When I saw that the first speaker in the Edmonton Public Library’s Forward Thinking Speaker Series was going to be Anita Sarkeesian talking about The Real World of Online Harassment I made sure to set a reminder so that I could buy tickets as soon as humanly possible. I don’t know how long it took to sell out; it may not have been necessary to jump on that six minutes after they went on sale. But I know I did not want to worry about it because a talk like this could not be more relevant to my interests. I am not going to rehash what was done to her in this space. You probably already know, and if you don’t, you don’t have to take my word for it. But she began the talk by saying that she would much rather be known for what she does, rather than what was done to her. And what she does is very important: she is not talking about misogyny within the confines of academia using language that most people don’t understand. Just as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are bigger as communicators than they are as scientists, I think one of the most important things about her work is that it speaks to ordinary people and talks about things that are important to us like our video games. Being effective at engaging such a broad audience is something that is very difficult to do. I think she did a fine job of this on Wednesday evening, but it was inevitable that not everyone can be engaged in the same way at the same time. I have found the same thing about reading Crash Override: I find many parts of it very interesting. But then they have to take a step back to explain things to the parts of the audience that have not been closely following this subject matter for many years. It’s not exactly news to me that Twitter exists and has woefully inadequate mechanisms to protect people from harassment, or that there are men who feel way too threatened by the existence of “other” people in the gaming world, or that people say terrible things on the internet. And while my greatest fear did not come to pass (nobody tried to be disruptive), I did find that some parts of the talk were going over things that I already considered part of the historical record. I don’t have a good solution for this; whether presentations of this nature should be split into introductory and advanced versions as if they were academic courses I don’t know. But if I was pressed to find something about Wednesday’s talk that I didn’t like then I would say that it would have been more interesting if there was even more about the more recent work she is doing and a little less of the history that we can learn from watching that TED Talk I linked to and various other online sources (excluding the smear pieces, of course). I also would have been interested in hearing more about what we can do in the post Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games era to pick up the torch and continue forward.
This still hasn’t happened, despite Tropes vs. Women in Video Games having been around for five years.
This is not to say that I left empty-handed. Well, I guess I did in the literal sense because it was ideas that I took from the presentation. I didn’t leave empty-headed? Anyway, I did receive the message loud and clear that I need to read/watch lots of things that Alan G. Johnson wrote/said. I especially liked the clip that Anita played on Wednesday of Alan talking about monopoly. My only other encounter with his work is when he is referenced in Wall-E as Sociological Storytelling which no doubt inspired what I wrote about Monopoly in June in reference to what is happening in Canada. I don’t know how I managed to write that post without at least a nod to one of those sources. Though my style of blogging deliberately favours conversational tone over citation-rich academic style writing, I should still be giving credit where it is due. Anyway, what Alan says about the game certainly did resonate with my thoughts on games in general and I need to spend more time with his work and engage with systems theory as it related to gaming.
The other thing that I am taking away from this is the importance of not staying silent. It was a little bit upsetting when Anita revealed that she almost didn’t come as I really did enjoy the speech and not just because she made fun of Toronto at one point (the only way she could have played to the Edmonton audience harder would have been if she did the same thing but wore an Oilers jersey while doing it). I would have been really disappointed if I didn’t get to hear this talk. But the fact is that Anita didn’t owe us this. I am glad she did it, but if the ideas of rising against hatred instead of remaining silent about it in our gaming spaces are to stay alive and continue to grow stronger then this issue can’t be about Anita Sarkeesian, or Zoë Quinn or any other individual person. It can’t be left to a few individuals who are already carrying a wildly disproportionate amount of responsibility and expectation for counteraction of hate in the gaming world. The ideas will be stronger when they cease to be about humans who can sometimes be fallible. I don’t mindlessly agree with everything these women are saying and writing about harassment in the gaming world even when they are at their best. But the ideas, those don’t get frazzled or misspeak or have bad days that can be exploited by malicious critics. I have before and affirm again today that I will not resign to the acceptance that the internet is a dumpster fire that cannot be put out or cleaned up. My spotlight may be very small compared to others, but I still intend to use what I’ve got to detoxify my tiny area of the gaming world. If I am to be known for what I did rather than what I was, I hope that it be that my writing has contributed to a much larger force of public opinion that eventually made this sort of harassment a thing of the past. The presentation from Wednesday has renewed my enthusiasm for this. If that is not time and money well spent then I don’t know what is.
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