from aphrodite to athena

Weirdly, there are no male angels in the Magic: the Gathering cosmology, at least in recent years. This is confusing to me. The game has of late been criticized for having a particularly regressive set of tones, themes, and artwork especially as compared to its early days. In particular, art before the Weatherlight block was much more open and accepting of a variety of artistic styles, whereas contemporary card art is essentially neoclassical painting. But the angels are weird conceptually. Why do we have an entire race of good looking women when no other fantasy trope is so gender biased? And why angels specifically? Why not goblins or orcs or vampires?

But it's not just the art, and it's not just M:tG. You could argue that the Asari from Mass Effect fulfill the same trope considering their affinity for space magic, though I think there is more sex at play there. Can we just chalk this up to something as basic as the male gaze--the sexualization of women for an assumed-to-be-male audience? While I don't doubt it's a contributor, I don't think it's the whole story. It still doesn't explain why a race of characters that are literally a messianic symbol are gendered female. Consider the Innistrad set.

Avacyn is specifically referred to as the angel of hope, and her return from exile names the final expansion of the block as a coming out from darkness. Until this point, the themes of the set can basically be said to be "We're all going to die." She is implied and seen in narrative to be extremely powerful, and in gameplay she actually prevents every card you control on the field--including herself!--from being destroyed. On top of this she is barely sexualized, perhaps less than any other female in M:tG.

This isn't the male gaze, or, at least, this is a different kind of male gaze than the sexualized one which has characterized the history of fantasy pop culture. This isn't your girlfriend; this is mom.

Although this is but one example, it's a representative one. This is a different kind of "troping" of characters, and females in particular, than I've grown up knowing and reading about in the context of gender, but I feel that it speaks to a change in the way that games, especially high fantasy games, create superheroic characters. The male fantasy is no longer the submissive, biddable woman that serves his every desire but has no agency of her own 1. It is the powerful, sheltering mother-warrior-goddess woman that can protect him from the terrifying world and, most of all, save the day in the nick of time. Men don't want Aphrodite anymore; they want Athena.

To some degree, this is understandable and not even that problematic. When we fantasize about an ideal partner, we want someone who is strong enough to help us when we are in trouble and kind enough to act as a balm to soothe our wounds. Furthermore, when you look at forms of media that are at least perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be created for a female audience, you find that the same kinds of power figures there are weighted male. Supernatural? Twilight?

If this is what we think of when we think of a perfect woman, I say bring it on. This allows women to be idealized in a way that has nothing to do with their sexuality. Athena burst forth fully formed from her father's head. She never lost a battle, ever, marking her as perfect in the traditionally male dominated sphere of war. Her wisdom and compassion were legendary.

Is the mere presence of the Athena character empowering to real women, though? Doubtful, but I'm not convinced it's oppressive either. I think it's less that the standard portrayal of an ideal female is changing and that that's bad, but that we get more idealized females than we get idealized males, and that we have fewer non-idealized females than non-idealized males. Non-sexist writing doesn't mean we can't have Wonder Woman and Black Widow. It means every woman shouldn't be one or the other.

And more controversially, I think if we want to be fair and equal about the presence of some characters being idealized hero-goddesses that we can unconsciously fantasize about saving us, then maybe we need some male counterparts? Sometimes people talk about the muscled super-hulk being a male power fantasy rather than a female sexual fantasy, and I buy that to a degree, though I'd speculate it's probably more a matter of creators who imagine that's what women want. But there are a few examples of powerful male gendered characters representing both male power and female sexual desire.

More Thor? As a guy, I could live with that.

1 - Ironically, Avacyn is an artificial creature created by the wizard-vampire Sorin to protect his home from falling too far into darkness. This might say volumes itself, but this aspect of the character isn't emphasized on any card and is buried in the backstory, and by the time the set occurs, Avacyn is an independent character with her own agency.

civilization and ludic eurocentrism

Sid Meier's Civilization is a eurocentric game.

Now, I know what you're going to say to me. You're going to say to me "No way, Jake! You're full of crap! Look at the balance of western vs. non-western leaders and civilizations portrayed in the game. Look at the fact that those leaders speak their accurate native languages (or close approximations thereof), and that the units you control do also! Raargh, I'm angry that you're wrong!"

Well, hopefully you won't say that last part. But you're right! Civilization as a series does have a very good track record of representing traditionally marginalized societies and groups. It uses as a measure of who should be included not only expansionist success and historical fame, but also internal political achievement and successful defense against colonialism, as well as making an effort to include nations that might have been great had they not been outright exterminated.

But centrism is about more than that. It's not merely the erasure of certain peoples' contributions to history, which Civilization laudably doesn't do. It's instead a totalizing system of values that emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes others. It tells us--in the case of Civilization, through gameplay--what is important and what is not important. Civilization is Eurocentric not because it whitewashes history or under-represents certain groups, but because of what it is about: expansion, conquest, and technology.

As I see it, these have been the things that seem to have been viewed as important to western powers, at least in our understanding of them. What do we study in Western Civ 101? The expansion and conquest of the Roman Empire. The wars of the middle ages. Colonialism. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Napoleonic wars. The world wars. The cold war. Granted, we do hit religion, industrialization, the rising middle class, and the change in theories of government, but I feel that the balance lies on the side of foreign policy and the Idea of Progress over the social.

For any historians who take issue with this, I am willing to concede that this might be a historiographical problem on my part. But if it is, it is a history that the designers have also bought into and that informs their decision making. Expanding your territory and researching new technologies are the two things that are absolutely critical to success in the games. Later entries have allowed a more peaceful and less expansionist approach, but even these are either dependent on earlier expansion (economic, cultural) or also easily facilitate the militaristic path (diplomatic, scientific).

This type of centrism is necessary, and we shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in it. In fact, that's such an important point that I'm going to repeat it. We shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in eurocentrism to the degree that they have. Because of game mechanical concerns (what some scholars have taken to calling Ludic elements), you could not have a non-centric game, or at least not a successful one. A game that attempted to give equal weight to all of the things that nations, states and societies have viewed as most important and have focused on would be terrible. It would be a nightmare for the player to micromanage and contain so many interconnected systems that it would collapse under it's own weight. Because Civilization is a game series and not a historical analysis, it must necessarily emphasize some things at the expense of others.

But...what would a different Civilization game look like? What if we made a conscious effort to emphasize the traditional concerns of East Asian civilization, for example? I am not a historian or an East Asian studies major, so my understanding is limited, but I'll speculate.

Given collectivist tendencies, a sinocentric game might focus a great deal more on internal rather than external strife. Your empire could have a "harmony" value that represents your overall social cohesion. Let it fall too low and face the risk that groups of your cities could attempt to break away into independent empires, or that pretender armies might try to seize power. You could be forced to balance the competing demands of accumulating technologies from foreign trade and preventing foreign cultural influence. If ahead in tech, you could play the cultural colonialist role and sell your advances for influence or exotic resources. Expansion and warfare would still be a big part of your strategy, as these are things that every state has struggled with, but they might have an impact on your harmony stat or your foreign cultural influence. It's a matter of what's emphasized.

This is obviously a cursory speculation, and if anyone with more knowledge about both East Asian culture/history and strategy games wants to fill out my ideas, or call me out on where I'm wrong, I'd look forward to hearing from you.

at the crossroads of GIFT and teamwork

So, I'm reading Playable Pedagogy, specifically Alex's comment on being a noob in Dota 2.

I hesitate to play any real matches against real opponents because my teammates warned me that if I play with others, I will be verbally torn apart if I can’t play decently. This is the main reason I stay away from collaborative gaming.

As a friendly gamer who regularly joins pick-up groups in MMOs, this is incredibly disheartening to hear. I know what she means; Gaming in multiplayer for nearly twenty years has given me my fair share of interactions with the slime and human detritus that lie waiting in the gutter of the gaming community. What I mean is that it's incredibly disheartening to hear that yet another person has been turned off from gaming with strangers because of this. I hear it all the time and, unless it subsides or we can change the conversation, it's going to continue to damage the reputation of the hobby and turn away the more thoughtful people who might help make great games and great multiplayer experiences.

Maybe I'm different in not being as bothered by these things. I grew up in Quake II, where trash talking was simply one of the rules of the road. You didn't have to instigate—I never did—but you at least had to tolerate it. There was also respect there if you could bite back sharply and cleverly after you were bitten—but only once; making a big deal out of it was seen as getting emotional and thus embarrassing. I'd liken it to the way stand-up comics are expected to deal with hecklers by making a joke at their expense and then moving on.

But trash-talking is probably the least disquieting form of internet abuse in most cases, especially because you expect it coming from the other team and because it has a long history in competitive activity outside gaming. It's another thing entirely to hear your own teammates rip you open and tear out your entrails.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly unique to internet competition. For example, can you imagine what the reaction would be if, during a post-game interview, an NFL quarterback blamed his offensive line for folding up and his receivers for dropping clean throws and also refused to address what he could have done differently? He'd be canned before they could get him off the air. There's no place for this in athletic competition, so I don't buy the often stated argument that people playing Dota or other MOBA games are more aggressive because they're more competitive.

One of the things at work here is clearly GIFT. In 2004, Mike Krahulik, who draws and sometimes writes for Penny Arcade, articulated in a simple formula what internet veterans had unconsciously known on some level for years: why people are jerks on the internet.

Fig 1. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

This is, of course, comedy, but it's important because it articulates in an extremely accessible way a foundation for further understanding. Personally, I think it's an oversimplification that is essentially true nonetheless. On the academic side, psychologist John Suler was writing contemporary to Krahulik and published a well-cited paper on what he termed the Online Disinhibition Effect, citing six primary factors for the change. Whatever the specific reasons, it is well documented that online interactions do cause people who otherwise might be reasonably helpful, or at least neutral, to become hostile.

So how does this influence Alex's concerns about being a noob and the particular brand of hostility directed at new players? She has a point there:

I think what experienced gamers get out of noob-shaming is more self-serving than that. I think experienced gamers reinforce their experienced-gamer-culture in part through noob-shaming.

Maaaaaaybe. I'd need to know in more detail what she means by "experienced-gamer-culture," but I'm skeptical. I know many experienced gamers across many different games and in many different communities and only very rarely is a part of that culture an exclusion of outsiders. A preference for insiders and a respect for knowledge and expertise, possibly, but not a closing of the culture.

What makes more sense to me is to explain it as a form of blaming the thing. There's a video of a chimpanzee eating a lemon, clearly disliking the sour taste, and then attempting to smash the lemon in apparent punishment for the foul flavor. You can see this in humans too sometimes; people who stub their toes very hard on an object will sometimes kick the object out of a reflexive anger that comes from a wholly irrational place. By shifting blame onto others, we can avoid the shame of our own failure.

I mentioned that I wasn't as bothered by these things; I game with strangers in spite of their occasional hostility to me. For a long time I felt like getting used to this was a process that everyone had to and would go through, a forging-in-fire that resulted in stronger people and the ability to shrug off trolls. But if the number of friends who have vocally expressed their aversion to gaming collaboratively is any indication, I'm clearly wrong on this.

We need more thinking and scholarship on the issue as it relates to gaming if we want to create a more welcoming environment for people who aren't willing to go through that fire. Playable Pedagogy, "tag you're it."