Being a trans lass in the gaming space is weird. With two little pills, I went from being the target audience of practically every AAA video game to a social justice witch hellbent on destroying gamers.
Now, while that last part may actually be true (shh,) the fact remains that my gaming interests are largely the same now as they were pre-transition. I love violent horror games, cutthroat first-person shooters, niche fighting games, and weird anime smut (Kandagawa Jet Girls hype!) Yet expressing those interests now paints a big ol' pink target on my back.
Of course, this stigma is nothing new. This industry grew out of a culture of masculine entitlement being forcefed to entire generations, regardless of how many women were also into it. That led to a community riddled with oozing pustules of entitlement, misogyny, and general dickish behavior. So when women finally found a collected, unified voice for their fandom, those pustules split at the seams and spilled onto every woman bold enough to say, "yeah, video games are pretty cool."
Things have gotten a bit better in recent years - or, at the very least, not as alarmingly bad. More women are out here writing about games than before; there's a wider array of women in competitive gaming spaces; more developers are recognizing that more than one demographic plays their games. That said, harassment campaigns are still the norm, seemingly every major studio has rampant sexual abuse issues, and most major games are still marketed towards guys. Gaming is still very much considered a male hobby by many, regardless of what the actual numbers say.
Which is why what the ESA pulled on Twitter today is so, so egregious. The fraught organization shared an article from Parade, entitled "The 26 Best Online Games to Play With Friends While Social Distancing."
The article, written by Nicole Pejer, is generally harmless. It's primarily a rundown of popular casual games like Words With Friends 2, Fortnite, and Pokemon GO. There are some interesting inclusions, like Final Fantasy XIV and Stardew Valley, but it's mostly a lot of casual games and some big-name AAA titles. From top to bottom, it reads like a mommy blogger listicle, and there's nothing really wrong with that. If anything, Pejer should get some props for having such a wide array of games in here.
From where I stand, the issue here lies in how this article was edited, packaged, and put out to the public. A now-deleted SEO byline reads, "gals love gaming just as much as men," which is just all kinds of gross. It's not only a common sense statement - of course women are into one of the world's biggest entertainment industries - but also the same kind of false equivalency "feminism" that does more harm than good. Women don't like games "as much as men" - they just like games, period. You don't need to bring men into it. They're not a quantifier. It doesn't fucking matter. Why are we talking about this? It's 2020, y'all.
On top of this terrible SEO choice, the ESA sharing this article was an extremely stupid decision. The article is clearly not written by somebody in the games industry, and published on a site that is, primarily, focused on lifestyle blogging. While I'm not going to berate the writer for putting gaming content on a non-gaming site, I am going to berate the ESA for not understanding what they're putting on their social media channels.
It's yet another misfire for the organization, who've spent the past several years stumbling from one blunder smackdab into another. From leaking journalists' personal information to the public, to being unable to keep Sony at E3, to waiting until the latest possible moments to cancel E3 2020 during a global pandemic.
This might seem minor in scale, but it sends a clear message. During a year where the gaming industry is having a real reckoning with how women are treated - both in development and in the community at large - posting something like this is callous and tone deaf. It doesn't read the room, or seem to even regard that there's a room to read.
While their eventual decision to take the post down was the right one, that decision was still ultimately made, and it speaks volumes to just how out of touch the ESA is with its own community. Stick to posting games and news about them, and let the community decide what they're into.
Because, ultimately, games are for everyone - regardless of gender identity, race, creed, etc. There doesn't need to be a quantifier for what games are for who. Instead, there needs to be a mass reckoning with the community that surrounds those games. Only then can this hellscape of a community marginally improve.
Maybe.
If we're lucky.