Anyone with an interest in videogames and the gaming community will be aware of the poor reputation they have for their treatment of women. One only has to think back to 2014’s misogynistic, online harassment campaign, commonly referred to as ‘Gamergate’, to remember how unwelcome women have often been within the community. Women are subjected to misogynistic abuse when playing online games, and their performance is heavily criticised and demeaned.
Female characters are also regularly treated with contempt. For example, in the 2018 title Red Dead Redemption 2, an invented character by the name of Dorothea Wicklow, whose entire purpose was to add flavour to a busy cityscape, quickly attracted the attention of YouTubers. These gamers rushed to publish compilation videos in which they viciously tortured and murdered her. Her crime? She was a suffragette. Similar montages often crop up online—with sex workers in all Grand Theft Auto games, Lady Boyle in Dishonoured, and Lara Croft in Tomb Raider to name just a few.
This disdain towards women, and the delight in the enactment of violence towards us, is something that I have been aware of for a long time. However, until recently I had not considered how this toxicity has impacted the way that I play and enjoy video games.
In a community so unwelcome to us, I have felt a deep impulse to prove my place as a ‘gamer’, not only to others but also to myself. There remained a twinge of guilt whenever I found an exploit. I felt a sense of shame whenever I struggled against a games’ difficulty. This imposter syndrome was something that always nagged at the back of my mind. However, it was not something I truly confronted until I played the Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild (BoTW).
Although many games had promoted freedom and imagination before, this was the first time when I saw these concepts etched into the core of a games’ development. It is no bad thing to find a cheeky way around a hard boss, just another way of playing the game. Much of this liberation comes from the design of BoTW itself. It’s often grouped in with a selection of games developers like to refer to as ‘systemic’. Essentially this means that there are various systems in place in the game, which create rules that players can always rely on. Wood will always burn, metal will always conduct electricity, and water will always freeze. BoTW goes far beyond these examples, but the existence of such a system means that there’s always several ways of solving a puzzle or defeating an enemy. The game developers are not trying to force the player into a single set of actions that will complete an objective. They have simply set up a scenario for you to find your own way through.
But, this liberation goes beyond the mechanics. There is only one real objective in the game: to defeat the main boss. Everything else is completely optional. You are free to wander the world, meet different characters, and build yourself up in your own time. There’s no wrong way to play the game, the only thing that matters is your enjoyment of it. It was only about halfway through, as I was gleefully watching an anthropomorphic tree dancing with maracas (don’t ask it’s a long story) that I realised something. In an effort to prove to myself that I belonged in this community, I had been curtailing my love for videogames.
I’ve discussed already the vitriol women face from other gamers. However, I also want to make clear that toxicity in videogames is often far more insidious. In their first incarnation, videogames were created to extract as much pocket money as possible from children in arcades. This explains the notorious difficulty of old-school games. The more the player died, the more money they would have to fork out to have another go. This hangover from the arcades followed the industry into the home consoles of the 1980s. Gamers we’re expected to learn and master a videogame—not only to beat them but also to score a formidable high score. Battletoads, Contra and Ghouls n Ghosts, are prime examples of these punishing games. The fact that games were marketed to boys only exacerbated this toxicity. It would not be until the late 1990s that games began to change, a shift heavily driven by the release of Metal Gear Solid.
Directed by Hideo Kojima, this hugely influential game came was complete with credits, cinematic cut scenes and a story that took itself way too seriously. The focus of games changed, from challenging the player’s skills to the extreme to creating a blockbuster experience.
However, videogames remained very much in the male sphere. Violent and bloody titles, usually featuring women in scantily clad outfits, were considered the top of the gaming hierarchy. Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin’s Creed, all gained mass popularity. Other gaming series were extremely popular as well, especially the Sims series and titles from Nintendo, the latter having its own issues with the portrayal of damsels in distress. However, there remained a snobbery in the community about people who played these games. The rise of mobile games in the last decade has only heightened this fixation on the genuine gamer. ‘Casual gamers’, as these players are often referred to, quickly became used as a pejorative term. Casual gaming offered a new accessibility to women, and the gender ratio of gamers in the UK is now an even split. However, many within the community dismiss this fact, because they do not value different sorts of games.
The rise of indie games, however, has diversified videogames. Journey, Night in the Woods, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Papers Please, and countless others have been extremely popular in recent years. These are independent games that craft stories and narratives in a way that you simply cannot do in any other medium but videogames. Indie developers tend to be more diverse than larger studios, not only in terms of gender but also race and sexuality, meaning they attract a wider range of different perspectives. They have influenced larger titles immensely, and given rise to a new appreciation of the value of a less toxic enjoyment of games in the community. This is something that, I believe, has culminated in the BoTW and will drive videogame development in the future. Already, the developers of Immortals Fenyx Rising and Telling Lies have stated that they drew heavily from BoTW, and this trend looks likely to continue.
I’m not saying we need to abolish the hardest difficulty settings. Nor am I saying that difficult or violent games are automatically bad or sexist. I love an old western gun fight in Red Dead Redemption just as much as the next person. But I also love to sit for hours growing crops and fishing on my farm in Stardew Valley. We should not value one of these experiences over the other. So, I am excited to see where this road takes us, and am looking forward to a less toxic, and a more enjoyable time with videogames.
Words by Matilda Smith
This article was published as part of The Indiependent‘s May 2021 magazine edition.
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