If there's nothing to do about this demented quote but scream, well, I'm screaming

Yes, fine, but is Aris really the problem?

by Ken

You'll be relieved to hear that I don't plan to keep you here long. In an article I was reading yesterday, I was stopped dead by a quote, and I haven't come close to recovering.

It was a piece by in The New Yorker's "Tech" issue (November 24) by Ben McGrath, "Good Game: The rise of the professional cyber-athlete," and I have to say there probably aren't a lot of other writers who could get me to read a piece on something called StarCraft II, an apparently phenomenally difficult and brain-challenging online game. I'm going to try to spare you as much of the detail as possible, which you can get far better from Ben directly. I think there are just a few things you need to know:

• The game, which began its rise in Korea, has spread through the international online gaming community and now also draws large crowds for live matches with big-time cash prizes, and pretty much out of nowhere, so far as that community is concerned, a powerhouse player has emerged with the handle Scarlett, in reality a girl from eastern Canada, Sasha Hostyn, now 20, who has staggering analytical and problem-solving abilities, and also enthusiastic support from her father, a geology professor, and her mother, "who has worked in public radio, politics, and software design."

• The online gaming community is not only overwhelmingly male but -- and this is a concern of Sasha's father, the geology professor -- afflicted with what Ben describes "the toxicity of gaming culture, with its adolescent sexuality and its tendency toward misogyny."

Which almost brings us to the quote I want to get to. It harks back to spring 2012, when, as Ben writes,

a controversy arose in a coarser corner of the e-sports world, when a prominent Street Fighter personality named Aris Bakhtanians was asked by a Twitch employee [Twitch.tv is "a game-streaming site . . . which Amazon acquired three months ago for just shy of a billion dollars"], Jared Rea, whether the fighting-game community’s habits of using vulgar and, in some cases, hostile language toward women could be tamped down. As Rea put it, “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?”

Now comes The Quote:

Bakhtanians replied, “You can’t, because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, fifteen or twenty years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting-game community it’s not the fighting-game community—it’s StarCraft.

I get that our Street Fighter sage is specifically exempting StarCraft from the "culture" he's talking about, but that's not my point. The fact is that this quote disturbed me to such a degree that I haven't yet read much farther in Ben's piece. Here we are being told that the fighting-game community is a culture in which sexual harassment is inextricably bound. And it's not being treated as if it were the end of the world?

What I'm hearing here is that the human race is corrupted to the point where there's hardly any point in trying to save us, even if it might be possible to do so. I don't know what an appropriate response would be, but the least I can think of to do is scream. So I'm screaming.


I ADMIT I'M COMING IN LATE HERE --

This is a world I have no connection to, the gaming community, so I'm coming in late. I see that in August 2012 Amy O'Leary wrote a piece for the NYT called ". At the end she quoted James Portnow

a game designer who has worked on titles including Call of Duty and Farmville, wrote an episode about harassment for his animated Web series “Extra Credits.” In it, the narrator says: “Right now, it’s like we gave the school bully access to the intercom system and told him that everyone would hear whatever he had to say. It’s time we take away that megaphone.”

At the end of the video, viewers were encouraged to e-mail Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s team, asking for changes to communication tools and improvements to reporting systems.

Microsoft in fact wound up inviting Portnow to its headquarters, where "he met with a team of executives, including a vice president, for four hours, and they discussed how Microsoft was developing better algorithms for things like automatically muting repeat offenders. Microsoft confirmed it was working toward improvements to its community tools." I don't know, maybe they solved the problem. But I'm thinking that this isn't a problem about community tools or algoritms.
The O'Leary piece ended:

“For the longest time, people have seen games as a children’s pastime, and we as an industry have stood behind this idea,” said Mr. Portnow, who will be speaking on a gaming convention panel later this month called “Ending Harassment in Gaming.”

“But that’s not true any longer,” he added. “We are a real mass medium, and we have a real effect on the culture. We have to take a step beyond this idea that nothing we could possibly do could be negative, or hurt people.”

Again, it's possible that that gaming convention panel at least paved the way toward solving the problem. But I don't believe that. It's out there, it's part of the "culture," and it terrifies me. For one thing, does anyone believe we're talking about just the gaming community?


UPDATE: CHECK OUT LARRY P.'S COMMENT

I commend to readers' attention the comments left by reader Larry P.. who (I was relieved to see) understood what so shook me about this business and really ran with it, applying some valuable cultural perspective. Thanks, Larry!

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