So. Some of you know I’m old enough to remember the original text-based Star Wars game played in computer centerss around the world on old-fashioned timeshared mainframe and mini-computer terminals. I never figured out how to play it. And you might not know it but I spent… several days trying to figure out the original “Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe” game on a friend’s original Apple Macintosh. And never got it. And while I never did figure out the fireplace-thingy clues I also spent several days trying to get the hang of Myst when it was ported to Windows. My partner and her roommate instantly mastered Minesweeper on my new Dell 386 with its whopping one megabyte of RAM. I mostly mastered landing on mines in as few clicks as possible. Which would have been great if the goal wasn’t to avoid them. The other day I asked my daughter to show me how to play a sword-fighting game on the Wii. A few minutes in my son said “you’re talking to him as if he was a kindergartener.” (I admit I’d noticed that too.) She replied to him, in all seriousness, “I know, I think he needs that.”

I ought to add that it’s not just computer games — I’ve managed to get fools mated in chess twice in a row, and in Trivial Pursuits I tend to know almost every bit of trivia related to a question. Except, um, the correct answer.

So in other words, basically, I never learned how to have fun. Especially fun with computer games.

But!

My son, who’s always been a bit of a sphinx around the house, has started playing Halo on the XBox. Not only does he really get a lot of pleasure from it, and not only is he really good at it, but he want’s to talk about it. And he gets a lot of pleasure out of talking about it.

Between that and a recent resolution to turn over a new leaf I’ve decided to spend some of my spare moments figuring out how to play Halo so that even if I can’t play at his level I can at least experience it first hand enough to really talk about it. And hey, if I can get to a level where he can mentor me (mentoring being a critical skill I want all my children to develop) then so much the better.

Anyway, I bring all this up because sports in general and computer games in particular are supposed to be the near-exclusive province of boys and men.
Never mind the extremely large percentage of gamers who are actually women and girls.

Girls like Metaneira of the new-to-me feminist gamer site Empowered Fire. Who is, um, amazing (emphasis mine.)

It shouldn’t be a surprise, but running a feminist web site doesn’t exactly make you popular. As anyone who identifies with feminism will tell you, simply dropping that particular f-word can turn conversations into arguments, discussions into flamewars, and will likely result in ad hominem attacks faster than you can blink. And when you talk about feminism in the context of a very male-dominated arena (such as WoW), whoo, boy, do the slurs come flying fast and furious. Geek feminism in general and feminism in WoW specifically seem to be getting more attention lately, and with that attention comes the trolls: people who go out of their way to belittle, insult, and threaten the poster simply because she had the audacity to express an opinion. I do not wish to speak for Ais, but in my own tenure here, I’ve been called a slut and a whore, and I’ve been told I’m too fat and ugly to get laid or even get raped (as if rape has anything to do with the victim’s attractiveness). In fact, not only do I never get laid, I engage in cyber sex with anyone ready and willing — I assume because my fatness and/or ugliness doesn’t matter to the anonymous WoW players I exchange naughty phrases with. I only write about feminism because really I’m just angry about how fat and ugly I am; if I were good-looking, I wouldn’t be a feminist. I’m a bad mage, a bad warrior, a bad Warcraft player. I’m a bad writer, and everything I do on this site is a waste of time. And not only am I wasting my time writing about these things, I’m just a waste of space in general. I’ve been told the world would be better off without me in it. All of this invective simply because I write about how my personal philosophy intersects with my hobby. And I know I’m not alone: I’d be surprised to find any feminist blogger who hasn’t had her share of abuse in comments or e-mail.

So to those trolls, the ones attacking me and the ones attacking my fellow feminist bloggers, I say: fuck you, I’m amazing.

Read the quote in context here.

That male gamers would project onto women players the exact same stereotypes that are cast on them (pasty faced or pimply, useless, doughy, a waste of perfectly good oxygen) is ironic in the extreme.

I’m fairly certain it’s not a mistake my son would make. Not least because I’ve mentored him in the matter of stereotypes, especially gender stereotypes, since the days when I stayed home with him while his mom worked. But… just in case I’ll mention the particulars of post to him when we get together this evening. For him to show me how the thumb thingies on the XBox controller are supposed to work.

Melissa Gira Grant left a comment at Geek Feminism Blog about proposed guidelines to mitigate the seriously painful practice of men in tech “sexing up” dull presentations with… um… call it sexual-assumption-laden references or images of women. The problem being, as is often the case, the difficulty of distinguishing twittery vs. substance. Melissa lays it out nicely, and hits exactly the crux of the problem (emphasis mine.)

I think I get the thinking around these guidelines — and the totally male-dominated conference circuit that needs to hear this sort of guidance — but I just am stuck on this:

How do we keep guys (or anyone) from non-sensically using sexual or sexualized imagery and language in their presentations and preserve the right of people to use that information when it’s actually really, really what the presentation concerns?

This might be beyond the scope of these guidelines, but I am thinking back to the first BlogHer, during a “Birds of a Feather” session organized by self-identified mommybloggers, who were irritated that when they discussed the biological particulars of childbirth and childrearing, they were told they were being unprofessional, NSFW, or “overshare-y” — or, obscene.

It’s hard to address intent in this stuff. And I don’t want to sit through anymore stuffed-shirted dude “presos” on boring web marketing that just have some naked women sprinkled throughout to “sex things up” — because usually, those are the same dudes who don’t actually want to hear women talk honestly about sex, either.

Read the quote and follow links to the original sources here.

I think that’s about right. The problem isn’t the guidelines themselves. Or perhaps more accurately the problem isn’t insufficiently fine-grained guidelines. The problem is subsets of participants for whom the notion of the objects of their desire as biological human beings is both figuratively and literally TMI.

I’m emphasizing the notion of alienation from biological reality because, as this FAQ from Gender Shouldn’t Matter (also via Geek Feminism) demonstrates by reference that men are actually perfectly capable of acknowledging women as intellectual peers… under, um, certain conditions.

[Q] Free Software communities are meritocracies. Aren’t your recommendations purely discriminative?

[A] Everyone likes a true meritocracy. A community fails to achieve it, however, whenever female members resort to hiding behind male usernames.

I found the FAQ here.

The conditions being, um, when they don’t realize the intellectual peers they’re interacting with are biological women. Which, again, makes it a twits vs. substance issue — twittish sexual ideals (“it’s just harmless fun,” “we’re all men here,” “eww, you’re feeding babies with those things?!?!?!”) vs the corporeal, biological substance of those peers.

And, sigh, the problem in this case isn’t solvable by the standard 1st Amendment “the answer to bad images is more bad images.” (Although one imagines the rhetorical impact of PowerPointing a Wikipedia-derived photos of micro-penises into the graph at Gender Shouldn’t Matter as “just a light-hearted illustration” of the small face-to-face participation of women in Free/Open-Source Software venues as a response to the highly influential developers who angrily deny the women’s breasts they present in their own graphs might be objectionable.)

Instead it’s going to take something closer to confrontation. And possibly intervention. And it’s going to be a tricky intervention not so much because you have to overcome resistance (though there’s plenty of that) but because you also have to overcome this conception of the role of women in tech as not only things-not-people but as unapproachable/unachievable things.

Which, sad to say, is just an exaggerated version of the mainstream vision of women. Which is yet another consequence, of course, of the vision of sex as transactional.