Misogyny in the Gaming World (and Elsewhere) and A Plan of Attack Via Sane Reason I’ve been watching a Twitter stream of discussion about misogyny in the game world lately, and I see a lot of things happening that I find disturbing. I participated in it, at least a little bit, and I saw something equally disturbing first-hand. What is that, you ask? Ultimately, it breaks down to a poor understanding of human nature, and how to improve it. Preaching to the Choir: how NOT to draw an audience For someone that has a great cause (like stomping out the sin and crime of misogyny in gaming, or just in general) it’s all too easy to revert to human norm, in the basest of ways: this includes trying to force people back into their “place” by vitriol and actions, and to use the reasoning of might makes right: that might might be in the form of propaganda or overt physical and verbal abuse, or just making so much noise that no other voices can be heard. This doesn’t work for much more than to make the forceful ones feel good for a small time: these changes never last forever, and the victory rings off-tune. Nobody wants to be subjected to a choir singing the same old unpleasant tune at the top of their voices: that choir gains an audience just long enough for their desired audience to get what they’re screaming just long enough to plug their ears and point at them saying, “See? They’re just making our case for us, they can’t do any better than that bad out-of-tune squawking!” and thus, the choir is preaching to itself. If you want to make progress, a change of tune is far more useful. You Have to Fight for your Right to Party (the Safety Dance, and SING!) A choir of all sopranos or similar registers, frankly, isn’t all that pleasant to listen to: it’s too strident and unbalanced. For that matter, all basso profondo is equally blah. One side trying to drown out the other causes a cacophony instead of harmony. How, then, do you achieve harmony? The musical equivalent is offering the others a part that works well in concert, to make a greater sounding piece using all the parts. So, too, should a reasoned approach towards a greater good be based: if it’s not win-win, it’s lose-lose by definition, because nobody but those badly out of tune would care to be involved in cacophony. Selling an idea on the basis that someone is lesser or greater than the other always breeds resentment: the past history of mankind shows that always falls apart. Only once there is only one side left in such a conflict that “wins” by being the last side standing, or someone takes the chance of forgiving past bad behaviors and provides a constructive forward solution, is there progress. In the first case, such a “win” just moves the focus from one enemy to a new enemy to be conquered: quite often, that enemy is their self. Once you can all sing the same liked song, then you can dance. It’s the safety dance… and SING! Admittedly, it’s not always easy to get people to see the music and desire to sing: some people are bad actors on the stage of a drunken karaoke contest, determined to sound bad and torture people. Depending on how badly they’re behaving, you may not have much choice but to use a bit of force: they’re drunk! Trying to reason with someone when they’re drunk tends to not work well: it really comes down to blunt force, and immediate, if you don’t want to sacrifice your rights. I’m a firm advocate of not giving up your rights, but reserving them to yourself, to only give out as you see fit. Reserving your rights in no way implies you may take someone else’s rights, no matter how tempting that is, or how much that seems deserved: that just perpetuates the long-term problem. Sometimes, you just have to take a music stand! Disrupting the Status Quo: Getting your Needs Met by Providing Wants To know your enemy requires that you love your enemy: if you don’t know what their wants and needs are (which requires a deeper love to know them that well) you can’t fight them and hope to be victorious in the long-term. In human history, “enemy” tends to refer to a person or a group that acts out of fear of some type, and that fear can breed hatred. Sadly, so many people and societies are very fearful, and while that fear doesn’t seem rational, nonetheless it is there, and guides behavior. Over a long enough period of time, it warps societies, tearing them into shreds of civility, threads of decency unraveling the cloth. Fear breeds justification, which leads to anarchy, and counteracting forces that would sew up the raveling cloth by dictates until there’s nothing weft. The strength and number of secrets in a society or more than one party is inversely proportional to the amount of trust: where absolute trust exists, no secrets need to exist. Not all secrets are of the type related to national security: often, the most vital secrets are personal. Where someone has no trust in others, they fear secrets, and often imagine secrets that don’t actually exist. This is where the status quo is counterproductive to change: the secrets, real or perceived, are acted upon by those that fear what those secrets are and how they’ll be affected, and react in such a manner to try to control all sources of those secrets to get their wants met. How does this exist in our society now? Is this all social engineering run amok in the deep past? Does it come from instincts of the genders? Predator and Prey: We’re All Just Animals There are stereotypes of what’s male and what’s female: a well-known one is that males are hunters, and females are gatherers: males build and destroy, and females keep things from falling apart. Reality often isn’t that cut-and-dried: many of the roles are very interchangeable. Let’s explore the stereotypes mentioned and how that might have brought things to where they are now in a thought experiment: if males are the hunters, then the thrill of the hunt is what makes them tick. If females do all the stereotypical things, then they tend to not go as much for the thrill of the hunt, and seek stability. These two opposite forces of nature aren’t easy to keep in harmony. Females, being the intelligent beings that they are, recognize this hunter nature of their males, and behave accordingly, devising ways to keep the hunter from getting bored, thus encouraging their males to stay around longer, providing stability. To do this, head games are involved: rules are changed arbitrarily by the females to keep the males guessing, so they can experience a non-stop thrill of the hunt. If these stereotypes are generally true, should it be unexpected that not all are fully adapted to enjoy their stereotypical roles? What if a female wants to be the hunter, and not the faux prey? What if the male wants to be the faux prey, and not the hunter? What if, regardless of which role they gravitate towards most, they just don’t have the patience for all these games on either side of the equation? Secrets cause frustration and fear, and changing rules on either side results in a break of trust as consistency disappears. To confound things, many are unable to accept and properly deal with the fact that someone else doesn’t fulfill their expectations and act according to their stereotypes, and that causes them much fear. The Big Game: How Gaming Brings Out the Best and the Worst Take all these factors together, and think about role models, stereotypes, add anonymity to the equation, and stir it up with the fact that, male or female, humans are competitive animals that have an absurd need to put everything and everyone into some particular order, and score things according to some set of rules, often rules that they make up on the spot. Some people become different people while playing games: other people become more of what they are in every other context, with the only difference being that there’s a clearly-defined set of game rules to also work within. Take an artificial set of constraints, a competitive nature, someone that is stressed by them, and they’ll revert to their norm at their basest level. Should they be consuming mood-altering or inhibition-destroying substances, it gets worse. People that are the most insecure in where they stand in the social order are most likely to behave badly. If you don’t care where you stand in relation to others, including your immediate opponent, then a game is just a game: if you care too much about where you stand in relation to others, then the game is just a part of the larger game of social domination. The Golden Rule: No Money Needed Unfortunately, a society and how it treats those within and without rarely changes quickly: you can’t just mandate a new set of rules towards the greater good and expect meaningful, positive change. For a society to make positive changes, the underlying requirement is that secrets are reduced, and trust is increased. This is best brought about by people treating others how they’d want to be treated: the Golden Rule. Someone needs to take the risk first, and experience the results, and make those results more widely known, so others emulate them, until they no longer need to emulate, but act with that as second nature or even first, in the ideal world. Once people have incubated such behavior for a long enough time by willful actions of many, it sets a deeper long-term pattern, at least in the general case. It’s not perfect and won’t work for everyone: sadly, in the game of life, there will always be sore losers.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 06:51:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015