As a game reviewer, I play a lot of video games: everything from First Person Shooters to gentle puzzles; from role-playing adventures to saving the princess. Games are the interactive stories of the 21st century, shaping our culture much as film did in the 20th Century. I've met countless kind, considerate, smart and genuine people through gaming who have gone out of their way to help me. I want to be proud to call myself a member of this community.
Alas: there is a snag. For every decent person in the gaming industry, there are at least a dozen others who seem committed to making us all look like misogynistic sociopaths.
In the last couple of weeks, the media's gaze has been focused on a new ‘mod’ – an alteration to a game’s code in order to make it operate in a different way from the original version - that's been added to the ever-controversial Grand Theft Auto 5. Usually, mods are pretty harmless - they can be anything from bug fixes to enabling flying limousines - but GTA's 'rape mod', a user-created addition to the online version of the game, allows players to ‘rape’ other characters. These avatars belong to other players, and once the ‘rapist’ begins, the ‘raped’ player is powerless to move or continue play until the act is completed. It is above and beyond even the graphic violence Rockstar include in the game, and it is humiliating – particularly as videos of the act are often posted on YouTube. Many players have complained to Rockstar's Reddit page, saying that they feel personally violated by the acts. These reports also indicate that the majority of players being targeted are - would you believe it? - female.
For the uninitiated, in GTA 5, the playable characters are exclusively male. After having sex with a prostitute, a player is able to either leave, or kill the prostitute and get their money back. Apart from these prostitutes, there are few female characters in the game's storyline.
The rape mod is only the most recent example of misogyny in gaming; it permeates most corners of the industry. Games developer Zoe Quinn received rave reviews for her game Depression Quest, which tackles the difficult issues surrounding depression and illustrates them in a way that can help both suffers and carers. Rather than celebrating her success, she has been fending off a torrent of ‘slut shaming’, after rumours that she had slept with reviewers flooded gaming forums. Her personal details have been made available on the internet, alleged nude photos of her were stolen from private servers, and her family have been the recipients of rude and abusive phone calls.
In the trailer for the , meanwhile, Lara Croft is taken captive by scavengers on a desert island – and appears to narrowly escape being sexual assaulted. In the game, this scene is interactive, with the players having to use both brute force and intelligence to escape from their captors. If the player does not succeed in escaping, then Lara is killed, and the player must start again.
Would this scene have attracted as much attention if it had been in a novel or TV series? Probably not. But maybe that's the problem. We're not talking about films, categorised as 18 because the viewer will sit in the cinema and see a bit of sex and violence. Instead, players of these games are interacting with the other characters; they are making choices in the real world that they can see reflected in their virtual one. Those GTA users are choosing to kill the prostitute, rather than passively watching it happen on a screen. It may only be the click of a button, but it’s a wilful act.
A recent Canadian study into the behaviour of 100 13- and 14-year-olds found that over-exposure to violent games weakened empathy for others. Of course, concerns over too much screen-time are old hat – and there’s even evidence to suggest that playing video games for an hour a day can be good for children - but surely, when that screen time is spent on interactive games that routinely feature sex and violence, it’s a whole lot more sinister.
There is some hope on the horizon. There are some amazing people out there trying to make a difference. Pixelles, a Canadian online community, runs free workshops and showcases to encourage women to develop more games. Her Interactive, Purple Moon and many other games development companies are openly courting female developers. We’ve also got Feminist Frequency, a popular YouTube channel dedicated to looking at gender equality across all platforms of the gaming industry.
And there are a growing number of people in gaming who don’t want to put up with this anymore. The people who made that rape mod aren't true gamers – gamers are people that want to build a community of friends where they can play and explore peacefully and equally. So I will reclaim the word gamer, because we’re not all misogynistic internet gremlins – some of us girls just wanna have fun.