I think that fame is a real disadvantage. Especially when one is trying to promote equality. “Listen to this person promoting equality, because they’re special!” presents a paradox. There is no such thing as a “good” celebrity culture.
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Only that a Grand majority of criticism she received were ridicule and death threats. And that was WAY before the Zoé Quinn scandal even got off the ground.
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It is incredibly sad that a large portion of her fame is “that person who has gotten all those threats”.
I do find her to be single minded, but she does have a point. From time to time. But she is paving a way for others to follow, so respect for that.
He uses that word a lot, I think, but this time it could have been intentional.
Sarkeesian says so herself. But not for the reason you suggest. She is not anything as asinine as a celebrity.
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To be honest even without the gamer gate crap and all the idiots getting whiny about what she says, she’s been pretty influential to me. She did a great job of getting me to really think about an art form that is a majority of my (increasingly small) entertainment time. The first time I watched one of her videos I was full of scoffing Demi-outrage until I realized - holy cow - this woman has it nailed. She’s right and she did a good job of presenting it in a scholarly and erudite way and convincing little old (for a gamer) white male me that things I’ve ignored or glossed over in games are not good and should be improved upon. It was only after that that I heard about the gamer gate nonsense and realized those morons were doing more to prove her point than any video game developer had in 40 years of video game development.
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I guess it’s telling what kind of influence Anita has on her public. Here’s a person with over 190 thousand YouTube subscribers, 275 thousand Twitter followers and raised over 152 thousand more than
her 6000 dollar goal to make videos pointing out things she feels are negative about video games. That’s a lot. When that person makes a video (that has over 220,000 views) that recommends a specific game, you’d think that game would have a pretty significant bump in sales, but there wasn’t any bump at all. Not on Steam, anyway. It says to me that either the majority of her subscribers played the game already or there aren’t a whole lot of video game enthusiasts among her subscribers .
http://steamcharts.com/app/204060#1m
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So, you’re implying her subscribers are #notruegamers?
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Ahh… Time magazine. The publication of choice for the almost informed and the half-bright. Good to see it’s still knocking about.
Their international version is (was?) pretty meaty, but it’s the US version that has cover stories like “Is your pet psychic?” God bless America!
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Amen, Bart. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP came out in 2011 and sold 1.5 million copies by 2013, and the Windoze version came out in 2012. Criticizing her for not moving units on a 4 year old game on a secondary platform is weaksauce. Do you even rocketjump, torgbro?
I played it at launch on the definitive version (iPad), and still I loved watching Sarkeesian’s take on it 4 years later. She has a eye for things I didn’t even notice I liked about the game, and watching her go through it was a nice way to revisit the gameworld without replaying the game.
Sarkeesian is brilliant. Full stop. She’s operating with deep knowledge in multiple domains: games, game genres, current gender-poltical culture, film critique, feminist theories, sociology, psychology, pop psychology, commercialism, etc, and brings all dat together in a way that’s influential, educational, and entertaining. She’s serious, funny, and seriously funny. The mainstream recognition is well earned. If she ever writes for Offworld, I’ll probably get teary.
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“Why don’t women just make their own games?!!”
What, like, say … Zoe Quinn?
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Why don’t Gamergater’s make their own games, and leave the rest of us to discuss the market we want?
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They did, with Vivian James:
Given how roundly they’ve been rejected by game developers, they’ll have to do it themselves.
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Hopefully not.
ust one of a number of terms including emotional, irrational and shrill, all essentially meaning the same thing: “crazy lady” or one who may or may not be on her period. Hysteria was for centuries a handy way of describing a woman who was angry, outspoken or generally behaved in a way that wasn’t becoming. Hippocrates blamed it on a woman’s womb, which had the tendency, he believed, to go roaming about her body, wreaking havoc as it went (a migratory organ in the wrong place will do that, as anyone with basic first aid will know). As a mental disorder, it wasn’t dropped from the DSM, the standardised classification of mental health conditions, until 1980. Yes, 1980. Despite this, countless commentators are happy to continue to diagnose women in public life, if the treatment Hillary Clinton, among many others, gets is anything to go by. During her nomination campaign, CNN’s Glenn Beck noted: “After spending decades stripping away all trace of emotion, femininity, and humanity, Hillary Clinton broke down and actually cried.”
In that context, calling men “hysterical” is no different than saying an emotional man is a “pussy”, or that a man who can’t throw a baseball throws “like a girl,” and especially when used as a pejorative against men, is highly misogynist, as it says that a “womanly” trait won’t be tolerated in men.
Which of course is seen as negative, because emotion is something the wimmins do.
One of my favorite series as a kid.
I guess one of the things that bugs me about the us vs. them debate is that it’s sort of turned into this world where only brave souls like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, scrappy upstarts from outside the industry, can get games made.
Keep fighting the good fight. I like to think Roberta played a huge part in moving games past “go kill the bad thing.”
Sometimes I feel like computer games died in 1993.
Thankfully, that’s not entirely the case.
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It all depends upon the intention of the speaker. I have encountered this plenty of times, but I think that automatically assuming that being compared to a woman is unflattering creates it’s own problems.
I think the intent is pretty clear.
Perhaps. I find that, in practice, assuming that it might not be clear encourages people to think more about the implications of what they are saying. Rather than simply reacting.
