Parallax Abstraction wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 16:25:nin wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 14:30:
I'm just glad everyone is finally seeing her for the fraud she is.
I take major issue with the way she both makes her arguments and factually represents the games she covers (the way she portrays Hitman Absolution is nothing short of outright lies) but I have a hard time accepting she's just an out and out scam artist. People can say what they want about how many death threats she's actually gotten and how credible they are but I think there's no doubt she has gotten a lot of those and taken a lot of abuse. Is enduring that really worth the $160K or whatever she got from her Kickstarter and whatever else she's getting from some of her speaking engagements and consulting? Not to say that isn't no money but it's not like she's becoming a millionaire off this and it seems an awful position to put yourself in for not ultimately a ton of money. Personally, I think she really does believe in her cause and what she's doing, I just have big problems with how she does it, how she manipulates the media and how she refuses to debate anyone who might be able to refute her.
Verno wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 09:00:
I see plenty of strong female representation in games, we don't need to go around changing the whole fucking hobby to suit an extremely small vocal minority who can't just be patient while these things happen on their own over time.
nin wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 14:30:
I'm just glad everyone is finally seeing her for the fraud she is.
...People like Quinn, Sarkeesian, Wu and their supporters would call her a traitor to women for thinking that way. In fact, I've seen them do exactly that to people with similar viewpoints. This is not how you advance an otherwise just agenda. But you can't say that because you're slapped with fallacies and told you don't count. I don't know how you resolve that.
NKD wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 04:29:InBlack wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 03:31:
Everyone is so quick to punish the gamer, calling it a TOXIC CULTURE. Why is that? What is wrong with people, why is there so much prejudice everywhere?
I have a few ideas about what is going on, and why you see so much toxic crap in response to relatively mundane stuff. For example, the disproportionate response to Anita Sarkeesian, who is a nobody in terms of actual feminist causes, and who never really said anything too controversial. Her videos were just pointing out obvious cliches everyone already knew about and had been poking fun at for decades. The only reason anyone is talking about her is because of the hate she gets. Her actual contributions to anything are basically zero. So if she didn't do anything of note, why did it get such a nasty response from certain people?
Some gamers can be very defensive. This is because, unlike what the so-called feminists want you to believe, a lot of gamers do not consider themselves to be a privileged group. They've been bullied, they've been social outcasts. A lot of gamers are not financially well-off. Many are not only gamers, but members of other groups that are unfairly ostracized. Many straight males in gaming have little or no experience dealing with women. They were often ridiculed and mistreated by girls while growing up. LGBTQ gamers have dealt with even worse. Game culture, for them, has become their comfort zone. Gamers can be cruel to each other, but they can also be really kind to each other and identify with each others plights. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than what they are experiencing in their personal lives. Often overcome by loneliness, and not having many people to turn to.
Then comes along a bunch of non-gamers making a big ol' scene. They say a lot of things, and some of them sound an awful lot like the same stereotypes and cruel things said about you in the real world. Most of what they are saying is innocuous, some of it even makes sense, but the only things you can hear are the things that remind you once again that you're not cool. Your friends and hobby are "offensive" and "problematic." Your reason and logic go out the window, all you feel is your comfort zone being chipped away.
Think about it from the perspective of those among the gaming community who are less fortunate and have had bad social experiences in their lives. The ones who use gaming as their escape from an otherwise lonely and cruel life.
These loud voices, mostly coming from relatively well-to-do, popular, white professionals, do not resonate with you. They do not sound like the voices of a fellow outcast looking for their fair shake. They sound like the next generation of the bullies who hassled you in junior high. In the 21st century, it's not the jock who is cool, but the socially savvy hipster who makes use of social media to garner a massive following. They have thousands of Twitter followers, millions of YouTube subscribers, and other well-to-do people lavishing sympathy and attention upon them.
Sure, those of us with a little more confidence and a little more social savvy can see where both sides are coming from, and can see that both groups have had issues with social inequality, despite being privileged in many ways. But for the more awkward gamers, they just feel like they are being bullied once again, this time in their own backyard.
So of course they bite back irrationally. Trolling and sending anonymous threats. You can hardly fault them for their life experiences that have left them bitter and unsympathetic to your claims of oppression. Not every gamer is like that, but you can hardly be surprised or shocked when people who have been bullied, outcast, and disenfranchised are not super receptive to the cries of oppression from some popular Internet celebrities.
It's terribly asymmetrical as well. Let's look at the outliers, the people being straight up bullies. On the "gamer" side you have anonymous trolls and threats. Virtually everyone disregards them as the meaningless flailing they are. But on the "feminist" side, the people doing the bullying have ACTUAL BULLY PULPITS. They have thousands of followers, editor status on some high traffic website, and an army to retweet every thing they say.
TL;DR: These feminists playing the victim don't go over too well with some gamers because from their perspective it looks a lot like cool popular kids trying to pretend they know the plight of the outcast and the marginalized. They themselves feel marginalized, which makes the sting of being painted a privileged misogynist scumbag even harder to bear. The less stable among these marginalized gamers will indeed lash out irrationally, and you'd have to have been blind to not see that coming.
Icewind wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 20:46:loomy wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 20:38:
intolerant assholes on all sides are responsible for this mess. it's not about games. it's a religious war against disagreement. everyone needs to shut the fuck up and leave people be
Bingo.
Every hobby will always have people that like "A" style.
It will also have people that like "B" style.
People who like "A" style hate people who like "B" style, and vice-versa.
So the folks who want more "Gone Home" style games about lesbians and sexual tolerance need to learn to accept the folks that want CoD killfests and Bayonetta crotchshot games just as much as the latter group needs to accept the former.
But no, that would be too easy, and everyone wants to bitch. I've grown tired of it.
Prez wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 21:49:NegaDeath wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 19:06:
I've ignored this whole annoying debacle for the most part. But when the article starts with this?
"How a video game fan weathered a misogynist backlash to become pop culture's most valuable critic"
This shits gone full retard.
Yep. Rolling Stone really couldn't have sold out for her any harder than they did. Unbelievable. Did they even try to watch her video and compare it with actual facts? Her videos are so easily debunked even pretend journalists like Rolling Stone could have found her out as a hack in little time. Instead they rrelease this shamefully lopsided piece of shit article.
InBlack wrote on Oct 20, 2014, 03:31:
Everyone is so quick to punish the gamer, calling it a TOXIC CULTURE. Why is that? What is wrong with people, why is there so much prejudice everywhere?
bobbyweenus wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 17:34:
The media coverage of gamergate, and the narrative being pushed against gaming and gamers in general proves a lot of points I personally have believed for a long time.
The lack of female gamers over the years (until recently) had everything to do with social acceptance and nothing to do with gaming being some kind of boys only club.
Who was chasing girls off of the Super Nintendo? Who harassed a girl off of a Sega Genesis? What anonymous death threats were being slung against girls playing Playstation or Xbox 1?
Up until recently, gaming was NOT socially acceptable. Being a gamer as your chief hobby was looked at as geeky, nerdy, or dorky, all things that have all been negative descriptors. Dorky or nerdy chic only came into popularity in the recent years as the world had to accept that techy type people were the movers and shakers these days. The hipster movement on nerdy outfits helped make nerdy a socially acceptable group.
As it became more socially acceptable, women became more comfortable participating in it. How many girls wanted to join video game clubs in high schools in the 90s or the early 00s? It just did not exist on any kind of comparable level, and the internet and accessibility to communicate was not nearly as established or common then, so you cannot seriously blame it on harassment. No one at an EB games ever stopped a parent from buying a game console because it was for a daughter and not a son. I'm confident in saying that has absolutely NEVER happened.
Now, the media, spearheaded by hipster online media and marketing types, has worked their asses off to make sure gaming is no longer socially acceptable. Instead of isolating the type of lunatics who would send ANYONE a death threat, they just label it as gamers, and they celebrate their friends jumping in on making sweeping generalizations.
then these people, who want to be celebrated and respected as members of the gaming industry, they join in on this, and when people respond to their negativity with equal negativity, it is labeled harassment.
This is all so dishonest, and it sickens me. The threats sicken me. The shit talking sickens me. The lies sicken me. The entire situation is a mess but the media will only focus on one side of the mess and it will not make a better community or society moving forward.
If we don't acknowledge this bullshit as a whole, we will not grow from it. It will just be someone else who is taking the beating, instead of figuring out a way to grow as a community and eliminate the bullying in ANY form.
This is the world we live in these days. It is acceptable to bully and victimize someone if they have been labeled the enemy, and no one is adult enough to understand the flaws in that system. No one is mature enough to be honest about it because just like the witch hunts of lore, people are willing to fabricate complete bullshit toward someone else so that they too are not hunted as a witch.
Gaming is being attacked socially again and people are so caught up in things like "Hey people! We're helping women here!" that they won't acknowledge what is happening as a whole here. In the years that come, anyone who identifies as a gamer is going to be seen with this lens. The lens that the media has painted. All of the progress that was made by celebrities showing off their game rooms on MTV's cribs, the celebs coming out as gamers, the celebs starring in game commercials or voice acting in games, all of that work is being undone before our eyes by things like "If you are a GAMER, unfollow me NOW!" and no one gives a shit.
At the end of the day, being a womanizer who hits on drunk women in a bar on a Saturday is and will always be more socially acceptable in the US than sitting at home and gaming with your friends of any race, age, gender or faith.
Grinding up on a woman in a bar is more socially acceptable than grinding out levels. This is the world we have all lived in for a long time and the turncoats who sold this industry out have ensured that it will continue for the foreseeable future, right as eSports grows bigger than most of us ever imagined and gaming as an industry continues to be recession proof.
Long live the GamerGate era, where a man who leaked a woman's nudes as a means of revenge against her is lauded for his efforts in censoring discussion on this topic on his forums.
Double standards are double standards, regardless of who they are victimizing, and they will continue to make us all look like assholes as long as we are too afraid to speak out against the status quo and point them out.
NegaDeath wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 19:06:
I've ignored this whole annoying debacle for the most part. But when the article starts with this?
"How a video game fan weathered a misogynist backlash to become pop culture's most valuable critic"
This shits gone full retard.
Icewind wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 20:46:Feminists like Sarkeesian think that the sexist and violent depictions of women in video games significantly contributes to sexism and violence against women in the real world. So it's like the old violence and video games debate only re-packaged for a more feminist leaning audience. So as long as they believe that CoD killfests and Bayonetta crotchshots pose a genuine threat to society they will continue in their crusade.loomy wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 20:38:
intolerant assholes on all sides are responsible for this mess. it's not about games. it's a religious war against disagreement. everyone needs to shut the fuck up and leave people be
Bingo.
Every hobby will always have people that like "A" style.
It will also have people that like "B" style.
People who like "A" style hate people who like "B" style, and vice-versa.
So the folks who want more "Gone Home" style games about lesbians and sexual tolerance need to learn to accept the folks that want CoD killfests and Bayonetta crotchshot games just as much as the latter group needs to accept the former.
But no, that would be too easy, and everyone wants to bitch. I've grown tired of it.
loomy wrote on Oct 19, 2014, 20:38:
intolerant assholes on all sides are responsible for this mess. it's not about games. it's a religious war against disagreement. everyone needs to shut the fuck up and leave people be