Wonderful profile of Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist games critic who made an army of shitty manbabies very, very upset

Did it meet the criteria @cecilia_FXX set of being “successful” (whatever that means)?

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Definitely cult status at least.

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If she really wanted to be taken seriously; she should have designed a next gen chip set.

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Nah, she should have built a Turing-complete computer from nothing but first principles, three toothpicks, and a small piece of chewing gum.

Anything less just proves she doesn’t know her arse from her elbow.

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:thinking: this is a persuasive argument, and yet… and yet… I think learning to go alcohol free, as much as you can, might be a bit better long term solution.

Sorry, have you not been on the internet since The Force Awakens came out? Star Wars fans (well, “fans”) have been screaming bloody murder about the franchise being “ruined” by SJWs and Kathleen Kennedy. They bullied Kelly Marie Tran off of Twitter. They submitted a petition in Aurebesh to strike The Last Jedi from canon. People who enjoyed The Last Jedi are frequently told to kill themselves. Chuck Wendig has several stalkers and trollies who harass him constantly because of the tie-in novels he wrote. There is a lot of fucked up shit happening in the Star Wars fandom right now.

Gamergate was exploited by right-wing people like Adam Baldwin (who coined it) and Christina Sommers. They took a relatively small hate mob aimed largely at Zoë Quinn (whipped up by her piece of shit boyfriend after she dumped him) and pointed it square at the eternal targets of right-wing ideology: feminism and diversity, growing its base by reframing it in more “neutral” terms, like “it’s about ethics in game journalism” (never mind the multitude of actual ethical issues in the gaming journalism niche like the paid reviews and industry-dictated access to pre-release copies of games based on fealty… there are WOMEN INVOLVED). Outlets like Kotaku and Polygon that had spoken positively about people like Anita Sarkeesian (or even just mentioned similar opinions about the state of gaming) were targeted because of their stances on diversity and inclusiveness, underscored by an idiotic demand that games journalism be “objective” (in much the same way conservatives cast aspersions against mainstream journalism for being “biased”). It’s not the same playbook because it was ported from Gamergate to the 2016 election, it’s the same playbook because conservatives (and later even more right-wing movements like neo-Nazis) applied an old standard to a new source of bubbling resentment.

They’ve repeated this playbook in comic books (remember the outrage over female Thor, or the black girl who became Iron Man?), movies (see Star Wars above, though the seeds of this in mainstream coverage go back to at least Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall), TV shows (to pull a seemingly impossible but actually real example from left field: there are neo-Nazi and alt-right bronies in the MLP fandom. They have a mascot. She’s a white pony with blonde hair named Aryanne. I am not joking.), and literature (the Sad Puppies trying to brigade the Hugo awards nomination and votingprocess, led by noted misogynist Vox Day).

In every instance, these have been spaces that were formerly perceived to be the sole provenance of (young) straight cis white men, in which marginalized communities have finally begun to make their voices heard. These communities are frequently outgrowths of nerd or pop culture, and I think it’s because of the deep emotional attachments people have with these products that the backlash has been as intense as it is. Those attachments are actively encouraged by the corporations that produce those products, because it’s profitable, and they can run so deep that they become part of a person’s identity. That can turn toxic fast. Anyone critiquing video games, or comic books, or movies—or making changes to those things—is not just someone doing something different or trying to spark a dialogue, they’re committing an attack on the identity of the people who enjoy those things.

Again, none of this is unique to games, and not all of it is even related to politics. A lot of it is just shitty people being given an opportunity to be shitty without any fear of repercussions. If gaming seems to be disproportionately represented in the shit-slingers, consider that gaming as a community largely grew up at the same time as the internet (and was in the same demographic as those with prodigious internet access and free time to use it), so much of its fan base is also internet-savvy, and there’s a massive cross-over between male-heavy tech culture and male-heavy gaming culture (and in both cases, women were actively excluded from being marketed to or supported once those things became remotely profitable or desirable).

The alt-right is just one outgrowth of the toxicity poisoning that hanging out in the depths of the internet engenders. The sorts of places where being edgy makes you cool, where liking things is bad (see also: “cringe culture”), and where causing offense and even trauma is a way to show how “above it all” you are. Mods are asleep, post child porn. Trick people into looking at goatse or 2girls1cup or lemon party. It’s all just “lulz”, I’m only joking, stop being so sensitive. Gaming, as a medium that grew up largely in the age of the internet, is particularly thick with these shitty wannabe edgelord idiots, but it’s not the video games that are the cause. It’s ultimately a result of the toxic definition of masculinity permeating our entire culture that drives boys and men to bury their feelings and their empathy, combined with how easy it is to “other” people when you can’t see them face-to-face, and that’s a practice that’s as old as time itself.

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Weirdly enough, when you look at meta studies people that drink usually outlive tee-totallers by a small margin on average. So a moderated consumption of this particular addictive substance may actually be healthy.

But shaky as it is this analogy actually holds some merit. In a lot of countries alcohol advertisements have to contain a phrase like “drink responsibly”. But that is only targeting the addictive nature of alcohol, there are no rules targeting the media content of alcoholic beverages because wine doesn’t contain a media experience.

And in this thread we are not talking about the dangers of the addictiveness of games. We are talking about the critiqing of the story elements of games, and why this critique is so scary to a vocal minority of “Gamers” that it warrants extreme harrasment. As a (very) recently converted gamer maybe you can shed some light on why that is?

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I remember the raging manbabies upset at there being both a female and black character shown in the trailer for TFA.

God forbid in a fantasy world with FTL travel, mafiosi slug creatures, clone armies, world destroying planet sized spaceships, fantastical alien species, sentient robots, and magic space wizards that you dare tell a story that doesn’t revolve around a white dude.

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It’s wildly disproportionately represented.

The videogame culture is what scares me the most. There’s something deeply wrong with these people, what they do to others. The alcohol analogy carries – perhaps exposure turns “hardcore” gamers into abusers at a much higher rate than other forms of media?

Do you remember all the work Riot did with League of Legends, the tribunal, all the anti-abuse stuff? I considered this admirable, cutting-edge work, and it was…

… and then it was revealed that Riot was totally toxic on the inside THE WHOLE TIME.

This blew my mind :exploding_head:

Really, I should have seen all this coming. My quake clan from 20 years ago, with 10 men who have 3 divorces, one child molesting felony, and one spousal abuse felony split among them. Riot telling people how it was fighting toxicity in its player abase when all along it was toxic as hell on the inside. Feminist Frequency deciding “hey let’s write about games” and then getting railroaded into oblivion by idiots. But no, as a gamer myself, I felt “games are just another kind of media, there’s nothing special here, people saying that gaming is especially toxic are just wrong”.

Well, they weren’t wrong. I was wrong.

when-a-stranger-calls-phone(1)|nullxnull

Gaming is toxic, maybe in a “not all games” way it isn’t all 100% toxic, but certainly toxic enough as an industry to be considered alcoholic content that you should be age 18 before drinking.

Facebook is just another symptom. We’ve turned everything into a videogame, with no drinking age, no limits… no consequences.

Discourse is no exception.

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So let people be wrong then. Other media forms often gets critics that miss the mark. They usually get ridiculed, not harassed, any insight to offer why “Gamers” resorted to harassment?

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It’s a videogame; it’s not real; there are no consequences. These aren’t “real people” anyway they are NPCs behind a screen. The outcome of this doesn’t affect my life other than being entertainment. Speaking of, it’s funny to taunt and grief people, and it’s all just lulz anyway, so lighten up, right?

Games are mostly about competition. Winning. Losing. Fighting. Levelling up. Hack the system, by any means necessary. That’s what you get trained to do… so that’s what you do.

That’s why you need something that lets people get the kind of entertainment they can from videogames while interacting face-to-face with real people whose sensibilities they have to take into account. Escapism, power fantasy, exploring worlds of imagination in a hobby that’s striving for inclusion.

Fortunately, tabletop RPGs are already growing in popularity.

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One of the key things video games could teach us, that non-interactive media can’t is consequences of our actions.

Why are they “just” NPC’s? I’d argue that in a well crafted game you’d respect a Non Player Character, simply because it seems like a person.

Maybe instead of dismissing games, or restricting them, we could have a discussion about their strengths and flaws and use those criticisms to make games a tool that improves empathy instead of one that breaks it down.

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What problem would you suggest this solves?

The excessive harrasment for a woman daring to speak out in a male oriented space? There are plenty of examples of women making the kind of statement you propose in game-form, there is plenty of harassment to go around with those examples.

Or do you suppose that a game would be better at changing the status quo around gaming culture? It’s hard to say for sure but I don’t think that’s possible, her YouTube series had a really big impact, I don’t think a game could match that.

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Welcome to an early game designer’s attempt to make an “adult” game - even if you’re into kink it’s really appalling, and comes off like rape.

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Also, I remember the Harry Potter fandom back in the day when it was the Hot Thing on the internet, and there were incredibly shitty people involved. Snooty gatekeepers who looked down on book/movie fans as not real fans, ridiculously entitled shippers who threw shitfits when their personal ship wasn’t validated by JK Rowling (there were plans to rewrite the last books so that Harry ended up with the Obviously Right Girl…), unhealthily intense adult fans who lashed out at the kids for daring to have fun with the books/movies, toxic right-wing nutcases who thought Voldemort Did Nothing Wrong, etc. etc.

Any sufficiently large fandom will have its horrible people in it. The main issue is, will those horrible people be shunned and marginalized, or allowed to be horrible and even catered to? In video gaming, there’s way too much of the latter.

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That’s one reaction. A self-defeating and childish one that essentially gives the industry leave to keep catering to arseholes and that lends credence to charlatans like Jack Thompson, but a reaction.

Sarkeesian’s response, which amounts to calling for the AAA industry to finally grow the heck up, seems like the more productive one. It’s not like the industry and the communities that grow up around it are going away.

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So the alcohol industry, sorry, the AAA gaming industry, should just “grow the heck up” and learn to regulate … itself? Do you think Facebook is gonna wake up one day and say, man, we sure oughta regulate ourselves better?

That doesn’t seem particularly likely to me?

I mean these loot crates aren’t going to buy themselves, are they?

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The wine industry I’m using as an example did, more than a century ago. When you think of an annoying wine fan today, is the first image that comes to mind a roaring alcoholic or some blowhard rambling on about fruity highlights and a hint of cedar? The industry, perhaps at the urging of Sarkeesian-like oenophiles, made a conscious decision on its own not to make known destructive arseholes its core customer base. There’s absolutely nothing preventing the AAA games industry from doing the same if it chooses to.

Government regulation also plays its part with the wine industry, of course, but that’s specifically focused on health effects (e.g. kids shouldn’t be drinking lots of alcohol) and on labeling and safety standards (e.g. alcohol content). But those laws have mostly re-inforced the industry’s existing decision about its core market rather than defined it.

That highlights an example of government regulation playing a part in the video games industry:

It doesn’t address the industry’s choice of core market directly, though.

Facebook, though somewhat gamified, is part of a different industry, as I’m sure you’re aware. The ills of the social media industry (unlike those of the video game industry) can be addressed in significant part through government regulation – specifically updated anti-trust measures and stronger consumer privacy rules. That kind of regulation has the potential to alter that industry’s own crappy engagement-driven advertising-based business mode (one which tolerates Nazi users) in turn. Facebook is well aware of the likelihood of this, which is why it’s suddenly making an out-of-the-blue push for its Libra cryptocurrency.

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