From the desktop of an omega male gamer
Dear readers, I figured I would give you my perspective on things. Being I’m a poor pedestrian gamer & geek I figure I have a unique perspective on life compared to the archetypical university student or the professional nerds that get free swag wherever they go. I’m not saying it’s a terrible thing to be a university student or to be a professional but it does sort of create separate layers of reality from the one I currently reside in myself. (By that I mean our circumstances alter our perception of the world.)
Below I’ll try to answer some questions you may have for me!
1# Ben, did you go to college?
Yes, I attended the commercial Arts Institute in Minneapolis. I got to diddle around with a lot of emerging software such as Photo-shop,3D studio max, Maya, and a few animation & website creation kits I no longer recall the names of. Sadly, I was a “hick” from the country thus I had no previous experience using the tools I was given.
College was very difficult because I went to a whole new city and didn’t know the lay out. The prices for groceries were expensive and I was poor at managing money in the first place which compounded an already problematic issue. I also busted up my ankle pretty bad while rushing to an art supply store.
Highlights included drawing nude models with charcoal, gaming, and using the computer lab to look at & print hentai. (Instead of using the computer lab to actually do assignments. lol.)
As much as I learned in college I learned even more on my own. Boy, I wish I had a program like RPGMAKER VX ACE back then. I could have made my dreams come true right then and there! (All I wanted to do was make my own indie games, really. That and to draw whenever the whimsy hit me.)
When I returned home I did so prematurely after my ankle injury so I did not get a degree. I was hounded by loan companies years and years and years until I finally barraged them with paper work that proved without a shadow of a doubt I was on disability.
Personally, I partially regretted going to college but your own personal experience may vary!
2# Did you get and special treatment for being white and male?
Not at all. Matter of fact, I had a Hispanic professor named Alonzo who not so subtly hated my guts. (Which is odd because there were other Caucasian students in his class he treated just fine.) I think he knew I was from North Carolina (a southern red state) so he just assumed I was a racist republican yokel. However, I did notice Alonzo favored the ladies, especially a hawt Latino girl that attended my same class. A part of me can’t hold that against him (Er, she was cute) but as a result he gave her more breaks and chances than he gave many of the rest of us.
By the way, I was a clerk at the college book store and my boss was a pretty black woman. Luckily for me, Sheba was awesome! She was one of the best damned supervisors I ever had. But as you can see, “being white” and “being male” didn’t automatically get me into a seat of power.
3# Was feminism ever brought up on your campus?
We were mostly a laid back and respectful bunch as students. There was an unspoken rule everyone deserved to be judged on an individual basis upon their merits and flaws as opposed to their gender and their race. No one had need to get up on a podium and demand “fair treatment” and to my knowledge no one I knew got raped or sexually harassed. (Though one female student was doing stripping and pornography as a career of her own volition.)
It’s funny on account many of the female students I interacted with were intelligent, independent, and well learnt but none of them had the compulsion to label themselves as feminists. Even my boss Sheba who was pro equality and pro reproductive rights never dropped the “F word” when we were having conversations.
4# What was your life like as a omega male attending higher education and shortly thereafter?
"This is Ben.....Ben Stiller!"
There seems to be a popular theory we’re ruled by a “patriarchy” that’s by men and for men. I suppose this is true if you’re a wealthy man & a 1%er but feminists seem to forget most men are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths and we’re certainly not all born with advantages that guarantee our success through life.
Despite what I stated above, my life outside of classes as a omega male in college wasn’t so bad. I had a couple of friends and females in general were nice to me. I realized early on I was comely enough to be considered attractive (Don’t know how much that holds up today. lol) but my shy aloofness, abysmal fashion sense, and problems with money still prevented me from being “cream of the crop material” when it came to dating and mating.
It wouldn’t be until I returned home injured I would experience the ugly truth of being an omega-male. My dad told me right away he wanted me out of the house and working. I began staying at a boarding house and got a job as a dish-washer at Brevard College in my home state of North Carolina. Suddenly, certain college students were being mean to me just because I was a blue collar worker. Ironically, I had been a college student too but they couldn’t tell that merely by the look of me. It seemed to be a fast growing consensus that blue collar folk were inferior dullards when compared to those paying for a degree or those who lived on a university campus. At that moment I was disgusted by the very concept of “higher education”. The fact I was being hammered by my college loan debt certainly wasn’t helping my mentality.
Miserable and alone, I tried over-dosing on my lithium prescription. My closest friends tried helping me get back on my feet afterwards. During that stage I had began cutting on my arms again. (Something I did occasionally in college as well but I hid it beneath my long sleeved shirts)
Eventually I’d be diagnosed as bipolar and finally get a stable income with my disability money. However, before that I faced homelessness and even a little bit of street violence. I felt elated when I got my own apartment! It was a small victory but an important one!
5# What’s it like living with bipolar disorder?
I don’t struggle as much as an amputee or someone in a wheelchair. Or rather I do but it’s a different kind of struggling. Being bi-polar is kind of like having a malfunctioning symbiote. Sometimes you’ll have boundless energy but the pay off for that are days when getting out of your bed and facing a new day is a monumental struggle. Either you will be over sexed or you will be under sexed. Sometimes you’ll be the center of the room and a charismatic conversationalist but other days you’ll shut yourself away from the world and all its’ people because you want to be left alone.
Bipolar disorder makes it difficult to be in a stable relationship and those of us who live with it are afraid we’ll lash out and say things we do not mean or become undesirable when we are too manic, too horny, too withdrawn, or too depressed to fall within conventional behavioral norms.
Admitting to someone you are on some kind of disability assistance is a daunting under-taking and there’s no guarantee they will understand or be sympathetic. In a society where people seek out a perfect intimate partner those who are disabled go into the romantic-rat-races already feeling broken, inadequate, and less than human.
Lastly, anxiety and depression can cause problems with frequent insomnia, heart murmurs, fatigue, indigestion complications, and heartburn so there are physical ramifications that can pop up simultaneously with the mental ones.
Despite all that doom & gloom there are positives! I’ve learned to be able to function as a single person, I have an overactive imagination, and I feel a deeper level of immersion when I play games or work on my personal projects. Bipolarity contributes to these benefits so in a weird way I’m partially glad my mind is configured the way it is now.
6# What’s it like being on your income and being a gamer?
On an income akin to my own you have to make sacrifices. I decided early on I’d be an avid pedestrian because even if I could afford a used car paying insurance on it would kill my wallet. As a gamer there are some months I have to forego getting a new release to get something more important such as a new pair of shoes or a new pair of pants. I also usually wait for price drops on games before diving in. I’m not one of those trendy privileged tech nerds who can afford to own every console but if I could I would!
I know there are quite a few passers by who make snap assumptions about me based on my income and the fact I walk to every place I need to go. Though their ridicule hurts me sometimes I also realize those people wouldn’t be good friend material anyway.
7# You seem to have an issue with people like Anita Sarkesian. You mad bro?
I’m not as mad at Anita as mad as I am about everyone trying to be so politically correct. I’m sorry, but not everyone is a special snowflake and not every genre & hobby can be tailored in a way it entertains everyone while simultaneously offending no one.
To me diversity is important. For example, I love the art style in Dragon’s crown. It’s sexy and ridiculous, but I love it! Back in my college days no one would begrudge me for digging something akin to Atlus’s and vanilla-soft’s upcoming fantasy beat em up. Yet now I’d have people labeling me as a sexist and misogynist just for ogling over the witch and amazon characters. I mean fuck, it is possible to be aroused by fictional depictions of women AND see real women as equal human beings.
Everyone on the internet today seems so clannish and tribal. You can no longer be the middle man. You’re either the solution or the problem, the good guy or the bad guy. It’s like that in politics, like that in religion, and like that in debates on feminism and I’m so sick of it. Benjamin Franklin once said it’s better to hang together than hang alone and it really seems like there’s some sort of governmental conspiracy to keep us divided into petty arguing social cliques. That way we cannot come together as one unified people. It’s the divide and conquer strategy all over again and unfortunately it really seems to be working splendidly for whomever put it into play.
My problem is with 3rd & 4th wave feminists is that I have to pretty much see and hear geeks discuss Anita Sarkesians “negative female tropes on videogames” thousands of times whereas news concerning an Iranian actress getting 90 lashes for her part in a movie quickly disappears off the radar. Shouldn’t feminism be focused on helping oppressed women in 2nd and 3rd world countries where rape and femicide are still tragically common? And why is it most of the loudest feminists are privileged white females from universities speaking down to the rest of us? I’d really love for one such woman to spend 5 months in my body living as I do or 5 months in the body of an Iranian woman living in Iran. Maybe then she wouldn’t ask me to check my privilege and realize how good she has it in the western world!
Look, it doesn’t take a degree in sociology to put your own bias interpretation on a preexisting concept. To Anita Princess Peach is a negative helpless damsel in distress stereotype. But to someone else Peach could be a goodhearted important person who’s worth the effort to rescue. Heck, I could write a thesis paper on how Bowser and the koopas represent a slandered and oppressed minority. Maybe they kidnap Princess Peach just because she was ruling over them unfairly. If this is true, Mario and Luigi are war criminals responsible for koopa genocide and koopa enslavement. (Peta already presented this angle. Lulz!)
The fact of the matter is videogame writing back in the day wasn’t a patriarchal conspiracy to keep women down. It was simplistic, uninspired, and lazy. “Saving the girl” was an easy goal to give gamers and to justify all the whacked out stuff the pixellated heroes had to do in order to reach the end. Also, why isn’t that a good moral motivation? If someone I loved was in danger I would sure as hell try to save him or her. Heck, even if it was one of my best guy friends I’d be just as eager to come to the rescue. So, it’s sexist to try to save someone’s girlfriend, sister, daughter, or mother but “a-okay” if they save a monkey, a man, or an inanimate object?
Can’t these examples be spun another way too? If a man comes to the aid of another man is he a misogynist because he’s not coming to the aid of a woman instead? Is the kung-fu using school girl a misandrist on account her love interest happens to be another female as opposed to it being a teenaged boy? Is Tarzan into bestiality if his main goal is to free a gorilla from its’ cage? Is the space marine a perverted misanthropic machine-o-phile if he’s attempting to free his female android companion from the clutches of an evil super computer on the basis she’s not a “real woman”? Is the heroic female space bounty hunter a xenophobe because her job entails killing hostile extraterrestrials? Is the protagonist “gay” because he’s male yet wears a pink costume? Is the black superhero a racist & a bully because it just so happens the super-villain he strikes down is a nerdy white guy? Is the star ace’s phallic shaped spaceship symbolic of rape and domination? See how easy it is to twist this shit? I could go on and on for hours! Interpretive symbolism sure is fun! (snarky wink)
"This type of stuff is the real problem."
Be that as it may, I’m not trying to dismiss the fact sexism exists within gaming. Ever read the replies to a female game reviewer who did not like a game which has a hardcore fan base? Ever played an online multi-payer death match when out of the blue someone tells your female bestie to make him a sandwich? Ever watch a female geek get ridiculed and drilled harshly just because she fumbled on some tidbit of inconsequential obscure nerd trivia? These injustices happen all the time. An this what concerns me. Griefing REAL FEMALE GAMERS are subjected to. By contrast I really can’t give two shits about Cat Woman’s sexy skin tight costume or the jiggle physics in Dead Or Alive. Sorry, but I simply do not care!
Beyond all this, feminists have many fractions within their own ranks. For example, pro sex feminists would be fine if a woman wanted to pursue exotic dancing, prostitution, or pornography as a career but conservative feminists would see those professions as man controlled abominations. Some feminists are fine with women who want to be stay at home moms while other feminists believe stay at home mothers are a dated trope that reinforces bad patriarchal values. What does this mean? More or less that it’s impossible to make a book, a game, or a movie that would make every single feminist happy. They’re unique individuals just like the rest of us!
"Sure,Tetris is inoffensive but should every game be like Tetris?"
My biggest fear is that as game developers try to appeal to everyone’s sensibilities games themselves will become more bland. Tetris technically is a completely inoffensive game. Yet how much “personality” does Tetris have? (Besides for the catchy Russian music that accompanies the game play! Wait a second! That‘s offensive! Damn those hammer & sickle communists! Subliminal messaging I tell ya! To any of my Russian friends reading this I‘m being sarcastic. lol.)
Lastly please, change the word feminism! I request this on the basis you cannot claim to champion equal rights for everyone when you use a word that puts femininity above all other things. Beyond that, I’ve never heard a new wave feminist talk about problematic issues men face or the dwindling numbers of men in educational institutions. If you’re going to be for equality you have to care about all human beings as opposed to the self interest of only one centralized group of human beings.
LOL
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