Anita Sarkeesian has been making videos critiquing media through a feminist lens for almost 15 years. Her website Feminist Frequency, a non-profit organisation that started as a med𝔍ia outlet and went on to promote diversity and raise awareness of sexism and discrimination in video games, will be shutting down in early 2024.
The news has been celebrated by GamerGaters everywhere, members of a movement that targeted women in the games industry in the mid-2010s in an attempt to stymie feminist criticism of games and prevent ‘political correctness’ from entering the medium. They doxxed female criti🍒cs and game developers, including Sarkeesian, and sent death threats and harassment to countless others.
GamerGate was a turning point in the gaming world, bringing to light the vicious misogyny faced by women in the space and how resistant gamers were to the hobby being anything but a boys’ club. That mentality persists to this day, despite the social progress that games criticism has seen as an industry. When I first applied for the job of Features Editor at TheGamer, it was made very clear to me that because of the platform I would have and the views I hold, I would likely be exposed to online harassment, at the minimum. I was prepared to take that on because I believe that good, inclusive, intersectional media criticism is crucial to the health of the games industry and the media industry as a whole. TheGamer is a place where I can write about the portrayal of🐭 mental illnesses in triple-A games, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:queer representation in Star Wars Jedi: Survivo🌸r, and the erasu🌳re of Freya’s feminine rage in God🔜 of War Ragnarok. This is, whether you like it or not, a consequence of Sarke🐼esian’s legacy.
The thing is, Sarkeesian was not saying anything particularly radical. From the start, Feminist Frequency was talking about the basics of feminist critique: the male gaze, sexual objectification, and different tropes that developers used with female characters instead of doing them justice with nuanced writing and deep characterisation. I didn’t agree with all her takes, but they introduced the most basic of feminist language into a space that was entirely resistant to it. The backlash she received then, and the backlash that people are facing now for praising her in the wake of the shuttering of Feminist Frequency, only proves that there is a l🐓oud population of gamers who are committed to misogyny and willful ignorance.
No woman should ever have been sent death threats for critically analysing the treatment ꦡof fictional women in video games, but that’s what happened. That was the world that Feminist Frequency was created to address. In an interview with Polygon, Sarkeesian said, “It was at the very beginning of video blogging and internet video. We were talking about representation very early on in a mainstream way. It wasn’t a popular thing to do outside of academia.” She continued, “And we did it. People paid attention, and people started caring aggressively.” Developers started to pay attention – Arkane Studios’ Harvey Smith spoke to her about the women in Dishonored, and made a deliberate effort from the DLC onward to put women in more interesting, nuanced roles. Naughty D📖og director Neil Drunkmann .
It is partly Sarkeesian’s influence on the industry that has brought us to a place where it is a norm for big gaming websites to publish incisive feminist critiques about video games. It is because feminism was brought to the industry that we can recognise the danger of being a 🍬woman at game confer♛ences, and highlight that the lack of women at ౠSummer Games Fest is part of a wider problemౠ in the industry. It is because of Feminist Frequency that๊ women began to feel they had as much of a right to video game discourse as men.
We may have finally moved beyond the need for Feminist Frequency and the base level of discussion it provokes, but we are far from beyond the need for feminism in the gaming space. Critics are still regularly attacked for having opinions that show any concern about societal ills, or for talking about misogyny or women in games, full stop. Bﷺut the fact that this is a norm at all already shows the impact of Sarkeesian’s legacy. We can never go back to what it was like before, and that is a good thing. We must only go forward.