Dear Internet,

EA was just voted the Worst Company in America by readers of the Consumerist for the second year in a row, and that sound you hear is me rolling my eyes. I dislike EA to the point where I refuse to buy any of their games even though sometimes I think that if Bioware were a person I would hug them, but this is just painfully stupid.

Always-on DRM is bad, buying great companies and then laying off their talented people is bad, Day 1 DLCs are bad. But damn, people, get some perspective.

You know what’s worse than anything EA has done? How about a huge employer firing people who need expensive medication to fight cancer or refusing to hire full-time employees so they don’t have to give medical benefits, all while your executives have money fights? (Walmart) Or maybe illegally foreclosing on people’s homes, raising interest rates to absurd numbers without reason, and charging people $5 every time they want to access their own money in their own account? (Bank of America)

Oh wait — EA totally ruined SimCity, man.

People, if you don’t like EA, stop buying their games. (I suspect but cannot prove that a good number of the people who voted for them — 78% of the votes overall in fact — have bought an EA title this year.) And don’t ignore stuff that actually matters because stuff that matters (health, home) is scary and stuff that doesn’t actually matter (Day 1 DLC) is easy.

Dear EA,

You’re still super terrible about video game stuff. And please stop blaming homophobes every time you get shit from gamers. Way to stand by your decision to … treat LGBT people with basic human dignity, I guess. That doesn’t make Always-on DRM any more palatable.

Last week I wrote about my disappointment over the initial Wildstar character options and their overuse of broad-chested guys and big-chested ladies (and ladybots). Someone suggested to me via Twitter that the reason we constantly see “hot chicks and cool dudes” as character models is that they’re the most economically successful choices. We, the gaming public, like to be sexy and cool in our video games.

No slight to the fellow on Twitter, but man, as a whole I’m starting to make a face whenever a current game development habit is defended purely for being the profitable option.

First, that response neatly removes all responsibility from the marketplace and places it all on the player. If we’re overwhelmingly offered the option to play generically sexy humanoids, to use an example from the Wildstar post, is it really surprising that people overwhelmingly play generically sexy humanoids? And what about marketing? Player preferences certainly seem less organic and democratic when you consider that close to a billion dollars* is spent each year by the game industry in the hopes of influencing our playtime decisions.

In fact, while games featuring only male protagonists sell 25% better than games with both male and female character options, on average the latter game will get a smaller marketing budget. Apparently having a female protagonist in an action game is “tough to justify”, but is this the will of the people, or a self-fufilling prophecy?

I also have concerns about money being a grand arbiter of game development and publishing because it seems like a slippery slope that historically we are not good at avoiding. Bioshock Infinite is downplaying both the character of Elizabeth and its unique retro steampunk vibe in its advertising to appeal more to the “frat boys” because that’s where the big money is apparently, and while on its surface that might not seem so bad it also seems to set a boundless precident.

When the driving question is “what will appeal to a larger market”, the answer can almost never end. What if the Bioshock Infinite folks took out a bit of story in the middle and put in another shooting level? What if they put Elizabeth in a bikini on the front cover? No wait, what if they got rid of Elizabeth completely and instead gave lead character Booker a posse of wise-cracking white dudes with big guns? Hey, the market gets what it wants, baby!

And exactly how small does a gamer market segment have to be to not earn the attention of developers and publishers, anyway? Perhaps generically pretty character models do statistically attract the most players, but at the same time approximately 32% of Guild Wars 2 characters are the tiny dog-faced Asura or weird giant cat Charr. Shortly after it launched, roughly 21% of WoW players played a decidedly unsexy gnome. Heck, Star Wars Galaxies had one human option and a bunch of weirdass aliens and it still hit 200k subscribers at its peak, which is not an amazing number but certainly not peanuts for 2004.

Developers and publishers can probably wring the most profit out of their game by avoiding innovation. So what? Once you factor in things like the industry’s own marketing efforts, the (lack of) availability of alternative options, and fact that games that offer something different have an existing audience and receive higher critical scores.. well, I don’t think “because money, that’s why” is a reasonable argument.

* That’s an estimate based on the fact that game marketers spent 824 million in 2008, the only hard number I could find.

I have lived a lot of my life online, and much of that time was spent trying to hide my body from the internet.

Ten years ago I would routinely Photoshop any exposed photo of me as much as possible. Hips got smaller, boobs got bigger, eyes wider, blemishes disappeared in a blur. I even made my hair more blonde once or twice. I got tired of that, though, after a while. As someone who is essentially pretty honest I was uncomfortable with even minor levels of deception.

After that, instead of creating computer-assisted versions of myself I spent a few years just not existing as a corporeal being on the internet. Photos of me in my early 30s simply do not exist, online or elsewhere. Profile photos on social networks would be a decade old or simply shots of my assorted game characters. I never lied about who I was or what I looked like if someone asked in an appropriate conversation, but I was more than happy to hide behind a monitor otherwise.

There are many reasons I went to such lengths to hide my “real life” self, including just some plain old self esteem issues. I was also incredibly aware of the patriarchal message in our society that women have nothing to contribute except being hot and making babies. Appearance is often the first thing latched onto by trolls and haters when they deal with women, and even as a self-aware feminist it’s hard to ignore the inherent message in “you have made my penis sad and therefore are of no value”.

It’s not good enough to be smart or thoughtful or kind, if you’re not hot to go with it, says popular thought. It was entirely evident that being overweight and not traditionally attractive would cause people to stop taking me seriously, and there is nothing I hate more than being intellectually marginalized.

Perhaps I’ve just gotten older and wiser, or at least less patient with putting up with dumb shit, but in the last few years my body has begun appearing on the internet again. I use real, untouched photos of myself for my social media profiles, and my full name (and with it, my gender) is very easy for anyone to find. I even appeared on camera during our live podcast at PAX Prime earlier this year, and while it made me a little nervous I was pleased that it didn’t stop me from trying something new.

In fact, it was about two days after posting the livecast video and mentioning that I was writing for RiftJunkies now that a comment arrived in my email. It said, “RiftJunkies must be really fucking desperate to hire a fat chick. No one cares what you say.” I wrote back a carefully manufactured “lol, wutever” response, but truth be told I was momentarily devastated. There it was, the reaction I had been dreading all along. No one cares, old fat lady. Go home.

(This was particularly exacerbated by the fact that the dude who sent this email then proceeded to follow me around the internet for a while posting the same thing whenever he felt like it, as though I might forget my status as useless unattractive woman and start thinking that my opinion mattered.)

I put it aside and tried to keep pluggin’ on until I saw this great tweet by Very Lemonade which I included at the start of this post. Then I got really, really angry.

Hey dude who wrote me and all other dudes who have done the same thing to other women (and there are many of them): fuck you. Fuck you for implying that women have to reach some standard of penis-pleasing to write about video games, of all things. Fuck you for not attacking me for what I say or what I do, or for any metric to which I can respond. Fuck you for being an asshole.

There are professions and hobbies where physical appearance is a critical element of doing a good job (model being the obvious one) and enjoying and writing about video games is so far from that, it’s laughable. Asshole Dudes, you might think you’re chasing icky girls out of your hobbies by following them around demanding sexual gratification in some way, and sadly in some cases you’re probably right. In other cases though.. cases like mine.. you’re just making us more determined to be involved in our hobbies, if for no other reason than saving women in the future from having to put up with the same bullshit.

My first Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) was in 2008. I had just met some of my Seattle guildies earlier in the year, and they talked about this video game convention that I should check out. At the time I was a game player but not really a member of the game community. I didn’t really know about this Penny Arcade comic thing, but I figured.. why not? I drove to Seattle, ambled up to the ticket booth on the Sunday morning and got a day pass, and had a lot of fun wandering around the show floor for a few hours.

My, how times have changed.

My feelings about Penny Arcade and the two fellows behind the property are.. complicated. On the one hand, they’re pretty good at getting to the heart of game players sometimes. They’ve picked fights with the game industry on behalf of the little guys, created a great charity in Child’s Play, and popularized John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory which is pretty fundamental internet sociology. They’ve given the spotlight to some pretty talented folks, too, like journalist Ben Kuchera and the Extra Credits gang.

On the other hand, the PA guys have said a lot of horrible, hateful crap. Probably the most famous is of course the “dickwolves” incident, where PA founder Mike Krahulik responded to concerns about a panel featuring a rape joke by mocking trigger warnings, selling a t-shirt that repeated the joke, and declaring on Twitter that it “feels pretty good to be actively encouraging rape culture”. Yeah. Ponder that shit. As if that wasn’t enough, earlier this year the PA guys also actively promoted and helped fund a hentai rape-based collectible card game. It’s pretty clear to me that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins as people and artists don’t want women in their game zone.

So then we come to PAX itself. I’ve gone every year since that first one in 2008, which makes this.. my fifth PAX! And if we can put aside the fact that its founders are buttheads, PAX itself is amazing. (If you’ve never been before, read this wonderful article about it from last year.) I’d estimate that at least 40% of the attendees now are female. Booth bunnies aren’t allowed on the convention floor, which makes for a very pleasant environment. PAX Enforcers (the volunteer guides and security) include a lot of women and are very easy to find if you should need one.

The result of this inclusion is that at PAX I feel I can relax and just be a game enthusiast like everyone else. There are costumes and line parties and Nintendo DS throwdowns with strangers. There are event parties where you get to meet your fellow players and developers, and movies that run late into the night. All games are there, from Magic to D&D to SpaceChem to next year’s multi-million dollar title. I have friends that I pretty much only see at PAX every year. You know what it’s like if you’ve ever been to a hobby convention — that warm feeling of everyone being there and on the same page because you all love the same thing.

But the fact remains that it is the Penny Arcade Expo, even if the Expo is the important bit for me. Every year I feel more and more conflicted about giving the Penny Arcade machine my money. Is 48 hours of nerd community bliss worth the teeth gritting whenever Mike Krahulik (in particular) says something horrible and depressing? Can I continute to pretend that PAX welcomes women in gaming while Penny Arcade clearly doesn’t care for them? After this year.. I don’t know.

Now, though, is the time to pack all my nerd shirts and update my contacts list and dig out a wall charger for every mobile device I own. Tomorrow I am off to Seattle for PAX Prime 2012, to be with friends I haven’t seen in ages and rush around between panels and go to parties (RIFT party people I will see you there!) and this year for the first time host a live podcast from my hotel room. I will have fun with people who like some of the same things I like.

Let us eat, drink, and game, for next week we ponder our line in the sand.

PS: Going to PAX Prime? Wanna hang out? Email me at liore@lioreblog.com or follow me on Twitter and we should meet up!

I didn’t mention it here at the time because I didn’t want to jinx it, but I submitted a PAX panel this year titled “Women in a Virtual World: How Gender Roles Affect Your Elf”. We didn’t get the panel, as it turns out, which I found really disappointing but .. well, life is like that sometimes I guess. (It might not be too surprising that my post “My Hobby is Stupid and So Am I” was written the day I got the rejection letter.)

The panel was oriented towards an audience of women. Men were certainly welcome to attend but it was women, I think, that would have gotten the most out of it. In fact, my goal with the panel was to not talk about men at all either as allies or potential agents of patriarchy, and the panel description opened with the lines, “It’s not about the men!” which I guess in retrospect was perhaps threatening. The idea was for women to talk about how external social issues (often that we put on ourselves) can creep into our virtual worlds, and how to deal with it. I basically wanted to make women feel good about playing MMORPGs.

To that end, I planned on talking about leading a hardcore raid guild. When I initially filled that role I found it challenging to not fall in to “girlfriend” or “mom” patterns because those were what I was familiar with going into the game. I’m a woman! I’m nuturing and supportive and oh my god if you stand in that fire one more time I am going to remove you from the raid. Women are not traditionally groomed by society for the “Dear Leader” role, so it was a challenge for me to figure out what I wanted it to mean.

I think our panel probably lacked game “celebrity” firepower compared to many of the entries, but I couldn’t ask for two better co-panelists. I have to give mad public props to the tireless Apple Cider and the fierce Arolaide for agreeing to my wacky scheme in the first place. In my initial vision Apple Cider was going to talk about “sassy plate” and how external forces can make women feel bad about how they dress their elf. Arolaide was going to take on “momgaming”, and the general societal expectation that once a woman has a child she is no longer entitled to her own hobbies because she is a mombot.

Like I said, the idea was to talk about things that can make women feel bad about playing MMOs, and simultaneously commiserate and discuss ways to handle it. I thought it was unique because it was addressing a female audience and was approaching things from a positive perspective rather than a negative one. (The latter is covered quite nicely by the usual “Fat, Ugly, or Slutty” panel.)

So yeah, I was pretty bummed when we didn’t get it, but okay. I mean, I didn’t see the other submissions, and maybe ours just wasn’t right. C’est la vie.

But then I see this morning on Twitter that one of the accepted panels is about how to handle “wife aggro” (seriously, that’s in the title), and now I just feel kind of deflated. Wife aggro. Wife. Aggro. Not spouse aggro, but wife, because obviously gamers are all men (or in a same sex relationship but I suspect that’s not what Mr. Panelist had in mind) and women just don’t get it, amirite? Arolaide has already done a way better write up of why this is so irritating than I can, so go read it.

So, like, PAX dudes, you don’t have to take our panel about sisters doin’ it for themselves in MMOs, but could you at least not accept panels where women are othered right from the first five words? Sigh.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for feminist gamers.

The new Tomb Raider was announced to feature a kinder, gentler, more rape victimy Lara Croft that men would, apparently, find more appealing. The Executive Director of the title said to Kotaku, “There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.’” The dumb rape stuff aside: dudes, y’all are getting the short end of the stick here too with the “guys have to be tricked into feeling paternal about Lara Croft to play the game” angle. I’m pretty sure men can and have managed to play a game with an independent female lead without feeling in doubt of their manhood.

Then there’s the whole “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” Kickstarter debacle. You’ve probably already heard about this, but the woman behind Feminist Frequency created a Kickstarter to produce a video series about female tropes in games, and the response from the internet was honestly and sincerely terrifying. The point of the project was clearly not to attack men or video games (not that those would be an excuse for the abuse thrown, but still), but to examine and unpack the different traditions and habits that the video game industry falls into when creating female characters. In response, site author Anita Sarkeesian was sent rape and death threats. Her Wikipedia page was repeatedly vandalized with insults and hardcore porn. Someone even commented that everyone who contributes to this project should “get raped and die of cancer”. (As of writing Sarkeesian was asking for $6000 and had recieved over $130,000!)

Actress Aisha Tyler was attacked by trolls on her Facebook page for daring to host the Ubisoft presentation at E3 because she “isn’t a real gamer”. (Hint: She is.) Oh, and Penny Arcade is again telling people to stop whining about games objectifying women, but I’ve gotten used to that by now. (Way to rage against the proles, rich white dudes!)

Misogyny is not limited to video games of course, but I contend that the hobby seems to provide a safe place for these kinds of attitudes to breed. Maybe it’s the competitive nature of most games, maybe it’s the fact that traditionally it’s a “man’s hobby”, maybe it’s because it attracts a high number of kids, but for whatever reason in my mind part of “gamer culture” is inexorably linked with the kind of crap you see on an average day at Fat, Ugly, or Slutty.

So.. do I want to be a “gamer”?

I mean, I am one, by the general definition. While I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to adopt a label as their entire identity, it is helpful shorthand for a lot of what I enjoy. I like to play games, talk about games, write about games. I like a lot of periphrial “gamer culture” things like, say, The Guild or nerd t-shirts or Jonathan Coulton. I have made an “arrow to the knee” joke. (Sorry.) While I have more interests than just games, “gamer” is ostensibly not a bad way to generalize my hobbies in most environments. It’s also a word heavily associated with a lot of shitty, shitty behavior, much of it directed at women.

I went through a phase recently where I tried to not identify myself as a “gamer”, but it feels weird. I mean, I’m pretty involved with games in my downtime, even professionally to some extent. So I ask you, folks who read this: is “gamer” a badge of shame, or a useful term that could use a bit of a reputation fix?