To my knowledge, no one over made a video game where you can beat Ebert to a bloody pulp. Did she disclaim her first video or did she wait until after the ridiculous disproportionate backlash?
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It looks like the whole âsheâs not really a gamerâ thing is based on some very heavily-edited footage from a single lecture. Not much of an argument there, chief.
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Yup.
I hate this argument. âI agree with what you have to say but I donât like the way youâre saying it so Iâm going to dismiss it.â We call that tone-policing and de-railing in where I come fromâŚ
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Ebert wasnât a film maker, I guess we can throw out all his reviews then. /sigh
Iâve seen a lot of people saying this but very few specifics.
But letâs address âcherry-pickedâ real quick. Even before she started doing video games at all she was analyzing media depictions of women. So the fact that she chooses to focus on problematic representations of women within the medium of video games is not âcherry pickingâ any more than someone talking about the problematic presentation of race in To Kill a Mockingbird is âcherry pickingâ by ignoring all the stuff in the book that isnât about race.
OK, go. Shallow and cherry-picked how?
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Well, I think there can be legitimate issues with the way people express themselves. If someone takes on an insulting tone that is a perfectly reasonable reason to decide to stop listening to them. We have to be sensitive when we talk about sensitive topics, and I think - whether this is understandable to many people or not - video games are a very sensitive topic.
But yes, criticizing tone instead of message is definitely fertile ground for those with the goal of dismissing valid points.
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We had (might still have?) the Lady Rams here in town.
We are, in fact, a bunch of city slickers.
I think feminism is the more sensitive topic at hand today, Games come second. 
And yes, if someone is insulting, sure, but so far the only insults have come from Feminist Frequencies detractorsâŚ
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The point is pretty clear, perhaps he doesnât want to elaborate because there is no way of putting it without sounding as a sexist pig.
Iâll give it a shot, I hope I donât get banned for thisâŚ
if the âlady grizzliesâ were actually better than the âgrizzliesâ perhaps they would hold the generic name âthe grizzliesâ by now, and thus, the other team would become âthe boy grizzliesâ.
They are sports teams, itâs all about who wins, the spotlight will always be on the winner, there is nothing inherently sexist about it, if anything it would be âweakistâ or something.
I donât mean it as an offense, Iâm pretty sure that the worst player of the WNBA can kick my ass playing basketball, but the best of them canât compare to the best of the NBA.
Anita says in her video that male is perceived culturally to be the default or source of humanity.
Ironic then, that biologically, all fetuses begin life as female and only after the Y chromosome is activated does the fetus turn male.
See for example the existence of the inoperable male nipple, a reminder that we all begin life as female.
Halt your tongue! It was words like that that summoned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from the neverwhere that it should have stayed.
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I actually think that this isnât true and that itâs important to understand this to understand where the rage is coming from. Suppose someone wrote a story about how games were racist, or infantile, or a waste of time. Do you think the reaction would be less?
As great as the fury over this video is, it is dwarfed by the fury over Diablo 3 having a real money auction house. It is dwarfed by the fury unleashed by people who insist that one race is more powerful than another in Starcraft 2 despite the fact that this happens every day. Try going to a gaming board and talking about how Minecraft is stupid because there is nothing to do.
There were a thousand people having a sit in in the magic online tournament rooms to protest the shut down of daily events and people comparing their shutdown to dismissing employees without notice. When Blizzard tried to switch to real names on their forums people harassed and intimidated their community managers after finding out their real names just to show what happens when you use real names.
Games are extremely sensitive about games and this is exacerbated by people assuming that games are too trivial to get upset about.
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Hey now, male nipples are fully functional. Men have milk ducts and mammary tissue. It is very unusual that men actually produce milk, but thatâs different than the nipples being âinoperable.â
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⌠I was being hyperbolic and trying to demonstrate that stating one topic is more sensitive than the other can lead to dangerous misunderstandings⌠thank you for illustrating my point.
For what itâs worth, Sasha is a diminutive for Alexander. I wouldnât assume this particular Sasha is female.
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Shallow: Her analysis of Rogue Legacy is wrong. The characters that wear bows are non-homosexual females and homosexual males. Character attributes are randomly chosen and I think around 20-25% of all characters are gay. She specifically says that âallâ female characters wear bows⌠that is wrong.
She accuses Hotline Miami of damseling the prostitute. Given that the main character isnât a hero and the two share no dialog, assuming that she is being treated per the damsel trope is her own interpretation, when viewing the situation in a darker light is just as valid.
Cherry-picked: She accuses Psychonauts of Damseling the female lead. To do this, she shows a cropped picture of her tied up. Anita had to crop the image because the male and female mentor figures are tied up right next to the female lead. In reality, pretty much everyone gets gets kidnapped (or brain-drained, or is insane) but the hero.
She frequently focuses on Japanese titles. From some of her videos you might wonder if anyone but the Japanese make games. And yes, the Japanese games industry has its problems, but some videos indict the whole industry for the work of a rather specific subset.
I can go on if you wish.
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Children recognise gendering at a very young age. I canât find the link, but thereâs research where gendering toys the other way, such as making dolls manly or cars girly, will actually lead boys to prefer the former, and girls the latter. You can see this with some action figures for boys, even.
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Iâm a gamer and I really donât see where sheâs shaming gamers.
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Sounds like a rather minor error rather than a âshallow analysisâ. Even good work occasionally has errors. That said, putting bows on homosexual males is probably a more egregious example of the trope than putting bows on every single female character (rather than simply the vast majority). How many actual homosexual men do you know who routinely wear bows in their hair?
The main character is certainly a protagonist even if not a hero per se and you yourself admit this is at least open to interpretation. I donât know anything about this game but youâre surely entitled to your own interpretation just as Sarkeesian is entitled to hers.
What it sounds like is that she is saying is that the game is subjecting the female lead to a treatment that is reminiscent of how female leads are treated in other games whereas you are focusing on the female leads relative to other characters in the game. Certainly if youâre looking for examples of games where the female lead is kidnapped and tied up (and there are plenty) Psychonauts would qualify. On this one it sounds to me like youâre cherry-picking to find something wrong with the example when the example is actually completely valid with respect to what Sarkeesian is actually arguing.
None of the criticism made by Sarkeesian has struck me as very harsh. Sheâs explicitly said what sheâs doing is to analyze problematic representations of women in video games. If you perceive a tendency to focus on Japanese games then it seems to me you could take that as a vindication of the US game industry. However, you probably shouldnât because you and I both know that the US industry isnât exactly great about depictions of women either.
If you insist. I suspect it will just be more âcherry-pickingâ.
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See, that implication totally wouldnât register on me. I think a Lady Grizzly could elegantly murder any unladylike Grizzly whilst simultaneously composing a sonata.
âLady Grizzliesâ scans really badly, though. And Lady Buffaloes is even worse. Team names are supposed to be alliterative, arenât they? Like the Screaminâ Eagles or the Tennessee Titans? I canât think of any team name that really works with âladyâ in front of it.
Then again all our local university teams are named after the state bird, the Fightinâ Blue Hen, which is nearly always portrayed as a rooster, so obviously people around here have scrambled brains. Probably best not to listen to me.
