No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games

boing
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She’s a prolific and opinionated tweeter. One tweet out of context doesn’t prove your point, it just shows that she expressed an opinion on the game being discussed. Pointing out something as problematic is not the same as saying it’s “essentially wrong” or pushing for “stamping it out”.

You were talking about videos though. Which videos do you mean? From the way you were talking it sounded like you haven’t seen them yourself but were just relying on what some other guys told you about them. Some specifics would be helpful.

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Where does she say she wants to ban anything? She’s saying that she doesn’t like the focus on blood and gore and that it’s creeping her out. She’s a critic. Expressing an opinion is her job. She doesn’t call for legislation anywhere in what you’ve posted.

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Oh no the poor Canadians! Of course that proves your point!

(Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Sarcasm is in my blood)

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Ugh. Freaking hated the Upton ads. Bad cosplaying outfit, boobs, and all.

Granted how the blazes are you going ot make a ‘GIVE ME MONEY GIVE ME MONEY GIVE ME MONEY’ microtransaction hell game exciting for a commercial? I just felt… embarassed whenever those ads came on. I’m male, I’m a gamer… sorta… even if my computer is eight years old and I’m broke. This is what the industry thinks I want?

Sod it, I’m going back to terraria.

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I didn’t say she does, just that I see where people can get that impression. I think her main argument relates more to the ubiquity of violence to the exclusion of other dynamics, but the Twitter stream can give the impression that it’s just a moral panic.

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That’s my impression too. For most game designers violence (hacking, shooting, punching) is the only existing interaction model. Often I play games with a beautiful setting, sophisticated backstory etc. and the only thing I can do is shoot the crap out of it? Seems a tad unoriginal …

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I love the allies that are with until you turn the critical gaze on the thing they love. So helpful. /sigh

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As a Canadian; I say these dudes we’re plants!! I need to see their birth certificates or landed immigrant papers! Please.

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I hate the ads but gotdamn do I love her. She’s amazing. So lovely. And girl is getting paid!

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Have you tried The Long Dark? My current obsession. Just updated this weekend so now we have to relearn everything!

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I was the nerd getting made fun of in high school. Girls don’t play D&D. Who the hell is Ray Bradbury? Why do you read such weird stuff?? Only girl in woodshop? - let’s make crude dildos on the belt sander and brandish them at her!

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Have you ever been a stay-at-home parent? Because if you want to talk about long hours of difficult and lonely work, be the sole caregiver to a pre-verbal human being 24 hours a day. Women have been doing “difficult and lonely” and unappreciated work for millennia.

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It’s also untrue. During WWII and after computers were row upon rows of young women doing math. Computing was deemed to be especially feminine. But when a machine replaced the women it was suddenly masculine.

This idea that women stayed away is wrong. Women were driven away from the very thing that previously had been their forte.

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Oh yeah, totally. But he’d clearly already dismissed that point so I wasn’t going to get into it. Only the idea that women don’t do long hours of lonely work was such bullshit I couldn’t let it go. I have a feeling that he doesn’t count that as “work”, which is why he could say such a ridiculous thing in the first place.

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Oh, really?

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I’ll start with the premise that any culture dominated by young males is going to be toxic, for both mature men and women and especially for young women. I can’t think of any counter-example in the history of the humanity.

So, if we want to make the culture of gaming more young-women friendly, we need to eliminate the young male customer base. Traditionally this is done by sending them to war to die in large numbers or putting them to menial work so hard they don’t have the energy in the pittance of leisure time permitted them.

However, society has (thankfully) changed. Instead of destroying the supply of young males, we need to destroy their desire to be part of the culture. The simple answer, eliminate all the aspects of gaming that appeal to young males. And the quickest answer to that - eliminate the attractive forms of violence and sexuality in games. Have the government ban them.

Bereft of the sex and violence that attracts this demographic, they stop buying, and the market collapses. With AAA titles all dead (and probably the consoles as a whole), the independents (of whom there are quite a few now), suddenly become visible.

The dominant culture morphs and games are now seen by all as acceptable (albeit economically and socially irrelevant).

I don’t, however, have an answer for those who like violent video games, but not the type of people who are generally attracted to them. I’m not certain how you separate the wheat from the chaff. It’d be like wanting a social aspect to hard-core pornography, but not wanting to deal with the creeps.

(In fairness to young males, it should be noted that probably only 10-20% of the young male are highly problematic. However, they’re inseparable from the demographic as a whole (and they’re constantly going into and out of problematic phases), so the whole demographic has to go. Apologies to my sons.)

As an aside, isn’t this more or less what happened to comic books to make the industry at least somewhat more female-friendly? Based entirely on personal experience, the last time I visited a comic book store it seemed (1) much emptier (2) far harder to find (3) much more evenly split between male and female customers (4) diverse in terms of content (5) vastly more pleasant - none of that slightly grungy elements (stores, customers and staff) I associate with comic book stores in the 80’s.

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Much better to spend our time doing housework and caring for babies. You know: the easy and well-supported work we’re made for.

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Or. OR. We could accept that some people like different things and rather than trying to eliminate anyone, we could create spaces that are large and diverse enough where people do feel safe. You can sleep easy at night in the knowledge that the young men you so dislike are otherwise occupied with violent computer games, while other spaces are left freer for you. Encourage people to get into independent games. Make them successful, demand content that you will enjoy and the industry will take notice. Oppose online harassment when you see it. After all, the problematic 10-20% of young males is actually a really small percentage of the total gaming population, so the normals outnumber them by far.

[#ProblematicYoungMalesLivesMatter]

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I assume this isn’t what you mean to do, but gender stereotyping like this isn’t helpful. I know plenty of men that don’t care for guns or explosions and plenty of women that love them. (My sister-in-law loves to brag about how she out-shot her husband on the Barrett .50 when they went to a “Drive a tank” course for their anniversary. Care to guess which of them was the driver for that package? I don’t think she’s stopped grinning yet.)

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Actually, it’s the increase in testosterone and other “male” hormones at puberty that’s the problem. In fact, when testosterone goes up in women (menopause, hormone supressants for cancer, etc.) we get the same jump in aggression.

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