I’d like to just take a moment and suggest that we all just reference the last thread on the matter and everyone can just link to their previous post and it might speed things along until five days have passed.
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i love this series, and even as a gamer i found this particular segment shocking and quite hard to watch. i’m not a fan of FPS games, so most of the games exhibited in this one were familiar to me only by name. she lays out a very damning case, and makes it clear that she’s endeavoring to point out the problem, not condemning the games as a whole.
as for the argument that a player can just choose not to play the content that one finds objectionable (which i initially agreed with), she points out that “a toaster is still designed for and capable of making toast, whether or not you use it to make toast.” – the problem is that designers are still putting this sort of thing in games to begin with. avoiding the content doesn’t help… it shouldn’t be there in the first place. i felt that was well said.
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It is most certainly not. It’s a variation of “No true scotsman”, where criticisms are hand-waved by appealing to purity. It works the other way around to; Feminists, when confronted with actions of some violent contingent, for example the Erin Pizzey case(warning: Fox News), they resort to “Not all feminists are like that”. Meme-complexes seem to reject all external criticisms as attacks, hence the vitriolic nature of the conversation around Gender issues. We are A, opposed by B, hence all in Set B are wrong forever and ever.
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No disagreement here. A lot of people (myself included) love games despite the stupid bullshit, not because of it.
But if you’ll forgive me nitpicking slightly: it’s not so much that games include a lot of unnecessary T&A, damsels in distress and all that stuff as that they include it by default. It’s so prevalent that it’s become the go-to way of making a game. A lot of developers simply don’t question it. They hired artists who have devoted their careers to making the most amazing ladies’ bottoms. Of course they are going to use those skills.
For all their other faults, Japanese developers are ahead of the curve here: they often have just as many beautiful-and-dangerous men with perfect arses. That’s great! We need sexy games with beautiful perfect fantasy people that everyone can enjoy, just as much as we need realistic women to go alongside the realistic male characters.
It’s about inclusivity. And that’s not just about taking stuff out!
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Cory Doctorow:
“All who disagree with me are Mansplaining Misogynists Poster Children of Patriarchy hence their arguments are invalid”
Shane_simmons:
“Hey let me appeal to authority to validate my tu quoque as I move this goal post.”
You spin me right round, baby right round…
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“Mansplaining” is pretty mild compared to some of the language coming in the other direction… I dunno if I can condemn people’s anger and upset so quickly. The truth is, I don’t know how aware I would be of the magnitude of this problem if it wasn’t for angry feminists calling people out for their behaviour, hurt feelings be damned. It’s frustrating to see the same bad arguments derail the conversation over and over.
You’re right though. We’re talking about big systemic cultural problems here. I think we could all do a better job of getting people to understand that the “not all men” is implied. I mean hopefully everyone already knows that, genuinely, most men are not terrible. 
I dunno tho. How do you call someone out without making it personal?
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[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc[quote=“EcholocateChoco, post:26, topic:34682”]
I dunno tho. How do you call someone out without making it personal?
[/quote]
It’s definitely tricky to point out bad behavior without making the person exhibiting that behavior feel personally attacked - if nothing else, it requires being aware of the fact that they are going to be insecure and defensive about being told they did something wrong, and planning accordingly.
Toes are going to get stepped on - it’s unavoiable when there’s an elephant in the room. But at least we can take steps to make those bumps and bruises as painless as possible until we can all work together to get the elephant out where it belongs.
Jay Smooth, New York Hip Hop radio personality and in my opinion all around amazing person, has [a great video that touches on this sort of topic][1]. Here he was speaking about issues of race, but his advice could just as easily work for issues of sex as well.
The long and short of it is that there are ways to point out bad behaviors without making it seem like you believe the person who exhibits that behavior is a bad person. Smooth sums up this concept in the idea of clarifying the difference between “what they did” and “who they are”.
Now, people are touchy creatures, especially in our culture where mistakes are seen as bad and embarassing. If you want to change bad behavior, you have to point it out - but if you want that act of pointing something out to actually matter, you need to not overwhelm the person you are correcting and make them defensive and unwilling to listen.
That, in a nutshell, is my entire argument. When a person (man or woman) tells off someone else (man or woman) for ‘mansplaining’, all they typically accomplish is making that someone else embarassed, resentful, defensive, and closed-minded. And it’s really darn hard to get a reasonable message through to people who are in that sort of mind-frame.
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Yep, this was a really well done segment!
I hope that people commenting actually take the time to watch it in full before posting. It’s well worth it. As with all the segments, she’s talking about a specific issue within games, not condemning games on the whole. In this case, she’s not just talking about women “hanging around” in the background of games, but about sexualized female NPCs, and what role they play in gaming and culture as they are dehumanized.
Her discussion is thorough, and she supports every point she makes with several examples (The older examples are used to show development in gaming history @Shane_Simmons. She uses examples right on up to GTA 5.)
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I’m not exactly seeing an appeal to authority anywhere. Did I miss something?
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Mansplaining, briefly, is a real problem that comes up frequently in daily life, and men are usually not even conscious they’re doing it unless they’re called on it. Men should be paying more attention to women’s conversational signals, should be checking themselves, and should accept this criticism graciously.
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I’m not certain I understand your post.
What aspect of my comment are you saying “is most certainly not”? Linguistically that could apply to two or three different sections of the excerpt you cite, each resulting in a different meaning.
Just want to make sure I understand what you’re saying before responding, since from my skewed angle you seem to be arguing in two different directions at once - which seems unlikely.
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There are some clearly horrible examples of prostitutes. Some of the one’s she picked were particularly nauseating. Using prostitutes to regen health is certainly pretty much devoid of any redeeming value. I don’t want to diminish the point. She clearly points out some ugly examples.
That said, you really can’t toss it all in the trash. Prostitution is a real thing. Fallout as a pretty good example of game where prostitution has nuance. There is no power up to prostitutes, they have male and female prostitutes, and you see examples of “good” prostitution where the women own the facilities are and bad prostitution which is supposed to be ugly. Seedy is a valid setting. Seedy settings and prostitution go together like peanut butter and jelly. Run down building, prostitutes on the street, trash, and impoverished looking people are what define seedy not just in video games, but in reality. Simply having a seedy setting with prostitution doesn’t inherently make something sexist. It is how you treat that setting that separates crude sexism of Duke Nukem from the sometimes chilling and clearly disapproving depictions of powerless women in game like Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout: New Vegas is a particularly apt example as it is chocked full of strong gun toting women, yet is clearly set in a sexist world. That is a pretty self conscious decision that if you walk away from thinking it is sexist, you have clearly missed the point.
The examples of the players killing off women in an open world game is just goofy. All of those games allow you to kill literally anyone. Women are treated as just any other NPC that when you put a bullet in it, it dies. Open world games in general let you wantonly murder. I am kind of disappointed she spent so much time on it. It reminds me of the anti-video game hysteria of the late 90s. Yes, in an open world game, you can be a bastard. No, the game doesn’t instantly end when you get caught for killing someone. It doesn’t end when crash into a cop car, blow down a sidewalk at full speed taking out pedestrians, or take a bullet to the head, like it properly should. Banging prostitutes for health is sexist. Being and to gun down men, women, and cops on the other hand is not sexist. Simply having the capacity to run around selectively killing women, instead of the more traditional murdering of everyone on the sidewalk that you are using as a speedway, while a sexist act on the a part of the player, isn’t sexist game design. That is like calling paper and pen sexist because you have the capacity to write a sexist note with it.
Further, there really is no solution, and she never offers on, to open world games. The point of an open world game is to let you wander around causing mayhem. You can make that mayhem sexist in nature if you really want to. You could also make it racist, misandariest, or haircolorist.
Video games have a series sexism problem to be sure. Worthwhile female characters are far and few inbetween. Worthwhile female characters acting as the main characters are even more rare. For every Alyx Vance who is a strong nuanced woman, there are a hundred throw away cartoon female characters. That is a solvable problem. Open world games letting you murder people who happen to be women though? That isn’t solvable.
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Just want to second that actually. I saw that video a while back and it’s excellent.
As divisive as it might be, I still think words like “mansplaining” have power. I’m already well on the side of feminism but I’m still a dude. It’s hard to deny that I’ve been socialised, particularly as a white middle class english guy, to act like a fucking know-it-all. That little word stuck in my head like a piece of grit… if I’m talking to a woman, I am much more aware now of the danger I’ll switch into mansplaining mode.
It’s like that thorny word “privilege”. Tell someone they have it and they’ll get right on the defensive. But if they acknowledge it… it sums up a lot.
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They should! But if they are already doing that then you’ve already won half the battle. 
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The way he linked to a woman to highlight his point, which if he had actually read it, is old information that doesn’t even address his plagiarism problem. But hey a woman said it…
I quoted one sentence which has one singular point. There isn’t much to understand here.
Oh by the way, since I’m already talking way too much. A good personal and professional friend of mine has vouched that the next game his studio develops will have playable male and female characters, as a direct result of discussions that started because of Sarkeesian’s videos.
So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, haters.
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I’m sorry if I’m being dense, but I honestly am confused by your response.
I had hoped politely asking for clarification would help me to understand what you said, but you seem oddly unwilling to clarify, so I guess that’s that?
Sarkeesian is clearly sex-positive, and interested in the liberating potential of the medium. At 16:55:
This is especially sad because interactive media has the potential to be a perfect medium to genuinely explore sex and sexuality. But that’s not what’s happening here. These interactions set up a transactional relationship in which women are reduced to a base sexual function. It frames female sexuality as something that belongs to others, rather than something women enjoy for themselves.
I’d argue that none of this is really about sex at all – certainly nothing resembling authentic consensual intimacy. Publishers and developers are instead selling a particular fantasy about male power, centered on the control of women.
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Appeal to authority takes the rough form of:
A is an authority on a particular topic
A says something about that topic
A is probably correct
The fallacy is in the assumption that authority confers immunity to error. A simple example is arguing that a doctor wouldn’t misdiagnose a person simply because they’re a doctor.
Shane_Simmons argues that “the ‘con artist’ bit” isn’t purely driven by misogyny. To support this claim, he presents the evidence of that particular argument being made by women.
Although it is technically possible for women to be misogynystic, in common usage we typically understand “misogyny” to be a trait exhibited by men, and not by women. Hence, by demonstrating that women have made the same argument that men have, this suggests that the argument cannot be derived exclusively from misogyny, as the women making the argument could not be said to be exhibiting misogyny in making the argument.
Whether you accept that particular argumentation or not, I don’t see where it’s supposed to be an appeal to authority. 
