the masquerade. His complaint that “My eyes are up here” is glib, rather than revealing new understanding of how uncomfortable it can be to be ogled.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Parenting Made Easy” starts with an arbitration in which Lockhart/Gardner is representing Pamela Baker, a professor who was fired and believes it was because she complained about her boss rubbing her shoulders. The boss, provost Daniel Clove, starts by claiming that he fired Baker because of negative student evaluations, but it turns out that the real reason is because she was outspoken about her conservative views. Clove says that the issue is that she was disruptive, regardless of what she was saying, but Lockhart/Garder argues that Baker’s civil rights were violated and that what she said about homosexuality (while defending Santorum!) was religiously-motivated speech rather than hate speech. It almost looks like they’ll win with this – until the defense proves that Baker hid her faith, so Clove couldn’t have known that what she said was religiously motivated. It was nice seeing Lockhart/Gardner representing a conservative, and the show did a good job of portraying her as a real person with firmly held beliefs rather than just as a stereotype or cliché. I also appreciated the way they had the character complaining about sexual harassment turn out to be a religious, conservative Republican, since all too often – especially in recent Herman Cain coverage – our national conversation sees sexual harassment as a pretend issue invented by liberal feminists.

The show also uses this case to remind us that all the characters on the show – including the ones we’ve assumed we won’t see again – live in the same world and intersect in a variety of ways. Alicia initially expects the arbitration to be routine, so she chooses it for Caitlin’s court debut – but it turns out that they’re up against Martha, who was Alicia’s first choice for Caitlin’s job. Martha is holding a grudge against Lockhart/Gardner, which in turn puts more pressure on Caitlin. Martha also ends up calling her boss to come help, and he is none other than Michael J. Fox’s Louis Canning. It seems that Canning and Alicia have developed, if not a friendship, at least a grudging respect for each other’s abilities, and Canning tries to convince Alicia to work for him. (Finally! It had been a whole few episodes since someone was trying to coax Will or Alicia or Kalinda away from Lockhart/Gardner!)
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