Anita Sarkeesian

SPEAKER_02:
It's the latest development in what has become known as Gamergate, an online culture war.

Tig:
Hello and welcome to episode one of Neutral Good. It's been a long time coming. Taken me this long because the depth of research necessary to even go into the first topic I chose, which is Gamergate. It's an iceberg. It's one of those internet icebergs where you think, you know, that there's a decent amount of information beneath the surface and it's a pretty lengthy topic. And then you go diving and find out that it is 10 times that size. And the information is limitless. There's like a million different rabbit holes to dive into. So. I did, and we're going to explore some of them, but it's going to take some time. In this episode, we're going to lay some foundation for how things kicked off, how Gamergate formed, where, who, what, etc.

SPEAKER_04:
The topic of discussion today is Gamergate.

Tig:
Gamergate. Gamergate. My name is Tig and I am your host and will be your guide through all of this insanity. And trust me when I tell you that it is it's just insane. It's it's chaos. It is the worst of the human condition offset by some of the best redeeming qualities later on, you know, but we have to get to that part of the story because it is a rough ride.

SPEAKER_01:
My next guest is one of the most talked about people of the moment. Rolling Stone magazine just called her pop culture's most valuable critic. Others have called her a feminist bravely confronting sexism in our culture. For two months now, Anita Sarkeesian's name has been splashed across the headlines as a central figure in what's been described as a war on women in the video game industry. Since going public with her criticism of the industry, Zarkissian says angry gamers have smeared her reputation, violated her personal life, and most alarmingly, threatened her safety. Back in September, she received a bomb threat while at an awards banquet in San Francisco. Then just days ago, she canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University after the school received an anonymous threat from an alleged gunman who promised to shoot students if she spoke. The FBI is now reportedly involved in Sarkeesian's case. And in the meantime, more women are coming forward with similar stories of harassment and threats.

Tig:
So back in 2012, Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of some videos that she wanted to put out about tropes of women in video games. She wanted to produce content in her wheelhouse. So she launched a Kickstarter campaign in May of 2012 to fund these videos. She was only asking for about six thousand dollars and the campaign made, get this, the campaign made $158,000. So you can see there was obviously some interest. There was interest in her content that she was producing. There was interest in this campaign. Here is Sarkeesian herself explaining her project.

SPEAKER_00:
In this particular project, which I'm calling Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, I'm going to create a series of five videos that look at and deconstruct the most common and the most stereotypical representations of women in games. This new video series will primarily focus on tracking five stereotypical representations of women throughout the history of video games. Last year, I released a successful video series called Tropes vs. Women, where I looked at the reoccurring patterns of the way that women are portrayed in the media. A trope is a common pattern in a story or a recognizable attribute in a character that conveys information to the audience. Feminist frequency videos have been used in middle school, high school, and university classrooms. They've been integrated into the curriculum of media studies, gender studies, and law school programs. Parents have even reached out to me saying that they use my videos to spark discussions with their kids about representations of women in the media. As with all Feminist Frequency videos, these will be available online for free for everyone and anyone to watch, share, and use. This is an incredibly ambitious project because of the scope and scale of the research and production involved. So please donate any amount you can to bring this video series to life.

Tig:
Now, this all sounds amazing, right? I mean, this is the kind of content that is necessary in 2013. This is the kind of content that's necessary, period. And obviously, with the fact that the campaign made $158,000 and it was only asking for $6,000, that is extreme positive interest in the topic, right? So here are some excerpts from a post on Kickstarter.com from when the project had hit its funding goal. funded in the first 24 hours. I'm honored and excited by all the positive feedback and support. Thank you all so much. When I was initially planning this video I came up with 10 tropes focusing on female characters in video games but I wasn't sure what the level of interest would be in this project so I narrowed it down to the 5 most common and easily recognizable tropes. I figured I would do another kickstarter later if this was successful to continue the series. Since the funding has happened faster than I could have imagined, and there seems to be an enormous amount of interest, here's what I'm going to do. For every $1,500 I raise above my goal, I'll do another one of the trope videos on my extended list. So those extended ones included things like the Voodoo Priestess Tribal Sorceress trope, Women as Reward, Mrs. Male Character, Ugly equals evil man with boobs. And I think there was more posted after this, but you can see already within 24 hours, the project was funded and it was funded past what it had to hit. And so they hit a bunch of these stretch goals. A bunch of these videos are available on the feminist frequency website. Let's hear some excerpts from the very first video that was produced after this was successfully funded, which is damsels in distress.

SPEAKER_00:
One way to think about damsel characters is via what's called the subject-object dichotomy. In the simplest terms, subjects act and objects are acted upon. The subject is the protagonist, the one who the story is centered on and the one doing most of the action. In video games, this is almost always the main playable character and the one from whose perspective most of the story is seen.

Tig:
yeah the man the guy with a sword or the big gun or the well usually it's usually one of those usually big sword or big gun so this sounds very on point so far right i can't see any possible problem with where this is going

SPEAKER_00:
So the damsel trope typically makes men the subject of narratives while relegating women to the role of object. This is a form of objectification because as objects, damseled women are being acted upon. Most often becoming or reduced to a prize to be won, a treasure to be found, or a goal to be achieved.

Tig:
Well, there's no way that capital G gamers, you know, the ones who pride themselves on playing every game and telling you how to play every game and that if you don't play this game this way, you're not a capital G gamer, those folks, they couldn't have possibly seen any problem with with Anita's video series or her her in research that goes into these videos so nobody could possibly have any problem with this. Well, well, let me tell you she started getting the worst kind of possible hate and online harassment that you can expect being that she's a woman online that she is vocal online about the the plight of women in general and especially online And to speak about these things is a faux pas amongst way too many people, unfortunately, especially capital G gamers who feel that any threat to anything gaming related is essentially a threat on them. And so the backlash was massive. She started getting about like a 150 harassing tweets per week easily. Some days she said it was just unbearable. And that's just on Twitter at the time. Apparently, there were bomb threats. There were bomb threats made to locations where she would have done speaking events. There were other speaking events canceled due to threats of a shooting. These all All are documented things, documented outcomes of a ridiculously violent and overzealous reaction to her videos. And this is pre the actual Gamergate itself. This is all leading up to and just sort of an intro to the flavors of what we're dealing with.

SPEAKER_03:
This is Anita Sarkeesian. She's a self-described pop culture critic and founder of the video web series Feminist Frequency, with her most well-known project by far being Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, a series of videos where she points out the apparent sexism within gaming. However, are Anita's claims about video games all that accurate? Today we're gonna find out. In this video, we're looking at eight Anita Sarkeesian fails.

Tig:
Let me read you some of the hateful comments that she received on her support my Kickstarter project video. The first video that we heard bits from these are comments on that video. I hate ovaries with a brain big enough to post videos. Fun aside, she completely forgot to mention that every guy in video games has these stereotypes, too. Did you see us parading about it? No, honey, it's a video game.

SPEAKER_04:
This isn't sexism, and if it is, it's towards both sexes. It's just the current state of modern video games. They have no originality, and they feel no need to flesh out characters, which is why the bald muscle man and the busty babe are constantly pumped out, game after game. It's not sexism, it's just laziness and the shitty state of the gaming industry.

Tig:
She needs a good dicking. Good luck finding it, though. Well, I'm interested in seeing the video. I don't see why you need $6,000 to make it. But they've already donated almost $24,000, so I guess don't worry about it. Why do you put on makeup if everything is sexism? why don't you shave your head bald stop wearing makeup and stop wearing huge slut earrings you are a fucking hypocrite slut yeah i i can't i i just can't i can't continue because these are awful and that's just five did we read four or five of these comments she received on this video and this is one video and this is just her it's just disgusting and the the amount of of crap that she received on twitter was equally as heinous it was all of this stuff and this is still 2013. This is still 2012-2013 leading up to the events that triggered Gamergate itself. So the hatred, the sexism, the misogyny, the weird obsession with controlling the gaming space, being very possessive over the gaming space, especially male dominating the gaming space. It's all there already. It's all bubbling just under the surface, as you can see. A lot of this stuff was not reported on. These events, these threats to the comments in the videos, all this stuff was not really reported on until years afterwards. It wasn't really reported on during. It was reported on during, but not with the same lens. It was reported as in the heat of the moment. These are what horrible people are saying. Oh, well, whereas after, you know, it is seen as much more of a greater movement, a greater, deeper, awful understanding. There's something much more to this than just some nasty people on the Internet dropping nasty comments on a girl's video. Now, I know we've only been talking about one person so far, Anita Sarkeesian, but I can't express how important Anita's story is to the rest of the Gamergate story, because you can already see what's going on here and you can see the exact same response bubbling already years before Gamergate was ever a hashtag, was ever a movement, whatever you want to call it. And so her story, I think it's incredibly important to tell. It's incredibly important to spend the time dissecting, you know, this aspect of the beginnings. In episode two, we'll dive into Gamergate itself, the events that kicked off the whole shebang, the whole thing. We'll explore all of it.