Author: Mary Hamilton

I'm an operations specialist, analytics nerd, recovering journalist, consultant, writer, game designer, company founder, and highly efficient pedant.

We work here: online abuse is a workplace issue

When harassment or threatening messages are characterised as “just the internet”, it’s doubly frustrating. On one hand, that’s a glib way to deny the reality of the harm caused and emotions experienced by the people on the receiving end. On the other, it assumes the internet is something you can switch off if you want – a harmless unreality that’s an optional extra, and not part of your real life.

The reality, however, is that many people on the receiving end of online abuse are being abused at work. The internet is not just a place of play and recreation; it’s also a work environment. Journalists, community managers of all kinds, marketers, and any number of other professionals cannot do their jobs effectively without the ability to access social media, and to speak freely there without being harassed for their presence.

Amanda Hess, in a long and excellent piece on women, harassment and the internet, speaks to this problem and a few others. She points out that online abuse, arguably, constitutes employment discrimination, as it discourages women from pursuing work online as well as causing significant distress to those who do and who are harassed in return.

Those who have reason to expect harassment are discouraged from promoting themselves and their work. They may employ particular strategies to protect themselves that aren’t necessary for those who are less likely to be abused, and that may hurt them professionally. (An illustrative example: I didn’t use my own image in profiles anywhere online for several years, because I was keen not to have my appearance used as ammunition, positive or negative. During that time I had more than one conversation with male social media journalists, seemingly unaware of these issues, who told me not using my own photograph was unprofessional.)

The prevalence of online abuse manages to put minorities who work online at a disadvantage in two ways: either they moderate their behaviour to be safer but take professional consequences, or they do not moderate their behaviour and risk more severe abuse. Either way there is an extra cost to working online, which is currently borne entirely by those on the receiving end of systematic harassment.

In addition to those employment issues, Hess also speaks about her experiences with police, and the fact that keeping track of her stalkers has cost her money. The police response to Twitter abuse is, in her account, frequently to tell her not to use Twitter. If your job requires you to use Twitter, or your work’s success relies on your personal ability to promote it, this advice is impossible to take without harming yourself economically and professionally.

Increasingly, for many careers, social media is not a space where participation is optional.  “Just ignore it” doesn’t work and isn’t appropriate when a customer in a shop starts yelling abuse at a retail worker. It’s not appropriate online either. We work here.

Break news everywhere, not just on Twitter

Steve Buttry has a great response to a reporter worried about being scooped by the competition if they post on Twitter. He argues that: “You can’t get scooped because competition gets tipped to a story when you tweet about it. Your tweets already scooped the competition.”

That’s true, but not quite complete. You may have scooped the competition, but you’ve only scooped them on Twitter – for readers who don’t use Twitter or who don’t follow you there, you might not have broken any news at all. The choice of where to break stories or how to develop them live isn’t just “Twitter and/or your own website”. Twitter matters, that’s certain, but what’s less cut and dried is whether it matters more than anywhere else, for you and for your readers.

Sometimes being first on Twitter is worth a huge amount of prestige and traffic for your work. Sometimes, in all honesty, it’s just nice-to-have – the traffic and prestige you really want is elsewhere. Would you rather be first to tweet, or would you rather be the first thing people see in their Facebook newsfeed or the first with a chance at a link from r/worldnews? Is the audience for what you’re writing actually using Twitter, or are they elsewhere? Are you better off dashing off an alert to your mobile app users, or an email to a specialised list, before you take to Twitter?

All Buttry’s advice for how to report live, digitally and socially, is excellent. And it all also has platform-agnostic applications. You can post to a brand Facebook page as well as – or instead of – a brand Twitter account; at the moment, with all the dials turned up, that’s likely to have a significant effect.

You can argue the Facebook audience will most likely disappear when Facebook makes another newsfeed tweak; that ignores the fact that right now is a good time to put your work in front of people who might never have seen it before and might never see it again unless you go where they are and show them.

It also misses the important point here, which is that no one platform is the answer in all situations for every news organisation all of the time. You have to build a strategy that will be flexible enough to respond when something changes, positively or negatively, on a social platform. Social and search sites do not owe you traffic, and relying on one at the expense of others is not sensible in the long term. You have to be willing to allocate resources away from the shiny media-friendly very-visible things and towards the more oblique, less obvious, less sexy things. You have to be able to go where your audience is, not just where you are as a journalist. If your audience is all hanging out on an obscure forum, go post there.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or can’t also try to be first on Twitter – if you’re doing news seriously, you absolutely should. Twitter’s huge, and hugely important, but it isn’t all there is to social news, and it’s crucial to think about where else your readers might be. If you’re only thinking about breaking news on Twitter, you’re not thinking broadly enough yet. Break news in weird places, if that’s where your audience is.

Libraries, games and books

There’s no need for physical media any more, not really, not unless it is a beautiful and delightful object that requires physical existence in order to truly accomplish what it sets out to do.

I am thousands of miles away from my McSweeney’s quarterlies, my copies of the Codex Seraphinianus and House of Leaves, but I kept them, when we moved; they live in boxes in my parents’ spare wardrobe along with the textbooks and miscellany I couldn’t bear to get rid of. Since we landed I’ve bought three books: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, a Bible-sized chunk of literature that I pick up maybe every week or so for a hit; a field guide to Australian birds, because it helped me feel less like an alien if I could identify the stuff in the sky here; and S., a gorgeous full-colour library book full of fake marginalia and individually-produced inserts. A formal experiment of the sort I can’t devour enough of.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a physical copy of a game for the PC. Digital downloads have supplanted physical games for the PC, and in doing so they’ve freed a vast multitude of new, small, interesting games from the strange tyranny of the physical product. (Except possibly in Australia, where you can actually buy things like The Basement Collection on disk, presumably because the internet here runs about the same speed as a smoke signal.)

Now Steam sales and Kickstarters have turned my PC gaming library into the same sort of collection as the bookshelves I tore up before we moved to Australia. It’s loosely organised by genre and by ‘feel’, in a way that’s intuitive to me but makes little to no sense otherwise. Its construction and contents reflect a lot about me; the things I’ve chosen to dedicate time to, the games I want close at hand for replaying.

It’s also full of games I probably won’t play to completion, in much the same way as the Shelf of Shame I used to keep my unread books on. For most of those games it doesn’t matter – the concept of ‘completion’ is pretty fuzzy on games without linear narrative – but there are more that I haven’t started than I feel entirely comfortable with.

That never stops me from buying more. It reminds me in some ways of the glory days of the PS2, when publishers produced the most astonishing array of strange and wonderful (and often utterly awful) games, and you could pick them up relatively cheaply knowing you would get a flawed but often interesting experience. (The collection of interesting PS2 games is also in London; the bad ones we traded in, so some other poor sucker has the joy of playing Air Rescue Rangers and America’s Top Ten Most Wanted now.)

I’m also now part of the friends and family sharing system, which means I tend towards buying games that I might have been on the fence about, so I can share them with others who will probably get as much from them as I will. But it also means my Steam library has an extra 200 or so games in it that I didn’t put there, that don’t fit the system. Like merging books with housemates or lovers whose tastes overlap but don’t entirely cohere. I had to make a new category for games I don’t want to play – not the same as games I haven’t played yet but will, one day. Games I just don’t want.

But that sharing is a joy, and not just because we don’t need to pay twice for two people who share the same computer to play the same game. It’s joyous because I get to explore and discover games I’d never have thought to try, and because I also get to explore someone else’s library, the way I used to wander through bookshelves when I visited friends. It’s joyous because that library even in its barest form – as a list of names without categorisation – is a sort of access to someone’s identity, a carefully chosen stack of media that says, at the very least: this is how I like to spend my time.

Media consumption, especially conspicuously, is a way of constructing identity; it follows then that Steam sales are cheap ways of being people.

Make new year habits, not resolutions

I don’t make new year resolutions any more, because I always break them. But I do try to make new habits every year, and the start of January is a good time to take stock.

It takes quite a long time to make a new habit. The commonly-cited 21 days claim is most likely a myth, but it’s possible – it just takes a little longer, and the length of time is different for everyone.

Most of the resolutions people make are really about changing habits. Write every day, get fit, eat healthily, stop smoking – when you turn them into resolutions, breaking them becomes a trigger to stop trying. That’s setting yourself up to fail. But turning them into habits makes them an ongoing project that can cope with some setbacks.

Changing the timeframe helps too. Instead of “exercise every weekday starting tomorrow”, I went with: by the summer, I would like to be someone who exercises more days than not, more weeks than not. That’s not a grand resolution, and it’s not a sudden change; it was a slow process, but so far – two years on – a sustainable one.

Grand sweeping changes take time. They’re incremental processes created not from one single decision, but from hundreds and hundreds of small ones. They have to be, when it comes to changing what you do every day or every week, because they also involve changing who you are. Changing your personality overnight is more often the result of trauma than positive self-directed life changes.

What new year’s resolutions are really about isn’t rigid adherence to new behaviour patterns. They’re about becoming a slightly different person by the time the next new year rolls around. They’re climate, not weather, and what matters is your trajectory.

The most important habit I want to keep in 2014 is the relatively new discipline of making games, regularly releasing them, and using the process to learn new skills. And the most important new habit I want to have by this time next year is writing and publishing something, however small, more days than not. I’m starting as I mean to go on.

13 moments, 2013

The Trial

Cards from The Trial I am wearing a blue polo-neck shirt and a charity shop brown cord skirt and I am Fiona, a spotlight shining in my eyes, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in the Science Museum in London, being interrogated. Maybe three or four hundred people have interrogated me so far today, and I have answered the same series of adversarial questions with the same series of answers and the same series of hand gestures, pleading my innocence.

Then one woman with brown hair and a serious face sits down in front of me, her face level with mine or even a little below it, to ask her questions without interrogation. I can see her eyes. She is concerned and gentle. Around her, one by one, the other adults who have come to discover this world sit down too, like five-year-olds at the feet of a schoolteacher, and I lean down and tell them Fiona’s story, but this time with relief.

The call

My dad has come to visit me. He is in London for a few hours for a meeting that has him dressed smartly, suit and tie, but he looks smaller than I remember him. He has cancer. That word circles in the air but we do not speak it. I show him the wall where the next day’s newspaper is beginning to take shape, the room where we have morning conferences, the newsdesk. Someone asks if he is lost and I say no.

We are sitting in the cafeteria and talking about surgery and my phone vibrates on the table between us. I can read enough of the email to know that I need to open it. I open it and I am going to Australia. My dad looks at my face and asks me who died. I tell him I have been asked to go to Australia. It is the first time his smile reaches his eyes.

The partingsFriends

We take a break from the planning, the packing, the preparations. More people than I can count turn up to wish me happy birthday and to wish us both safe travels. Friends from five cities come. I cannot spend time with everyone I need to see. We empty out the 20-kilo bag of boiled sweets left over from last year’s games onto the varnished table in the upstairs room at the pub at the end of our road. We talk endlessly. I know I am going to miss these people, the family I have chosen. I have no idea how much.

The landing

It is ten hours since our plane landed. It is thirty-five since it took off. It is fifty since I last slept. I am standing in an underground room with twenty other people who have had much more sleep than Grant and I. I am at a university with a cup of tea in my hand looking at a grid map of London made from rope and nametags on the floor, working out which bits need water before they burn. Later I will make a paper sculpture before a new friend drives us to a new home and we eat kebabs and fall asleep on the sofa.

LorikeetsRainbow lorikeets

I am standing in Sydney botanic gardens in front of a tree full of rainbow birds that I never in my life thought I would see in the wild, and I am weeping.

Moving in

It is dark. The new ninth-floor flat has windows on two sides and outside the city is tall and filled with wonder. We turn off our lights and stand with music playing, his arms around me, looking at the bright windows in the tall buildings and the lights glittering on the far side of the harbour. I fall asleep still staring out of the window and dream I am on a ship.

LaunchChocolate echidna

On the way to work I listen to Run Boy Run. All day it rings in my ears.  We are in the morning papers roundup, despite not being a paper. Kath is on TV and I know before I see it because the graph spikes. People welcome us. By teatime I have more messages than I can respond to, than I can even read. The numbers tick up and up.

On the way home 15 hours later I listen to no music and hold a chocolate echidna in my hot hands. Grant meets me in the park and I give it to him to eat.

SaturdayThe Guardian

One week after the election. Last week we went out in 30-degree heat to a local school, where instead of dusty booths and queues there was a fair and saxophonists and bouncy castles and four different options of sausages in buns. The campaign is over. I am taking a day off, or I would be, but we have a story. I sit in the corner of our too-springy sofa while Grant plays a console game and I push buttons and pull levers and post messages and watch as a 4,500-word essay published on a Saturday morning becomes our most read story thus far, and I am proud.

Freeplay

I am on a stage talking about Detritus and class and gender, and no one heckles me. All weekend no one tells me I should not be there. My games count as games. My journalist’s background does not exclude me from any conversations, nor does my live game design work, nor do my many other backgrounds. I am a whole person who does and is many different things and none of those things must be excluded for me to participate, here. I eat sushi with people I only know from the internet and play games projected onto the floors and walls. It feels like coming home. And people play Detritus and tell me it moves them, and I am proud.

Octoberbeach

The work days begin to blur together, starting early and finishing late, too many exciting moments and too much to do, all of the time. It becomes routine. At times – between fires that blot out the sun and the screeching of the enormous bats – I almost forget we are on the other side of the world.

Then for a brief week the routine stops. Our closest friend visits, impossibly, and we take him to visit our Sydney: sunshine, the gardens, the beaches, the roof. We wake up each day with a new plan. Walking Darling Harbour, dumplings in Chinatown, kebabs in Manly, the ferry; a day doing nothing but sitting in, playing games, like old times when we used to live together. When he leaves I am broken, as though we have just left home a second time.

CairnsGreen island

There is rainforest. There is birdsong and the beach and my parents visit. My dad is walking well. We swim and eat and watch the great blue butterflies lazily flap along the gully. There are turtles.

Valkyriesride1

Everyone in this smoky room is intensely serious. We are all holding cardboard swords and axes, held aloft, pointed at one another: a battlefield. As the music begins and the Valkyries ride – plastic helmets, blonde wigs, cardboard hobby horses – we battle heroically in slow motion. I dodge a blade, twirl low, bring my axe up to strike as my opponent leaps sideways out of the way. I am tapped on one shoulder, called to die, and I die in the most epic fashion I can muster at the hands of a giggling 12-year-old boy, gurgling on the smoke-covered floor in a small room in St Kilda.

Christmas

There is no turkey. It rains too much to go to the beach. We play Netrunner for hours, eat smoked salmon sandwiches, visit new friends, talk endlessly in the rain. Three days later, in short sleeves and flip flops, we walk from a friend’s house to the bus stop. The pub opposite is festooned with ridiculous Christmas lights. One looks like a car on fire. It takes us five minutes to work out it is Santa, in traditional summer gear, handing out gifts from the back of a truck.

Note to self, aged 15

The JCARN prompt this month is to write a letter to your 15-year-old self. Well.

It gets better.

This will be the mantra of your coming years. This will be what guides you, what gets you up in the morning and gets you to sleep, eventually, late at night. This will be the phrase you cut out of newspaper letters and paste on your walls in seven different places you call home. This will be the only thing you believe without empirical evidence, not because it is pleasant but because you have already seen the alternative, where it was worse, and that is no longer an option.

It gets better.

You will crawl out of the hell of the depression you live in now. You will eventually discover other ways to contain the fire inside you that has you tearing at yourself. You will learn to name your emotions, and you will learn that they cannot, must not, be excised. You will learn to budget, to cook, to clean. You will find yourself laughing from time to time. Between the drama, somehow, you will pass exams.

It gets better.

You will leave the shattered remnants of your teenage years and flee to a new city, where you will fall in love, and out of love, and in love again more permanently. You will discover talents, and interests, and the Cow Tower on the river bend. You will learn to think in systems as well as stories. You will not sleep, until eventually the nightmares recede. You will learn to eat. You will learn to work. You will learn that you are valuable and worthy of respect. You will sometimes believe it.

It gets better.

You will move. You will grow. You will find London and, within it, friends. You will make things – games, poems, stories. You will smile almost every day. You will no longer need to make lists of what is good in the world. You will know it in your bones. You will work well in a job that makes you happy. You will play well in a world that makes you happy. You will create muscles where once was skin and bone. You will still have bad days, but they will be rare and nowhere near as bad as they once were. You will fly half way around the world and a lorikeet will crash into your window.

But first, before it gets better, it gets worse.

You will decide there is no purpose, no future, nothing of worth to you, and you will try to destroy yourself. You will not succeed. You will see out the millennium with a glass of fake champagne in an NHS medium-security ward, a nurse at arm’s length. There will not be fireworks. You will get birthday cards from the other patients. You will punch walls until your fists bleed. You will lie on the carpet and not make your bed and only emerge from your room for coffee. You will not take your hat off for five months. But slowly, you will take your first steps toward believing what I now know to be true.

It gets better.

The PAX diversity lounge vs the benefit of the doubt

According to an Indiestatik report on some leaked documents today, PAX is introducing a special “Roll for Diversity hub and lounge” at events – a place “to provide a resource hub for PAX attendees in relation to marginalized communities within the gaming audience”. According to the post, “It will be a hub for communication, networking and, hopefully, an increased understanding of issues facing these communities every day and the promotion of a tolerant, safe space within PAX.” Which is… interesting.

From the post:

Despite the proposal documents mentioning these spaces to be part of a continued effort “to provide a safe and welcoming environment,” in labeling an entire, separate little village as the “diverse” space, I think you’re running into a lot of potential problems, even if the experience is supposed to be focused on non-judgmental learning. For instance, why can’t the entire PAX space be explicitly marked as a safe space? Why does it appear that this is going to be the only area where someone might not feel threatened because of their ‘biological gender?’

There are the added concerns about the “diversity specialists” on hand to teach people about diversity in the gaming industry. Who are they, and who is vetting them? Why have these individuals been chosen to specifically represent queer gamers or woman gamers, or gamers of color? And why does the promotional registration policy for the diversity lounge seem so draconian?

(Quick disclaimer: I’ve not been able to verify this story myself, so I’m relying on Indiestatik’s source & reporting for the facts here. I don’t have any reason to doubt them. If that changes, I’ll update this post.)

The diversity lounge isn’t just one tone-deaf response to the need to build an inclusive space and a diverse community at PAX – although it is remarkably tone-deaf, given that presumably one of the things this space will be safe from is the remarks of one of the company’s founders. The issue isn’t just that hiving diversity and safety off into a small space is strange when you control the rest of the space and could, presumably, decide to make it all safe and all inclusive. It’s not just one iffy approach that needs a bit of work. The problem is the context.

The context is that, since the start of the dickwolves stuff, there have been – what, five? six? – let’s say, a lot of incidents where Penny Arcade or at least one of its founders have gone through this cycle. It goes like this: do something dodgy, get called out, apologise (sometimes with a greater degree of sincerity than others). There’s an optional fourth step where they take back the apology or go on to do something else equally dodgy that demonstrates none of the criticism’s been taken on board.

And those are just the things they’ve been called out on – at some point presumably someone with some diversity training will take them up on their persistent use of “crazy-person level of attention to detail” in their job posts, for instance, but while that level of casual cluelessness remains on show it’s pretty much impossible to take their organisational approach to inclusivity very seriously.

This isn’t just one thing. It’s a pattern of behaviour – a hypocritical one that seeks the right to continue to do stupid, harmful stuff under a consumer-friendly cloak of vague respectability, as though the word “sorry” means more than not doing it again. Right now, none of PAX’s critics are going to take a half-hearted, tone-deaf “diversity lounge” as anything other than a hilariously bad joke at best and a disaster waiting to happen at worst. Even if it’s well intentioned. Because that’s what so many of their other half-hearted, tone-deaf approaches to diversity have turned out to be.

For this to work the way it needs to work, for it to be a positive space that can provide practical benefits for people traditionally excluded by events like PAX, it needs a lot of goodwill from the same people who’ve been hurt by PAX in the past – the devs, the game designers, the public speakers, those with personal knowledge and professional expertise, the people who’ve been put off and dismissed in public by the event’s founders.  The people who say they won’t be there at all, never mind corralled in a small safe space.

PAX needs to prove that it’s broken the pattern. It needs the benefit of the doubt. The problem is that Penny Arcade has never once proved that it deserves it.

Notes on Papers, Please

Papers, Please

1. Papers, Please is a much easier game to slip into than Cart Life even though they’re both tackling Big Non-fun Things. I found the feedback loop much more rewarding and engaging – I’ve not yet got much beyond day 3 in Cart Life despite repeated attempts, because I’m not finding the flow within it. Maybe that’s the point, and Cart Life is supposed to be boring to play as well as simulating a boring experience. Maybe I just haven’t hit the sweet spot with it yet. But Papers, Please is doing something much more engaging for me.

2. A chunk of that is the way the game’s designed to tap skills I know I have. I am reasonably good at this game. I’m not sure you’re meant to be good at this game. I’m not sure that’s the point. I’m also not sure it’s meant to be fun, but I’ve gone back to it several times, so there’s definitely something satisfying going on here.

3. When I had a friend, the security guard outlined in green, I was terrified that a bomber or a gunman would kill him. It made me worse at the job. Whenever I had someone to help I was slower and more thorough because I was scared of letting them down, these meagre human connections. By contrast, when I was concentrating hardest on the tasks in hand, I stopped caring about any of the other characters.

4. Everyone has an agenda. Sometimes they’re incredibly clear what that agenda is; sometimes it’s obscured. Sometimes you get taken in. There is nothing in the game more bitter than going out of your way, risking financial or other punishments, for the sake of a little human kindness, and then having that thrown back in your face. Papers, Please is very good at making you quickly feel very bitter. I hated the inspector. I hated the people who abused me. I hated the journalists, in particular.

5. This is a game I would recommend for journalists to play. If you want good examples of how interactivity illuminates systems in a way that words, images, video and audio just can’t, this is right up there with the best. It is a game I would suggest for journalism courses, not for its content so much as for its methods. It is extremely powerful in what it conveys, with a very clear internal rhetoric, and I can easily imagine reskins that would make it a vehicle for understanding, say, border control in North Korea.

6. That said, some of the power behind the game’s EZIC storyline is that it is not realistic, at all; it reads better as the desperate power fantasy of a powerless official struggling to find meaning in what they’re doing. It has the qualities of delusion: shadowy figures, cryptic messages, strange codes. An ending in which things are just magically better, somehow. I was almost expecting it to turn out to be a test, a front for the secret police. Its implausibility only serves to point up the grinding cruelty of the situation you find yourself in.

7. And it is grinding, too, it is awful. The game distracts you from the humanity of what you’re doing by giving you puzzles to solve. Simple, absorbing tasks against the clock, requiring concentration and attention to detail. No time for empathy. No time to feel bad for the people you don’t let through, only just time to kick yourself for letting through one or two who bring your totals down. Like the gorilla at the basketball game, no spare mental bandwidth to take into account the little human gestures people make as they come through the checkpoint. Just when you are getting the hang of it, being able to rely on your memory and instincts, the game complicates itself. Before long you are a monster.

8. The process of checking someone’s documents manipulates the pacing in an enormously clever and carefully judged way. The frantic checking makes the imposed pauses problems to be overcome – you are impatient, annoyed at the time it takes for a fingerprint slip to print or a scan to be undergone. But you are also stopped in that moment, and it gives you seconds where you become suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the task you’re engaged in. It breaks flow. The scans, in particular – suddenly the player’s perspective shifts a little and you realise, as the scan prints, that this is a horribly degrading and largely meaningless thing. Then you flip the image, spot the package of drugs, and hit the detain or deny button, but you have had that moment of connection with your actions and it is deeply uncomfortable. Especially when you are checking gender.

9. I couldn’t play it through without doing the EZIC tasks. There is an ending for just doing your job, and I couldn’t get to it, knowing there was no hope.

Tabloid vs broadsheet, Facebook edition

There’s a lot of chatter around about Facebook at the moment in the light of the high levels of traffic it’s driving to publishers, and the way it’s trying to define itself as a news destination as well as a social one. Particularly interesting post on this topic at AllThings D today, which talks about the not-entirely-successful news feed redesign, and the dichotomy between what Facebook seems to want for itself and what its users seem to want from it.

Most people think of Facebook in a similar way: It’s a place to share photos of your kids. It’s a way to keep up with friends and family members. It’s a place to share a funny, viral story or LOLcat picture you’ve stumbled upon on the Web.

This is not how Facebook thinks of Facebook. In Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, Facebook should be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” He wants a design-and-content mix that plays up a wide array of “high-quality” stories and photos.

The gap between these two Facebooks — the one its managers want to see, and the one its users like using today — is starting to become visible.

I’m not a fan of the constant return to the print metaphor whenever we talk about new ways of depicting news online – the newspaper idea – because it tends so badly to limit the scope of what’s possible to what’s already been done. It’s an appeal to authority, the old authority of print pages, the idea not just of a curated experience delivered as a package but also a powerful force in the political world. An authoritative voice. And it’s likely that Facebook would not be upset if, as a side effect of becoming a more newspaper-ish experience, it also gained more power.

But what we’re talking about here isn’t just a newspaper-Facebook vs a not-a-newspaper-Facebook. It’s the tension between tabloid and broadsheet style, played out in microcosm in the news feed, just as it’s being played out in a lot of news organisations that used to be newspapers. It’s the question of whether you can really wield power and authority, whether you can be trusted, if you’re posting hard news alongside cat gifs. It’s the Buzzfeed questions played out without any content to publish, an editor’s dilemma without editorial control.

It’s also an identity question, because it always is with social media. We’re not one person universally across all our services; we don’t behave the same way on Twitter as we do on Facebook. What Zuckerberg wants isn’t just a news feed change, it’s also a shift in the way we express and construct our Facebook selves – a shift more towards the Twitter self, perhaps. A more serious, more worthy consumption experience and sharing motive, a more informational and less conversational self.

Maybe that’s a really difficult problem to solve, adjusting the way identity works within an online service. Or maybe tweaking people is easy to do, if you just find the right algorithm and design tweaks.

In defence of ‘gamer’

Simon Parkin in the New Statesman has an excellent take on the ways gamer culture strikes out at those outside it, and the way homogenous stereotypes reinforce that behaviour – it’s a great piece, and you should definitely read it, but the headline is wrong. It says “If you love games, you should refuse to be called a gamer.” But I love games. I’m a gamer. I’m a player too. And the good guys don’t get to do boundary policing and gatekeeping any more than the bad guys do.

(To be clear I don’t think Simon’s advocating this position – his point is that this is not a homogenous community, that people who play games aren’t just one thing, and I am 100% with him on that score.)

A friend of mine did some research looking at women who play games, their experiences of games and game culture, and found that a great deal of the people who responded to her survey would not define themselves as gamers, in part because of the stereotype and the hostility they felt from the community. I don’t look like the stereotype, so I can’t be one – a similar issue to the one facing feminism, where the strawfeminist is assumed to be the definition of feminism. Except that in gaming the stereotype is celebrated, rather than criticised on all sides.

Gamer as an identity isn’t going to disappear. It’s not limited to videogames (though lots of videogamers seem to think it is). It’s not limited to those who play vs those who don’t play. It’s a useful label, something that people bond over and around – and that’s not limited to dudebros playing CoD. It applies to me playing PC games, and tabletop RPGs, and board games, and live games, and finding commonality with all those gamer communities. It implies a shared vocabulary and a shared set of interests, but it’s also big enough these days to accommodate a huge number of overlapping sub-communities. And one of those – in fact, several of those – are mine.

Gaming has a huge identity problem. Many gamers see gaming as an integral part of their identity, and one of the messier results of that is that many people still perceive criticism of the games they like as criticism of them as people. That leads to all sorts of awfulness – backlash against those who are discriminated against in games and who dare to speak out, critics being attacked for doing valuable work. Some groups of gamers behave more like fandom than most of fandom does – ingroup/outgroup policing, jostling for status, assuming an outsider position, banding together against perceived adversaries. None of that is healthy or particularly sensible given the spread of the hobby.

But that doesn’t mean that’s all the label is. That headline falls into the trap that the article laments: assuming gamers are homogenous, and that the identity itself holds no value. It holds value for me: it’s been important in fostering a sense of togetherness, in creating shared spaces where I feel like I belong, diverse spaces that include other gamer women and other queer gamers. And many of us fought to be called gamers, used that label in public in spite of hostility, and we would not have done that or continue to do that if it wasn’t a valuable and useful thing.

I can criticise the actions of others who identify as gamers while also calling myself a gamer. I can be proud to be part of a community that makes Journey and Gone Home and Dys4ia and all those other games. I can be proud of being part of a community that’s – slowly but surely – getting broader, more accepting and more diverse, and I can fight against – not disown – the backlash against that process in my small corner of this culture.

Owning this identity helped me find friends on the other side of the world. It would be a shame to lose it.