Anita Sarkeesian on GamerGate: ‘We Have a Problem and We’re Going to Fix This’
She started with a YouTube account and wound up on the front page of the New York Times. In between, all that the Canadian-American feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian did, via her video series Feminist Frequency, was calmly, comprehensively collect and explain examples of the shoddy portrayal of women in video games. Titled “Tropes vs. Women,” her series on gaming pointed out that the roles most often available to women — from princesses to be rescued to prostitutes to be murdered — are both sexist and unimaginative. If these roles were rethought, diversified and expanded, Sarkeesian argues, gaming’s creative class and audience would be diversified and expanded in turn, and games would become more fun to boot.
Hardly controversial stuff, you’d think. But for this, Sarkeesian has been treated like Public Enemy Number One by a reactionary community of hardcore gamers who’ve gathered under the “#GamerGate” hashtag. Under the guise of pushing for journalistic reform and anti-censorship in gaming, GamerGate has targeted prominent women critics and designers like Sarkeesian, Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu and Leigh Alexander with a relentless campaign of threats and harassment. Sarkeesian has been driven from her home by the threats; just this week, she canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University after an anti-feminist detractor threatened a mass shooting when police refused to search attendees for weapons, citing the state’s concealed-carry law.
But the backlash has only made her point for her: Gaming has a problem. And as this interview demonstrates, gamers like Sarkeesian are determined to solve it.
You’ve described yourself as a folk villain to a certain subset of gamers, and you’ve become a folk hero to another. I can’t imagine these were your goals when you started making these videos.
[Laughs] No, they weren’t. Feminist Frequency started in 2009 when I was in grad school. It was my way of pulling feminist theory out of academia into a more public space for a wider audience. I used popular culture because I’m a big geek, and these are the things that interest me: TV, movies, comic books, video games. But also, it’s the common language that we speak. Most of us could walk into any room and not know anyone there, but we could probably start a conversation about whatever TV show was on last night, or what movie we saw, or what game we played, right? It’s a common language that we can use to talk about these larger societal and social concerns.
What inspired you to do a whole series on video games?
In 2011, I made a series of videos called “Tropes vs. Women,” looking primarily at harmful tropes that depict women poorly in movies and TV shows. That was actually met with a lot of positive responses. What I heard from a lot of people as they watched the videos was, “Yeah, I had noticed that thing in what I was watching, it made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t know how to explain it.”
“There’s a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynist hatred”
I know it sounds super basic — Comm Studies 101 – but having the language to name things in the world is really powerful. Providing the language for these overarching patterns — identifying the trope, giving them a name and description, and explaining them — really helped improve people’s literacy, their ability to unpack and to be more critical of the media they’re watching. I wanted to do another series like that, and some of the tropes that I was thinking about doing were really prevalent in video games.
Why do you think the video game series hit such a nerve?
That is really complicated [laughs]. A brief answer would be to point toward the toxicity in gaming communities that was around long before my video series. The year that my Kickstarter happened, Jennifer Hepler, a writer at BioWare, was attacked for comments that she made five or six years earlier. She was attacked in many of the same ways I have been, in terms of inundating her social media and threatening her and her children.
There’s a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynist hatred, this reactionary backlash against women who have anything to say, especially those who have critiques or who are feminists. There’s this huge drive to silence us, and if they can’t silence us, they try to discredit us in an effort to push us out.