It seems to me that you’re just on these threads to bring up the same old tired arguments and misplace the blame on the medium. Just ignore the many other societal and cultural factors that conveniently intersect here because video games have become super popular and mainstream. Long gone are the days when they were the nearly exclusive realm of (male) geeks and nerds. It’s a nearly $100bn business now.
I respect you and the work that you do, but I don’t feel like I can have a reasoned and rational conversation with you on this topic so I’m no longer going to try. Good day!
You mean a few thousands years of second class humanity has had a long term effect?
No… LOL… it’s the games, silly! Or maybe it’s women talking about games that’s the REAL problem. If they’d shut up and let men play, maybe misogyny would come to an end… /s
I think that blending the topics of misogyny in video games with a misandric statement like “all men are trash” followed up with a No true Scotsman fallacy is complicating what the streamer is experiencing and communicating here.
And they are all related but not limited to each other.
Have men been able to attack women at scale online before?
Can we legitimately say “violent, aggressive games don’t cause violent, aggressive behavior” if we are only scoping that definition to physical real world violence, and not the far easier-to-scale and safer (for the men, anyway) forms of online harassment?
To what extent is online life just plain life now?
I have never said men aren’t the problem, I’m saying videogames are an unprecedented online amplifier of the problem in a way they were not in the 80s, 90s, or even the 00s.
The problem is that we haven’t remotely succeeded. Voting for a pro-choice candidate, donating to PP, and not being an abusive dickhead is very nice, but…
1 out of 5 women in the US have reported being raped, and <1% of reported rapists receive a felony conviction.
At the current pace, women will achieve wage parity with men in 90 years.
45 years after Roe v Wade, women’s bodily autonomy in the US hangs in the balance.
95 years ago, the ERA was first introduced.
I could keep going, but I think you get the picture.
And ya know what? Things have gotten better- sexual assault rates have gone down, and the pay gap has decreased. There are more women in boardrooms (middle class white feminism at its finest) and IIRC more women serving as elected officials than ever before.
But women did the majority of that work, of course, and in the face of unceasing opposition from men. So yeah. Men are trash
IN THE TIME I TOOK TO WRITE THIS AT LEAST 6 WOMEN WERE VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT
There is no doubt in my mind this is true… for segments of gaming culture, and currently a very loud and obnoxious segment of gamer culture.
But in the same way that one can’t say that the currently elected president of the US isn’t an indication that all Americans are misogynistic bigots, saying “there’s a problem with gamer culture” ignores the fact that “the average gamer” in terms of actual hours played now are mobile gamers playing random free-to-play addiction lootbox games rather than FPSes, and that even within the FPS universe, there are players that exist in that culture in spite of that culture, not choosing to be there because of that culture.
I would not be surprised if many of the asshats who attack female gaming personalities are also the same types who perpetuate pizzagate, trolley mass shooting victims, post racist diatribes on twitter, and generally make the internet shitty for everyone. And if videogames didn’t exist, they would still do all those other things.
The idea that a segment of videogames exists and is expressly designed to appeal to these people is every bit as much an issue as Twitter failing to take meaningful positions against bigotry online, or of tacit government approval of bigotry and hate through willful ignorance and oblique support.
But saying “videogamer culture” as a monolith might as well be saying “asian culture” or “female culture” for how far it misses the mark in generalization.
Large analyses of violent crime and video violent game use find no evidence that increased sales of violent video games leads to a spike in violent crimes. Researchers make the case that if violent games directly led to violent behavior, the data would show increases in violent crime on a large-scale as more people played violent games. In fact, there is some evidence that as more youth play video games, rates of youth violence have decreased.
A recent analysis finds that research on video games is prone to false positives and false negatives, which leads to faulty conclusions.
Another review finds that much of the research on violence and video games is affected by publication bias; essentially, studies that concluded that video games lead to aggression and violence are more likely to be published than studies that find violent video games don’t have an effect on violence. As a result, large reviews of the data conclude violent video games lead to aggression without considering research to the contrary.
There is emerging research that finds no link between violent games and negative outcomes, such as reduced empathy, aggression and depression.
Therefore, no woman should EVER be critical of video games! Or anything really… QED! /s
What’s killing me here, is that we’ve gone off on a bad faith tangent, which misses the original points from the other thread and this one. Smash the patriarchy, because it’s BAD…
Her opinion is that men are trash? In general, it’s a fair cop.
Personally, I don’t see any governments laying claim to my body because I’m a man, no second class status, no extremist religious groups dictating my manner and dress (more than usual). Because her opinion isn’t part of an embedded societal discrimination against men, it’s just her opinion with no downside to me.
Agreed, but take a look at the 2014 top selling games list. These are all “classic” videogames, almost stereotypically so (which is part of the problem). So when one says “videogamer culture” it is safe to assume you are talking about the top 10 selling games.
Oh, I completely agree that playing violent video games does not turn people into violent criminals.
But does playing violent videogames turn people into online harassing assholes at an unusually high rate? That, my friends, THAT is the far more relevant Facebook era question that society currently faces.
I think the answer to that, based on all the data I’ve seen in the last 8 years, is a resounding and unequivocal yes.
Not true, and evil to drill that narrative into people’s heads. “You’re trash, now go do good. Trash is bad. You are bad. Do good. Trash is good for nothing. You are good for nothing. Now go forth and do good. Trash is bad for the planet. You are bad for the planet. Now go do good!”
