The Internet is, at once,
both a wonderful thing and a terrible place.
Although it represents the culmination of humanity’s ingenuity and
thirst for connection, it is also the Global South of interpersonal relations,
a slag heap composed of the craven ne’er-do-wells that dwell deep within us
all, many of whose darkest impulses have gained their liberty through online anonymity.
The most popular voices therein often have the least—or the worst—to say,
giving daily vindication to Hamilton and Madison’s dire admonitions against
direct democracy. Though the unnamed
writer of this article intends to council gamers and developers to be more
inclusive in their habits and styles, the intended target is unlikely to be
hit. More likely, the piece will succeed only in becoming a target, mainly for a
subset of those individuals who form the labor proletariat and consumer base of
cyber-capitalism’s most rapacious industries: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and
their diminutive retinue of black sheep cousins and pervert uncles. These
social laborers have a vested interest in pleasing the horde, for there lie the
most reliable viewers, followers and friends, all terms bastardized into
synonyms for the same blessed thing: An audience.
The author, Anonymous—who
will hereafter be gendered ‘she’ due to her stated sympathies—intended her
audience to be reasonable people involved in gaming: Designers, marketers and
players open to being persuaded that mainstream gaming is becoming mechanically
monopolistic and that more genre diversity would improve the overall
experience, even swell the ranks. While there is no dearth of this type of
person as a consumer of online
content, the person with whom one is more likely to share a genuine interaction with online is an altogether
different animal; let us call this entity an Online Reactionary Projectionist,
or ORP. This unintended audience will be
our focus moving forward.
The ORP is not a troll. The troll, in its natural state, is
a mischievous waif who delights in getting a rise out of ordinarily
disinterested users. The ORP, rather, is an individual who cares very deeply
about their online life, who is not open to persuasion, and who is a selfishly sensitive
person that, therefore, frequently projects standoffishness and ill intent onto
others. They often claim a monopoly on reason and ethics, lashing out at
trivial pseudo-contradictions, as if such rhetorical devices are damning
evidence of moral inadequacy. Anonymous—through her likely terministic screen
as a strong, capable, professional woman who both enjoys gaming and works in
the industry—allows her language to come off as presumptive (inasmuch as she
seems to speak for all women), intellectually elitist (referencing “mindless
cover shooters”), and sexist (“young men like to feel powerful”) to anyone
operating off of, for instance, the terministic screen of feminine independence
of thought or that of male disenfranchisement. This is not to say that ORPs are universal
contrarians; they usually target content that seeks to make changes in some status quo that the ORP wishes to maintain.
The ORP, then, is the online equivalent of a staunch social conservative. In
this case, the social institution that they are defending, from their forward
combat position behind a keyboard in the dark, is that of violent power-fantasy
gaming, and Anonymous provides them with plenty of ammunition.
To reiterate, the author
aims her appeals at likeminded or open-minded people in gaming, those who might
like greater “diversity of experience.” However, by opening her arguments with
pathos, namely the attenuation of women in gaming, and going on to the
logos-leaning appeal of female marginalization by way of FPS overproduction,
she makes two fatal implications: A) that she speaks for all women, who must hate
sports and violence because they are women, and B) that male gamers are, in the
main, simpleminded man-children with no appreciation of puzzles or technical
difficulty, whereas women alone are truly deep thinkers. This, by itself, is
enough to bring the ORPs crashing down in waves.
Consider these words by Anonymous: “I’m not excited by
the prospect of more detailed chest-hair physics…” Taken out of context, which the Internet will
inevitably do, this phrase is ripe for reaction. It comes off egocentric by
using “I’m not” instead of “many gamers aren’t.” Obviously, the inclusion of “chest-hair” as
an adjective is so sexually loaded as to appear almost chauvinistic, especially
through the terministic screen of male disenfranchisement, that favorite home
of the ORP. These reactionaries, though perhaps mostly young men with poor
social skills or poor social prospects due to economic/career hardship, are a
diverse group with diverse backgrounds. They need only to perceive two things.
First, they must perceive an assault on a treasured digital institution, in this
case graphic driven innovation in the field of FPS and sports games. Second, they must perceive a chink in the
armor, in this case the author’s implied intellectual elitism and her seeming
embrace of gender stereotypes, both of men and of women. In a sense, the
unintended appeal that Anonymous is making to the ORP ‘community’ is this: “If
you want my guns, come and get them.” Fear not. Santa Ana marches north this
very hour.
This article is massively
effective, insofar as it serves to incite ORPs against it. Although middling in
its stated objective—to engender a greater demand for diversity of experience
in gaming—it wins the day at bringing the ORP armies down from their
mountaintop caves.
The setup: A pathos-laden lament that girls are leaving gaming
behind as they grow up, not because they are growing out of games, but because
the industry is forcing them out by going where the money leads them, to wit:
“[Most] big games are marketed at young men through violence, competition and
sex.” As we know, male ORPs cannot stand such an assault on their own personal
depth. Similarly, it implies, to an ORP, that no woman has ever appreciated a shootout,
struggle or screw of any kind. Female or
self-styled egalitarian ORPs read it like this: “Young ladies are docile,
non-confrontational, and they prefer to spend their private time ruminating on
the luminescent purity of the Virgin Mother.” This constitutes a far-reaching
though not unfounded interpretation of the text. We see this when Anonymous
subsequently claims that the problem of marginalization “isn’t just about women
[characters], or people from different [...] backgrounds, it’s about entire
genres,” and “the very fabric of the design process.” This suggests, indeed,
that style itself can be sexist because the masculine and the feminine are
fundamentally distinct in their passions. More importantly, at least for male
ORPs, this amounts to an indictment of their favorite pastime as misogynistic.
Another chink in Anonymous’ armor comes in her appearing
difficult to appease. “I don’t really care if you put a female avatar into Assassins
Creed.” For female or female-appropriating ORPs who do care, this reads as
dismissive. For male or male-identifying ORPs who dislike this innovation,
perhaps because it affects or has the potential to affect their ability to
immerse themselves in that fantasy universe, such a pronouncement might seem
like overt self-privileging, or—to adopt the parlance of oblivious
misogyny—like the whining of an ungrateful bitch. Whether or not this attitude is ethically or
socially tenable is irrelevant; it has the same effect on an ORP.
Nothing, however, has more of a galvanizing effect on an
ORP than does hypocrisy or the incorrect perception thereof. This turn comes in
the sixth to last paragraph of the article: “We all like different things.
That’s not about gender, that’s about being human.” This was clearly intended,
at the minimum, to be a rhetorical concession, probably even an honest attempt
to clarify “diversity of experience” and to strip the term of any toxic
classifications or offensive labeling. To the ORP, it was merely backtracking.
First, she opened with women getting turned off from gaming by allegedly macho
tropes; then, she appears to deny the relevance of gender. To the ORP, this
constitutes a failure of logos, a contradiction causing the breakdown of the
article’s internal logic. This hypocrisy
is solidified in the mind of the ORP in the next two paragraphs, which
Anonymous spends giving a dual scenario about an implicitly female developer
who spends a decade in AAA sci-fi shooter development, taking her licks,
finally going independent to develop an alien dog game. Alternately, if she
starts out trying to do this sort of thing, she fails and is pushed to the margins
due to her falsely perceived lack of experience. In addition to the
misogynist’s another-bitch-bitching-about-having-to-work-for-a-living reaction,
the rote-logic ORP reads the implication of gender bias present in the author’s
language (“maybe you have a couple kids”) as compounding the previous claim
that this is “not about gender.” This perceived hypocrisy is compounded with
another rhetorical concession. “Sure, industry is a tough place for everyone”
but “I’ve seen women throw in the towel” more or less because they do not
“already fit it.” Together, these
various conceits are seeping wounds with the potential to draw ORPs to this
article like sharks to blood in the water.
In the end, the ORP is
just what their acronym suggests: Keyboard warriors who project their
insecurities onto others in an online setting, all to protect their personal status
quo. Anonymous, though aware enough of this potential audience to choose
anonymity, practically rings the dinner bell for them. Nevertheless, perhaps that audience would be
there to greet her regardless of her style or choice of words. Again, the
Internet is a terrible place. Fortuitous, then, that we are not compelled to live
on the Internet—at least, not all of the time.
