"Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?" asked Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rae of moderately well-known Tekken player Aris Bakhtanians during a conversation about sexist language at pro fighting-game tournaments. "You can't. You can't because they're one and the same thing," he answered. "This is a community that's, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community."
Unfortunately for Bakhtanians, these comments were streamed live on video as part of Capcom's Cross Assault reality series, which pits a team of Street Fighter players and a team of Tekken players against each other in a tournament for significant prize money. You can read a full rundown of the conversation and the ensuing large-scale controversy over at Giant Bomb. It's a very ugly scene. Female contestant Miranda Pakozdi ended up essentially withdrawing from the tournament, losing matches deliberately to escape Bakhtanians' jibes. He's since apologised, explaining that his remarks were made in anger, but that doesn't help much.
Sexual harassment is not part of the culture, obviously. I've been a part of the gaming community for going on 20 years now, and I don't think that sexism is a part of gaming culture any more than racism is a part of British culture. It exists, sure, but it's not mainstream. It's not accepted. But two things have happened in the past few weeks that have brought this issue – one that I'm usually happy to quietly ignore – into uncomfortably sharp relief, and made me question how we approach these incidents when they arise.
Just a few weeks ago, BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler ended up deleting her Twitter account to escape the hatred and abuse of gamers calling her an "obese cunt", a "fat bitch", a "whore", a "plague" and a "cancer", advising her to commit suicide and making harassing phone calls to her home. (Until recently, a quick Twitter search showed the full extent of this extraordinary harassment; since the closure of her account, it seems that it is no longer archived, which is good if you don't want your day ruined by reading it).
She was singled out by extremely angry people unhappy with, among other things, BioWare's inclusion of optional gay romances in Dragon Age II, the way that the developer's games are becoming more accessible, and perceived shortcomings in plot and characterisation in more recent BioWare titles that Hepler had worked on (or hadn't even worked on, in many cases).
Why was all this laid at Hepler's feet? Because she said, in an interview from 2006, that she sometimes didn't enjoy playing through the combat sections in games all that much, that story was more important to her, and that being able to skip combat would make games more enjoyable for some people. These responses, in heavily-edited form, were originally posted on Reddit and later on the BioWare forums. (The full original interview can't be found anywhere online anymore, so all we're left with is these out-of-context quotes.)
It's difficult to imagine the language used towards Hepler being as loaded and incendiary if she were a man. Why she, and not any of the other writers at BioWare, has been held solely responsible by a small group of astonishingly entitled and, evidently, astonishingly misogynistic people for ruining "their" games is largely a mystery; we can only assume that it was because she was a visible target for their hitherto directionless rage, and her gender made her an easy one.
It's a universal truth of the internet, from YouTube to political comments threads, that awful people feel more comfortable hurling abuse at you if you're female, gay or part of a racial minority. She also dared to stand up for herself before closing her account, which only angered them further.
Neither of these recent events reflects at all well on the gaming community. The thought that someone on the outside might think that this is what we're like – a bunch of pointlessly furious, venomous, entitled arseholes that consider ourselves outwith the normal rules and boundaries of respect for our fellow human beings – makes me extremely sad. It paints a picture of the gaming community that I don't want to believe in, and that goes against the vast majority of my experiences. This is not what we're like.
There is abundant proof of this. All you have to do is look at the wider response to either the Hepler or the Cross Assault controversy to see the small minority of hateful commentators drowned out by a vocal majority of people expressing outrage, disappointment and sympathy. BioWare has vocally stood by Hepler, making a donation to Bullying Canada in her name. Capcom has distanced itself from Bakhtanians' comments and apologised that they were broadcast.
Of course, both of these events have also brought the worst kind of person out of the woodwork and into the comments threads, too – much as almost any conversation about sexism, racism, homophobia or politics on the internet seems to attract the trolls like a giant unpleasantness magnet – but the bigger picture is a community of people united by common decency as well as a shared love for video games.
The difficult thing about the issue of sexism in the games industry, for me, is that even talking about it is giving it more attention than these idiots deserve. Often it only fuels the fire, and it attracts the haters your way, which is something that any sane person would want to avoid. It's impossible not to want to speak out against the people who give us a bad name and feed negative stereotypes, but the fear is that in doing so, you'll both bring negative attention upon yourself and tarnish the gaming community as a whole. But keeping quiet isn't an option either; we need to stand up for ourselves.
I've had abuse directed at me plenty of times by strangers online, a lot of it to do with my gender, but the idiots are always vastly outnumbered by intelligent and respectful people who are interested in actual discussion rather than insults and pointless cruelty. This is the gaming community, for me – the great people I've chatted, argued and played with online, the guys and girls I grew up playing split-screen multiplayer with, the readers who start thought-provoking discussions, the creative and interesting folks I work with every day in this industry. Not the twerps who call me names in comments threads.
Are things like the Hepler and Cross Assault situations acceptable? No. Should we quietly ignore incidences of sexism in the gaming community in the hope that it might go away on its own? No. But is this a part of gaming culture? Absolutely not. We are not like that. It's important that we make our voices heard, too.
• Keza MacDonald is UK Games Editor at IGN.com. You can follow her on Twitter @kezamacdonald.
