Jennifer Hepler's name has recently been dragged through the gaming press as a parable for Internet rage and misogynistic gamer lynch mobs. A writer for BioWare, Hepler has her roots in the tabletop role-playing industry, writing supplements for Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Legend of the Five Rings, and Paranoia. She was an early transmedia author, developing feature film scripts and TV pilots inspired by pen-and-paper role-playing games. At BioWare, Hepler worked on Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
In an interview with Killer Betties, Hepler explained her least favorite part about working in the gaming industry:
Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition…And with a baby on the way in a few months, my minimal free time (which makes it impossible for me to finish a big RPG in less than six months already), will disappear entirely.
It would not surprise me in the least that Hepler was usually a game master when she role-played. Hepler also shared how she would make games more appealing to women:
A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue. In a game with sufficient story to be interesting without the fighting, there is no reason on earth that you can't have a little button at the corner of the screen that you can click to skip to the end of the fighting…If you're a woman, especially a mother, with dinner to prepare, kids' homework to help with, and a lot of other demands on your time, you don't need a game to be 100 hours long to hold your interest -- especially if those 100 hours are primarily doing things you don't enjoy. A fast forward button would give all players -- not just women -- the same options that we have with books or DVDs -- to skim past the parts we don't like and savor the ones we do.
Although she didn't use the exact words, the aspects of gaming Hepler prefers to skip is the gamist part of Ron Edwards' GNS theory. Hepler clearly prefers narrativist gaming, which is true to her roots as a role-playing game author. In a world dominated by first-person shooters, Hepler's narrative bias sets her apart.
Combined with the perception that the recent Dragon Age games are no longer catering to its core demographic, Hepler's interview would come back to haunt her. These two arguments, that Hepler did not like playing games as much as creating them, and that she felt there should be a fast-forward function to make games more appealing to women, galvanized an Internet attack on her Twitter account. It's not pretty. Hepler promptly deleted the account. Kotaku also reported that a Reddit post led to Hepler being harassed by phone and email.
Cofounder Dr. Ray Muzyka defended Hepler on the BioWare forums:
Jennifer is a valued, talented employee who has been with BioWare for many years and we hope will be with us for many more. It is awful that a few people have decided to make her a target for hate and threats, going so far as fabricating forum posts and attributing them to her, and singling her out for projects to which she has not contributed (i.e., Jennifer is not even a part of the Mass Effect writing team). All of us at BioWare support and will continue to support Jennifer fully, and are happy to see so many people out there are also supporting her during this difficult time.
Daniel Nye Griffiths posits in Forbes that the fuel firing these attacks is a cultural shift away from heterosexual white males to a broader market. Connor Beaton zConnection blames it on the nature of the Internet and quotes my thesis on anonymity. It's likely a combination of the two theories is at work here: the core demographic that traditionally "owned" video games is being catered to less over time and it retaliated with impunity against a perceived "other" who represents all that is being taken away.
In the past, I've spoken out against bullying geeks. In this case, the geeks are bullying their own. Even if you're not a fan of BioWare (and I'm no fan of Mass Effect), no one deserves this. I fully endorse BioWare's decision to make a donation of $1,000 in Jennifer's name to Bullying Canada. If you feel what happened to her is wrong, please consider contributing.
Comments