Media critic Anita Sargsyan and the crusade against video games
RUBRIC "HEROINE" DEDICATEDfor women who are equal and who have something to learn - in one way or another. Anita Sargsyan has become almost the most discussed woman in the gaming community - she is hated, adored, and without a mention of Anita, not a single discussion of the current state of games takes place. Sargsyan has become famous for her video series on popular trails in video games and how they portray women. Despite the huge number of angry messages, attacks from game journalists and gamers themselves, Anita continues her work and does not intend to give up ideas that she firmly believes. We are talking about the phenomenon of Anita Sargsyan - an ambiguous figure that has become a symbol of the fight against misogyny in the gaming environment.
On October 15, 2014, Anita Sargsyan, the host of the “Feminist Frequency” video blog, was due to speak at the University of Utah. The day before, the university administration received several letters threatening a terrorist attack - in the event that they did not cancel the lecture. Anonymous authors of the letters claimed that they were going to kill Anita and other visitors to the event. Despite the fact that this was not the first case of threats against the organizers of events involving Sargsyan, each of which eventually passed without incident, this time Anita decided to cancel the speech, because according to the laws of the state of Utah, the administration could not prohibit Hall of arms to persons with a permit.
This story finally brought Sarkisyan out of the category of heroes of Internet battles, interesting only to geeks, to the level of world-scale newsmakers — the world's leading publications began to write about it, and not just the profile gaming or feminist press. How did Anita come to fame and what caused the anger of the network trolls and the attention of the world community?
Sarkisyan was born in Canada, her father was an engineer and soon introduced the girl to computers and games. Part of the time the family spent in California, where Anita graduated from undergraduate degree, after which she received her master's degree at the University of York in Canada in the field of social and political sciences. The theme of her diploma were images of strong women in science fiction and on television: "Strong Women in Science and Television". Anita’s opponents claim that before becoming an active feminist, she worked on dubious telemarketing projects and distant education, and her boyfriend (and future producer of her show) Jonathan McIntosh, an activist and blogger who spoke left-liberal, sent her energy to the right direction. criticism of the gaming industry when Anita was just getting acquainted with this topic.
Sargsyan just takes the paths known to cultural studies and rather superficially analyzes their use in computer games.
Most likely, as is often the case, Sarkisyan had several factors at the beginning of his work. Anita’s common interests, talents, and Jonathan’s experience in roughly equal proportions allowed them to start the Feminist Frequency, a blog and video show about gender roles and stereotypes in pop culture. Starting with reviews of TV shows, music videos and other phenomena of pop culture, Anita finally decided to concentrate on her favorite computer games from childhood. In 2012, Sargsyan launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the production of a series of commercials about the role of female characters in games and related issues. The results exceeded all expectations: first, instead of the stated goal of 6 thousand dollars, the project gathered almost 160 thousand from people who thought it was a good idea, and second, a huge number of users began to express their disgust at ideas and goals in a very sharp form Sargsyan.
So, almost instantly, Anita has become not only a popular video blogger with a large number of fans, but also the object of attacks, threats and trolling on a massive scale. One of the complaints that followed the collection of money for Kickstarter is the lack of transparency in the use of the total amount. As with any crowdfunding project, many have questioned the need for so much money; However, the video quality has improved significantly, so at least Sargsyan fulfilled her obligations.
Each episode in the series "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" she begins with a reminder that you can love something and enjoy it, but at the same time criticize some particular aspects of the phenomenon. The main idea of Anita's clips is to identify which paths among the common ones in video games are harmful from the point of view of feminism. The main ones were "a virgin in trouble", "a woman in the fridge", "murder out of pity," "Miss male character", "Smurfetta principle" and "women as decorations." Each of them, according to Sargsyan, not only describes the female characters, but is also a potentially harmful idea, which is reinforced in pop culture.
The "virgin in trouble" reduces the role of women to a helpless creature, capable only of doing what to sit in the tower and wait for salvation, as, for example, in "Prince of Persia." An extreme example of a similar situation is the “woman in the fridge” when the character is immediately killed in order to motivate the actions of the main character; The name of the trail was given by the plot of the comic "Green Lantern", where the girl, as you probably already guessed, is found in the refrigerator. Another option in which a woman must be removed according to the plot is “killing out of pity”. In the case of this cliché, the beloved character often loses control of himself, captured by evil forces, and he, in one way or another, has to relieve her suffering in a radical way.
In the same case, when a woman is not placed in the role of a helpless "princess", but they want to make her a strong character, they often use a different technique, literally placing the same male protagonist into the female body and limiting with external attributes like make-up or a bow in the elaboration of "the heroine ". The same superficiality emerges in the "Smurfetta principle" when the female sex is equal to any feature in male characters: one was clever, the second was rich, the third was a fool, and the fourth was a woman. Thus, femininity is reduced to a "variety" of the basic (read: male) image and is not an independent value in any way - there are no interests or peculiarities other than "femaleness" (such heroine is usually peculiar to whims, materialism and limitation). Sexual objectification of women is shown in a separate path - "women as scenery", which tells about the use of female characters exclusively for the external attractiveness of the game: there women have no replicas, plot value, personality, but almost always are sexy.
It is easy to see that little of this is a previously unknown or game-specific phenomenon. Despite the fact that, in essence, its findings are not fundamentally false, Sargsyan just takes the paths known to cultural studies and rather superficially analyzes their use in computer games. Most of the time in her videos she simply lists and demonstrates examples with conviction, briefly explaining the essence of the problem. This superficiality became her scourge: besides the fact that she had achieved drawing attention to specific images, she also attracted criticism even of those who do not wish her evil, but only trying to understand the complex issue in a little more detail.
It should be noted that “Feminist Frequency” received particular attention in connection with the “gamergate”, about which Wonderzine already wrote, - the conflict of game journalists, a number of independent developers and supporters of feminism in the gaming industry with anonymous masses of “simple gamers” of how exactly put it Andrei Podshibyakin, "lower Internet". Although Sarkisyan herself was the target of “antifeminist” attacks much earlier and there is no direct connection between her and the scandal around the game developer Zoya Quinn, the general themes of the role of women in the computer games industry, and most importantly, the equally frantic stream of insults and chauvinist attacks against them, dragged both girls in a single discourse.
However, if we discard the criticism of Anita as “the enemy of computer games,” “crusader against pop culture,” “wretched feminists,” as well as other senseless and not supported by reality curses that fly in her address from the unhappy, and also separate “Feminist Frequency” from questions of journalistic ethics (the accusation is addressed politely to the main defendants of the gamer game, which Anita is not), then there will be a few substantive claims. First, Anita cites many examples confirming her thesis, but does not consider exceptions, borderline cases, or situations in which the same primitive plot moves are used without gender coloring. That is, from her stories to people who have not played games, it may seem that nothing else there simply does not exist, which, of course, is not so.
On the other hand, Anita says little about the causes of the observed problems: she, of course, recognizes that there is no conscious misoinetic conspiracy of game developers and that they often simply follow existing cultural codes or become hostages to uncomplicated game mechanics. However, she does not attempt to analyze cause-effect relationships and the global context of the phenomenon. Well, and thirdly, Sargsyan pays little attention to the consequences of the existence of the phenomenon she describes - she says that she does not believe that gamers directly transfer behavior from games to real life, while postulating harm to gender stereotypes. In the end, it may seem that Sargsyan demands their complete eradication simply because she is unhappy with them.
The main difficulty with the personality of Anita lies in the fact that we know very little about her as a person. In all interviews and speeches, she focuses solely on explaining her philosophy and translating values, while she speaks very little about herself. No matter how much the opponents like to accuse her of narcissism, it manifests itself exclusively in rather subjective judgments on a narrow circle of issues, and not in inflating its significance. That is why it is so easy for Anita to hang the false label of hating men, the game and pop culture of feminists, or no less false - the enlightened martyr and the icons of the women's rights movement. No matter how ridiculous it is, in this way she herself becomes a hostage of the tropes, about which she speaks: in the first case she is “possessed”, for returning to the “correct” female image it is necessary to expose her to moral or physical destruction for the sake of a just cause. the second is the “maiden in trouble”, whose ideas are good only because they cause hatred and aggression of unpleasant people and she suffers for them.
But neither one nor the other determines Anita Sargsyan, as no flat trope can determine a real hero, whose goals and motivation are always a balance between selfish impulses and the desire to make the world better. Execution is rarely perfect, and mistakes are inevitable. In fact, Anita achieves one thing - a more conscious approach of the creators and consumers of games to the issues of gender roles in subjects and mechanics. The developer community has already heard it - in 2014, Sargsyan became the first woman in 14 years to receive the Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award, recognizing her services to the industry in highlighting the role of women in computer games. The real results of her activities will become clear only after a considerable time, and only through the work of hundreds and thousands of other people with their views and attitudes, on which Anita somehow influenced.
Photo: Feminist Frequency / Facebook