Danzig

5 posts

The GAMBIT Project, and The Gaming Community’s Minority Problem

Kotaku recently published an Owen Good editorial in response to a recent study conducted by the GAMBIT gaming research center at MIT that explored the legendary capacity of anonymous gamers to utilize hate speech in play and on internet forums.

At first I thought the article’s title – “Is This Studying Hate Speech, Or Just Intellectualized Trolling” – might have been one of Gawker Media’s signature pageview-grabbing titles, but upon reading the text I found several things that I felt compelled to address. Normally I’d just leave a comment, but their system seems to be on the fritz again, and besides, I feel as though my thoughts on this are numerous enough to compile a full retort, blog-style, and this is as good of a place to provide that as any.

I should preface all of this by providing my “credentials”. I am in what is often considered the core demographic of the gaming industry – a white, nerdy male in his mid-20’s pursuing undergraduate degree. I have loved video games (particularly those of the role-playing variety) for as long as I can remember. My favorite game is the original Fallout (for some wizened veterans of the gaming community, that might serve as a dog whistle warning), which I received for Christmas as an 11-year old in 1997.

I think a lot about games, about their design, about what makes them fun and their potential for real brilliance. But I have some beef with gamers and the gaming industry – I’m skeptical of the notion of games as legitimate art and I find myself at odds with the culture in general and its activist strains in particular. So it’s no small wonder that I get my hackles up over pieces of gaming journalism such as this one.

The GAMBIT study involved creating and registering gamer profiles with the names PROUD_2B_MUSLIM, GayPride90 and Black_N_Proud90, and playing Halo: Reach online with random players (for those who don’t know, the use of hate speech in gaming is usually associated with the proliferation of console multi-player gaming via the original Halo). As you can probably guess, the players using those names suffered much verbal abuse directed towards the identities their names indicated they had. Not only that, in player vs. player combat those with the minority-identified names were more aggressively targeted.

Good’s analysis of this study is, to my mind at least, indicative of the ossified privilege that is endemic to gaming as an industry explicitly designed to serve the sensibilities of disgruntled white teenage boys. Good looks at the hate speech and aggressive play and concludes that the minority-identified players brought the abuse upon themselves. Good writes – “If you’re looking to be called the usual filth-flarn-flarn-filth-flarn, those are some awesome gamertags, well worth the 800 Microsoft Points change fees.”

Good’s insinuation, as per his title, is that GAMBIT is involved in “intellectualized trolling” here, but his use of the term “trolling” is both disingenuous and fundamentally incorrect. Trolling, as those who have spent even a small amount of time on internet message boards will tell you, is a sort of forum sport in which a member posts something for the sole purpose of causing arguments and strife within the topic or thread. By definition, trolling is provocation – it is done solely to elicit emotion and negative response.

Thus, what Good is really implying is that being a Muslim, or black, or a woman, or a gay person, and being open about that fact to others, is an open provocation in the gay community, that being a minority player is something that you inflict on other people. There’s no real scandal in being called a nigger or a fag or a cunt in a game, or being singled out for aggression based on your identity – it wouldn’t have happened had you kept it to yourself. The onus is on the abused to prevent abuse. This is, obviously, a repugnant view to hold to, but it’s one that seems to be held as widely agreeable within the gaming community.

It’s not just relegated to multi-player games, either. In recent months, gay panic in single-player RPG gaming has hit an all-time high. When Fallout: New Vegas came out there were a surprising number of people who were shocked, shocked to discover that a perk called “Confirmed Bachelor” unlocked in-game flirting with same-sex characters. As the game’s lead designer noted, players would only experience a majority of these encounters if they deliberately indicated that their character was interested in the same sex, via the perk choice. But this didn’t really address what I suspect is the core concern of the horrified gamers – that gay characters were visible in-game at all.

"Confirmed Bachelor"

Dragon Age 2 is another game that features a degree of sexual diversity within its game-world, and in the weeks since it came out there has been some fan uproar over “neglecting straight male gamers”. From a poster on the Bioware Social Forums, one of the skeeviest corners of the internet –

“every previous BioWare game, I always felt that almost every companion in the game was designed for the male gamer in mind. Every female love interest was always written as a male friend type support character. In Dragon Age 2, I felt like most of the companions were designed to appeal to other groups foremost, Anders and Fenris for gays and Aveline for women given the lack of strong women in games, and that for the straight male gamer, a secondary concern.

It makes things very awkward when your male companions keep making passes at you. The fact that a “No Homosexuality” option, which could have been easily implemented, is omitted just proves my point. I know there are some straight male gamers out there who did not mind it at and I respect that.

When I say BioWare neglected The Straight Male Gamer, I don’t mean that they ignored male gamers. The romance options, Isabella and Merrill, were clearly designed for the straight male gamers in mind. Unfortunately, those choices are what one would call “exotic” choices. They appeal to a subset of male gamers and while its true you can’t make a romance option everyone will love, with Isabella and Merrill it seems like they weren’t even going for an option most males will like. And the fact is, they could have. They had the resources to add another romance option, but instead chose to implement a gay romance with Anders.”

This sort of complaint actually  first started cropping up when the first Dragon Age game, which had a bisexual male character that the player could “romance”*. The character, Zevran, was widely disliked, and there were anecdotal reports of players killing the character at the first opportunity so that they never had to deal with him. There were also complaints about being pigeonholed into gay romances, but as in the case of New Vegas and Dragon Age 2 (which also received the same complaints), gay romances actually had to be entered into deliberately and could be stopped at any time (except for New Vegas, which had no romances at all).

It seems as though the very existence of gay characters (who just come out and say they are gay and act as gay without the player’s permission!) is fundamentally threatening to many gamers, in a sad sort of reflection of grade-school level homophobia (is there any other kind?), like homosexuality is some flesh-eating virus that you can’t even acknowledge for fear of infection. It’s as sad as it is revolting.

And all that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The problems faced by female gamers are as old as multi-player gaming – ask a woman who plays World of Warcraft what she plays as, and chances are good she’ll be a male character so that she can move through the game without people assuming (correctly) that she’s a woman and acting according to game standards.

As for race, well, going back to Dragon Age 2, the third most popular fan-made modification for the game in its unofficial mod database is a reskin mod for Isabela, a dark-skinned romanceable character, that gives her fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. All told it’s been downloaded about 13,000 times as of this writing.

In his closing line, Good asks what the point of even talking about all of this is. “…if this kind of behavior is already known and largely assumed to be the norm,” he asks, “what is the application of this information?”

My reply is this: As represented by Kotaku and countless other gaming blogs out there, gamers have a pretty massive chip on their collective shoulder. They feel unfairly maligned, scrutinized, and persecuted. They feel stereotyped and disparaged (ironic, that). They hate being dismissed as ignorant, piggish college boys with no taste or intellectual merit, they feel like what they love is an art form, legitimate and worthy of respect. They want to be taken seriously.

The only way that the gaming community will ever receive respect (or be worthy of it, even) is by taking responsibility for itself, and that includes the ugly elements within the community. This sort of harassment and bigotry has no place in any other collective passion, why should it be accepted in gaming? The odd fatalism on display in Good’s editorial (“this kind of behavior is already known and largely assumed to be the norm”) is a tacit admission that a) Racism / Homophobia / Misogyny are acceptable as they are in gaming culture and b) there is nothing to be done about them. If these things are not worth paying attention to, how can they be worth addressing?

I think that taking ownership of these things is something that is actually possible, but given that a bigotry-supporting, victim-blaming opinion piece such as this one can be received with fanfare from one of the most prominent advocates of gaming culture on the internet, chances aren’t good. I honestly doubt the community is willing to commit. My only real hope is that diversity in games will be continue to grow, and that anxiety over it will abate. But that’s a slim hope. In the meantime, I’ve gone back to not reading Kotaku.

 

*And before you get the impression that Bioware is some vitally progressive company, they’ve refused to include queer male characters in their Mass Effect series, citing their “inappropriate for PG-13″ nature”, although female player characters can romance an alien character that is, by all signifiers, culturally and physically, a woman. The alien race is mono-sexed, so it’s not really a lesbian relationship, you see. They have ruled out exclusively gay characters in their games (all non-straight characters are bisexual) citing a lack of market incentive. Progress!

Stray Tracks of the Week (2/28-3/4/11)

*This is also posted on my personal blog, which features pictures of a hairy, mostly naked man this week.*

I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday Saturday night, mods willin’.

*** This week saw the arrival of a few packages from Mimaroglu and Boomkat that I’d been expecting for some time, as well as the usual bumper crop of digital music. I’ve got an old track from 13 & God, new stuff from NWG (aka Niggas With Guitars), and a new compilation entry from Subeena.***

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13 & God – Von Gradleute (Hrvatski Remix) (from Men of Station / Soft Atlas on Anticon)

While researching a Keith Fullerton Whitman / Hrvatski split casette I invested in a few weeks ago, I came upon a happy discovery – a set of remixes that Whitman’s “breakcore” guise Hrvatski had created for the great Anticon supergroup 13 & God (a collaboration between “art rappers” Themselves and German art pop group The Notwist) – and I just had to have it. 13 & God was centrally important to my entry into indie music 6 or 7 years ago, when a friend of mine included their perfect pop song “Men Of Station” on a mixtape he sent me, and I fell in love. The prospect of Whitman (my favorite experimental composer) having his way with that song and others was too much to resist.

As a general rule, remixes (and album-length compendiums of them in particular) are a grab bag, as you’ll usually have so many different artists pulling the music in so many idiosyncratic directions that at best you’ll get a few remarkable edits among a number of inessential curiosities. The single format that the Men of Station / Soft Atlas release takes is a lot easier to handle, and it helps that it’s backloaded with the two Hrvatski remixes, one for each song. “Men of Station” was my favorite 13 & God effort, and much to my relief Whitman’s edit does not disappoint. The song’s central melodic motifs are wisely kept intact, and even augmented by swirling harp samples, as well as reverb and delay that are sorely lacking in the original, and Whitman’s frenetic jungle drum programming fits in better than it has any right to. I’m sort of perplexed it took me this long to figure out that this remix was out there – I can only imagine how ecstatic I would have been hearing this when I was first listening to 13 & God and Hrvatski.

Stream “Von Gradleute” on Soundcloud.

(I acquired “Men Of Station / Soft Atlas” on vinyl because I’m dumb like that, and if you’re dumb too KFW probably has a few more copies over at Mimaroglu, but normal people can find it on iTunes, along with the 13 & God full length. Their follow-up LP is due in the next few months, so that’s exciting.)

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Niggas With Guitars – Milky White (from Ethnic Frenzy on Digitalis Vinyl)

This was the other half of my 13 & God Mimaroglu shipment, one that I picked up on a whim based on chatter that I had heard from associate tape collectors I respected. I have no idea who these people are or why they felt like “Niggas With Guitars” would be a good name for their outfit, but their music is definitely interesting. The vinyl was so new when I got it that there was no indication of which side was which, so my naming convention might be way off.

“Milky White” (if that is indeed the name of the song) is either the second or fifth track on the 6-track album, and like all of NWG’s music that I’ve heard, it is quite disarming. It could, one imagines, fit nicely into some odder corner of the “chillwave” scene, steeped as it is in a certain sort of nostalgia – the lilting, gentle synth melodies and horn-like drones call to mind old nature film soundtracks or meditation music ripped from casette (fittingly, NWG kicked around the fringe music casette scene before landing this endorsement from the sterling Digitalis label). But more than anything else, it’s strongly reminiscent of the interlude music that Boards of Canada would insert between its more propulsive songs on their old albums. Lovely, if slight, music. Now if they could just do something about that name…

Listen to “Milky White” on Soundcloud.

(I purchased “Ethnic Frenzy” as soon as it hit Mimaroglu, and your best bet might be finding it there [it’s up there at the top] – if Discogs is to be believed, there are only 200 copies for the world, with the first run of 75 sold out at source. Better hurry!)

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Subeena – Miscalculate (from Super Volume 1 on Super Recordings)

I’ve waited for Italian producer Subeena to go “next level” popularity-wise for awhile now and it hasn’t happened, much to my chagrin. Of all the dubstep(ish) techno-leaning freshman producers to come out of the UK in the last few years, Subeena was by far my favorite, as her love of early Warp records sounds was something that I shared, and she spent some time in the Planet Mu roster, which I’ve always looked to for more forward-thinking trends in electronic music. Popularity’s kind of a relative thing in electronic circles but I’ve always felt like she didn’t get the sort of recognition her talent called for.

“Miscalculate”, which just popped up on her friend Raffertie’s Super Recordings compilation, doesn’t sound like it’s going to break that trend. Overall it takes after some of the more recent work she’s done for her own Opit label, which finds Subeena contributing vocals, and bringing a more rave-ish sensibility to the music. But I feel like this track in particular is a little too reminiscent of “Spectrum”, the b-side from her “Picture” single. Perhaps it’s just the fact that the track feels in general a little too much like a b-side (not that anyone should expect A-material to show up on label compilations, necessarily). The track is still fun enough, but in comparison to Subeena’s best work it doesn’t quite measure.

Stray Tracks of the Week (2/17-2/25/11)

*This post is also posted on The Pop Stalinist, my personal blog. There were a few reviews that didn’t make it over here this week.*

I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Thursday or Friday night, mods willin’.

This week was actually pretty light, with a lot of my listening time devoted to older Swans records and newer Angels of Light recordings, which I have dug up in light of an incredible show put on by the former that I attended in Denver this past week. These are musical supplements I’ve been taking. I put in entirely too much work last week resizing Youtube (and apparently it slows WordPress down) so I’m just linking to songs this time.

Antena – Camino del Sol (from Camino Del Sol on Le Disques du Crepsecule / Numero)

This is actually an old song, from a band I wasn’t even aware of until Numero re-released their 1982 Camino Del Solcompilation / mini-album on vinyl not too long ago. Antena was a French band originally signed to Le Disques du Crepsecule, a small Belgian indie that became notable for its close relationship with the Benelux subsidiary of Factory Records, who in large part birthed the “Madchester” scene from which Joy Division / New Order and many other notable post-punk bands emerged. Unfortunately for Antena, Manchester’s heat didn’t rub off on them (though Factory Benelux artists, such as A Certain Ratio, did meet with some success) and they and they became the sort of act that obscurity collectors raved about but few really remembered.

It’s somewhat sad to contemplate, given a track like “Camino Del Sol”. This is certainly a sort of pop music, albeit the sort of pop that goes ignored all too often. Antena’s stock-in-trade is tropicalia (or as Neil Tennant called it, “electro-samba”), which, as you might expect, translates into typically sunny moods, but Antena’s song (and most of the album from which it is culled) contains a remarkable melancholy largely attributable to Isabelle Powaga’s whisper-sung vocals and the (synth harpsichord?) chords that make up the melody, giving it an extra depth. In terms of production, it near-perfect, so good as to feel contemporary, with the electronic elements blending seamlessly in with the percussion and the vox. It feels like a lost classic, perfect for a warm Summer, or a Roger Moore Bond film. One wonders what more Antena would have produced had they received the attention they deserved.

“Camino Del Sol” on Youtube.

(Camino Del Sol is currently being sold in vinyl format on Boomkat, but if digital music is your thing I’ve only been able to find it on iTunes, which is weird!)

Hype Williams – Business Line (from One Nation, forthcoming on Hippos In Tanks)

I admit that I reacted poorly when “Witch House” became a thing. Beyond being unimpressed with Salem‘s inexplicably acclaimed minstrel act and wary of blog-defined microgenres (as opposed to, say, regionally defined ones), beyond the universally irritating use of wingdings in band names and cheaply acquired occult signifiers, as an industrial music fan I had a chip on my shoulder over Witch House’s debt to that venerable scene. Every booster of Witch House (some bloggers briefly tried to rebrand it as “Drag Music” when it was clear the “House” designation was an albatross) seemed to go on about how a given act (usually Salem) was creating totally unprecedented music – dark electronic music with a debt to hip hop. I felt this was clearly bullshit, and I was ready to write the whole thing off.

But as the bloom came off Witch House in the mainline indie press and the paremeters of the sound, which were always nebulous, started to expand beyond acts that had hit my shitlist almost immediately (Salem, Tri Angle records, and Creep, who will always and forever be that band who called their music “rapegaze”), it started to sound better. All it really needed was a de-emphasis of the Screw Musicinfluences and the tacky triangles-and-hoods bullshit. Hype Williams was more than willing to offer those things. It’s not entirely clear what their story is – it’s possible that they’re an anonymous collective, but the public face of the group, such as it is, is a duo, Inga Copeland and Dean Blunt, hailing from Russia and London respectively. Perhaps their distance from the States (and the general lack of hype from the usual blogroll suspects) made them better candidates to push Witch House forward, but whatever the case, their sound palette has proved quite diverse in the project’s short history.

“Businessline” is from their forthcoming LP debut on Hippos In Tanks, and what’s striking about it is how out-of-time it seems – It could certainly have come from the same 80?s VHS haze as “chillwave” did, but the winding synthline brings it forward to the 90?s as well, when Richard D. James was intermittently putting out demo-quality tracks that  brought a certain rough-hewn pop sensibility to IDM. It’s a short track, but its unmannered lightness stands in sharp contrast to the sort of contrived gloom that defined Witch House when it was born. If I had to wager I’d put money on Hype Williams being one of the few bands that survives and moves on when that house of cards collapses, assuming they’re anywhere near the premises when it happens.

“Businessline” on Youtube

(“One Nation” will be available from various retailers in just about a week’s time. In the meantime, you can download “Businessline” from XLR8R, for free.)

Solar Bears – Cub (Keep Shelly in Athens Remix) (Unreleased)

Solar Bears’ She Was Coloured In was one of my favorite LPs from last year (I think it ended up on #2 or #3 on my list) but “Cub” was probably the weakest track on the album. At first listen it sort of fits into the Geogaddi-era Boards of Canada sound that Solar Bears appeared to be tapping into when their music first hit the blogs. But on She Was Coloured In they showed a range of influences and capabilities beyond mere imitation of BoC (and there are far worse acts to hound). As it stood, “Cub” was an anemic sketch, really little more than a tasteful hippy guitar jam that goes nowhere over 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Worse than pastiche, it was bad pastiche.

Luckily for us, Keep Shelly In Athens (who I had never heard of before this) took to remixing duties on “Cub” and pushed the BoC era a bit forward, to The Campfire Headphase day, doubling the song’s length and adding all the dramatic bombast and sonic texture that the original lacked. I’d be remiss to say there wasn’t something a little bit off about the track – probably the fact that all the song’s emotion is front and center, on its sleeve, so to speak, and the meticulous production is sort of wasted on that bluntness. But it’s still head and shoulders above the original in terms of efficacy and quality.

“Cub (Keep Shelly In Athens Remix)” on Youtube.

(This remix isn’t on any official releases. XLR8R has it for free download, however, along with a surprising number of other Solar Bears tracks.)

 

Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, 1955-2010

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson

Peter Christopherson died today. He was a founding member of several seminal industrial / avant-garde groups of the 70’s and 80’s, including Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Coil.

If I were to choose just one band that I would be forced to listen to for all eternity, to the exclusion of all else, I would choose Coil. They started out making very harsh industrial music in the mid-80’s, influenced as they were by the AIDS epidemic that was killing so many of the band’s friends. Into the 90’s and ’00s the band started experimenting with acid house and neo-folk, and were heavily invested in a stark sort of dark ambience by the time of Jhonn Balance’s death and the dissolution of the band. I keep my set of Ape of Naples vinyl away from everything else on my mantle because it is something approaching a sacred object to me.

Everything that Sleazy participated in, from TG all the way up to Threshold Houseboys Choir (his de facto solo project), was brilliant, and his music was changing and evolving throughout his career. I was looking forward to more decades of beautiful music from Sleazy, but sadly he has been taken from us too soon. I haven’t been this devastated over the death of an artist since Jhonn Balance, the other half of Coil, fell from his balcony to his death in 2004.

I was meaning to send Sleazy an email — he apparently would respond in full to every fan email he receieved and have extended conversations with writers – but somehow I slept on that and now I’m obviously kicking myself pretty hard. RIP.

The Quietus has a brief remembrance from Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti here. No word as yet from Genesis P. Orridge, who left the reconstituted TG a few weeks ago.

Coil – Who\’ll Fall?