Which explains why I'm not that great at video games in general. I love easy mode, and I appreciate it when a game gives some options for the less-skilled player to figure out the workings of the game so that it's easier for people like me to ease their way into the more difficult settings.
But I'm a rarity among my female friends. For a lot of them, video games are how they relax. They follow games series; they go to midnight releases. They play to the end (multiple times, in many cases--alternate endings, and all), do all the side quests, and rack up achievement after achievement.
They're good at them, is what I'm saying.
Maybe it's because of this that I was so shocked to see comments from John Hemingway regarding a beginners' skill tree Borderlands 2 called "Best Friends Forever."
If you missed it, here's part of the story (linked above) from Eurogamer.
The skill tree is called Best Friends Forever, what lead designer John Hemingway dubbed the "girlfriend mode".
"The design team was looking at the concept art and thought, you know what, this is actually the cutest character we've ever had. I want to make, for the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to understand the game and to play the game? That's what our attempt with the Best Friends Forever skill tree is."
One of the first skills available in the BFF tree is called Close Enough. This means your bullets that hit walls or other objects, that is, miss their target, have a chance to ricochet off towards the enemy.Let's get this out of the way: there are plenty of "better terms" that Hemingway could have used. Beginner Mode. Newbie Mode. First-Timers mode. This was not a case of "that was the clearest way to make his point."
Let's also get this out of the way: Hemingway, for all we know, could be a really nice guy who generally likes and respects ladies.
Basically, Hemingway may not be a sexist. But his statement here definitely is.
Having an easy mode on a game for beginning players is totally great. It's a fantastic stepping stone for people who are new to that game in particular or to video games on the whole.
Calling the easy mode "girlfriend mode," though, is bad.
From a female perspective, this title implies that women a) have no interest in video games beyond pleasing their male significant other or b) are way too bad at video games to play for no other reason than because they're girls (I don't know, because boobs make it hard to use a controller or something ), and they will be unable to play the harder modes of the game. To be fair, there are some women for whom this is true. But a quick search of the numbers will show you that female gamers make up from nearly half to the majority of the gaming community. You'll find articles about how female gamers are "more hardcore" or log more hours of playtime than their male counterparts.
Also, it's worth noting that the character that this skill tree is for is a female character, described mainly as "cute" (a patronizing term that, I, personally, hate with a flaming passion), again perpetuating the idea that easy modes are "for girls"and more challenging modes are "for boys." It's no wonder that female gamers aren't taking kindly to this.
But what about the guys? No one's really talked about it, but this whole "girlfriend mode" thing isn't good for them, either. It makes a very clear and potentially damaging statement to guys: if you're bad at video games, you might as well be a girl. And, as all boys in our heteronormative society know, it's bad for boys to be like girls.
While this whole debacle is an offensive mess, it's not terribly surprising-- video games have always seemed like something of a boys' club. Though, if you ask me, the two main sources of this problem are pretty simple.
Back in 1975, Laura Mulvey developed a theory called "Male Gaze." This is that thing that happens in movies, television, and video games when the viewer see the events unfolding from the perspective of a heterosexual male. Generally, this is thought to happen because most creators in these media are male, so their vision is from a male perspective. Guys make most video games, so guys decide what stories get told and how. Which explains why the women in video games look and act the way they do (and that's a post for another day). The easy mode's designed for girls because that's who these guys believe will need and want to play it.
In addition to Male Gaze, there's another problem: men, in general, don't notice sexism in the same way that women do. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, men don't share women's view of sexism because men don't experience sexism in the same way. Perpetuating a stereotype by calling the easy skill tree "girlfriend mode" might not strike a guy as being sexist, because he's not on the receiving end of a lot of the negative implications. This doesn't make sexism okay, but it is something that needs to be kept in mind before vilifying a guy for accepting terms like this without a fuss.
Hemingway's comments weren't the first instance of sexism in the gaming community, and they certainly won't be the last. There will always be some people that think that video games are for guys. Women are gaining a voice in the industry, but they're a long way from being on equal footing as far as representation and respect goes. Until women reach the same level in the larger video game community, there's an easy way to avoid raising the ire of the girl gamers around you: stop and think. By trying to put oneself in the shoes of a female gamer (or, really, anyone to whom one is talking), controversies like this can be avoided. A little perspective can fix a lot of these problems.
In the meantime, just don't call it "girlfriend mode."
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