How are you?
Today we will deal with three points of extreme honesty and asses their impact on my performance:
Thing 1 - Side effects of the stupid Olympics coverage juxtaposed with sexual harassment at conventions, stupid assed things on Facebook when my peer group should really be old enough to think about these things ( we are SOOO not teenagers) and the weekly/ or twice weekly fake geek girl nonsense.
Here's the problem, I keep having to deal with the side effects of retrograde backlash policy and attitude in real life scenarios such as health care, employment and other things. I am not unmarked by these things. I did however think that we were going to raise our children better than this, that some things would be difficult for me but not even blinked at by the generation we raise. Well the Internet and the government are proving me wrong, and to shut it all down for a bit I play games, but now that stuff is all inside my game spaces too.
It's my damage. But it's also kind of weird, so I'm putting something here because it's true and I posted it on twitter and backtracking won't make it less true. There is a kerfluffle about someone who is a designer referring to a difficulty tree with a special co-op mode as "girlfriend mode".
If you read the linked article there are a couple of things that make the "girlfriend mode line" not misogynistic but unthinkingly sexist. He refers to the character involved as the "cutest character" and he tells the story using "girlfriend mode" specifically "for lack of a better term" because he specifically imagined it in a scenario getting HIS sig-other to play when she might not otherwise.
Poor designer, his problem really isn't that there is a "lack of a better term". There are many better terms including the one his company actually called it which is apparently "Best Friends Forever" Mode ( as in you won't screw up my co-op game by being a newb and I won't ignore you while I'm playing my favorite game thus we can retain our permanent frienship status).
He honestly couldn't think of other reasons to use the mode, so that's what his brain came up with, but it could have been "newb mode" "friend mode" "non FPS gamer Mode" or simply "rookie mode"
Actually I like Rookie Mode, shows the inexperience but it implies competence after exposure and has NO gender associations. But designer guy is a male, and a male who lives in a kind of gaming world silo and he's probably not sexist at all so he didn't THINK about how it's sexism ( culturally pervasive sexism) that makes him think that the term that filled the "lack" was "girlfriend" because that's why HE needed the mode. What he and many commenters don't realize is this thing that I posted on Twitter:
- Videogames are difficult for me due to a symbol processing disorder, playing w/ friends might help but a combo of XX/LD is embarrassing so while a tree might be a good thing casually saying "girlfriend mode" means when I don't get better it'll be associated with gender not LD.
- What it really ends up is that I will be more nervous about reinforcing a gender stereotype so I just won't play.I fight that feel for
#mtg- Just in case anyone was wondering what the effects of casual or environmental sexism were. : )
In short - I won't play well because I'm damaged, I'm not damaged because I'm a girl, I don't want my damage to be blamed on being a girl, but it will now be casually associated with being female on a subconscious level.
One way to fight back a little bit is to self -identify the disability but it seems like I've only had to do that as an adult in order to play games. It's kind of weird actually and frankly feels like excuse making
( but in order to get people not to steamroll me or insist on clear board states I have to do it more and more. I have a feeling this is a "mid-level" magic playing problem, at high levels the board states will always be clean and at low levels everyone is having a little trouble so when you ask someone to clear up the state they just do it and everyone helps each other out).
I also think that younger gamers who don't socialize cross gender and thirty something gamers who had to be upper middle class with disposable income to play games, don't realize that the young girls who have grown up in the last 20 years had the same levels of access to console controllers that they did, even if they were playing different games when they were little. So they're remembering their childhood and the girls who have been playing forever are all confused at this portrayal of gaming. Most girls I know for instance play Dragon's Age, Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed and in my area Tekken variants. They've been playing them since they were 8. They learned the controllers while they were learning everything else, it wasn't like trucks or dolls, parents didn't gender police video games that were age appropriate. Parents controlled the games they played until they were about 11 and then couldn't keep up and just monitored ratings. Also in my area boys played Dance, Dance Revolution something fierce. I think the 30-something gamers are just like all of the other adults in the toy and entertainment industry - they're doing what they think was true based on what they remember from being that age and that is frankly just not the reality for the actual young people involved outside the very hardcore gamers and it might be the WAY they remember it but it might not have been true then either. Memory is unreliable, doubly so when nostalgia is involved.
With Magic I am almost always "patient zero". I lose a lot of competitive practice time because I keep introducing people to the game. That means most of the guys in my social circle play because of me. But if they have more free time, no LD and more disposable income they will be better than me in pretty short order. If we travel together most people will assume that I play because of them not the other way around. I'm not even on a target market chart for Hasbro or WotC as far as I can tell.
That's the effect of culturally embedded sexism and possibly hidden disability ableism. Once again, it's taking up headspace it needs to be here in the journal.
Thing 2 - fear of offending - I have mostly written the Stats for Vorthos entry with graphics and charts but I keep avoiding finishing/posting it because it's basically going to be slamming one particular artist and the art is actually problematic, but I feel bad doing it.
Really, really bad. Because it's the Internet and the Internet is forever. If I were his editor I would have caught it and spoken to him about it privately and allowed him to correct it or if he wouldn't just realized that it was intentional and taken the appropriate next steps.
After reading all of the comments in the various things about the Olympics and the ridiculous minimization of women in a thousand different ways I have come to the conclusion that someone really can be incredibly unaware of their own blatant objectification/sexism and actually be supported in it.
If this guy is that guy, then I really feel bad because he doesn't realize how bad it is.
I was never this timid as a reviewer before, possibly it's because I feel like I have no standing as a Magic Player and I'm not currently an editor ( although I was one before so I stand by my analysis and critique.)
I'm going to have to bite the bullet and find a way to publish the stats. Because I'm afraid of it so therefore I should do it.
Thing 3 - I forget I actually know what I'm doing.
I souped up my Quirion Deck for FNM with Ponders instead of Think Twices because I enjoyed playing the deck so much I wanted to see if I could goose it enough to move it into "possibly competitive" Meanwhile Rachel ( who is super-competitive) had been working on a green ramp build. Before FNM she had finally managed to put together the cards she had been trading for so I offered to play my Delver against her so she could test it, and I'd be playing the Quirions during the FNM anyway. A quick glance at my hand and I knew I should mulligan and what I wanted to have in the hand against her - and then I realized "Oh wait! I saw it, knew it and took appropriate action quickly because I knew my deck and what I was doing." Not that I sucked, I just hadn't learned the new stuff I was working with well enough - I beat her 7 times in playtesting with her, she used her deck to come in second that night, I used my new Quirions and increased my win rate from 15% to 60%.
I need to not undermine myself by assuming I'm dumb. I'd never let anyone else get away with that.
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