by Nick Yee
The Price of Cotton
Between 1882 and 1930, the price of cotton in the southern United States was directly correlated with the number of black lynchings. As economic conditions affecting the wealth of southern whites worsened, the frequency of mob violence against southern blacks increased. A more recent study of six central and eastern European countries has revealed similar correlations. In the mid-1990s, the perception of minority groups fluctuated according to economic conditions. Negative stereotypes of these minority groups increased when economic conditions deteriorated. These studies show that economic frustrations are most easily vented on a vulnerable minority group.18
As in the history of the Gold Rush, minority groups become most vulnerable when economic conditions are poor. Sudden surges of new players into an online game certainly lead to overcrowding of resource-rich areas. Players cannot always find or collect what they are seeking, especially since many game economies are inherently unbalanced and runaway inflation is difficult to control. It is also unfortunate that wealthy players are able to purchase in-game advantages. Players experiencing these economic frustrations may find it psychologically convenient and comforting to identify a scapegoat, blaming all the world’s troubles on a vulnerable minority group that cannot even respond in English. And just like that, Chinese gold farmers become the singular cause of complex economic outcomes driven by diverse actors and variables.
Avatars are not created equal even if all are just made of pixels. And putting people in the same virtual world doesn’t mean that they will all get along. More important, human beings always seek out otherness, whether online or offline. Things that shouldn’t matter in virtual worlds matter a great deal—the color of your offline skin, the arbitrary national boundaries you were born into. The Proteus Paradox isn’t only about how our psychological hardwiring doesn’t change in virtual worlds, it’s also about how our offline identities and ethnicities are forcibly dragged into online games in which national boundaries do not exist. In online games, racial scapegoating can lead to genocide. It means that simple insults, humiliation, and harassment of a minority group are no longer sufficient for venting frustration. The story of gold farming reveals again how our digital fantasies remain fully tethered to the physical world. How we play these games (and how some players can afford to not play these games) is very much tied to global economic differences and local labor costs. And as the histories of the American South and the California Gold Rush show, ethnicity can determine who to blame. Even in a world where humans and elves can coexist, a player’s assumed offline ethnicity still matters.
CHAPTER 6 THE LOCKER ROOM UTOPIA
I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English. In a plural context, you can resort to using “their,” but in the singular form, you have to make do with the verbose “his or her” or the very situational and awkward “one.” In Edward Castronova’s book Synthetic Worlds, he avoids the verbose style and instead alternates with either “his” or “her” in his prose. And thus, in the section in which he argues that virtual worlds are a rational alternative for people living joyless lives in the physical world, he ends with the question: “If a person rejects a bad game in favor of a good one, who can blame her?” This question is ironic, not only because many gamers describe their game lives as being a stressful second job (as described in chapter 3), but also because the female pronoun highlights one of the most incongruent aspects of describing virtual worlds as utopias. In 2012, the Entertainment Software Association reported that 47 percent of all gamers are women. Whereas the video game industry demographics are approaching gender parity, the gender ratio in online games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest II remains highly skewed. Studies consistently show that only about 20 percent of players in these online games are women. If virtual worlds are indeed utopias, why are so few women playing these online games?1
One way that academics and game developers have addressed this disparity is to suggest that men and women prefer very different kinds of games. Under this logic, we just need to get better at understanding what these untapped female gaming desires are. This argument is often paired with an evolutionary psychology perspective. In 2000, the University of Copenhagen’s Torben Grodal argued that men prefer action and shooter games because these games tap into men’s evolutionary disposition to be hunters in a hunter-gatherer society; these shooter games dovetail with men’s innate interest in developing spatial and motor skills for hunting. He concludes, “It is deplorable that the video game industry has not yet invented games that cater to those gatherer skills and motivations that are attractive to girls.” Other researchers have echoed this sentiment. For example, Kristen Lucas and John Sherry identified several differences in gaming motivations between men and women and have noted that “redesign efforts [in games for women] should focus on playing into female players’ natural cognitive abilities.” Game designer Chris Crawford has taken this line of reasoning to its logical, albeit uncomfortable, conclusion: “All this leads to a suggestion for what might work for women in games: social reasoning. The ideal game for women, according to this simplified model, would be some sort of interactive soap opera or bodice ripper, presenting the player with complex social problems as she seeks the ideal mate.” These arguments suggest that creating games for the “female brain” is the only sensible solution to attracting women to play video games; there is a set of feminine game mechanics we simply haven’t found or perfected yet.2
As sociologist T. L. Taylor has argued, these attempts to create games specifically for women are “reifying imagined difference[s]” between male and female gamers. Because the assumption is that gameplay motivations are the primary barrier for potential female gamers, the women who currently play video games are perceived as “the oddballs, the nonmainstream, the exceptions”—they are aberrant women who can’t tell us anything about real women. Certainly player motivation is an important variable, but trying to understand gaming by referencing brain evolution in the Pleistocene savannah ignores the reality of how people actually play games. Playing a game isn’t simply about what players would like to do in the game; it’s also about how they gain access to a game, their past experiences with games, who they play the game with, and how other players treat them once they are in the game. Gaming is an uneven terrain that presents different navigational challenges depending on the player.3
Boys Only. Do Not Enter.
Cybercafés are popular among Taiwanese online gamers because they offer decent computer equipment and convenience for friends playing together. They also tend to be seedy places filled with cigarette smoke and noise. Anthropologist Holin Lin has written about the social dynamics in these establishments. Most cybercafés locate the computer equipment toward the back, behind a room full of pool tables. Combined with the highly unbalanced gender ratio, it’s obvious why most teenage girls would prefer to steer clear of the prying eyes and catcalling, and enter only if accompanied by a male friend. In short, Taiwanese cybercafés are male territories that women need male companionship to enter safely.4
The dramatic issues of physical access to online games in Taiwan actually mirror more nuanced issues of access for female gamers in the West. Even in the days of video game arcades, the degree of parental control and oversight exerted on boys and girls was different. Parents were more likely to restrict a girl’s access to a video game arcade than they were a boy’s access. The gendered territory of video games is made perfectly clear in other ways. In a census of video game characters, Dmitri Williams found that 85 percent of all video game characters are male. In fact, if you look only at the protagonists in video games, that number gets even higher: 89 percent have male protagonists. Female characters, when they appear, are typically relegated to secondary roles—sex objects or damsels to be saved. These social norms become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boys encouraged to play video games grow up to become men who are interested in making video games. Girls, on the other hand, are di
scouraged from playing videos games and do not grow up with the desire to create these games. The end result is that video gaming is dominated by male game designers making games for male players. In Williams’s interviews with game designers over a two-year period, he found almost no women. As he noted, “It is no surprise, then, that an industry-wide masculine culture has developed in which a male point of view is nearly the only point of view.”5
The current dearth of women gamers is especially notable given the history of computer science. Before there were digital computers, roomfuls of human “computers” performed complex mathematical calculations by hand. Most of these human computers during World War II were women with degrees in mathematics. Compared with being on the battlefield, computing was perceived as women’s work. When the first electronic general-purpose computer was built (the ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania during World War II), the first computer programmers were drafted from this pool of human computers. Thus, the first six professional computer programmers were all female. Significant gender shifts in computing interest have occurred since then. The percentage of bachelor degrees in computer science awarded to women peaked in 1983–1984 at 37 percent. It has been falling steadily since: 27 percent in 1997–1998 and 12 percent in 2010–2011. When the first professional computer programmers were all women during World War II, and only 12 percent of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 2011, it is clear that social factors play a significant role in who does and does not engage with computer technology. The gendering of computing technology is a recent social phenomenon, and we shouldn’t mistake the current disproportionate male presence in computer-related fields as reflecting an unchanging, innate, biological basis.6
These social factors have also created unspoken rules about who plays video games. In the same way that Taiwanese cybercafés are perceived to be male territories and accessible by women only when accompanied by men, the same is actually true of online games in the West. Data from the Daedalus Project have shown that a romantic partner introduced 27 percent of female players to online games, whereas only 1 percent of male players were introduced to an online game this way. And 60 percent of women in these online games regularly play with a romantic partner, compared with 15 percent of men. Many women in these games are also highly aware that male companionship is one of the few legitimate access points into online games.7
I find that most people do not think female players in game are really female unless you have your significant other (husband, boyfriend, roommate) playing the game, too. I think most people in game assume that 98% of all players are male and the other 2% are girlfriends / wives who were dragged along into the game—that it’s not something a girl would want to do. [World of Warcraft, female, 38]
Many also seem to assume that I play with my boyfriend or husband, and are surprised when I tell them that I played MMOs long before my former boyfriend started playing City of Heroes, and that he doesn’t play EverQuest at all. [EverQuest, female, 24]
Two threads of logic are revealed in these anecdotes. First, as games researchers Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell have noted, “for most women, transgressing gender norms in relation to playing games occurs most frequently when it is legitimized by male relations (boyfriends, cousins, brothers and fathers).” And second, a woman’s biological sex is under question unless she can point to a male companion.8
But every once in a while, I seem to meet someone who wants to violently deny that I am who I am. And how am I supposed to respond to a charge of “You are not a girl!”—I can’t exactly flash ID or body parts to prove it. [World of Warcraft, female, 36]
The assumption underlying this logic is that no woman actually wants to play online games. And this logic is rhetorically powerful; it legitimizes the presence of a woman in a male territory while preserving video games as a purely masculine pursuit. But for women, having to constantly justify your presence in online games quickly gets tiring. And if anything is a clear sign that you’re not where you belong, it’s when people question your body parts.
These issues of social access emerge not only when a woman logs on to a game but also the moment a woman walks into a gaming store. At an academic workshop at UCLA, I met Morgan Romine, a member of Frag Dolls, an all-female professional gaming group sponsored by Ubisoft. She recounted many experiences in which store clerks were shocked to realize that she was buying a video game for herself. When Romine was in Los Angeles that week, she stopped by the local game store to pick up a new Nintendo DS game. When she approached the counter, the cashier greeted her with, “So who are you getting this for?” She had a similar experience when she was preordering Halo 2. After the clerk chatted with her for a bit, it finally dawned on him that Romine was a gamer, and he blurted out, “Wait. You’re ordering this for yourself?”9
Even when a female gamer’s biological sex is no longer under question, other obstacles abound. Because women are often presumed to be uninterested in gaming, they are also often presumed to be incompetent gamers.
I definitely classify myself as a gamer and make no bones about it to anyone. When I played EverQuest, I was so sick and tired of being treated like a moron or hit on 24–7 that I made a male character. The way people treat female chars and males in EverQuest was drastic; I had immediate respect. When on a female char, men think you don’t know how to play, can’t be hardcore, and try to give you things to hit on you. It’s annoying to say the least. It’s been this way in EVERY game I’ve played (EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and World of Warcraft). [World of Warcraft, female, 35]
And because women are presumed to be incompetent, their advice and insights are more likely to be ignored after their biological sex is revealed.
I found that once people establish I’m really a female that some things I say get taken less seriously when it comes to strategy. [EverQuest II, female, 31]
Once some of the people realized that I was female in real life, I noticed that a few of the members seemed less likely to listen when I made suggestions about how to manage certain fights, or which way to go. Nothing terribly overt, but they would ask the group leader instead, where previously they asked me. [World of Warcraft, female, 22]
Even in its most benevolent form, the underlying assumption of incompetence is apparent to many women.
Men in game are more likely to defend me with situations they’d just let another guy friend handle. [EverQuest II, female, 31]
Playing an online game can be a struggle for women. If you say you’re a woman, few believe you. And if they do, you’re now thought of as incompetent, someone whose opinions don’t matter and who needs to be protected. For women who are experienced gamers, they also recognize that any mistake they make will be assigned to their gender rather than to circumstantial factors.
Even as gamers admit that some women play online games, these women tend to be labeled “casual gamers.” This euphemistic label designates someone as having a passing fancy with online games, and even though they are in an online game, they aren’t a “real” gamer. Again, this label acknowledges women are present in games while simultaneously designating them as second-class citizens. A study of EverQuest II players challenges this assumption. Server-side game logs showed that women actually spent more hours each week playing than men, by about four hours on average. But women were more likely to underestimate their own playing time in the survey compared with men. While men underestimated by about one hour per week, women underestimated by about three hours per week. And women were also less likely to indicate plans to quit the game compared with men. The underestimation of playing time among women highlights the power of stereotypes, and these data points reveal the baffling irony of labeling the more frequent and loyal players as being “casual.”10
For many women, from the moment they step into a gaming store to when they log on to the game, they are bombarded with signals that they don’t belong. They are presumed to have no inherent interest in games. They are presumed to
be incompetent at games. And they are assigned labels, such as “casual gamers,” that are disconnected from reality.
Male Fantasies
Because these fantasy online games are designed by male game developers to be consumed by male audiences, they are technologically constructed male fantasies in a very literal sense. And because this male point of view in the game industry is entrenched and largely unquestioned, the fetishistic aspects of these male fantasies have become largely invisible to male gamers. But they are very apparent to many women.
Back in 1999, when I had recently gotten a computer and an Internet connection, I was standing in Wal-Mart, looking at the game titles. The two MMORPGs at the time were Asheron’s Call and EverQuest. I read the back of both boxes, and both looked fun, but I picked Asheron’s Call because the art on the box left more to be imagined. The figures could have been male or female. The EverQuest box (Kunark, at the time) showed Firiona Vie, with her blonde hair, impractical armor, and gratuitous cleavage, tied down, while an Iksar brandished a weapon at her. I read into that—this is what women amount to in this game: victims. [EverQuest II, female, 24]
This male fantasy is about both how women should look and what their roles should be. The sexually exaggerated design of female avatars is a common complaint of women gamers.
The only really off-putting detail is that it’s ludicrous that every time my elf fights, her breasts stick out to the side repeatedly. It is a constant reminder to me that this game is made for 13 year old boys, or men who still think like them. [World of Warcraft, female, 42]
For the most part I completely agree with the generalization that video games are designed with the younger male in mind. It’s very annoying to always see the same type of woman (hero or villain) who has giant breasts, large eyes and teeny tiny waists. [City of Heroes, female, 31]