I play video games, but I don’t consider myself a gamer. I suppose you could call me a de facto gamer, but I don’t feel a part of the gaming culture at all. I enjoy watching videos of people playing games, but I find the most popular mode of screaming and acting up as you play to be off-putting. I’ve watched a few of these YouTubers/Twitch streamers, but was immediately turned off. Not only was it difficult on my ears, the constant antics by the YouTuber/streamer hurt my eyes as well and detracted from the game actually being played. In addition, many of the top YouTubers/streamers are very bro-y, making dick jokes and slamming women every other minute. Let’s not even talk about Twitch chat, which is often a cesspool of grotesqueness. The best-known YouTuber is a man called PewDiePie who made his bones by yelling rape over and over in his videos. He has moved completely away from this, but the few minutes I’ve watched of his early videos is enough to make my black heart shrivel even further. I watched a few minutes of one of his newer videos, and he was mugging it up so much, I had to shut him off. When I was watching playthrough videos of the Bloodborne DLC, I had to expand my usual pool of YouTubers because they didn’t play it. Two of the guys I watched made rape jokes, and a third, in facing the only female boss of the DLC, kept snickering over how he was fisting her with his stake driver and how much she was loving it. I quit watching all three and haven’t gone back since.
Even the guys I like are, well, young white dudes. They’re more sensitive than the lot above, but by necessity, they’re limited in their points of view. I know if I’m watching their shows, I’m going to hear them talking about shit (literally), making dick jokes, and other dude topics that are of little interest to me. Even the ‘here we go, boys’ meme that has been circulating through Twitch streams is yet another reminder that I’m most emphatically not part of the crowd. It’s one reason I don’t watch any shows live or look at the chat; I prefer to watch the VOD with the chat window turned off. In addition, I could be many of these guys’ mother, which means I miss a lot due to the generation gap as well.
I’m not saying the culture shouldn’t be a young man’s culture; I’m just saying why I’ll never be a part of it. About a year ago, I tried to find a female YouTuber that I could enjoy, but most of them just weren’t very good–when I could find any at all. The one I did like suddenly made two rape jokes in one video (about the tenth one I’d watched from her), and I quit watching her then and there. I felt as if she bought into the idea that she needed to be edgy like the guys in order to get views, and I wanted no part of it. That’s the thing I’ve found with most of the successful female streamers–they mimic their male counterparts to some degree. They’re very careful not to complain about how difficult it is to be a woman and a streamer or the egregious sexism that often surrounds them. I once saw a show of four women, three of them streamers and the other moderating the conversation, and I was struck by how odd (and refreshing) it was to see four women talking about games. It’s almost always all dudes, and if not, three dudes and one chick. It’s never two and two, let alone four women. It was a very interesting conversation as they discussed the phenomenon of boob chicks. Yes, chicks who use their views to get clicks. These women said it was never enough and any woman who just did that would quickly fade away. And yet, one of them is known for showing off her boobs, and all three of the streamers were conventionally pretty. There are plenty of ugly, fat, and/or nondescript guys who stream, but I have yet to see a successful female streamer who’s not pretty. There is one female YouTuber I like who does Souls videos, and it’s because she’s very chill as she plays. She plays the way she wants to play, switching from melee to range whenever she feels like it. Her name is Kay Plays, and I highly recommend her.
I’ve joked that I’m going to start streaming, and it’s going to be me sitting on my couch with my cats. That’s it. Nothing else. I had more than one person tell me they’d pay to watch that, which was a little weird. Seriously, though, I’ve thought about streaming, but it wouldn’t work for so many reasons. One, I’m old. Yes, there are older streamers, but mostly doing family-friendly Minecraft videos and videos in a similar vein. I am definitely not family friendly, and playing Minecraft made me nauseous. Two, I mostly play Souls games, and I would never play them on stream. Why? Because Souls fans are fucking obnoxious. They believe there’s one way to play the game (their way), and they’re insistent in pointing out things the streamer has missed, even if the streamer explicitly says not to spoil anything. It gets so bad that some streamers have a ‘you spoil shit, you get banned’ policy in effect, which they have to defend time and time again. I know it happens with other games and their fan bases, but something about the Souls game draws this type to them like flies. I think it’s possible to have a good community if you set out firm rules from the start, but even then, I feel alienated for other reasons (mostly, because I’m old and not hep to what the kids are up to these days).
Another reason I wouldn’t stream is because I’m fat. Again, dudes can be fat and stream, but chicks? No. Not acceptable. Third reason, I’m too thin-skinned to deal with the bullshit of the chat. Like I said, you can set rules, but you need moderators who are quick to deal with the shit. Also, I’m Asian. Surprise, right? That would open up a whole nother can of worms. Mostly, though, it’s because it would ruin games for me. If I were playing a game on stream, I would feel obligated to play at a brisk pace so people watching won’t get bored. Plus, talking the whole time would be nearly impossible, especially with a Souls game.
Anyway, back to the bro culture surrounding video games. It’s not surprising that this relatively new industry is so dude-heavy, but it’s discouraging. What’s even more discouraging is that there’s barely a blip of a conversation about it, at least from what I’ve seen. Games themselves are slowly, agonizingly, becoming more diverse. And, even though it’s taking time, there is at least that discussion. I remember when The Witcher 3 came out, and there was an outcry because it’s so overwhelmingly white. It was made by CD Projekt Red who are Polish, so obviously, race is seen differently there than here. I was sympathetic to the complaints, but I also understood where they were coming from, too. Personally, I want more diversity in games, but I don’t want to mandate it, either. I played The Witcher 3 and really enjoyed it until the very end, but that was mostly fatigue. I put nearly a hundred hours into it in a fairly short amount of time as is my wont, so it’s not surprising I got weary near the end. In addition, there was a bullshit maze mission that had me in tears because I have a horrid sense of direction and couldn’t make my way out of it. To make matters worse, the woman who accompanied me in vanished so I had to make my way out on my own. I got turned around more times than I care to admit, and if it hadn’t been part of the main mission, I would have quit and loaded a previous save.
One thing I noticed as I played as Geralt of Rivia*, however, was that all the women he talked to were comely lasses and that most of them had a thing for him. I met one of them as she was taking a bath, so full tits were on display. I am not anti-boob. Indeed, I am very pro-boob, but it felt gratuitous. The two main love interests are the good girl (Triss) and the bad girl (Yennefer) personified. The former is a red-headed girl-next-door type with a very perky American voice, and the latter is a dark-haired brooding emo type who growled and snarled at Geralt almost constantly. I chose Triss over Yen, but I really didn’t care for either. I also lifted an eyebrow when I ran into a black woman who was a literal succubus. Let that sink in. The only non-Caucasian woman of note was a succubus. Ouch. The male NPC were allowed to be varied in size, shape and looks, but most of the female NPC were thin, but buxom with chocolate box pretty features. There are two women in the game that I really liked. One is Ciri, Geralt’s adopted daughter, who is a badass of her own, but she’s also stereotypically thin and pretty. I did like that she was either bisexual or a lesbian, and she wasn’t just an auxiliary to Geralt. The other woman was Cerys an Craite on the island of Skellige. She’s one of the two people (the other is her brother) vying to be the ruler of the island. By The Witcher 3 standard, she was heavy (though she really wasn’t. She was normal-sized and only seemed hearty in comparison to the other women) and she had a wicked scar bisecting her cheek because she was a Viking, damn it, er, a Skellige woman!
Still, my irritation about this aspect of the game was muted because the rest of the world was so richly realized. The Witcher 3 has one of the best mission storylines I’ve ever seen in a video game in The Bloody Baron. I was very satisfied with the ending I got, and I was happy to put it in the done column. I looked forward to the DLC, and by the time Hearts of Stone came out, I was ready to plunge into the world of Geralt of Rivia once again. I hated it so much. I hated it as much as I enjoyed the base game for so many reasons. The skills I so painstakingly built up in the base game meant nothing in the DLC. Also, Ciri isn’t in the DLC, which immediately cut down on my interest. Thirdly, the love interest aspect was boring as fuck. Fourthly, there was a major event that should have been a turning point in the story, and yet, it ended up not mattering at all. And, lastly, the reason that is pertinent to this post–the brothers who are the main….antagonists for lack of a more precise word are total fucking assholes. They are misogynistic and cruel and completely irredeemable. They are psychopaths which is a personal pet peeve of mine, and I had no interest in spending any time with them. I know the argument is that these type of men exist, but so what? The aforementioned baron was a loathsome man, but he had some humanity to him that made him seem like a real person. In contrast, the two brothers are cartoon villains with no interesting dimensions to them, and I hated every second I spent with them. One of them is a ghost, and at one point, he insists on inhabiting Geralt so he can ‘feel’ what’s going on. I had so many problems with that (issues of consent), and even though the developers played it for laughs, it was deeply repugnant to me.
My point is, in all the reviews I read about the DLC, none of them brought up any of the gender issues. Most of the reviews I read were by men. I’m not saying that a female reviewer would have had an issue with the things that bothered me, but they would have been more likely to at least have noticed it. That’s the thing with having a homogeneous culture–it’s too easy to not see shit like this because it’s the norm in your culture. But, just because it’s the norm, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. I’d also like to say that I don’t think the culture needs to change just to make me feel less alienated; it just makes me sad that something I enjoy (video games) is not very welcoming to me. I will still play the games I enjoy and watch streamers I like; I’ll just know it’s not really meant for me.
*One of my video game boos.