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Even so, in this kind of retirement from being a firebrand, she’s still a lightning rod. I posted that I was listening to her talk and one of my social media friends decided to “pre-criticize” the speech based on what he figured it would be about, given the title of Does the Game Industry Hate Women?” And in came a swarm of commenters and a big argument ensued.

In her actual speech, which you can read in full below, she celebrated how “we won” as she observed that there are more women characters and heroes, fewer tropes where a man must rescue his dead wife’s soul from hell, and fewer scenes objectifying women in games. She showed pictures of female corpses that were scantily clad in games like Mafia 2, Dead Island and BioShock 2.

Sarkeesian recalled the contrast of showing women’s butts while playable male characters had their butts covered with all sorts of clothing, from capes to long jackets. She celebrated games like Gone Home for its sensitive portrayal of a queer woman coming of age, and she cried on stage as she recalled how the studio head was called out for toxicity toward staff.

But she dispassionately pointed out all of the sexist practices from a decade ago, like noting that the press celebrated the “year of the woman” in 2015 at E3 when there were only seven playable female characters in 76 games shown off on stage, or 9%, only to see that slip to just two playable female characters in 59 games shown on stage at E3 2016.

And she celebrated the progress made with characters like Ellie in The Last of Us and Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, as well as the presence of women leads in titles coming like Star Wars Outlaws.

“This talk is about winning and what we won, and more than anything it’s about how much more we have to do,” she said.

After the talk in Dubrovnik, Sarkeesian said she did not want to take any questions. I caught up with her briefly to ask if she had analyzed the industry in the wake of the Sweet Baby controversy, which many have dubbed GamerGate 2. She said she just could not re-engage with that content. I mentioned that it felt like the return of GamerGate made me think the opposite of her conclusion, which was “We won.”

Here’s an edited transcript of her talk.

Anita Sarkeesian: I wrote this talk at the 10 year mark. It’s now been 12 years. This is just going to keep happening. I thought I caught them all, but I didn’t. 12 years ago I was a fledgling creator of YouTube videos inspired by the work of Bell Hooks on pop culture as a way to illuminate feminist concepts for a wider audience. I was also angry at widespread patterns of misogyny that I saw in video games and the culture around them. As someone who believes that the values in mainstream media can’t be separated from the values of our larger culture, I wanted to challenge those values.

I announced a little series of videos to explore women’s representation in gaming. That was called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. This was my fundraising video. It’s been 12 years since that goofy little Kickstarter video, and it’s been really heavy reflecting on how to talk publicly about this thing that I’ve spent years being defined by. Both the work and the cost of the work. My existence came to symbolize so much for so many people in so many different ways.

On one hand I hold a lot of trauma and fear and anger. And on the other hand I hold enormous pride in the contributions that Tropes made in the shifting tide of games culture. I wasn’t the first or the only one to do this kind of work. I didn’t do it alone. Proper social decorum tells me to be humble, but I think that at this moment, at this point in history, I get to say that Tropes opened up a conversation that fundamentally changed this industry for the better. The culture war that ensued, I think it’s fair to say that we won. This talk is about winning and what we won, and more than anything it’s about how much more we have to do.

I set about making this series about the history of gaming. It pissed off a lot of people. It was like a geyser opened and a flood of extremely violent hate spewed forth in ways that startled and frightened a lot of us. The anti-Tropes, anti-me hysteria was deeply rooted in entitlement and misogyny. I’ve done a million talks about all that. But today I want to talk about how it was rooted in a belief that creative freedom for developers, always producing games about grizzled dudes and victimized, endangered, objectified women–this is what developers were doing because it represented their uncompromised artistic vision.

In that context I represented not someone advocating for a broader range of creative possibilities that broke free from the tired status quo, but a scolding censor demanding that these brilliant artists stop focusing so much on the greatest subject any art form has ever known: the pain of New York City cops whose families are brutally murdered, sending them on violence-fueled killing sprees. Sorry to anyone who worked on these games.

The fear that female characters would become less objectified, less victimized, more humanized, more centered in games, and that games as a whole would become less exclusively geared toward the tastes and interests of presumed straight male players with fairly standard patriarchal fantasies was so earth-shattering to some people, it would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamn tragic. Many straight cis white men who grew up being bombarded by TV, movies, and video games that centered them internalized the idea that straight cis white men is effectively the default setting on humanity.

I often see comments from them on Twitter saying things like, “Oh, yeah, let’s make every game about a black trans queer Muslim woman, as if black trans queer Muslim women are any less fully human or any less deserving of being the heroes of video games.” But that’s what our white supremacist misogynist society and media landscape have taught them, and all of us, without us even really knowing or acknowledging it. 

I’m going to assume that some of you in this room are at least loosely familiar with me. You may have watched a video, an episode back in the day. I thought it might be interesting to show a little behind the scenes clip on how these episodes were made. The awesome filmmakers at Area Five made a documentary about me and this work. They got a lot of incredible footage of the process. With their permission, here’s a clip from one of our writing sessions.

I want to talk about what was happening in games as I was making these episodes. In 2012, the same year I announced the Tropes project, the three top-selling games were Call of Duty Black Ops II, Madden NFL, and Halo 4. We’d just started working on several episodes about the damsel in distress. The history and the inclusion of this trope was so vast that we had to make three episodes about it. At the time almost two hours of a single YouTube video was unheard-of. Now we’re all watching six-hour videos, but then I remember releasing a 20-minute video and thinking, “Nobody is going to watch this.”

I’ll show you a quick clip from the damsel in distress episode two. If you’re not familiar, the “women in refrigerators” trope I refer to in this clip is when a woman is murdered to kick off the motivation of a typically male hero.

Does anyone remember the Ubisoft “women are too hard to animate” flub that happened? For those who you who don’t, when Assassin’s Creed Unity came out, people started asking why the game had four male protagonists. Where are the women? And one of the devs said something that turned into the meme of “women are too hard to animate.” I actually see this event as a mark of progress, because you know developers have said stupid shit like this for years without anyone batting an eye. But also, for a long time, journalists rarely even asked these kinds of questions.

Questioning the lack of female representation in games, or the way women were represented, by and large just wasn’t done at the time. For quite some time, the overwhelming majority of game journalists in the U.S. were straight white men themselves. But the truth is that asking questions like this in a games culture that was designed to cater to them probably never even occurred to most of them. If they had asked those questions, that would probably be frowned on by their peers. The fact that this time, these ridiculous comments made headlines for being ridiculous meant things were changing. Eventually we made a video about that, and how to respectfully and believably include female combatants in your games. 

I received my first of many bomb threats at GDC when I was honored with the ambassador award. I think I was the first woman to receive the award? Maybe that’s another thing. The industry recognizing that this work was important enough to award it at big industry events, that seemed like progress. Then I released Woman as Background, an extensive history of using women’s bodies and victimization as a way to make a game world dark and gritty.

Then Gamergate happened, which some of you may have heard of. That’s most of what you can say about that. We released an episode about how women’s bodies are used to reward players for a job well done. Long after that, there was the so-called “Year of the Woman” at E3. I feel like no one remembers this. But this year at E3, people were saying that there were so many games prominently featuring female characters. Social media was abuzz with excitement at this progressive shift. And certain outlets wrote pieces praising these exciting games with female protagonists on the horizon.

Naturally we wanted to see if this was true, if this large-scale shift was actually happening. We started counting and publishing this data. You know what? Just seven out of 76 games announced at the 2015 E3 presser had solo female, exclusive female protagonists. That was the Year of the Woman. What’s funny and sad is that it actually was. We kept counting every year after that for the next five years. 2015, with just seven out of 76 games, had by far the highest percentage in that five-year stretch. The very next year there were only two new games announced at E3 that fit the bill, ReCore and Horizon Zero Dawn. Both of them were already counted in the seven games from the year before. In most cases there were more games that let you play as a car than cast you as a specific female character.

It matters when games give us specific female characters and non-binary characters we have to play as in order to play that game. There’s a limitless pantheon of defined male protagonists, from Mario, Link, Master Chief, Nathan Drake, on and on to name them all. But historically there have been so few women given that same level of prominence.

We kept making videos. This is one of my favorites. It’s called The Strategic Butt Coverings. This was the weirdest video to capture, because I took out every single game I had and went, “Butt, butt, can we see it, can we not see it?” Days of this.

In between all of that, one of my favorite games of all time came out, Gone Home. It’s a nonviolent queer love story, and it was a fucking revelation. It was the start of an answer to what we needed more of. More female representation, more queer representation, and an incredible video game. It truly stunned the games industry. We’d been so hungry for a game like this. But it was still an exception to the rule at this point.

We made all these videos, 16 in total, plus two animations. Despite people perpetuating, to this day, the myth that Tropes was never finished, we more than completed what we originally set out to do. Then we followed all of that up with a three-part series called Queer Tropes about the history of queer representation in gaming. Through it all, I experienced tremendous resistance, tremendous reactionary hate and harassment. To be honest, it was and still is kind of rough. But in that time I saw things ever so slowly start to shift. I saw the conversations around games change. I saw that after I showed these patterns in game history to people, they couldn’t un-see them. They wanted to change them. The work became much bigger than me, which was of course the goal all along.

What does that look like now? Ten years later, it’s still the same top-selling games. I was going to update it for 2023, but it would have been Hogwarts Legacy, and the symmetry isn’t as much fun. You get the point. It’s still the same problem. Has anything changed? Obviously it’s not true that nothing has changed. There are a number of metrics we can use to judge that aren’t just game sales. I just showed you some of them.

There was a moment several years ago where I was sitting in my office and I was invited to do a talk. I was trying to think about what to say about the state of gaming. I looked over at my colleague Carolyn Petit and said, “We haven’t really been mad about a game in a while. Are things changing?” It was this weird moment where I would cautiously make the argument that at least in the west, games are, overall, less overtly and egregiously sexist and racist. Very cautiously making this argument.

In that sense I would say that Tropes was successful, and that progress is being made. The nightmare that some gamers felt I was ushering in, a world in which developers lost their uncompromised artistic freedom and sometimes had to tell stories about women as real human beings, I guess that came true. So we won. And if I tried to make any of these Tropes videos today with only the games that came out in the last 10 years, it would be a lot harder. Not impossible, but a lot harder. There would be fewer examples, and the patterns less egregious. I think that’s telling.

There are less games now where a woman takes off her clothes as a reward if the player completes the game fast enough. I know there’s a game that just came out that does that, but we won’t talk about that. I said less, not entirely gone. There are less games where women are brutally tortured in the background just for texture. There are less games where the goal is to save your dead wife’s soul from hell. It’s shocking how many games there were with that storyline.

What about female protagonists? It’s exciting that we got Aloy and Ellie as flagship characters from Sony. Again, not without problems, but still, pretty cool. We still have a long way to go before there’s anything like real gender equity in the space. The list of iconic male heroes is filled with names from 40-plus years of history. It’s certainly welcome to see that, for instance, Ubisoft’s new Star Wars game Outlaws centers a female protagonist, and Nintendo gave Princess Peach a game of her own this year that doesn’t seem to be one big giant PMS joke like the previous game they gave her. But Showtime is a B-tier game, a modest production with nothing like the development budget or marketing campaign that mainline Mario games receive.

When I think about this question of progress, other things have been on my mind, like the death of the single-player game. Our industry has been moving toward service games, games where you choose from a roster of characters, or maybe even character creators. This has done two things simultaneously. We now have more characters, and more diversity of characters. More players get to see themselves reflected in games than ever before. But it has also killed stories. 

We have less stories overall. These characters look cool, but they aren’t fully realized. They don’t have back stories. They don’t have life experiences that we get to experience by inhabiting them. There are lore dumps, but that’s not baked into the gameplay experience. If it’s not baked into the gameplay experience, most players will never experience it. It’s awesome that Overwatch has a neuroatypical character, but most players don’t know that. It’s cool that Apex Legends has a non-binary character, but most players don’t know that.

You know where stories are happening? It’s indie games. We have so many indie games that are doing so many interesting things. Did you know that you can play a game that teaches you about being a mortician? That’s fucking cool. Or a game where you’re unpacking boxes from a series of moves during your life, and it’s actually fascinating. The tension between indies and triple-A has always been that indies afford themselves the ability to take greater risks, tell different stories, and experiment with different mechanics. When it succeeds, triple-A comes in and does the same. I want triple-A to take more risks, but that’s a different talk.

During the course of this work I found that I judge progress in another way as well: through the sheer amount of developers who expressed to me their regret and ignorance about games they made that included harmful stereotypes. Most important, though, they weren’t going to make those mistakes again. These conversations were among the most gratifying for me because I would say to these people–whenever they approached me, it went something like this. “It’s not that you fucked up that matters. It’s that you take accountability for it, that you learn from it, that you grow from it, and that you do better in the future.” I’m not here to be your feminist priest and grant you absolution, as some people hope for when they awkwardly corner me at parties. But I am here to tell you that you can be better and do better. That’s how change happens. We’re not perfect people. We all make mistakes.

The same year as my Kickstarter, Dishonored came out. It was another frustrating experience where you have a truly remarkable, incredible game filled with extraordinary disdain for women. Just about every single female character was one flavor of sexist trope or another. Fast forward to 2016 when its sequel was released, and none of those tropes that made it so hard to enjoy the first game made it in. The developers listened to critics. They heard us. They made a real effort to be better, and the game was better. It was more approachable for a wider audience. It was also just a fucking amazing game.

The way some people reacted back when Tropes was under way, you would have thought that the world would end if games changed in these ways. But it didn’t. All those people who once complained so vehemently about my poisonous influence on games–most of them are probably still playing games in this era. They probably played Dishonored 2 and loved it just as much, and didn’t even notice that there weren’t women in French maid outfits cowering in every corner. Maybe, just maybe, those people who thought the sky was falling overreacted just a little bit.

Gaming doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The cultural context we live in is a part of this story. We’ve seen changes across other entertainment industries and our larger society as well. Social media gave rise to voices that were historically silenced. Streaming media created a la carte movies and TV shows that catered to historically ignored audiences. A brew of regressive politics and backlash to all of this perceived progress envelops everything we’re talking about. Feminist writer Laurie Penny has said about the small gains made toward more inclusive media, “What we have right now isn’t equality. It’s not like equality. But it’s still enough to enrage the old guard, because when you’ve been used to privilege, equality feels like prejudice.”

I don’t think we would have had the Year of the Woman or the backlash against the Ubisoft flub or any of the outcries against the status quo if we weren’t in the midst of a culture war where people are forced to take sides. I would bet real human dollars that there are several people in this audience who did not care, understand, or even recognize that representation in games was a problem in 2012. I know that because I heard from so many developers over the years who have told me this. But I would also bet that you see it now and you care. Maybe you’ve even been an advocate or an ally in your company for better representation. It might be hard to remember what it was like before you knew these things. I think a lot of you saw the backlash and harassment and everything Gamergate represented and realized you needed to pick a side.

Just like Gamergate, I think, galvanized the industry to realize that feminists were not the problem, and maybe we had some real constructive perspectives to offer–I hate to talk about Trump, but I think Trump’s presidency and ensuing backlash had the same impact on #metoo. For some people it was easy to never notice the sexual violence and abuse that’s all around us until we were forced to confront a president who was a rapist and brags about grabbing pussies. We couldn’t pretend that Trump was an isolated bad actor. The misogyny and white supremacy he represented, and continues to represent, were and are all around us, and have spread globally. Then, too, you were asked to take a side.

I mentioned earlier that in 2013, my favorite game was released, a game that seemed to open a window into what games could be. That for so many women and queer folks, it was our first experience of really seeing ourselves in this medium. This art form that we loved so much, but that has rarely loved us back. I’ve never been able to do this without crying. I’m sorry.

Seven years later, in 2021, the creator of that game was ousted from his studio for being abusive and sexist to his employees. If you were one of the people in 2012 who didn’t understand why I was making videos about misogyny in games, or why I would withstand years of abuse for that work, and now you do, maybe you’ll trust me when I say this. You probably don’t see the suffering that’s happening in your companies right now. It was never just enough to talk about in-game representation. This industry is drowning in trauma and abuse and harassment. Workers are mistreated. They are abused and harassed by people who hold power over them, by their communities, and by their fans. As an industry we aren’t okay, and we haven’t been okay.

We all know the stories about Riot, Ubisoft, and Activision Blizzard, where CEO Bobby Kotick presided over and directly contributed to a culture of toxicity and gender-based harassment. In spite of that horrible legacy, when Microsoft’s purchase of that company was complete, Kotick departed with a golden parachute worth $15 million. This isn’t just one company or one CEO. Clearly the industry is not yet prepared to truly reckon with these powerful people and the harm that they cause. But that harm is not only happening at these massive companies, and it isn’t just perpetuated by obscenely wealthy executives. It’s happening at small studios too, because this isn’t fundamentally a problem of money. It’s a problem of power.

A couple of years ago maybe you heard about leadership abuses at Funomena and Mountains too. Maybe you already know about them. Maybe you can name another handful of studios where abuse is happening right now. I talk to people every day who think that harm isn’t happening in their workplaces. I wonder why you think that, that it’s always other workplaces and not yours. That you’d see it. That you’d know it was happening. It’s a combination of privilege that makes abuse invisible to you, and also how abuse often happens in secret, sometimes subtle ways.

I like to think of this as an iceberg. The stories that make the headlines, the most escalated examples – murder, rape, sexual violence – that’s the bit floating above water. But underneath the surface are all the everyday harms that feel ubiquitous, but not that bad. The problematic jokes and language, the stereotypes and microaggressions, the verbal threats and harassment, the objectification and unspoken otherings, these are what prop up and enable the escalated violence to happen. Yet we consistently dismiss that whole part of the iceberg under the water as harmless, as no big deal, as just the way things are. But if we don’t address the entire iceberg, nothing is going to change.

Over 10 years ago, the most we’ve been able to grapple with as an industry was, “Hey, maybe having some female protagonists with clothes on would be cool.” That felt like the end of the world. Today the challenge is treating employees with dignity and respect and believing and supporting survivors of harm. So what are you doing about it? How are you working to end abuse in this industry? Because you are a part of it. As Howard Zinn famously said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. 

I want you to take a picture of this slide, because I want you to go home and go back to your office and spend some time filling out these statements. To make the games industry safer, I’m committed to start doing the following. I’m committed to stop doing the following. I’m committed to keep doing the following and improving on it. Whatever those commitments are, bring them back into your life and work, because this industry does not change without you doing the work of making it better.

Normally this is where I would pitch my non-profit, but this year, after running it for 15 years, I’ve decided to close its doors. We did some amazing things, much of which I discussed here today, creating educational materials, videos, and podcasts. We also ran the games and online harassment hotline, which provided real time emotional support for people who make and play games. The Culture Shift project, which helped studios learn how to holistically create real culture change to support all their workers, and probably a million more things I’ve forgotten over the last decade and a half. We were actually doing really well, but it was just time to take a rest. Fifteen years is a long time to be doing this work.

I think there is value in ending things. I think there’s value in starting again. That might be another talk for another day. But I do have two quick resources I want to share with you that exist from all of this work. The first is my colleague Jae Lin, who is absolutely brilliant, and ran the games and online harassment hotline for four years. They’ve started a non-profit that focuses on supporting people who have caused harm. Almost immediately, when the hotline started, we began receiving calls from people who have caused harm or harassment and were fired, kicked out of their guilds and communities, and didn’t know where to turn or what to do.

Jae built Respec, a drop-in monthly meeting space for people who have caused harm and are engaged in taking ownership of their choices and behaviors and the impact they have. It’s about working with folks to help change and end the cycles of abuse, not validate the harm that they have caused. They also do one on one work with individuals, and I cannot stress to you enough how ground-breaking and revolutionary this work is. Please consider reaching out to them if you need support in this area, and also please consider donating to them, because they just got their non-profit status just two days ago.

For me, in more than 15 years of doing this work, I consulted on numerous titles from publishers and studios of all sizes, and I’m continuing to do this work. It’s thrilling and exciting. It lets me be a tiny part of helping make people’s games incredible. I do inclusivity consulting. I jump in at any point in development. Obviously the earlier the better, but that’s not how games work. I focus on representation issues such as gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and more, looking at art, scripts, and gameplay. My goal is to equip developers with as much information as possible to help them make informed choices that are best for their games.

Tropes was essential. It created conversations. It illuminated patterns and problems that had been staring people in the face for decades, but that many of them had never noticed before. I encourage people who make games to make different kinds of games, and by encouraging marginalized players to imagine a gaming culture in which their humanity was represented and validated too, Tropes changed the world. But that change was only the beginning. The fight takes on many forms, from media criticism, community support initiatives, labor movements, pushes to unionize, workers demanding better treatment, freedom from crunch, exploitation, and harassment–the struggle is bigger than any one of us. It involves everyone who cares about creating a better, safer, more inclusive gaming industry and gaming culture.

The past 10 years have been a grim reminder of how ubiquitous and pernicious racism, sexism, and transphobia can be in this industry. But they’re also encouraging proof that real progress is possible. We have so much further to go, so let’s get to work. Thank you so much.

Disclosure: Reboot’s organizers paid my way to Dubrovnik, where I moderated three sessions.