The vicious and ugly coordinated campaign to drive video blogger Anita Sarkeesian off the internet for the temerity of trying to raise money to support a series about the depictions of women in video games was one of the biggest stories in the feminist and geek spheres this year, and I’m glad to hear from Sarkeesian herself, through a talk she gave at TEDxWomen, precisely how unsuccessful that campaign was:

It’s amazing to hear that Sarkeesian is able to do this work full time, that a curriculum came out of her efforts, and perhaps most encouraging, that video game studios have invited Sarkeesian in to speak to them—the organizations that make the games that Sarkeesian’s haters would like to see stay reductive and as attuned to straight male fantasies turn out to be interested in her voice and perspectives.

But even more than knowing that Sarkeesian is still standing, still fighting, and appears to be bearing up psychologically just fine despite a campaign even more intense than some that have succeeded in pushing other women offline or out of covering certain areas of popular culture, it’s the way she explained what happened to her that is important. The attacks on her, she explained, were coordinated like a massively-multiplayer online game. Participants psyched each other up like they were fellow guild members, providing reinforcement for each other even as other voices condemned their actions. The escalation of the campaign was a form of leveling up. And Sarkeesian herself was turned into a boss character. That dynamic made the game sustainable, encouraged other people who might have otherwise sat on the sidelines to join in, and incentivized steadily worse behavior towards Sarkeesian. It worked at getting people participating. But at the end of the climactic boss fight, she’s still standing. For people who are considering gaming dynamics as an organizing tool, this is a powerful, if very negative, lesson about how to get participants to enlist in a campaign, if not how that campaign can be successful.

And the designation of Sarkeesian herself as an ultimate enemy is very telling. It’s one thing to enjoy depictions of attractive people of whichever gender you happen to be attracted to. It’s another to think you have a right to depictions of those people. And another entirely to be so attached to those depictions, and so uncomfortable or insecure about acknowledging that they might be problematic, talking about it, and enjoying them anyway that you get hysterically angry when someone proposes simply to analyze them. That says a lot more about you than your rational, intelligent, easily-supportable target. And it means that even if you succeed at whipping up a small, dedicated subculture to try to shut the thing you hate down, your chances of succeeding, and of being taken seriously by the outside world, are necessarily going to be limited. In a way, Anita Sarkeesian’s haters are like the Westboro Baptist Church: they can cause real emotional pain, but not substantive change, and they mostly exist as a reminder of their own increasingly marginal role in cultural or political life.

Well, this is a little intense:

When a Japanese couple decided to tie the knot recently, they wanted everyone who was important in their life to be on hand to share in their joyous day. One catch — for the groom, those important people included NeNe Anegasaki, his virtual girlfriend in the Nintendo DS dating sim Love Plus. The perfectly charming piece of software even had a place set for her at the wedding, so that everyone on hand could meet her…

The bride apparently didn’t find the situation exactly tenable either, and before the evening was out, the night had dissolved into predictable, if one-sided, violence. Once the wedding ceremony was concluded, the blushing bride determined that NeNe was one of the things the groom was going to have to give up with his bachelor lifestyle, going the way of the cool movie posters in his bedroom. Which we feel would be kind of unreasonable, if the groom wasn’t doing things like “inviting his virtual girlfriend to his real wedding.” At that point, man, you’ve got a problem.

It’s perhaps not as consequential as some of the questions we’ve been discussing here over the past couple of days about male body image and expressions of female sexual desire. But it’s definitely easier to solve: if you have an issue with your significant other’s emotional attachment to a piece of culture, figure it out before your wedding.

Over at Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera talked to analyst Geoffrey Zatkin about the market conditions for video games that have only female protagonists, as opposed to male protagonists, or the choice to play as a male or female main character. There are a lot of insights in there worth considering, but this one stood out to me:

We know from our previous article that marketing spend is one of the few, if not the only, things that can overcome negative reviews. Television commercials, ads in magazines, and even shelf space in stores are all for sale, and the more you have to spend the better your game will sell.

Games with only female heroes are given half the marketing budget as games with male heroes. That’s an enormous handicap that cripples their ability to sell well. “Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said.

So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do publishers send female-lead games out to die without proper support? “I think it might be, and I think in some cases, though this is a guess, that these games may be considered more niche, and you advertise niche games less,” Zatkin said.

It’s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?

And this is exactly a point. I don’t want to hear that video games starring women don’t sell as those starring men unless you can show me a persistent failure of video games starring women that have received the same quality and investment in their advertising campaigns and rollouts. Don’t tell me that African-American actors can’t conquer international box office until you make the same efforts to build more Will Smiths as you do to build Taylor Kitsches and Daniel Craigs. Our assumptions about what works and what doesn’t, what will sell, and what won’t, are not natural laws. They’re decisions we’ve made.

Salon’s named Vikings punter and marriage equality advocate Chris Kluwe its sexiest man of the year–the publication always picks someone substantive to counter the influence of the People’s Sexiest Man issue, which this year honored my beloved Channing Tatum–and Tracy Clark-Flory has a fun interview with him about everything from homophobia in sports to gaming miniatures. But I was particularly struck by this passage where Kluwe describes where he developed the voice he’s put to such politically effective use:

I have to admit it: I admired the immensely creative cursing in your now infamous letter to delegate Emmet C. Burns Jr. Can you teach me how to swear like you?

It’s actually very simple: You have to hang out on online gaming message boards for about six or seven years and get into a lot of arguments.

So that was your training ground.

With the whole arguing on message boards, I found a very effective style was to present a carefully reasoned, thought-out argument and highlight it with really kind of bizarre swear words where you stop for a moment and go, “What does that even mean?” It’s the juxtaposition between the two. The swear word sticks in your head but you think on it and you realize there was a point too.

There’s been a lot of talk of late here, and elsewhere in the geek-o-sphere, about the worst representatives of video gaming culture. But Kluwe’s a good reminder that fighting the good fight in the places where it’s hardest to do so can be fantastic training for advocates. You can only actually figure out if you’re a hero if you strap your biggest sword to your back and set out for a land where you know there be dragons.

Well, this is super-charming. Sony Computer Entertainment has gone up in French markets with an ad that compares the PS Vita, which has touch screens on both sides, to a headless woman with two sets of breasts:

I don’t know what’s worst about this. The photoshop of horrors that’s distorted the model’s arm? The depersonalization of the woman involved here? The idea that it’s cool to get to grope breasts without having to deal with an actual human with her own particular needs and responses? The idea that boobs=sales? I can’t even just be irritated on behalf of women. Remember, fellows: this industry, and many, many others, thinks you’re stupid, drooling, sexually deprived easy marks.

Campaign finance and advertising have been a heated subject of discussion down the stretch of this fall’s presidential election, particularly the role of Super PACS in both the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney and down ballot races. But though it’s unlikely to change the game entirely, the Obama campaign is going back to a kind of advertising it pioneered in 2008: billboards within Electronic Arts campaigns. Obama was the first candidate to advertise in video games in that race, which is all well and good. But while it’s easier to report on who’s spending what, and on what kinds of advertising, the larger question with this, and with the rest of the campaign advertising we’re awash in, is whether it makes a difference.

Commercial brands seem to believe that in-game advertising is valuable. Unilever signed a deal this spring to place its products inside the Sims. It’s a kind of advertising that makes sense because it can be smoothly integrated into the environment where it appears. Tricia Duryee put it, “It’s much harder to work a bottle of shampoo into a game that’s set in the forest or at a poker table. But when a game is about sleeping, eating microwave dinners or taking showers, that sort of product placement becomes much easier.” It’s not disruptive to have products be branded in-game as they are in real life. And if advertisers are looking for product recognition and familiarity, placement is an easy way to achieve it.

That said, the overall impact of in-game advertising appears to be a bit of a mixed bag, for both game companies and advertisers themselves. EA may have more than 300 million users, about whom they have a fair amount of data. But straight-up display advertising doesn’t seem to have become a core business for it and other video game companies the way it is for, say, television networks. If players want to escape into a world, the best way to sell your product or your person may be to bow to the rules of that world, rather than placing advertising that takes players out of the universe they’ve entered.

The Obama campaign’s decision to spend money on advertising in EA games may be about generating impressions and reminding folks to step away from the console on or before November 6 (the 2008 ads reminded players that early voting had started, among other messages). But it’s also a way of letting a constituency know that they’re on the campaign’s mind. It’s become all too easy for advertisers, political and otherwise, to gin up stories about spots that they have no intention of actually running, or no funds to actually air. But to get attention to your advertising in a sector of the media that isn’t dedicating a lot of space to campaign coverage is a clever trick. And that coverage, more so than the ads themselves, may be worth the money.

EA Sports, the video game magnate behind successful franchises like Madden NFL Football and other sports games, announced this week that it will for the first time include international female hockey stars in NHL 13, the newest version of its National Hockey League game. EA included a female body in its “Create A Player” option in last year’s NHL game, but this year, it is going a step farther, adding former Team USA star Angela Ruggiero and former Team Canada player Hayley Wickenheiser to NHL rosters in this year’s game.

Both Ruggiero and Wickenheiser are four-time Olympic medalists in a sport that isn’t widely known but has grown across the world since it was first included at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. The inclusion of women in this game should help bring even more attention to the sport, as Wickenheiser said in a release from EA:

“The EA SPORTS NHL franchise took a big step last year by including female characters to create a more inclusive experience for female hockey fans,” said Hayley Wickenheiser. “I’m excited to be a part of NHL 13 and hope that the addition of women’s hockey legends will encourage greater participation in hockey from young women everywhere.”

EA, for years, has included female golfers in its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf games, and it is facing a petition drive to add women’s teams to its series of FIFA soccer games after the success of the U.S. Women’s National Team, and the sport in general, at the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics. EA now says it is “inevitable” that women will appear in the soccer game, even if it is too late to include them in the 2013 version.

A cynic could take the view that this is all a marketing ploy — other companies have found success by increasing their marketing efforts to young girls — but I’ll take the opposite view: in a world where women’s sports are becoming more visible, in a world where more young women are playing the games, in a world where we more often talk about the gender issues that permeate the sports world and the successes female athletes have despite numerous obstacles, EA is acknowledging not just the fact that women and girls play sports, but that they play sports video games and should have the same opportunity to participate in the gameplay experience men have every time they sit down in front of their XBox or Playstation.

By Tony Palumbi

Every so often I get a twitching in the long finger of my right hand. It’s happened enough that I know the reason and the cure: Bayonetta, released in 2010 by the wild-and-wacky Platinum Games. Fast-paced Japanese action games have always been a personal favorite dating back to Devil May Cry on the PlayStation 2, and Platinum, helmed by DMC creator Hideki Kamiya, has built a reputation for action titles with personality. Bayonetta was successful on release—reviews praised its kinetic combat system, its visual design, and mind-blowing boss battles. At the same time, they scratched their heads at the confusing plot and uneven dialogue. Many frowned at the hyper-sexualized protagonist: Bayonetta has two pistols strapped to her stiletto heels and carries another pair, contorting into sexually gymnastic poses or finding conveniently phallic objects to pole-dance around while she deals hot death to her foes.

Lead designer Kamiya didn’t help matters, admiring Bayonetta’s sex appeal and declaring “women are scary” with a mix of misogyny and adolescent confusion that’s not uncommon in Japanese gaming culture. Bloggers pounced, taking strident issue with the poses, the orgasm sounds released by certain female enemies, and the lollipops that grant temporary power-ups. They really hated the lollipops. What’s the difference, the critics asked, between this and a thousand other sexpot gaming characters? Mocking condescension of the hapless male lead and relentless violence does not a feminist make. Lara Croft was always more than the guns (I refer to her pistols, but take “guns” in that sentence however you like). Given the flimsy story and dialogue, isn’t Bayonetta just a brunette Barbie with leaner proportions? Opinions differed, but from my perusal of the debate a solid consensus emerged: Bayonetta is a really excellent video game, but it’s too exploitative for the feminist label.

I knew all this going into my most recent binge. But it didn’t ring true to me. Maybe it’s my good fortune to grow up surrounded by amazing women, but I just couldn’t see Bayonetta as a victim. The critics, I felt, were wrapped up in a confining vision of the liberated female: one where sex needn’t define any part of a woman, and flaunted sexuality is inherently a concession to the male gaze. Which, it seems to me, still appropriates sex as something controlled by men. As somebody whose fiercely independent sister takes the stage in rock bands dressed like (I mean this in the best way) a tart, I felt this was wrong. But I needed to play the game again to figure out why it was wrong.

Writers suffer from a very particular arrogance: we believe we control the world. Not the world of reality and cold sores, but the worlds we build ourselves. Wielding the power of creation, we can make something amazing or something terrible and own it completely. It’s tempting to apply this to fictional forms like games; Tom Bissell has written extensively about his frustrations in the industry. Writers hear the cringe-inducing dialogue in video games and question the missing links in their plots. We could do better, they always think. But video games crush this special writerly arrogance more than any other fictional form. Games succeed when they cede control back to the player. Tiny details of design, hammered out through relentless testing, have powerful impacts on the audience without words and within moments—achieving subtle narrative feats in spaces so small even Kafka would have thrown down his pen.

Which is to say that for the purposes of my critique, the plot isn’t terribly important. Sun-themed male Lumen Sages oppose the Moon-themed female Umbra Witches, a child is conceived in forbidden love, and Bayonetta is the product. She plows through the patriarchy like a wrecking ball, teaming up at the end with a fellow witch to summon a demon that punches God into the Sun. These things are feminist in the same way that pole-dancing animations are misogynist: superficially.

I posit that Bayonetta is an unsurpassed experiment in radical empathy, the ultimate act of putting yourself in another’s shoes—absorbing their feelings, experiences and desires. You become another person, if only for understanding’s sake. It seems to be what most feminists really want from men: to think for a moment about the female experience as lived by women. Bayonetta achieves this kind of radical empathy in a way nobody could expect and I’ve never seen articulated. Through colorful moments and flawless mechanics, it locates the player inside Bayonetta’s physical person and unlocks her weird, wonderful personality. There are no moral lessons here, just good fun—.
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I spent an hour yesterday considering how to tackle Stephen Marche’s calamitously awful piece for Esquire, “The Contempt of Women,” an attempt at cultural analysis in which he strawmans Girls, Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey all in one paragraph, praises President Bush’s myopia, and literally cites declining sexual assaults rate as evidence of women’s contempt for men. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say so much as I didn’t know where to start, at least until Marche tweeted “The women who show their contempt for my piece on the contempt of women prove my point by virtue of their contempt. Does that make sense?” It’s the perfect encapsulation of an idea that’s shows up in culture everywhere from the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian to the defense of comics who say that women aren’t funny: that women don’t have the right to determine what’s fit for judgement, particularly if their target is something admired by men or conferring of male privilege, and when they do, their judgement is inevitably tainted by self-interest or motivated by irrational contempt rather than the merits of the case.

It is, apparently, not okay for women to want clarity about the status of their relationships and sex that is fulfilling for them as well as their partners, as Hannah does on Girls, to attempt to negotiate the terms of their relationship as Anastasia Steele does in Fifty Shades of Grey, tease the president of the United States, who is also your husband and probably comes equipped with his own set of domestic idiosyncrasies and slight annoyances, or appreciate Louis C.K.’s self-examination. The thing is, there’s a lot of stupid in our culture, and contempt for women is embedded in that very stupid. I’m not sure why women are supposed to accord a heightened level of respect for narratives that tell us we should fall for inconsiderate schlubs whose inattentiveness is a theoretical down payment in future awesome, or the idea that sexual harassment is part of video game culture, or assertions that female incompetence is adorable and endearing. If people and concepts are going to treat women with utter, logic-boggling disrespect, I have no idea why I should bring deference to a contempt-fight.

But we are in luck! Because it turns out that even if I’m not supposed to feel contempt for things and behaviors, and men are supposed to ignore me, Marche is allowed to visit judgement down on his fellow men, and they’d do well to fall in line. “I suppose I should feel compassion, or some kind of weird gender loyalty, for the guys who can’t figure this out,” he writes. “In all honesty, I don’t. There is no masculinity crisis. There’s a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes of the world are doomed. That’s not the end of men. It’s the beginning.” What a relief that someone is allowed to name nonsense for what it is! I hope Marche is ready and able to serve. Because I have a list of things I’d like him to hold in contempt for me.

I know I’ve been writing a lot about Anita Sarkeesian, the Feminist Frequency video blogger whose attempts to raise money to fund a series examining the portrayal of women in video games resulted in vicious, sexist attacks on her—and much higher levels of contributions to her project than she initially anticipated. But I really am struck by these unfolding events as representatives of larger trends and ideas. Most recently, as the attacks have expanded from Sarkeesian herself to Stephanie Guthrie, an organizer who decided to shame the creator of a game that allowed players to beat up a picture of Sarkeesian, I’ve been left wondering what the people who are trolling Sarkeesian and Guthrie are hoping to accomplish here if it’s something other than shutting both women up.

First, I should acknowledge that Guthrie’s language in calling out Bendilin Spurr—the initial tweet was “So I found the Twitter account of that fuck listed as creator of the ‘punch a woman in the face’ game. Should I sic the internet on him?”—was harsher than I would have used, though I’m not really opposed to publicly shaming people who do gross things or threaten people online, particularly if they do so under their real names or Facebook accounts, or leave a clear trail back to such things. People aren’t entitled to greater deference than they give other people. But I think if you’re going to shame someone, it’s probably better to take the moral high ground. That is not always an easy thing to define. Personally, I’m comfortable calling people by name and explaining why what they did was dangerous, offensive, or uncool, though I would never tell folks to respond with retaliatory harassment, or affirmatively contact employers or universities to suggest that they not hire or admit someone (not, for the record, things Guthrie did). If we want to keep the institutions of the internet and the real world troll-free spaces, we have to avoid adopting certain tactics ourselves.

That said, the response to Guthrie was of an entirely different proportion. On Twitter, a user told her that he’d be “The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, bitch,” promising “I will wip you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before, mark my fucking works.” Guthrie, justifiably, called the cops.

The thing is, given that trolls have failed to scare Sarkeesian into silence, and they now appear to be failing to shut Guthrie up, what do they think they’re achieving? Screaming violent, sexist trash at women doesn’t dispel the idea that gamers are sexist, or insensitive to women’s concerns, or afraid of people who challenge their ideas. It’s not as if this is an example of classical trolling, which is meant to reveal something about the target’s naivete or hypocrisy. Calling a woman a cunt reveals vastly more about what the speaker thinks is acceptable than it does about the woman who’s on the receiving end of his name-calling. Everything about this kind of trolling is oriented towards short-term efforts to get individual women to stop saying things that make the trolls uncomfortable. And if those efforts fail, the trolls have left behind huge amounts of evidence that reinforce the perceptions of people who think they’re a bunch of troglodytes, making it more likely that feminists of all genders will say more things in the future that make the trolls uncomfortable. In addition to being ugly harassment, it’s bad, stupid strategy. At some point, you’d think that dudes who don’t want to be called out as sexists would try something else.