SAN FRANCISCO — I remember, when I was a kid, desperately trying to persuade my mom and dad to buy me a Game Boy. They were very reluctant. The conventional wisdom of the early ’90s said that video games would rot kids’ brains, and as immigrants who came to North America from Iraq to provide a better life for me and my sister, my parents bought into that myth.
But there was another, more pernicious reason my mother questioned my interest: She thought it was a toy for boys. And could I really blame her? It was right there in the name: Game Boy.
I persisted, however, and after some months of campaigning finally convinced my parents that Nintendo’s hand-held gaming device was, in fact, appropriate for their little girl.
This was a story I was planning to share a couple of weeks ago at Utah State University. Unfortunately, I was not able to give my scheduled lecture there. The school received emailed threats to carry out “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if I were allowed to speak on campus. When the Utah campus police said they could not search attendees for firearms, citing the state’s concealed carry laws, I felt forced to cancel the event.
This wasn’t the first time my life had been threatened over video games. To parts of the gaming community, I have become something of a folk demon. My nonprofit organization, Feminist Frequency, creates educational videos, available on YouTube, that deconstruct representations of women in popular culture. Recently, I’ve focused on the negative, often sexist, ways in which women are portrayed in games. For this, I have been harassed and threatened for more than two years.
My own contentious relationship with gaming continued through high school and college: I still enjoyed playing games from time to time, but I always found myself pushed away by the sexism that permeated gaming culture. There were constant reminders that I didn’t really belong.
As a kid, I didn’t understand that this feeling of alienation wasn’t unique to me, but was part of a systemic problem. Traditionally, advertisements for mainstream games were almost exclusively aimed at men and boys. When women and girls appeared, typically it was either as eye candy or as annoying girlfriends.
The games often reinforce a similar message, overwhelmingly casting men as heroes and relegating women to the roles of damsels, victims or hyper-sexualized playthings. The notion that gaming was not for women rippled out into society, until we heard it not just from the games industry, but from our families, teachers and friends. As a consequence, I, like many women, had a complicated, love-hate relationship with gaming culture.
In 2006, I was drawn back into video games when Nintendo introduced a new system with intuitive motion controls and a quirky name, Wii. Nintendo projected the message that this new console was for everyone. Commercials featuring the tagline “Wii would like to play” showed families and friends of all ages. Nintendo’s console may not have been as technologically splashy as that of its Sony and Microsoft competitors, but it was deliberately designed and marketed to appeal to a wider audience — especially women and girls.
The Wii reignited my interest in gaming, offering play experiences I found engaging and rewarding, like Mario Kart, de Blob and The Beatles: Rockband. From there, I immersed myself in zany PC games like Plants vs. Zombies, World of Goo and Spore, and eventually became a fan of mainstream first-person titles like Mirror’s Edge, Portal and Half-Life 2.
Even though I was playing lots of games, I still didn’t call myself a “gamer” because I had associated that term with the games I wasn’t playing — instead of all the ones I was playing. This was largely because I’d bought into the myth that to be a “real gamer,” you had to be playing testosterone-infused blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft Auto, God of War or Call of Duty.
The Wii helped pave the way for the current explosion of popular indie, mobile and experimental titles — everything from serious, text-based games about mental illness to addictive mobile games about multiples of three; dance games like Dance Central, physics-based games like Angry Birds, artistic games like Monument Valley and immersive story-exploration games like Gone Home. Many offer an accessible learning curve or simple controls, and can be played right on your phone, making gaming available to new and diverse audiences.
Instead of celebrating the expansion of the industry, though, some who self-identify as “hard-core gamers” attack these types of interactive experiences as too casual, too easy, too feminine and therefore “not real games.” Players from marginalized groups are also targeted because they’re seen as outsiders, invading a sacred boys’ club.
The time for invisible boundaries that guard the “purity” of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about.
Those who police the borders of our hobby, the ones who try to shame and threaten women like me into silence, have already lost. The new reality is that video games are maturing, evolving and becoming more diverse.
Those of us who critique the industry are simply saying that games matter. We know games can tell different, broader stories, be quirky and emotional, and give us more ways to win and have fun.
As others have recently suggested, the term “gamer” is no longer useful as an identity because games are for everyone. These days, even my mom spends an inordinate amount of time gaming on her iPad. So I’ll take a cue from my younger self and say I don’t care about being a “gamer,” but I sure do love video games.
Anita Sarkeesian is a media critic and the executive director of Feminist Frequency.