part i | don't be upset just because somebody brought it up

Recently, a woman named Anita Sarkeesian kickstarted (yeah! Kickstarter!) a web series intending to engage the Tropes Vs. Women In Gaming. The first episode came out a while back on YouTube (and the third most recently), clocking in at about 20 minutes, and it detailed how frequently damsels in distress are used as a trope in games. A simple argument to make, right? Well, yeah, of course, you might say, games are simple, they tell simple stories, especially in the early days of the game industry, of course the stories they tell would be basic tales with chivalrous story-beats. The term for this is "courtly love" (which is different from Courtney Love).

Courtly love. Monster swoops in, grabs girl, guy doesn't want to face danger alone, takes sword, tackles adventure, saves helpless princess, pig-man slain, much rejoicing. Very true, honest emotion is spoken or copped to, but the story beats are decipherable and easy-going. "Traditional."

Somewhere in there though, when the criticisms started adding up over that 20 minutes in Anita's video, the Internet got offended when she raised these points as a negative.

Every motherfucker with commenting rights on a game blog flew into a rage, condemning her for bringing up things that don't need to be discussed...

...and for stirring up trouble... and why does she pick on Mario so much... and why doesn't she talk about Samus... and her earrings are dumb...

...and why did she get over $100,000 for this on Kickstarter... and why is the video 20 minutes long on YouTube...

...look at her fucking makeup... and why are comments on YouTube disabled...

...and if she's smart, she ought to be fucking afraid for saying these things... and she thinks she's so smart, talking down on people...

...and why isn't there a Tropes Vs. Men version... and this is a double-standard...

...and what would you expect from a feminist, right?

Because, am I right, guys?

Full-stop.

Internet, especially those of you playing videogames, if I may?

Listen closely.

If you are actually upset with these videos for bringing up these topics as a negative, it's for your own good that holes are about to be punched in your preconceived notions about the gender stereotypes you've absorbed through games, wittingly or not.

You might not have realized it, fellas, but you were probably misinformed at very young age. We're going to fix that. With talking. And words. Welcome to therapy, you willfully-ignorant sycophants.

part ii | the games industry, and its patrons, are not immune to criticism

Naturally, Anita began at the beginning, and a huge shout-out to her for doing her homework, not many people know that Donkey Kong began life as a failed attempt to create a licensed Popeye game. She earns all the cred she needs right there. People might complain that she takes some shots at the Mario games, particularly their creator, Miyamoto. The difficult part is that Miyamoto is a bit of an idiot savant and gives zero thought to story in Mario, he just keeps it in there to be funny. Also, some people have jumped in to remind us that westerners shouldn't go to Japan to get your dose of modern gender politics (he says with a sweeping, racist statement). However, that doesn't make any difference. These Nintendo products are the wide-audience games that are reaching the most people, and though we aren't going to go back and edit games made in 1983 for today's audience, even if they're innocent, to this day, New Super Mario Bros. U came out last November (and New Super Luigi U DLC more recently), and is potentially the most dangerous vessel for sending a terrible message.

In modern America, no freedom should be denied, not even from self-ignorance. No looking the other way on this, America.

Even though it's 2013, and not 1985, it's still Peach being kidnapped by Bowser. Can't even bother to make her playable like in Mario 2, can you Nintendo? Excusable? Yes, you can make excuses. But Nintendo's excuses for not making Peach playable suck. Lazy on both accounts.

But those are male characters trying to rescue the girl. Boys were doing a good thing, wanting to rescue the princess from capture. Innocent, right?

Right? It was a good thing. Remember, boys, or anybody that feels victimized by a woman allegedly trying to ruin your good time by pointing out that you're a jerk, we're diagnosing your psychosis and baseless desire to hate feminism.

The wheel turns once. Time passes.

To all of the deniers in the audience standing up for your videogame "hobby" -- you are not unique. If videogames are a hobby, then you are as excused from bigotry as the people building balsa wood airplanes. You may feel, as a fan of games, you are compensating for the chip on your shoulder, so it's justified. You are not in a secret fraternity. You are not sheltered. You are not the voice of a culture. You are not the hand of a counter-culture. You gave that up when you all went out and bought Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the most profitable thing since Avatar. That's mainstream. You are a participant. Videogames are the most lucrative entertainment medium on earth, and they are not a sub-section, or a secret alternative to TV or movies. You demonstrate nothing by defending it. It does not need defending. It will not shield you.

Games, the games industry, and, fuck, the tech industry in general, deserve criticism because they are still young -- or are still acting like it, which is even worse. Challenge somebody on the topic and they look at you like you're their mother, whom they might still fear, somehow. They might even accuse you of acting like one, or that you're looking for a fight.

Yeah, I am.

If we do not challenge them to be better, then they will not challenge us to grow up, be we 4 or 40 years old, or be we in 1914 or 2014.

Back to the damsel thing. Anita is right to point out that male-led chivalry is thousands of years old, so this isn't a new idea. Damsels are thousands of years old. Yes. We're in agreement there. And now we'll agree that the trope is an awful, outdated storytelling crutch. We really have no excuse to accept awfulness these days, do we? These days, if it's absolutely necessary, we can acknowledge that the trope existed using this great lens -- satire. Satire is very hard (impossible?) to do broadly. It's only now that when this assumed haven, videogames, is encroached upon, that we see anger from the trolls that dwell within.

I understand why a fukkin' whummin' bringing up the screwball unfairness of how women are framed in stories makes certain kinds of men angry. It's because these are the things those men were raised upon -- these tropes are the ground beneath their feet.

Boys, especially the kinds of boys that reach adulthood most significantly through books, and television, and videogames, likely come to maturity with "important" ideas get infused into their minds. (Source: the people I've known, and the life I've lived) Quite simply, birds fly, grass grows, clouds float, and women are unknowable, soft things, desirable things that you drop everything to obtain.

Did I say things? I meant people. If you're a human, there's about a fifty percent chance you're a woman, and if you are, you probably have been one for your entire life, growing up and living a life every day, but let's not complicate things, or upend the masculine, monomaniacal simplicity of, "sacrifice it all, be selfless, help the helpless girl." That's called "courtly love" and it's lazy writing.

That's uncomplicated and it could be mistaken for cleverness. Somebody once wrote that "the Internet is a race to be clever," and acting up, and being a terror, is usually the quickest way to appear sly. Don't mistake uncomplicated for cleverness and don't mistake anger for the constructive criticism.

But they've been writing that courtly love idea down over and over for centuries, so it's gotta hold water! It's a good thing to want to help the girl, right?

The wheel turns again. Time passes.

Girls get let into the club. It's disgusting to imagine it could be described as a "club" in the first place.

Give the the girls nice seats over there by the table with the cheese and ginger ale, won't you? That should satisfy them, right? (We boys don't want them to hear the tension-relieving jokes we're making at their expense.)

part iii | you shouldn't want tropes

To simply be selfless so you can label yourself as such is addition by subtraction. It's an error a lot of young guys make, deciding to deliberately embrace a sense of 13th century righteousness. You want to be a simultaneously aware and unaware, holistic person. You don't want to be a maniac devoted to any single thought or object. Don't be Orlando Boom in Kingdom of Heaven. Don't be Ahab. To repeat, do not be Captain Fucking Ahab, guys!

Well, in most videogame cases, the girl is an object, a trophy -- she is The Last Thing. After the trinkets and baubles and growth and strength, guy claims girl, the trails he faced prove he's earned it. If you go back to read my Princess Mononoke review, you'll realize I've mentioned this before, but the best stories that involve a guy and a girl in a fantastical setting require that they be fully-functional, self-motivated people whose converging lives might ignite an attraction. Booking your player-controlled bro on a train to the only visible digital female on the disc is not only bad storytelling, it's minimalizing, two of the few things in the world that piss me right the fuck off. The troubling thing is, this runs into a mighty conflict in the brain of the boy raised on, "save the girl, cuz it's the nice thing to do," because being nice to a girl, solely because she is a girl, is a bad thing to learn about early in life. Videogames frame innumerable rescue missions exactly that way and it imprints a negative message. So, something breaks in a guy's head at a certain age when he realizes that this thing, this GURL, isn't what he initially thought, and it fucks with him. He has learned from such an early age -- mainly from videogames, these days (and in the old days, shit, I'll take my lumps!) -- that you're just supposed to be nice them, and help them. They need it. That's what you do.

(This is where I blame Shakespeare a little bit, too, because he popularized never showing what happens after good triumphs. After all that posturing and good-doing, and bad guys suffering defeat, it ends -- in the stories, it ends.)

Guys, you do realize in the time that it took you to come to the realization that the princesses being rescued in every story ever aren't real, those real girls around you in real life were off becoming people -- becoming women? Again, this realization -- maybe women are something more than that voice in your ear (Cortana) or that goo-gaw right before the credits roll (Peach) -- breaks something in a young guy's head if he's been raised wrong on these videogame values that Anita brings up in her series. It happens right around when he sort of has carved out an identity and the world sort of makes sense, and -- oh, fuck, we've been wrong the whole time about women.

An emotional response occurs.

Finally!

Something to use this new Emotion Chip on! Confusion! When there is even a mention that gender relations are fucked up in videogames, even on as sloppily handled as what Anita has put on display here (more on that later), the backlash proves that the video is at least doing more good than harm. It's spurring conversation because the reactions demonstrate how upending the "tradition" and "shit you don't talk about, you just pretend isn't there" makes guys feel cheated, that they only meant the best when they were trying to chivalrous, and now this sudden swing? It feels like a sucker punch to them. They get defensive.

They didn't know the rules were going to be changed! This is huge for more kids than ever, considering two major factors:

1) Videogames are THE media touchstone of today, and...
2) There are statistically more scrawny introverts than jocks in high school, and all those boys are being influenced primarily by videogames. Think back. Think harder. Remember? I know, right? Now, suddenly, those kids have aged up. They're on the Internet. They're thinking about videogames. They're working tech jobs. But they might not have all grown up. To them though, this sect of men that would rise against Tropes Vs. Women In Gaming on the basis that, it is a sudden shift, unfairly, and it's hurtful that they thought they were kings of the clubhouse. Instead, they're on an ice floe of their own making.

Instead of moving the goal-posts on generations of guys to come, let's set them where they belong in the first fucking place! Let's have the adventures, and the stories, and experiences found in youth actually prepare people for the real world, instead of being the power-fantasies of under-developed film school drop-outs that don't read books, or talk, or think, and only develop opinions by stalking Facebook news feeds and blog comments sections. That's no way to live. Getting mad and commenting about how you can't comment on a YouTube video is the exact point: that nobody wants to even discuss this. They simply want to comment on it. 

Well, we are discussing it. Want to make a counter-point? Go nuts, make a video, write a blog post, but actually think about it, and stand behind it as a person, not as a faceless torch-bearer, and don't do it with one hand on your iPhone while standing at a urinal.

part iv | there are no winners because conversation is the objective

Did nobody realize that Anita is playing devil's advocate? She's kinda trolling, you guys. She just got in the first word. I bet you feel silly now.

And you don't have to stop enjoying games, or even playing them. You don't have to hate anybody. You won't ruin your own good time if you ask for something better, because that's what Anita is doing with her series.

Something better. Something not accepting of draconian tropes and actually modern. I've read a few books, and I've seen a few movies, and I've played a few videogames, and I went to some art museums once or twice in cities, man, and if you have too, then you can agree that there's a difference between artistic themes that are "classic" and things that are "old and shitty."

In conclusion, Anita brings up a number of great points, and demonstrates that we need to start talking about these things. Her research is there. For every FemShep, or Celes, or reboot-Lara Croft, we have every other kidnapped girlfriend, so yes, the industry's storytelling is imbalance, and as grouchy-sounding as Anita's argument is, that is the thing you should walk away with.

The grouchiness is tempered, and appropriate, and necessary.

That doesn't stop me from encouraging people to watch it and to try to understand your reaction to it, either positive or negative. I guess we'll see what happens in future episodes as she releases them.

Oh, wait, the third episode just came out!

Check it out, if you like, it's on YouTube, and remember, being angry isn't clever.

OTHER RELEVANT READING ON GHOST LITTLE: Bayonetta Steps On The Patriarchy's Balls

-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 8/8/13)