Play a game online, and chances are at some point you’ll hear a stream of racist, homophobic, or sexist remarks aimed at yourself or one of your peers. It’s an ugly side of our community, but, thanks to an extremely vocal minority, it’s also an uncomfortably prevalent one. Sadly, this vitriolic hate speech is often written off as competitive trash talk and simply accepted as a part of playing online.
If you’re like me, then this behavior is exactly why the fun has been sucked out of online play, and as a cis, straight, white male, I’m not even the typical target of these insults. For a better example of how hurtful and pointed this behavior can be, check out Fat, Ugly, or Slutty. While this site deals primarily with sexism in the online community, racism and homophobia are equally prevalent.
Enter Gamers Against Bigotry, an organization founded by social justice advocate Sam Killermann. With the ultimate goal of creating a community where gamers of all identities are welcomed, GAB has a multi-faceted strategy for improving the conditions within the gaming community.
Phase 1: A Show of Force
The first step in GAB’s master plan is a good ol’ fashion roundup, a digital show of hands, an electronic all-in-favor. A portion of GAB’s site is dedicated to a simple pledge:
As a gamer, I realize I contribute to an incredibly diverse social network of gamers around the world, and that my actions have the ability to impact others. In effort to make a positive impact, and to create a community that is welcoming to all, I pledge to not use bigoted language while gaming, online and otherwise.
This count of solidarity does two things right off the bat. It shows those who believe in the cause that they are not alone in their desire for change, and it initiates an act of leadership for each pledge. “I’d really like to emphasize that when people sign this pledge they are leading by example in their community,” Director of PR James Buckley writes. “Part of that is to stand up against bigoted language when they see it or hear it online.”
In quantifying the community’s desire for inclusiveness, we can raise awareness for the cause and lay the foundation for the next step.
Phase 2: The Powers That Be
Devs like EA have the power to set inclusive trends.
As patrons of interactive entertainment, we look to the publishers, developers, and artists for our continued enjoyment. These entities are the powers that be in our community, and it’s toward them that GAB’s next step is aimed. Using its growing number of pledges as a basis, GAB intends to begin a dialogue with developers on behalf of the community in order to encourage the reevaluation and reformation of the methods currently in place for keeping our games hate-free (or, rather, the lack thereof).
Currently, most gaming services allow users to mute other users, but these “opt out” systems do little to address the actual problem. Instead, they allow game chat to fill with hate speech by default, which players can only then selectively cut out when they’re inevitably annoyed or offended by it. As a result, players continue to take this offensive language as simply the gaming community’s brand of competitive trash talk and perpetuate it in order to fit in without fully realizing the harm these words cause.
Phase 3: Qualitative Change
By partnering with developers and other organizations, GAB hopes to help implement improved tools for keeping hate out of games. In the GAB Action Plan, this means “providing incentives for those who deserve them, and taking away communication privileges from trolls who only use them to abuse.” Online communication is indeed a privilege, and the trolls among us are a minority, albeit a loud one. These are the obnoxious people who privately message someone only to call them hateful slurs or demean them for their sex or perceived sexual preference.
It’s important to keep in mind that GAB isn’t out to censor anyone. They’re not on a witch hunt to punish anyone who’s ever called their opponent a “fag,” or claimed they “raped” their opposition; they simply want players to take a moment to consider who we’re hurting when we use that type of language and reconsider its use in the future. After all, the first step to creating an inclusive environment is to stop perpetuating exclusivity.
While we do our part to affect positive change on the consumer side of the community, GAB also has plans for change on the production side.
Making games as diverse as ourselves
It’s not hard to see that video games have a dearth of meaningful characters outside the usual straight white men, and it seriously narrows the scope of the experiences available to players. One of the biggest draws of video games is that they allow you to step into the shoes of someone else, making them incredibly powerful tools for developing empathy. Understandably, GAB would like to see this power applied to characters as diverse as the people playing them. Doing so, however, requires a degree of delicacy.
Sam Killermann, founder of Gamers Against Bigotry.
“It seems like every day now I’m reading an article on Kotaku, The Mary Sue, or Polygon about ‘diversity’ in games,” Sam tells me. “But diversity is a shape-shifty type word, so we’d like to help nail it down. Our goal is to provide a concrete set of examples folks can look to as they try to make their games more representative and appealing to gamers of all identities.
“Video games are an incredibly young entertainment/artistic medium, but they have more potential than any other medium there is – we want to help video games reach that potential. Complex characters and inclusive story lines will be a great start.”
As Sam points out, this is a process. Diversity is far deeper than just adding in more women or characters of color; it’s about the respectful treatment and representation of people from all walks of life, and doing so takes much more than a list of principles.
“Our inclusivity document is still a work in progress, so we’d rather not talk specifics. We’ll be working with game developers and other industry folks to ensure the final product, and our eventual suggestions, are meaningful, reasonable, and implementable. Going out on a limb now with a premature idea we have might do more harm than good.”
The virtues of negative attention
Though still quite young, Gamers Against Bigotry has already received significant attention, and not all of it good. Only days after GAB’s original site first launched, it was bombarded by DDOS attacks and hackers who defaced its pages to display disgusting images and racial slurs. Even more damaging, however, was that attackers managed to repeatedly wipe the pledge counter back to zero, clearing well over 1500 pledges. To take it a step further, Sam’s personal blog and portfolio sites were also targeted.
Sadly, these types of attacks are relatively common in the online community. Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency was similarly attacked after the launch of her Kickstarter, which aimed to raise funds for the extended video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games. But however heinous these occurrences are, they thankfully can have a silver lining. There’s a reason why the saying “there’s no such thing as bad press” exists.
Anita Sarkeesian received death threats after launching her Kickstarter campaign.
Negative actions as these attacks tend to get the attackers exactly what they want: attention. Most of the time, however, this attention paints them as the bullies they are. In addition, the circulating news gains the targeted parties the attention they need, and they tend to subsequently see a spike in support. After the attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, for example, her Kickstarter finished out with more than double the asked funding.
The attacks on GAB’s site have received their fair share of press, and GAB’s cause has been strengthened through developing relationships with organizations like GaymerConnect and AbleGamers. In the future, Sam hopes GAB can work together with industry giant EA. “What they did at the Full Spectrum event a few weeks ago left us all incredibly moved. It was a huge leap forward for the industry, and made it clear to us that they are ready and pushing for our brand of change — it’d be great to help them in their efforts.”
Active advocacy and how you can help
GAB practices a brand of advocacy James likes to call “active” advocacy, in which each and every one of us can participate. By taking the Gamers Against Bigotry pledge, we’re doing more than just signing a petition in hopes of raising awareness; it encourages us to speak out against hate.
Rather than spending all our time standing on a soap box trying to yell the loudest, we have the potential to do a great deal of good simply by speaking up on an individual basis. When someone makes hurtful remarks or tasteless jokes in online chat they expect their peers to chuckle along, but by calling them on their behavior and asking them to stop, you cast the spotlight on the negative implications of their behavior. With just a few simple words, everyone will think about what they just heard, and you’ll have provided them with a real-life example of who the words hurt.
Speaking out like this can be hard — there’s a lot of social pressure not to make waves — but it’s also an extremely effective way of standing up to insensitivity. Consider that a large number of people who use hurtful slang don’t actually believe they’re hurting anyone; these people are much more likely to change their behavior if they’re proven wrong. Now consider that these people very likely outnumber the people who actually mean to be hurtful. By getting the people who mean no harm to stop using bigoted terms, we can begin to shift social pressure to fit that trend. More often than not, even bullies will bow to social pressure, and that means a lot less hate speech in our games.
Of course, this brand of advocacy won’t sway everyone, which is why GAB seeks to partner with developers to help put better systems for negative reinforcement against outspoken bigotry into place. To do this, it helps to have the community at their back, and to this end GAB has an entire page filled with ways you can help them in their quest. The organization is looking for volunteers for everything from spreading the word on social media, programmers and artists to help enhance their web presence — they’re even willing to help you get college credit for your help!
If there’s one thing you take away from this, it’s that it’s within your power to make our community a better place. Take the pledge, stand up for inclusiveness, and show the community that haters are gonna hate, but we don’t have to let them keep the megaphone. Fun isn’t exclusive, so why are we?
The post Fun isn’t exclusive: Gamers Against Bigotry and the quest for inclusive gaming appeared first on Video Game Writers.