Let me start by saying this post is not intended to hurt anybody’s feelings or paint them as bad people. Trying to keep this a ‘what they did’ conversation, not a ‘what they are’ conversation (ref)—please call me out if I fail in that. I’m as excited as the next high-information games enthusiast at the prospect of a new “vertical” (whatever that is) contributing its voice and editorial vision to the milieu, and hoping against hope that it will be a unique and valuable addition. I understand that the people involved have the best intentions, so let’s move on to:
THE BEGINNING OF OUR STORY…
This morning, Twitter brought me to this article about “The Guys Behind Verge” (Vox Media) scooping up well known contributors and editors from Kotaku, Joystiq, UGO, et al to form—Voltron-like—a new gaming venture called (temporarily) Vox Games. Their respective departures were already public knowledge and the timing suggested they were heading the same place, but seeing the roster under a tab abbreviated as “The Guys” in my browser made the gender homogeny glaring. There was some courteous feedback about lacking even a single woman—their ratio worse than the actual Voltron squads—and Justin replied that this would be addressed before they launch.
Soon after, a post [no link available] at the Vox Games page on Facebook asked the multitude who their favorite “female games writer” is. There were well over 150 replies when I last checked, but the post was removed during my commute home so I don’t have a final count. While many people were grateful for the exposure to writers they hadn’t heard of or read and the chance to express appreciation for writers they enjoy and respect, the question and context landed somewhere between ‘weird’ and ‘offensive’ for many, depending on who was talking and how gracious a mood they were in at the time.
It can be hard to opine with couldas/wouldas/shouldas without feeling like a self-indulgent jerk, but it’s much easier when the responsible party earnestly pleads ignorance and asks for input. So let’s break down a couple of the aspects that struck me as harmful:
Women as the Second String
When you poach established talent from well-known entities, it suggests you thoughtfully considered your options and chose your All-Star Team. Polling your audience like Harmonix with Rock Band DLC, or Mountain Dew with limited edition flavors is, at best, innocuous social marketing aimed at fostering engagement and maintaining mindshare with your audience; at worst, it signals some combination of ignorance, laziness, lack of conviction, and lack of seriousness. If Vox Games were the Americans Elect of games journalism, recruiting all its contributors by referendum, that’s fine. What’s not fine is to say you know which 8 guys will form your core team, your braintrust, and then punt on selecting women to join in the endeavor.
The lack of concern for how the announcement is perceived versus the actual content once they launch was characterized as “caring more about product than perception.” This is Bullshit: sounds nice, means nothing. It is materially not the same to launch with women who were brought onto the project in a second round of recruitment, compared to having women in your announcement on equal footing with the other founding members. This is how Old Boys Clubs are formed and how institutional sexism can easily travel from host to host.
Women Defined by and as Others
At risk of conflating two distinct problems: the public request for recommendations of “female games writers” gave the impressions that women are ‘other than’ games writers in general, and that while the founding men were hand-picked in the smoky backroom of some Italian restaurant by games journalism kingmakers, women should be subject to a public popularity contest. While I’m sure that neither of these were intended effects, they are both very real and are especially resonant when looking at a Facebook page in the wake of the ‘Vote on How Female Shepard Should Look’ debacle.
An easy alternative? Just ask who our favorite games writers are. Particularly with the gender imbalance already being a known issue for those of us who notice these things, you can bet we would have come in and recommended women without them being defined as a separate category of writer. You might even have learned of some men you didn’t know about, too! It was barely 2 months ago that Leigh wrote her Kotaku piece on this Othering issue, specifically in the space of games journalism—let’s not be so quick to forget.
As far as a woman’s worth being defined by others’ opinions of her: that’s a big box, and outside the scope of this blog post to fully unpack. The FemShep voting was explicitly about her appearance (though skin tone, hair color, &c. certainly carry weight in terms of identity) and therefore not identical to this case, but the process and underlying difference in the treatment of ManShep and FemShep is instructive here. Why is there a thread that is effectively a tally of how many people recommend a particular writer? Why should only the potential female contributors deal with that pressure of invidious comparison to their peers on a public forum as part of the launch? It’s incredibly unprofessional to have this kind of public vetting for only a subset of potential contributors/employees.
ALL’S WELL…?
That said, the response to this backlash has been generally reasonable and respectful after the obligatory hyper-defensive, taking-offense-at-people-being-offended period wore off. It’s a shame, too—I had a whole section snarkily dissecting that nonsense, but with the retractions and my general feeling that none of this was done with bad intentions that seems excessive.
The post requesting recommendations of female games writers was deleted from Facebook, and now a new post referencing it exists, where Justin took the opportunity, in his own name, to apologize for posting the question originally. Arthur Gies also Tumbld a “Vox Games isn’t [sexist]” response, to which I note that the discussion here isn’t ‘Are you sexist?,’ it’s ‘Does what you did appear sexist?’ I say the answer to the second question is yes. You understandably don’t want your apology to retread over everything and identify how and why it was offensive, running the risk of opening another can of worms, but I hope you’re open to hearing insight on why it was an issue, and one worth discussing.