I’d say it’s the same solution we need for social media as well – more regulation.
We don’t fully understand the risks of the things we’re building until decades later.
Oh yeah I forgot about that, apologies 
I’m sure Ms Sarkeesian will find that of use when someone is stalking her.
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Unless the person you’d like to ignore is in your face in real, 3D life… or unless the person you’d like to ignore on this site is an admin or staff member.
Yes, the topic of this discussion IS actually Anita Sarkeesian, and not the devs/coders who have issues with her and/or her work.
We should probably get back to talking about the actual subject.
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This is not cool.
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The thing is, I saw similar attitudes with users of early adopters of bloody spreadsheets and word processors and sometimes personal computers in the 1980s. Booth babes and sexist magazine ads for office software were used to market these products, too, just not to the same degree that video games have taken it.
An adolescent boy’s club mentality has been in place in software development for a long time, games or not. A famous example you’re probably familiar with:
I can’t agree that video games are more dangerous in this context than movies or TV are. The vitriol aimed at Leslie Jones in regard to the 2016 Ghostbusters remake was as bad as that aimed at Sarkeesian, and often came from the same people.
The problem is not primarily with the difference in the storytelling mediums but with similarities in the industry/industry sector cultures and business practises (and, as noted above, similarities in their chosen core consumer base*). That’s not something that can be regulated away in terms of content, but rather has to be (and slowly is being) addressed through more inclusivity and participation and representation in the coding profession by women, PoC, and LGBTQ people.
[* I might as well spell this out: socially awkward males who haven’t yet or never outgrew their adolescent insecurities about women and masculinity]
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I changed my mind – versus the ongoing cost to society, I don’t think videogames are worth it any more.
What really struck me here is “what’s different” versus TV, movies, books… why is this genre so demonstrably toxic relative to the others?
It’s interactive, just like social media. Same set of risks we didn’t fully understand.
I didn’t want to believe it, but now I do.
So then, would you qualify your statement to suggest that online, multiplayer gaming with strangers has no value? Because from my perspective, I’ve been deeply moved by stories in single-player games, and I routinely co-operatively game with family members who are now in a different country than me, and to me, that sort of interactive entertainment definitely has a value to society versus, say, plain facetime calls.
The former is more directly relevant to this article, though - storytelling in games, to me, is critical, and that’s why Ms. Sarkeesian’s points matter so much to me personally - because right or wrong, they are informing future game development, and I selfishly want well-rounded, inclusive games with stories that aren’t all off-the-rails fanboi all the time. I hope we get there, but as I mentioned above, I’m worried we’re going to go backwards first, with developers afraid to approach sexuality in gaming for fear that they will “get it wrong”.
Putting on my mod hat, though, and stepping away from my personal opinions: It’s important to remember that one can appreciate the inroads Ms. Sarkeesian made in literally changing the narrative in video games and getting people talking about this stuff in any more meaningful way than “yeah, games are for guys” crap, and appreciate and respect the personal toll it took on her to do something so daunting, especially once the blowback began, but at the same time disagree with her conclusions or methodology as well.
As I said in my first comment, She’s a goddamned war hero in my books, regardless of her opinions, because she got people talking about this stuff, while wading through miles of the worst social media and asshats could throw at her.
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One thing she definitely changed my mind on, after reading the source article a few times: there is something especially vile in the culture of video games, and that is directly caused by the interactive nature of games versus other media.
It’s just a game, bro!
I didn’t want to believe it, but videogames may actually be more dangerous than other kinds of media by their very nature. Jack Thompson (ugh) and Anita were both right.
That brings up an aspect where the different medium might make a difference because, as I and others mentioned above, the consistent lack of proper and professional moderation in multiplayer and PvP games is as big a problem as it is with BBS’s and social media and chat.
Discourse is an admirable and well-thought-out effort to solve the problem for BBS’s and make the mods’ job easier, but I don’t see any comparable in-house efforts by game companies to do the same for multiplayer games.
Jack Thompson equated correlation with causation, and when he couldn’t just straight out lied. He wasn’t right any more than the anti-vaxxers are.
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It’s not the games which are the problem; they are not independent sentient beings with free will and agendas of their own.
People and their behavior (both active and subconscious) are at the core of pretty much every problem that human beings experience.
"We are the architects of our own demise."
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Video game journalism was (and to a large extend still is) crappy because the industry literally owned the only accessible media until the internet age, and even now it’s a poorly kept secret that they require outlets to pre-promise positive reviews in order to get reviewable copies before public release. Add in developer pay being tied to metacritic scores and you have incentives to both corrupt and be corrupt-able in the industry because the norms carried over from decade ago when attention was not on their activities (because ‘video games are frivolous’ type attitudes).
It’s not the type of media causing the problems here, especially with how many brilliant media experiences are only possible through video games offering stories no other media is capable of providing. It’s not like you can make Undertale into a book or movie or TV show, they literally can’t even turn Fate/Stay Night into a coherent television experience - so the standard applies for low brow and high brow experiences.
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The design of the interactive game can indeed be the problem, both in terms of singleplayer and multiplayer. Heck, the design of the massively multiplayer game called Facebook is part of society’s current problem…
The “aha” moment for me, in this topic and certainly related to Feminist Frequency’s work, is that interactive media is much more dangerous to society. I used to be a fan of video games, but I’m not any more.
(Also, putting the videos on youtube was a form of “gameplay” in itself, wasn’t it, and that ended so badly for everyone… in fact youtube is still bad for us as a general thing isn’t it?)
I suspect that @KathyPartdeux was referring to your words in this thread which do fit her characterization.
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I think I have whiplash from reading this thread…
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It’s not video games, it’s “nerd culture” writ large. GG and the extreme backlash against women like Anita Zarkeesian, Biranna Wu, and Zoë Quinn may have been the first and most obvious expression of it to hit the mainstream, but everything from the Sad Puppies at the Hugo Awards to “Rey is a Mary Sue” to the 2016 Ghostbusters film backlash to people openly thanking NCSoft for forcing Arenanet to get rid of many “diversity hires” in this year’s restructuring surrounding Guild Wars 2 to the alt-right attitudes toward women like AOC and Ilhan Omar are of a kind. Video games are not special in this regard. It’s entirely a manifestation of privileged white men seeing the expansion of their “escapism” product of choice into a broader market and reflexively (even violently) seeking to squash that expansion by any means necessary.
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Truth - a loud but vocal minority of geeky dudes, in other words. I suspect that they speak to larger social and cultural forces of the last few decades which has led to popular culture becoming ever more the battle ground for social and cultural issues.
[ETA] In other words, punks and nazi skins throwing down outside the punk show has gone into other subcultures and then gone mainstream.
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Right, the only reason I used those words is to make it clear that this is my opinion.
I am glad Feminist Frequency did this work, because honestly until today I thought of video games as “just another kind of media” and didn’t understand why video games would need special criticism … and I was already so very extremely tired of the usual cheeto-infused bong hit videogame “culture”.
Now I’m connecting the dots with social media, and interactive media in general.
The toxicity that we saw with videogames and gamergate was a sneak preview of the toxicity we would see on social media that got Trump elected. Just a different kind of “game”.
Extra criticism is warranted because the risk to society is so much higher with interactive media. Social media is dangerous. Videogames are dangerous.
That extends to the world of mainstream politics, too. As I often say, right-wingers and Libertarians from Newt Gingrinch to Ted Cruz to Ben Shapiro to Stephen Miller are all basically bitter debate-club nerds who never got over not being one of the “cool kids” in HS.
The most pathetic aspect of these sour-grapes attitudes is that they’ve persisted long after the geeks won, culturally and economically. But apparently it’s not winning to them unless they get to stay at the top of the heap and exclude people who are not like them.
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