Weirdly it proves that these people don’t know jack shit that they think they can jump in with criticisms like this. People who are know-nothings don’t stop talking because they don’t know when to stop talking. I have this experience regularly when I get schooled on historical facts by my history-studying, museum-working friend. It’s not that I know nothing about history. The problem is that I know something and don’t know enough to know that I know nothing. I just fill in the gaps with my inevitable prejudices.
In this case, the prejudice is that women are ruining gaming (essentially through some mix of magical and improbable abilities), so clearly their skills can be criticized by some jackass who’s finally figured out how to write helloworld.cpp.
It’s not all critique, but this particular critique. If you’d read the thread, you’d see plenty of critiques of the game’s visuals that aren’t “YOU’RE NO GAMMMMMEE DEVEEEEEELLLLOOOOPPPPEERRRRR”, which is the BS this troll actually said.
It seems like there is a lot of concern from people who think, “I could be this guy” or “Anyone could be this guy.” So I’m just going to admit it: literally anyone who decides to tweet at a female game developer to tell her how worthless he thinks she is and how bad her game is is in danger of being labelled misogynist.
When I was in first year computer science, they would tell us in our classes how to contest the marking of something, but it would come with a warning. If you have something marked wrong and it’s right, make your case, maybe the person marking it read it wrong. But if you were wrong and you disagree with how many marks you lost for being wrong, do not contest the mark. How bad a mistake you made is up to them, and you could just as easily lose more marks as gain some.
So here’s the deal, if you want to be a giant asshole on twitter, you don’t get to decide what kind of asshole other people think you are. Maybe I think this guy is misogynist, or maybe I think he’s just a misanthrope. Maybe I think this guy is making this complaint because he’s angry about his own lack of success as a game dev, or his own lack of success in general. Maybe I think he doesn’t even care and he’s just being nasty for the sake of being nasty. Once you decide to be an asshole, you lose control of the narrative of just what kind of asshole you are. If you don’t want to be thought of as misogynst, find some way of expressing your opinion without being an asshole about it.
Or, you know, have an opinion and don’t feel the need to shout it at the developer on twitter. Maybe talk to your friends about your feelings instead of a stranger. Oh wait, this guy doesn’t have any friends (or at least I’m free draw that inference if I choose).
Yeah, I just don’t get that. If you don’t like the graphics just you know don’t buy the game… the end. While graphics have made me mildly interested in some games it isn’t the big catch for me. Is it a game I like playing. Heck I still love the old school vector graphics Battle Zone and honestly for what it is the wireframe graphics are perfect. The original Starcraft and Warcraft still hold up quite well for the games that they are as it is the game play that wins not the graphics.
Given the fact that you joined two hours ago and your username is “Wherethegirlsat”…yes, that seems pretty likely.
Anyway, when a female developer has been under attack by a deeply misogynist movement that’s famous for sockpuppetry for a year and a half, and a random internet person comes along who just happens to echo the primary attack she’s been hearing from them for all that time, nearly verbatim…well, some dots beg to be connected.
I think you’re being overly generous, and that you’re right in your initial assessment that they know absolutely nothing about game development. So their prejudices against women is joined with their prejudices about game development (and the game industry in general). Which results in them spewing a meaningless flood of bullshit as a sort of ad hominem attack to try to support their feeling that women shouldn’t be in game development (which is borne out of their prejudices about game sales and how the industry has changed filtered through their misogyny).
Although in this case it’s pretty clear exactly what kind of asshole he is, just based on the context of the tweet he was responding to and supported by his other tweets: a misogynist, #gamertaint asshole. And it was clear his tweet wasn’t (primarily) him expressing an opinion about the game (in an assholish way) but attacking the idea of female game developers in general, using what was intended to be a bit of ad hominem. Only if we divorce his tweet from all context does his assholery become ambiguous. Being accidentally mistaken for a misogynist because of criticism isn’t really an issue and those people using this to claim that all criticism of female developers is being labeled misogynist is being either disingenuous or very obtuse.
Maybe she shouldn’t have limited herself to sixty-four colors from the range of badly lit artificial food coloring.
Those betitted anorexic, insectoid plastic muppet-killbot-things would look better in an environment with light sources and shadows that are not just random or missing entirely.
I get Brianna Wu’s reaction to the critic, who very well might be a misogynist or too stupid to avoid looking like one. (Probably is one, I just can’t tell from this one thing I know at this time.)
Because those screenshots look like something from the past, Wu’s retort reads like an explanation of how she used massive resources to achieve those shitty archaic looking results.
Edit: I now understand that Gelatinous indeed seems to a be a name physically descriptive of this misogynistic creature writing from his mom’s basement, getting beaucoup bites.
I totally agree. But I wanted to talk about the slippery slope argument because it’s such nonsense. There is no slippery slope between thinking some anonymous asshole is misogynist because of a tweet and the takeover of an authoritarian government, even if we were dead wrong about the guy being misogynist. Really, what they are trying to say is that men who are called misogynist are being oppressed, or that men are too terrified of being called misogynist to express themselves.
If people (men especially) thought twice about what they said for fear of being thought of as misogynist, I think we’d be better off, not living in a dystopia.
Yes, discussions would likely include more ideas and interesting questions. Moderation actually increases free speech as voices feel safer from personal attacks to contribute and participate.
Another analogy, regulation against kids carrying guns on the street makes safety from gun violence increase. The core right to bear arms is also stronger from the appropriate democratic rule-making.
I don’t think so. How it looks to you is a different discussion. The game emphasized development over art direction (and when you’re on a budget, you tend to leverage your strengths to accomplish your goals).
The truth is if this game as it looks now had debuted in 1996, this conversation would be about how amazing the graphics are (and folk would be wondering how E&S or SGI produced the hardware horsepower necessary to achieve it). I can see no argument that can be mustered to refute this.
That would require paying attention to the ads, something I stopped doing because at least a fifth of them are clickbait, usually something sexist or at least really tacky.
Tyranny is not disagreement and hurt feelings.
The slope of justice is stickier than a movie theater floor.
What does a comment about how somebody thinks that the game does not look good, have to do with the technical aspects of old hardware and how much the commenter knows about it? The troll got trolled but there’s nothing glorious about it.
Yes, the trolley got trolled, hoist by his own petard, if you will. Hardly a “pwn” moment though, and a piss-poor defense by any standard. If I say “Windows 8’s GUI interface looks like something designed in 1955”, replying with “Hah, Windows 8 couldn’t run on the most powerful computer in the world in 1955!” is not a defense by any stretch of the imagination.
Furthermore, without looking into the entire posting history of the Twitter handle “GELATINOUS”, what about their statement is remotely misogynistic? … … … Okay, I just took a couple minutes and actually did that; not a single tweet that’s remotely misogynistic at all. This is a fanboi article with a clickbait headline.
