Fansplaining: Fresh Out Of Tokens

Podcast Episode
Fansplaining
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Episode Title:	Fansplaining: Fresh Out Of Tokens
Length:	1:18:52
Featured:	cypheroftyr
Date:	February 22, 2017
External Links:
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Fansplaining: Fresh Out Of Tokens is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.

For others in the series, see Fansplaining

Introduction

Elizabeth and Flourish talk to Tanya DePass, host of a podcast of the same name, founder of I Need Diverse Games, and author of a whole lot of Dragon Age fanfiction. They discuss gaming, fan/creator interaction, intersectionality, politics, and more. They also share a listener letter about game fandom and discuss the place of art in times of political crisis.

Links

• Episode, show notes, and transcript: Fresh Out Of Tokens, ^{Archived version}
• Tumblr Promotional Post
• Full Fan letter as excerpted in the episode

Topics Discussed

• Racism in Fandom
• Feminism and intersectionality in the gaming industry
• #INeedDiverseGames and how that hashtag got started
• Needing meaningful representation and diversity in video games, especially that which challenges stereotypes or racist portrayals
• Twine games
• fan/creator interaction and fan entitlement
• How to give feedback to creators constructively, and the role of diversity consultants
• Gaming fandom, and fandom centred on video games
• Responding to a fan letter about transformational/affirmational fandom in gaming

Excerpts

FK: To get us started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your fandomy life?

Tanya: OK. So my fandomy life is majority Bioware fandom, I’m a big nerd for Bioware, I’m actually wearing a Tevinter shirt while we’re recording. I got into Dragon Age and stuff a few years ago, got into Mass Effect later, I’m very much into video game related fandoms, I write a lot of fanfic for those fandoms, I have a lot of words on Archive Of Our Own, last time I checked it was over 3,000,000, a lot of that is co-writing with other people, but I’ve been writing fanfic for quite a while under the fanfiction.net profile that hopefully no one ever finds again. [all laugh] That is the angsty teen stuff that I am shamed to admit ever existed. I actually wrote Power Rangers fanfic.

ELM: But so then, your fandom also intersects with your professional…you have a podcast and various projects, so, I wonder if you wanna go in a little bit.

Tanya: Sure. My love of gaming and love of seeing myself in these media and things like that intersects with what I do. I do have a podcast as well, it’s called “Fresh Out Of Tokens,” it’s a weekly show. We’re talking about feminism, intersectionality, I try to talk to people who are doing interesting meaningful things in games, not just AAA folks, not just the “big names,” quote-unquote, because there’s a lot of people making really cool indie things that may not be out there yet or I may have come across it thanks to Tumblr or Twitter, and those are the folks I wanna talk to. Because you have this cool game and you’re doing stuff, but for some indies you either don’t get coverage or people don’t care till the game’s actually out, and getting that pre-build, pre-release interest is really important as well. I just talked to someone who's making a [?] game and they’re just really excited, and I saw just the art for it and I was like “I must know more about this game,” because it’s really cool.

So I do that, I have a weekly show, and then I run a nonprofit called I Need Diverse Games, which took about two-and-a-half years from a hashtag when I was legit angry about games at six in the morning. [all laugh] I was. I was just literally angry about games at six in the morning in October 2014. Cause I think it was the whole “too hard to animate women” thing, and inches from playable women was crossing my streams again, and I was just like, “I’m so sick of this. I’m so freaking tired of it.”

FK: Remind us, remind us of too hard to animate women? Cause I remember this scandal but I’m not sure all our listeners will.

ELM: Not a reminder for me! Please educate me about these things that you just mentioned.

Tanya: I think it was “Assassin’s Creed: Unity” was either going to come out or was shown at E3 that year, or something, and it was literally the same four white dudes in different color clothes and people were like “Gemale assassin? Maybe?” They’d had the Sony portable, Vida, game, with Aveline, not Aveline from Age, Aveline de Grandpré, and she’d been in a Vida game and everything. So you clearly know how to put women in your games, so people were just not happy with the fact that for the most part Assassin’s Creed had been good with historical accuracy and things like that but they’d not had a female character or anything like that, and it was just the “It’s too hard to animate women.” Which turned out to be ridiculous, because I think someone who used to work at the studio was like, we used the same wireframe, the same “male” quote-unquote wireframe for Aveline—so it’s not that you can’t do it. So it just made me angry. Granted I don’t make games, I’m not a dev, it just seemed like a really BS excuse not to do it.

I was angry about that and then there was, “Far Cry 4” was coming out and they said they were “inches from a playable character” for a female character, and I was just… I’m done. I’m so angry. And those kind of excuses to me as someone who admittedly knew far less about the industry then, made me angry.

ELM: That’s fantastic. Do you, have you found since you started this that the attitudes within the industry are changing? I know we’re supposed to be talking about fandom more than the people creating this stuff, but do you feel like they’re actually listening and actually maybe—you don’t have to be as frank as you might wanna be.

Tanya: People are listening and the, what I’ve found is that there have been people doing the work behind the scenes that fans would never know about. Sometimes it’s like, people are doing what they can quietly, behind the scenes, because one, we see what garnering attention happens, especially if you try to be more public about it. And two, the people making the games are gonna be the ones that can effect most change. I am a fan of games and I’m part of the industry now and I do have that privilege to talk to people who have that access, like going to GDC and things like that. But fandom unto itself is not going to effect change unless there’s a critical shift in thinking about games as an art form and as a medium that has value beyond just strictly entertainment.

And that’s where I think a lot of people are stuck, because they’re so tied to “This is supposed to be fun. I’m supposed to just be able to play a game where I shoot a bunch of brown people and have no consequences,” or “play things where black people are total stereotypes,” or “women are easily killed off for the main dude protag’s motivation,” and not think about the fact that media does not exist in a vacuum. It has a relation. So if I am constantly exposed to games where I don’t get to exist, or I get to exist only as a plot point and then I get killed, or I’m a stereotype like “Deus Ex: Human Revolution,” the black character sounds like a [?] cartoon, that has an effect on you. And representation is important, not just for small children, but for everyone, because at some point you go “OK, this is not for me.” Which is why a lot of people of color, a lot of LGBT folks, feel disenfranchised from fandom and that’s why you go you know what, we’re gonna make our own, but when we make our own, nobody’s happy then either.

FK: So, anyway, for awhile I was really like “Why don’t we get everybody to make text games?!” and I made text games for Yuletide like three or four times, and then it was interesting because I think there’s not as much fanfic that—or games that are fanfic-y. Like, people tend to make their own original games, I feel like, instead of making fanfic games. And I still haven’t quite entirely figured that out. There are some obviously, I’ve made a bunch of fanfic games and I know other people who have, but I don’t know.

Tanya: Well, I have a thought about that. One, if you’re talking about playing in someone else's IP. Fanfic unto itself is like, as long as you’re not profiting off it or something like that, but making a game based off fic…and also it’s a different structure, because I found this out when I tried to sit down and make a Twine game. You have to really think about connections and kind of if X happens it must connect to A, B, C, D choice, and you have to be much more concise. There’s no real easy way to go back and edit something that either you get too wordy, you get too verbose, because someone playing a Twine game isn’t going to sit there and read through like 200 lines of one section. You wanna go “OK, I made this choice, it goes to this branch, I have to make sure it makes sense to come back to the other branch, how do I make this all connect and make sense.”

As someone who writes a lot of fic I can always go back and edit something I’ve written if either it doesn’t make sense or it’s a little wordy or doesn’t quite line up. But sitting there branching out and making sure you don't get scope creep in something like a Twine game or anything else, you have to really think in a different way. You have to think about different structure, and so it’s one thing to take your own words and maybe go “OK, maybe I can use Twine to plot out a fic,” because you’re never gonna publish it, but then it’s like, how do you backward engineer that into prose.

(On negative fan/creator interaction)

Tanya: [snipped] I actually just saw a post today, before we recorded, about someone having the theory that Bioware stole Fenris from a fanmod from “Awakenings.” Yeah, I had that look too [in reference to Flourish and Elizabeth’s expressions]. And one of my friends used to work at EA, really wrote a good response and debunked it. Because even though I’m part of this industry, we still don’t know the length of a development cycle, especially for a big property like Dragon Age. It’s like, “They stole Fenris.” And it’s like, “This game has been out how many years ago and this is just now surfacing—really?” That’s my response. It’s not like they’re gonna go “Oh oops, we stole this thing!” Because A, I’m 99.9, 100% sure they did not cause that’s just a ridiculous claim. But things like that where it’s just like, “You do know someone from Bioware’s probably eventually gonna see this.” [all laugh] And that’s just ridiculous.

But it’s the way people interact and I know someone’s gonna think it’s tone policing but if I’m a dev, and a fan screams and yells at me on Twitter, I’m not going to respond. I’m probably gonna block them and move on because there’s a way to interact with people. And you know, I get it too. If I retweet devs or if I interact with devs or if we have them on the show, and didn’t get a lot of negative response, but there are people like “Oh my God how did you even talk to him?” and blah blah blah and like… cause he wrote a character that I’m a fan of! And he agreed to be on my show! So there’s this idea that “I don’t like this dev, I don’t like this person,” or “I don’t like this franchise, how dare you interact with it,” well, sorry! It sucks to be you. You have the right not to listen to stuff that you don’t like. And I think that’s where a lot of the fan fail comes from, because there’s… yes, you put it out in the world, yes fans interact with it, we’ve consumed it, but it’s still not your property. If that makes sense.

(On the harassment of Leslie Jones being attributed by some journalists to entitled fans)

ELM: [snipped] And there seemed to be this desire from, this certain realm of I would say— to generalize — white dude affirmational fandom that thinks that anyone talking back to a creator is an entitled fan, whether you are being a racist jackass to someone putting diverse, a diverse cast in, or the opposite. So I guess my question is, though, one of the things I always get hung up on is often you are using the same methods to, you know, if I wanna talk back to a creator, right, how do I—how do I unpack this idea of, I want content creators to be held to account when it comes to things like, you know, sexism and racism and homophobia. But how do you separate that out from being a respectful fan and not shouting at them or…obviously I don’t advocate shouting at them, but…

[snipped]

Tanya: So a lot of it, I think, as much as I hate the word, it’s gonna come down to tone and approach. It’s two things: it’s on the fan side, it’s tone and approach, and I always bring this up with—in my case, let’s say I’m not a big fan of Vivienne or Sera in Dragon Age. Sera is the first lesbian character, not bi, not bi-curious, she’s lesbian, that’s it. And I’m not a fan of Vivienne because while we finally get a dark-skinned black character she’s still very much a trope. And there’s a way for me to go to Bioware and go, “Hey, you know what, I played ‘Inquisition,’ have some thoughts about this character and representation, can I talk to you about it,” versus getting on Twitter, getting on Tumblr, and going “Oh my God you racist assholes how could you do this?” or “You’re homophobic!” Or people who called David Gaider homophobic for writing Dorian when he’s a gay dude.

I think it’s, again, in approach, and there’s a way to express your hurt and express your feelings and this is very tone police-y, I’m aware of that. But it’s also how you're going to get a response versus just getting blocked on Tumblr or Twitter or whatever. I think a lot of people decide “This is public, your Twitter is public, you're available, therefore I can say and speak—I can say and do what I want with no consequence, and I’m the fan, I own you, I own this, I made it what it is,” which is true, if there’s no fans of the thing then it’s not going to flourish, but you also literally don’t own the property, you don’t sign this person’s paycheck. So I think it’s finding a way to interact either tweeting at someone going “Hey I’ve got feedback on a game” or “I’ve got feedback on a character, is there a way to respond,” because remember Bioware shut down their forums, which I am really happy about.

On the creator side it’s being willing to listen. Unfortunately a lot of the bad signal to noise comes through and fans that scream and yell, and I would even hesitate to call them “fans” at that point, the people who are acting entitled get through because they’re so much louder and they don’t stop tweeting at someone, they find other ways to message them, or if I mention someone—like I mentioned medievalpoc in a tweet and someone who didn’t like them decided that was their moment to shine and go take them down and yell at them and I’m like “I just mentioned them. Leave me alone.”

ELM: I just feel like you’re making games sound better than — which surprised me! — than a lot of the media that I normally am writing about. But like, I think that you’ve seen over and over again these creators just doubling down. “I’m not racist!” And just curling up in a shell and acting like all critique is the same. It’s like they’re being pummeled by the same forces whereas, I don’t know, it’s tricky cause I don’t wanna be tone police-y too obviously but…but…I worry that for some of them they’re lost and they’re never gonna be able to listen to any criticism, they’re gonna be like “You’re so PC!”

Tanya: So about that. [all laugh] So one of the things that, and I talk about this a lot across fandoms just across everything, is that what I’ve seen, for me, and this applies more to when I talk about US politics right now, especially when I mention white women who voted for the president, I get a lot of “I didn’t vote for him! How dare you! I’m not a racist!” and I was like, “Did I call you a racist?” [all laugh] And if you didn’t vote for him, I wasn’t talking about you. And I think we’ve gotten to the point where more people are, they are so defensive and so afraid of being called a racist versus actually considering what they’re doing as a racist action because of the society that we’re raised in, that it’s hard to get people to listen.