Ah - the television is entertainment for the great unwashed - so representation there doesn’t matter argument.
Or movies - or that yellow press.
I only read classic novels and attend the opera myself.
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It does, but note that Anita said she specifically didn’t have problems with crazy people until she got to video games. Hence, the issue is video games.
If it matters in other media it obviously does here as well.
And opinion journalism that addressed those issues elsewhere was not different and no more important.
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Do I think videogames cause violence? No.
Do I think that there is a large correlation between violence and the kind of people whose identity is tied up in being a “gamer” that any criticism or analysis of what they’re playing – especially into how the games may reflect harmful media tropes – causes them to attack the critic? 100% yes.
Do I think that there’s a purity culture in games that encourages participants to lash out even more and more outrageously against critics, whether they have a YouTube channel or simply share the same living space? Hell, yes. There’s plenty of documented examples.
Do I think that gaming as it exists today has a component that makes it easier to threaten and enact violence? Why, yes, it absolutely fucking does.
What are the biggest stories in our world right now? Concentration camps. Militias threatening to murder people who are upholding the law. What do they have in common with video games and gamer culture? The flattening of people into “Us” and “Them”. The remove of individual one-on-one contact. This is huge.
When we think of the Nazis executing people, we immediately jump to the end: cavernous rooms with thick cement walls. We tend to think that they were built that way because executing every Non-Aryan, non-cishet, non-conformist, is a big job, so this was more efficient, but that’s not the real reason. See, they were mass executing people long before the death camps got built. Shooting people puts you into proximity to them. You can hear them cry, beg, pray. They tried using “easier” methods: crowding them into trucks or vans and running the exhaust inside, but the executioners could still hear the screams. It took its toll. Nazis were getting PTSD. So they built the camps, to minimize the number of Nazis exposed to the cruelty. The thick cement walls were designed so no one outside could hear the screaming.
What does that have to do with video games? Our modern connected world allows us to hate in remote. The people killed in a video game are just pixels on a screen. You’re not actually killing people. The problem comes in that – in many cases – that is what people like AS are, too. They don’t see her, they see carefully chosen clips of her ( “cherry-picked examples” you might say) on a monitor, presented with a pre-determined spin. Even the violence can be done by remote: fire off a death-threat from a throwaway email (that makes it easier to divorce from your identity and treat it as “just another game”… it’s not just about traceability any more than the death camps were “just” about efficiency) and then sit back and giggle with your friends in chat. Spoof a phonecall and outsource your violence from half a world away. Let some other sucker (who you’ve also never met) deal with the PTSD. You can’t hear the screams and the crying. Kind of like they’re just another NPC in a game (gee… hmmm… Who adopted that terminology lately? Where might they have picked that up?).
Games themselves offer a mechanism for creating this, and it’s not the violence itself. It’s the narrative structure where you’re seemingly in control, but in reality the game guides your choices. Games tell us what we have to do. Oftentimes, outrageous behaviour gets rewarded. Even the “bad” endings are a kind of reward. Yet unlike a TV show or movie that we passively absorb, games have us taking an active role. We guide the character from point A to point B, but we must go to point B – even in the most open-world games you have to do so eventually, if you want to advance the plot. You may be presented with a false choice – talk to Bob and he will give you the MacGuffin if you’ve got the skills, or shoot Bob and loot his body for the MacGuffin. But you need the MacGuffin to continue. We do what we must to obtain it. The worst consequence is a “game over” that we can restart at the last save point.
Which means we learn to take an action without seriously considering the consequences, because there are no real consequences. “I had to use the threaten option because my speech wasn’t high enough.” The problem comes when that reasoning gets applied to perceived threats to one’s self-esteem or identity. Especially when we consider ourselves part of an elite group, and the criticism comes from someone we’ve excluded. (I say “we” because this is human nature, not because I have ever been welcome among the gaming elite).
In short, it’s not the games that cause violence, hut the entire culture from creator to player. Gaming has largely been a white male monolith, because white men were the only ones with enough free time to play, whether as a gamer or mucking around with code. They never had to consider anyone else. Now that they’re being asked to, it’s the same old “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Take a group of people who have been indoctrinated with stories about a lone hero rising to strike out against the hordes of evil, teach them that the enemy is simply light dots on a screen, throw in a culture of “beat the system”, give them the tools where they can divorce their actions from any real world consequences. Now crack open their little world and open it to criticism from the outside. Take a wild guess what happens next.
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The source article indicates that everything changed w/r/t abuse when she dipped into video game culture, transitioning from TV —
This was the first time I’d been invited into a corporate space with creatives who make decisions about making games. So, well, I guess I’ll do a talk about games. I needed to do a bunch of research really quickly. I only played the games that I wanted to play. I didn’t play every game that had ever been made, whether I hated it or not. So all of a sudden I’ve got to talk about all these games that I don’t really like, and I would never have played otherwise.
“So I did a ton of research. I put a talk together for them about tropes in games and problems with women’s representation in games. That video of that talk is still available internally for Bungie employees. And I bet you it’s a fucking embarrassing disaster. But it’s still there.
…
So I uploaded the [tropes in video games] fundraising video to YouTube. “And that’s when it happened. That’s the moment when everything changed.”
That implies to me that there is something especially rotten about video game culture, versus TV and movies.
So - we agree with her.
I guess her work had value.
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Or… you just like to argue for the sake of arguing, especially in topics about/by/for women, Jeff.
That’s what the optics here look like, period; and it’s really not cute.
I personally don’t care about video games, or gaming journalism either, but the reason I’ve been active is this thread is because I do care about sexism, misogyny and needless harassment.
Um… I didn’t say anything at all about gaming journalism up to this point, YOU did, in the link you posted, which I didn’t click on.
O_O
I’m not talking about what you wrote or thought 5 years ago; I’m talking about the present day, and your emphatic participation in this particular conversation.
Per your own admission, your position is that you don’t actually care about gaming or gaming journalism, which is fine… but that’s also one of your direct criticisms of Sarkeesian and her vids:
Bottom line: if you’ve expended so much energy commenting about a topic for which you claim to have so very little regard, then that deeply implies that you have some ulterior reasons for being so engaged in the conversation.
I’m moving on now, because I know how these conversations with you always end up, and that even trying to communicate with you is basically pointless.
Have a good Sunday.
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There’s also something rotten in regard to sexism and fundamental disrespect for women in coder culture in general, and there has been for the almost quarter century I’ve been involved in the tech industry in various capacities. The video game dev sector takes it to horrible extremes (as it does other dysfunctions of tech workplace culture), but to a lesser degree it’s pervasive throughout the industry as a whole and has been for a long time.
The TV and movie biz, which I’ve also been involved in, has its own problems with sexism of course. The difference is that the creators’ sexism doesn’t carry over into the consumer base to the same degree of active malice that it does with video games, with certain exceptions.
Those exceptions come with the SF/fantasy/superhero genres, where the fandom can get vicious about female-oriented or LGBTQ casting and creative choices “ruining my childhood” (the reaction recent Ghostbusters reboot stands out). Given that there’s a lot of crossover between geek fandom culture and tech culture, I don’t think this is a co-incidence.
This discussion has as much to do with “ethics in games journalism” as a discussion of the growth of white nationalism has to do with “economic insecurity”: those things exist, but in the end they play small parts in a much larger problem.
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Word, but my contention is that Jeff was agreeing with something that HE himself had posted… and yet he was attributing it as if the statement had come from me, which it did not.
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Nothing related to videogames has value. In that sense… I guess?
My mind has been changed as a result of this discussion. I now think videogames themselves are the primary source of the problem, much more so than TV, movies, books, or other media.
In other words, there is something “special”, and not in a good way, about videogames as a medium that makes it dangerous.
I always wondered why lame videogame “journalism” bothered me so much, I mean for decades, and now I know why.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
If we create an art form, our own bias and personal experience inevitably has an effect on the final product that we’ve created.
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This is the part that I now agree with.
Prior to this I saw videogames as “basically just like TV or movies, another form of media” but they are in fact much more dangerous.
The marginal benefit isn’t worth the risk. Burn it all to the ground.
And yet - you’re so passionate about the subject and about one reporter on the subject.
So - you think they’re associated with violence and misogyny- and that this isn’t important or newsworthy,
But that misogyny and violence are important. But not important.
Maybe if people just ignored it - it would go away?
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My years-long history of posts here and elsewhere would not indicate that is the case. Feel free to take a look if you don’t believe me.
I think videogames should maybe be a whole lot more strictly regulated given the additional demonstrated risk over TV, movies, books and other media.
Maybe part of a broader conversation about the risk of social media to society, as well, which we’re only now starting to kinda understand.
This is like one of those “change my mind” meme images. My mind was actually changed!
I’ve tried that tactic with annoying people; it never works.
Ignoring them just seems to make them ‘double down’ and act even worse.
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Well - it’s true that you just can’t ignore some people. Try as one might.
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But - this whole conversation brings us back to the title of the article- how Anita Sarkeesian actually was doing important work and is kinda bad ass.
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With one significant exception …
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