Response to Anita Sarkeesian’s TEDxWomen Talk

Anita Sarkeesian’s TEDxWomen talk about online harassment and cyber mobs describes her experience with harassment after starting a Kickstarter to fund a video series about the representation of women in video games. She tells her audience about the misogynistic hate campaign she endured and tries to imagine the social contexts and thought processes that could have driven her attackers to lash out at her as they did, comparing their hate campaign to a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO).

Given that she’s speaking at a TEDxWomen conference, Sarkeesian’s talk is likely intended for an audience outside gaming culture. She introduces an audience unfamiliar with video games to the culture surrounding them. Despite her focus on how misogyny and harassment are prevalent in gaming culture, Sarkeesian is optimistic and believes that over time the culture surrounding games will become more open to women. By giving her talk, Sarkeesian may have hoped to raise awareness of the problems with gaming culture. She may have even given a wake-up call to people who empathize with her harassers.

I appreciated Sarkeesian’s dissection of the “game” her harassers thought they were playing. It was interesting, although somewhat sickening, to look into how they were able to rationalize their behavior and encourage further harassment from some people in the gaming community.

It’s hard for me to connect Sarkeesian’s talk to my own experience because my experience with video games in very limited, aside from playing Mario Kart and the Sims with my siblings as a kid. On the other hand, my limited experience with video games is likely due at least in part to the problems in representation and acceptance of women in video games that Sarkeesian points out in her talk and her video series. The fact is that, for the most part, video games are not made for women and girls like me.

As we continue to discuss Gamergate and the representation of women in video games, I’d like to know more about games that do a good job of developing female characters and appealing to women. Are they becoming more prevalent? What do they look like? I think it would be interesting to look more into the change for the better that Sarkeesian believes we’re beginning to experience.