Editor’s note: This interview contains minor spoilers for Mass Effect 2.
The gaming community is just a smaller version of the world you interact with when you go to class, work, supermarket, or bar. Have you ever been uncomfortable due to a linear combination of your surroundings and your identity? Do you go to a different place? Or do you change who you are? Neither one of these is an acceptable choice. Unfortunately, there are groups of people who feel this way in the gaming community. For example, lesbian gamers may often feel dissatisfied with their role-playing experience in a game like Mass Effect due to the ability of creating a female Commander Shepard and not being able to pursue a relationship with Ashley. The reality is that there are some gamers out there who love this hobby, but often experience something like this that ends up tainting their experience with a game. Could you imagine if this happened to you with every game you picked up? We were able to do an e-mail interview with Alexandra Raymond, one of the editors from The Border House, in order to gain insight on various aspects of the video game industry and inclusion.
SideQuesting: Now, what you’re mostly into writing about is the subject of sex and gender in video game content. What exactly interests you about writing about sex and gender in video games?
Well, one reason is that it’s personal. I’m a woman, and I love video games. So I stand to benefit from better and more varied gender inclusion in games! And that personal aspect I think is the driving force behind my writing. But also my feminist education has always been intertwined with gaming. But the short version is that I learned about feminism from participating in female-oriented gaming communities, like Girl Gamers on LiveJournal and The IRIS Network. So once I started blogging about games, writing about gender and games was just a natural extension of that, although I didn’t initially start writing about games with that in mind.
One of the places you’re writing for right now is The Border House. To get the readers up to speed, would you like to tell us about it? Specifically, what is its mission and purpose?
The Border House is a gaming blog that aims to be a place where anyone can come and read about and discuss video games, computer games, and virtual worlds in a safe space. “Safe space” is an anti-oppression term that refers to a place — physical or, as in our case, on the internet — that is free of unchallenged sexism, racism, homophobia, able-ism, transphobia, and class-ism. A lot of the major gaming blogs have environments that are toxic to anyone who isn’t a straight, temporarily able-bodied (the preferred term for people who are not currently disabled), white, cisgender, male gamer. They do things like put pictures of booth babes in their articles even if it has nothing to do with the topic, make racist and transphobic jokes in their posts, or write dismissively about gamers and gaming communities that advocate for LGBT inclusion or accessibility. Even the blogs that aren’t quite so awful have toxic, free-for-all comments sections, preventing many people from participating in discussions or being part of the community. So at The Border House, folks can read and participate without having to worry that an editor is going to make a racist joke or they are going to be called misogynist slurs and dismissed for voicing their opinion.
We also do a lot of analysis and criticism of games and gaming news from a feminist/anti-oppression perspective, which is an important part of our goal, though we also like to point out when game developers and the media get things right. Denis is bringing over his “LGBT Spotlight” series from his blog, and Lake Desire is reviving a series about Female Characters Done Right from her blog as well. We also have a series called “My Commander Shepard,” where folks write about their Mass Effect characters, which serves to spotlight Shepards that aren’t the default white dude that dominates all the marketing for the series.
In the piece you mentioned, you said that one of the first times that you felt the urge to voice your thoughts about the gaming industry and sex involved a tense time between producer of Assassin’s Creed, Jade Raymond [no relation], and some of the gaming blogs. With certain writers aside, do you feel like gaming media as a whole has “gotten better” about the way they address women in the industry?
That’s a tough question. I think in a lot of ways the industry, both on the media side and the development side, has gotten better. After so many years of talking about the issue and making people aware that a great many girls and women do, in fact, play video games, the message has started to sink in. But I also think we are starting to see a backlash. Games are more technically impressive than they’ve ever been, and yet we still hear excuses about how there aren’t enough resources for female characters, the same excuses we’ve heard since gaming began. If the technology isn’t available by now, when will it be? My guess is never. So I simply don’t accept those excuses any more.
How do you feel about the blogs you put out before you started writing about sex and gender? What did you write about? (I know some of us here have kept blogs that we wish could be buried forever)
The only blog I really had before this one was a personal Livejournal, which I basically kept as a diary during high school and part of college. Luckily [LiveJournal] has a friendslock feature, so no one can read it unless they are friends with me on there, thank freaking goodness. [laughs]
Do you consider yourself a feminist or just really pro-inclusion?
Um, both? =P I do identify as a feminist, and although I focus on gender issues in my writing because that’s what I’m familiar with, I’m also interested in other areas, like racism and LGBT issues in games, and how they intersect.
Which games, developers, or publishers are especially inclusive?
Unfortunately I can’t really think of a game or developer that really does it all, but there are several that do some things right. I’m a huge fan of BioWare, which is a bit frustrating because they do some things right and others so very wrong. Dragon Age is one of the most inclusive games ever as far as gender and sexuality go — it takes place in an almost completely gender-equal society, and there are same-sex romance storylines that are just as deep as the opposite-sex ones. But it’s not so good on race issues. For example, if you make a character of color [for certain origins], you will still have white parents! Whereas Mass Effect is, in some ways, the opposite: racially inclusive with many important characters of color, but no same-sex male romances, and some annoying gender issues (particularly with the Asari).
Valve has a history of creating great female characters, particularly women of color, though they still fall into the trap of tokenism. Valve and BioWare are the two that immediately come to mind, though Naughty Dog is getting there, if they continue having awesome characters like Elena and Chloe from Uncharted 2.
Speaking of Mass Effect, you once wrote a piece about gender issues in the game that caught the eye of some devs at BioWare. What your issue with them?
With them? I have no issues with the BioWare folks! Assuming you mean the game, though, there were two main things. First is that the Asari seem like an alien race an adolescent straight boy might make up — they’re a race of hot blue women that can have sex with anybody, and are genetically evolved to be attractive to everyone. It’s ridiculous. And the problems with them are magnified by the second issue, which is that aside from a single Quarian, they are the only female aliens in the entire game. (And that single Quarian is Tali, who also happens to be sexy.) So while there were a great variety of male aliens running around, the only female aliens that were allowed had to be sexy-looking, with breasts and tiny waists and curvy hips. It was severely imbalanced, insultingly so. That is the short version of my criticisms, anyway; there is a lot more explanatory background.
And I remember you saying that they commented on the piece. What did they say?
Yeah. Someone posted my article on the Mass Effect boards, and BioWare writer Patrick Weekes responded. I copied his full comment into a post. But basically, he spoke a lot about the human female characters, which I didn’t mention in my post because I was focusing on the aliens, and I think the human women were handled very well, actually. At the end he says they were trying to make a “summer blockbuster, not an art house movie.” Which is fine, but 1) you can make a summer blockbuster without being sexist and 2) Mass Effect actually DOES say some interesting things about race. So clearly, there was some interest in exploring social issues.
Were these issues addressed in Mass Effect 2?
Largely, no. The Asari are much more than club dancers and love interests in Mass Effect 2, which is nice. But otherwise, the gender issues were not fixed, and some even became worse. In Mass Effect 2, Shepard travels to both the Krogan home world and the Quarian Migrant Fleet. At the Migrant Fleet we get to see male Quarians for the first time. But at the Krogan home world, the female Krogans are still unseen, said to be off at some other camp. It’s frankly insulting that they would put more male aliens in the game, but keep up their bullshit excuses about why the female aliens aren’t around.
Also, there’s a conversation Shepard can overhear on Illium between three men — human, Salarian, and Turian — who are watching an Asari dancer. It’s a bachelor party, and they each talk about the very concept of a bachelor party as well as why they find the Asari attractive. The conversation serves to tell the player more about what Salarian culture is like as well as to explain how Asari sexuality “works.” It’s pretty cleverly done, but the implications are kind of disturbing. Most disappointingly, there is no male romance interest available for male-Shepard, despite fan demand and the possibility of a (minor) female love interest for female-Shepard, which I find to be inexcusable. [We, at the Border House,] will be writing more about ME2 in the coming weeks.
Which games, developers, or publishers stand to learn a thing or two from visiting The Border House?
All of them ;)
Clearly, as time goes on, the number of female gamers will only continue to grow. But do you think it will ever get to a point where males and females of all genders will be treated as equals in video games?
I hope so! I think this is something that will happen gradually, as the culture at large becomes more egalitarian (or so I hope).
I suppose that the bottom line is that we’re apart of the gaming community. As members of the community, we want the culture associated with it to be the safest and – for lack of a better term – coolest it can be. Now, is this goal something that is achieved by first reaching out to developers and hoping that their games rub off on the culture? Or is it something that is addressed by focusing on getting the community to be more understanding?
That’s a good question. I think both approaches are worthwhile and effective. That’s why at The Border House we reach out to developers by critiquing their games as well as the community by writing about gaming culture and events in the community. [Either way,] I think it’s important to get people talking and to keep talking about these issues until it sinks in to the gaming culture conscious. We’ve seen this happen with the issue of unrealistic female characters that cater to the male gaze (for example, Lara Croft) — that’s something folks have been talking about for over a decade, and now we’ve got people in positions of power in the industry, such Tom Farrer from DICE, who produced Mirror’s Edge, and Amy Hennig from Naughty Dog, coming out and saying they deliberately set out to make realistic female characters. And we still have a long way to go, but that’s progress. And that’s wonderful! It’s something I hope we can accomplish with race and LGBT issues, and more.
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