Though the Iris Gaming Network was ultimately launched by Andrea Rubenstein and Robyn Fleming, the creation of a gaming community for getting women’s voices into the mainstream wasn’t just the culmination of two women’s vision – and its history goes back much further than the record ten days between choosing a domain to the public launch of the site.
In fact, Iris is the result of years of frustration born of having to choose between “mainstream” gaming sites and publications – where women are alternatively fetishized, ridiculed, and told they don’t exist – and “girl/women” gaming options which, while often providing places where women can share their opinions and experiences openly, have historically been too small and isolated to have lasting impact on the general gaming culture and industry.
Conceiving of a Community
Gamer Majority
Technically, the website that would become the Iris Gaming Network was over a year in the making. In its original incarnation, it was called Gamer Majority and it was first thought of in February of 2006. Ariel Wetzel, who was the original person to conceive of the site with Andrea, explained her reasoning behind choosing the name to be that minorities are actually the majority in numbers (though not power), and so the name is a reminder of the power that we do hold.
The site got as far as a very rough layout (see image), but then got mired in technical difficulties. Originally the plan was to either code the site from scratch or to integrate various pre-packaged open source software (such as phpBB) into one single site. However, this was not a realistic goal for only one programmer to handle and so alternatives were looked into but nothing was decided. This indecision led to the project being put aside indefinitely.
Girl Wonder
During the course of that year, something seemingly unrelated but truly significant happened. The feminist-oriented comics site, Girl Wonder.org, was born. Participating in the community there renewed Andrea’s feelings that this kind of thing was exactly what the gaming community needed, and gave her the opportunity to meet up with Robyn, who shared Andrea’s passion for gaming, though more in the tabletop than the video game variety.
The site also did something else significant; it provided a model for a community site that would later be the template that Iris would use in its own creation. In essence, their pioneering inspired us to do the same in the gaming community as well as provided us with the structural template that we were missing until then.
Jade Reporting and I Read the Internets
Another connection that is not obvious at first would be Andrea’s involvement in a gender in games linkblog called Jade Reporting, a blog with the express purpose of “enabling more dialogue to happen in the blogsphere on the topic of gender and video games,” and Robyn’s involvement with her weekly geek-related linkblogging post series called I Read the Internets which includes at least one post on gaming every week.
Through their linkblogging, both Robyn and Andrea independently came to the realization that, while there was a wealth of female gamers out there on the internet, there didn’t seem to be a sense of connectedness between them. They both had what they felt was their small group, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted what the comics blogsphere had: a strong feminist voice fighting for a gender inclusive product and culture.
Where are the women bloggers?
In February and March of 2007 two things happened in rapid succession. First there was a blowout over sexism (which also started out with Peaseblossom stating her wish for “a bunch of feminist gaming blogs that did feminist critique of new gaming products”) in a tabletop game called Spirit of the Century, which both Andrea and Robyn got embroiled in. It also prompted Feminist SF blogger Liz Henry to write, “Now if only we could have the feminist discussion without the enormous hijacking attempts?” This, of course, brought up all sorts of nostalgia for Andrea about Gamer Majority and so she started looking into it again.
Before the waves from that event had time to die down, Brian Crecente, the senior editor at Kotaku, wrote a piece about not being able to find women to bring on staff which, of course, caused a strong reaction with Andrea and many other female bloggers.
Making of a Community
Conceiving of Iris
During the conversation between Andrea and Robyn about the events described above, Robyn remarked that “it’s too bad that there’s not some kind of central meeting place for feminist gamers like G-W is turning into for feminist comics fans.” To which Andrea, in the eloquence of having the last straw placed on the camel’s back, replied, “Fuck it. I’m making it.” Which was probably the smartest cursing that she ever did.
Robyn, still smarting from the messages that the Spirit of the Century issue sent home, immediately volunteered to help, and from then on used her enthusiasm to galvanize Andrea to get all of the boring administration done, thus crossing the first hurdle.
Launching the Site
On March 13, 2007 the domain was registered. Choosing a name was possibly the hardest task, but after much deliberation Iris was chosen as homage to Beyond Good and Evil. Though Robyn didn’t know the reference, and thus read the name as “neutral”, Andrea choose the name because the IRIS Network in the game is a freedom-fighting organization.
Andrea assumed that she would have at least a month before launch, but Robyn sensibly pointed out that she wanted to launch while the issues that had been the catalyst for the site were still fresh in people’s minds. A launch date of March 23 was chosen, but to our surprise we were leaked three days prior to launch by accident, and then again one day before launch. Despite the pressure it put on the newly-formed Iris Team to get the site up to code, that we were leaked not once, but twice, because of the excitement over what the site represented was a clear sign to us that we were doing something right.
