Good grief! It’s been about a hundred years since I updated this thing – and unfortunately, my gallant return to this blog doesn’t come in the form of a particularly wistful or insightful analysis on any kind of video game thing. Nah. I kind of just want to update my readers on recent stuff that’s been happening, and share some cool events and links. So here we go!

Freeplay

This is the big one. At the end of 2012, I became the new director of Australia’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival, alongside my good friend and brilliant indie dev Harry Lee. Freeplay’s been a very big deal for me, and I credit it with part of the reason why I write about video games for a living today; being able now to be an actual part of the thing, and to hopefully influence others through it the way it influenced me, is quite a thrilling thought.

The Freeplay conference happens in Melbourne in late September this year, and Harry and I have some crazy ideas planned that we hope you’ll love, too. In the meantime, we’re focusing on lots of gaming-related off-season events. Our first, Indie Allsorts at Federation Square, was incredibly successful – check out our photos!

The next week is also a big one for Freeplay. This Saturday, we’ve got Twine workshops happening at the Children’s Book Festival. Twine’s a wonderful tool for creating interactive fiction, so we’re hoping to expose more potential game designers to the ease with which they can get their own games up and running. And then, on Tuesday, we’re doing another Re:Play event at ACMI. We’ve gathered up a bunch of incredible speakers – Farbs, Andrew Brophy, Yang Tian Li, and Laura Crawford – to chat about just what it means to be indie, anyway.

If you’re not one of the hundreds of people jetting off to GDC next week, we’d love to see you there!

No More GameSpy :(

So yeah, awkwardly, my most stable freelance gig came to a halt due to GameSpy’s closure. I did the weekend news there for nearly a year, and really loved the work I got to do – my editors were incredibly cool, and they encouraged a really unique and engaging voice in our writing. I also loved doing the Free Agent columns.

Needless to say, I was pretty crushed when the site closed, and sadly envisioned myself dining on meals of potato chips for the rest of my life. It’s not all bad, though. The silver lining is that I’ve picked up more work elsewhere!

You’ll find me doing random bits and bobs of news at IGN. I’ve also joined TouchArcade’s team of reviewers (yes, iOS devs, I finally have a place to write about your games now!). The extra time I’ve suddenly found myself in possession of also means I have more room to work on the long-form feature article-type stuff again…

Recent Articles!

I’d love it if you checked out the new magazine Five out of Ten, a publication dedicated to video game culture. In its second issue, I’ve got two pieces – one’s an edited version of my exploration of Sleep is Death, originally posted on this here blog. The other is a vaguely manic piece looking at the overly sexualised female monsters of Silent Hill: Downpour, with an analysis of when misogynist monster design is okay – and when it isn’t.

Five out of Ten is only five pounds, though there’s an early-bird discount on right now that’ll get you an extra 30% off. These two pieces haven’t generated as much feedback as my other online work tends to do, so I’d be really keen to hear your thoughts.

The other main article I really want to spruik is this interview with Day[9] at Games.on.net. When I got into this games journalism thing, Day[9] was my number-one dream interviewee; who knew that, not even a year and a half later, I’d get to speak to him for nearly an hour? Dreams do come true, guys! He did not disappoint, either. His views on the school system are really interesting, I reckon, and he has really refreshing thoughts on how being a better gamer might actually equate to being a better person.

And finally, if you prefer bloggy stuff, I’d love it if you added my Tumblr to your lists. I’ve had it going for a few months, and though the past few weeks have seen little action, it’s still better updated than this WordPress blog. Something about the simplicity of the Tumblr interface makes it much more inviting to write on, y’know?

GDC Funtimes

Finally – GDC. I’ll be there this year, with grand plans to crash all of the parties. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a flight that will see me land before I leave. Yay, international dateline.

I really want to meet people over there. I’m going with a kind of dual purpose in mind – I’ll be doing my freelance thing for sure, and I still have some times free to check out some cool projects. As usual, I’m most interested in PC games, but I’d love to hear from any devs with a groovy thing going on. Get in touch! I’d love to check out your wares. Maybe we could arrange an interview?

I’m also going for Freeplay business – Harry and I would love to meet with anyone interested in contributing to the festival. We’re especially on the lookout for possible international speakers. If being flown down to Australia to talk about indie games sounds like your thing, hit us up! We’d love to have a chat.

I’ll be in San Fran Town till Wednesday the 3^rd of April. Email or tweet at me; I’d love to meet you.

But why the fuck should I have to fear posting this? I’ve been quiet on Twitter and Facebook lately, for many reasons, but you know what? I think I’ll make my own list of Reasons Why right here:

• Because when I tell people what I do for a living, they still say, “But you don’t actually play games, right?”

• Because, at university, I had a classmate say, “I know for a fact that women don’t understand games. I know. I have a mother.”

• Because when a man condescends to me, I’m told it’s because I’m wearing a pink skirt.

• Because we still have people saying, on a daily basis, that sexism will go away if we just stop talking about it.

• Because when I call out this behaviour, I’m told it’s my fault for having an “attitude problem” and maybe I should be less of a bitch.

• Because when a fellow games student from my university comments on my articles, he says that I should stop whining and just accept that games journalism is a boys’ club – even though I’ve gotten far further in my games journalism career than he ever did.

• Because when I tell the PR rep I want to look at AAA console games, he takes me to the pink Facebook games anyway.

• Because I have other women in the games industry tell me to “just be quiet” if I don’t want to be harassed.

• Because I’m told to “stand up for myself” – and then, when I do something like this, I’m dismissed.

• Because I’m scared to post this on Twitter.

“If I’ve done anything in my 29 years of making games, it’s that I’ve championed a single idea and been sort of bull-headed about pursuing that idea.”

Warren Spector – one of the most well-known, passionate guys in games development and with a head that is inexplicably not at all bull-shaped – is telling me about the various accolades he keeps receiving for his work in game design, the latest of which is the “Game Master” bestowed upon him by Melbourne’s ACMI. He seems a little confused by the fuss.

“It makes me feel uncomfortable, if you want to know the truth,” he continues. “I just put together teams that want to investigate my idea – that doesn’t seem like any particular genius or anything. I mean, I just find an idea that’s really interesting to me, and I manage to hire people way better than me to execute it.”

Spector’s first game was 1990′s Wing Commander, and what’s followed since has been a string of games in huge franchises, such as Ultima, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, and Epic Mickey. He’s come a long way from what he describes as his days of “just me and a blank screen”. He likens his role today to sitting on top of a stagecoach full of hundreds of game developers. “They’re like a team of horses that have made the run from Austin to Amarilla a thousand times, and all I have to do is sit there and make the horses go where they know I want to go. But when I do my job wrong, I have to pull on those reins pretty hard,” he laughs. “Like with Deus Ex – that was the most dysfunctional team I’d even been a part of. At the end, I’m pretty confident in saying that everybody looked at it as the high point of their careers.”

Lemon-Lime >>
So let’s take a look at Deus Ex, then. Pretty much the entire gaming world revisits the game again and again; us here in the HYPER crew are no exception, and I wouldn’t be surprised if our mentioning it has you reinstalling it right now. What was Spector’s secret? How did he make a game that resonates with us so deeply, even over a decade later?

“Deus Ex had one thing going for it that no other project that I’ve ever worked on – or frankly, even heard about – had,” Spector tells us. “John Romero, bless his heart, came to me and said, ‘Make the game of your dreams. No one will ever tell you to do anything. Do exactly what you want with no interference.’”

“It’s the only time I’ve ever closed my eyes at the beginning of a project and opened them up three years later to see the game that I’d imagined. It’s really special to me in that way. No one interfered. No one bugged me. There was no focus testing, there was no marketing guy telling me to do this or that, there was no business guy telling me that I was spending too much – it was exactly what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.”

And that was something that was reflected in the game, too. Players could do whatever they damn well pleased, whether it was picking the lock on a door or blowing it to bits; sweet-talking an NPC or making him talk to a gun. Years later, we still discuss with friends how we solved our problems in Deus Ex, which characters we let perish, which paths our stories unfolded upon. It’s literally a game that’s all about us and our choices, and Spector confirms that this is no coincidence.

“I’ve championed one idea for nearly 30 years,” he repeats, “and that idea is empowering players. I try to get myself and my designers out of the game so that players can express their personality, show how creative and funny or serious or whatever they are.”

“One of the things I have to beat into a designer that comes to work for me is that if they ever say a player ‘has’ to do something, or ‘this is the bit where they do X action’, they have to forget it. We’re done talking. Rethink it. Because as designers, we should never force the players to do anything. Get yourself off the stage so the player can get on it.”

Pathfinding >>
Spector likens the choice-and-consequence model of the average modern game to “an enormous pick-a-path book; like five scripts jammed together with cinematic pictures added to it”. While he admits that some such games, such as Heavy Rain, can still be a “work of genius”, it’s still not the sort of game that he’d never try to make.

Remembering the enormity of my choices in Deus Ex, I ask Spector if he thinks any game has come close to its profound choice-and-consequence system since.

“Probably none,” he says flatly. “I don’t say that to be arrogant, I say that because there’s another thing I have to tell my designers all the time to differentiate what we do from what other developers do. And that is that we don’t play the metre, and we don’t let players play the metre. We don’t judge the players.”

“In all the other choice-and-consequence games I can think of, one of two things is true. Either the choices don’t matter – like yeah, you can make a choice but at the end of the day nothing about the story changes, nothing about your character changes, nothing about the world changes. And the other thing they do is: ‘You can be good or evil!’ And there’s always a needle or a metre, and you go and check that and basically, what that’s saying to the player is, ‘I am the designer. I’ve decided what is wrong, what’s light and dark, what’s good and evil.’”

This is something that should be up to the player, Spector feels. “Who gives a darn what I think is right or wrong – what do you think is right and wrong?” he implores. “I’m going to let the player explore that. I honestly don’t feel that I’ve played a game in the last five years or so that gave me that feeling, that the game was about me – not the story creators or the game designers.”

Mouse From the Machine >>
Spector suggests that it’s about trusting the player to be an adult capable of making his own choices; to not spoon-feed him a particular experience, and to let him tailor it to his own idea of what a game should be. The lack of trust is inherent in the gaming industry these days, Spector says, and it doesn’t know what it means to create a ‘mature’ game.

He’s currently working on Disney Epic Mickey 2, which he admits he has been questioned about repeatedly due to its apparent difference to the darker games in his portfolio, such as Thief and System Shock.

“Good lord, how many games can you make about guys who wear sunglasses at night, or guys who wear chainmail and swing enormous axes?” he says. “The thing that surprises me is that people don’t see that the underlying philosophies behind Deus Ex or Epic Mickey are essentially exactly the same. They are about players expressing themselves through play, letting them tell their own story.”

He’s aware that Mickey might be brushed off as a light-hearted cartoonish thing for children, and he has some strong thoughts on the industry’s perception of maturity.

“I was at E3 this year,” he says. “I saw a lot of slow-motion blood sprays. I saw a lot of fill-in-the-blank shooter sequel number fours, and a lot of beheadings and breaking walls and putting your fist through somebody – and let’s not forget the buxom 19-year-old sucking a lollipop while wielding a chainsaw and wearing a schoolgirl outfit. I will go to my grave believing that Epic Mickey was the only mature game at E3. And all that stuff that actually passes for mature content? It’s actually adolescent crap. Junk. I can’t believe people can’t see that mature content in Epic Mickey, and they apparently do see it in pick-your-favourite-shooter game. I don’t get it.”

New Vision >>
With the triple-A scene so saturated in casual violence and noisy, blood-spattered visuals, I ask Spector where he thinks the industry’s hope lies. Are designers held back creatively by what audiences apparently expect from their big-name games?

“I actually think that right now is the best time that you could possibly imagine to be a game designer or developer with a different vision,” he says. “As recently as ten years ago, you had to get approval and funding from a publisher, you had to get the publisher to put your game in a box, you had to give your game a traditional marketing and ad campaign – you were completely dependent on the publishing model. And now it’s just not true. There’s a thriving indie game movement; there’s mobile games, iOS and Android where four guys in a garage can really do something magical, you’ve got independent distribution, you’ve got digital distribution through Steam and Kongregate and Origin…”

Spector says that there’s no telling which game will be the next Deus Ex, or which game will next echo in our gaming histories – but he’s incredibly excited for the potential of today’s games, and where the future will see the medium.

“No one knows what the future of gaming is like. Is it social, is it mobile, is it triple-A, is it story-based, is it puzzles? Nobody has a clue – not the people at EA, not the people at Disney, not the people at Ubisoft or Zynga, nobody has a clue. If you have an idea, you rule. You are as likely to succeed and change the world as the CEO of a triple-A publisher. And that’s amazing – I mean, come on!”

I’m so incredibly grateful I got to be so involved in this year’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival, which concluded barely a fortnight ago. I was a speaker in the conversation session Games and Words, exchanging thoughts on the written word’s relevance to video games. On the panel Levels of Discourse, I contributed to a discussion of various aspects of games criticism. I was on the judging committee for the Freeplay awards, playing through dozens of excellent indie games from all over the world. I somehow even convinced director Paul Callaghan that it’d be a great idea to let me present an award at the Freeplay awards ceremony. (I hope he’s not too mortified I took the opportunity to slip the word “throbbing” into the script.)

I have a history with Freeplay, actually, and I’d say it’d played a pretty critical role in what I do now. At last year’s Freeplay I met a whole bunch of people I’d only admired from afar till then; now I consider many of them to be great friends, mentors, and alcohol suppliers of mine. The year before, at Freeplay 2010, I’d just begun writing about games, and it was all the cultural discussion at the festival that really guided the path my writing would take, each panel I attended and game I played at Experimedia shaping my path like wire on a bonsai tree – so being an actual part of the festival my third time around means an immense amount to me.

And this year, as in previous years, a lot of discussion was generated that has me thinking still, even two weeks later. Though the official theme was “Chaos and Grace”, I think several unspoken sub-themes also emerged in conversation, and there’s one I’d like to expand on today…

The question of legitimacy was something that permeated a few of the sessions I saw, and it was certainly, in two highly differing manifestations, a part in both of the sessions I spoke in.

On Levels of Discourse, both Jessica Citizen (who writes primarily news on her own gaming website) and James Dominguez (who writes daily for a national paper’s online gaming blog) shied away from applying the term “journalist” to themselves. I took issue with this, but I also knew their reasons for doing so well – gaming is not a serious, “real” enough area of coverage, arguments about the usefulness of journalists in the field could be avoided, they didn’t even have journalism degrees, et cetera, et cetera…

And that irritated me, if I’m being honest. It irritated me because I’ve long grappled with the idea of games being a legitimate area of focus myself. For the first year and a half of my career I’d dodge the word, instead ambiguously calling myself a “writer”. Never mind that my friends and teachers outside of the games industry 100% considered me a journalist; never mind that my dad, himself a journalist of over forty years, considered me a journalist, too. A part of me feared that others might think games weren’t a good enough area to cover, and I wanted to avoid confrontation. I wanted to avoid being challenged. In not defending their importance and value in culture, I legitimised the uneducated idea that games were not a “real” medium.

It was going to GDC this year that finally changed my thinking. “I’m a writer,” I would say when meeting developers and other games journalists, and they would say, “What the fuck is a writer? Call yourself a journalist, dammit, because you are a journalist, because what you cover is legitimate and needs to be read, and its prominence shouldn’t be eclipsed by this idea that not even you believe in the legitimacy of what you’re writing.”

**

After each of the two sessions I spoke on, I’d take a break to scroll through the #freeplay12 Twitter hashtag to see what people had been saying while I’d been speaking. And apparently, not a whole lot of people agreed with my view of journalism being a necessary part of the advancement of video games in greater culture. It upset me – not really in an oh god why did I read the comments way, but because it contradicted what people had tweeted during the Games and Words session the day before.

Games and Words, see, was one of a series of “conversations” designed around the idea of having two people – one familiar with video games, the other from a different discipline of work or study – coming together to speak about one aspect of games through a wider, less self-examinatory cultural lens. In my case, I got to speak at length with excellent Melbournian poet Katie Keys.

The nature of the speakers’ backgrounds was the most important thing about the conversation sessions, and the greatest generator of a unique kind of discussion still largely unspoken within the games industry. Bringing in the expertise of an “outsider” really helps us approach the medium in new ways; according to a recent interview I had with Peter Molyneux, it was a part of his hiring strategy for his new studio 22 Cans. How do you expect innovation, he said, if you’re asking the same people to do what they’ve already done a million times before?

Katie Keys, as a poet and only a casual player of games, had some frankly brilliant insight into the medium, and it was a conversation I was immensely proud to have been a part of. That’s why it bothered me, looking back over the tweets, to see people pinpoint use of words such as “real” and “legitimate” to distinguish a divide between mainstream writing and writing found in games.

I understand the criticism, but I also wish some consideration had been given to why that distinction might have been made. Why might someone unfamiliar with the medium say such a thing so flippantly, not realising that it’s something we in the industry facepalm at on a daily basis? Is it perhaps because not even our journalists, our mediators between games and the mainstream media, are willing to consider themselves “real” journalists? How do we get so indignant about the Herald Sun’s unfair portrayal of games when our own journalists don’t feel they can legitimise their own career choice?

You could argue that with racists picketing outside the State Library on the final day of Freeplay, there might be more pertinent issues for journalists to pick up on than, say, the problems that arise during the development of a video game. But look – there are other areas of entertainment journalism that don’t have nearly as much potential as games do. Why is it still not okay to be a games journalist?

We need journalism if we want gaming’s place in the broader cultural spectrum to be taken seriously, and we need our journalists to stand up and say, yes, we are goddamned journalists and we’re serious about the work that we do. How can we expect others to take us seriously if we can’t take ourselves seriously? The outsiders’ view of gaming isn’t going to change without a change in our own views; it’s not going to change as long as we stare at our feet and mumble, “Umm, I’m not really a journalist, I just write stuff about video games.” So let’s stop talking each other down, timidly dismissing our accomplishments and insights, and acting as if this career path we chose is just some hobby to be shrugged off. We know they’re important. It’s up to us to help others see gaming’s relevance to non-gamers, too.

Covetous. That’s apparently what a video game manifestation of me would look like, according to indie superstar and my good friend Andrew Brophy.

He has this hilarious theory, see, that game developers look like their games, in much the same way dog owners look like their drooling pooches. (It’s something that will be expounded upon eventually in the nascent game development fashion blog Indie Ankles, I’m sure.) Seeing him discuss it with a couple of other game devs on Twitter recently, I butted in to ask what a video game based on me would look like. I always figured I’d be the tangle of words in a work of interactive fiction, or perhaps something wistful, beautiful, and immensely sad in tone, like Dear Esther. (Wishful thinking up in here.)

But apparently I more closely resembled Covetous’ little melty boy-thing. Thanks, Brophy.

Covetous starts benign, just like the sickness it gives form to. What exactly that sickness is seems to differ between its players. The story dispensed between stages seems to suggest the growth of a whole new lifeform, something sentient, and as such many players in the comment section read into this as the boy’s consumption by a parasitic twin. Others see cancer. What I saw was in the same vein, but not quite so physical.

To me, Covetous is a narrative of self-doubt.

It seems a comfort at first. Oh my god, my hair is awful, you think. My friends probably think I’m fat and awkward. This tiny pixel is here to eat away at those tiny pockets of self-doubt you have, to clean you of what makes you unpresentable to the world.

But the pixel grows. It begins to leave holes in its wake, leaving you ridged with scar tissue. Soon it’s large enough to occupy the pit of your belly like a great, grotesque spider, and it begins to reach into your pitiful, defenseless limbs. And then, seemingly suddenly, it grows too big to permit you movement; you lock your doors and hide inside, where the world can’t see what a monstrous, self-pitying, self-feeding wretch you’ve become.

The end is a choice. You can choose to wrench the beast from yourself. But you’ve nurtured the carnivorous little pixel; you fed it and guided it about your body, and now it doesn’t occur to you that you can end its growth. You’re too used to it, to the arrow keys, to the comfort of hurting yourself. You don’t know how to do anything but feed your own self-doubt.

Covetous is terrifying and ugly. I really doubt Andrew meant his flippant answer to my question to be the trigger to a desperate self-evaluation, but now, having played it, I definitely see shades of myself in it. I wonder if I really do look this broken. I wonder if the self-doubt I’ve sought protection in is written right there, plainly, on my face.

And I wonder to myself, as I refresh the browser, what will happen if I try to fight it.

So I just got off a plane to this flood of tweets and messages and emails and urgh, I was already tired enough after spending fourteen hours watching old Futurama episodes with my kneecaps crushed against the chair in front of me. If you’re clueless as to why I might be on my blog instead of sleeping off the horrors of flying, I kind of wrote this article about PR sexism at E3 and it got a little attention. If you’re here for precisely that reason, cool! I want to address a few of the things that keep coming up in various comments, forums, tweets, and probably also hastily scribbled notes attached to the legs of the angry carrier-pigeons that will be arriving at my house in a couple of weeks.

Why didn’t you STAND UP FOR YOURSELF?

This is pretty much the most common negative response, and in hindsight, I wish I’d addressed it. I certainly thought of addressing it; what I didn’t think at the time was that it was apparently necessary. We already know well that women often don’t speak up. We should even know why – this article on “gaslighting”, which the entire internet read and linked and ranted about last year, illuminates the issue exquisitely.

In the first year of my games degree, I learned quickly to stay quiet in the face of male-heavy classrooms. I was never welcome; one guy said that this was a degree for hardcore gamers, and that I didn’t belong here, obviously being a player of the Sims or Farmville. In one of my very first classes, a guy raised his hand and said to the female tutor: “Hey, can we get a guy teaching this class?” I was always last choice for group projects, because nobody ever assumed a girl could know anything about games. Things got thornier when I tried to protest their stupid opinions of women’s abilities to play, develop, or analyse games. My gender was always used against me to shoot me down. “Nobody else has a problem,” they would respond. “Is it that time of month?” “You’re overreacting.” “You have an opinion, that’s so cute. Now get back in the kitchen.” From even more obnoxious classmates: “God, you’re a crazy bitch.”

It’s not pleasant to be the target of such language, and hearing it in such great volume – just for challenging a bunch of guys’ uninformed views – was exhausting in a way most can never fathom. Finally, worn down, I learned to say nothing.

But I also learned, in my final year at university, that writing was a fantastic release for me. It allowed me to finally enjoy games as much as any of my classmates did – in a far more productive way, and in what has generally been a much more supportive environment. My way of saying “fuck you” to the idiots of my uni was to advance in a field they didn’t believe I was capable of penetrating; to develop a career many of them only wished they could be a part of.

So the accusations of not “standing up for myself”, and the associated implication that what happened at that particular booth was somehow my fault, are both bemusing and frustrating for me. When you’re treated like that for years, it becomes really fucking exhausting to keep trying to speak up. You give up; you find other ways of dealing with the issue.

So what was my Kotaku post, if not retroactively standing up for myself to much greater effect?

Your little story means NOTHING unless you name and shame the guy!

For one thing, I don’t think the guy in question deserves to lose his job or be targeted by an internet mob. When these problems have been going on so long, I wouldn’t blame him for not realising that his behaviour wasn’t right. And following the embarrassment gamers made of themselves for the Ocean Marketing thing, I really don’t want to orchestrate another lynching.

For another – and I’ve said this several times and am getting quite tired of repeating it – this isn’t about the one goddamn guy. He’s indicative of a problem that’s deeply rooted in the industry itself. Naming him is treating the symptom of a disease, not the cause. We could all go and make his life hell with threats on the lives of his wife and kids and pet ferrets and whatever, but in two weeks things would be exactly the same as they were before. We would believe that the problem had been taken care of, leaving one guy bruised and broken while the true disease continues to manifest in the industry.

I think my refusing to name him is making people feel uncomfortable, because it prevents them from just blaming one person, destroying him, and then sweeping his remains under the rug. I mean, sure, I hope the PR rep in question has read my article and realises that what he did was wrong. I also hope that many, many others in the industry are also taking note.

And as a side note, I also don’t appreciate a fellow games journalist’s assertion that I am fearful of being blacklisted by the publisher in question. I mean, I’m not much of a reviewer; I have never done this for FREE GAEMZ, and the insinuation I’d care about that is a little insulting. If blacklisting is even a possibility, then I’d say that’s actually worth exploring as a real example of games journalism being broken – demanding that I name names is dodging the issue I’ve raised, and that in itself is pretty broken.

Fyi, everybody who visited booth X/played Y game was treated the same way as you.

That’s a real cute way of downplaying the issue. Nobody knows which booth this happened at, or what the game was. I’d also like to highlight a line in the article that everyone apparently missed: I looked down the booth and saw gamers at the other computers playing their own games, their own hands controlling the avatars.

At the time I visited, I was certainly the only one it happened to.

I’m a woman and it didn’t happen to me.

This kind of response has been incredibly disturbing to me. Besides belittling what I experienced, it’s also frustrating, because I kind of semi-understand the sentiment behind it. If this one chick comes out and complains about sexism, are people going to think all girls in gaming are like that? Gosh, how embarrassing for the rest of us.

I have trouble believing the problem was as isolated as many seem to be implying. Not when we still have Hitman trailers, not when ladies are still harassed online for the crime of having vaguely girly screennames. Maybe the specific PR problem didn’t happen to you. Maybe every one of the hundreds of people you met at E3 was unquestionably polite, and maybe not a single male attendee attempted to hit on you or check out your ass while you weren’t looking.

You might be incredibly lucky: none of it may have happened to you. But if it happened to someone else, it is still a problem.

Read that piece of yours for Kotaku. Katie, you’re better than Kotaku. They’re the Herald Sun of gamer news. You can do better.

This is a Facebook message from one of the aforementioned guys I went to uni with – and unfriended – years ago. I have literally no response to this. I’m just pasting this here because I actually find it incredibly hilarious, and I really need the laughs. I couldn’t think of a better place for my article to have ended up but at Kotaku – I’m proud it’s generated so much discussion, and has affected as many people as it has.

I’m going to turn comments off on this post, as I don’t particularly want to have to stay up all night, jet-lagged, moderating things on my personal blog. I hope the above has cleared some things up for people. If you’d like to discuss anything, email or tweet at me.

I’m in Menethil Harbour. I’m fishing. It’s many hours past sundown, the dusky blue sky reflecting on the ocean, reflecting the shadows outside my bedroom window. The cataclysm is yet to rend this quiet harbour town, plunging its inhabitants and half its buildings beneath water. No one here knows their fate. I am yet to know mine.

I am a pretty night elf with a trademark bob of teal hair. I’m a rogue, a sneaky little slip of a thing with a mean temper.

And I’m standing on the docks, fishing.

I’m not sure why; I hate fishing, and I don’t think this harbour provides any of the kind of fish I particularly need at this time. Ships with full, golden sails arrive occasionally at the far pier, collecting or depositing passengers before they leave once again. I stand here, plucking fish off my line every now and then, for about fifteen minutes before another boat comes in from the city of Stormwind, dropping off a lone occupant.

Unlike the other travellers, he does not instantly summon a mount and race out of town. This little dwarf warrior, in the mid level 20s, is dressed in the drab kind of gear that signifies he’s new, if not to this game then at least to this realm. He’s American, I presume, given that most Australians like myself are asleep at this time. He doesn’t seem to own a mount yet; he jogs over to me on foot.

But before he even approaches I know what he’s going to ask. I sigh inwardly.

“hey” he says to me out loud, his imagined voice the only text in my otherwise empty chat box, the only sound in this town save the occasional bell of an arriving ship.

“Hi,” I venture, monosyllabically and noncommittally, waiting for him to make his request.

It takes a few seconds; I imagine him stabbing at his keyboard with two index fingers. “do u know how to get to arathi?”

“Leave this town, stick to the path, and follow it left when it forks,” I reply promptly. I reel in another fish, and I hope that the dwarf doesn’t need further explanation.

“k thanks” he says.

He’s about to leave, but I know he’s not done yet. And I’m right. He has another request.

“can u take me there?”

I feel myself physically bristling at this. I’m at the level cap, dressed in sleek, colourful gear attained from the current raid instances, and I am busy fishing, dammit. At this time, I’m one of the few people in the realm to own a two-seater motorbike, but I only allow friends to sit in its side-carriage. Not anyone like this lowbie. What makes him think I am going to make the time to ferry a stranger across half the continent? Why do lowbies, with their poor typing skills and irritating abbreviations, always feel entitled to ask favours of high-levelled players? I gave him directions – was that not enough?

So I simply say, “No.” And to prove how busy I am, I cast another line into the sea.

“k” he says passively, turning to leave.

He’s not far when he seems to change his mind yet again. I brace myself for another inane question, another unwarranted request for a favour.

But after hovering at my side a moment, instead of saying another word, he drops a small wooden chest, out of which springs a mirror ball that sways to and fro, casting small spinning shards of reflected light across the pier’s haphazard wooden planks. The night sky lights up in a kaleidoscope of colour; fast-paced music featuring the laughter of gnomes plays, and in a wondrous daze, I click on the ball to see what will happen. My rogue abandons her fishing rod and begins to dance.

And with that, the dwarf is off, out of sight and running out of town.

I later learn that what he has deployed is a D.I.S.C.O. Ball, a rare item presumably used to raise the spirits of jaded, impatient, high-level raiders.

As I find myself grinning at the absurdity of this mirror ball, I feel something in myself soften. It’s just me and the mirror ball here on this dock, and though it’s the middle of the night in both of my existences, my world is alight. I feel awful.

Thinking of that little dwarf navigating the Wetlands outside town by himself, I remember the first time I came to this harbour as a baby rogue. My brother, a rogue far more competent than I at the time, had been the one to protect me from the Wetlands’ crocodiles. I might have quit without his help, given up. Though the game has been nerfed and gone through numerous changes since, I wonder if I have just sent this little dwarf to his death.

Quickly, I type his name into my chatbox. “Wait,” I whisper to him desperately. “Do you still need me?”

“nahh” he says. “i’ll figure it out.”

“Well…” I say finally. “Let me know if you ever do need help.”

“k.”

The following morning, unable to stop thinking of the dwarf or his mirror ball, I add him to my contact list. The next time I see him online I message him immediately to ask how he’s doing, and to offer him a hand if it needs it.

He is as short with me and I was with him upon our first meeting. He politely declines my offers of help. We stop talking. I instead observe him through my contact list as he levels over the next few weeks, making it to the 60s before he stops logging on altogether. I never see him again after that.

He was right. He didn’t need me.

The game didn’t need people like me.