Also, it’s great to see you still dip your toes and provide a bit of scholarly wisdom on the game industry. Your posts on Kotaku put me onto some really amazing academic articles and linked to good random stuff on sites like Terra Nova.

I think Dan Golding’s point(s) on Twitter re: discursive effects of all this talk and are we misdefining a ‘field’ that doesn’t exist are worth pondering, but I’ll consider that at a later date!

I’m glad most people understood your ‘don’t do it’ as cautionary – I really think the idea that it’s exclusionary is a serious misreading (same thing goes for advice re: grad school). People are going to try regardless, but it’s so hard to understand how difficult something is before you’ve entered into it. And I think a lot of the ‘don’t do it’ advice is more constructive than people give it credit for: ‘don’t do it, and here’s why, and if you are going to do it, here are things to think about.’

Hello to you too, and cheers right back. I did enjoy the Game Athropologist! If I have any ‘regrets,’ it’s that I didn’t get to put more of that kind of writing on Kotaku.

People said “shame on you” to my face through comments and from a distance on their own blogs. But the majority of commenters understood what you said: it is advice that is cautionary, not exclusionary.

It’s very tempting to vent out an “I told you so”, but really what I wanted to say is thanks for everything and to also let you know that oh no, this isn’t the first time this has happened and yes, it was from someone with whom (I hope) you had some solidarity, even if only briefly and from afar.

Hello, and cheers.

The author of Vorpal Bunny Ranch made an interesting comment when I posted this on G+ – he said that when he used to read the comments on Kotaku (when I would link to his articles) (1) many people assumed he was a woman, simply based on the topics he was writing about and (2) those comments were much more harsh than the response he’s gotten when he’s been perceived as male (assumed straight).

One of the things they wanted us to do towards the end of my time at Kotaku was really get in the comments section and interact with the readers – I had 0 interest in doing that. Yes, there were plenty of nice people; I know a lot of them were scared out of the comments section (not particularly strange). There were also really aggressive/rude/hateful people & I really saw no reason to throw myself into an online environment that was going to make me feel lousy. It was unfortunate, because I know there was thoughtful discussion – I just didn’t want to deal with the non-thoughtful part of it. There comes a point where it’s hard to just brush it off as online trolling.

Anyway, you’re absolutely right that until this starts being seen as a problem for everyone, not just for marginal groups, we’re just going to go in circles. Maybe someday ….

I have never been as much of a target for gender-based insults and personal attacks than when I joined the games industry in a more visible position. Even as an outspoken female games blogger talking about gender and other social issues on my blog, it wasn’t often that I’d be attacked in such a way, particularly on my own blog.

As an Editor at The Border House, it’s not unusual for the blog tp receive comments (that we don’t approve, of course) that threaten violence, rape, assault, etc. as well as make personal attacks and such against our authors for the simple fact that the blog discusses and highlights the views of the marginalised in gaming.

After I became a Community Manager at a game development studio (indeed, the very first WEEK I started my new job), however, the doors opened wider to that sort of thing from fans (not my coworkers at all–they’re totally cool), both “positive” gender-based attention and negative.

Unfortunately in my personal experience, any woman who has any opinions and is working in a public position or blogging in public as a woman is basically a target. My personal experiences have trained me to be cautious of gamers online. Sadly, the misogynistic, verbally abusive male gamer is really quite common on the internet and that shows no signs of going away. What’s also sad is that males don’t see “female” issues as necessarily having an impact on them at all. They don’t see that sexism has an impact on them or their enjoyment of games or the community of gamers, or not nearly enough of them feel that way, so if that issue “doesn’t affect them” then it’s not really a problem. Until males start seeing sexism as a problem that hurts men, too, then this discussion will continue to go in circles.

Let me give an example. The Google+ “Nym Wars” didn’t start getting a ton of widespread media attention in the social media world until a few high profile white men started complaining about it. Women and other marginalised folks had been complaining about Google’s naming policy for quite a while before people like Scoble started waving flags about it. Until the issue was important to men, it was not important, full stop.

It is a really jumbly thing for me, too. It’s hard to know where to even start, which I guess is one reason I don’t like to write about it much.

Wow, that was one awkward sentence. So I’m going to leave with a comment that Bi Shumin is a wonderful writer (if we can overlook some Jodi Picoult tendencies), and leave it like that.