Viking women got more respect than gamer girls

The other day the creative director of LucasArts, one Clint Hocking, made the point that if the gaming industry wants to be sustainable, they need more women. His chosen metaphor of Viking raiders unfortunately suggests a "Mars Needs Women" sort of mentality...which, ya know, could be part of the problem. Not that I think he's wrong about it.

Most of those who have responded with articles seem to agree with him, though many of the comments are predictably defensive, boneheaded, and hostile. Even the better comments demonstrate a certain degree of detachment from reality. At least one commenter claims that the problem isn't that there aren't more women in gaming development NOW, it's that women haven't "grown up" with gaming and (therefore) you need to appeal to the young kids coming up now in order to get results some time in the safely distant future. Aside from the fact that he is flat wrong about that (which I will get to in a minute), this is the kind of thinking that produces Barbie doll games and pink game controllers. I am not impressed.

Free Clue #1: Most geeky women are well-educated and well-read, and consequently highly likely to be feminists of some stripe. We are not interested in putting up with your boy's club crap.

Free Clue #2: Painting it pink will not help. That is because...and listen closely to this one, I am about to tell you a Female Type Human Secret...not all girls like pink. While you adjust to this shocking revelation, I further assert that putting a pink bow on it and calling it quits reveals that you have the mentality of an eight year old and the marketing sense of the Underpants Gnomes. "Lady gamers," forsooth.

Hocking is careful not to make the assertion that there is a vast untapped market of women gamers out there, but actually I think there might be. I base this on my own personal experience, plus my circle of acquaintance. I know a whole lot of very geeky women. I mean seriously geeky women; among them programmers, Georgia Tech and MIT graduates, LARPers, inveterate Monty Python quoters, and humanities PhDs. Some of them are gamers; some of them are not.

I personally grew up in the age of arcade games, and my favorite game was Galaga. I started reading science fiction when I was eleven, and my consumption of DAW paperbacks was prodigious. I've also played practically every RPG ever invented, including both Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. I used to have D&D in the pink box. I have committed LARPing. You'd think that when console games, MMO's and all the rest came along, I would have been a shoo-in. I tried; I used to play Civilization when it first came out.* Then I got bored.

And there you have it. Despite the fact that I have been heavily steeped in geek culture almost from infancy, and regularly play RPG's still, I do not play any form of MMO or console game. That is because they bore the snot out of me.

Basically, they take the things that I like least about RPG's....fight fight loot, fight fight loot...and strip away or gloss over the things I find most interesting....character creation, character development, social interaction, improvisation, and storytelling. MMO might as well stand for "Monomaniacal Munchkins Only." Based on a highly scientific survey which I conducted via the respected research methodology of asking my Facebook friends, many nerdy women agree with me. What those women like most about the games they do play are the social, storytelling aspects, and they are often frustrated by the limitations of what they are presented with. For what they can't get from MMOs and the like, they play text-based RPG's, as do I. Those are to my knowledge completely player-run. To tap that market, you'd have to offer the players something tailored to their tastes and needs which they can't already do themselves.

I occasionally get interested in the idea of working in the gaming industry, on the premise that I have something new to offer them in the way of ideas and approaches. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, am a fiction writer, and actually have professional training in educational role-playing games. Again, you'd think I'd be ideal. I've even got cultural street cred. I don't have many of the technical skills, but I'm not a complete dunce in that area plus, you know, gaming already has plenty of people who do that.** However, every single job description I've ever read for a writer or developer, even the fuzzier ones for which I don't need a lot of technical skills, includes something to the effect of, "must be a passionate gamer and familiar with all recent developments." That is, before it's even possible for me to offer a new perspective to a culture which alienates me to its own detriment, I would have to be completely immersed in that culture. In other words, in order to even qualify, I would have to not be the kind of person they presumably want to attract. I gently suggest that this might point to where the problem lies.

I don't know what else to say about that, really. Maybe someone in the gaming industry will read this and take what I've said to heart. Or maybe they'll decide the way to fix their Viking problem is to add some cute kittens.




*I tried again much, much more recently than that. Still bored.
** "Find someone just like me, only with tits" is not actually a diversity strategy.

Fundraising for "The Fifth Sacred Thing" movie

Yerba Buena Studios currently has a Kickstarter fundraising page up for this. I think it's worth supporting simply because 1) More science fiction in the theater equals yay! and 2) This is a very different kind of science fiction.

I liked the novel, though it had some flaws. But it contains a vision of a culturally diverse future, and grapples with ideas and tensions that your average movie completely ignores. They are pitching it to major studios in order to bankroll it, and it's possible that it's so different Hollywood will freak out and screw it up or they will alter it out of all recognition. But...maybe not. They made The Handmaid's Tale, right?

In case you didn't know...

Writers are a bunch of freaks.

An opinion in five facets

I.

I started reading science fiction in 1979. My mother taught a high school literature course on it...this was before public education got strangled in its cradle, before the rise of the Christian Right, before Reagan and the Contract With America, long before No Child Left Behind was even a malign daydream. My rural school system in southern Appalachia had a healthy vocational program, and also art, music, civics classes that taught you how government worked, local history...and science fiction.

The book was called Science Fact/Fiction
and had an introduction by Ray Bradbury, in which he talked about short stories he'd written and found difficult to sell because of their political and religious content. One dealt with civil rights, another with the question of what is or is not "human" (one of the great themes of science fiction, surely), another with the skin-color-based caste system and classism. That had been in the 1950s, and from the vantage point of the mid-Seventies he said, "It is hard to remember an America so involved with such shadows and such fears."

I was eleven years old.

II.

There was a conversation not too long ago about a comment made by Eric James Stone on a post titled "Perfecting the Saints in Utero" in which he proposes that eugenics is just dandy as long as it is rooted in homophobia instead of racism. The comment was made several years ago; the present conversation was prompted by the fact that his novelette "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" won a Nebula and some folks were saying, "Do we really want to be giving this guy awards?"

My position on that was that I saw plenty of problems with the story in and of itself without bringing in any extraneous data. Also that considering how many talented writers are also jackasses, I felt a strong sense of impending impracticality.

I also, to be clear, think that the correct response to a problematic statement is to address it directly, and to a problematic piece of writing is to respond any of the ways that writers have challenged each other down the centuries...with open criticism, with parody, with creative responses of various types. Leaving out the occasional brawl. I think it's perfectly appropriate for someone to call him, or anyone, out. Or to write a different story...

III.

So, apparently Lavie Tidhar wrote a microfiction called "The School." I won't spoil it with summary...suffice it to say that it calls out several science fiction authors by name, including Eric James Stone, and effectively skewers the "metaphor for race" trope among other things. According to Tidhar, two different markets declined to publish it as it was, because of "potential fallout."

I note in passing that Stone's story, with its triumphalism and homophobic subtext (not to mention ham-handed Austen references), was not (to my knowledge) rejected due to fear of "potential fallout." Nor do I think it should have been. I think we should fear not to challenge controversy: publish 'em all and let God sort them out.

I also believe that authors giving each other a hard time is an ancient and honored practice; at least as old as the Greeks and likely older than that. There is probably an as-yet-undiscovered cuneiform tablet of Enheduanna, the first recorded individual author in history, slagging off one of her upstart rivals in the hymn-writing business. As long as it is done elegantly and with substance, it contributes to the discourse.

The story is indeed substantive. Godwin's Law is not a prohibition...you can make the reference to Hitler when the comparison is apt. Which, when your story is about a future where humanity's ambition has been reduced to genocide, it is.

IV.

One commenter on "The School" complained thusly: "Just in case you forgot to feel guilty for a few hours while reading escapist sci-fi, Lavie Tidhar has followed you into your fantasy, nagging you from behind. Now there is nowhere safe from White Guilt."

You know what? Nobody held a gun to your head and made you read it, dude. Nobody chased you down, either. Plus, the premise that science fiction is and must be escapism is one I deeply loathe. Those of us who act like it has relevance in the real world...that is, who take it seriously...are not parade-raining spoilsports who peed in your cornflakes.

The presumption that some kinds of science fiction are "escapist" and therefore politics-free, and that those should be free from criticism, is simply wrong. It asserts that ideas and tropes and values which the speaker finds comfortable are not political. The implication is always that only the ideas they find uncomfortable are the political ones.

Let me go all old-school Second Waver feminist on you for a minute here: It's all political. Just because you are comfy with the notion that, say, some people are genetically superior to others, or it might be unquestioningly accepted by your social circle, does not mean the idea is not political. It just means you are complacent about it.

Besides that...anyone who thinks that science fiction = escapist adventure stories, and (by implication) it's just these modern blacks and wimmenfolk and gays who want to muck up your perfect Boy's Life nostalgia genre...hasn't really been paying attention.

The "Golden Age" of science fiction was dominated by people who came of age during and shortly after World War II, many of whom grappled seriously with the implications of nuclear weapons, imperialism, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, political paranoia, and perpetual war. Heinlein (whose issues in other areas I could write a dissertation about, but won't) wrote a story about sexual harassment on the job called "Delilah and the Space Rigger." It was published in 1948...when the propaganda push to get women out of the factory and back in the home was in full swing, and hardly anyone else had even heard of the concept. One of the stories in Science Fact/Fiction,
"Disappearing Act" by Alfred Bester,was a ferocious indictment of militarism which began, "This one wasn't the last war or a war to end war. They called it the War For the American Dream." That one was originally published in 1953. Judith Merril's short story "That Only a Mother, " published in 1948, has similar themes and was voted one of the best science fiction short stories of all time.

I grant you that women, people of color, and sexual minorities are often culpable for the promulgation of such notions. However, we have been doing it for at least sixty years. That ship has already blasted off.

V.

Octavia Butler, in her essay "Positive Obsession," talks about being told "Negroes can't be writers" by a well-meaning aunt, and later, that black women didn't write science fiction. She also talks about being asked, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" At this late date, the "debate" about representation and inclusion of women and minorities in awards, tables of contents, and discussions is still raging...underneath which in the subtext is a question from the Implied Default Humans, why should we have to read their stuff? What good is it to us?

To which I must respond...why were you reading science fiction in the first place, again?

"What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider other ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what 'everyone' is saying, doing, thinking---whoever 'everyone' happens to be this year."

Tell it, Ms. Butler.

Twitter Chat!

I will be moderating a #FeministSF Twitter chat on world-building tomorrow (Sunday, June 26). Following it on TweetChat.com will make it easier to deal with. Look for my Twitternym, GollyMollyB.

Raising the banner of mythpunk in academia

I will be presenting a paper on "Mythpunk Poetry in the Classroom" for the 2011 SAMLA conference in November. That's South Atlantic Modern Language Association for those keeping score at home. Regional conference, so not as many cool points as the MLA, but it also is in Atlanta and therefore easier to get to. The panel is called "Statues Talking Back, Beauties Becoming Beasts, and Little Red Riding Hood Laughing at Wolves: Revisionist Mythmaking in the Classroom." I totally intend to namecheck Catherynne Valente, Amal el-Mohtar, Erzebet Carr, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Rose Lemberg, and the rest of those miscreants.

Tornado Relief

Tornado Relief

People are rebuilding and still need help.