Before I do, though, I'd like to preface with a bit of fair business reality. The economics of online journalism and blogging are enormously challenging. Every site faces the challenge of balancing the desire to produce fair and valuable content with the need to drive ad revenue via web traffic. Writing provocative headlines that we online writers hope will entice you to click is part of the job. We aim for the luster of buzzworthiness without compromising our facts and our ethics. Games journalism may have a bit of work to do before it reaches parity with coverage of more established media, and because of that our audiences tend to be very demanding of our quality levels and ethics -- but this is one reality not unique to us.
We all want to publish work we can feel proud of and that you can feel proud to enjoy, but sometimes we have to compromise with, to be frank, the need to earn money. This means sites that would rather offer you something a little richer than litanies of picture-heavy Top 10 lists will offer you the lists because lists get traffic reliably. This means business sites will run sponsored content, where all we can do is ensure it's clearly marked as such and try to keep the company concerned from being unfairly self-laudatory.
This means websites like Kotaku have to publish articles about boobs.
All online websites try to balance the need to make money with the desire to offer audiences content they will enjoy. And often these are managerial decisions; you can blame the writers as much as you want, but these are things they have to do. If you want to blame anyone, blame the legions who click whenever they're promised anime panties after the jump.
Have a little sympathy. Since all of this "business reality" talk is preface to talk about Kotaku, let's just stick with Kotaku: I worked with that team for several months last year and to this day I've never seen folks work harder. The amount of knowledge and passion the entire staff has about video games was constantly intimidating to me. After a year of all their hard work, imagine how it must feel for Brian and his team to realize some of their most "successful" pieces of 2008, in business terms, were about Playboy models and cosplay cleavage shots?
I don't need to imagine. I've written many things at Kotaku I am proud of -- my coverage of EA's bid for Take-Two, or my interviews with the Blizzard team following the Diablo III announcement and ahead of Lich King come to mind. I worked my tail off at E3 as part of their team (and they proved to have far more stamina than I did). I still love the reception my monthly columns get there. Nonetheless, my most-read piece of work for the site remains my interview with Playboy "Cyber Girl of the Year" Jo Garcia.
Just wanted to remind everyone of how things work before people start roasting Kotaku all over the place because of this. As of the moment I hit publish on this blog post, it has over 43,000 views and 777 comments after just a few hours live, better than most of my features perform over their lifetimes.
Hokay. That being said, this article is abysmal to the point of inducing cringe -- but let's focus on the article itself for a while. Lest you think I'm about to pull out the girl card and decry the sexy pics and the porn industry, I'll get right to the point -- this article is more insulting to men than it is to women. Further, it's not even a gender issue in the end; it's insulting because it's a massive backward stride in the evolution of games as a healthy, valuable adult culture.
Is Kotaku actually read by a "healthy, valuable adult culture?" If not, should it aim to be? Good question. But I don't see how promoting destructive stereotypes of gamers playing Unreal Tournament "for 48 hours straight" with pizza and energy drinks within arm's reach is useful to anyone. Many of Kotaku's readers are boys who aren't even men yet -- is it fair to tell them that they ought to resign to the fact they're awkward shut-ins on a Bawls drip who can't talk to girls? Worse, to suggest they embrace it as an identity inextricable from their enjoyment of video games?
It does not necessarily matter that the writer of this article is a porn actress. It may seem very egalitarian to act unsurprised that an attractive woman who has sex on camera for a living is a self-described "huge sci-fi gadget and gaming fan" who spends hours "leveling her World of Warcraft characters", but get real -- it is surprising. I'd even go so far as to say it's interesting.
Or it could be, if she didn't employ her unusual status to condescend to the very gaming culture to which she claims to belong.
In games as anywhere else, a woman can succeed in a male-dominated field with one of two strategies: 1. Prove she's an equal or 2. Use her sex appeal. It's evident what Raven Alexis has chosen. That's an insult to gamers of either gender. And the latent disgust she feels for the "nerds" who buy into it is evident: "Remember your manners, and use a napkin, please," she advises primly, beneath a picture of herself somewhat suggestively cupping a Red Bull can. And if her tips don't help you meet girls, she says coyly, you can always go peruse her body of work and entertain yourself.
Misogyny continues to be an enormous, embarrassing stain on a culture I'm otherwise proud to serve as a writer. I have been able to understand, somewhat, the hostility that young male gamers have had toward women based on the fact that in the past, media messages about "nerds" have taught them that girls are an enemy who will either reject them or try to employ their sexuality to manipulate them.
We are growing out of this. There is more equality and respect in gamer culture with every passing year, and we are passionate about refusing to permit prejudices of race, gender and sexual orientation where we see them. We are coming to understand that for games to thrive and evolve, their audiences and their creators must be diverse.
But the only way to sweep out our lingering dark corners is to lead by example and stop drawing gender lines. That's one of the reasons I have desperately wanted to avoid taking the "GRRL GAMER" tack in my work, even though I know I'm an oddity, even though many women email me with criticism that I won't stand up and "represent" more forcefully. I am a woman; I can't have any other than a woman's perspective, and that's valuable to people sometimes. But more importantly, I'm a person. You're a person. We both like video games, and that's usually all that matters.
Alexis' fifth and most reasonable tip -- just go talk to a girl and try to find some common interests -- is delivered with a sincerity that marks a tonal shift from the rest of her piece. This is what leads me to hope, at least, that the entire thing is intended as a little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor.
If that's indeed the case, I'd be perfectly willing to admit that it's me who's condescending to Kotaku's audience by assuming they won't get the joke. But enough of you guys who follow me on Twitter -- many of whom are game developers and other quite sharp folk -- had a negative reaction that I'm sure I can't be alone in misinterpreting.
Humor or not, based on everything I've worked for and believe in, it still stings me to see such an antiquated representation of gamer culture and the dynamics of male and female gamers represented on a site that I write for, that my friends write for.
I know I sound stodgy, maybe even self-superior. Maybe not everything on a gaming blog has to be top shelf, sincere content all the time. Maybe we shouldn't take things so seriously. Maybe sometimes we do need to confront the fact that a huge portion of the readership is actually comprised of overweight geeks who never go outside and have no real relationships off the computer; maybe we need to make concessions for that, maybe we need to join them on their level sometimes. Maybe we should write not for what we want people to be, but for what they are.
It's just that that's not what I believe in, and the people who lead Kotaku, among others I am lucky to have called mentors, have played integral roles in shaping my beliefs.
I prefaced this post with a reminder of the business realities major blog networks face because I find it hard to believe that Brian, who taught me quite a great deal about going the extra mile on news reporting -- because our audience deserves the whole truth -- would thumbs-up a porn star's "celebrity" advice column unless it were part of a larger and necessary Gawker initiative (I wonder what sister site Jezebel thinks of it). I find it hard to believe that Stephen Totilo, who never settles for anything less than my best work on my monthly features even when "good enough" would be good enough, would not strenuously object.
Their content decisions are their business, and I have no inside knowledge of them nor do I feel I have the right to ask. But I have to assume that these odd celebrity columns lately are not necessarily what they would have chosen for Kotaku.
Either way, rather than get up in arms complaining about blogs, game journalism, Kotaku or anything else, I hope those angered or offended can focus on what we don't like about this article and react simply by continuing to be the best examples we can of the culture we want to have.
77 comments:
"I hope those angered or offended can focus on what we don't like about this article and react simply by continuing to be the best examples we can of the culture we want to have."
That is perhaps all we can do, isn't it?
What kind of culture would you rather we have as opposed to the one we've got (one we've got being fat dudes, energy drinks and porn)? I think those that have hopes for a different kind of game culture sometimes have different views of what it can or should be.
Usual great job, Leigh, but I wonder if your opening admission that the site thinks it needs bikini shots and cleavage is part of the problem.
Sites get addicted to those kinds of hits and, since those are the articles that passed around - if even for blue hairs like me to complain about them - then that reinforces the idea that Kotaku is all about the cheap hits and not the good original features that they occasionally do.
Either you are a part of the change in the gaming news/analysis game or you're not. And I sometimes think too many large sites try to have it every way they can - both exploiting and embracing the awkward geek stereotype, both decrying and promoting the misogyny that permeates our hobby and business.
This article, tongue in cheek or not, does not reflect well on anyone, IMO.
Excellent commentary. I was in the middle of a blog post about the very article. A lot of my friends seemed insulted or offended that I was up in arms about that tripe.
You explained it with much more clarity than I would have.
Tips to pick up gamer girls at LAN parties. What LAN parties?
I do find it ironic that a porn actress is giving relationship tips. Let's be honest, ending up in porn usually requires a great deal of emotional baggage and bad relationships. No to mention to make money one often ends up having to dance at strip clubs which doesn't give one the best view of men.
I could be wrong but it looks like the celebrity columns are a way to fill space with Crecente basically on vacation.
Robert:
Let's not make sweeping generalizations about porn actresses, trying to make judgments about her integrity and personal life. That's just as bad as what she did.
Leigh, thank you for writing this great article.
I do feel compelled to point out something about the apology at the beginning... developers, too, must deal with business realities and the disconnect between what we like and what the public desires. And how much grist have online game sites gotten out of big publishers' "annualization" schemes, cheats as paid DLC or rushed, terribly-constructed movie license games? When these are announced or the shelves, we are well within our right to criticize - even if those decisions do make sense from a financial perspective.
Therefore I ask: if, say, D3's Dream C Club or Koei's Dynasty Warriors series are essential to those companies' survival as ongoing businesses, and we pummel them for it, can we not also pummel Kotaku for its snickering schoolboy panty-related posts even if they, too, may be necessary?
Matthew -- that's an excellent point, one I'll probably permanently install in my brain going forward.
It's probably as disheartening and exhausting to developers for "us" to continually harsh on necessary revenue strategies as it is to journalists for "you" to continually call us hacks and traffic-drivers.
I think things like that shouldn't be taken so seriously. It's just some website craving for hits, don't like it - don't read it.
I've seen worse on Kotaku. I tend to just ignore this kind of stuff. If others like it and make it a traffic generator it says more about the state of video game culture than it does about Kotaku pandering to it. But I can understand why you thought it was crappy. I did as well, but then I'm probably not the intended audience (14-17 year old boys).
I disagree with the idea that "This means websites like Kotaku have to publish articles about boobs." They are not FORCED to publish these kinds of articles. They choose to do so because it increases page hits but it is not something they are required to do in order to maintain the site. They can choose to not run these stories and still get traffic to their site. Especially since they are now so well known. They do not need to stoop to showing boobs to get daily traffic.
Anna, while I agree with you wholeheartedly, integrity doesn't pay the payroll, unfortunately.
They want a bigger payroll, they have to pander to the hits. Is that a good thing? I think not. I hate it. But the logic is there that in a business sense, it's a sound choice.
I feel compelled to make a half-hearted defense of the piece. Half-hearted because I don't really think it's a great piece; I just think the shoe probably fits more often than we'd like.
Maybe the gaming culture in the USA is more evolved than in my country, but fact of the matter is, the gamer stereotype described is the norm around here. Most people I know that are into games as seriously as I am have trouble talking to women.
The article's suggestions veer between silly (I groaned at the "save your friend's PC from a virus in front of her")to common sense, and yes, I think many gamers (and the internet as a whole) could, indeed, benefit from a bit of common sense.
So, yeah. Totally an article beneath Kotaku's usual standards, but hardly, I think, worthy of the trashing it's getting. And let's note, the condescending tone is something that I believe is common of any "you should do this to get girls" write-up, regardless of the group it's aimed at. I'm pretty sure a porn actress writing for Maxim would sound the same.
In any case, it was nice to read your perspective in the matter.
I admire your work, Leigh, but I have to admit finding it somewhat ironic that you bemoan the cliche-ridden sexual politics of videogame culture, and the (mutually) exploitative sexualization of women within it, on a blog called "Sexy Videogameland." Is it wrong for me to identify a certain amount of having-one's-cake-and-eating-it-too?
Well its unknown for sure, but this was probably commissioned and therefore different from most Gawker posts. In general though Gawker media pays by view count. So author's have a huge incentive to draw in viewers and click throuhgs.
I understand your frustration. But I don't think the article is out of place on Kotaku. I mean this is the Gawker network we're talking about. Sex and snark are major elements in the Nick Denton equation for website success. Why would Kotaku deviate from the formula? Maybe there's an upcoming Fleshbot tie-in?
Also, no offense to Kotaku, they're the best at what they do, but I wouldn't say there's been a concerted effort to take the site's content to a place that doesn't totally serve the adolescent enthusiast audience. I find articles about video game sword replicas as stupid and insulting as advice from porn stars. I think if you call this article an affront to Kotaku's standards, which is, I think, one point of your article, aren't you splitting hairs at a certain point?
I'll be the first to admit though, that I almost clicked through to Raven's homepage. ALMOST!
@David Hill But business sense also says there is always something unethical one could do to increase profit. That doesn't mean that a company must do these things.
Just because something increases page hits is still not the same as saying it MUST be done. Each site chooses where they draw the line.
Possible Reactions to that article -
1) Confusment
2) Getting on with your life
3) Intrigued about a porn star trying to present her gaming side to further promote her career.
4) Disgusted about a porn star trying to sell herself off as a gamer to further promote her career.
5) Defending the right to be controversial
6) Attacking the right to be controversial
7) Defending her as you think it's a clever joke ironically playing against said stereotype
8) Attacking her as you think it's a poor joke that is placing males in the audience as those stereotypes rather than laughing at it with them.
9) Fap.
10) Look at it for a bit, feel a bit dissapointed whatever its meaning then just move on.
11) Be Leigh Alexander showing surprise at such a thing but eloquently describing a sensible and intelligent view before moving on.
Did I miss any out? I'm with @Troy Goodfellow in hoping Kotaku doesn't get addicted to those kind of hits.
William, that's a fair guess, but not accurate -- if you read my blog faq, I explain why I named it that, and it wasn't as a come-on to male readers or an effort to be provocative of anything more than thought.
Enough people misconstrue it that, had I to do it over, I'd name it something else, but it's way too late now.
Amen! I can't claim to be follower of the author, but these are some damn fine points that needed to be made.
Now I gotta start interviewing my porn buddies about what games they're playing and their feelings on articles like these. Thanks for the article gem...
Love,
Izilla
I also have to say that gamers perpetuate the nerd stereotype a lot more than any such article could.
Checking the Kotaku comments, a great deal of them is not about how it is offensive to women, men, Red Bull or any such thing. One of the most poignant points of discussion seems to be the veracity of her status as a gamer.
Why is this? Because she plays WOW with the default UI? Newsflash: those pics are taken to make her look good, not to be any kind of representation of her real life.
No, gamers cannot accept that she might be one of them because she looks good - personal taste notwithstanding. This is the most common reaction to women claiming to be game players: the veracity of their claims is made in relation to their attractiveness. If a person is attractive, she cannot be one of us.
I find this disturbing, and a little sad. Regardless of what we think of Raven's opinions, or her tone towards gamers, we should really be a bit more open-minded. The stereotype we abhor so much is one that is perpetuated by the gamer community at large - even if they, themselves, are not part of the stereotype.
This is thematically related to Matthew Burns' most recent blog post, "Soft Body Dynamics". It was a good read.
http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2009/12/soft_body_dynamics.htm
It's "features" like that that made me stop reading Kotaku in the first place.
There was a point where I went to both Joystiq and Kotaku for my gaming news -- Joystiq for the slightly cynical, often lighthearted perspective on the happenings inside the industry and Kotaku for a more focused, more thought-out perspective.
Now it's Joystiq and personal blogs (like this one!) where I go for my information, and it's straight up because of things like this. It doesn't matter who wrote it, it's the fact that it reads like a help column for Lewis and Gilbert, circa 1984.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon, you know. Ever since people have been able to publish their thoughts, there has always someone willing to reach for the lowest hanging fruit.
And what of it? They sell romance novels and Pulitzer Prize winners in the same store. Write what you think is necessary, and be judged by your words.
Furthermore, what about the other end of the spectrum? Don't you think that for every anonymous member of the "legions who click wherever they're promised anime panties," there exists an intellectually-oriented gamer who abhors such behavior but chooses to shy from the public forum?
Something tells me both groups are probably about the same size...but I bet it's harder to write for the latter. And it may not pay as well--up front.
Hi Leigh, I thoroughly enjoyed your write up.
I always find it frustrating when people are condescending towards gamers, and more so when it's a woman sharing her regressive views and patronising her readers while she's at it.
It's a needless step backwards and I can't really see the merit in it.
Having written for Kotaku while at the same time not pandering to under-24 male set (I would like to think) - it IS business, and they do need to get those hits. And boobs do it a lot better than esoteric discussion. A while back Brian invited people like Ian Bogost, Simon Carless etc. to be guest editors while he was on vacation, and I'm preeeeeeeetty sure they weren't pulling in the page views like Raven Alexis.
As an aside, we did not get paid by page views while I was there (otherwise I would've been making absolute peanuts). However, bonuses were assessed based on a page view formula. I'll caution that I left Kotaku about a year ago, so it's possible changes have been made. I was also a poor grad student during the bulk of my Kotaku tenure & was paid much much better for my work at Kotaku, even without bonuses, than killing myself over graduate work & teaching, so I probably have a somewhat rosy remembrance of the pay system.
Kotaku serves its current market. Not everyone who reads the site wants half-naked women plastered across the page, but there are plenty of places to go if you're looking for a more highbrow discussion. I'm sure it is frustrating for many of the writers. I used to get extremely frustrated at spending hours writing up a feature piece, only to get ripped to shreds in the comments for "being too elitist" or having a stick up my (elitist) ass. Is that a Kotaku problem, or an audience problem? Brian was always very supportive of me doing my thing, which was frequently a 180 from what a lot of the site was/is like. I cannot say the same about many readers of the site, which I guess is to be expected.
Hey Maggie -- yeah, the importance of web traffic stands regardless of how individual writers are paid.
And for the record, absolutely -- I encountered (and still do) a lot of the same types of criticism from the readers that you did, and I also always had Brian's support for any topic I wanted to cover or pursue. I think it's important to say that while working there I never felt any pressure whatsoever to shill for traffic. In fact, I feel that we as staff were always protected from having to think about that.
Hopefully that -- and the "blame the audience" angle that I share with you -- are evident in this post, but I figured I'd better state it plain just in case.
Now if you could just help my RebelFM/Bitmob/Geekbox homies to not be so 'reactionary' [eventhough in some cases it is warranted] then i think this growing trend of elitist games journalism will be a much more inviting space.
I won't get too nuanced on this, but I've developed a firm belief that Kotaku lacks any real editorial direction. When you have:
This: http://kotaku.com/5395084/can-videogames-be-our-friends
Raven's write-up, and this: http://kotaku.com/5418225/this-treasure-chest-made-no-sound
...shoveled into the same stream of symmetrical information with no real distinction, there's a fundamental lack of thinking happening about tone, consistency, the reader's experience, or just what Kotaku "does."
Yeah, this "article" on Kotaku was pretty insulting to gamers in general and the comments became insulting to everyone with a brain. At least, they do it way less often than other websites that, while not having porn stars or ex-nickelodeon hotties write articles, post about boobs in games a bit too often.
And yes, the audience is mostly to blame for this as they are the one bringing in the clicks.It's harder and harder to get video game news websites with a certain level of quality.
Also, talking about misogynism and stereotypes, aren't the Spike VGAs soon?
Bruno:
I don't know about the VGAs, but you can always turn to G4 if you haven't had your daily taste of childish misogyny or racism.
Given the way the 5th point is phrased, I find it hard to take as anything other than tongue-in-cheek. Having said that, I think the tongue-in-cheek-ness of it sits right alongside the hits pandering nature and the two are not mutually exclusive.
I appreciate the sincerity in this post, but the call for "sympathy" or restrained reaction (as per the last paragraph) is frankly insulting. Although backlash can be counter-productive (e.g. it generates even more page views), it's also the only way to counter the tastes of the panty-seeking legions, and enough backlash will ideally turn bad content into bad business.
Let's call a spade a spade and let Kotaku take their deserved lumps.
Well I'm glad we can all agree that fat people are just not cool enough to represent what we'd like gaming culture to be. Death to fatties!
"Their content decisions are their business, and I have no inside knowledge of them nor do I feel I have the right to ask."
Um, what? Of course you do. Are you saying you can critique them in public but not to their face? Because that's nuts. You write for them, they're your colleagues, and you're a professional games journalist. If you don't have the right to ask, who does? Damn, Leigh.
On a more serious note (what I mean to say is that in my previous point I am kidding -- I am a giant porker) I think that the web is doing real damage to editorial, and this is an example of how.
It's not just about the superficiality of the hits-based system -- i.e. you run what will generate more traffic and this is likely to be something prurient or simplistic (porn stars, top 10 lists.)
It's also that since readers self-select content, unlike in the past (at least with me, I tend to read everything in a magazine -- at least glance at it enough to know what it is) you lose the guided walk through what's relevant that is the purview of true editors.
This kind of ties into the "what is this publication anyway?" comment above. There is no longer a mindset of what a site like Kotaku is -- the only important thing is that the content is About Games in some way, even superficially, and hopefully it has enough relevance that it sucks some subset of your audience in -- and maybe enough cultural cachet to suck in people who don't read the site at large.
I.e. there might be an audience just for Tim Rogers' stuff on Kotaku that is not the general "reader". There may be no general reader. This may be antiquated conceptually, a holdover from the print days. Anybody could be reading Kotaku -- sent to a specific article by a friend's tweet and never ever to navigate its wilds themselves deliberately.
Following on from that, we have to face it -- there is an audience for whom this content is relevant. But it doesn't extend back OUT and make implications about the whole readership of Kotaku because Kotaku is not structured to have a "readership" anymore.
And that may very well be intentional.
See, while we're losing something of the "guided" experience an editorial team can craft for readers (and which I think is great) we arguably gain somthing back by having more people find more infromation more freely. Someone who would never just go to a game site front page may end up reading something on Kotaku and learn there's more to this shit than they expected (or if they read this Raven shit they might learn there's even LESS to gaming than they expected and run away screaming. That's what we're dicing with here!)
Information passes more freely. With Facebook and Twitter and Delicious and Tumblr and personal blogs it's being distributed to a wider audience. There are people who read my personal blog who would never have picked up a GMR when I wrote for it but who end up learning about the biz of games via Gamasutra articles I link and say "hey, this is a good overview piece if you are getting interested in games because you bought a Wii."
So it's a give and take. We're not just losing, we're gaining. Just not sure what the balance of the ratio is!
PS CAN I HAVE A HAM SANDWICH NOW
comment 3, tl;dr version
Brian Crescente gains back the karma he lost by putting this felch up by posting Tim Rogers' columns. And that is how things work now. Get used to it.
Comment 4: Aw hell, I might as well come out and say it.
People who want to exclude loser gaming dorks from the world of games because We're All So Much More Intelligent Than This, Now, Really are just the obverse of the people who make gaming out to be the exclusive domain of murder simulator-obsessed bloated virgins in basements. You're assholes too, FYI, and owning a copy of Veckatimest does not make you any smarter than anybody else.
PS I am a JRPG-obssessed bloated, bearded nonvirgin with Veckatimest on my iPod. I used to own five .hack T-shirts, but some wore out.
@ferrice Indeed! Can we please agree that gaming has grown to be all-encompassing, and that includes both overweight dorks and sassy, condescending pornstars?
Thank you!
I agree with everything you've said; you took all of my feelings and somehow molded them into an article...are you in my head?
I guess paying the bills is great, but I assume that Kotaku was founded by people who love games. If you truly love games, and are in a position to serve those like you, it seems like a horrible wasted opportunity. You have to realize that by going with the easy dollar by providing what is essentially non-content, you are alienating the exact kinds of people who want to have intelligent discussion about the topics you are passionate about.
We all have to pay our dues at some point and work under the yokes of those out to make a profit; I'm not talking about people in that situation. However, once you're towards the top, that's when you have a choice to make: are you there for passion or money?
If sales, clicks, etc are down, work harder to get the scoop, adjust your writing style, do something! But don't abandon your mission. Far too often does Kotaku take the easy joke or only post about a game because it has cleavage, most of the time leaving me wondering where the journalism and thoughtful articles are. I've always counted on you and Totilo for that, Leigh.
@ferricide
I hear what you're saying. But a lot of the finger pointing makes those nerds look like whiny bitches. Real talk.
I'm pretty sure there will never be a time when posts about boobs don't perform. Nor will there ever be a time when thinkpieces, fascinating features and investigative reporting rake in the megahits.
Therefore, I am okay with Kotaku occasionally stooping to the lowest common denominator. On some level, it allows me to enjoy the following Kotaku pieces (Google them):
-"GameStop Sells Played Games As New, Sources Say, Practice Could Be Illegal"
-"They Made The Wii Bowling Ball, And They're Not Done Yet"
"Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It's Fun Or Not"
-and, for good measure, "Why We Love To Hate Activision — And Might Be Wrong"
You've probably already seen this, but in the comments, Raven said:
"This is Raven, and I'm so glad to see that people are sharing their differing opinions.
I wrote this article as a tongue-in-cheek piece. Obviously, points 1 through 4 are jokes, and the entire point of the article is that people should be honest and real in order to get a girl (or guy). "
A news piece from yesterday's Guardian makes mention of those breast-laden banner ads for Evony that have littered the Internet for the past six months.
This quotation in particular sticks out:
"Prominent games blog Kotaku said that the 'boobs smorgasbord' was a 'pathetic attempt at enticing people to play.'"
Exchange 'play' for 'read' and you have a pretty damning indictment of Kotaku's own habitual practices, one that I think perfectly illustrates the point Matthew makes here.
There is a disconnect between the standards the lowbrow gaming press expects game makers to adhere to regardless of commercial imperatives and what they are willing to do themselves in the pursuit of profit/ survival.
Regardless, I just know that I wouldn't be friends with any of the people involved in the commissioning, writing, editing and publication of this linked piece. Anyone who lets editorial focus drift here, ESPECIALLY for commercial reasons is, frankly, a dick.
Let's be fair Simon, there's low-brow and there's lower-brow and then there's Evony. Kotaku might be doing the same sort of thing, but there's such a thing as scale.
Personally I only ever read Kotaku for the news, I look to the likes of RPS and Sexy Videogameland for anything deeper, because they're writers I respect and trust. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this article if Leigh hadn't tweeted it (sadly I can't take my hit back).
Although from the point of view of someone who just skims the front page on a regular basis, this doesn't seem a million miles away from the thousand and one pictures of Bayonetta (the character, often will little mention of the game) they've been putting up lately.
@Simon Parkin
You, sir, are the proud new owner of a point.
I hated the article by that Raven thing. It's condescending and insulting. Its also useless from a practical perspective.
"I guess paying the bills is great, but I assume that Kotaku was founded by people who love games. If you truly love games, and are in a position to serve those like you, it seems like a horrible wasted opportunity. You have to realize that by going with the easy dollar by providing what is essentially non-content, you are alienating the exact kinds of people who want to have intelligent discussion about the topics you are passionate about."
Kotaku was founded by Gawker Media, which cares about making money. Leigh has been dancing around the point that many decisions made about Kotaku are not ABOUT Kotaku (they are about bottom line at Gawker HQ), nor do they emanate with the head editors. The site redesign (to make it more 'portal-like'), for example, was not Brian's brilliant idea. Having to boil down post intros to 30 words was one of the worst things I ever had to consciously do to my writing. We were always pretty well insulated from goings on higher up, but the occasional Gawker Media-wide email left little doubt about who was controlling the longterm 'editorial direction.' Again, Brian was always very supportive of my work & giving me free rein to cover subjects usually not found on Kotaku. But I was the serious part timer & when I started, there were few posts on the weekend anyways - and I wasn't wasting prime time hours with esoteric stuff.
Kotaku isn't trying to be the bastion for intelligent discussion on gaming. They cast a wide net with (usually) little depth & that's what the format is designed for - no one could produce, nor could readers get through, as many posts as are mandated to be put up in a day if they were all Deep Thoughts (even now, the sheer volume is overwhelming). Had the "covering intelligent, thoughtful discussion" been a viable angle, there would be more of it. But guess what? Very few people wanted to read it, which is why it's restricted to a few articles here and there and the occasional essay by writers like Leigh. I think my most popular article ever was on ... Tetris bookshelves.
I do think this is a situation where real-time metrics are hurting, not helping, as my friend William pointed out - but it is what it is & I can't imagine they'll be scrapping them anytime soon.
Anonymous:
Objectifying Raven makes you the problem, and makes us all look bad.
Be better than that.
It's a cop-out to say that any site "has to make posts about boobs." That's more of an admission of the perceived identity of the site's current dominant audience and a lazy willingness to pander to them for easy hits. If you "had to make posts about boobs" to be profitable, wouldn't every site be doing it, not just the ones at the bottom of the barrel? It's not so, because some sites have an editorial mission and financial model that allows them to stay online without calling screenshots of Princess Peach's panties a news story. It is absolutely fair to blame the owners of the site for lack of adherence to editorial standards and insufficient business ability to remain profitable without rolling around in the mud.
Whether we give these practices a pass or not and support them with our work is part of your final call for your readers to "continue to be the best examples we can of the culture we want to have." In the case of a writer that doesn't agree with a particular website's approach to editorial, that would involve not supporting them by generating content for them to profit from. To Matthew's point, in a developer's case that involves not working for companies that represent a business or cultural model you personally oppose. If you disagree with Bobby Kotick's methods or EA's designed waves of mass layoffs, you can either say "well, that's business, I gotta pay the bills," or you can commit not to support those enterprises by finding another way to pay the bills. I'm not saying it'll be easier than putting pictures of boobs on the internet, but not much is.
Kotaku has long been circling the Maxim drainpipe for a while now, this just seems to be the sprinkle-covered icing on the misogyny cupcake made of biweekly "hey, you can see her nekkid" bayonetta posts that has consumed the site over the last few months.
I used to be a big fan of the site, and it was always one of the first places I checked for videogame news, but they've really gone from including an occasional booby post to keep ratings up to including an occasional interesting post between articles about gaming porn stars, Bayonetta, and any game where girls clothing can be ripped off.
It reads as though some of the defenses or explanations of the Raven column posit the alternative as a series of "deep thoughts" articles.
Though I certainly have no problem with deep thoughts stuff, it's not like dropping boobs and juvenalia forces you to become Gamasutra or Game Critics. I'm sure there are other games media outlets that manage fine without turning to porn star attempts at humor.
@TroyGoodfellow -- right.
@Maggie -- yeah, you came out and said directly what I was getting at. I probably should have said it directly myself, and I wonder why I didn't.
@Ferricide you should take your comment and make it its own post on your LJ or something, because I can't disagree. Then we can go eat bacon and listen to Grizzly Bear.
I'm a 40-year-old woman, in admin and programming, with a very tangential interest in gaming culture--a lot of the younger folks I work with and take classes with are gamers--and quite frankly I don't see boobs on a gaming website to be that much of an issue. Those ads for Evony I see everywhere just make me laugh.
I guess I tend to come at this from a different perspective: I'm more worried about other kinds of boobs--older guys still at the top of the heap who generally *aren't* gamers--treating women of all ages in the IT/CS workplace as if they're less competent than men, less able to lead project teams, and worthy of a smaller salary. If objectification is shown to spill over, among younger guys, from gaming into the classroom and workplace, then I'll start to worry. But I haven't yet seen that happen.
(Then again, I'm middle-aged and not particularly hot by anyone's standards but my husband's, and he can objectify me any time he wants.)
On the one hand, I wish the web (and the world in general) was organized in a categorical way in which the interesting, thought provoking bits were isolated from the drivel, because I get so disgusted searching for anything of value among news sites and forum posts that I tend to avoid them altogether, and consequently always feel like I'm missing something.
The open nature of the web is in direct conflict with this, of course, because it is collaborative. Feedback from one's intended audience is instantaneous and, if you are popular, massive. And because the majority of people surfing the web at any given moment like porn, then porn and porn-like media is inevitably going to find its way into a large number of popular sites.
The way to counter this does not appear to be boycotting, because a boycotter's hit will probably not be missed and an even higher ratio of the traffic will come from people who like what they see. Complaining on the article itself also does not appear to help, as it counts as a hit and will be drowned out by any number of inane posts surrounding it.
It seems the only way to change trends in media is to build a presence that not only has a solid ideological base, but is popular and prestigious. The best example I can think of is Penny Arcade; they have a great hook with their comic strips, the writing on the news posts is well above a middle-school reading level, and they do not compromise integrity. They are actually big enough to criticise game franchises that hire them to do tie-in comics (such as Dragon Age).
So, while I agree with the criticism going on here, I think the best way to change the direction of how gamers, females, and gamer females are perceived in the media is to find a media source that you can get behind, that matches your ideals and says something of value, and rally support around it until it gains prestige among the gaming press, and hopefully game publishers in turn.
I really enjoyed this piece and the ensuing discussion. Props for sharing your angle Leigh and all the commenters for keeping it civil and on-topic.
I guess if I had anything to contribute it's be the saying, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I'll admit I've been both needlessly elitist as well as denigrating & low-brow before, so I'm unwilling to call anyone else out on it. I'm glad you brought your perspective to bear on such an important topic.
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/of-sexism-hawp/46773
Whoa, nice to see smart comments on the web.
Internet is like business, things live, survive and prosper because we want them. Some of us want more elaborate articles, and some of us want "in your face" boobs.
Consumer power on the web!
Btw there are a lot of sites, like giantbomb.com where boobs no way in hell would be a source for cheap hits. Even though the mentality there is very geeky and nerdy.
But for me - that doesn't mean so much, because me and my nerdy friends are very social and loving people. Of all genders and ages. Maybe "my country" has developed a nice sense of acceptance and not alienating nerds. For me, nerds are in no way predominantly males.
My belief is that there are a lot of nerdy girls on the web as well, but they are of course not as much attracted to boobs and thus not generating these kinds of hits :)
I kind of feel it's likely that in no way was the content of the Kotaku article on anybody's mind when the deal was signed to have Raven write it. She gets free advertising with the very audience that she's crafted her persona around (genuine or not), and Gawker's smart enough to know what she'll do to hit counts, even if all she posted was copy and pasted from Tom Bombadil.
The truth is every medium has its share of pandering and raunch, from cable news to books to magazines to TV, movies, music... you name it. Games and games journalism aren't far off the norm, we're just extremely sensitive to it because we feel it reinforces an existing stereotype of our industries.
But even in these fields, there are plenty of sources that don't engage in that behavior. As with every other industry, that's a hard road to tread, because quality is much more expensive than cleavage, and we just need to make sure there's enough of a support structure out there so that those voices don't get lost. At the same time, I kind of feel we need to gnash our teeth and wring our hands less about the stuff we don't like, because all we can do is create a feedback loop that generates more hits and attention for it.
Instead, we need to show in the marketplace that quality and insightfulness, over the long haul, outperforms the pandering. It probably does because it expands the market and is much harder to commoditize and imitate, but it's harder to get off the ground in the first place.
Too many people already made enough good points here:
- Don't like it? Don't read it.
- If it gets traffic, then there will be more of it. So blame yourselves.
- Hey, maybe there ARE people who dig those articles, just as those who don't
- Gaming can be all about the high-brow and low-brow (inclusive not exclusive, right?)
In honesty I think it's more dubious that gaming sites/mags took an all-expenses paid trip to review MW2. So where's all the outcry and journalistic digging into that scandal? Because that's something more worrying than a Kotaku fluff piece.
Leigh, I loved the article, it was very thought provoking. However, I do feel like you rather casually brushed off William's point about irony.
I am familiar with the reasons you named your blog as you did. However, you also have written a fair number of articles about your enjoyment of hentai games and used to have a link to a fair amount of hentai artwork. Did that sometimes attract readers to your blog that you wish hadn't come? Is that on you? On them?
I'm not expecting answers, I think these are hard questions to grapple with. I just know that I, like William, did feel a bit of a "moral outrage" disconnect.
Got to say, I wasn't very angry or offended by the piece. It was fluff, something to pass over in favor of actual gaming news. And somehow, the moral outrage of those who commented on the piece struck me as slightly... hollow. False.
But, that's one mans opinion, and I have had a few beers already.
@Leigh
I'm glad this place is called sexyvideogameland. It sends a message of "come for the sex, stay for the conversation."
In all honesty, I think I first came here because of the site's title and the fact that "whoa, there's a chick that plays videogames and knows her stuff!" I keep coming back for more because of the great commentary though. I like sex, videogames, and thought provoking, eloquently written discussion. This site has it all.
You're doing exactly the same thing, Leigh - I mean you only have to look as far as the name of your site.
@jocoub If you read the comments, you'll see Leigh already addressed that.
And doing a little research for my own (comedic) take on this, I see Raven responded in the comments saying that it was, indeed, meant as a tongue-in-cheek piece.
Of course, that makes it alright for Fridays post on Gaming Laid Bare to go up now! (Not that it wouldn't in the first place)
Honestly, a whole slew of articles and comments on this, and nobody's stating the obvious?
Anybody could have written this article. A-NY-BO-DY
They chose a particular body to do it - a porn actress.
Let's face it, we live in a society where women are valued based on how sexually attractive and/or available they are. Raven's article was read less because of the content and more because SHE wrote it. SHE is important because of her roles in pornography, and not because she is distinguished for her knowledge of relationships or how to woo the opposite sex (Because seriously? Implying that somebody knows relationships because they're in pornography is like saying someone's a chef because they starred in a McDonalds ad). Raven is not read because she has anything to say, but simply because she - unlike many other women - will be listened to. If you or I had written that article, it wouldn't've been published.
In the meantime, older, accomplished women are laughed at for their hair cuts and "cankles". There's a reason young female actresses and athletes are harassed into posing nude, in the hopes that it will improve their careers. It's because we are valued only when we encourage men to think sexy thoughts about us.
This breakdown is surely offensive to women, as it furthers the idea that a woman has something worthwhile to say ONLY if she is beautiful and ONLY if she is (or men can imagine her to be) sexually available.... Not fighting against that is going to bite us all in our shapely little behinds one day, when those behinds aren't so shapely.
In short, SVGL, you and I had best enjoy our brief bit of "sexiness" (or as society defines that) while we can enjoy it, because that's the only real power that society gives us.
One Handed -- no. I really do like hentai games and I tried to look at them thoughtfully. Did it give some people the wrong idea about my work? Maybe, but I have no control over that.
I'm not saying "don't deal with gender and sexuality." I'm saying there are constructive versus destructive ways to deal with gender and sexuality.
One's gender and ideas on sex are not things they should feel they have to repress. They're just not things they should exploit.
I categorically and with offense reject the assertion that I'm "doing the same thing" because of the name of my blog or subjects I have treated in the past.
Anyone who's seeing a double standard here must be meeting me for the first time, and that's absolutely as far as I'm willing to entertain that discussion.
Hi, Leigh. You Rock :)
And my laws, do I agree with what you've said here.
From where I'm sitting, much of the industry - from designers to hardware manufactures to the our beloved and thoughtful blogging brain-trust - has spent the first four years of the current console generation vigorously working to define and redefine the term "Gamer." And few sites have tackled that redefinition with more vigor and fearlessness than SVGL.
(Speaking of which: would you really rename the blog, were you to do it again? I dunno, man, it's a pretty fricking awesome name.)
By now, I think we can mostly agree that the more inclusive that term - Gamer - can become, the better for everyone - more mainstream acceptance, more people playing/buying games, more options for those of us who love the medium, etc. I know that I fall well outside the gamer cliché, and the farther the scene moves away from it, the more invested and included I feel.
So while the sexism in the Kotaku post is a starting point for discussion, and is certainly offensive, the post as a whole sticks in my craw less because of the sexisim per se and more because it is essentially an amplified, long-form love letter to exactly the Stereotypical Gamer-Type that so many are trying to evolve the industry beyond. The sexism is just a part of the pandering, but the tone-deafness of the article is what elevates it to real, honest-to-goodness suckitude.
(And is that a digital audio workstation on her desk? For some reason, the fact that they left that in the shot greatly enhances its tragicness.)
I really admire your work, not only because your writing is of a uniformly high caliber, but also for your tireless commitment to broadening the niche, to pry, pry, prying things ever so slightly more open each day, and with each post.
I would imagine that reading something like Alexis' post would feel like a deliberate, forceful step backwards by the very publisher that gives you such a wonderful megaphone each month, a depressing, unnecessary, and unintentionally ironic counterpoint to posts like that great one discussing the concept of "maturity" in games that they ran back in March.
Ah, well. I'm reminded how slowly change occurs; and the weeping, the teeth, and the gnashing.
Anyway, props for this post. It sure beats the hell out of the lazily written, deeply unfunny article that Hardcasual put up today.
(Side note: Outside of webcomics, can we, the gaming community, really come up with no better humorists than these? If a culture can be judged by the quality of its satire, then we are in dire straits indeed...)
Kirk -- I'm honored by your strong praise, and yeah, your imagination of my feeling here is pretty spot on.
Would I really rename SVGL? Honestly, I think it's an okay name. I gave it virtually no thought when I began it because this blog was intended as an experiment, as practice for myself as a writer, and I never really foresaw it gaining steam the way it did.
And sexuality has always been a part of my work. I've aimed to make it the kind of sexuality that counteracts the crass and exploitive just as handily as it counteracts weird social norms that force people to pretend to be sexless if they are to be respectful.
But from afar I see how people misinterpret. I've read plenty of criticism of me that hinges on the blog name and/or the fact I put up photos of myself -- I simply thought people would relate to my work better if they had a face to the name. I know I like faces behind the bylines I read.
Maybe being a reasonable-looking girl with a blog titled "Sexy" anything leads people too easily to jump to conclusions about me. Generally I feel if I keep my work up to my own standards I can eventually surmount misinterpretation -- but I do often wonder if it would be better to avoid baiting it in the first place.
So yeah. I think I would change the blog name now if it weren't too late, but I hope I am always provocative.
I think you should change the name of the blog to "ReasonableLookingVideogameLand".
Heh. As someone who made the in-hindsight-exceedingly-questionable decision to name his own music blog "Murfins and Burglars," I kinda get where you're coming from, at least to some extent.
But for whatever it's worth, I really do think that "Sexy VideoGameLand" is just about the coolest gaming blog name I've ever seen.
And as long as you keep tackling the topics that you do, some folks are gonna find something to get all weird and double-standardy about regardless. Might as well just toss them a big fat "Sexy" right up front, ya know?
I'd doubt changing the name would do anything . If a culture is sexist then it views woman as unnatural in the Public sphere . so anything that woman do regardless of context is criticized.If it has any remote connection to sex is subject to scrutiny about her tainted morality.
Which generally leaves a person with two unfair cultural option to pretend to be sexless "Since you know female sexuality is evil along with boobs and what not " Or call her a whore
With patriarchy your left essentially with (The Asexual Virgin with no Agency of her own ) or The Whore who can't control herself giving it up to the first person that comes.
If shallow feature stories were the dodgiest thing happening on Kotaku I think they'd be rightfully proud. They've got much bigger problems in terms of repeating other sites' content without fact checking, walking an increasingly blurred line between honest endorsements and corporate shilling, and straight out misrepresenting stories in the race to get them online quickly.
There's a lot of good people at Kotaku and I enjoy your articles and the features of the other writers, both regular and guest, (particular Stephen Totilo). But that site needs to decide whether it's an aggregator blog or a genuine news outlet, and then make some serious changes once it decides.
I like the acronym SVGL - it's the same as SunnyVale Golf Land - an arcade in Cali that's pretty popular for getting import fighting cabs and whatnot. Which is why I get the two confused...but it's a good confusion!
I was reminded of this blog post after reading this sad article on Kotaku recently:
http://kotaku.com/5438044/kotakus-most-popular-posts-of-2009
It was even sadder that it happened around the same time as the last female kotaku writer left for better things. AJ Glasser just left for GamePro.
I hope kotaku isn't turning into a boys club.
Hi great article I really like this blog, you are very good making them. I say that the issue discussed in this blog is quite interesting and of high quality.
Post a Comment