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.

So, here it is. Click to expand...

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.

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.

]]> http://mitu.nu/2012/02/29/on-women-in-game-development/feed/ 0 http://mitu.nu/2012/02/29/re-post-gaming-made-me-everquest/ http://mitu.nu/2012/02/29/re-post-gaming-made-me-everquest/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:41:04 +0000 Mitu http://mitu.nu/?p=555

Note: this is a repost (for posterity) of my contribution to Rock, Paper Shotgun‘s Gaming Made Me, a series of highly personal retrospectives on landmark computer games. This is dated 18th June 2011. Original article can be found here.

EverQuest was like magic.

I feel like I’m cheating a bit writing this; after all, this isn’t about one of the games that I played when I was the tiniest, my perception of the world at its most plastic. The games I played then – illicitly, on a Commodore 64 that wasn’t mine; and later, on a series of hand-me-down consoles – certainly defined a lot about the person I would become. However, not all of our most formative experiences happen when we are tiny, young, and impressionable. Instead, many happen when we’re at our most vulnerable, our most confused, our most lost: during our mid-teen years. When I was 16 years old, EverQuest made me.

The thing is, I don’t know quite how to tell you about this. Lots of clever people have said lots of clever things about what games could mean, what they could be. It seems trite, almost, to speak of an experience which was, essentially, about a simple sort of escapism. There are, after all, so many anecdotes about just that. My life was in a complicated sort of situation then. You can blame being a first-generation British-Asian girl. There are probably a few less anecdotes about that. If only there were more. But anyway, this, I guess, is simply mine.

I got into EverQuest about a year after its 1999 release. I’d taken a break from PC gaming for a number of years, all my gaming experiences at the time happening instead on the N64. And so, when a friend introduced me to the concept of EverQuest, I was entranced. By that time, the game was already into the first of its many myriad expansions, The Ruins of Kunark, adding yet another vast continent to its already inconceivable, breathtaking sense of scope. I had little concept of what might even be possible in this bizarre, new type of game; this massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. A pervasive world. A world that pervades me, my actions, or anything I might do. A world that is, quite frankly, huge. Which has oceans to cross by boat. It blew my mind. I re-read the box and the manual, over and over, as I waited to install it for the first time.

(I wish I still had that original box. As it happens, I only have the Gold Edition box I’d bought to replace it a few years later, when the original CDs had become too scratched, too well-worn, from all the times it had laid about on my teenage desk from all the re-installs. That game went with me on every machine I owned.)

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, goes the infamous Arthur C. Clarke aphorism. To me, that’s exactly how EverQuest seemed. Magic. Past the triumphant fanfare of the loading screen, what awaited me was a world teeming with possibility. Having never played anything of the sort before, I simply didn’t know where the limits could lie. And that part of it was so important: I couldn’t see the seams. (Well, okay, there were the LOADING, PLEASE WAIT… notices when zoning. But, for the rest of its magic, I forgave that.)

These days, with being a more experienced programmer, and with my design sensibilities more attuned, I can see through the curtain. Now when I love a game, it is often in a very different sort of way; in the way that we find beauty in the skill and achievement of others. For the most part now, my appreciation of games lies within the cleverness and mastery it took to create it. To me, EverQuest marks the last bastion of my innocence and naivety, which made it seem truly, and irrevocably magical.

After all, in my previous experience, most other games had revolved exclusively around the player; my own success determined the story’s success. A game world was a dead thing; brought to life only in the places I inhabited and encountered. Other games would exist exclusively around – and for – the player; an uncanny solipsism. EverQuest seemed the opposite; a world that lived and breathed, independent of, and even despite the player. It would grow, and change, and things would happen, whether or not I was there. That was beautiful.

From this magic, I felt anything could arise, and I loved it all, from the beautiful nonsense of the never-ending plague of giant-rats-who-carry-copper-coins at the gates of West Freeport, to, quite literally, Luclin (the moon) and back. The deserts of Ro, punctuated by an oasis, ripe for hunting low-level, mysteriously oversized sand beetles and spiders – but where, at any time, Cazel the sand giant could pop up and wreak destruction. The inevitable shouts of “Train to zone!” The ensuing corpse runs. This was a massive, hostile world, full of unknown danger. During boat journeys across the Ocean of Tears, I sat pensively, watching for some imagined Kraken. Yet, it was so very tranquil too. Sometimes, I would sit on the dock, half-heartedly fishing, watching that boat pull into the harbour, and away again. Really, I just loved the music there.

In Norrath, each zone felt so different, and so huge. With each area of the world so vast in its own right, the whole seemed more than the sum of its parts; a patchwork of tiny realities. My favourite memories are from my earliest days of the game, when the sense of wonder at the breadth of the world was at its most potent. Of course, it was a sense of wonder that never really went away, either.

EverQuest was a game that got under your skin. There was a reason, I suppose, that it was so widely referred to as EverCrack back in the day. EverQuest gave me a place to be. I mean Be. Sometimes, I would run across the length of one of Norrath’s then-five continents – just to travel. A kind of virtual dromomania. It seemed impossibly huge, the trek from Freeport, across the Commonlands, through the haunted-at-night Kithicor woods, through High Keep, and Highpass Hold into the twisty gorges of East Karana, and then across the vast plains of the Karanas, North and West. It seemed to take forever, and that was okay. Even that arduous-seeming journey was only just a small section of the world, and that was just brilliant.

Yet, exploration is not always simply about distances – often, it is about detail. I remember when, as a still-relatively-new player, I stumbled across a little gap in a wall in East Freeport, and, eventually, found myself in the city’s sewers, which I didn’t even realize existed. That too felt like magic. There were empty houses in North Freeport, with beds upstairs. When I could, I would ‘camp’ in one of those, to pretend I was actually boarding there (even though, of course, I didn’t need to).

The curious cultural differences between the races and their habitats made the world seem all the more alive. The wood elves, with their arboreal city of Kelethin, perched at dizzyingly treacherous heights. Halflings, with their little under-hill homes, and warm fanfare whenever you’d enter their town. The Erudites, mysterious, haughty and exotic, somewhere on a distant island. The intrigue in their dealings with one another. This was a world where even the gods held grudges. To gain faction with one race, may reduce your faction with another. Politics is difficult. A Qeynos guard regards you dubiously.

It was a world teeming in lore, and intrigue. One that I threw myself into wholeheartedly, carefully compiling a folder full of backstories, and of maps. But of course, this tiny reality, re-skinned with fantastical races and drenched in magic, reminds us that our own is just as rich, just as complex.

Looking back, there were these small touches of meaning I couldn’t quite discern at the time. The way the persistence of the world mirrors our own reality – the world goes on, while we’re here for a fleeting amount of time. Only our experiences, and our interactions with one another matter. The world is shaped by the people who inhabit it. It was not the intention of the game designers that the East Commonland tunnels be such a bustling, exotic marketplace; it was the players. It just sort of happened, from the confluence of all these different players.

The implications of all this for me were profound. Getting to know a game this intimately means learning its context and its history. EverQuest grew, of course, out of the tradition of MUDs; I hadn’t even heard of these before, but, once hooked on the latter, I went back to investigate the former. I even created and ran my own MUD, at one point – a derivative of DikuMUD. From there, I went to pen-and-paper roleplaying. I think that devolutionary journey, too, made me.

(Funnily enough, I also ran an EQ pen-and-paper campaign too, a few years later. The books, still in my possession, are gorgeous. Essentially, a reskinned D&D – though, with EverQuest owing its roots to there, that seems wholly appropriate.)

Eventually, time in the real world wore on, and everyone began to move onto new MMOs, and so did I. Of course, by then, I knew how these things worked, and although I certainly enjoyed them, somehow, the oblivious wonder that had been so key to my love of EverQuest could never be recaptured. It had changed me. That’s not to say I didn’t try again. I dabbled in running an emulated ‘classic’ EverQuest server, to explore the ‘old’ Norrath (which, by that time, had been altered by many more expansions), but it wasn’t ever the same. The zeitgeist moved on. I had moved on. Sometimes games are not just games, they are events, and they just can’t happen in the same way a second time.

And so nothing ever recaptured that feeling that EverQuest gave me. The beauty, the wonder, and the passive companionship I shared with everyone else who lived in Norrath back then; those who made it what it was. To those people: A dark elf enchantress regards you warmly.