Actually, It's About Ethics in Game Journalism

The gaming community has been in what might be seen as the precursory rumblings to the gaming equivalent of a Civil War. The debate has to do with opinions concerning gaming and have made practically everybody touching the subjects involved look bad in the process. Gamergate is at the center of these debates as of right now. I do not mean to suggest those that support Gamergate are better or worse than anybody else, but elements from all sides have done wrong over the course of the past few months and the topic of Gamergate is featured heavily in those discussions right now.

Gender Swapping

There is a lot of discussion concerning people playing genders other than their own in games. Particularly video games when the player's own gender is available to them. It is a topic I have considered touching on in the past.

A recent article by Angela Murray on Gnome Stew about playing alternate genders in pen and paper roleplaying games made some good points and helped tip me over to typing out a blog post. I think her article raises some nice talking points especially concerning expectiations from others concerning playing a different gender in relation to playing other differences from those of the player. I won't touch on most of what she covered as I feel her article is worth a read, but I will brush against a couple of points she makes.

As far as pen and paper games go, I am more likely to play my own gender. I have played females and both are enjoyable. I would say the ratio of my male to female characters is somewhere around seven out of ten of them being male. The opposite is true in video games. The majority of my characters in video games are female. The ratio is higher than nine out of ten. In City of Heroes for instance I had over ninety characters (I deleted way more) and four of them were males. Even in Lord of the Rings Online my favourite Dwarf was named Deborah. For those unfamiliar with the game, there is no option for female Dwarves.

There are many flippant reasons people give. I for example oftentimes tell people it is cheaper than an operation. It still surprises me when some people that know me think I am being serious.

Many men joke around and say they play females in video games because it provides a better view. In some cases this is actually true. Females tend to be less broad so take up less screen realestate which is also one of the two reasons I tend to prefer shorter characters as well. Run animations being the other as characters tend to cover the same distance at the same speed and the taller they are the more it looks like they are running in slow motion, but that is a separate topic. My point here is there are advantages to being able to see around your character. I do not have a widescreen monitor, so the less space a character takes on my monitor the better.

Screen space is not my primary reason however. The evidence can be seen from when I was playing MUDs on a regular basis. I was closer to a fifty/fifty mix of active characters then. I did however spend more time playing the female characters.

When I play a character in any game, either in person or a digital format, I feel the need to act as the character would. People might start to begin to think of me as my character or my character as me. I am my own person separate from my characters, and they are their own individuals separate from me.

I find this separation is easier to do when face to face. Those games tend to last a few hours once or possibly twice a week at most. Those players get to see me outside of the character. It is easier to see where the character I play ends and I begin. There is a time when you are definitely in character, and there are times when you definitely are not. There is also time to interact with others under both circumstances.

This is harder for me when playing video games. People can easily spend twenty or more hours a week playing an MMO. That time is spent running around in the game in the skin of a character with no time spent for most people to get an opportunity to see you outside of your character(s). There is a huge difference between playing a character a few hours a week and getting to know the people behind the character ourside of the game itself, and playing a character in the same environment day in and day out. It is difficult to swing in and out of character when the situation does not shift between being in and out of character.

Because of this I feel I have to always be on when playing a male in a video game. There is this constant need on my part to play male characters so extreme there is no way other people could think that is how someone really is. My males in video games tend to become so extreme as to never be believable. I can not let off the throttle unless there is a chance for pure out of character interaction. This can be quite tiring both for myself and others.

I can relax and be myself when playing a female however because that level of separation does exist. It is generally easier for others to separate their concept of the character from their concept of the player when the gender is swapped in a video game. Sure, I have to remind people from time to time that I am male in order to keep that separation going in their mind, but it is easier to be myself and not have people think me and my character are the same person. Sometimes this is as simple as switching pronouns when acting as my character or speaking as myself. Other times it requires me to straight up tell someone again and again. I will sometimes forget to give reminders and it can become rather awkward because people will associate me with the character where with tabletop gaming it is more likely to have people associate the character with me. Even with reminders I still experience reactions in games when playing a female character that I have not as a male character, and never in a tabletop game, but I still get to be myself.

I am sorry there is no short, simple explanation outside of "I am more comfortable playing a female." That answer is very easy to interpret in termss other than how I mean it so is not the short answer I like to give so you get this novel instead.

Do We Need Feminism?

This is one of those more mature discussions. If you only come here for gaming or paint talk then you might want to skip this blog post. This post contains none of that though I am writing a follow up blog post right now that will contain hobby talk. This is my personal blog. There may be times I openly share things other people consider personal. This is one of those times. Some may also consider this post to be disturbing in nature. If you have any doubts, then please look at the tags before reading to see if you want to read on those topics or not. I am uncertain how else to preface this to warn people that might not want to read it.

There's an internet meme I see from time to time where males share a picture of themselves holding a sign with a pithy phrase along the lines of, "XXX is why I need feminism." The idea behind the meme is an interesting one that is clearly designed to grab attention, but does little to really get into the details of why these men feel the need to do this.

I grew up surrounded by women with the only men around being those I had seen in school which were few and far between from my scattered memory. Both my mother and step mother were strongly independent women that proved to me time and again that men were not needed. I never felt the desire to really get to know my father outside of a passing curiosity so never understood the need of other children for that connection. My sisters have all grown into radiant women I am intensely proud of. There are many good things I have learned being brought up in this manner.

One downside however was that I grew up feeling there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This was not the fault of any individual, but an accumulation of years upon years of never quite being as wholesome as the people around me. I came to believe there was something inherently evil about myself.

There came a point in my life when I spent some time with a person that grew up being abused. The fact she was a female was often times used as a focal point for that abuse. I had maleness directly pointed out to me as the cause of many of humanities troubles. I had never associated with other males outside of other children in a classroom setting so there were no examples of either good or bad men in my life for me to compare myself to. This individual still had a lot of hurt from growing up female, and events from her life as an adult did not help matters.

I came to believe that my sex was a problem. Not just for myself, but potentially for society in the future as well. I became extremely despondent as I could not think of a solution to the problem. Suicide was not an option because that would leave others to clean up my mess after me. Being male was my only option no matter how wrong it was.

We were talking one time and it was another discussion on how males cause many of society's problems. I sank further into myself so I would not have to face my own wrongness when she put a knife down in front of me. There was a solution. We talked for a long while after that. I did not even realize I had picked up the knife until she was taking it away from me. I had not yet earned the right to cleanse this evil from myself.

This happened on more than one occasion. Each time I would be talked into picking up that knife or a pair of scissors. Each time I would come away ashamed that I was still unworthy to remove this sin from my body. I truly did come to the point where I felt I would never be a whole individual as long as I had a penis. It was not a desire to be a female so much as it was a need to no longer be male.

A couple of years ago somebody posted a news article on some forums about a woman castrating her husband. I made an off colour comment about how all men deserved it at some point or another in their lives. It was not until people responded to that post that I began to realize that not everyone felt that castration was a viable option to the problem that is men. Not only that, but manhood in and of itself is not a sin.

Thankfully, I was amongst friends whom I was able to openly discuss things with so I could more easily understand where they were coming from. I went from childhood up into my thirties believing that castration was not only an option, but something to strive for and actively earn. I never truly realized how alone I was in feeling this way. I understood on an intellectual level that castration was illegal, but beneath the surface I still believed that all these men walking around were carrying the same shame I had for all those years. That is what being male meant to me.

There are many things that people never talk about. Most of them are uncomfortable topics. Some of them are so common that everybody assumes these things do not need to be talked about while others are so uncommon that most people never experience those things at all. If you never talk about these things then it is hard to know which is which so you can come to the assumption that something you take as common is an experience not shared by many. The inverse is true as well. Just because you are going through something does not mean you are experiencing it alone or that there is not somebody available to help. Find somebody, anybody to talk to about anything and everything. I did not even realize how deep my issues with my own sex went until it came out in the open.

I do not know what it is like to be a woman having never been one. I do know what it feels like to be made to feel like there is something innately wrong with yourself due to your sex. I also do not know if feminism is something the world needs or not. It is a step however, and we need to take steps to move away from where we are at. I definitely prefer feminism over standing still. If feminism makes it to where fewer people grow up feeling their sex is a vile thing to be ashamed of then I am for it.

Oh, and before it comes up, the person that intensified and focused my feelings on maleness being a blight upon the world was not a feminist. She was an abused individual that needed help and was reciprocating her experiences back into the world because it was all she knew. I can hardly blame her for amplifying my own feelings at the time.