Bernard Bobs His Knob

"Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose
Everybody knows"

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

 

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"For lack of a better term, I would say, that the feminine values are now the values of America. Sensitivity is more important than truth. Feelings are more important than facts. Commitment is more important than individuality. Children are more important than people! Safety is more important than fun!"

Bill Maher - Victory Begins at Home (2003)

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For anyone lucky enough never to have heard of Alex Jones, he's an American lunatic / con artist "shock jock" peddling conspiracy theories to the yokel fringe - to the tune of twenty thousand fringe yokels hanging on his every word daily. His "turn the freakin' frogs gay!!!" sound bite, for sheer self-contained insanity value, still ranks among modern pop culture's most ludicrous moments in a very crowded field. However, half-truths make the most effective lies, and his insane ranting had latched on to a very real phenomenon. Contemporary Western society has become increasingly feminized over the past few decades. It's been particularly evident in online games, which back in the '90s and early 2000s were infamously the realm of overcompensating, hyperaggressive adolescent males. How did we get from that to games filled with adorable little girl characters?

 

The difference, rest assured, is real, and intrinsic to our nature as a dimorphic species. Several years ago, after I'd already been blogging here for several years, I ran across Geoffrey & Elizabeth Loftus' 1980 book on video gaming Mind at Play at the library. Elizabeth Loftus has in the intervening decades grown slightly famous mostly for her work on the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases, and also dealt feminism an unexpected blow by debunking "recovered" (a.k.a. fabricated) memories of childhood sexual abuse, one of the many means by which modernity has demonized men in our public unconsciousness. Mind at Play was written as a more sedate counterpoint to the immediate and recurring paranoia against video games which has been springing up every few years since the '70s... and being forty years old on the topic of electronics, is hilariously dated in some aspects. No matter how much computers might have changed since 1980, though, human nature has hardly changed since 1980 centuries ago. On the topic of human interaction with interactive media, I found Mind at Play echoing many of my own conclusions from the past couple of decades. To the point here, they cited Thomas W. Malone's experiments on manipulating video game elements to gauge player interest. Malone's 94-page dissertation can be found here but I'll be citing the Loftuses' summary of one experiment on fifth graders for the sake of brevity:

"In the game of Darts, a number line is presented with specified numbers defining the ends of the line. There are three "balloons" protruding from the line, and the player's job is to decide which numbers correspond to the positions of the balloons.

[...]

Malone [...] created a version in which, after each incorrect try [...] the player was given "constructive feedback" such as being told "A little too high" or "Way too low." In other variations, the balloons were broken, but not by the darts. [...] other versions had no music

[...]

The most intriguing result to emerge from the experiment was that boys and girls differed substantially in terms of which features determined their preferences. [...] Girls liked music, whereas boys disliked it. Girls liked (and boys disliked) being told (verbally) how they were doing, whereas boys liked (and girls were relatively indifferent to) having a visual, or graphic, representation of how they were doing. Finally, boys liked having bursting balloons and especially liked the version in which the balloons appeared to be burst directly by the darts. Girls disliked both of these balloon representations, and especially the latter."

 

Precisely because it dates from the dawn of computer games, this observation caught my attention. One of my own oft repeated gripes over the past decades concerns their shift away from doing various things for the sake of the result itself to straightjacketed activities with no options or effect on the in-game environment, in which the main reward is praise. So how did we get from shooting rockets at each other for the sheer pleasure of seeing brains splatter, seeing those skull balloons pop, to being told how speshul we are, chasing codependence in the form of shiny, friendly Steam achievements for nonsensical non-tasks like... walking.*  Is this a conspiracy? Who turned my toads all femmy? Are there estrogens in my data packets? Did someone reload my plasma crossbow with ovaries?  There's certainly some truth to the top-down influence coming from game developers trying to tap the female market's fine assets. One can't underestimate the justified fear of career-ending feminist lynch mobs, should one fail to glorify women at the expense of men. The decline in quality also coincided with a larger proportion of females in games than before, especially in so-called MMOs with social elements. But correlation is not causation, and as someone who played through this shift from the late nineties to the present, I can't stand by those who claim it was some chick conspiracy (chickspiracy?) which ruined games.

We did it ourselves.

We, the dudes, the bros, the nerds, the hayseeds, the he-men and the me-hens.

The proportion of females in games through the 2000s when online game culture (guilds, achievements, rock/paper/scissors teams, etc.) went mainstream, was still much too small to exert measurable pressure on its own merit. What it could provide was an example of personally advantageous behavior. We, the twenty-something young men who had spent our teens with horns locked in vicious and futile competition, looked to our new sisters in imaginary arms and saw... a better option. Cutesiness. Umbrage. Favor-currying. Emotional manipulation. We saw a magical world in which expressing pain might draw sympathy instead of mockery, where one's ignorance and failings might elicit tutelage instead of ostracism and lowering the bar might be considered a virtue, and gifts were received instead of given. Where all one had to do was show up. No performance anxiety.

We wanted us some of that.

And so, even if we didn't hide behind female avatars, we often unknowingly began aping feminine mannerisms and stated preferences, the infantile, facetiously deferential neediness and hollow mutual social reinforcement and holding praise or decorative fluff more important than hard-won victories. Histrionics which might have placed us as males in Richard Simmons' uncanny valley in real life held more sway in a medium of stilted inter-avatar interactions. It was a way of cheating our assigned masculine station in life as workhorses and cannon fodder. By the time "bronies" intersected the world of online games a decade later, the degeneration into whiny, sniveling brats was already well under way, tanks had replaced healers as the least popular RPG option, and "tryhard" had long replaced "carebear" as a go-to cheap slam.

 

Of course, personal dishonesty and cognitive dissonance aside, no system can consist predominantly of cheaters. Someone has to be first over the wall, across the plank, bringing home the bacon for others, and as trying hard went out of style so have team games, difficulty decreased to kindergarden levels even in single-player, and strategy given way to idle games.

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* No, I'm not joking; No Man's Sky as one example praises you based on walking distance. It's a $50 Fitbit for your middle finger!

 

P.S.

Note, very little observed in this post is unambiguously good or bad... except for InfoWars being a pile of steaming manure. The hyperaggressive l33t-d00d mentality of '90s online games was itself unbearably stupid, trying hard in games becomes meaningless when it devolves to endless practice makes perfect to nail that last space invader and some degree of feminization was warranted especially in American society where chest-thumping machismo reigned supreme in the post-9/11 BushJr.-era jingoist mainstream. But being a walking caricature of anti-masculinity is no better than being a walking caricature of masculinity.

Seriously, the hell with bronies already.