Shakes' post on female gamers has gotten much deserved attention, from men and women alike. Earlier today, she e-mailed to ask me why, saying that she knew the secretly violent femmes would respond, but not the stereotypically violent mens. I couldn't quite answer then, but I can now. And it was her other post, on Cindy Sheehan, that clarified it.
What struck me about her piece was her articulation of what's always attracted me to games; the desire to be a hero. If you read her blog, it's the same thing, there's a subtext that says one girl and her keyboard can change the country, one girl and her keyboard can light enough fires on enough mountains that, Lord of the Rings style, the other bloggers will see the flames and wave the torches in front of their audiences, the audiences will light flares before their politicians, the politicians will set fireworks in front of the media, and all of us will finally snap out of our stupor, strap on our swords, and march on her political Mordor. And, with the Downing Street Memos, it almost came true. Half a thousand blogs sparked tinder and demanded attention and, for a few days, Bush and Rove and all the rest were singed by a fire she helped light.
That is, to an extent, what the blogs are. They're attempts to be more than people with opinions. We call the right the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, but we're doing the same thing. They want to pretend they're fighting a war, we want to believe we're stopping one. In a Campbellian sense, the two are archetypically equivalent: we all want to be heroes. It informs our writing. Not every piece, certainly, but those few where righteousness flares up and our opinion becomes a call to action, one that rattles at the cage of our websites and spills out across the internet, sometimes into the media, sometimes into the political structure. It happens rarely, sure, but the promise of it is one reason so many do this, or at least why they start.
