I wanted to say that the class wasn’t really what I was expecting, but then I realized that I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting. I learned about it because someone in the CS department sent out an email about it and it seemed interesting. One of the reasons I minored in Anthropology was because my CS classes were always so devoid of any social discussion or politics, and I needed something that focused more on people. This class seemed like it would be more a combination of social issues and computing, so I took it. And in some ways it was, although I was a little disappointed by the lack of understanding of technology that most of the people in the class had (there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that it would have allowed for more in depth understanding and discussion of things like privacy and games, which are influenced heavily by their underlying systems). I’ve been exposed to internet cultures my entire life, and I’ve become deeply entrenched in many of them over the years (I spend an unhealthy amount of time online). It was interesting to talk about things like games, which I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing and critiquing, in class and hear what everyone else thought about them. I’ve been familiar with many of the topics in the class for a long time, and it was nice to be able to think and talk about them in an academic setting.

The topic I was probably least familiar with was web series, which my team worked on. I enjoyed finding and watching different series as research, I had no idea how many were out there and the range of topics they covered. I’ll definitely watch more of some of the ones we looked and, and look for more good ones. Most of the content on mainstream shows is just really boring to me at this point, if there are no lesbians I probably don’t care. So it’s good to have a source of series that in a lot of ways are breaking away from mainstream tropes and standards and creating wonderful original things.

Working in teams was something that I’d done before in at least one CS class, but this was a somewhat different context. It was frustrating that some of the people we tried to interview worked out badly, and it was harder to work on the final project with what little of the interviews we did have. There were also a few technical problems (the trial version of the skype recorder, Adobe Premier save files not being backwards compatible) but we managed to get everything done. Despite the problems with the interviews, I really enjoyed hearing what the interviewees had to say about what they were doing, it’s always great to watch someone passionate about something talk about it. I initially reached out to Amber Jones and watched a significant portion of the show that she was on, Between Women, so I was disappointed that I could only see 5 minutes of her interview, but it was good to see just that and I’m glad it went well.

I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription this year. I’m not sure how much the class had to do with it, but it certainly did remind me to do what I’d been meaning to for a while. I first started to see through Amazon’s shiny and brightly painted facade when I read the 2014 Salon article detailing a few of the numerous abuses of employees in Amazon’s enormous warehouses. Some of them include constantly increasing the expected output of workers, making them wait in line for 10 minutes of their 30 minute lunch break for a security check to make sure they aren’t stealing anything, firing them if they cry on the job, and refusing to open loading doors on days where it got so hot inside the warehouse that workers were collapsing because they were afraid the workers would steal something (they had ambulances stationed outside all day on a few days, and gave the workers “cooling headbands” after over a month of this). But it’s almost difficult not to buy anything from Amazon, they have good prices and fast shipping, although it’s all supported by the backs of exploited workers. It’s similar to Walmart in that it’s a good place to shop if you don’t have very much money, but everything costs so little because the entire process makes workers do absurd amounts of work for very little money and no benefits. Learning about all of this and becoming more and more anti-capitalist made me want to cancel prime, but I didn’t for a while, partly because I thought I would lose the remaining part of the year I paid for, and partly because it was convenient. Which was selfish. But I also didn’t buy enough to justify spending that much on being able to buy more stuff and get it shipped to me quickly.

In the Amazon team’s presentation, the Amazon employee said that Amazon coming to the school was mostly just to breed a new generation of Amazon prime customers, and he was right. Amazon already has the student program, in which anyone with an edu email can get prime free for 6 months, after which they get a discount on the service. This was how I started with it, it seemed like a good idea, I could get free 2 day shipping on my textbooks and whatever else I ordered. Then when the free period was up I was like, well, it’s been convenient to get things so quickly, and it’s discounted now, I can justify that. Giving the whole campus free one day shipping automatically means that they’re getting so many more potential customers, and I’m certain that students will welcome it. Because people like fast shipping, it’s nice, and sometimes you just need things fairly quickly but not quickly enough to go to through the time and effort to get up and go to a store. But I don’t think students will really be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes to give them that free one day shipping, and a lot of them probably don’t really care. And if people can’t see how harmful something is but benefit from it, they generally won’t go to much effort to stop what they’re doing or fix it. Besides the exploited workers at Amazon’s warehouses, many of the goods they sell are made from raw materials gathered by slaves in the global south, and manufactured by much more exploited and underpaid workers in China or Mexico. All of modern society is built on the backs of slaves and abused workers, and for the most part, people don’t really care. We like having our shiny new computers every year or two with coltan mined by Congolese slaves inside them, constructed by Chinese workers in buildings with suicide nets. The problems are easy to ignore, so we do. Being able to look at a picture of something and buy it, then have it show up in a locker a day later without ever having to interact with another human just puts one more layer of abstraction between us and the consumer goods we rely on, and makes it even easier to forget that they don’t just pop out fully formed from the void.

I touched on some of these thing briefly in a previous post but wanted to expand on them. In D. Fox Harrell’s talk at Amherst, he talked about how the underlying systems that programs use to store information carry a social bias. As a computer scientist and trans person it was an engaging talk and something that I had given some thought to in the past. His Mii example was interesting because when he showed the code (I’m not sure it was the actual code, but I’ll assume it is) there was a boolean, isGirl, that determined the Mii’s gender. They not only imposed a gender binary just by using a boolean, they also made male the default state, with isGirl as a modifier to the default. Since I’m nonbinary it’s often frustrating to have to deal with gender binaries in bureaucratic documents, but when it’s shoved into what’s supposed to be entertainment it’s just disheartening. What’s worse is that in games with characters you can create, strictly enforcing a gender binary is actually more difficult for developers. In a character creator, gender is always one of the first things you choose, and then all the other options from there are restricted. Male characters can’t have boobs, use “female” hair styles, wear makeup, and female characters can’t be muscular, or have body hair. Each one of these restrictions has to be specifically written into the code, and often completely separate base body templates are created for men and women, instead of just having one that can be modified in any way. Clothing must also be specifically coded to be either for men or women. When there are 50 sliders for eyebrow shape, why isn’t it possible to make a muscular character with boobs? Of course, not every game is like this, Dark Souls has a binary gender choice, but then has a “hormone” slider to make the character either more feminine or masculine, Sunset Overdrive lets any character wear any piece of clothing, but they’re exceptions. Pronouns are also not difficult to add into the code. If you have the option to use either “he” or “she” in dialogue (assuming it isn’t voice acted), then it’s trivial to have a longer list of pronouns or just have the player type in whatever they use.

For NPCs or player characters in games where you don’t create your character, it’s easy to make them trans too. There are tons of trans developers and writers who are making games and would love for someone to pay them to make games. But they don’t get hired, because of hiring discrimination and a lack of people who think they need trans characters in games. But this is vitally important. Trans people commit suicide and get murdered at a hugely disproportionate rate, and a lack of representation is one cause of this, especially suicides. When the only way you’re portrayed in media is as disgusting and dirty or as a joke, that’s not something that’s going to make you feel like you want to exist. Almost every single trans person that I’ve talked to (myself included) has said that one of the main things that helped them come out to themselves was listening and talking to other trans people online and realizing that being trans is a thing that real people can do. All the mainstream media depictions of trans people (which are pretty much exclusively created by cis people) are so completely off the mark and alien to actual trans people that we don’t even realize we exist until we come into contact with anyone else. Genuine media depictions of trans people will not only get some cis people to recognize that our lives have value and aren’t as sensational as on Jerry Springer, but they will help trans youth who feel alone and trapped know that they exist and give them at least one small place they can see themselves in and feel accepted.

Before this class I only had a vague idea of what web series were. My partner had shown me The Guild years ago, and I watched Bee and Puppycat and Baman Piderman, but I didn’t really know how web series were defined or how many there really were. An article I read a while ago about Bee and Puppycat talked about how when it was originally pitched to the youtube channel that it’s on, the male founder rejected it, until he showed it to his wife. Cartoons are generally targeted towards young teen boys, and an animated show for girls, never mind older teen ones, is something that doesn’t really exist much, and certainly not on TV. Steven Universe, which came out towards the end of 2013, was the first show on Cartoon Network that was created by a woman, although the main character is still a boy. Both Bee and Puppycat and Steven Universe have large fanbases of late teens, early 20s women, and they’re meant to be accessible to anyone. Although a handful of these semi-mainstream cartoons are now being made by women, it’s still entirely white women, though both of these shows include PoC and queer people (many of the characters and voice actors for SU are WoC). But Bee and Puppycat, along with other animated web series, is different from live action ones. Animation is typically more expensive, it takes more time and therefore requires teams of animators to get episodes out quickly. It is possible to have small teams or a single person working on a few minute long animation, but then it takes months between episodes, and even longer if it’s not their job. Both Bee and Puppycat and Baman Piderman are on channels that publish multiple webseries, and are funded through the ad revenue, but I’m not certain about how much of that money goes to creators. These two shows have both run kickstarters, for Bee and Puppycat it was to fund the series after the pilot was successful, and for Baman Piderman it was after 23 episodes over two seasons, when they lost funding before they could finish the last 5. To give you a sense of the cost, Bee and Puppycat asked for $600,000 and got $872,000, and Baman Piderman asked for $50,000 and raised $112,000, and neither of these are huge productions (episodes are around 6 minutes long, Baman Piderman only has 2 people working on it). I’m not aware of any animated web series that have a very small amount of funding the way many live action web series do, but I’m sure they exist. There are some animators on YouTube who release videos on their own periodically, but they’re generally not in series, and most of those people at least have patreons. In general it’s much harder to break into the animated web series scene than it is to get into the live action one, because animation takes so much more time, it’s hard to create videos quickly without getting paid to work on them full time, and you can’t really get paid unless you have a publisher or a preexisting fanbase. So while the barriers are higher, they’re still much lower than mainstream studio productions, and that means a wider range of animated content and creators can make cartoons and get paid for it, which is a great thing.

From Dys4ia, by Anna Anthropy

I’ve been playing games since I was 6, and since then, have spent a far larger portion of my life than is probably physically healthy clicking things on a screen. But I don’t identify as a gamer, and just hearing the word usually makes me cringe. It’s not because I don’t think I qualify or because I want to avoid the nerd connotations (although that term makes me cringe at least as much as gamer, I probably spend more time watching anime than I do talking to people I don’t live with). The main reason is because of all the baggage that’s attached to the word for me, and because of my experiences with gamers and gamer culture. Growing up as a white boy in crushingly straight, white suburbia, I developed a host of terrible ideas, not only about society and other people, but also about myself. I spent most of my free time playing games with a group of boys at my school, who thought it was cool and fun to constantly use slurs and ~ironic~ sexism/racism/homophobia. These were gamers, and I was a gamer.

Once I got to college and started learning that hey, maybe it’s actually really fucked up to be in a position of power and use oppressive rhetoric “ironically” because you think it’s funny. I started distancing myself from those guys, and started playing games less. I still played them quite a bit, but online games just aren’t as much fun if you don’t have someone to talk to and play with. Then a while after that I realized I wasn’t actually a boy, which made my relationship to games even more complicated. Even though for as long as I can remember I’d been choosing the girl option if a game gave it to me, there were still tons of games where I could only play as a boy. And like, it’s not exactly comfortable to play a role that you just worked so hard to get yourself out of. Never mind that authentic stories about women in games are practically nonexistent in games, the number of stories about cis women looks almost overwhelming if you compare it to the number of games about trans women. Nah, we’re just the sex workers provided for the player to murder in GTA (keep in mind that black trans women doing sex work on the streets make up a huge portion of the percentages of assaulted and murdered queer people) and the justification for hitting women (Poison from Final Fight was designated trans because devs were concerned about allowing the character to beat women in the game, and of course trans women don’t count).

The problems with games aren’t limited to representation. The industry has been stagnant for years, and thanks to capitalism loving AAA studios, it’s not going to change until there’s another crash. Stories are usually just tacked on, and if they’re not, they’re rarely engaging, interesting, or relatable. Gameplay has been standardized to the point where every FPS feels identical, except for maybe one or two gimmicks that get stale after a few hours. MOBAs sometimes have slightly different formats. Platformers have been rehashed to death. The mainstream games industry pumps out maybe a couple good, somewhat original games every year, but for the most part it’s just not worth the $60 for the latest big hit spending millions of dollars in advertising to try to convince you that it’s good. The indie scene isn’t too much better. Most indie devs still need huge amounts of money to make their unoriginal projects. What both of them also have in common is that pretty much everyone involved is a cishet white boy. But obviously it’s not just cishet white boys making games, PoC make games, queers make games, women make games. But marginalized people rarely have millions of dollars to develop a game (the going rate for a AAA is $20,000,000), never mind millions for advertising it. It’s also difficult to learn the prerequisite programming skills without higher education (although a seemingly disproportionate number of trans girls are programmers). There are tools like twine, an engine for creating dynamic text games, which has become very popular among marginalized people to create games in, because it allows them to create accurate representations and stories about people that are like them. More marginalized people are starting to create their own games, and just giving up completely on an industry that wants nothing to do with us and doesn’t seem to have any intention of changing. And that’s an incredibly powerful thing. It wears down on you when you can’t relate to anyone in any of the media you’re exposed to. Telling our stories and being able to shape our own narratives helps others see that it’s possible, and it gives everyone more variety.