2019 Feminist ACTion! (15) Famerz
By Lee Do-im
Published Sept. 28, 2019
Translated by Marilyn Hook
※ As women’s call for an end to hate
and discrimination gains momentum online and reverberates through the
streets, we record these new voices of feminism and the diverse actions they
take. This project is carried out with the support of the Korea Foundation for
Women’s fund for Gender Equality and Social Development. -Editors
1. What kind of girl likes games as much as you do?
It’s now been a while since computer games like MapleStory,
Mabinogi, NEXUS: The Kingdom of the Winds, and Junior Naver Animal Farm
have become nostalgic games. The other activists in Famerz also fondly remember
these games as ones that they enjoyed as kids. But when I hear people say
things like that, even as I nod my head, I find it hard to agree fully in my
heart.
The reason is simple: I didn’t really come to know
those games until after I became an adult. The people who raised me wouldn’t
allow a girl to play video games. Growing up in that family environment, I’d
only heard the names of the games listed above; I’d never dared to try to play
them.
But in my heart I loved games, and so I didn’t bow to
this oppression. I secretly honed(?) my love by watching gaming broadcasts
unbeknownst to my guardians, choosing video games I liked as homework topics,
and so on. And then, when the stress of school was at its height, my passion
for games erupted as a form of rebellion.
In mid-2016, a game called “Overwatch”
was popular. I often skipped out on my school’s evening self-study sessions and
escaped to a bookstore or movie theater, and eventually ended up going to a PC
room for the first time. I started going there regularly, playing online games
like Final Fantasy 14. When I think about it now, this disobedience
seems both reckless and trivial, but it was a very enjoyable time for me as a
gamer.
As I finished my time as college
entrance exam prep student and became an adult, I was finally able to truly
live as a gamer. But living as a female gamer in Korea is no easy thing.
 |
| A collection of screencaps of misogynist comments uploaded to Twitter by Girls Who Play Overwatch @famerz_GGYG |
2.
Difficulty level of living as a female gamer in Korea: ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆
The materials posted by the Twitter
account “Girls Who Play Overwatch”
[Obchihaneun Yeojadeul] (now ‘Gaming
World Misogyny Reporting Account [Geimgye
Nae Yeoseonghyeomo Gobalgyejeong], @famerz_GGYG) include a diverse range of
misogynistic comments.
“Mercy has to be played by a pretty girl,”
“Scientifically, women’s voices reduce tension. Because there’s no tension [in
playing against women],” “Today I’ll have to eat[1] (name)”,
and so on...
The screencaps of in-game chats uploaded to the
account are full of hateful comments made because the target is presumed to be
female.
I had just started playing online games, so I was a
casual Overwatch player who didn’t use voice chatting, and my gender wasn’t
easy to guess from my nickname. So I was never victimized. But after seeing the
contents of the Twitter account, I began to feel fear. It was the fear that I
could be sexually and verbally harassed when playing computer games just
because I was female.
The year 2016 saw both the Gangnam Station murder and
the firing of computer game voice actor Kim Ja-yeon for expressing feminist
sympathies. Watching these things happen, I wondered what I as a woman had to
do to live safely in Korea. Even while gaming, doing what I enjoy as a hobby, I
was at risk of attack for being female. This unjust situation made me so
furious that I had to do something about it.
The fear that I had felt at first turned into anger,
and this pushed me to volunteer as a staff member of the “National Diva
Association” (now Famerz) in December 2016, when it was preparing to launch
itself as an organization.
3. Is gaming a male cultural pastime?
Isn’t is it ridiculous to say that gaming is a form of
entertainment that’s for men? Yet, this flawed proposition is accepted as fact
in the gaming world. This is because in male gamers’ minds, female gamers are
no more real than unicorns, and women only exists as targets of sexual
objectification.
For girls and women, there is no space in games or
gaming communities where they are allowed to exist. If I reveal during a game
that I am a woman, I’m immediately vulnerable to sexual harassment and other
forms of misogyny. In gaming communities, it is commonplace for female gamers
to be aggressively othered and even subjected to sexual harassment in the form
of evaluations of their appearance. Under these circumstances, female gamers
have no choice but to give up communicating altogether or pretend to be male.
Ultimately, there is no space where women are allowed to exist simply as women.
That is why Famerz’s main goal, as a group for
feminist female gamers, was to make the existence of women in the gaming world
visible and create a space for female gamers.
 |
Members of Famerz holding a book club meeting. © Famerz
|
When we first started our activism to make women in
the gaming world visible, fights with antifeminists were common. Every time, we
would have to prove our status as “serious gamers” by taking screencaps showing
our level in a game we were playing or our list of games on Steam or other
game-selling platforms.
But in the end, that kind of proof means nothing. The
people fighting with us about feminism are obsessed only with attacking us. The
materials we collected are twisted around to fit their needs and used to attack
us. But what is a “real gamer” anyway? How many hours do you have to play per
day, how much money do you have to spend on gaming to earn recognition as one?
Who decides these standards? Female gamers, us included, are endlessly pushed to
prove that we were “real gamers” by vague standards that no one can clearly
define.
In these ways, proof of the authenticity and even the
very existence of female gamers is demanded. On the other hand, the bad-faith
consumers who do things like conducting ideological purity tests on female
workers in the gaming industry and calling them “Megal” [like the website Megalia] are considered real gamers without a shred of proof
or recognition required. The game industry readily listens to and accepts the
ridiculous arguments of these “real gamers”, and as a result, the women who
work in it face a crisis of labor rights violations.
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