Sometimes, there is just a deluge of bad news: there is global boiling, Putin still refuses to unconditionally surrender, and the premier outlet for feminist criticism of videogames, the esteemed format Feminist Frequency, spearheaded by luminary Anita Sarkeesian, is about to cease production. According to a recent video, which I did not watch as I was in such emotional turmoil, but which I read summaries of, her channel will shut down by the end of the year. As a glimmer of hope, the format Feminist Frequency Radio will be kept alive by one of her very talented co-hosts, so all is not lost.

For those of you who are unacquainted with Feminist Frequency, I have to add that this format filled a gaping hole in games criticism. It all began with journalists at outlets like Kotaku, Verge, Polygon, and Waypoint banding together to help out creators they liked, such as Zoe Quinn, the auteur behind the masterpiece Depression Quest. Unfortunately, some insubordinate white men crashed the party and slandered this collaboration, claiming that it violated “ethics in video games”. This was a ludicrous accusation, so gaming media as a whole had to make a stand and defend the medium they love against people who actually play video games.

Rushing to the help of Zoe Quinn and her many maligned supporters in video games journalism, Annita Sarkeesian managed to build a strong brand and also shift the conversation, all with the help of said journalists. It was really great to see such a grassroots movement lead to actionable results. Feminist Frequency blew the lid on sexism in gaming. While it may be true that gaming has seen one or the other female heroine such as the horribly named Samus Aryan in Metroid, or the unrealistically proportioned Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, far too often women are depicted as support characters that draw the male gaze on them. They are healers or whores, or, much worse, mothers. A particular cause of ire for the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian was that women are very often displayed as damsels in distress. Before her, nobody even noticed that Mario always has to rescue Princess Peach. The evil rapist Bowser kidnaps her over and over, further reflecting the real world patriarchy in video games.

Feminist Frequency played a very important role on gaming in the 2010s and beyond, and it helped the industry move out of the intellectual Dark Ages. Much of the work of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian has happened behind closed doors, but we know that she was involved in the Battlefield franchise, which reached new heights with Battlefield V, a title that was praised by video game journalists for its realistic depiction of white women with rainbow hair and artificial limbs, or wheelchair-bound black lesbians, in the trenches and front lines of World War II. Unfortunately, some white men refused to get with the program and engaged in an act of international terrorism by refusing to buy this game. There are also rumors that the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian had a hand in the development of Cyberpunk 2077, a revolutionary RPG that is widely regarded as the best game ever. In particular, it excited gamers thanks to its character editor, which allows you to mix-and-match primary and secondary sexual organs.

Perhaps the most important contribution of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian is to get all major video game publishers to agree on removing the terms “male” and “female” from games as much as possible. You may have noticed that more recent games either avoid gendered language altogether or refer to the sexes as “body type A” and “body type B”. As gaming is moving past the male gaze, we now also get to enjoy a much wider variety of body types in gaming. While there was some initial misconception that “type A” would conform to outdated standards of female beauty, and “type B” a muscular male, “type A” characters nowadays need to reflect that women in the real world are often obese and sometimes deformed. The latest trailer of Fable is a wonderful example of this kind of inclusivity in gaming. Male characters are still buff because nobody can deny female games journalists a bit of titillation. Besides, this is at best only a mild concession to women after millennia of constant oppression. Keeping male video game characters attractive while showcasing diverse female body types simply rights a historical injustice.

As the years went on, the teachings of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian became more and more accepted by the mainstream. Thus, there was perhaps less of a need for her to still get her hands dirty. The YouTube channel Feminist Frequency has in excess of 200,000 subscribers. Its videos often have very respectable view counts going as high as 500 or 1,000. This further demonstrates that the video game industry has fully internalized the teachings of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian. To put this in context, a YouTube channel like “Bob Takes a Dump Around the World”, in which a toxic white male streams himself for hours, sitting on a toilet bowl in various hotels, defecating, while playing Splatoon 3 or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on his Nintendo Switch, reaches up to 10,000 views per video. It is most impressive that content as difficult to understand as the teachings of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian reaches 5 to 10% of the viewership of a toxic white male taking a shit (oh, what a metaphor this is!).

The channel Feminist Frequency may soon become dormant, but this is irrelevant because we are all Feminist Frequency now. The legacy of the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian will live on. The esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian has done a lot for the gaming industry. It is sad to see toxic, white males spew their hatred online, accusing the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian of running a so-called “grift”, by which they imply that she was only in it for the money. From insiders, however, we know that the esteemed video game critic Anita Sarkeesian is very content with what she was able to achieve. She completed a very ambitious project to move society forward, i.e. rejuvenating the most toxic industry around and making it attractive for women and underrepresented minorities. Triple-A gaming is in a better shape than it ever was, with recent blockbusters like Forspoken, and upcoming mega-hits like the remake of Fable. I, for one, cannot wait for what the future of gaming holds.