So, what have I learned in English 302?

Mostly, what I’ve learned is to be critical and not accept what’s given to me at face value. Whether it’s the programming of video games or the politics of the companies that run the websites we all use, I now have a more complicated view of how I engage with new media. It is, and always will be, important to interrogate and not just accept. That goes for all things in life–not just new media.

We function within a society in which everything is politically charged. There’s absolutely no way to cut out every company that is moderately evil and still have what’s considered a full life these days. A cell phone isn’t just a cell phone, and while you can choose the one that’d work best for you, it’s ultimately a product which is owned by a company which has done some pretty shady things. Everything online and in new media is the same way. As a responsible consumer–if such a thing can even exist–we need to be thinking about who owns what and what they’re doing with it. Unfortunately, the lesser evil is typically still pretty remarkably evil.

So, as someone who uses Google Drive for her word processor, I think about the implications of that. As someone who has an Amazon Prime account, I think about Amazon’s questionable business practices. As a Facebook user, as a Twitter user, as a Tumblr user, etc., etc., etc. As much as we may like to, these things are a part of our everyday lives. Unfortunately, if we want to continue to live in the ways that we do, we have no choice but to use them, with these major companies buying out and absorbing all the competition.
What do we do? Unplug and go live in caves? I’m kind of resistant to that idea. Everything we interact with, every corporation we buy from, has these skeletons in its closet. I may be part of the problem, but I haven’t quite reached the point where I’ve decided that the solution is the cave option–because if I stopped engaging with every shady corporation in America, I’d have little other options but the cave.

I’m a gay woman and I play video games. I don’t call myself a gamer, or a gaymer, or a girl gamer–not because I think any of those terms are in any way invalid, but because that is just a minefield I do not feel nearly equipped enough to navigate. Marginalized people who do? Kudos. Kudos kudos kudos. There aren’t enough in the world for you.

The gaming community is, to put it sensitively, terrifying. It looks a bit like if you took society and pressure cooked it until it exploded. Because as much as we’d love to say that these sorts of things–fandom communities or the gaming community or what have you–are separate beasts from society, they absolutely live within them. The gaming community is our social community. You have probably met somebody in The Real World™ who’s launched a gendered slur into the terrible void that is Zoe Quinn’s mentions on Twitter. It’d be great to look at the gaming community and say “at least the rest of society isn’t like that!”, but unfortunately, that’s just not how it works.

If society’s Dr. Frankenstein and the gaming community is his creation, well, they’re both monsters in the story.

Calling myself a gamer or by any other title is an inherently political move, being who I am. Calling myself a gamer is cause for an immediate interrogation into my credentials, skills, and even my identity and femininity. So, I’m a gay woman and I play video games. That’s as far as I’m willing to take it for now.

As a gay woman who plays video games, I have a complicated relationship with diversity and, specifically, how the industry seems to assume I want it. I’m gay, which means I like women, which means I want to see them sexualized, right? I’m basically just a straight guy but a woman. Except that’s just the thing–I’m a woman. I can’t speak for all queer women, but oddly enough, seeing women being reduced to sex objects just doesn’t do it for me as a woman attracted to women. There’s a fundamental disconnect between what straight men think queer women want–which is basically considered to be exactly what straight men would want, if it is considered at all–and what queer women do want.

Video games, then, become rather difficult to navigate. I love a game where I can play a queer character, but there’s the constant worry of gaze. When I’m playing a game like Mass Effect–my admitted game of choice–I have to be really careful in how I play it. If there is a relationship possibility between queer women, I have to worry about whether it’s going to be solely portrayed as titillating to the male gaze or a fully realized relationship. I have to worry about things like costuming, camera direction, changed dialogue, music, setting, acting… At any point there is the threat of a romance between queer women being framed as something for male consumption. My relationship as a queer woman gamer to these romances is secondary or negligible at best. I’m fortunate with Mass Effect: I find the main queer romance palatable. But it’s by far the exception, not the rule.
Interacting with gaming as a gay woman is complicated. I’d imagine that interacting with gaming as anyone other than a straight cis white man likely has similar complexities and challenges. Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to just shut my brain off and enjoy–and believe me, I would love that–it’s just patently impossible for me being who I am.

I could probably be considered an optimist when it comes to the online world, at least when taken into comparison to some of the doomsayers. I’m not the type of person to ring the alarms whenever studies come up saying “oh god, our kids are on Facebook more often than they kick a soccer ball” because, well, yeah, the world as we know it and how we interact with it is changing. I’m hesitant when it comes to labeling one thing as inherently good and another thing inherently evil. I’m more likely to label something as inherently complicated.

I grew up on the internet. My life online began when I was eight years old and found forums for one of my computer games–and so far has yet to see an end. And that may be where some of that optimism, perhaps sometimes idealism, comes from. I could not be more thrilled, then and now, to have more methods of communication available to me. As a kid, I was “shy”. As an adult, I see that for what it was and is: social anxiety. I hear a lot of people claiming that the internet makes kids socially awkward or irreparably damages their social skills. In my experience, it was the opposite. I had trouble with forming and maintaining social relationships long before the internet came into my life, and it was only through the relationships I made online that I was able to recognize what my behavior was and learn how to live with it. That isn’t everyone’s story, but it is mine.

So when I see clickbait titles talking about Facebook devaluing friendships or text messaging making teens more aloof or unempathetic, I’m typically a little skeptical. Sure, that could be true. Ask again in fifty years when the technology’s been around to prove it. I think there are bigger fish to fry than scaring parents into cutting off their kids’ access to their long distance relationships.

But here comes the inherently complicated part. Because as good as this sounds in a vacuum, we don’t live in one. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Apple, Amazon–all the companies that allow these things to be possible–are all inherently political, deeply flawed, and sometimes moderately terrifying organizations. They all exist as political entities. They all exist within a capitalist framework. As much as we talk about keeping the internet a free zone, of course it isn’t. Facebook doesn’t exist as some kind of utopian fantasyland designed to bring people together–it’s designed to make money. Platforms link advertisers to consumers. If all they did was link consumers to consumers, well, there’s a cannibalism joke in there but not much money.

Twitter is both an incredible revolutionary force and one which commodifies its users. Tumblr amuses and censors. Amazon sells and monopolizes. Facebook irritates and deprivatizes. The list goes on.

I love the internet. It could revolutionize communication as we know it. It could break boundaries, educate, and unite people from all over the globe.
I do not love the implicitly political space we have to navigate to use it.

Image source: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/insider/files/2014/11/social_media_strategy111.jpg