Mile
Zero

When I started thinking about blogging again, after an unintentional break, I realized that I'd been doing this, almost continuously, for more than seven years now. That's a long time. Although it was tempting to let it lie fallow, I figured it would be a shame after such a long run--and besides, I do like writing here, especially now that most of the readers (such as they were) are gone.

When I turned Mile Zero into a blog, way back in the day, one of the main things that I wrote about was gaming--specifically, gaming culture. That wasn't all I wrote about, but it was something I was interested in, and there was a whole community of great gaming blogs I could join. Gaming culture had plenty to write about, because it was (and is) a problematic place dominated by emotional children and shameless hacks pretending to be journalists. If I took on those issues, even in a tiny way, I hoped it could help--and it was a good distraction from an office job I wasn't thrilled about and a freelance career that probably wasn't headed anywhere either.

A few years later I got a job at CQ as a "Multimedia Web Producer." Nobody at CQ knew what that was supposed to mean, so gradually I turned myself into the newsroom's go-to person for interactive journalism. I loved my job, and the time and energy I put into it (not to mention the strict editorial policy of non-partisanship) meant I cut back on blogging. I also threw myself into dancing, which I think took me by surprise as much as anyone else, particularly once I joined Urban Artistry. And I went on a bit of an information diet, angry with the low quality/high volume approach of most gaming and tech sites. When I got a chance to write here, usually once a week, the spread of subjects had become more random than ever.

So here we are, seven years (and almost two months dark) later. Sure, this was never really a gaming blog. But I did write about gaming, particularly the sexism, racism, and classism I saw there, and I hoped it could get better. Has it?

Well, kind of better. I mean, it's still awful, isn't it? Sometimes it just seems like the exploitation gets more subtle over time. Tomb Raider pops back up, for example, but now Lara Croft's proportions are less exaggerated--and she's being threatened with sexual assault so players can feel protective toward her. One step forward, two steps off a cliff marked "Seriously, guys, what on earth were you thinking?"

At the other end of the malevolence spectrum, I just finished Driver: San Francisco. Loved it: it's funny, well-balanced, filled with homage to classic car movies and TV (including constant callbacks to its obvious inspiration, Life on Mars). But even though it's a game where the main character is never playable outside a car, even though it's set in a world where the solution to every crime involves vehicular damage, even though the physical make-up of the hero is literally of absolutely no consequence whatsoever... you're still playing as John "Incredibly Generic White Dude With An Incredibly Generic White Dude's Name" Tanner. You could not possibly challenge fewer conventions than Driver:SF, which these days is not so much actively frustrating as it is wearying.

That said, I think there's hope. When I look at something like Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs. Women project on Kickstarter, which went from zero to troll-ridden to ridiculously over-funded in a matter of hours, it kind of blows me away. Seven years ago, would Sarkeesian's videos have gotten that much support? Would it have gotten sympathetic attention from the corporate blogs? Would it have been picked up across a wide range of non-gaming media? I feel like no, it wouldn't have. And while tools like Kickstarter have made it a lot easier for small projects like this to get the funding they need, I suspect that changes in the culture have also made a big difference.

More importantly, it's not just one culture anymore, if it ever was. Communities don't just grow by getting bigger, they also grow by having new circles intersect at their Venn diagram. You see this everywhere: look at the way that music fans start out as a small, particular group, and then as the artist gets bigger, different people begin to attach--sometimes for very different reasons, which may eventually drive the original fans away. The reasons why I love the Black Keys (their early, filthy-sounding recordings from Akron) are not the reasons that new fans probably love them, but we all end up at the same concerts together.

When I was studying intercultural communication in college, the term for these meshed sub-populations was "co-culture." I didn't care for the term then, but now it seems appropriate. Gaming is bigger than it was seven years ago, and it's no longer accurate--or seen as desirable--to say that the "real" gamers are the angry 14-year-olds with a chip on their shoulder about girls and minorities. This space can (and does) support more than that: from Troy Goodfellow's series on science and national characters in gaming, to The Border House providing a critical examination of character and plot, to rhetorically-stunning games like Auntie Pixelante's dys4ia. These are not all the same voices I was reading and responding to seven years ago, but they are stronger and louder and more influential. That's fantastic.

I'll probably never refocus here to the degree I did when I was writing a post or more a day, because being a single-issue blogger (or a single-issue anything) has never been interesting to me. But I'm thrilled other people are doing good work with it. As a gamer, the same way that other people might be movie buffs or music snobs, I want to see it grow and change so that I'll be exposed to new and interesting perspectives. I don't want to see it stagnate. While progress is slow, I think it's being made. Let's hope in another seven years, I can look back and say the same.