Not hard, I think. GG has had damned little to do with game journalism right from the start. It was specifically designed as a personal attack on a female games programmer - “corruption in game journalism” was a stalking horse to conceal this. Do a search on Google (or the search engine of your choice) for “Gamergate chat logs” - it should be instructive.
In fact, do some homework before you start saying “a pox on all houses”. It may be a minority of the people who play games who are causing the grief (and there has been a mort of it recently, not just Quinn and not just “(admittedly foul) driving trollies”), but it’s not a particularly small minority, and it does wield a disproportionate amount of influence in the industry, so those nasty feminists may just have sufficient “proof of endemic misogyny” to work with.
Yeah that argument always bothers me b/c when I was a little girl, video games were generally seen as being for kids. Men who played games hadn’t grown up with them. Older boys and young adult men were just starting to build the boys only club house, or the media was building it for them in alot of ways. I was never told games were not for me until the internet told me when I was in college. In general the better toys and cartoons were for boys, but “cool” girls liked them too. And just about half of the people in my high school sci-fi club were girls.
It’s not like old-timey saloons or smoking rooms with no women allowed signs. Women were always allowed in arcades and comic shops. It has never been an actually exclusive space, there has just been a push to make it less welcoming.
I’ve never gotten crap in a comic shop or a game store or a convention but I’ve felt like I might if I was back in my 20 year old body today and tried to do those things. Now I’m old enough where people assume I must be serious, and when I was younger the “fake geek girl” meme had not yet cast suspicion on any girl in a geek space.
Excuse me, but the gaming medium has existed for about 30 years. Film has been around for more than 100, music for more than 1000, and literature for almost 3000 (going by traditional Western sources, but I bet some Chinese or Middle-Eastern mofo came earlier than that). And you’re complaining that games are repetitive?
You are likely watching films and reading books that are literally rehashing Homer’s Odissey, and you complain that the problem is a medium that can give you multiple-pov storylines, open-ending worlds, nonlinear plots and procedurally-created landscapes? You have seen the trash Hollywood spits out every single day, and you bitch about gaming, a medium that is constantly gaining new capabilities and hence new ways to express multi-layered concepts even in AAA productions?
Either you’re just trolling, or you’re fairly ignorant on the subject. In either case, your contribution is pretty weak.
Is that so completely unnatural to think? If you are in a club, chances are that you like it how it is.
To be brutal, most of those discussions on “how to get women involved” were basically just lamentations that the club/culture was not perceived as mainstream, that it carried a stigma and that women were (seen to be) the group most sensitive to that stigma. The undertone of these debates in the nerd world has historically been “I love comics/games/fantasy/whatever but pursuing this hobby I’ll never meet girls”. Modifying the hobby to appease female sensibilities was not really part of the plan.
You seem to be so good at coming up with whatever it is I’m thinking that I’ll leave you to script my reply, rather than actually attempt to explain what I actually said, and untangle it from what you’re implying I said. There’s no point to doing that because you’ll just come up with a new script of what I really meant.
Which is to say: talking with you is like arguing with a brick wall. It’s impenetrable and not getting anyone anywhere. Best of luck, and as we used to say on Usenet, plonk.
Except, as others have pointed out, girls and women have been a part of this culture since the beginning and only recently has this shifted from “kid” culture to grown up culture with this expectation that its boys and men who are into it (which is in part media driven). What is being modified about it other than making the culture less sexist towards the people who are already a part of this culture? Some of the best of this culture already treats women as human beings, not objects to be leared at or abused on a whim. Besides that, a “boys only” club (for example, the Boy Scouts) doesn’t have to mean an anti-woman club, which is really what’s going on with some of the reactions we’re seeing with this stuff.
i think you’re spot on – but i think it’s not just about getting laid.
men are just plain scared of getting ostracized by other men. i think, in part, because instinctively they know that’s where a lot of the privilege is in society.
in many social groups, no one wants to become the outsider by being the first to stand up for what’s right.
since, a person’s gender and sex is with them their whole life. being pushed out of the men’s group doesn’t put you in the women’s group – it leaves you alone.
To make it clear - I’m no expert and your personal experience would be worth far more than mine. More to the point, I meant “weird” from the North American perspective. i.e. unfathomable to me. I’m certain the reverse also applies, and I’m certain there are many in Japan who are incredulous at parts of our society. (Owning a gun is important? That’s crazy! (Of course on that, I’d agree :-)))
Mod reminder: Victim blaming isn’t allowed. That includes blaming people for having nude selfies released by another party to the public. If you are unsure about how that is victim blaming, I refer you to:
The Boy Scouts are not exactly the most progressive example to bring up when discussing gender rights (they initially shunned girls into creating their own organisations, and now discriminate against ‘teh gays’ – to be fair, you can’t expect much better by someone so close to the military and state-religions). They might not be “anti-women” now (and I honestly don’t know my Baden-Powell by heart), but they definitely were at various points in their history.
I think part of what has changed in the '90s is the obsession with PC hardware specs. Anecdotally, my female friends never had any qualm in picking up a console (from the Atari 2600 to Nintendo and Sony), but they were never interested in PC rigs. That world has more in common, philosophically, with the motor-racing world, which you’ll find a much much more sexist world that games have ever been. As more games made top-speccing more and more mandatory, I saw less and less female friends interested in the whole thing.
To be honest though, I also saw more and more friends “dropping out” when taking part in the whole social setup became more important than “playing”. What I mean is: we keep saying that boys pushed out girls, but the opposite might also have happened at the same time, with female leaders actively despising the hobby and making it one of the many “other groups” to discriminate against when in good society. My wife was quite the gamer at some point, but today she’d never dream to spend her free time on games – that’s got nothing to do with the subculture.
No one is denying anyone the right to criticize. I used to be a film critic, and I wouldn’t stand in the way of anyone expressing themselves, no matter if I agree or disagree with them.
Did you actually read the tenor of my post?
As a creative person, I don’t want ANYONE, Not government, not the well-meaning, not feminists, not concerned mothers, not Tipper Gore, not leukemia survivors, not part time horologists, or even adorable little yorkie puppies to bully or manipulate creatives to fit their particular political POV. I am against censorship, in short. As creatives, we are explorers, not Baghdad Bobs.
If someone comes out with a sexist game or movie, then call it such. If no one buys it, or no one cares, it will wither and die on the vine. That is what culture is.
You are for free expression, right? Do I have the right to write a book about an middle age intellectual who kidnaps and performs statutory rape on a minor? If not, one of my favorite books, Lolita, would not exist.
As for people making threats, we have laws and protections under those laws to protect people from harassment. Trolls are a fact in an internet that allows for a certain degree of anonymity.
Let’s keep this discussion civil. I, for my part, have tried.
But to say that video gaming, and criticism of video games isn’t a legitimate “Shared Space” or that it’s some kind of invasion of a private space (and consequences are only natural…) is completely unfair. Also the “boyz” making threats are doign so in a decidedly public forum. Video games are a broad medium and as such are a part of the larger culture. There is space for subcultures within it, but this story is about a particular, hateful voice wanting to dominate a culture, and “protect” it from other voices. As others have pointed out, the idea that video games were the sovereign property of boyz and then the girls came in and interloped is a false narrative.
The author argues that it is unacceptable to threaten violence against people who are trying to critique the presentation of women in video games. You asked a slippery slope question about what the author of the article really wants to do, once she gets her power-hungry way, raising the spectre of censorship, as if there weren’t any other clear objectives laid out in the article. I offered that it was pretty clear what she wants, and that dancing around that adds up to a whole lot of FUD. What does she really want? Asked and answered.
No, that’s true and I’m not indicating that they are, but rather that they are an example of a male space. I could say the same of… I don’t know, Morehouse College or Wabash College, or any boys private HS.
And how much does that actually have to do with gaming culture per se? Is it the core of the culture?
Women and our experiences and world-view is a subculture? Really? The problem with that is that it assumes that women’s experiences are only a marginal part of our modern cultural experience.
Have you asked her why she’s not as interested in gaming as she used to be?
Who are these “female leaders” you’re speaking about? I want to know who I am getting my marching orders from…
Who on earth would argue FOR harassment? There is a bigger and separate issue here than personal attacks. The context of the issue is as clear as day.
I am against culture warriors whether from the right or left. Bill O’Reily, or Tipper Gore. Ninnies and scolds of all types, or want to effect the creation of any media. There are a few examples of SJWs in the gaming media who bullied developers to change their games to be more “correct.”
You do realize what a culture war actually is, right?
Again, you haven’t answered my question. Should people be allowed to write the next Lolita or not? If that’s FUD, well let me go and lie down on my fainting couch.
Just because I don’t want to support GamerGate doesn’t mean that I want to support the other side, either.
I don’t want to support people who are saying that all gamers are just a bunch of virgin mouthbreathing manchildren, as so many of them have. The rhetoric of the GamerGate opposition keeps painting “Gamers” with an incredibly broad brush, and frankly as someone who’s always respectful of others in games that I play and who enjoys a very diverse group of gaming friends, I don’t like being told that all gamers are horrible people. Essentially, I don’t appreciate being indirectly insulted by people who know nothing about me, and I really don’t appreciate being directly insulted by you.
In the real-life circles that I run with about half of the gamers are female, many of us (including myself) are somehow queer, and racial diversity is higher than the surrounding city. My personal experience is not one where geek culture is exclusive to other groups of people. My experience is of a culture made up of self-described “social misfits” who respond to their exclusion from other social groups by being fiercely inclusive of others.
I find myself distancing myself from either side in a lot of issues like this, and I think that might say something about me, but I think that something isn’t that I’m a horrible person (as you suggest) but that I don’t automatically read “present company excluded” in when someone makes blanket statements about groups I’m a part of. When someone says “_____ people are _____” I can’t help but feel personally insulted. “Gamers are sexist” rubs me the wrong way, even though I’ve never been a sexist person and I support all of the explicit goals of feminism. Based on your username, you appear to be a gamer, but apparently you’re perfectly happy being called sexist. That’s probably the difference between you and me. You can read “present company excluded” into those statement and join in on the rallying call. I can’t. I internalize those statements and feel insulted and marginalized, and it makes me unwilling to join the counter-movement to GamerGate.
) article. thanks!
