Yesterday, Lionhead Studios tweeted a silly image in honour (if that's the right word) of National Cleavage Day. The image was of a barmaid with an ample bosom holding up two jugs (get it?) of ale. Many quite rightly felt that this image, in the social context of the current climate of video games, was tone-deaf and stupid.
Of course, Gamergate disagreed, because of course they did. Lionhead removed the tweet, which of course caused Gamergate to explode about how SJWs were censoring artistic freedom. Which is missing the point, because we SJWs didn't even want them to remove it - that was all Lionhead. We wanted to have an open discussion about it (you know, open discussion? That thing Gamergate used to pretend they wanted?), and perhaps would have liked Lionhead to apologise for it. That's very different to censorship, but that's an aside to what I wanted to talk about today.
I had a discussion with someone who was complaining that Lionhead was pandering only to straight dudes. That I took on board, but as a straight dude, it's also not flattering to be reduced to a boob-liker. To be fair, I do like boobs, but out of everything that makes up who I am, for that specifically to be chosen as the thing that would appeal to me felt manipulative and insulting. I wasn't, in making this point, trying to say "but what about the menz?" - I was trying to demonstrate that the tweet was doubly stupid because it excluded a large number of people and wasn't particularly flattering to the people it was including.
On reflection, I was right to feel manipulated. It was, "Here's some boobs. You like that, don't you? That's what you want." It was a condescending pat on the head for conforming to expected masculine norms. Where does that expectation come from? It comes from patriarchy.
I remember hearing about some feminist developers who complained that there are already a lot of games for men because there are a lot of games about shooting and racing and sports. I don't want to cast aspersions on how 'truly' feminist they are, but the idea that that is What Men Want is a deeply patriarchal attitude that they've internalised. At the time, I resented the fact that they thought that games with more substance, nuance and/or complexity were an exclusively female domain.
I still don't like the idea, but now I see it for what it is. It's an example of how the patriarchy harms men. The patriarchy sees male as default, and female as an exception. That idea contains a lot of advantages for men, and it's a large part of where male privilege comes from. But in gaming terms (which is, after all, what this blog is about), as soon as something breaks away from the default (and might thereby be more interesting), it's suddenly Not For Men, because male is default.
In fact, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game with not one, but two male-coded words right there in the title, and, one could argue, a game that is brimming with masculine themes, and yet it "feels" like a game for girls because the masculine themes it covers do not conform to patriarchal expectations of masculine norms, nor do the tone or mechanics remotely resemble the games men are "supposed" to like. (Incidentally, it also happens to be one of my favourite games - go check it out.) Brothers is an exceptional game in two senses of the word: it is both excellent, and an all-too-rare departure from the patriarchal default.
The restrictive expectation to conform to masculine norms, whether that be of behaviour or, as in this case, taste, is certainly an area where patriarchy is harmful to men. And when it's compounded by an industry that seeks to maximise profits by targeting a 'default' audience, at the same time reinforcing masculine norms to keep that 'default' market stable, it's also harmful to gaming.
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