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Oct. 24, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
09:03
Leigh Alexander Explains #GamerGate
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Thrilled to introduce Lee Alexander.
We are now joined by Lee Alexander.
She's a critic and a writer of games.
She writes for Gama Sutra.
So I'm Lee Alexander.
I am a writer and critic about video games.
Don't know if you heard.
I've been doing this for about eight or nine years now.
I have an acting degree.
I went to two-year conservatory in New York.
As a woman, I'm socialized not to toot my own horn, but I want everyone to see games the way that I see them, as beautiful and full of potential.
I want to be able to tell somebody about my work and hear them say, Yeah, that sounds worthwhile.
Not like, cool, how's that for you?
You know, they look at you like they think you're a creepy arrested child.
And as it slowly sunk in for me, the way that women who stand out are often targeted and shut down, it was like I pulled on this little thread inside myself.
I found a thread and I pulled and I pulled until the entire thing had come apart.
So I tend to try to combine a lot of things that I'm interested in so I don't feel boxed in.
So the market, I have an acting degree.
I write about the games industry, which includes the people that make the games and the technology that supports the games.
And I also write about the culture of their creators and their players, which has been interesting lately.
I guess the shorthand we can refer to this in the whole Kerfuffleaz's Gamergate.
Yeah, that's Gamergate is the hashtag that the true gamers have elected for themselves.
I make a full-time living freelance.
I do it on my own terms as a woman in a space that's traditionally pretty hostile to women.
There's an article up today, part two of how I'm the worst game critic ever.
I have a vice column called Understanding Games, which is just stuff I'm thinking about.
You mentioned E3, and actually, I haven't gone to E3 in many years, even though my full-time job is to write about video games.
My writing on video games has focused mainly on evaluating hardware and software as tech products.
The largest addressable audience who reads that stuff primarily expect a buyer's guide.
They want to know whether they're going to have a good experience or whether they're going to get the value for their dollar and that type of thing.
My blog was full of feelings and thoughts and ideas about the games that I was playing.
Sort of lost interest in the big blockbuster commercial arm of the games world because it has so many commercial challenges.
It's really doubled down on a dying demographic, which is this idea of the hyper-testosterone, junkie 18 to 23-year-old male, which most of us are no longer reviewers anyway.
Many of us do, but your average game journalist has matured out of putting scores on things.
We're trying to look at games as cultural objects and not as products that you can rate and put in a catalog and tell gamers buy or not.
You know what I mean?
Like we're even out of that milieu.
We don't look at or talk about games in that way anymore.
In addition to regularly writing and speaking about feminism, I reject as much as possible conventional models for video games writing.
Yeah, I hope that by doing non-traditional work, I can help and play a role in catalyzing a different kind of more mature conversation about video games and their role in our culture.
And I knew that games were not going to have a healthy creative community or a desirable culture or a meaningful role in the world's media landscape at all until we could address diversity problems and inclusivity problems and all these other problems that come from games' origin as these hyper-masculine capitalistic technology products.
So it's like it's no longer a special niche treehouse for angry young men, but you know, they haven't got the memo on that yet.
So I guess the shorthand we can refer to this in the whole Kerfuffleaz's gamergate.
Yeah, that's Gamergate is the hashtag that the true gamers have elected for themselves in order to pursue their interrogation into, oh God, I guess what they would say is it's corruption in video games journalism and the fact that their medium is being taken over by feminists and social justice warriors who want to push their agenda on everyone.
Destroying gaming with my sister, People get very angry when you talk about inclusionism.
Yeah.
Like you're trying to, like, like inclusionism is fascist and you're trying to impress some kind of agenda on them.
I'm absolutely proud to advance amazing creators and conversations that I think matter to games.
Yeah, I have an agenda.
Sorry.
And of course, I'm far from the only person doing progressive writing these days, which is awesome.
I'm part of a community as well.
I'm part of a, I feel I'm part of a movement.
And the story that Andy was telling you about was speculative fiction on the Atari dig that was written as if I'd gone, kind of, and then I just made up a story about it that said what I wanted to say about the event.
Whether I'm doing interviews, criticism, anything, no pretense of being unbiased.
I write about the things I'm interested in, the creators I care about, and the trends that I want to see succeed.
Sorry, that's the conspiracy.
That's the scandal that gamers today are facing in America.
It's tough out there, you know.
So many social justice warriors, just they won't.
I know, just won't.
In general, my approach often puts me at extreme odds with the typical gamer fan type of reader for various reasons.
I'm a polarizing figure.
I wrote an editorial about the changing gamer demographic, and I phrased it a bit like bombastically, and other people did as well.
There were a number of articles on the death of the gamer.
But of course, I'm committing slander and libel against gamers.
And this community of lovely people is just being super raw nerve right now.
And like, if you have anything to say about what's going on, if you have any criticism of gaming culture as a result of all of this, you're part of the problem and you're taking the wrong side.
Zoe Quinn is a woman game developer.
She made a game called Depression Quest.
It's a flowchart, basically, but it's a well-written game.
Of course, the traditional gamer audience has kind of had it out for her ever since.
She didn't make a real game.
She's not a real game developer.
The traditional audience has historically been really pushing back against the new stuffs with particular attention to the participation of women and minorities in games.
They're going to say it's not about that.
It's not that we're sexist, it's that the games they are making aren't real.
That there are a lot of conversations about how challenging it is to monetize the work, even though the demand is proven.
Basically, the narrative that they distilled was she slept with a guy to get positive reviews, which the narrative blew completely out of control thanks to these trolls.
They wanted a full interrogation of journalistic ethics that we're all corrupt.
I'm corrupt.
Is a social justice warrior a good person or a bad person?
It's probably good.
So the Digital Publisher Thought Catalog, they gave me an advance to do my first book, Breathing Machine, which is a memoir of growing up alongside the early internet and computers and stuff.
Basically, as soon as I took their money, though, they started letting their quality bar plummet and publishing transphobic hate speech, which was a really bad situation for me to be in.
So somebody leaked my book onto the internet.
So now instead of giving money to Thought Catalog, there's horrible pirates stealing it.
See, they're finding anything that they can in our past and our personal lives to be.
Everybody.
It's horrible on the internet.
I think you tweeted about that too.
And I was like, that's.
I think that, you know, I think everybody who's currently a gaming writer has empathy for being an anonymous troll on the internet at some point.
Everybody's been in those message boards.
But it's just, you know, it does kind of make you wonder if things are worse now because of how long the market has sort of catered to these kinds of kids.
Yeah.
There's maybe something that people who like video games have in common culturally that exacerbates this conflict, but it's really hard to tell.
They are interested to a certain extent in the people who make games, but only to the extent that those people can then make promises to them, the consumers, that the consumers can then hold them accountable for.
I don't know what this, I honestly can't tell how many trolls there are or what the size of the problem is.
I think the fact that I often feel so personally about the things that I write about helps me draw support from my own readership.
The people who want this, I have to believe that the people who want this are as numerous as the number of creepy fanboys.
If I stay off Twitter, I feel really supported by people in my professional life.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, I get plenty.
Like, I have people with like 12 Twitter followers saying that I'm a nothing blogger whose career is going to be ruined by this episode.
And really, any reasonable person looks at this and says it's a bunch of misogynistic basement trolls who are like freaking out because they feel that their hobby is being lost as it matures.
Which, you know, is a fair maybe thing for them to be worried about, but they want to feel like they're in a noble fight for something because the world around them is confusing.
They can't trust their authority figures.
And my writing might have a role to play in that.
And I have a vision of a mature, independent conversation about video games.
You know, you can't be a female columnist or like a woman who writes her opinions without people making referendums on your personality or speculating about your motives or even your mental health.
without people making referendums on your personality or speculating about your motives or even your mental health.
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