The Duke debacle

 

The crotch of controversy.

Over the weekend, my friend Rob Fahey posted this editorial on GamesIndustry.biz, later published on Eurogamer. It’s about Duke Nukem Forever’s ‘Capture the Babe’ mode, which is, as you’re probably aware, a variant of Capture the Flag in which teams compete to carry a tied-up woman to their base, administering the occasional slap on the behind to calm her down if she wriggles.

I don’t really want to talk about Duke Nukem. I’ve been asked to write an editorial on it, but I declined – partly because none of us have actually seen the game yet, and partly because I tend not to engage too much with women and games issues, for reasons I’ll go into later. But what really interests me about this issue isn’t Capture the Babe mode itself. It’s people’s reactions to the controversy, and what that says about us.

The comments thread in this article makes for astonishing reading – it’s at nearly 600 comments at the time of writing. If you object to Capture the Babe, you’re a Guardian-reading bleeding-heart PC-brigade apologist with overdeveloped sensitivities to harmless, satirical entertainment. If you don’t object to it, you’re a knuckle-dragging mono-browed guffawing imbecile who thinks it’s funny to hit women. There is apparently no middle ground. This, it seems, is a politically polarising issue – it goes beyond what you think of videogames and starts to become relevant to who you are as a person.

Most of Eurogamer’s commenters – who, according to readership data, are overwhelmingly adult men – rallied against Rob’s views. A few resorted to questioning his masculinity and journalistic credentials, but most came up with reasoned, intelligent but nonetheless passionately dissenting responses. Many of them were genuinely appalled by the suggestion that Capture the Babe was misogynist.

This vociferous defensiveness is something I’ve encountered in real life, too, and I’ve found myself fascinated by what’s behind it. In the aftermath of an unnecessarily heated argument that I recently had about Capture the Babe, I was offered a plausible answer. The guys who support Duke Nukem’s right to do what it wants – intelligent, socialised men – resent being lumped in with neanderthals at least as much, if not more, than those who oppose Capture the Babe resent its content.

I think this is what’s behind the sheer force of the negative reaction to Rob’s editorial. Eurogamer’s commenters took deep, personal offence at even the inference that they might be women-hating pricks for thinking Capture the Babe is harmless. That is, after all, a pretty serious accusation to make about someone’s character, even if you’re only doing so by association.

Thing is, though, the other side has its reasons too. It’s all about context, and I find it extremely easy to understand why you’d be moved enough by Capture the Babe to plant your feet firmly on the ground and take a stand against it. I wanted to provide a few examples from my own life to illustrate why.

I’ve been writing about games professionally about five years, but I’ve been a Girl On The Internet for much, much longer than that. I know what it’s like for people to think you’re less of a person because of your gender: that your opinions don’t deserve as much respect, that your viewpoint can’t possibly be relevant, that you’re either an attention-seeking slut or an ugly fat bitch because you play online. I am convinced that it is a tiny minority of people who think like this – but equally, you won’t find a female gamer who hasn’t encountered it in some form.

There’s a reason I started writing under Keza MacDonald as a teenager, rather than Kelly. It’s an established nickname, sure – my family and friends almost all call me Keza – but it’s also more gender-neutral than Kelly. It’s not that I was ashamed of my gender. I just wanted to talk about videogames, and I knew that doing so under an obviously female name would only get me unwanted grief or attention. I just didn’t want the hassle.

Similarly, as a journalist, I’ve always stayed the hell away from women in games issues because I’ve never thought that my gender makes my opinion on anything more or less relevant. I also think that the best way to deal with the ‘issue’ of women in the games industry is usually to behave as if it’s not an issue at all – which is the ideal state of events that we’re all shooting for. Drawing attention to particularly objectionable incidences of sexism in games doesn’t often do much except fuel the fire.

But the truth is that there is a lot of sexism in games, and at times it really gets on one’s tits, for want of a better expression. I wouldn’t usually class it as misogyny, because it’s so infrequently intentional. We’ve got Fumito Ueda saying that he doesn’t use female protagonists because girls wear skirts and aren’t as strong as boys, without really being aware of what that sounds like to a non-Japanese audience. Most of it is completely casual and intended to be harmless, and almost all of it IS harmless – but it’s insidious.

And sadly, these attitudes very, very occasionally extend to people who play games as well. As a seventeen-year-old staff writer, I had to listen to people at the publisher I worked at making jokes behind my back about how I must be sleeping with my editor to get the job. I’ve already mentioned the shit you have to contend with on Xbox Live, though the excellent website Fat, Ugly or Slutty does a much better job of illustrating the point. In comments threads, I have more than once been asked whether PMS might be affecting my judgement of a game. From speaking to other women in the games industry, I know that this stuff isn’t that uncommon.

This is the *less* unpleasant end of what we have to deal with.

The thing is that something like Capture the Babe can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – the one incidence of casual sexism and puerility that finally makes you take a stand, like plenty of female commentators have. I think that was the case for Rob, too. He’s not female, but he’s as fed up as anyone else with the games industry’s mainstream image as an irrelevant or even potentially dangerous adolescent pastime, and things like Capture the Babe, in his view, do nothing to help.

What I’m trying to say here is that we all have good reasons for how we feel about issues like this. I’m amazed by the scale and ferociousness of this argument, and by how eager we all seem to be to jump down each other’s throats about it. I didn’t think that an argument about something as fundamentally silly as Duke Nukem could be so emotionally charged, and yet here we are. It’s worth thinking about why that is, and trying to explain why people are reacting to this the way they are.

As for Duke and his captured babes? On that front, I couldn’t possibly offer an opinion. I haven’t played it yet.