TITS OR GTFO! – 4Talent, Central England

Sarah Dobbs went along to a Women In Games panel as part of a film festival celebrating female filmmakers. But even with four women who work in games on the panel, she still felt it missed the point, and talked to some female gamers to see what the situation is really like…

Busting stereotypes
Despite Nintendo’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, the enduring stereotype of a “gamer” is of a male twenty-something slouched on the sofa in his underwear. Yet according to research by the Entertainment Software Association, 38% of all game players are women; it’s just that you won’t see them in online games, because up to 70% of female gamers choose male avatars in order to escape online harassment.

Well, that, and also because many games don’t offer female avatars to begin with. Twelve years after the first Tomb Raider game introduced us to Lara Croft, games with female protagonists are still few and far between.

Debate
The Women in Games panel, held as part of the Birds Eye View film festival, aimed to discuss the role of, well, women in games. “Women in Games” is a title that needs some unpacking, though, since it covers three main issues: women working in the games industry, women characters in games, and women who play games. To cover all of that in a two-hour panel discussion is a huge undertaking, which could be why it felt so superficial.

Chaired by Emma Westecott, a programmer and producer who worked on Starship Titanic with Douglas Adams, the panel comprised Katie Ellwood, writer for The Getaway franchise; Laura Kippax, a character artist for Cambridge-based Ninja Theory; Emily Newton-Dunn, ex-Bits presenter who now works on the Burnout and Harry Potter gaming franchises, and Helen Kennedy, a university lecturer who has published extensively on the subject of women in games, focusing on Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft and female Quake players.

Paneled
In her introduction, Kennedy quoted a recent newspaper article on the “tits or GTFO” culture of online gaming, in which female gamers are subjected to sexist abuse by fellow gamers who either don’t believe they’re female or want revealing pictures in exchange for “letting” them play. But after that, each of the other panelists stuck to discussing her own career history, steering clear of any controversy.

When, for example, Kippax talked about her character design work on the PlayStation 3 title Heavenly Sword, she mentioned that part of the concept for Nariko was that she would be “sexy”. This, and the accompanying concept sketches, passed unremarked. But while featuring a female protagonist in a fighting game is still a bold move, and one that should be applauded, the debate failed to question why a female character still needs, above all, to be sexy – leaving a lot of assumptions about the games industry unchallenged.

Scary feminism
The apparently unwanted spectre of ‘feminism’ loomed over the whole event, with everyone seeming keen to avoid mentioning the word. The only time it came up was when a woman in the audience asked the panel whether they thought increasing the number of women working in the games industry would lead to games becoming boring and sterile. Rather than challenging the inherent misogyny of the question, Kennedy sidestepped it, saying she was afraid to seem like a “humourless feminist” when, in fact, she “enjoys hardcore porn.”

This desperation to avoid seeming militant – and to reassure everyone that no-one is trying to remove the sex appeal from games – emerged during discussion of the representation of women in games. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball’s focus on bouncing breasts was deemed simply funny, while the equally lecherous treatment of women in more serious games was left unaddressed. But why such reluctance to criticise the games industry for its objectification of women – or even to acknowledge it?

Female gamers
Maybe the problem lies in the fact that none of the panellists seemed to do much online gaming, and were thus unaware of the genuine misogyny that exists in gaming communities under the guise of humour. After all, it’s easier to ignore the objectification of a character in a game if you’re not having to deal with the same objectification yourself.

A gamer known as “fraghag” told me that, while playing Call of Duty 4 online, she noticed fellow gamers treated her differently when she started using her own gamertag rather than her husband’s. “As soon as they knew I was a woman, they started chasing me around, trying to teabag me,” she recalls. Another female gamer, who didn’t want to be identified, recalled being told to “get back into the kitchen” when she used her microphone in a game of Halo. It’s starting to become clear why women pretend to be men online.

Skirting the issue
The games industry obviously can’t be held responsible for the actions of every single gamer. But increasing the number of women working in the games industry should help change things. It’ll be a slow process – all of the Women in Games panelists admitted that they were still very much in the minority at work, so while their achievements are worth celebrating, that’s not the end of the story.

The panel’s uncritical approach to gaming in general turned the event into little more than an opportunity for self-promotion. When asked by a non-gamer in the audience how the games industry could attract her to gaming, the panel told her she could already count herself a gamer if she played games on Facebook or her mobile phone. This, again, skirted the issue; it’s not that women aren’t interested in games. It’s that the ones who are, are being driven away.

This article was originally published on Channel 4’s 4Talent Central England website.