What Worries Me About Gearbox

I, like many of us here at Dorkadia, think Gearbox Software is pretty nifty. They’ve made some excellent games, including Borderlands 2, which is rightfully on a lot of Best Games of 2012 lists.

But I have some pretty big concerns about Gearbox.

Let’s start with Duke Nukem Forever.

Say what you will about the game, but it’s true that Gearbox gave it their all. It was a prolonged labor of love. I was fortunate enough to play the game when it demo’d as a huge surprise at PAX 2010. I waited four hours in line to play that game and the thing I remember the most about the demo was Randy Pitchford’s passionate story about how it came to be. I spoke with him for a short while before I played the game and he was gregarious and fun to chat with. He clearly loved the product and most of all he was sincerely excited for us to play it. You could tell he was thrilled to be at PAX with this product, thrilled to have his name on it.

But Duke Nukem had some problems and I’m not talking about the fact it just wasn’t that good of a game. I’m talking about Capture the Flag – among other things. It was a pretty big controversy at the time: the game’s Capture the Flag (“Capture the Babe”) mode involved grabbing a busty ‘chick,’ carting her around over Duke’s shoulder and occasionally giving her a friendly swat on the ass to get her to calm down.

Whoa, boy. Did I just write that? The game puts the player in a position of manhandling a hysterical woman and spanking her to cease her hysterics. While it’s true that Duke Nukem has always been a franchise trying to one up itself in it’s machismo and over-the-top attitude, this crossed a line that should have been incredibly recognizable. I mean, the days of hysterical women are so long over that it’s barely even a trope in movies any more. The days of office ladies getting swatted on their asses by their managers? Long, long over – to the point of seeing casual sexual harassment in shows like Mad Men is shocking to us. Or at least it should be, and absolutely no game should be furthering that as a fun activity…as a part of basic gameplay.

I apologize for only dangling ladies. I didn’t want to find disembodied breast pictures.

Among other terrible ideas in this game was a marketing ploy stripping mini-game on the website that involved shooting clothes off of a woman. In the game itself there was a section where you had to race to kill women pregnant with alien parasites while Duke cracked off-color and casual jokes. Throughout this level there were also disembodied and grope-able breasts coming out of the walls (which I gotta say, is a level of creative WTF that’s difficult to even begin to comprehend).

Despite the outcry from the gaming community (and more), the Capture the Babe feature stayed in Duke Nukem Forever when it shipped, with no changes. For presumably unrelated reasons (once again, it was not a very good game), the game tanked in reception (making many of 2011’s Worst of Year lists). Personally I’m not particularly upset about that.

Then we move on to 2012 and the hype surrounding Borderlands 2. An excellent game, it involves a pretty cool mode that encourages players new to gaming or those very casual, to learn how to play as a fun support class with simplified character building and controls. The problem? Borderlands’s lead designer, John Hemingway, referred to this as ‘girlfriend mode’ in the same interview where he expressly said the mode was for people who ‘suck at first person shooters.’

Because clearly, if your girlfriend is playing a game, she’s a new player who can’t handle complex controls and will suck at first person shooters. While I hope that Hemingway doesn’t believe that there’s no boyfriends of female gamers that might like this mode, that there are parents or non-gamer friends who are unfamiliar with gaming, he sure didn’t do a very good job expressing that sentiment. It would not have been difficult to rephrase this – ‘Casual mode,’ ‘New Player mode,’ ‘Newbie mode,’ ‘Simple mode,’ ‘Weekend Gamer mode,’ ‘Baddie mode,’ there’s a ton of informative or funny nicknames he could just as easily have used. But unthinkingly, without paying attention to his words, John Hemingway chose ‘girlfriend mode.’

Much like how Gearbox shipped Duke Nukem Forever complete with hysterical woman spanking shenanigans in place, there was never a real apology for this comment. The dev didn’t comment further on it and Pitchford’s comments (“Borderlands 2 does NOT have a girlfriend mode. Anyone that says otherwise is misinformed or trying to stir up something that isn’t there.” “… personal anecdote has been twisted and dogpiled on by sensationalists.”) didn’t express any apology. It came off as far more defensive than apologetic and didn’t really seem to show an understanding as to WHY people were pissed over the comment and its demeaning implications. He laid blame on sensationalist media dog-piling instead of taking a moment to acknowledge that hey – this quote is pretty offensive to female fans. (Note: a few days after his original Twitter responses, Pitchford gave an interview that candidly discussed the issue. He shows more of an understanding of the issue here, but still doesn’t acknowledge the biggest problem – why did Hemingway choose to call it ‘girlfriend mode’ in the first place? What spawned such a choice of words?)

via http://borderlands.wikia.com

I don’t think these guys are malicious misogynists who believe that women belong in the kitchen and not behind a controller. I think they are great guys who love games, the gaming industry and putting out a good product. I think they wanna do the right thing. As evidence – in Borderlands 2, Gearbox Software presented Ellie, a female NPC who is quite literally a very strong female character. Her body type is about as far from the sexual normative that we see in most media and video games and Gearbox did a good job in not making her figure just another off-color joke (trust me, when I first saw the character I was already worried she’d be named ‘Large Marge’ or ‘Big Bertha’ or something horrifically stereotypical and foolish). Ellie’s figure doesn’t define her character in the least and they did a great job with her – she’s bombastic as Borderlands characters are, but she’s not a joke. She’s another strong character in a cast of ludicrous, awesome characters.

Though she’s awesome and hopefully the start of a trend, one outside the box character doesn’t make me stop worrying about Gearbox’s casual attitude towards female gamers and equality (or their use of non-Ellie female characters including some of the other Borderlands characters).

So what worries me about Gearbox, if I don’t think they’re a load of misogynistic bros? It’s that I don’t think that Gearbox’s crew is THINKING about this stuff as much as they should be. They don’t realize how furthering the image of carting around a hysterical woman or implying that girlfriends need a simpler game mode only helps further sexist thinking in the gaming industry. And especially lately we have been hearing all about sexism in the gaming industry.

When you create a product going out to hundreds of thousands of players (many of whom are young men), you have a little more responsibility than just making a good product. Your storytelling, characterization and plot philosophy is in the public spotlight, it’s being played by young people who are forming their opinions of the world and soaking in everything they are exposed to. Making it fun to spank some a woman, making a joke about girlfriends in games – people see these things in popular media, they hear respected devs saying these things and they make the assumption that it’s okay. It’s no big deal, these chicks need to lighten up. And if you assume it’s the norm and no big deal, you stop being able or trying to understand why people DO make a big deal of it. Why women get offended, why women stop being part of nerd culture. This is the road to true misogyny – to antagonism and hatred.

via jeminabox.deviantart.com & dontbeadickday.com/

There is a moral obligation to those submitting product to popular culture. Really when it comes down to is Wheaton’s Law, which doesn’t just fall onto internet etiquette or not flipping the table when you’re losing in Magic the Gathering – Don’t Be a Dick. Don’t be a dick to anybody. Man, woman, old, young. This covers everything including equality.

One of the emerging trends to try and counter this sexism in nerd culture, both industry and fandom, has been events geared towards women. While I think this is a greatly well-intentioned motion, I’m not sure how it fixes the problem of inequality. Encouraging females over males does create another level of imbalance – it puts us out there as saying ‘LOOK AT US, WE’RE FEMALE NERDS.’ We do this because it helps dismiss the old adage of ‘girls don’t play video games’ and ‘there are no women on the internet.’

But personally? I don’t want to have ‘female’ or ‘girl’ or whatever put in front of my nerd tag. I don’t want geek girls and geek boys. Can’t we all just be geeks together? Why does gender even have to matter?

The last few PAXs I’ve attended have had panels on women in gaming and similar topics and I think that’s a great start. We really need to do is try and stop furthering stereotypes of all sorts; gamers are gamers, nerds are nerds. Every time a developer like Gearbox makes a game with content that degrades women, they’re furthering not just the objectification of women, but the stereotype of male gamers BEING sexist – which is obviously also a pretty damaging stereotype. I don’t want to be worried about Gearbox; I don’t want to have to think twice before I buy their games, I want to shut up and give them my money – and not just them, any other studio as well.

Developers need to stop looking at women as a market demographic that they can never reach because ‘girls don’t play games.’ Male gamers need to stop repeating ‘there are no girls on the internet.’ Gender needs to stop being a divide and we all need to start remembering that we’re all enjoying the same thing.

Having fun. A lot of the time by shootin’ bad dudes in their bad dude faces.