9 Things Straight White Guys Won't Understand About Gaming- A Rebuttal

This is bad. This is horrendously bad. This is an "article" that offends me on a professional level, as I am a man who takes writing seriously. This is not an article that invites the reader to think, nor is it an article that educates the reader on issues regarding the LGBT community. For that, at risk of my mental health, I provide a rebuttal to what may well be the worst piece of writing I have ever had the misfortune to dissect. As always, the original work will be in bold, with my words written beneath. An archived link to the original is here: http://archive.is/Wz8Fl

1. The gamer who just kicked your arse at Assassins Creed is probably a 33-year-old lesbian from Wollongong.

At this point, Dan Golding provides a GIF of a character from South Park, specifically the main antagonist to the episode Make Love, not Warcraft. I did not include the GIF because I did not wish to clutter this entry. But more importantly, by including this image set, Golding makes an implicit statement regarding gamers. See, the character in question was not just the antagonist of the episode, he was also fairly stereotypical: fat, unattractive, lacking in personal hygiene, and highly implied to have nothing better to do in life than to play video games. This is going to shoot Dan Golding in the foot quite quickly...

You’ve all heard the stereotypes. The gamer is a boring teenager who lives in his mother’s basement. He’s an obsessive, probably only more interested in objectifying women than he is his game collection. But it’s wrong.

Oh yeah, I remember those stereotypes, they were pushed by people like Leigh Alexander, who made the claim that gamers were mostly white men who lived in their mother's basement. This was actually a huge part of the anti-GamerGate narrative back in the day: the idea that these white, cis dude bros were somehow acting as garekeepers against the growing number of women and minorities who were rising up in gaming, from being developers, to simply being gamers too. Meanwhile, there was #NotYourShield, a Twitter hashtag started by women and minorities in gaming criticizing the anti-gaming media for using THEM as a shield against GamerGate. What I'm trying to say is that it was sites like Buzzfeed, which published this list, and writers like Dan Golding, that pushed the "gaming is dominated by white men" narrative. THEY were the ones spreading the stereotype.

Pretty much every survey of players in Australia has shown that a massive proportion of videogame players are women. The last major survey had women making up 47% of the game playing population. Game players are from all age groups, too, with the average Australian player being 33 years old.

Like gender and age, there’s also a huge diversity of sexual identity among those who play videogames.

And here is where the central thesis of the first item on this list presents itself. Don Golding tried to present the idea that gaming was a diverse culture formed not just by white men, but also by men and women of all races, creeds, nations, and sexual preferences. This is true, of course. Sky Williams, famed Youtuber who focuses on producing League of Legends tips and comedic commentary, is both African American and homosexual. Lillypichu is an Asian-American woman who is famous for her League of Legends videos featuring her doing a cute voice.  The list goes on and on.

It is too bad that Dan Golding held himself back by limiting himself to making a point using only seven sentences while offering no concrete examples of how diverse gaming truly is, as that would have made his point so much stronger. But alas, perhaps it has to do with the fact that Golding has a narrative to sell...

2. Gaming has never been the sole domain of the straight, white dude.

Oh boy, here we go. At this point, Dan Golding included a GIF of the main characters from the film Top Gun giving each other a high five. Nothing to say to that, because the GIF itself says nothing.

Although all sorts of different people happily think of themselves as gamers, over the years we’ve also seen the rise of sub-identities. The “girl gamer”. The “gaymer”.

These are telling because they show us that even though lots of people play videogames, there’s certain assumptions about who our culture most easily accepts as a gamer.

If it wasn’t assumed that your average gamer was a man, people might not have felt the need to call themselves “girl gamers”. If no-one thought your average gamer was automatically straight, the “gaymer” term might not have taken off. The need to make any sort of distinction shines a spotlight on how people can be excluded from the “standard” identity.

Growing up in gaming, there was one thing that is made clear to you: skill is everything. Gamers are people who will root for the skilled players, and deride and jeer the unskilled. When I was a kid, we would huddle around the guy who knew how to pull off the Fatalities in Mortal Kombat, or watch him go undefeated in Street Fighter. Nowadays, instead of on the arcades, it's online: we subscribe to the Let's Players who show off amazing skill, but we nuke off the Internet the unskilled players.

Gamers like to call themselves gamers, not guy gamers, not Latino gamers, just gamers. I myself, a non white man, want to be called just a gamer. Part of the reason we deride the term "girl gamer" is because it calls attention to something other than skill, in this case, one's gender. It is seen as a call for attention by pointing out something the gamer was born with, not earned. THAT is why we reject the term "girl gamer".

I'm not going to pretend that there aren't racist, sexist gamers out there, because there are. Nor am I going to pretend that I don't see the appeal of proudly stating that your're a gay gamer, a girl gamer, or what have you. I can only afford the perspective that putting emphasis on the pride you feel for something you hadn't earned isn't exactly something other people, myself included, will feel inclined to respect. When I'm playing my games, I want to be called a gamer, not a Puerto Rican gamer, or Man of Color gamer. More on THAT later, though.

3. Creativity, not masculinity, drove the early gamers.

I feel like I would be so much happier just ignoring this, because this is yet another tirade on how masculinity is bad, and feminism is good, and blah blah blah yada yada yada. I've heard it hundreds of times before from jackasses like Dr Nerdlove, I don't need to hear it anymore. But, I have a responsibility to offer a rebuttal to this piece, so onward I press.

Computers are the fabric of everyday life and games, when it comes down to it, are computers plus creativity. Back when computers were created – those big, room-sized machines that you saw Benedict Cumberbatch working with in The Imitation Game – they existed to solve problems and do sums.

Playing games was the first thing that anyone ever thought of doing with a computer that wasn’t just solving something. It’s there, right from the beginning. Even Alan Turing himself created a chess game all the way back in 1950.

It continues all the way through computing history up until the earliest commercial videogames, like Pong in 1972.

This, coupled with their sheer ubiquity today, makes videogames an important arena to get representation and diversity right.

OK, so where's the talk about masculinity? Where's the talk about creativity? What, no talking about how difficult it was to create the first video games, how game creating takes at least several weeks of coding just to create the first draft of that one NPC who will likely have ONE line all game? No, none of that? Just a quick gab regarding Alan Turing?

Let's do some REAL talking, starting with Alan Turing. Turing was one of the unsung geniuses of the 20th century, right up there with Nicola Tesla in just how much he's done for the modern world. Alan Turing created computers that decoded Nazi messages, which helped bring down the Nazi regime and secured several Allied victories. This is a man who may well have turned the tide of World War 2 in the Allie's favor. But you might not read about him in your school textbook because he was forced to kill himself. Why? Because he was gay, and in those days, being gay was punishable by death in his home country of the UK.

Allow me to repeat that: the man who may well have single handedly helped the Allies win World War 2 and stop Hitler for good, whose contributions to computing has become indispensable to the point one could say we wouldn't have what we have today if not for him, was forced into suicide because of his homosexuality. Maybe THAT could have been a good talking point regarding LGBT contributions to gaming? But no, it gets worse, boys and girls. So much worse...

4. Indie developers are putting the gay in gaymer, and the mainstream is taking notice.

At this point, Golding included a GIF from Robert Yang's game Stick Shift, where you rub a car's stick shift up and down until you get it to climax...seriously. You rub the car's stick shift up and down as if it were a penis, with the Player Character having a lecherous smile on his face. There were plenty of other games the author could have chosen to represent LGBT presence in game development, including one he himself also briefly name drops, My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant, which in my opinion would have been a far more dignified representation of LGBT produced games with a clear LGBT theme. 

After all, do gays REALLY want their contribution to gaming to boil down to a game about giving a car a hand job? I mean, I can't make the claim that I know what gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans folk want. But I can guess that if they would like gay gaming to be represented by a point-and-click game about a space man rescuing his boyfriend or a game about giving a car a hand job, every LGBT person with dignity would pick the former. But maybe I'm just talking from the perspective of someone with self respect.

Locally, My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant by Australian developer Luke Millar broke barriers when it was released in 2013. Internationally, Anna Anthropy made a huge impact on videogame culture with games like Dys4ia and Lesbian Spider-Queens Of Mars and her influential book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters.

Yeah, uh, about Anna Anthropy, see, a good chunk of her positive press was given by people she personally knew, like Kotaku writer Patricia Hernandez, who wrote about Anna six times, not once disclosing their personal ties. So forgive me if I sound a bit cynical regarding the quality of Anthropy's games, because the one time I tried playing Dys4ia I had found it was taken away from Newgrounds so that Anna Anthropy could sell the game at a profit.

And just which barriers did My Ex-Bpyfriend break? Was it the first game developed by a gay Australian? The first Australian made game featuring a gay protagonist? The first COMMERCIAL Australian made game featuring a gay protagonist? I tried googling Luke Millar and found nothing. A wasted opportunity to talk about a game that actually looks interesting, made by someone who really could have used some publicity. But nope, Golding has people to shill!

Meanwhile, American designer Robert Yang manages to explore homoeroticism in intelligent, funny, and deeply NSFW ways. His amazing games so far include a dick pic game, a scrubbing-a-dude-in-the-shower simulator, and Succulent, a “small 2-4 minute game about watching a dude slowly / erotically stick a thing in his mouth”.

So Robert Yang makes a few casual games with a gay theme and gets an entire paragraph to him, but Luke Millar only gets one sentence and has to share a paragraph with Anna Anthropy. MAYBE Golding could have given other LGBT game producers some more exposure, but alas, it was not meant to be.

He gave an example of three game developers who have made LGBT themed games. Not bad in any other type of essay. But in an article that talks about gay gaming and eventually talks about an Australian convention for LGBT game developers, it's a good idea to try and cover as many developers as possible. Why? Because you want to show the world that LGBT people can produce top quality games that anyone can enjoy. Dan Golding provided only three examples: a woman who benefited from cronyism, a guy who made a game about giving a car a handjob, and an unknown you can't even find on Google. Not exactly a shining example of LGBT in gaming. Maybe it gets better?

5. The girl gamer is now the game maker.

Crap, here we go again. Time to act like women making games is a new thing!

“Seeing myself as a protagonist was surprisingly emotional,” the influential developer and critic Mattie Brice told Kotaku in 2013. Sick of waiting for a major game developer to create a game with a playable character that looked like her, she downloaded some game-making software and did it herself.

The result was Mainichi, a game where Brice leads players through an average day in her life.

Even the software Brice used didn’t have any pre-set characters with Brice’s skin tone or hair. “So I had to do some scavenging and editing to finally get me in there. I remember looking at myself and crying, I was so moved.”

An applause for Dan Golding! Instead of talking about the long and illustrious history of women in gaming, like how Roberta Williams (edit March 2, 2016: I had mistakenly written Roberta King instead of Roberta Williams. Apologies) was the first woman who started and kept her own game company and went on to DEFINE the Adventure genre in gaming with her classic King's Quest series, or Reiko Kodama, the woman who made the very first RPG with a female lead, he chooses to talk about a woman who made a game in RPG Maker!

He could have saved himself so much trouble by just sharing this one simple image:

But then again, who am I to tell Golding how to do his job? Wait, no, hold onto that idea, please.

6. Black space warrior goddesses are a thing, but visibility is still an issue.

Despite some isolated advances in mainstream videogames recently, the default character is still definitely the straight white guy. Even if a game allows you to play as an amazing black space warrior goddess, like in Mass Effect 3, it’s still the crew-cut white space marine who gets to be the front cover.

Seeing different people in our videogames, apart from anything, helps shift what’s considered “normal” away from straight white guys as a default. We shouldn’t need to think of a game with a woman of colour on the front cover as unusual. We shouldn’t need to be surprised when a mainstream videogame turns up featuring a transgender character. At the moment we are, but every time it happens, it unsettles the straight white guy from the default setting a little more.

He has a strong point here. Cultural shifts are propelled by works of art that dare to try something different. Will Smith wouldn't have a movie career if not for the African-American cinematic community creating and supporting films with African American protagonists. Before Nichelle Nichols, black women on TV were just maids. Before Goerge Takei, the only Asian characters on TV were either martial artists or white people in Yellowface.

The character of Uhura from Star Trek has inspired an untold number of black women to pursue science or acting. Whoopi Goldberg owes her career to Nichelle Nichols. Dr Jae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut, credits the character of Uhura as her inspiration to become an astronaut. Representation helps change lives, and this matters.

Golding would have benefited greatly from adding these examples.

7. LBGTIQ games have a loyal following, but there’s still more work to be done.

Despite its success, Anna Anthropy seems to not like her game Dys4ia anymore. One reason might be because people seem to think that just by playing this semi-autobiographical game about Anthropy’s experiences with hormone replacement therapy, they’ve done the work of an ally. They don’t need to listen anymore. They’ve got their brownie points.

This is pure conjecture. Offer a citation and THEN I might feel inclined to believe this. Oh, and again, I'd like to establish that Dys4ia was available for free on Newgrounds, but then Anna Anthropy had it removed. MY proof: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565

Anthropy was once asked by a gallery for her permission to exhibit Dys4ia as an “empathy game”. She responded by offering instead to send them a pair of her shoes, which visitors could wear and walk a mile in.

This makes Anna Anthropy sound like such a dedicated crusader for the rights of trans people everywhere. And note that I say that with the most bitter sarcasm I can muster.

“I respect games too much to see them relegated to a way for the privileged to opt out of their responsibilities, to allow them to become the trendy new format for after school specials,” Anthropy wrote. “My work is a window to the expansive, multifacated and self-contradicting artist that I am, not just to my genitals.”

After what she did with Dys4ia, I can make the claim that Anna Anthropy is no different than any other game developer, as she's all about that bottom line. Of course, the fact that she's charging for a game that's all about her kind of puts her several thousand leagues below, say, Sid Meier. To quote Kyle from South Park: "If you really think people need to see this, why not put it on the Internet for free?" This is why I think it highly inappropriate to say that Anna's "work" has any sort of impact on trans issues. And she shouldn't knock after school specials, because they could at least educate the viewer if done well.

8. Games can offer a representation of love and sexuality as diverse as real life.

I already talked about this in point 6.

When a friend of Alan Turing’s, Christopher Strachey, got his hands on a computer in 1952 he made a love letter generator. These Love Letters were absurd, even funny by design (“You are my anxious longing,” begins one). Turing and Strachey reportedly found them amusing, which has led a few commentators to suggest that perhaps the love letter generator was intended as a parody of the predictability of heterosexual love by Strachey, a gay man. For the researcher Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the generator is a satire “of one of the activities seen as most sincere by the mainstream culture: the declaration of love through words.”

Non sequitur. We were talking about video games until now.

So games can simulate things, which is pretty unusual as far as art forms go. And, as we’ve seen with Dys4ia, while they can’t replicate people’s genuine experience, videogames can certainly offer a representation of it. We’ve seen this time and time again across some really amazing games, from Nicky Case’s Coming Out Simulator to Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story, to Merritt Kopas’ HUGPUNX, to even indie megahit Gone Home.

Personally, I think Nicky Case's game could have served as a better example of LGBT produced games than anything by  Robert Yang. No, I still haven't been able to get that image of a man giving a car a hand job out of my mind.

Of course games can simulate various experiences, though not perfectly. Games can also be a medium for story telling, like a book or a movie. Unlike a book or movie, the story isn't what's most important in a game; it's the gameplay. People play games for FUN, not entirely for story. The problem with the games listed here is they all put story and politics before fun; Gone Home is nothing but a walking simulator, Coming out Simulator is a text based game where each choice eventually leads to the EXACT SAME ENDING, meaning that literally nothing you do has any impact in the game. HUGPUNX is a hugging game, where you hug people. That's it, that's all there is to it.

This reflects extremely poorly on games made by LGBT producers: they are presented, at best, as just casual games, or at worst, as self important narratives that don't care that you have fun, only that you accept the narrative. So why should a regular consumer even bother? I'm not asking for a game as big as Fallout 4, but please, at least give me some EFFORT! I want to be entertained, not indoctrinated!

9. LGBTIQ players need a space to call their own.

Sometimes, it’s important for queer people to come together and acknowledge and support each other. And in this case, it’s videogames that’s the uniting force. With support systems for Australia’s queer youth under attack, it seems as crucial an idea as ever.

GX Australia, Australia’s first queer gaming convention, is happening in Sydney for the first time this weekend. It’s following the successful GaymerX model from the United States, with exhibitors, panels, and international guests. Topics for discussion include body image, identity, polyamory, and more.

It’s an inclusive festival that aims to be a “space for gamers, geeks, and allies of all stripes to come together regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation”. The attraction of GX Australia is in recognising that lots of different people play videogames – lots of people who don’t fit the stereotype, that is – and in acknowledging that everyone’s experience with games is different.

This was it, ladies and gentlemen, this is what Golding was TRYING to lead through the whole article: a gay convention in Australia. But not just any convention, the FIRST gaming convention with an LGBT audience in mind. This SHOULD have been huge. this SHOULD have been the focus of the entire article.

Let me recap what Golding has been TRYING to say. Visibility for women and minorities in gaming is an issue that deserves to be spoken about. Female game developers deserve recognition for their creations, and LGBT game developers who make LGBT themed games exist and deserve to be recognized. Game development isn't strictly a white man's field, and there are plenty of women and minorities who contribute to gaming. This is an excellent topic to talk about! 

And the notion that there was an entire convention in Australia that brought these minorities front and center, that catered directly to the LGBT gaming base and presented topics of their interest, including polyamory and body image, why not focus on that? Why not focus on WHY GX Australia was needed, or why it was a good idea?

Maybe some of those straight white boys Golding attacked would have been interested in learning that there was a convention for LGBT folk in Australia. Believe it or not, you don't have to be LGBT to support LGBT causes or issues. Look at me, you think I can't support LGBT folk just because I'm straight?

I'm all for gay marriage, and have supported it since 2004, when I turned 18. I'm all for adoption rights for homosexual couples. I support the trans community and try to use their preferred pronouns as often as possible. And I'm not the only straight ally the LGBT community has.

So, why were we attacked? For clickbait, plain and simple. This article was pure clickbait. It said nothing of value, offered zero information, and didn't even have the balls to explain WHY straight white guys can't understand that there are gay gamers out there, that women make games too, and that there needs to be more black people in video games.

Let me explain something: white allies are nothing new. White people marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. White people opposed slavery for hundreds of years before it was finally abolished. Yes there was racism, but blacks weren't the only ones fighting it; whites were, too. And Asians, Indians, Native Americans, and so forth. White allies are nothing new; they have been present in the fight for equal rights for a long time. The woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin? White. Just to give an example.

So why would Golding believe that attacking white guys and otherizing them would generate clicks? Because it's all part of that narrative that he and his cronies at games journalism and ill thought out "activism" love to spin: that it's white people against "colored people." As a Latino, let me just say that I HATE the term "people of color," it is degrading and it erases my identity, making something that to me is incidental (my skin color) and reduces it to ALL there is to me.

Is there racism against non whites in America? Absolutely. Is there racism in the world? Hell yeah. Is there homophobia? You better believe it. Are whites racist? Some, yes. But judge a man/woman not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their soul. And don't judge a person by their sexual preference, but by how they treat others. The spirit of homophobia can be reduced to one sentence: "because I loved differently, I was marginalized and told I was worth less."

We need to focus more on building bridges, not burning them. Make friends, not enemies. And some foul tongues in the world will say "I've been too hurt by whites, cis, and straights. I will not befriend them." My answer to these people is a question: then how are you any different from straight, white, cisgender people? Your heart hates, which means your very soul is poisoned.

And ultimately, what Don Golding did was to exploit this hate for clicks. He knew otherizing white men would anger people, not just whites, and would click on his article to offer rebuttals or flames. He knew the "Social Justice Warriors" would click on it and wave their hands in the air while saying "SLAY!" without even bothering to read a single sentence. He exploited hate for clicks. And that is what makes him a truly reprehensible person.