Cerise Magazine

In October I went to Utah’s only Anime Con; Anime Banzai! I’ve been going to this one on and off for years, but this year it was bigger and better. Knowing many of the staff, I decided to give them some free publicity. (more…)

But I don’t want to be a gamer anymore. I’m looking for another term, even a separate but equal term for a person who likes to play all sorts of games. Why? Gamers as a community police each other only when they wish to. They may be rabid about the best this or the worst that, but as a whole they manage to flow together. Say just three words, three simple words and gamers will rise in solidarity. Be he ne’er so vile this phrase shall gentle his condition: video game violence. The bile and froth rise even now to defend, declaim, and defuse this mode of operation of the game industry. Never has so great a battle charge been made as those who ride across the plain to defend the fair Princess Video Game’s honor. (more…)

In 1993, Julian Dibbell wrote about a rape in cyberspace. At that time, the idea was completely foreign to most of the readers of The Village Voice where the article was published, and this was still basically true five years later when it became the first chapter of his book My Tiny Life. Today, the idea of virtual rape hits a bit closer to home, especially for gamers. In fact, just last year, Belgian law enforcement officials investigated a claim of virtual rape in the online game Second Life.

The obvious first question is: wait, how does that even work? Apparently, whereas the sophistication of the technology has improved dramatically since the early nineties, the sophistication of these virtual rapists has not. In Dibbell’s LambdaMOO, an early multiplayer online game, the rape involved a “voodoo doll”; a subprogram that allows for the attribution of actions to other characters that their users do not intend. In the text-based game, this meant text scrolling on the screen while the victim-users were forced to read the awful things that their characters were supposedly doing. In Second Life, a virtual rape can occur in much the same way, with the “voodoo doll” code taking the form of a seemingly mundane Second Life object, such as a book or an article of clothing. When the player uses the item, control of their character is given over to someone else. Granted, in Second Life players do have to give consent for someone else to take that control, but anyone who has ever played can vouch for the fact that the interface can be somewhat perplexing, and persuading a new user to click a certain button would not be a difficult task.

And even though Second Life may not be considered a “game” in the traditional sense, this kind of behavior can happen in less-obvious forms in any virtual world where players have control of avatars. I read in one World of Warcraft player’s blog about how she was approached by two male characters on a boat taking them to another continent and spammed with text about how they were “raping” her while their characters chased her around the boat. Although she knew that neither she nor her character were in any actual danger, she felt a sense of helplessness from being trapped there. In another example, apparently in the World of Warcraft beta – when there was no language barrier separating the two opposing factions – a game named “Strip or Die” became popular. Imagine being a relatively powerless new female character suddenly jumped by a group of much stronger opponents who demand that you strip to your underwear or they’ll kill you. Refusal may not just mean death – a relatively minor inconvenience for WoW players – in this case, but being targeted and continually harassed, essentially destroying your gaming experience for the day.

Don’t mistake me; I am definitely not saying that these events, whether the term “virtual rape” is appropriate or not, are anything like real-world rape. I am not suggesting that abusive WoW players be thrown into jail as sex offenders. However, even if not as serious, these acts do have real impact on the victims. Many roleplayers can attest to just how close they become to their avatars, especially for hardcore gamers; if you spend nine hours of a day as your character, that may be even more of your waking hours than you spend as yourself. The potential psychological damage of watching someone who is basically an extension of yourself in such a position is very real. This is to say nothing of the real life victims of rape and sexual harassment playing these games as well, who might be forced by this type of virtual behavior to re-live real life trauma.

One of the problems with this kind of sexually victimizing behavior is that it can often be incremental. Maybe it starts with the gamers who insist upon asking every character whom they expect is a real-life woman if she wants to have cybersex. Or maybe it starts with “consensual rape” in a game like Second Life, where players can purchase rape pose-balls or hire virtual prostitutes who will allow their character to be controlled. Granted, there are woman who legitimately have rape fantasies and use virtual worlds as a “safe” way to live out these fantasies, but there is no way of knowing that the person the other end is thinking of it as just a “fantasy.” Last year, an investigative reporter infiltrated a group in Second Life who traded in “virtual” child pornography and participated in age-play – Second Life avatars can be made to look like children – and the group eventually offered to put him in touch with real-life child pornographers. If this sort of behavior can leak into the real world, then perhaps the violence against women can as well.

After all, it’s not unheard of for the virtual world and real world to collide. In his book I, Avatar, Mark Stephen Meadows wrote about an experience of a female friend who roleplayed as a slave in Second Life. Somehow a group of virtual slave traders found out some of her real information and began contacting her on an instant messenger; though she refused to give them any further personal data about herself and eventually canceled her account to deter them, she found out later that the group was known for collecting slaves through roleplay and then tracking them down in real life. Just this past August, a woman who began a relationship with a man in Second Life drove to his workplace and attempted to kidnap him at gunpoint. The fear of this kind of thing happening suddenly became very real in 2006 when hackers gained access to Linden Lab’s database of the real-world names and addresses of 650,000 of Second Life’s users.

Even outside of Second Life, it is simply becoming easier and easier for cyberstalkers to get information about their victims. In late 2007, a 20-year-old man met a 15-year-old girl through playing Halo, and from some small amount of personal information that she revealed, was able to find her brother’s MySpace page. A few more Internet searches gave him what he needed to drive forty hours to her house, where he left her a text message threatening to rape her. A couple of months before that, a man was charged with stalking a 16-year-old girl that he met in World of Warcraft. He played a female character in the game, and got to know the girl through a guild where he went by the name “Vera” and posed as a female Canadian college student in order to gain the girl’s trust. Once he found out where she lived, he drove thirteen hours to her school, where he tried to pass himself off as “Vera’s” best friend.

As girl gamers, we are used to dealing with certain behavior, and this can cause us to become desensitized to it. After a while, we might get used to the endless offers for cybersex, the lewd jokes and propositions. We may even choose to play as a male character or disguise our voices over chat programs to avoid these things. But as a socially conscious gamer, I think that it is important to be on the lookout for victimizing behavior both so that we can protect not only ourselves, but the rest of the women who play these games. Don’t let other players get away with sexual harassment. If someone does go so far as virtual rape, be sure to report them, and be sure that something is done about it. If the system fails you, look to the community: most gamers (and yes, this includes most male gamers!) don’t want the world to be a place of fear, for women or otherwise. Sometimes the repercussions of a public outcry can be as serious as any official action.

And above all, remember: this is our world too. We will not let our games be a place of discomfort or fear simply because of our gender. The virtual world may be one of the last frontiers where we have to fight to fit in and gain equal footing with men, but we have every right to be here. That doesn’t mean that anyone has the right to make us victims.

On the weekend of October 31st, 2008, my hometown, Tucson, Arizona, had its very first gaming convention: RinCon ‘08, organized by the Southern Arizona Gamers Association. Taking place at the Tucson Convention Center, RinCon ‘08 featured three days of gaming, both scheduled and spur-of-the-moment, an exhibitor hall and other cool activities and events. It was the most fun I’ve had on a Halloween weekend since I got too old for trick-or-treating and all-night candy binges!
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This year, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) announced a new program entitled G.I.R.L., or “Gamers In Real Life”. The purpose of G.I.R.L is, to quote the website itself, ‘to positively impact the way females are depicted in video games and create and influence content to be appealing to women’, and ‘to encourage the gaming industry to positively promote women throughout all facets of games, game production and into game management’.

G.I.R.L. is still new and limited in scope and size, as is typical for burgeoning programs of its type. Currently, the program is predominantly a scholarship and internship opportunity developed in tandem with The Arts Institute. Winners of the scholarship are awarded $10,000 towards attaining a degree in the gaming industry, and an paid ten week internship with SOE. With this opportunity comes access to a blog on the SOE site with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of readers and the ability to interact with some of the bigger game developers in the world. However, the scope of G.I.R.L. is severely limited because of the requirements placed upon it. The scholarship is only available to students enrolled in The Arts Institute, and the award is only applicable at that institution. In addition, winners need to live near both The Arts Institute (in order to attend) and near an SOE Studio.

Very few women gamers are students at The Arts Institute and have access to an SOE studio, and thus very few have the opportunity to attain the scholarship in the first place. It seems like G.I.R.L. doesn’t have a lot to offer the majority of female gamers, especially since the scholarship is strictly focused on the area of game development. SOE hasn’t engaged female gamers as an entity – as they might with other interest groups – in regards to G.I.R.L. yet, and if there are plans to do so, they haven’t been announced. At first glance, G.I.R.L. seems small; a token effort that doesn’t address the problem.

However, that isn’t the case. This program represents a very important step in the gaming industry. SOE is a large corporation and is part of the larger Sony electronics family. As a company, SOE is the major producer of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). SOE games may not have the popularity or player base of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, for instance, but they do have over half a dozen MMOGs out in the market with several more in the works. SOE’s EverQuest defined and shaped the MMOG world, making it what it is and creating the strong market for the genre that exists today. Speaking of EverQuest as an SOE game, it is over a decade old with 15 expansions and is still attracting new players, a feature you will not find with most games of any type out on the market.

SOE, by creating G.I.R.L., has acknowledged the proverbial elephant in the room. As a major company, and part of a major international corporate family that is doing revolutionary things within the gaming industry, Sony Online Entertainment has recognized that the gaming industry has a major problem: sexism. While sexism in the industry, both in terms of the creators of games and the consumers of games, has long been obvious, this formal acknowledgment of it as a problem within the industry is groundbreaking. This is especially true because, in creating G.I.R.L., SOE has not only acknowledged the problem, but taken steps to rectify it. G.I.R.L. represents what has the potential to be the beginnings of change in a very gendered industry.

Still, SOE’s decision to create G.I.R.L. isn’t purely philanthropic; the Pew Internet Project, an internet research project, just released a national study of 1102 teens aged between 12 and 17, which showed that 94% of all females within that age group play video games. This population represents a relatively untapped market in an industry that has long held that males are the only viable demographic. G.I.R.L., by reaching out to young female gamers, means bigger profits and more market control for SOE.

Despite knowing this, I’m still incredibly hopeful about the initiative, and I think you should be too. By responding positively to G.I.R.L., we can demonstrate to SOE that we are paying attention to them, that we are interested in change, and that we want to help them make it. This program may not reduce the hyper-sexualization of female characters or the gender stereotyping of those characters in the immediate future, but it is an important early step. I can envision a future MMOG where character selection starts out with a degendered/desexualized body wherein players can pick and size features such as breasts, hips, and muscle sizes, as well as the gender identity of their character (male, female, transgendered), and where characters can pick the types of clothing they wear so that the same outfit on a male is not automatically pants and on a female not automatically a skirt. The real question is, can SOE envision it too? I’m just beginning to think that maybe, maybe they can.

In the seemingly endless debate on whether or not video games are moral, I find that discussions of morality itself are strangely absent. Most debates deteriorate into bickering and name-calling anyway, but I find it absurd that many pundits choose to focus entirely on aspects of the games themselves whilst ignoring aspects of how morality works in the first place altogether. To be fair, morality is not an absolute; deciding what is and isn’t moral is the beginning of a slippery slope which at best leads to confusion and at worst to us-against-them preaching. But in trying to twist video games to fit into our own ideas of morality, whatever those may be, we’ve got it backwards. We shouldn’t be discussing whether video games fit into morality; we should be discussing how morality fits into video games.

The nature of morality itself is a vitally important, constantly-evolving philosophical debate that, for some strange reason, never seems to find its way into discussions of how morality works in video games. To grossly oversimplify, lest we be here for days, let’s say that morality is a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong. But even this definition, simplistic and all-encompassing as it seems, raises all sorts of questions about what qualifies as a “code of conduct”. The Ten Commandments, the Penal Code, the Terms of Service of your favorite online forum, ground rules set down by your parents… If we can’t even agree on what morality actually is, then is the question of how it relates to video games doomed to be just as unsolvable? (more…)

This year I had the pleasure of attending my first HAL-MODE FESTIVAL (aka HMF), a yearly event that my school holds in order to showcase the portfolios of its graduating students. Attendees are a mixture of current students, their friends and families, prospective students, and a more generalized audience. This year’s theme was “Made in Japan,” so all the groups chose a Japanese product that they felt was representative of Japanese industry. For instance, one of the CG groups chose Cup Noodle as their theme and created a commercial for it. (more…)

One of the latest projects associated with Girl-Wonder.org is the Con Anti-Harassment Project. Attendance at conventions is one of the many things that gamers and comics fans have very much in common, so we asked Elizabeth McDonald to tell our readers a little bit about CAHP.
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I’ve been known to half-jokingly refer to Girl-Wonder.org as Cerise’s big sister, but all joking aside, the description is more accurate than not. The example of Girl-Wonder.org was a huge inspiration to Andrea Rubenstein and myself when we first began discussing the project that would turn into the Iris gaming community and Cerise Magazine. The thriving community of feminist and feminist-friendly comics fans that was coming together at Girl-Wonder.org was inspiring. And if comics fans could do it, why not gamers?
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A Canon for Gaming?

William Shakespeare. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. J.R.R Tolkien. These are familiar names, some more accepted by the designators of literary classics than others. Now imagine another set of names by their side. Will Wright. Richard Garriott. John Romero and John Carmack. Roberta Williams. Sid Meier. We know our great computer game designers but we rarely speak of them. Rarely are they afforded the same respect that we afford the great authors: their games are not considered essential to understanding the medium. When someone like me starts talking about the merits of one particular title or another, we are unlikely to be speaking from the knowledge of a core set of canonized games. Any English teacher will tell you this leads to trouble. We can’t see the precedents of our own form if we do not know those precedents. We can’t envision the games that are to come if we don’t know where we’re coming from.
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