One night in October, before the media critic Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a speech at Utah State University, someone e-mailed the school, threatening to commit mass murder. “This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history, and I’m giving you a chance to stop it,” the message read. “I have at my disposal a semiautomatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs,” it went on. “I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.” The message mentioned Marc Lépine, a man who shot and killed 14 women at an engineering college in Montreal in 1989 before killing himself.
Sarkeesian had been invited by the university’s Center for Women and Gender to give a talk about sexism in the video game industry, which has lately become the kind of topic that generates death threats, in large part because of Sarkeesian’s work. As her plane made its way toward Salt Lake City, school officials quickly discussed the e-mail with police and decided it was safe for the talk to go on—it wasn’t the first time someone had promised to create havoc at one of her appearances, they reasoned, and nothing too terrible had happened before. The “terror threat,” as it was called, was reported in a local newspaper, and Sarkeesian learned about it after she got off the plane and checked Twitter. Her friends were e-mailing: “Are you OK?” She was too scared to leave the airport and called the school. After learning that the event staff couldn’t screen for weapons because of Utah’s concealed-carry laws, she canceled her talk, got back on a plane, and returned to California.
“Harassment is the background radiation of my life,” says Sarkeesian. “It is a factor in every decision I make. Any time I tweet something, or make a post, I’m always thinking about it. When I post our videos, it’s a consideration. It affects where I go, and how I behave, and how I feel walking down the street every day.”
The strange part is that Sarkeesian is essentially an academic who has spent the past two years putting together a scholarly criticism of video games as a medium, through a series called “Tropes vs Women in Video Games,” published on her website Feminist Frequency. She finds disturbing, recurring themes in the ways that women are depicted in games, from blockbusters such as Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty to obscure titles such as Splatterhouse and MediEvil 2.
The Utah State incident raised her profile yet again, landing her on the front page of the New York Times the following day. She broke 200,000 followers on Twitter and is in demand on the speaking circuit, where she talks about online harassment almost as much as she does video games, deconstructing and dissecting it like one of her game motifs. “Tropes vs Women in Video Games” was on track to become the kind of minor academic work that professors make their assistants churn out to help them get tenure. But it tapped something that was waiting to explode. And it might change an industry that’s by some measures now larger than Hollywood.
Petite and fair, with long, shiny hair the color of merlot, chunky boots, and nails painted gold, Sarkeesian, 31, telegraphs an earnest grad student—part activist, part literary theory major. She was studying for her master’s at York University in Toronto when, as a kind of hobby, she started making videos about women in popular culture. Her degree was in social and political thought—her thesis was called “I’ll Make a Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television”—and she was interested in creating something that might make feminism more accessible. After graduating in 2010, she produced “Tropes vs Women,” a series of six videos about movies and television, looking at the show Glee, rap lyrics, the marketing of toys for boys and girls, and so on. She hoped that by focusing on “tropes”—storytelling devices—through popular culture she could help viewers become more critical consumers of media.
In 2012, Sarkeesian was invited to speak about creating strong female characters at Bungie, the game studio near Seattle that made the Halo series. She got surprisingly good feedback and decided to push her thinking into video games, which she’s loved since playing on a Game Boy as a kid. Sarkeesian started a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter: “Have you ever noticed that with a few notable exceptions, basically all female characters in video games fall into a small handful of clichés and stereotypes?” she asked at the start of her pitch.
She set a goal of $6,000 and reached it in less than 24 hours. Two weeks later, after passing the $22,000 mark, she posted a video describing the project on YouTube, and it started to draw the attention of hard-core gamers. Thousands of comments flooded YouTube, Kickstarter, and Sarkeesian’s own website. Some asked why she wasn’t looking at male characters and argued that the things she was pointing out weren’t sexist, necessarily, but realistic or historically accurate. But many comments were couched in vicious language: “I hate ovaries with brains big enough to post videos,” “f--- you feminist f---s you already have equality. In fact you have better s--- than most males be glad what you got bitch,” and “get back in the kitchen, if you hate it go make your own games.” Sarkeesian took screen grabs of the comments and posted them, which in turn drove more comments, and more people to contribute money on Kickstarter. The campaign ultimately raised $158,922 from 6,968 backers during the 30 days it was open.
Then Sarkeesian got to work. There are games stacked in piles around her San Francisco home, where she has a Wii; a WiiU; a PlayStation 2, 3, and 4; an Xbox 360; Xbox One; PS Vita; Nintendo 3DS XL; iPhone; iPad; and a gaming PC spilling out of various Ikea shelves and TV stands. The place is a jungle of cables and wires—she has three power strips behind her TV—and also includes capture equipment to record segments of games, as well as a recording studio where she creates the scripted portions of her videos.
Each video can require hundreds of hours of game playing, which she does herself or with the help of her co-producer, Jonathan McIntosh, who’s created his own share of viral cultural critiques. Getting the right snippet of a game—the appearance of a particular character, for example—can require playing it 10 or 15 times to drive the narrative up to the desired point and in such a way that the footage will be clear to anyone watching it later. A common joke among gamers, Sarkeesian says, is that even when you’re inhabiting one of the rare playable female characters, you can leer at her butt up close—you’re playing a woman and checking her out at the same time. At one point, Sarkeesian spent two days replaying every game to satisfy a hunch that first-person characters had the capacity to stare at the butts of female characters, but not at the backsides of men. She was right.
Some of the images of women she assembled were subtly diminishing—a princess trapped in a crystal, for example—but many were brutal. In a clip from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a marquee game made by Ubisoft Entertainment (UBI:FP) and introduced with a national TV campaign, the throat of a barely dressed maiden is slashed. Women are beaten and kicked in other games. They are slung over horses, dumped in trunks, and run over with sports cars. Often, when they are killed, a player is rewarded with money. Each trope video opens with a similar disclaimer: “I need to stress that this video comes with a content warning and is not recommended for children,” Sarkeesian says to the camera. “This episode includes game footage of hypersexualized female characters as well as extremely graphic depictions of violence against women.”
The videos last about 20 minutes to 30 minutes each, with Sarkeesian narrating, often using dense terminology imported from feminist theory (“building off of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s work on objectification theory …,” etc.). She focuses on the darkest, most violent and sexualized parts of the games and the limited range of their female characters, whom she terms “nonplayable sex objects”—often barely dressed streetwalkers, pole dancers, and barmaids spilling out of their corsets; helpless mistresses outfitted in shredded dress-bits with double-D cleavage; and the ongoing parade of women who are stabbed, shot, and mutilated in service of plots about heavily armed male antiheroes.
The first three videos in the series examine the “damsels in distress” trope and the ways in which women appear not as characters with power to take action but as victims in need of rescue and “a core incentive or motivation for the protagonist’s quest.” Sarkeesian draws an engaging line through history, from Perseus and Andromeda, to King Kong and Fay Wray, to Popeye and Olive Oyl, to Super Mario and Princess Peach. Two more installments look at a second trope, “women as background decoration.” They open with a clip from a Sega game called Binary Domain, set in a purple-hued brothel. “Sorry, all booked up,” says a hooker breathily, puffing on a cigarillo. “Too bad, too, ’cause I would’ve given a stud like you a free sample.” As Sarkeesian illustrates through clips of Grand Theft Auto and other games where “whore” is often a synonym for “woman,” the nonplayable females are just elements sprinkled into the environments to make them edgier and more titillating to men. There are more trope videos coming, including one about women as rewards and another about women as erotic sidekicks.
Each time a new video comes out, the harassment spikes. People impersonate Sarkeesian, creating fake accounts with her photo. Some spread false information. There was an effort to get the IRS to investigate the nonprofit status of Feminist Frequency. She gets private messages and pictures showing her image being raped by video game characters, some with her face Photoshopped onto porn stills, in addition to the standard threats and insults.
In August an independent video game designer named Zoe Quinn was swept up in a separate Internet storm when her ex-boyfriend posted a rambling 9,000-word essay about their relationship on several online forums. Quinn was best known for a game called Depression Quest, about suffering through mental illness, something she has experienced. The angry boyfriend’s post led to accusations that Quinn had a romantic relationship with a video game critic for the gaming website Kotaku. Although Depression Quest is available for free and the critic never reviewed the game, Quinn became the target of rape and death threats, obscene calls to her father, and online petitions to try to sabotage her career.
The campaign grew and morphed and got a name, “gamergate.” Very few people came out looking good in the ensuing hashtag war—an example of social media at its worst, with childish insults, sarcasm, disingenuousness, and threats of rape and other violence. Quinn fled her home in Boston and hasn’t been back in months. She periodically gets reports that strangers are lurking outside. She’s working with criminal prosecutors and the FBI on some of the more serious threats, but she says that her life has been practically destroyed. “I talk to my therapist,” Quinn says, via Skype from London. “She says, ‘I don’t even know what to tell you, this is so f---ing far outside anything I’m aware of.’ ” Other women involved in game development were affected as well.
(Bloomberg Businessweek)
