You know what people who want to talk about social justice should know better than do? Shit on marginalized groups (as in “groups with limited social capital”).
This whole scene has demonstrated that the SJWs, who are a group whose entire identity is based on being marginalized, have more social capital than, as they were called earlier in the thread, the “socially unsuccessful young men” for whom the gaming subculture being villainized is a safe space. We can make [true] claims about it being historically “not their space” but for anyone under 25 it’s been carved out as tailored-to-prevailing-conceptions-of-masculinity for their entire lives, so it really isn’t relevant. We can talk about it “breeding sexism,” but there have always been contexts for intra-gender socialization with norms that wouldn’t be acceptable in mixed company, and (based on animal studies) probably always will be. Unfortunately for the current generation, communication is now largely mediated in ways that leave a record, so all the routine incivility of the human experience is suddenly visible. I’m getting to be a fan of public incivility, because it means it isn’t happening in private, across large power differentials, and can be addressed where appropriate, but it’s going to take a while for society to get used to it being visible and recorded.
Honestly? The second. The gamers that I know are the most friendly, accepting, and generous people that I know. It’s not just that they play videogames, but that they revel in loving something and sharing that love with others. The gamers that I know don’t care if you’re a man, a woman, gay, straight, young, old, or disabled. We all play games, and we’re all equals in the world of gaming.
If you think that’s a horrible and ugly thing, then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Nobody here does. None of the people you catergorise as “opponents of GamerGate” do either. That’s what the whole damn thing is about fer chrissake!
And, have you even read the Gamasutra article?
You may categorise yourself as being neutral in this fight, but you’ve partaken of the GamerGate Koolaid. >.<
Get past the straw man and see the other side for what it is - for equality and safety for everyone in games culture.
Let me assure you the problem you perceive isn’t localized to any one nation state or confined to any particular set of borders. In fact compared to many other places, y’all have it pretty good back there in the US of A.
[quote=“Thebarton_Gamer, post:229, topic:42342”]
Nobody here does. None of the people you catergorise as “opponents of GamerGate” do either. That’s what the whole damn thing is about fer chrissake!
[/quote]My point is that people are making unfair generalizations about gamers. And not “straw men.” TheOtherMichael and Jerwin are directly making harmful accusations about gamers as a whole to me.
I’ll definitely admit that it’s hard to stay neutral when I’m getting attacked.
Forgive me. “Gamers” are a Marginal group. If I wrote that they were Marginalized groups, I was in error, as that would imply that the misogynistic assholes who identify as “gamers” were acting out of innate, immutable personal qualities, rather than out of choice.
Now, certainly, those who identify as Gamers do have a right to a private life, private prejudices, private passions, but when those private elements collide with the rights of other persons, I have no sympathy.
If you don’t recognize you in the description, then you aren’t the target. It’s all defensiveness and overly broad rhetoric and use of labels, and then people that actually agree with each other feel they’re on opposing sides.
Having read the Gamasutra article, it is pretty poisonous and it certainly expresses a lot of contempt for socially unsuccessful males. I get that the author really resents the influence that these young men have had on the industry and thus her livelihood, but… wow. She does unload with both barrels.
However, I suspect that she also conflates the viscous threats made by a few members of the gamer community (sorry Mindysan, FPS gamer community) with the sort of discomfort with the presence of women (i.e. low-level misogyny) that tends to be omnipresent with groups of such young men. I don’t.
I’ll grant that the over-the-top threats arise from the same place as the low level misogyny (the objectification of women, the feeling that women have all the power, massive insecurity, etc.) and that because of this, the “gamer” community isn’t going to condemn the jerks as widely as it should.
But even as I wouldn’t want to associate with 16-year-old me’s D&D culture (which also had the much the same inability to see girls as people), I don’t think I’d feel comfortable having it condemned in the same manner as gamers were in the Gamasutra article. At least the Christian D&D panic was trying to save us rather than implying the world would be better off if we were dead (sorry, no longer of any commercial or social significance).
On the other hand, I think the GamerGate is enormously destructive for gamers. By ostensibly being about the Gamasutra article, it’s primary effect in the media I read is to provide cover for massive over-reaction to (well deserved) feminist-oriented criticism of the games themselves. Given the practical effect of such criticism in the industry (at best a little more inclusiveness and a small reduction in the absolute worst of the sexism), no reaction at all is needed.
Worst of all, amping up the resentment towards women, even just the Gamasutra author, only deepens the pit that young men have to climb out of to become decent human beings. GG is does a disservice to gamers by deepening that pit.
The prose of the article was a bit purple for my taste, which I think can be subconsciously inflammatory, if you’re ready to be offended, but I took the thesis of the article to be: “The world of people who are deeply passionate about gaming is so much broader and diverse than the immature trolls who have dominated the public perception. This public perception has been fed by marketers elevating said sliver of the population. Let’s let the world know that we are not defined by a subset of ourselves.”
Seems like the message, in the end, was similar to yours: “We are diverse, don’t put us in a box.” I could see how it would sting if you share some phenotypical traits with the descriptions in the article, that was perhaps unnecessary (i.e. can’t I play games in a basement and not be lumped with the haters?) but overall, I agree with others, if you’re identifying with the target of this article, you’re identifying with a very specific subset of the gaming community.
All well and good (and I recognize that) but it’s irrelevant. As this seems to be a discussion about American society and politics, there’s no reason to get into comparative studies of other countries.
It’s easy to just say “well, it’s worse everywhere else, so what’s the big deal?”. But that’s a cop-out. Doesn’t matter what the rest of the world is like: we just want to make America better.
Let’s take these same questions out of the gender context and put it into a racial context.
Was the goal of the abolitionist movement “to enforce a particular mindset globally”? Was it “to impose a particular cultural view upon all?”
Were you alive in the 1840’s, do you think you would “certainly hope not”?
Note that I am not trying to take your entire comment out of context or to imply you are either racist of sexist. What I’m trying to do is to make a point about the goal of changing cultural norms and whether it’s fair to imply (or just make the outright accusation) that folks trying to change cultural norms are necessarily trying to “enforce a particular mindset globally.”
If you don’t like the race analogy we can go back to gender. Were those who “fought” (a common enough martial metaphor) for women’s suffrage trying to “enforce a particular mindset” beyond their own movement? (Specifically,the mindset that women are rational beings capable of self-determination and therefore are as entitled to representation in a democratic system as men.) Were they trying “to impose [that] particular cultural view upon all?”
Well, it seems to me that the answer to those questions is “yes”. Had you lived back in the 1920’s, would you nonetheless “certainly hope not”?
Or we can talk about Islam. Westerners seem to have this “particular mindset” – a “particular cultural view” that, for example, cartoonists should not be executed for drawing cartoons that are critical of a particular religious viewpoint. I think it might be fair to say that a lot of westerners would like to “impose [this] particular cultural view upon all.” But do you, personally, “certainly hope not”? I.e. do you think it’s unfair to “impose” such a “cultural view” on radical Islamists?
If you think it through a few minutes, I think you’ll have little trouble identifying various cultural norms that you would “certainly hope” would be imposed on others along with other cultural norms for which you would “certainly hope not”. Can you come up with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to separate those cultural norms which probably should be imposed on all from those that shouldn’t?
Or do you believe that morality is completely arbitrary and that therefore that the goals of radical Islamists are exactly as justifiable as the goals of SJWs?
LURK MOAR on 4chan for a sufficiently long period of time.
Find a thread full of somewhat vitriolic, opinionated shitposting.
Tell them that you respectfully disagree, and attempt to refute their crap, but be polite (e.g., tell them you respectfully disagree but understand why they might be angry, tell them you hope they have a nice day, etc.) while remaining appropriate to the situation.
Repeat.
What I have observed in my personal experience is that the most common initial response is “You are a gigantic faggot” or perhaps being called “autistic”. Which, being 4chan, is actually quite mild. I interpret it in this situation to mean “I am annoyed with you” since, if you continue with the same sort of grossly polite discourse, I have seen the trolls leave the thread.
I classify it as a counter-trolling tactic and would like to see if it scales up.
It’s 4chan, so I don’t know if the intended targets are the ones who are actually replying to me with insults, but given the drying-up or derailment of a thread, it seems relatively effective.
On polarizing opinions, you seem to have an extreme point of view, and seem to be preoccupied with the direction and tone of the discussion. That’s a sort of preoccupation that assumes an objective baseline for reality available to all. The biggest mistake of young idealists. That the ideal has value because its ideal.
All you can do is plainly say what you mean and listen to what other people say.
