We Can Do Better than Building Misogyny into Our Video Games
Sadie would never put up with this shit. (Game still by Rockstar Games)
Let me set the stage for you: I (a female gamer) spent a long day at work recently in meetings with my boss, HR, and a male coworker over issues of gender bias in our workplace. The details aren’t as important as the context here, but I got home at the end of that long, wrenching day, made dinner, and sat down to play one of my favorite open world games: Red Dead Online.
There’s something about its scenery, its quiet poker games, and shooting a bounty in the fucking face that makes for a very cathartic experience at the end of a hard day. I occasionally run into asshole players, but I’ve taken the usual steps that femme gamers are used to taking in order to cut down on the effects of gamer-on-gamer abuse: I play on defensive mode when I don’t feel like dealing with it, I keep my voice chat disabled unless I’m with a posse, and I avoid red dots like the plague they are.
On this day, in between hunting trips to slake Cripps’ insatiable need for materials (seriously, dude, take a break), I pulled a couple bounties from Strawberry and Blackwater. As I was riding back from Big Valley with a bounty — a scraggly Skinner Brother wannabe on the back of my horse — the “bounty banter” portion of the ride began, with the usual cries of “You’ll pay for this!” and “I’ll hunt you down!” Ok, buddy.
What I didn’t expect to hear was his next insult: “Get back in the kitchen!” Upon hearing that phrase — a phrase that has been hurled at women marching for the right to vote, running for office, getting an education, or just going to work — a phrase that has been “jokingly” tossed my way when I became just a little too loud or opinionated — I came closer to hurling my controller at the screen than I’ve come at any other time in my history of gaming. I was immediately pulled out of the immersive environment of RDO and was back in that shitty Zoom meeting with HR and my boss and my male coworker, with someone trying to put me in my place while I just tried to do my job.
Over my time playing RDO, I’ve become more and more fed up with the persistently sexist dialogue from NPCs. My avatar has been called bitch, an uppity bitch, whore, sweetheart, and the still baffling comment about my character’s having “tits like potatoes” (I ain’t even mad about that one, honestly, because it was just weird enough to make me laugh). And that’s all by programmed characters. If we were to add in player commentary to that, the list would be endless and would include things like graphic sexual propositions and death threats.
This is in addition to the racist dialogue that is also baked in to some NPCs, from the man in Blackwater I overheard complaining about the presence of “the Chinese” to the gun shop owner in Tumbleweed who complains about the town’s Black sheriff by saying things like “If you give them just a little bit of power…”
Women, BIPOC, LBTQIA+ and other marginalized communities experience these kinds of aggressions, micro and otherwise, every single day in the real world, and we experience them at the hands of other players in the gaming world, too. The play quality for us is markedly worse when it’s baked into the gameplay, too, because it’s inescapable.
Some folks will say it’s an Old West game, so this kind of thing should be expected. “That’s how it was,” they complain. But is that really the motivation? We can compare it to something like fast travel. A real Wild West equivalent for fast travel obviously does not exist, but developers included it in Red Dead because it infinitely improves gameplay. We can and do bend the rules of reality to improve a user experience, and we have plenty of precedent for doing that. Removing the misogyny and racism from built-in dialogue is no different, and creators need to exercise that option.