Booth babe or cosplayer? Gamer Jessica Nigri dresses up for E3.

What a year it was for female gamers, geeks and nerds. The Internet was ablaze, especially during the summer months, over ill-considered tweets, Facebook rants, opinion columns, and harassing flash games that policed women and girls’ participation in traditionally male popular culture. In case you missed it, I’m referring to controversies in game and comic book communities that marked 2012 as the year of misogyny in geek culture. Critical attention to this issue is coming from game and media studies scholars, as well as courageous members of these fan communities. In this post, I add my take on all this misogyny by considering how “the booth babe” contributed to a backlash against female fandom.

It all started long ago, though no one is sure exactly when and where. The brief history of booth babes appearing in The Atlantic, notes the first appearance of spokesmodels at the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show in 1967. However, the use of female promotional models to sell technology is linked to the mid-20^th century automobile show and became an international phenomenon, repeated at trade shows around the world. Promotional models are common at expositions for construction tools, audio equipment, guns, cycling paraphernalia, cell phones, cameras, video games, computers, and much more.

The stereotypical booth babe is a temporary employee, hired for event-specific work, which requires standing for hours handing out promotional material and encouraging attendees to approach the product booth. The promotional model is most often, though not exclusively, a woman, and she tends to wear revealing clothing. Or, as demonstrated at the HyperMac booth last week at CES, body paint.

Booth babes may also don costumes worn by characters from the fictional worlds of games, anime, and comics. And thus, like so many female characters from these worlds, often wears Spandex, plate-metal bikinis, or ripped shorts and torn tanks. Photos of booth babes are among the most popular images that emerge from trade show and convention coverage, particularly on fan sites and industry blogs.

During CES 2012, the BBC posted a video about booth babes, which brought the first wave of attention to the phenomenon last year. The video moved swiftly through the Internet, due, in part, to dismissive comments from the president of the Consumer Electronic Association.

In June, game designer and 30-year industry veteran, Brenda Braithwaite, called out Senior Vice President of the Electronic Software Association, Rich Taylor, when she tweeted her dismay at the continued presence of booth babes at the Electronic Entertainment Expo:

“I dread heading off to work at E3 today….It is as if I walked into a strip club w/o intending to. These are the policies of @e3expo and @RichatESA. I feel uncomfortable in an industry I helped found.”

Short-lived attempts to ban booth babes have been made before. The women tech writers appearing in the BBC video and Braithwaite’s tweets provided a much-needed critique of an industrial practice that perpetuates a “boys-only” culture in gaming and technology, and does little to assuage gendered employment and wage discrimination. These moments, and others from last year, reenergized a conversation that deserves sustained attention, organized response, and formal policy changes. However, as summer heated up, the conversation suffered a melt down.

Late one night in June, Destructiod writer Ryan Perez questioned Felicia “Queen Geek” Day’s credibility in a (supposedly alcohol-fueled) tweet: “Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona?” Adding, “Could you [Day] be considered nothing more than a glorified booth babe? You don’t seem to add anything creative to the medium.”

Perez’s Twitter feed was flooded by furious Day supporters, including Wil “King Geek” Wheton, who called Perez an “ignorant misogynist” and demanded Destructiod fire him. They did.

A month after Perez lost his job, Joe Peacock wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com, titled “Booth Babes Need Not Apply,” in which he conflated hired promotional models with female cosplayers. Peacock was apparently disgusted by these “poachers,” claiming “they’re a pox on our culture.”

In November, comic book illustrator Tony Harris ranted on Facebook about “COSPLAY-Chicks” who, in his analysis, are only “quasi-pretty-NOT-hot” and know nothing about comic books. Central to Peacock and Harris’ comments, is the assumption that they have a super power to discern the real female fan from the fake female fan, and the booth babe from the cosplayer.

What these three moments (and many others from last year) reveal is a palatable anxiety from certain dark corners of geek culture. The increased presence of women at cons and expos has sparked a misogynistic backlash. Female cosplayers experience sexual harassment at cons, and are accused of being “attention whores” whose fan knowledge is questioned. Women working in games, comics, and technology attending trade shows are often presumed to be promotional models, and find their creative contributions to the industry dismissed. Standing in the center of this backlash is the booth babe, a misunderstood and misrepresented chimera. She has become a convenient amalgamation and target of many parts of geek culture’s gender problem. It is time to figure her out.

Feminist game studies examines how gender, and its intersections with race, class, sexuality, etc., is produced, represented, consumed and practiced in and through digital games. Analyses of the representation of gender in games constitutes a significant portion of feminist work, a sub-field of which could be called Croft-studies. Like critical analysis surrounding Madonna in the 90s, Lara Croft from the hit series Tomb Raider attracted much popular and scholarly press when introduced in 1996. At the time, Tomb Raider was one among a few games featuring a lead female character. Like Madonna, Lara’s 34D-cup breasts and double-fisted guns sparked a similar debate about female sexual empowerment, the male gaze and objectification.

While still under-represented in the game world, leading female characters are far more prevalent today, and offer gamers a wider variety of play experiences. Male characters are (relatively) more complex, and offer more diverse depictions of masculinity. These contemporary representations require as much feminist analysis as Croft, if not more so, because so many more people engage with and create systems of meaning for negotiating this symbolic material. Furthermore, feminist game studies can offer a corrective to the seductive discourse of postfeminism, which has often dominated critiques of gender in the post-Croft era.

The popularity of gaming on mobile and other portable devices has broadened where and when people game. It is no longer accurate (if it ever was) or useful to think of games and game spaces as primarily male domains. Those spaces are far more fluid, literally traveling between devices and between home, public, work and back again. How are gamers navigating leisure and work time when they play Words with Friends at the office on their iPhone or Uncharted 3 on their PS Vita in between child care and household chores?

Related to the above, the rise of so-called “casual” gaming has significantly expanded both the market for games and the industrial practices of game production. During the casual games revolution, the traits associated with casual games – who played them, what constituted casual, and how the games were made – were defined against the masculine “hardcore” world of games, and thus became (like soap operas for television) the feminized version of video games. Nintendo’s Wii, also a technology feminized through popular and industrial discourse, contributed to this bifurcation between hardcore and casual.

One area of feminist research I think is particularly interesting focuses on how gamer behavior online performs homophobic, sexist and racist hate speech. The virtual spaces where this behavior thrives exists on privately owned servers that operate as quasi-public social gathering spaces and are occupied by hundreds of thousands of players. How is behavior regulated (or not), what are the ethics of online spaces, and who is defining the rules of behavior in these public/private domains? How can online spaces be created that are safe and inviting for racial minorities, women, and GLBTQ gamers?

Feminist perspectives on video game production are a small, but growing area of research; most of it is focused on the lack of women in the industry. Mia Consalvo has written about the industry phenomenon “crunch time” – mandated extended workday hours for weeks or months on end. Through interviews with women game designers, Consalvo provides a rare look at quality of life issues that deter many women from staying in or even entering the industry. Crunch time controversies like the Rockstar and EA Spouse incidents, expose the quality of life issues vexing the industry and how these industrial practices affect the familial sphere. Feminist production and organizational ethnographies can shed light on these internal dynamics, providing strategies and policies for creating family-friendly workplaces and healthy work-life balance.

Thus far the small amount of production studies has focused on North American, white-collar creative labor, and further investigation is needed there in order to deepen our understanding of how gender, race and sexuality, etc. are produced, marketed and distributed via games. But other, less glamorous areas of labor should not be ignored, such as the hardware manufacturing and assembly of the platforms and peripherals upon which games are played. Feminist game studies scholars can build upon existing feminist perspectives about ICTs, particularly in the global South, where the majority of video game hardware is manufactured, in order to understand the role of globalization in production.

These musings are far from a comprehensive collection of all the past and current work in feminist game studies. There is much happening and much to be done, some of which you can hear at the various games studies panels on the program at SCMS this week. I hope that the feminist media studies series at Antenna is a place where we can continue to find and encourage feminist game studies as well.

I am frequently reminded of the canonical status of the Zelda franchise whenever another “best videogames of all time” list is published, which coincidentally happened last week as I was playing through Ocarina. The local weekly paper, The Boston Phoenix, created a top-50 list on which Ocarina was #11 and A Link to the Past was #3 (Half-Life 2 was the #1 game of all time).

Of all the Zelda titles, I chose to play Ocarina for this Late to the Party post because last March when the Penny Arcade Expo came to Boston for the first time, I was reminded once again of the gaping hole in my personal gaming history. I attended a very entertaining PAX East panel lead by videogame critic N’Gai Croal and Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo. As described by the panelists, Croal and Totilo created a game out of ranking the ten best videogames of all time. They started with the aggregate review scores from GameRakings.com, on which Ocarina is listed #1. Prior to the convention, they presented this starter list to thirteen videogame developers, and offered two moves: swap the position of two games on the list, or replace a game on the list with one not represented, adding it to the vacated spot. As Croal and Totilo reported the process to PAX East attendees, the audience cheered or booed each move. While the final list is unsurprising and reflects a certain videogame purist perspective – the extremely popular Madden and Pokemon games are not represented – I couldn’t help but notice the only title I had not played was a Zelda game.

Ocarina, the fifth title in the Zelda series, was released in November 1998 for the Nintendo 64, seven years after A Link to the Past. Nintendo fans were anxious to play a new console Zelda game, especially after witnessing the three-dimensional transformation of Mario in Super Mario 64. Ocarina is a canonical videogame, in part, because of its innovative game mechanics. The game was the first to use a target lock attack system and to incorporate context-sensitive actions, both of which are now staples of game play. The introduction of context-sensitive actions increased how the 10-button Nintendo 64 controller could be mapped, and thus how Link, the beloved protagonist of Zelda, could interact in the 3D world of Hyrule. While not the first example of a videogame using diegetic music to solve puzzles and unlock levels, Ocarina was novel for its integration of music into a classic role-playing, dungeon exploration experience. Throughout the game players collect songs that must be performed correctly on the ocarina in order to summon friends and open time portals (see Zach Whalen’s treatment of in-game music, which includes an analysis of Ocarina).

Playing a free-roaming 3D game from 1998 was a bit frustrating. After spending hours in open-world environments like the Grand Theft Auto franchise, I wanted Link to move faster, and I kept misusing the right analog stick on the Wii Classic Controller in a futile attempt to rotate the camera (I’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty on my PS3 lately). Usually after switching platforms or game genres I need just a few minutes to adjust to the controls. I think I struggled more with Ocarina because the 3D environment was so familiar, even though the game is twelve years old.

My first several minutes with Zelda’s 64-bit music and graphics evoked memories of favorite childhood videogames, particularly the hours I spent with my siblings playing through King’s Quest and Wizardry games. Despite this nostalgia however, my late to the Zelda party experiment hasn’t inspired me to play other past titles in the series, and I probably won’t finish Ocarina. Unlike arcade-style games that I play again and again – Yar’s Revenge on my Atari 2600 and classic Donkey Kong and Mario games on the Wii Vritual Console – I think the Hyrule zeitgeist has passed by me.

Dear defenders of the videogame canon, please don’t eviscerate me for my lack of Link love. I genuinely appreciate Ocarina for the innovations it brought to gaming, and I bow to creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on my favorite third-person perspective games, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Beyond Good and Evil, and American McGee’s Alice. Unfortunately, the dungeon exploration, item hunts and quests feel slow and tired because a dozen years of game development has passed since Link imprisoned Ganondorf.

The next game in the Zelda series, Skyward Sword, is due in 2011. Sword fighting is a central component of game play, featuring the Wii Remote and Wii MotionPlus controller. I will watch (and likely play) Skyward Sword with interest, particularly for how creatively the game exploits motion-sensing technology. After a buggy demo at the E3 2010 Nintendo press conference, there is concern that MotionPlus technology isn’t ready for the action-heavy game play promised in Skyward Sword. Despite these early rumors, Miyamoto has high-hopes that the first Wii native Zelda title of a quarter-century old franchise will attract a new generation of players, and once again innovate game play mechanics.

Born of a handful of events and revelations in the games industry over the past few month as well as new directions in my research, this brief post about ethical gaming is a provocation for gamers and game studies scholars. It begins in the virtual frontier of Red Dead Redemption (RDR), a “sandbox” game set in the early 20^th century American West from Grand Theft Auto (GTA) creators Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. RDR was released on May 18 with the hype of a summer blockbuster movie, and reviews of the game are glowing, if not embarrassingly gushing. New York Times reviewer Seth Schiesel likens the game to a Sam Peckinpah film and calls RDR a “tour de force,” lauding Rockstar’s creation of a stunning geographical environment filled with compelling characters. With an estimated development budget of 80 to 100 million dollars, RDR reinforces the hit-driven trend of big games from established studios. As both a gamer and game studies scholar, I have been dithering for weeks over whether to purchase the game.

My hesitation to play RDR reflects, in part, my disinterest in open world action games and a general dislike of the Western genre. I’ve played through the entire GTA series, including the Liberty City episodes for GTA IV, and I am a bit bored with the format, and with more action roles for horses than women, stories about the Wild West have never held my attention. Taste preferences aside, my reluctance to play RDR is largely driven by what I know about the labor conditions at Rockstar San Diego, the key studio in RDR‘s development. In January of this year a group of spouses of Rockstar San Diego employees publicly denounced the company for prolonged, mandatory unpaid overtime, which resulted in the physical and emotional suffering of their partners, forcing a few to seek medical attention. (To read more about this, see an Antenna post by Sean Duncan and a piece I wrote for FLOW.)

Unpaid overtime, commonly called “crunch time,” is a frequent point of discussion and tension among game developers, particularly when high-profile companies are accused of excessive abuse, like the Rockstar incident and similar complaints in 2004 about Electronic Arts. The industry’s professional organization, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), has issued several white papers and best practices guidelines, recognizing that the long-term health and institutional history of the industry depends on the health and happiness of its workforce. Last month Game Developer Research released a 2010 salary report, which revealed that 71% of game developers have worked in the industry no more than 6 years, and only 13% have a decade or more of experience. The workforce is also young, with 37% of employees between the ages of 25 and 30. Widespread attrition in what is popularly regarded as a “cool job” is attributed to the incompatibility of crunch time with the responsibilities of family life and the desire for a reasonable work/life balance.

The Rockstar controversy prompted me to consider my relationship to the media products I consume, both as a player and as a scholar. If I am careful to avoid clothes made in sweatshops, why not apply the same labor concerns to the games I play? I am not suggesting that working conditions for North American or European-based game developers are the same as working conditions for exploited apparel manufacturers. I am suggesting, however, that if the conditions of production (including labor) of the material objects we consume influence our choices – whether they be local, organic, sustainable or fair trade – why not the same principles for the immaterial products we consume – movies, music, television programs, video and computer games? If IGDA issued a “fair trade” label for games, would it encourage better labor practices and, at least, allow consumers to exercise an informed choice? Following the call of Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell for scholars to pay attention to the “ecological context” of the technologies we study, I am also thinking about gaming hardware: the console systems, handhelds, Wii peripherals and RockBand guitars that fill my living room. Under what conditions was the Xbox 360 manufactured? If I ever part with my PS2, how should I ethically dispose of it? Lisa Parks’ contribution to the future of media studies issue of Television & New Media (January 2009), made me wonder how games studies should also intersect with environmental and labor studies. I have no answers, just lots of questions that I am eagerly investigating. I also welcome your thoughts.

Post-script: As I edited this piece, an apropos link to PBS’s MediaShift came across my Twitter stream, “The Mediavore’s Dilemma: Making Sustainable Media Choices”. While author Don Carli does not specifically mention gaming, the column is illustrated by the game over screen of Pac-Man.

Presumably the audience for The Tester is gamers since one can only access the show through the PSN. Sony assumes this audience believes a job in the games industry is a dream come true. The recent Rockstar Wives controversy, which I wrote about on FLOW and Sean Duncan posted on Antenna, confirmed this attitude in the many online posts that followed the story. Amid sympathetic comments for overworked employees, it was common to read quips about how “awesome” it is to work in games and that the beleaguered employees at Rockstar San Diego should shut up and put up.

In addition to the veneer of “coolness” that hides the reality of unpaid overtime and exhausting, unrealistic production schedules, game testing, in particular, is widely touted as the best way to get one’s foot in the games industry door. On Sony’s website for the new show, David Jaffee, a former Sony creative director and lead designer on God of War, says, “I started as a Tester 15 years ago with Sony. And testing is still one of the best ways to break into the industry. I’m looking forward to seeing which cast member rises to the top.” The show is motivated by this assumption and we should expect to hear anecdotes from successful Sony panelists and guests about the game production career ladder that begins with entry level Q&A jobs.

Viewers should also expect to see Sony address the “hard work” of testing. It won’t be portrayed as all fun and games – where’s the challenge and voyeuristic pleasure in that? No, we will hear about callused thumbs, soar eyes and aching backsides. We will relish the “physical challenges” the contestants must endure. But will the realities of working in games and the realities of play testing be explored in any substantial way? I doubt it, because it doesn’t make good television and, for a show sponsored by Sony, on the Sony network, packed with current and former Sony employees, featuring (I imagine) PS3 and PSP games, workplace realities challenge the “cool” factor, the escapist ethos, the fun of gaming, and the sublime corporate synergy of this production.

Ask any current or former play tester (and there are far more former play testers) about their experiences “playing games all day for pay”. The stories are not pretty or cool. Most play testing jobs are temporary, part-time, non-benefited, contract-based work. Slogging through a broken, buggy, unfinished game doesn’t look or feel like “playing” at all. Furthermore, the play tester who moves to fulltime employment as a designer is as rare as the high school basketball star who makes it to the NBA.

Some of the issues I will be interested in seeing and discussing when The Tester airs in February include how this show imagines game production and the role of the play tester in crafting ludic experiences? How Sony leverages itself in this program, and how audiences/players respond to this echo-chamber for Sony-branded entertainment? And, how will the critical dialogue about labor sparked by Rockstar Wives and the announcement of this show develop?