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Sept. 9, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
23:17
A Conspiracy Within Gaming #GamerGate #NotYourShield
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I'm sure by now you're all aware of Gamergate, and I'm sure you're all aware that there were a suspicious batch of articles written by several influential people in the gaming press.
They all came out on the 28th and 29th of August, and they all followed the same direction, and attempted to put down or demonise people who considered themselves to be gamers.
Taking this article by Leia Alexander as an example, the title is Gamers Don't Have to Be Your Audience, Gamers Are Over.
This article was linked on a blog by a company called Silverstring Media as part of their coverage from the social justice warrior side of Gamergate.
They wanted to draw attention to a bunch of articles on the subject, all supporting their position, including the one by Leia Alexander.
Silverstring describes themselves as follows.
We're a relatively young company, and although we've had some great successes over the past year and a half, our name is still not known by many in our industries.
Recent events have thrust our company under the spotlight, and we would like to take this opportunity to welcome you, new visitor, and tell you a bit more about us, our goals, and our commitments.
Silverstring Media makes art.
We're a game developer.
We consult with other game devs to help them write better stories for their games, and we make our own games.
We're a small team, just a few people working together to make cool stuff and to try and make a difference.
We're proud of the team we've built, and the people on it are the best we can find.
We've also been super fortunate to have the support of some amazing advisors.
We're really proud of how far we've come in the last year, and we have lots, lots more that we want to accomplish.
They expand on their agenda by saying, We are a feminist company.
We've said it before, but we believe that all people deserve to be represented in art, games, media, and that too little out there does so.
We will make stories about women and LGBT people, and people of colour because it's important, period.
Not only do Silverstring have skin in the game, but they also have a very definitive agenda to push.
People from Silverstring attended the 2014 Digital Games Research Association's conference, DIGRA.
In this case, it was Zoya Street, the newest Silverstring advisor, who wrote an article about her time working with Andrew Grant Wilson.
In part 4 of her Digra Letter series, she has a paragraph entitled, What Does It Mean to Try and Demolish a Structure That You Know to Be Hurting People?
Academia hurts people, and people try to change it from the inside, which is hard because it primarily hurts the people inside of it.
Arguably, I suppose, it depends on how you count the effects of, say, DARPA-funded research on global suffering.
The architecture is oppressive, but if you're the one being strung up by it, you might not want to see it being dismantled, even if you had the power to do so, for fear that you'll be hurt in the process.
It's the only thing holding you up.
It's oppressing you and sustaining you at the same time.
Even if the person who is able to change things is willing to hear you, what do you do to communicate to them?
In response to your last letter, Adrienne Shaw pointed out on Twitter that people aren't just afraid or complacent, they're exhausted.
This is a really important point to make.
People often join the humanities precisely because they care about social issues and then find themselves living in one.
Megan Blythe Adams, of the first-person scholar, wrote on her personal blog this week about the need for DIGRA to prioritise accessibility without demanding that people most affected by its lack step up to provide solutions.
Sympathy is not enough, we need resources and help.
Well, that's all very interesting, but I want to know who Adrienne Shaw is.
And why anyone is taking her opinion seriously?
Adrienne Shaw is the assistant professor at Temple U. She's written a book called Gaming at the Edge, Sexuality and Gender in the Margins of Gamer Culture.
Looking at her Gaming in the Edge book, it says, Adrian Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently, revealing how representation comes to matter to participants and considering the high stakes of politics of representation debates.
She finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalised gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.
They do have disproportionately large influence considering their numbers.
She's an assistant professor at Temple University's Department of Media Studies and Protection, a member of the Social Media and Communication Graduate Facility, and is part of the government-funded Cycles team.
She is co-chair of the International Communication GLBT Studies Special Interest Group.
She received her PhD in 2010 from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the intersections of new media, minority representation, and quantitative audience research.
In August 2014, Shaw co-chaired a roundtable discussion called The Playfulest Political, a fishbowl conversation on identity and diversity in game culture.
This was hosted by DIGRA at the 2014 conference that the Silver String Media employees were attending as well.
DIGRA stands for Digital Games Research Association.
DIGRA is the association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena.
It encourages high-quality research on games and promotes collaboration and dissemination of its work by members.
Put bluntly, this is a propagandistic think tank.
With an ideological agenda, all its members agree to and attempt to actively disseminate to the public.
So let's take a look at DIGRA.
The current president of DIGRA is one Mia Consalvo.
Mia Consalvo is the Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at the Concordia University Department of Communication Studies.
Her main focus is game studies, with particular interests in players and the culture of gameplay.
I'm currently working on a book about Japan's role in the creation of the video game industry, as well as game culture generally.
I'm also doing work on social games, sports video games, and the now defunct classical MMO Faunosphere.
It's also important to introduce you to T.L. Taylor, a quantitative sociologist working in the field of internet and game studies.
Her work focuses on the interaction between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure environments.
She has spoken and written on topics such as network play and social life, values and design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, avatars, and gender and gaming.
Her most recent research explores the professionalization of the computer gameplay, examining the developing scene of high-end competitive play, spectatorship, and the growing institutionalisation of e-sports.
And lastly, I'd like to introduce you to Shira Chess, Assistant Professor of Mass Media Arts at the University of Georgia.
Shira Chess teaches courses in media studies and media writing.
Her research focuses on digital media studies with an emphasis on gender and gaming.
She is, of course, a feminist ideologue, and she has written publications such as You Can't Sexualize a Shrub, Girls, Video Games and Resistance, and Going with the Flow, Dinner Dash and Feminism in Feminist Media Studies.
She's even on Rate My Professors, where she's received some pretty unfavourable reviews.
Quote, honestly, her tests were crazy hard and did not match up with her notes.
Avoid at all costs.
I didn't care for her.
Rushed through a lot.
Luckily, I already have a knowledge of this stuff.
She always says, I reserve the right to blank, and the blank can usually mean do whatever I want.
I don't like professors like that.
I would take other professors if available, and arbitrary presentation of information, tests, that I do whatever I want comment hit the nail on the head.
I'm avoiding her in future.
Now, she co-chaired this the playfulest political of fishbowl conversation with Adriana Shaw.
And everyone else I've listed here was present there.
It took place at the Digra Convention on Sunday the 3rd of August 2014 at 2.30 to 3.45pm.
This is an annual event and there are a lot of people involved, and they're all in academia, and allowing this to filter down to companies like Silverlight and then eventually to the media.
Adrian Shaw herself tweeted a transcript of the conversation had from the notes taken.
I'm quite surprised at this, especially given the content of the notes.
But this was all before Gamergate, and unsurprisingly, it's now been removed.
But luckily for us, some diligent user of the internet decided to save a copy and upload it on a separate account.
Thank fuck for the internet.
The Playful is Political, a Fishbowl Conversation on Identity, Diversity and Gaming Culture.
Digra 2014 in Room Superior A 2.30pm.
Please add your notes from the fishbowl discussion below.
Adrian and Shira intro the fishbowl format then first fish's talk.
It's just fish actually.
Mia Consalvo starts off by saying gender and games have always been an issue.
I thought we'd taken group notes.
TL Taylor.
We've come a ways since ten years ago.
E.g. We have moved beyond an unarticulated imagined player to actually look at actual players, contexts, practices.
We don't conflate women and girls so much anymore.
We've made some inroads, but we are just starting to talk about gender and masculinity in men, not just women.
We now have more nuanced conversations.
We spent a lot of time early on just getting the basics on the table.
Exciting that we can now talk about intersectionality at game studies conferences.
Chris.
We have a good critical mass now, where we can present a unified voice in helping new scholars get caught up, supportive rather than just being dismissed.
Mia, I can count on both hands the number of solid papers on race and video games.
TL.
I could have done more early on, but there were so many battles to fight.
Chris, there are countries represented in North America and Europe.
Florence, it's hard to be the diversity.
It's important to be acknowledged for what you do.
Make a leap to cite someone more marginal.
Remember the impact keynote selection has.
Florence.
Who gets invited to keynotes and the politics of citation is very important.
You can't just think about the bodies of the people doing work.
You also have to look at the work being done.
We have the chance to include older voices that were saying important things before.
Mia.
Reconsider graduate education.
Hanley.
Those not in North America slash Western Europe are often financially limited in their ability to attend a conference like Digra.
It can cost a whole lot of money to come, which means the cost eliminates the ability to attend and present slash share work.
Adrian, sure.
What can we do to make things better?
Mia.
Regional chapters can help make things more affordable and start a critical mass in a different area in a manner that saves money and time.
George.
Universities access is needed to get peer-reviewed research, but authors can put their information up for free online.
Shira Chess.
Is access just about physical things or is it also about what we're talking about?
Hanley.
It's not just about people inside and outside academia.
It's also about the questions that become important in situations where you are doing your research and teaching.
It's hard to teach work that comes from an extreme central view to the margin.
Learning and knowledge systems in different parts of the world grow differently.
How can you teach to indigenous populations?
How can you reach teach outside the centre?
Hanley.
There are different knowledge systems that are not acknowledged in game studies.
George.
Jargon and older psychology work is limited the potential audience for work.
Newer work is predicated on reaching a larger audience.
Zoya Street.
There can be hostility towards jargon, but writing in an inviting way can draw people in.
There is a lot of interest in academic work, but it is important to be transparent and critically examine what specific terms mean.
We're lucky in game studies that so many resources are freely available online.
A curious mind can step in.
Mia.
We need to rethink grad education and the dissertation.
A diss doesn't teach you how to talk to people.
Is it the best way of showing that you've mastered research?
Adrienne.
How has feminist game studies influenced developers and games?
Where's the impact outside of academia?
Deirdre, squinky.
Comes from the people who make stuff feel and newer to the academic side of things.
Feminist game studies influences my work in a personal/slash experimental kind of way.
Some of the most interesting work being done in games is by people who aren't of an academic background and who are speaking from personal experience to explore systems.
Twine is a fascinating way to do this.
Zoya again.
There was a moment in the keynote that sounded like zinister work, wasn't proceduralist.
Could be overdetermined by previous knowledge, but queer feminist work is often the most proceduralist because it's focused on systems.
Deirdre.
Queer feminist work can make the system more visible to people because it is critiquing the system and focuses on how the system works.
Andrew Grant Wilson.
Large divide between industry and academia.
Great conversations here, but those conversations do not occur outside of a group like this.
What can we do to bridge this?
What about when being published on Kotako is a bad thing, rather than a positive signal boosting thing?
Emily.
One of the most important contributions of feminist work is informal learning, safe spaces where people can play around and learn how to make things.
Without great mentoring and supported by a feminist scholar early on in the work, it couldn't be taken to a new community in Wales.
Adrian.
Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers?
Less of an issue at Indies, but there's always some people in the industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over, and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process?
How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them to do different work?
How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?
Deirdre.
This is a hard personal issue.
Getting attacked or having friends attacked hurts.
It's not hard to feel personally attacked and to get to an academic spot where you can take the personal out of it.
Andrew.
Feels quite viscerally injured when someone like Samantha Allen is lost to the industry because the reaction to her by some gamers was so violent that it didn't make sense to stay.
Academia needs to push for more radical positions within the industry to help make things better.
Emily.
Part of it is about education.
Can we help make more informed consumers?
Casey.
The people pushing for these dialogues are faculty or industry folks that are asking people to talk about things in different ways.
How can we invite industry folks into classes to help encourage people to think in different ways?
How can we help both students and industry get better?
Learn and run or learn and stay.
Staying helps us change things more.
Gamer Sutra will shut down negative conversation, at least in part, because they've had their awareness raised by academics.
Chris, we have to think about our obligation and the structures of our production, how we limit what counts and how quickly things can be done.
Kelly, we need to get our house in order first, within game studies.
Stop writing nasty reviews.
Megan.
You can't do one thing first.
There is so much work to be done on many fronts, and you kind of have to do all these things at the same time.
Aaron, peer review and publishing models.
The corruption of the peer review system is problematic.
The reliance on peer review to get tenure and a job impacts us and slows us down.
TL.
One good thing peer review can do is that it can push people to historicise and put things into context and address the politics of citation.
In the best sense, there is a collectiveness to the model of review that we can lean on.
Mia.
One benefit of peer review is that work can be critiqued in a way that we might not do to a person's face in a manner that drives our work to be better.
The way the system values peer review is bullshit, as the money accrues in the hands of private corporations.
How can we do the work and have it benefit us?
Aaron.
Background in scholarly blogging which can work as a good model for scholarly practice as long as it is well curated and executed.
A ton of work that isn't legitimized through the current system.
Shira.
Publishing online sounds fantastic, until you have to put together your C V and show value.
Megan.
FPS is a middle-state publishing venture to curate and review articles to highlight good work without peer review and run on a volunteer basis.
People are especially vulnerable when they are new or grad student.
It is a bad question to put someone in a place between volunteering time for an important project or doing something that helps advance your career.
Share things that aren't showing up in journals.
Adrian.
Not all of us are in stable employment systems.
We're not all in a position to turn down the traditional peer review.
However, those in positions of publishing can find ways of doing publications that are peer-reviewed.
Anthologies and special issues can help work around some of these issues and adding the review process helps add new voices and get the value out of academic work.
Zoya.
Memory insufficient publishing histories of games from various positions and marginalised positions to address ideas that aren't always explored.
The labour of politics of peer-reviewed journals are typically unseen.
Online efforts are sharing the process of labour, together with pay, what you want, and then share funds for all of the writers.
Pursuing an academic career is an exceptionally high-risk endeavour.
Is pushing a grad student writing to it the best decision?
Should we be promoting other modes of writing?
Deirdre.
What about peer-reviewing games?
Often find that instead of writing about something, I'm more driven to write a game and can make the point more powerfully through a game.
How do they do it in film and other media studies?
Some tension between working on a paper to be read by a few or on a game that can be played by more people.
When you make a game, you are forced within the genre conventions of game reviews and game scoring.
Feedback from IGF and Indicade can be lacking and only focus on the surface elements.
What about a scholarly, in-depth review of the messages within a game?
Hanley.
Do you have research protocols for what counts?
Shira.
Where do we go from here?
Andrew.
Flabbergasted that there's not more desperation in the room.
Everyone in the room should be scared, as everyone in the industry is scared.
Doing the right thing is going to hurt, but it's the only way to make progress.
If you're willing to take it on, push harder and do more.
Academics can still interface with the industry and talk with people to say things.
Deirdre.
Part of the reason to be scared is a perception of lack of power.
But we have more power than we think.
Lindsay.
Fear is actually part of the problem.
Figure out what you have to best use it.
How can you exploit the system and use it to your best advantage?
Determine the rules and the rules you want to try and bring them together.
As you mature, you become more confident.
As you become more confident, you're not afraid of difference.
Deirdre.
Millennial angst and lack of jobs.
Carolyn.
We need more explicit networks of support to help people within the struggles of their life in both academia and in the industry.
More links means more support and a better system.
Casey.
These are systems.
Who better to work out systems than game scholars?
Do special issues.
Mention people's names.
Cite good work.
When you do a conference, invite the folks people need to hear.
Mia.
You are Digra.
It's a small organisation, but we have passion.
There's no boot of Digra holding good ideas down.
If there's something you think we should be doing, make an effort.
In response to the calls for positions, we've had competition for one of five spots.
Lead an initiative to do something.
Lindsay.
Get nervous when people are scared by change.
But that's life.
You have to learn to ride the current.
Industry is going to change and keep changing.
Academia is likely to change as well.
You have to embrace the change and enjoy it.
Florence.
Moving on from here offers a nice link to mentorship, which goes beyond games.
Academia is a culture and people coming through academia have challenges in not necessarily knowing the rules of a culture.
Joaquim.
There are many barriers to making things better.
Education is not enough.
As industry works within the logic of a sexist and racist society.
Simply educating people in the industry may not be enough.
Thinking about academia and who can become grad students or this conference is a privileged group.
Cost of registration, planes, and other expenses means that you're going to lose certain voices.
Jose Z. Always hear the stories that you guys shouldn't do this, but why don't you do it?
Never seen anyone shot down for an idea.
Do it and run with it and it'll be awesome.
How can we help facilitate what you want to do?
Do it long enough and with enough conviction and we'll do it and it'll gain its own momentum.
If you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is, we won't get anything done.
Digra is all volunteer and doesn't have a ton of money.
Jillian.
Putting the work on individuals makes them choose how to divide their time and efforts.
A person can point out that a problem exists without being required to solve it.
Jose Z.
No one person can solve anything, but we need more hands to solve more problems.
Tracy.
Digra isn't you guys.
Digra is us.
So saying you guys do it is improbable, as it's about us.
Change has done by yourself, but you don't have to do it alone.
Bring other people together to do something really radical and good.
Committing something can help make it happen.
People at GDC also ask for change, but this year everyone came for IGF and many people left for the big game show and most nominated for the big game show were from IGF.
Only half of the half that are left stood for Anita Sarkeesian.
Some progress was made and some is important.
We're in the middle of this.
Mia.
The outrage is good because it marks change.
We're getting things done now in a way that is more advanced and more questions are being asked.
Tracy, backlash means we're making a big difference.
Megan.
Anyone who feels comfortable is a position of privilege, and those folks should offer help to those who are in more precarious position.
Adrian, a big answer wrap-up would be counterproductive, but many of the issues in academia and industry seem to be interconnected.
Citation is important and there is a long history we need to acknowledge.
This will require mentorship as well.
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