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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I was going to point that out. Thanks
You do realize that a lot of us involved in the making of games in any capacity know that we live in a world where this is what happens to some random youtube critic, so we’re a lot less likely to put anything into our work that defies it even if that is a complete limit on our creativity. You know that right? I’m really sick of people saying things like “then you should make a game” when some one criticizes the industry. If there’s no space for outside criticism in games there sure as hell isn’t any space for the kind of internal criticism that breeds real quality work. Good work takes awareness, collaboration, and requires a lot of carefully negotiated choices. It needs criticism for the same reason a small child needs to know not to poke at other kids with scissors and not to crawl into a heated oven.
Want games that suck less and feel less like addictive cash grabs? You don’t get it by putting the onus on marginalized developers to also serve as critics since both are more than full time work as it stands. That’s just horseshit through and through.
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It was rape… not kink. Rape.
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I just don’t see this at all. I’m watching Summer Games Done Quick all this week. It’s a huge fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders bringing in over $2M last year. A lot of speedrunning community is white men, but they feature plenty of non-white people and women. It’s about the most trans inclusive community I’ve ever seen. There’s a “famous” speedrunner with a disability that doesn’t allow them to use one of their hands so they plays games one handed. They don’t tolerate bigotry at all.
Speedrunning is about as competitive as it gets and is the very essence of hacking the system to get any advantage you can get. People put in hundreds of hours seeking world records and one-upping one another. Run a game for an hour, get some bad luck near the end and hit the reset button to try again. The dedication to being the best rivals olympic athletes. But the community is friendly and inclusive, they want to help everyone, the world record holder will give you tips on how to get better so you can beat them one day.
Also, watching different runners play different games you can see how cultures build up around different games. There’s nothing about Sonic the Hedgehog that suggests that the people who play it would be an ultra-hype near-parody of bro-culture while Devil May Cry runners would make the lamest excuses for puns (“If Dante were a baker, this game could be Devil Make Rye”). It’s not being competitive or trying to hack the system or going for every advantage that produce these things. Drive to win does not determine the culture.
When I see competitive head to head games they run the full spectrum. Fighting games are full of heinous bigoted trash talk (last time I saw) and are very misogynist. Starcraft 2 has a pro who is a trans woman who earned $100k in 2018.
There is no logical connection between being competitive and being awful to other people. There is no logical connection between looking for every hack and exploit to be the very best at something and thinking that women are less than men. There’s no reason to think that experience playing video games makes people more inclined to think of other people as inhuman or unreal rather than training them to see through simulacra that are constructed to make us think of one another as unreal.
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