It was brought to my attention that I hadn’t linked recent (and now, I’m afraid, not quite-so-recent) projects and such from my blog, so here is a quick round-up of various things that have been happening lately (-ish).

- Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to be asked to give a talk on games for BBC Radio 4′s Four Thought programme. (Radio Times were kind enough to write a very nice review here!) You can listen to the 15-minute recording on the website, or download the podcast (at 19 minutes, complete with additional Q&A too).

- In May, the lovely and erudite Emily Flynn-Jones and I presented at the Feminists in Games conference in Toronto, on our letter series Dear Mitu, Dear Emily, in which we corresponded on gender issues in games, the industry, and academia. It was an enlightening process for us both, and, as a result, we wanted to open up the dialogue to others too. We were fortunate enough to receive funding from the FiG iniative to begin our website, Dear Ada, where we have lately embarked upon this mission. I’m incredibly proud of it, even at this early stage. You can read the mission statement here, and do be sure to read the letters, too.

- And finally, my game Redshirt is still coming along, very much under active development, and headed for private beta soon. (You can still always ‘like’ Redshirt on Facebook, remember!) Of course, making games is tough — particularly when you’re a one-woman studio making your first commercial game. I spoke a little about my own experiences of being a solo independent developer last weekend at the excellent AltDevConf Student Summit. You can watch a recording here. (note: it is, unsurprisingly, aimed at students who are maybe thinking of making the same leap I did – or who have just done so.)

- Oh, and finally finally, as an additional reminder, I’ve been writing a regular column for games culture digital magazine, Continue. Please do make sure to buy all three issues so far — aside from my ramblings on issues to do with controller technology, the magazine features an even-better wealth of features of amazing game developers and thinkers alike.

During E3 this year, there was a lot of discussion, once again, about the ubiquitous use of ‘booth babes’ at the event. This discussion was further sparked by the eminent Brenda Garno’s brave series of tweets about the way the practice makes her feel. Following this, I was contacted by a journalist for a national news publication looking to write a piece on booth babes, and on the perspective of UK female developers, such as myself. I don’t think the article ever appeared (or, I might have missed it!) but since I wrote up my very quick thoughts on the matter anyway, I wanted to share my answer here on my blog, too.

Here’s what I said:

I’ve been pleased to see the backlash against the use of ‘booth babes’ this week, coming not only from Brenda Garno, but also from many other industry figures whom I respect. I am very glad that Brenda spoke out against the practice. I think it’s important to note, though, that the target of our ire should definitely not be the women hired as booth babes, but absolutely should be towards the companies who reinforce such an outdated, exclusionary, and lowest common denominator practice. It is a practice which shouts “the products we’re selling are for heterosexual men only” and implies that women are secondary to their concerns. Which, firstly as a woman, and secondary as a lifelong gamer (and a developer who is relatively new to the industry), is a very hurtful message indeed; as if the time we have invested in games is not worth the same as if we were men.

It also cheapens the games themselves; it implies that there is not enough innovation in these companies’ games that they can stand alone as worthy products, without also needing to throw in attractive women to dress them up. Perhaps, sadly, there’s a correlation there: the companies with the least interesting/innovative games are perhaps the ones which use booth babes! I think they should spend their effort and money making better games, without needing to hire booth babes, and devalue the industry for us all.

I don’t usually ‘do’ movie reviews, so I’m blundering through this. But, I want to declare that I rather loved Prometheus after seeing it a few days ago; though it did also trouble me, in many ways. However, given the mixed reactions I’ve seen towards the movie, I wanted to record my initial thoughts and, quite practically, I wanted to write something that I could point friends to, to indicate exactly why I loved it, at least. So, perhaps this is less a ‘review’ than it is a wondering-out-loud about the movie. (In fact, I’ve just changed the title of the post!)

Basically, I’d love to raise some of these as points for discussion. If you’ve seen the movie (which, right now, is not you, American/Canadian friends – sorry!), then please do let me know your thoughts. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, etc.

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This is a follow-up to yesterday’s (still, to me, scarily) personal view I posted on here, regarding how Dove’s use of the word ‘normal’ to denote a particular skin tone, made me feel, as a non-white woman: On Why Dove’s Moisturiser for Normal to Dark Skin is Harmful to Self-Esteem.

It’s been a deeply bizarre 48 hours for me, but, after the awesome support on Twitter yesterday from many of you, it looks like Dove have investigated, and released a full statement on the issue, left both in the comments of my post, and in a post on Facebook. It reads:

Dove is committed to representing beauty of all ages, ethnicities, shapes and sizes. We believe in celebrating real beauty and in raising the self-esteem of women and young girls globally.

We found out that our European team was already aware of the mistake regarding labelling on Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion bottles. Many of our lotions focus on moisturization as the key benefit and in some cases we label them “normal to dry skin.” The Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion is a gradual self tanner that also moisturizes. It should have been marked as “fair to medium skin” or “medium to dark skin” depending on the skin type it focuses on. In this case, there was an oversight from our team and we accidently combined the phrases. As soon as our teams in Europe discovered this error, they began the process of relabeling the bottles. These will start appearing on shelf this summer. We are also in the process of correcting the language in our other communication vehicles where possible. As always, we appreciate the feedback and support from our community.

I will not, at this point, make assumptions about the nature of the error – though, as CBC’s Storify report on this issue notes, the UK Website for the product still lists it as ‘Normal to Dark Skin’, as of time of writing. I hope the change to the print is made soon, and the reprinted bottles hit stores sooner rather than later.

I am, however, very appreciative that Dove responded in the way that they did, and with such relative timeliness.

I’ve also been blown away by the messages of support to my last post. I hope I can respond to each one of you soon, because you made an uncomfortable experience far easier than it could have been. Until then, to all of you, thank you. Also, thank you once again to Laura for kicking this off, and campaigning tirelessly to bring this to attention.

While I do feel reassured that Dove has admitted guilt and wrongness by acknowledging that the labelling was a “mistake”and an “oversight”, this still brings the wider issue to the fore: why were there so many who chose to jump to trying to rationalise the use of “normal”? It’s this awful, galling feeling that I am finding difficult to reconcile. It feels, sadly, in many ways, like an empty success. After all, what does it all say about how quick we are to accept such things, even when they are later shown to be wrong?

This morning, during a cursory glance at Facebook, I spotted a mobile upload, posted by my old high school friend, Laura Dunkley. She posted this photo, along with this caption:

Laura: Not being funny but I think this is possibly unintentionally racist. Is dark skin not considered ‘normal’ by Dove???

Now, normally, I would not have noticed this myself, were I wondering around a shop such as Boots or similar. The reason I would not have noticed are pretty much going to be the crux of this blog post, but I will mention that I am a British (South) Asian woman in my late twenties, having been born & brought up in the south of England, where I’ve lived pretty much my whole life. I’ll come back to that later.

But, suddenly, with Laura actively pointing it out, something went off in my head. Here was Dove, very explicitly putting forward one type of skin as normal, and dark skin as, well, not normal. 

“Wow.” I posted in reply. “No, really, that is pretty racist.” I asked Laura’s permission to share it on Twitter, and on my own Facebook, and then went ahead and posted it. In both posts, I tagged Dove’s official accounts, on Twitter and Facebook respectively.

I also did something else, though, which I never thought I’d do. I started talking, out loud, a little bit about how those comments made me, as a non-white woman, feel.

And this is the point. The labelling on this moisturiser is actively harmful, and not simply offensive (for a good distinction between the two, please see Scott Madin’s blog post)

It is harmful because it positions ‘dark skin’ as abnormal in a culture where racism is still a very real and potent thing. This kind of labelling, subtle as it is, and in a world full of similar instances of labelling, sticks to people’s minds. It sticks to the minds of those who are supposedly “normal”, and it sticks to those that it is making “abnormal”.

It took me a long time to realise that growing up, yes, I internalised the message that I was not normal. And, that is not okay.

What’s worse though, is even despite this, the barrage of comments I’ve seen and dealt with today, to the the effect of “I’m sure they didn’t mean it like *that*, though” or “They don’t intend to offend anyone”, or “It’s the same as labelling ‘normal to dry hair!’” and so on. And on. And on.

After a while, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, because those are EXACTLY the kind of voices that have talked me down my whole life. The voices that have told me that any thought I had of being hurt by feeling ‘othered’ were just silly. Even if I was hurt by what I took to be implicit racism, it just was my fault for being offended, or something. (Of course, invariably, these voices have come from various ‘well-meaning’ white friends.)

The truth is, I’m angry. I’m angry at all the years I spent, my entire teenagerhood and beyond, feeling apologetic about my skin colour. Feeling as though I have done something wrong by not being white. Really. In a way, I actually believed that for far too long.

I remember my first day of school in the UK (I joined a couple of weeks or so late, after having spent kindergarten in Germany), walking into a class, as the only non-white child, and a handful of kids came up to me and inspected me. “Whoa, you’re cool, you’ve been tanning!” said one boy. “No, don’t be stupid, she’s just not like us.” said a girl (she may have said something worse, actually, but this is how I remember it.)

Or the few times, when, as a young teen exploring makeup for the first time, I went up to a beauty counter and asked, tentatively, if there were any foundations or concealers for me, and I would get a certain look from the assistant, and some awkward comment, and then I’d feel really apologetic – and embarassed - about not being white.

Or plasters/band-aids. (It took me a long time to figure out, actually, that these were supposed to be skin-coloured for white people. Until my mid-teens I thought that was ‘just the colour that plasters/band-aids are’.)

Or ‘nude’ tights.

Or, all the countless number of beauty products I know I must have seen which convey the same message as Dove’s lotion, because, for the first few seconds of looking at that picture by Laura, I saw nothing out of the ordinary; (Just like those who, even after having it pointed out to them, refuse to see anything wrong.)

All of this, of course, is not even counting all the overt instances of racism. That’s a whole other topic. But, I am angry and hurt at all of the various ways I have been told by the dominant culture, in ways both explicit and implicit, that my skin colour has not fit ‘normal’. That I do not belong.

This is the culture to which Dove’s monumentally unthoughtful wording is contributing. No, I don’t think they meant it, but intention is beyond the point here. Casual racism – a culture of ‘othering’ non-white people – perpetuates itself in insidious ways, when we do not expect it. The words we use matter.

Meanwhile, Dove (in the US, at least, I think?) are trying to promote their ‘Movement of Self-Esteem’. Well, I can tell you, Dove, from my own direct experience, that things exactly like this are what contributed to my own lack of self-esteem growing up. All I wanted as a kid – as we all do – is to fit in, and subtle things like this, adding up, take away from the ability of any non-white person to do so. The 21st century, in multicultural Britain, is not the place to still be equating “white” to “normal”.

I almost did not write this. I’ve felt apologetic about it to an extent where even bringing up my skin colour, and how angry all those experiences have made me, has felt uncomfortable for me. Writing this is uncomfortable for me. I don’t like drawing attention to it, even when it is on my own terms. I am trying very hard to get over that. (Thank you to George for encouraging me to write this. Also, a thank you to Emily, who, in my recent letter series with her about gender, noted my discomfort with talking about race, and really brought it to light for me. And, a big thank you, of course, to Laura, for having pointed this out in the first place.)

Now, while many people have, thankfully, also reached out to Dove via their Twitter and Facebook, Dove have yet to respond, even though they’ve been tweeting about their current ‘Movement for Self-Esteem’ nonetheless, ignoring all tweets about the moisturiser.  I hope they do respond.

Edit 1: Ah, it looks as though Dove have responded, with this general, acknowledging tweet, so far. Let’s hope more comes of this.

Edit 2: A few people have brought up the fact that the other lotion in this range is for ‘Fair to Normal Skin‘, as though this somehow invalidates the point I am making regarding what Dove – and, indeed, western culture - considers to be ‘normal.’ The point still stands; they should not be making assertions as to what is ‘normal’ for a skin tone, and what is not. Here, I have expanded upon how, as someone with dark skin, this makes me feel, in a culture where the notion that “white” equals “normal” is widespread. Again, the words and signifiers we use matter. This post is all about implicit racism perpetuated through words. Even by labelling the lotions ‘Fair to Normal Skin’ and ‘Normal to Dark Skin’, they are normalising skin that is white. Normal is a harmful term to use, where they could have said “Medium”, or similar. I cannot personally speak of the experience of someone with very ‘fair’ skin, but for those people with fair skin who have got in touch to say that they’re not offended,  I would like to reiterate: Just because something does not offend you, it does not mean it is not harmful when viewed in wider cultural context.

Also, because its been brought up, there is a point to be made here regarding how skin colour is perceived from a ‘fashion’ perspective – and how fashion dictates sometimes that white people’s skin should be paler, and sometimes it should be tanned, but I’m feeling weary of having to explain this. So, I will leave this link here to illustrate how this particular fluctuating aesthetic trend has nothing to do with race, and does not mean that racism does not exist.

Edit 3: Dove has posted a full response, which you can see in the comments below. Also, I posted an update to this post here.

At Game Developers Conference this year, I was very lucky to be able to participate in a Games for Change ‘microtalks’ session, on the topic of “How Designing for Love Can Change The World”. The session was moderated by Jane McGonigal, and compared by Jane Pinckard, and featured talks by Chelsea Howe, Martin Hollis, Scott Brodie, Michael Molinari, and myself. The session was, very kindly, covered on a number of outlets, and also, is now available on the GDC Vault, I believe.

My biggest takeaway from this experience, though, was that trying to talk about complex things, including complexity in five minutes is really difficult. Because, essentially, this is what this talk was about: the complexity of love, and of human experience.

My original draft was at least twice as long, as George Kokoris in front of whom I practiced (he can attest that I was trying to talk twice as fast) can assure you. So, in the interests of time, my talk became way more polarised than I’d have liked – and, of course, there was plenty of l’esprit d’escalier in there too; I think I realised that subtlety really  doesn’t really well, work when addressing a crowd.

I’ve written up the session here for posterity, with added notes where appropriate.

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Last week, Forbes published an article entitled Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away. Written by technology blogger Tara ‘Tiger’ Brown, the article appeared, on the surface, to be about unceremoniously ousting out somehow-exclusively-female ‘posers’ who weren’t as into some arbitrary measure of ‘geekiness’ as they ‘should’ be. Given this angle, it attracted many good rebuttals criticising the piece and calling for inclusivity, all of which were totally correct in their internal logic, of course.

But, the thing is, I feel that everyone, including, sadly, Brown herself, seemed to miss the point of what she was actually trying to unearth with the article, and what happened instead as a result.

I noticed this when I saw that some friends, a few hours after the post went viral, were pointing at Brown’s twitter feed, as purported examples of further internalised misogyny. I had a look, and, what I found most striking amongst the barrage of replies she was fielding was her repeated vague references to not wanting to name names in the article, and references to there being people who laugh behind the backs of ‘geek guys’, apparently explicitly for profit.

Indeed, it seems that Brown actually wanted to write this article about people – who, perhaps, in her own cross-section of life have been mostly women – whom she knows, whom she had in mind, and who have been openly disingenuous and specifically insincere in their intentions towards others.

But instead, I think this happened:

I hope you can see the parallel.

What happened here isn’t necessarily Brown’s fault, because this exists in a culture in which women are systemically called out for behaviour which, when attributed to their male counterparts, wouldn’t raise any eyebrows – or, is even valued. It’s the same crap that calls out women for ‘self-promotion’, yet this is apparently, perfectly acceptable for men, and actually helps them to get ahead. It also reminds me of this quote I read in a Guardian piece in December 2011,  which asked why British public life – in radio, television, and across media – men dominated. Dr Katherine Rake said:

“The number of women at the top often hovers around a third, and then stalls.” Once women reach that level of visibility, she suspected, there was a feeling they were everywhere, and their presence was becoming a bit too dominant.

Emphasis mine. The above astonished me, though I’ve since noticed that exact fallacious thinking surface a few times in casual discussion. In short, we notice when women do things which we’re not expecting them to do, and men are often not held to the same standard – and this disdain can come from both men and women. All this is the reason why the ‘idiot nerd girl’ meme surfaced in the first place, and this erroneous thinking on Brown’s part fed straight into it. It’s a cultural problem, and it is up to us all as a culture to be wary of this.

Indeed, Brown isn’t entirely without blame. She was not helped by the hit-grabbing headline when it came to misrepresenting herself, misrepresenting women. As an apparent advocate for women in technology, this was a massively irresponsible move on her part, as it plays not only into the aforementioned cognitive bias to gratuitously gender behaviours, but also, because it plays into the existing stereotype of ‘women-attacking-women’. Stereotypes which are admittedly perpetuated by a whole cornucopia of complex factors, but nonetheless, need to stop.

Brown’s article was not about ‘fake geek girls‘ at all, even though she thought it was, due to the way we gratuitously attribute gender to problems which need not be gendered. It was, instead, about calling out the very real, very undesirable human behaviour of insincerity. This is a far cry from women – and men – who are superficially into popularised ‘geek culture’, who self-identify as ‘geek’.

Insincerity and disingenuity bother me. Really bother me, and, believe me, I’ve personally experienced it spewing forth from all corners of the gender spectrum. Insincerity is a problem, and I do think it should be called out wherever it appears, but let’s recognise it as a human problem. Turning it into a gendered issue simply plays into our weird culture-induced cognitive biases, and is simply harmful.

I’d seen Brown make some mention of a follow-up piece to clarify the statements she’d subsequently made on Twitter, though as far as I’m aware, it has not yet appeared. (Do correct me if I’m wrong.) I’d be very interested to see how she extends her original discussion beyond the glittery lights of the Forbes blog.

An always-pertinent reminder. From http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1137440/poster-your-heart-is-a-weapon/

I think I originally saw this via Laurie Penny, who said, on Twitter: “I want to paste this over every bloody ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ that I see”.

I’m so pleased to be able to finally talk about the game I’ve been working on these past months! It’s called Redshirt. Here’s a little blurb about it:

“Redshirt is the comedy sci-fi sim about social networking aboard a space station, starring the station’s most ambitious low-ranking peon: you!

Navigate the professional and interpersonal politics of the ubiquitous “Spacebook” to curry favor among friends and colleagues. As intense intergalactic conflict rages around you, it’s up to you to accrue those all-important “likes” on your status updates! Whether you’re looking for love, opportunities for promotion, or even a chance to play Zero-G golf with the captain, you can schmooze your way through social circles and claw your way up the career ladder. Perhaps you too can finally achieve the dream of an off-station transfer, or even the Redshirt’s opportunity of a lifetime: being sent on an away-mission!”

So basically, it’s about a future (as represented by many of your favourite science fiction franchises!) in which we’re all still obsessed with social networking. The game is due out sometime in 2012, and is being published by fellow UK indie dev Positech Games.

For more information, visit the website, or, if you’re feeling really meta, you can also like the Facebook Page! Keep an eye on there, and The Tiniest Shark‘s blog, for more information shortly. I’ll start posting a series of (really, quite cheesy but informative!) development video blogs soon.

Late last year, I was very lucky to be asked by the Guardian’s Keith Stuart (after accidentally volunteering to be on his GameCity Breakfast Panel) if I’d mind answering some questions for a piece he was writing on women working in the games industry. Being as passionate as I am about diversity (in all things, and especially so in those who create our most important medium), I was, of course, very happy to help.

The article appeared in G2 in print, though is also available to read online here. Keith did an excellent job with the piece, and I was very happy to be quoted a couple of times. The experience was particularly useful as it gave me a chance to express, in longform, my thoughts on the subject, about which I care so deeply, yet I haven’t written about properly for a very long time (and, also, since I got older and wiser more of a clue, quite frankly).

I thought I’d share my answers, in case I do not get round to expressing this stuff elsewhere on this blog any time soon.