Pong Wasn’t Sexist — Gender Signifiers in Early Gaming
NEW: Watch my apology for this article on Youtube.
Modern gaming critics have a considerable advantage these days. Games are longer, more involved and fall on different price points giving a critic the ability to produce 20 minute reviews and 2000 word essays while still leaving the player the option to make their own decisions and learn about the game first hand. It’s even possible to speak directly to the programmers, designers and voice actors! This is a new phenomenon and should have resulted in better criticism.
Often this access leads to its own set of journalistic ethical wrenches where those who critique for their supper must be gentle for fear of losing that access. Game criticism doesn’t require a lick of access since you’re reviewing the game as delivered, but that’s an argument for another day.
Modern Critics Pick and Choose Their Battles
Critics of modern games run into even more trouble when it comes to taking a sharp look into the past. When modern critics (in this case, modern feminist critics) are not interested in the early history of gaming then they are not informed enough to comment on modern issues. Reasonably, one-quarter of the roughly 42 year history of games can be considered the early period if we choose the Crash of ’83 as the end of that era. A critic of modern music deserves no authority on modern trends if they’ve never listened to any bands from earlier than the mid-80s.
What kind of modern music critic ignores Led Zeppelin, the regrettable disco era and Black Sabbath? What kind of modern music critic has never used a record player? The kind of who gets paid for ignoring those years, that’s who.
Modern critics who decry games as sexist are willfully ignoring a decade’s worth of games because they do not fit into the narrative. If games are becoming increasingly sexist, then the start of the crescendo must be analyzed and underlined. If video games are inherently sexist, then modern rubrics to determine them as such must also align with the earliest games.
I’ll note that ignorance and dismissal of early games goes hand-in-hand with dismissal of second wave feminism, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The 1970s Were Not The Stone Age
Let’s start with some claims: Gaming as it is today did not emerge fully formed from the heads of sexist male game designers. Modern gaming is a result of advances in technology and must be understood hand in hand with gaming’s history of technology breakthroughs. Early gaming is not stone-aged technology. Working Atari 2600s and Pong consoles can be had for $100-$150 on EBay. I can guarantee you’ll have more trouble locating a working CRT television than a working early console.
So instead of diving right into talking about where we’re currently at in gaming (a subject on which I admit I am inadequately versed) I’d like to start with the most important video game ever produced: Pong.
Pong was based on the the game Tennis released in 1972 on the first at-home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. This resulted in a lawsuit against its manufacturer at Atari and Magnavox spent years pursuing legal action against other companies that produced games similar to Tennis.
Pong wasn’t the first video game ever produced, but it was the most important when you factor in its reach into the mainstream. So let’s stick a pin into this historical moment and make a bold statement based on my claims:
Pong is not sexist.
The most important video game of all time is not sexist.
Early Programmers Are Alive And Well and Browsing the Web
The first protagonists of those early games were its players. Yes, Tennis and then Pong were developed by men, but it’s unreasonable to claim that just because a game was designed by a man it is inherently anti-woman, especially since early games did not credit their programmers.
Claiming that modern games are sexist vilifies the game designers of today (including the female designers) who are able to respond to their target market and in fact are sentient beings who read their own reviews and gather feedback from their players. They are also gamers themselves.
It’s a pathetic feedback loop that allows non-gaming critics to be the most important faction to please with the video games built by lifelong gamers. You wouldn’t let a vegetarian review your steakhouse, would you?
In reality, early games were quicker to produce, and one truth about manufacturing is that when you have a faster turnaround time, you can respond more quickly to your market and to the changing technology. Games that were broken were returned. Atari programmers were not sending out beta versions to legions of testers, but instead they worked in an office full of programmers who were more qualified to give constructive feedback.
There is a sad lack of available interviews and documentaries about early programmers. It would be beneficial to give them a stronger voice in today’s gaming media. As a vaguely in-tune gamer who fondly recalls the thousands of hours poured into her childhood NES, I am often more interested in the views of the people who paved that way than the modern designers who are too busy with their careers to comment.
Early games were not social commentary, they were built around the available technology including available RAM and whether the system took cartridges. The programmers surely had their own views on the world but had no way of injecting such things into Super Breakout and Space Invaders. Early criticisms of those games were purely of and about the games. Now, critics are willing and able to personally attack those programmers.
Overhead Perspective Made The Player the First Person
Early games were not attempting to mimic reality in the same was as modern games. You were required to use your imagination to turn a dot into a ball and a line into a tennis paddle.
That same limited technology limited female protagonists. Of course, that means there were no MALE protagonists either. The first protagonist in video games was the player. Early games needed box art and manuals to fill you in on the details and left a lot to your imagination — now it’s all fed directly to you as a narrative.
Take Video Olympics as an example. Released as a launch title to the Atari, it included a female tennis player on the box art. Conspiracies ought to claim that therefore, Pong’s protagonist is a woman because Tennis, or something. The launch title Surround featured a male and female on the box art occupying the same space on their seat.
There’s a thesis’ worth of symbolism in those two examples.
Hardware First, Pixels Second
There’s a very basic trend here: technology and the hardware is necessarily prior to the software and therefore the storytelling in the game. Without the right hardware, without enough RAM in the console or cartridge, without battery power, it is harder to tell a story with characters be they male or female.
Nowadays to avoid naming a protagonist is to leave out a major piece of the game on purpose. Even John Everyman characters like Chell and Gordon Freeman are eye-rolling empty Mary Sues to the point where it’s deliberate.
Gendered Protagonists
Early games had no ability to produce real protagonists because they were limited by their pixels. Gender signifiers and female characters (and decidedly male characters) came about as graphics became better.
The first major protagonists were airplanes and sportsball players. If you were playing a baseball game it made sense to assume the players were all male because the best known professional athletes were and are men. It was all make-believe and in the mind of the player, anyway. And it’s not like it’s necessarily negative to assume that 15 pixels worth of a stick figure is obviously male, anyway.
But that’s an essay for another day.
I’M SO SORRY
Please watch my apology for saying horrible things.
I’m not certain what the argument is here? Early games weren’t sexist, so you can’t argue that modern games are sexist?
The fact that early games were so de-gendered is actually one of the things that makes me most critical of the current state of the industry (well, the state of the industry in the early 00s – it’s getting a LOT better these days). Games were considered a “gender neutral” toy much in the same way board games, lego and rollerskates were until the late 80’s, at which point many companies began aggressively marketing their products to boys despite the fact that gaming has always been a hobby that splits evenly down the middle along gender lines. The lack of clear gender markers in early games make the AAA market’s focus on the “male 18-35” demographic at the expense of everyone else especially frustrating.
There are actually a ton of resources on early coders/game makers available. Game reviewers/historians have always had p. much unprecedented access to game makers since early game designers were “fans” and “nerds” themselves – a lot of the problems that currently plague game journalism and gaming fandom today are because the barrier between producer/consumer has always been notoriously thin. Despite the “Hollywoodization” of games throughout the late 90s and early aughts, individuals involved in the production of games are still easily accessible and incredibly communicative with their fans, and many game companies (even big ones like Bioware, Blizzard and Valve) actively recruit from their fandoms.
“Often this access leads to its own set of journalistic ethical wrenches where those who critique for their supper must be gentle for fear of losing that access. Game criticism doesn’t require a lick of access since you’re reviewing the game as delivered”
– this isn’t actually true. Game criticism thrives on early and elite access that is usually garnered through cozy relationships with AAA designers in which 9.0 star reviews are the pre-requisite. It’s always been an accepted fact that basically every major game publication is in bed with Rockstar, Namco, EA, etc. and that all games coverage should be taken with a grain of salt. Games mags are cutthroat about early access and “special coverage”.
This is the major problem that has always plagued games journalism – the fact that publications that review games have traditionally also been publications that operate as ad-space and publicity for video games. Social critiques of gaming are not new, but they’ve risen to prominence in the internet era because the internet provides a platform for gaming journalism that does not have to rely on the adspace big bucks they get paid from the AAA companies. They can say whatever the hell they want to say.
“Modern critics who decry games as sexist are willfully ignoring a decade’s worth of games because they do not fit into the narrative. If games are becoming increasingly sexist, then the start of the crescendo must be analyzed and underlined. If video games are inherently sexist, then modern rubrics to determine them as such must also align with the earliest games.”
I’m pretty deep in the “feminist critique of video games” culture (I’ve been a gamer since I could form words so it’s p. important to me) and I’ve *never* seen anyone say that gaming is inherently sexist – that’s actually the opposite of what most feminist games critics are trying to say. Games “became sexist” when the game industry began to focus their marketing and content specifically on what they perceived as their core demographic- as I said, this was a late 80’s, early 90’s phenomenon. The male-focused marketing was so successful, in fact, that you see a lot of adult men saying that gaming is the “last male hobby” or that “no girls played games when I was growing up so why do they want to play games now” even though these statements have never been true.
Yeah, Pong wasn’t sexist, but Duke Nukeum 64 WAS. The games industry was a very different placed in 1997 than it was in 1972.
I actually think the point you make in this article proves that feminist critiques of gaming are vital even though you seem to be arguing against them. A lot of the anti-feminist gaming clique argue that the way games are now (and the way they were in the 90s and the aughts) is how games have ALWAYS been, so trying to enact any change is pointless and harmful. What you’ve argued here is important: games weren’t always mired in sexism and hierarchical gender roles. In fact, the origin of gaming was inclusive and gender neutral, so there is no harm in advocating for more games that treat gender the way pong did.
The author is welcome to correct me, but what I got from this was a reaffirmation of how feminist critics fundamentally misunderstand the medium of video games. Not just feminist criticism, though that is certainly the most poignant example, but ANY type of video games criticism that treats video games like movies or books and not like games.
Namely, there are no such things as “characters” with “agency” or “lacking agency” in video games; there is only the player and the objects the player plays with. The games of the early period with their graphical limitations demonstrate this most clearly. Everyone from Mario to Lara Croft to Booker Dewitt is a dressed up Pong paddle. It’s not women who are the ball; it’s EVERYTHING in the game that is not the player.
One is certainly welcome to critique the imagery of those dressed-up Pong paddles (though that critique is usually wrong and fraught with irony anyways), but the whole discourse over agency shows a fundamental lack of comprehension of what games are. “Media critics” who don’t understand that video games are, first and foremost, games does not understand media.