The SCUMM Manifesto

riskylengths:

Holy Crap, Eliza Gauger is writing videogame deconstruction. 

It is of course, awesome. Especially since she’s focusing on the one online game I actually play. 

Her metaphor of the Pyro as what it’s like to play as a female in the world of online gaming is brilliant. And it almost makes the idea of playing Pyro a conscious act of insurgency/rebellion/rejection/protest if you know why you’re doing it. 

Which makes me think of this statement by Flavia Dzodan of Red Light Politics when she was rightfully pissed off at Western Feminism:

To the point that I even considered ditching the label altogether. And if that happened, I would use a new label that pretty much sums up my politics: Flame-throwerism. Wherein I set feminism on fire and with its ashes I fill my cats’ kitty litter box and let them pee on it. That’s how angry I’ve been at feminism this week. Kitty litter levels of outrage.

I can draw no distinct connection to the two that really works, I guess, but adopting the Pyro as some sort of figure for feminist insurgency just seems to make me smile. 

As a side note, I’ve managed to never be on crappy servers where women are sexually harassed. The ones that were shitty and had a lot of homophobic or racist harassment going on seemed to be devoid of women, looking at Eliza’s article, they probably weren’t, just that the women didn’t speak up so as to avoid the same harassment. 

And I have always made it a point to speak up when I’ve heard harassment. Though I’ve never got around to buying a mic, so usually it’s just in text. One of my favorite days of playing though was a professed gay male griefing a ranting homophobe so bad until the homophobe left the server. The vocal majority of the server was in support of the gay male, and not the homophobe. It’s nice to know these communities do exist in online gaming, but it’d sure be better if that level of tolerance and support were the norm. 

{EDIT: On some level, I know the idea of griefing the homophobe was wrong, however thee was something uplifting about the support for the griefing, the idea that someone was standing up to him, and that at that moment everyone else was essentially standing up, too, that made it seem the right thing to do.}

(Source: thescummmanifesto)