CREDIT: YOUTUBE
Anita Sarkeesian has drawn the hatred of some in the gaming community in recent weeks.

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At least that’s how I wish I could kick off the column, but instead we’re going to kick off on a bit more of a sour note, so sit down, shut up and please take this seriously.

I am a gamer, and I have been for the better part of my life. I have gamer friends and gamer family and, for a little while, being a gamer was used as way for 12-year-old me to have some sort of subgroup to belong to. As recent as a decade ago, being a “gamer” was seen by the wider public as a stereotype, a socially awkward male, sitting unemployed in his parents’ basement and living life through a virtual world.

Fast forward to now and the idea of “the gamer” has gone, much in the way of the dodo – extinct, driven to obscurity due to the exponential growth and the changes in the gaming industry that have occurred, allowing for non-traditional types of people to join the rest of us under the “gamer” label, even if they don’t know it. Have you played Angry Birds on the bus? How about Farmville or Candy Crush? Congratulations, Aunt Mabel, you’re a gamer, welcome to the fold and take a seat, we have snacks.

So everyone can now be a gamer, that’s a good thing, right?

Enter Anita Sarkeesian, a York University alumna who carries a master’s degree in social and political thought, and a strong feminist advocate with a particular focus on media.

In 2012, Sarkeesian began a Kickstarter with the aim of producing a video series entitled Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, an extension of a video series that she ran on her blog Feminist Frequency. She asked for $6,000, a goal which was reached in a day, and the funding kept climbing, eventually reaching the lofty amount of $160,000, which she promised would be used toward the research and production of additional videos.

At a speed that can only be achieved on the Internet, the word was out and Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter, blog and YouTube videos were bombarded with a torrent of the worst kind of misogynistic bullshit that an online comment board can offer.

Every derogatory slur was typed, her credibility and education were called into question, and her blog was overloaded, preventing access. Her most recent video, posted to YouTube on August 25, brought forth a level of online abuse and threats that forced her out of her home and contacting the authorities.

It was fast, it was brutal, and for me, it was disappointingly unsurprising. After all, I’ve been around the industry and the people who consume it for a very long time.

See, there’s a reason that Anita Sarkeesian decided that this series needs to exist, it has seen her persevere in her goal despite knowing that she would be attacked, and a reason that her attackers surely understand deep down. She is correct, women are not portrayed well in the medium (cue shocked breaths from my fellow male gamers).

With an overwhelmingly tiny exception, a female character in the game is not there to be the hero or to contribute to the narrative but they may effectively be a prop, something to be rescued for points or a victim of some terrible crime that the protagonist must solve. These are unobvious issues that don’t even touch on the costumes and realistic proportions (or lack thereof) that occur in many genres that are still popular today, the type of thing that can only be properly discussed with an educated mind such as Sarkeesian’s. She could have easily spent her series regurgitating the same arguments about women in video games but has instead managed to produce a unique and proper look at these real issues.

Considering this, I implore my fellow “gamers” to do one thing and do it immediately: look in the mirror. Your old identity is dead, killed by cell phone gaming, casual games and the evolution of an industry that is now more powerful than it ever was. Now that you’ve accepted that, stop giving the rest of us a bad name, not just when it comes to Anita Sarkeesian, but any female that you come across while playing a game.

We should be embracing that OUR medium, the one that we held close to our hearts while it carried the stigmas of the past, is finally being embraced by the greater public. Hell, we should be beyond stoked that girls are finally into games, not chasing them away. Yes, a part of the wider exposure is being opened up to criticisms, and yes, many of these criticisms are hard to swallow but a campaign of uneducated online harassment will do nothing but prove these points, especially when the original arguments have been so exceptionally formed.

Anita Sarkeesian is a lot of things: opinionated, extremely intelligent and one of the best examples of how to academically analyze a video game (an approach that has always been important to me personally).

The only crime she committed is being a woman online with an opinion. Right now, she has been forced out of her home, suffered thousands of attacks but is holding her head high because she, and many others can see, that she is absolutely winning this fight.

Gamer vs. ‘Gamers’ will be a semi-regular edition of G33K LYFE, occurring whenever I feel like speaking, singing or shouting my opinions.