In Play - University of Maryland, March 2016

1. Playing Social Justice Warrior
Reclaiming Games through Cultural Revolution
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter

2. DEFINING A SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR

3. Urban Dictionary
(as of March 2016)

5. “Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War”
Laurie Penny
Boing Boing
This is a culture war. The right side is winning, at great cost…We are winning. We
are winning because we are more resourceful, more compassionate, more
culturally aware. We're winning because we know what it's like to fight through
adversity, through shame and pain and constant reminders of our own
worthlessness, and come up punching. We know we're winning because the
terrified rage of a million mouthbreathing manchild misogynists is thick as nerve
gas in the air right now.
Us Social Justice Warriors—this is me, stealing that word in order to use it against
my enemies- are winning the culture war by tearing up the rulebook, and there's
nothing the sad, mad little boys who hate women and queers and people of colour
can do about it. Nothing, at least, that doesn't sabotage their strategy, because
they can win their game from day to day, but they're losing the war. They can
punish me for writing this, and I'm sure they will, but that will only prove my point.
I'm not afraid anymore.

6. Social Justice Warriors, Nonadecimal Creative 2014

7. AN INDUSTRY IN CRISIS

8. Women in the Games Industry
Programmers and Engineers: 5%
Artists and Animators: 9%
Game Designers: 13%
Producers: 22%
Audio Professionals: 9%
QA Testers: 12%
Business and Management: 21%
Gamasutra Salary Survey 2014

10. #1ReasonWhy Tweet Themes
Gendered Assumptions
Rape and Sexual Harassment
Overt Sexualization
Silencing
Harassment
7,780 tweets (November 26-30 2012) collected and analyzed with Bridget Blodgett

11. #1reasonwhy because a boss
interchanged the terms ‘configure’ and
‘rape.’ So every morning we met to
plan how we would rape the
computers

12. #1ReasonWhy Because there’s only so
many times you can get hit on,
propositioned, or inappropriately
touched before it wears you down.

13. #1ReasonWhy An Art Lead for a BIG
title said in a meeting full of character
artists (all men) that “She needs to be
fuckable. No, rapeable.”

14. Women represent less than 10% of the
writers I have published, yet have
received more than 90% of the hate
mail. #1ReasonWhy

15. #1Reasonwhy Because whenever any
writer, female or male, highlights the
issue we hear “Can’t we get back to
just enjoying the games?!”

18. Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, Benjamin Daniel 2012

19. #DEATHEATERS

26. Although feminist game scholars follow, research, and sympathize
with the targets of this kind of coordinated hate campaign, it is rare
that academic work becomes a target itself. That is why we were
surprised that a conference event we organized became linked to
conspiracy theories about Zoe Quinn and journalistic ethics. We, of
course, have made similar arguments to those offered by what
GamerGate calls Social Justice Warriors (SJWs).
Moreover, we have shared some of their experiences in our own
fields. Academic conferences often marginalize discussions of
videogames and diversity, and women’s studies in particular are
regularly on the chopping block when budget cuts force universities to
downsize.
“A Conspiracy of Fishes, or,
How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity”
Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59:1, 2015

28. I and many of the other academics who have been attacked or
criticised by GamerGate are not opposed to fact checking or peer
review. It's part of our daily lives. The many people in GamerGate who
have caricatured me and others as hyperbolically "turning a fact check
into a witch hunt" appear to have deliberately misunderstood our
criticism, and ignored what GGers themselves are saying about the
digging-DiGRA project.
For all the reasons I described and more, it is not simply a neutral
assessment of facts. It is a deeply antagonistic, even spiteful
crowdsourcing of people to comb through papers to pluck things they
may not fully understand out of context. Indeed, the way they speak
of feminists and feminist academics is proof enough of bad faith. No
peer review is ever conducted in that way.
“On Digging Digra”
Katherine Cross
https://storify.com/Quinnae_Moon/on-digging-digra

29. GAMES FOR RESISTANCE?

41. Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames, Dietrich Squinkifer, 2014

42. GAMES FOR EMPATHY?

43. Gender Swap
BeAnotherLab 2014

44. merritt kopas
2014

48. dys4ia
Anna Anthropy
2012

49. You could say that Empathy Game is a
deeply cynical piece that suggests art
(or at least games) are incapable of
communicating meaningful information
and experiences. In fact, the opposite is
true. I respect games too much to see
them relegated to a way for the
privileged to opt out of their
responsibilities, to allow them to
become the trendy new format for
afterschool specials.
Anna Anthropy, 2015

50. GAMES…?

51. S: Videogames evaluate performance.
G: [Silence.]
G: And?
S: That is it.
G: That’s it?
S: That is it.
G: That’s no definition.
S: I confess it may need some development.
“Defining the Video Game”
Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Game Studies 15.2

52. Driven by its suspicion of other media studies, the central
question of game studies has, to this point, been: “How are
videogames different?” That they are different from other
forms is without question -- but, again, neither is there any
doubt that novels are different from films. Amidst
understandable concern for the things that made
videogames unique, game studies tends to lump other
media together as “representational” or, more often,
“narrative” media such that the prospect of studying
narrative in games has seemed to threaten the loss of
medium specificity as well.
“A Too-Coherent World: Game Studies and the Myth of Narrative Media”
Edward Wesp, Game Studies 14.2

54. Porpentine, “Creation Under Capitalism,” 2012

56. Porpentine, “Everything You Swallow Will One Day Come Up Like A Stone,” 2014

57. Procedural rhetoric affords a new and promising
way to make claims about how things work…video
games do not simply distract or entertain with
empty, meaningless content. Rather, video games
can make claims about the world.
But when they do so, they do it not with oral
speech, nor in writing, nor even with images.
Rather, video games make argument with
processes.
“The Rhetoric of Video Games”
Ian Bogost, 2008

63. OWNERSHIP OF “GAMES” MATTERS

66. Thank you!
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter
http://anastasiasalter.net