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Iām considering an analogy to a stereotypical frat house from an 80s movie. The culture has sexual harassment and assault baked right into it. That doesnāt turn off when the party ends and the sun comes up. But of course that culture is more dangerous when everyone is drunk. We all know that, so why not acknowledge the role of alcohol?
But the alcohol has been adopted by that culture in part to use it as an excuse. For a long time a man could get away with assaulting a woman by basically saying they were drunk at the time. I think weāve finally become horrified by that excuse (at least locally to me) but we still blame women for getting drunk and making themselves vulnerable.
So if the parallel to games is there then perhaps you can understand why are you getting so much pushback. If you were here arguing that alcohol acts as a kind of accelerant to toxic male culture, youād get a lot of pushback on that too. Itās because that argument isnāt traditionally made in the service of preventing actual assaults.
Because toxic male culture didnāt grow out of alcohol, alcohol is just a tool that toxic male culture uses to excuse itself. Consider another stereotypical use of alcohol by a culture: red wine at a book club for middle aged women who donāt usually get through the book. The alcohol is used by the culture to achieve a specific end. If the goal of the culture is to harass and assault women then the point of the alcohol is to facilitate harassing and assaulting women. If the goal of the culture is to have an excuse to leave your kids with your husband for a few hours once a month so you can unwind, then the alcohol is being used to help the unwinding. In both cases it might be there to overcome personal guilt about your own behaviour - even though in one case the behaviour is extremely bad and in the other case the guilt is unfounded.
So yeah, I might want to stay away from toxic Call of Duty culture. But like Iāve said already, the idea of competitiveness doesnāt have the idea of being a racist built into it. Iāve run a very successful competitive team in a very popular video game and the first thing I did when recruiting was weed out anyone who blamed other people for failure or who felt that success was putting other people down. Both of those things are bad traits to have if you want to be a high level competitor because they stop you from focusing on the only thing within your control: being the best you can be.
Itās not the competitiveness of Call of Duty that makes the people within it assholes. Itās our idea that competitiveness is about being an asshole that excuses the people who play Call of Duty for being assholes. Just like our idea that being drunk makes you an asshole excuses people who are assholes when they are drunk.
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Yes, well said, this is what I was trying to get to.
The games are by no means the cause, no wayā¦ but saying they are not a factor at all, ever simply isnāt true, either. Certain videogames were at the epicenter of all this GG nonsense, which morphed into Trump being elected and god knows what else down the line.
Nobody wants to be at a party where there is no alcohol because that is boring as hell, right? But being at a party full of career binge drinkers is a disaster waiting to happen.
I think you have a very interesting point there. Other hazards and their control points are in the real not measurable sciences and engineering. Humans, OTH, are somewhat elusive when it comes to measuring. The bullshit scale and the hate scale seem open, for example.
Quipping and punning and all other stuff aside, the measurability of human behaviour by analysing, e.g., social media is part of the problem. A technical solution isnāt really cool with me, because I know in my heart of hearts it will be gamed and perverted. I also am sure that even if control points will be implemented in social media, there will be engineering involved, and those dudes will have the last word.
That outlook makes me rather sad.
The epicenter was men being shitty, resentful, misogynistic assholes who resented women for having even the slightest modicum of success. May I remind you that the whole kerfuffle was started by Eron Gjoni writing an eighty page screed (no, not the first one, the second one) in which he claimed [s]the jews[/s] FeMiNiStS ruled the world.
It wasnt about women in games. Or later, about women in comics. Or politics. It was sheer weaponized male chauvinist resentment, aided and abetted by dumb slow AIs and the algorithms driving slow AI profit.
Gaming circles wanted nothing to do withthis shit. Resentful chauvanjst and now open white supremacist Eric got banned from every gaming forum.
No, this is on MEN.
Take responsibility for male culture and make strides to fix it.
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Gamergate and ProudBoys are a 100% overlapping circle. Gamergate was essentially THE right-wing anti-woman crusade pushed by Breitbart, Daily Caller, and Gavin āProudBiyā McInnes.
And spoilers, every last major gator figure is a terrible person.
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