Gamergate reflected for #MeToo era
Up in a second-story rehearsal space on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the cast and crew of “Non-Player Character” — the San Francisco Playhouse Sandbox Series production making its world premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 7, at the Creativity Theater — are pondering the latest update to the #MeToo movement.
“This is my main problem with progressive liberalism,” says director Lauren English. “It cannot survive without condemning. It’s such a hard edge.”
Days earlier, a story broke detailing a Brooklyn photographer’s date with comedian and actor Aziz Ansari that resulted in reportedly unwanted sexual advances. It quickly proved to be the most widely controversial entry into the national discussion around the boundaries of sexual misconduct — and one whose potential for useful dialogue seemed to be botched in various ways, depending on whom you ask.
English, to be sure, isn’t taking political sides nor is she soapboxing; she is instead referring to the staunch, black-and-white fury on any side of the debate that has exploded since. If anything, the consensus in the room is that the context is complex, and the backlash, across the board, ugly.
In 2018, the conversation is pertinent during rehearsal for a play about online gaming culture. In “Non-Player Character,” an aspiring female video game developer named Katja has a falling out with her male gamer friend Trent. Embittered, Trent unleashes an online campaign against Katja that speaks to the thorny gender dynamics of the gaming world and beyond, and the redefined dangers of harassment in the hands of the Internet.
The play’s story is rooted deeply in, and inspired by, Gamergate, the 2014 controversy in the video game world in which a game developer named Zoë Quinn was subjected to a widespread online harassment campaign born from an ex-boyfriend’s blog post. As Quinn and eventually other women — including feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian — became targets of death threats and doxxing (the act of publicizing an individual’s personal and private information), the controversy spilled across mainstream media.
“It became this big, sort of shambling monster of awfulness,” playwright Walt McGough says by phone from Boston. Yet, although Gamergate, even in its discussion in the mainstream at the time, was predominantly confined to the context of the video game world, its larger cultural implications of misogyny proved to be the “canary in the coal mine,” says McGough, a lifelong gamer himself.
Though “Non-Player Character” was written shortly after Gamergate, its place on the stage now, over three years removed, takes on greater meaning in the context of the #MeToo movement. “The relevance has mutated,” McGough says. “It’s no longer just a play about the way that women are treated in this art form. It’s now a play in conversation with the way that women and people of color are treated online and in the world as a whole.”
That conversation examines deeper questions at the heart of scenarios ranging from the blatantly wrongful targeting of Quinn to the murkier situations such as Ansari’s.
“There is something at the core of misogyny,” English says, “which is about expectations.”
In “Non-Player Character,” a set of expectations that Trent has of Katja is left unfulfilled, making way for online abuse and terrorizing. Another term could be male entitlement, McGough says, while referring to Elliot Rodger, a UC Santa Barbara college student who, near the time of McGough’s writing of the play, went on a murderous rampage targeting sorority members. Before the killings, Rodger uploaded YouTube videos of himself with titles such as, “Life is so unfair because girls don’t want me.”
Yet among the web of messy realities its narra-
tive is now enmeshed in, “Non-Player Character” still speaks specifically to the dynamics of online gaming — a tricky balancing act, as the production aims to confront the world’s toxic trappings while legitimizing its value.
“I want (audiences) to also understand why people love this medium so much, and why it is worth it for a lot of people to put up with all of this and keep working to try to make things better,” McGough says. “It’s a really amazingly versatile and fascinating type of art that gets discounted a lot.”
The play itself is largely set within an online game, and the production’s physical staging uses conceptual, abstract visual design, in the vein of actual video games in their early stages of development.
Ultimately, that love for the medium also means taking a hard look at its ugly sides. The play’s portrayal of online abuse is given a foundation of humanity, but little sympathy. McGough made a purposeful decision not to write from the male perspective of Trent to avoid making him a “hero of struggle.”
More importantly, the play literally and figuratively gives a woman the last word.
“This play doesn’t let us just sit in the wound,” English says. “It allows us to see what happens when a woman transcends the assault or the harassment and actually is empowered to become a leader.”