falcon2424 posted:

I haven't watched Sarkeesian's videos. But all of the praise is totally, 100% generic. She makes 'good points'. She's doing 'good work'.

But I've literally never seen anyone mention specific things they found surprising/clever/not already on TV tropes.

Is anyone watching her videos to learn stuff? Or is it purely a shibboleth thing?

Neurolimal posted:

quotin dis for a new page


zoe quinn is a jerk and gaming journalism sucks, but lol if you buy into "we're angry about corruption, not zoe quinn!!!", this is an industry that is entirely dependent on early review copies (often tied to the requirement of a positive preview article), a privilege that can and has been revoked on a whim depending on poo poo reviews, as well as review consoles, early swag, full-site adverts before the review is even released, meetings with the developers (and developers starring in videos, making the normal reviewer feel less comfortable saying "this sucks), moneyhats flooding popular vidgit game youtube peoples, etc.

but apparently this is the super sneekret conspiracy that just goes too far: a person possibly loving other people to win the Indie Nobody Award for Best Indie Nobody Game

The Guardian posted:

And ultimately, those members of the gaming community who distrust the games press, have a really wonderful option: make the alternative. Instead of constructing strange conspiracy theories and flooding games sites with vitriolic comments, withdraw entirely. Make your own game sites. It has never been easier – or more viable. Because however much you mistrust them, the big gaming sites serve the needs of millions of gamers who don’t worry about the relationships between the press and the publishers – who just want approachable reviews, cool videos and funny list features; that’s their choice. They can’t be denied or derided either. So the best, most positive option, is to create something else.

The Guardian posted:

And ultimately, those members of the Jewish community who distrust the Gestapo, have a really wonderful option: make the alternative. Instead of constructing strange conspiracy theories and flooding newspapers with vitriolic comments, withdraw entirely. Make your own nation. It has never been easier – or more viable. Because however much you mistrust them, the Gestapo serve the needs of millions of Germans who don’t worry about the relationships between the police and the military – who just want approachable public spaces, carefree news stories and freedom from banking practices; that’s their choice. They can’t be denied or derided either. So the best, most positive option, is to steal land from Palestinians and get the UK to declare it your own.

Spanish Manlove posted:

but seriously I wanna see those gay porno photoshops

revdrkevind posted:

juliuspringle posted:

Well if the people yelling hate at you got blocked then you couldn't yell about how people are threatening you so that you could push your agenda.

NutritiousSnack posted:

http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201409032102-0024126

Aljazeera is on the side of gamers, what loving world am I living in where loving Breitart and Alazeera are same side.

BottledBodhisvata posted:

I really don't want to think this is true.


This is a really good article, and actually demonstrates a bit of journalistic integrity by pointing out all the facts and that almost every major aspect of this debacle is unsubstantiated in some way. It presents both sides of the story in their own words, with no bias towards any other, and lets you decide from the facts presented. Also glad to see them reporting on the Jenn article and the fact that its author is a friend of Zoe's.

falcon2424 posted:

I haven't watched Sarkeesian's videos. But all of the praise is totally, 100% generic. She makes 'good points'. She's doing 'good work'.

But I've literally never seen anyone mention specific things they found surprising/clever/not already on TV tropes.

Is anyone watching her videos to learn stuff? Or is it purely a shibboleth thing?

revdrkevind posted:

falcon2424 posted:

I haven't watched Sarkeesian's videos. But all of the praise is totally, 100% generic. She makes 'good points'. She's doing 'good work'.

But I've literally never seen anyone mention specific things they found surprising/clever/not already on TV tropes.

Is anyone watching her videos to learn stuff? Or is it purely a shibboleth thing?

BottledBodhisvata posted:

Which, actually, raises the question--why HASN'T Twitter said anything about this? Why has nobody reported any of these harassment things to twitter, who has the power to ban users. Wouldn't that be a logical step, if you feel blocking hate speech wasn't sufficient?

Slanderer posted:

i think her audience is (a) people who automatically agree with her freshmen-level analysis and (b) dorks who are infuriated that someone would provide a milquetoast feminist critique of games

if her only viewers were the first category, she would be completely unknown because her analysis is utterly banal. but since the 2nd group exists and is terrible, she has been elevated to a position of "authority".

her stuff is dumb as hell, but is isn't wrong, so the backlash is loving hilarious

falcon2424 posted:

I haven't watched Sarkeesian's videos. But all of the praise is totally, 100% generic. She makes 'good points'. She's doing 'good work'.

But I've literally never seen anyone mention specific things they found surprising/clever/not already on TV tropes.

Is anyone watching her videos to learn stuff? Or is it purely a shibboleth thing?

BottledBodhisvata posted:

-there's absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be more empowered female characters and there are a lot of sexist concepts that continue to be recycled in games, primarily with the way women are dressed.

AkumaHokoru posted:

EGM/1up closed years ago they dont exist anymore

Cardboard Box A posted:

Tei posted:

Fooling around in Google, I have found this article from Leigh Alexander, the boss editor of Gamasutra and one of the authors that want to kill gamers.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_111/1359-Growing-Up-Gamer.2

This article helps visualize with she hate modern gaming. When she was young, she used to play a lot of videogames with his dad, but her dad grown tired of videogames becuase their evolution from whimsy to phony did not appeal to his tastes.

Again, his siters where at first his Player 2, but she grown to ignore games again.

So Leigh Alexander hate modern games because she fell games have separate her from his sister and dad. She had a awesome thing with his dad and sister, but games stoped being fun. The last games she liked, where probably in the 80's.

This is a person with a lot of contacts, one of these that can have your host remove your website with a single phone call. And she hate modern gaming.

Leigh Alexander posted:

When people ask me how someone with such a strong PC heritage came to be a nearly-exclusive console gamer—since that's what I am these days—I usually blame the Windows PC's rapid rise to power. My Apple IIe adventure gaming took me into the Mac Quadra and Centris era, and I could have played clicky Hypercard adventures and freeware games and stuff like Myst on them for the rest of my life. But then they put PCs in my school when I was in fifth grade or so and I had to learn to use them.

And then there was some box all over the shelves with this sterile two-toned man, bathed in light like some nerd messiah. The box said DEUS EX and I didn't want to play it.
It was culture shock, having been cousins with computers since birth. It felt horribly ugly and backward. When we got them at home, it got worse. Suddenly, things I never had to think of: Drivers, resolutions, sound cards, compatibility issues. I would buy games and half the difficulty would be figuring out how to get them to run. I had to memorize specifications. I didn't like fighting the machines for my entertainment. I turned to the Sega Genesis and the TurboGrafx-16.

Of course, everyone went on playing PC games without me. In the school's computer lab, mute, hostile boys with thick glasses and greasy hands were losing themselves in mazes of muddy corridors, firing guns. They worshiped at the altars of faceless spacemen, of aliens spewing blocky blood. I was not invited to join.

quote:

I was mad at Doom, and at what it made the People on TV think that games were about. There were no more bumbling astronauts, funny pirates and friendly princesses, no more dreamlike, thoughtful journeys. And then there was some box all over the shelves with this sterile two-toned man, bathed in light like some nerd messiah. The box said DEUS EX and I didn't want to play it. By the time that game launched I had virtually married my PlayStation.

quote:

Time passes, of course, and it's taken me some time to unclench the fists of prejudice in the ways I need to if I'm to be any good at my job, but I've mostly done it.

Fluo posted:

So what's happened since page 320. Over 1000 posts. :I

BottledBodhisvata posted:

She hasn't really responded to any of the criticisms against her as far as I know.

BottledBodhisvata posted:

I dunno if SA would be the place to do it

Fandyien posted:

feminism is good

BottledBodhisvata posted:

Sarkeesian subscribes to the school of thought that ANY objectification of women is bad, and ANY instance where a woman is admired for her physical attractiveness, or used in a situation where her biological function--pregnancy being a key one--supplements her character is Bad with a capital B. It'd open a dialog if she wasn't so smug about it all, I guess, but that's sort of women's studies majors in general, so I don't think there's any helping her there.

Suben posted:

feminism is cool but a bunch of maggotmaster-type people using it to scream at people because they're depressed and angry is not imo.

Karpaw posted:

To pick up the armchair psychoanalysis, the more I read of Alexander's writings, the more I get the sense the rabid nerd hatred is her outlet for bemoaning separation and exclusion issues from her childhood.

Bloody Hedgehog posted:

Slanderer posted:

i think ryan davis (pour one out RIP) called her a sociopath, and i'm pretty sure he was 100% correct

argondamn posted:

computer hardware is misogynistic.

Moldy Taxes posted:

why is it called "male-to-female"? why not "female-to-male"?

I'm getting triggered just thinking about it

Terror Sweat posted:

Lol this is definitely libel

Archer666 posted:

Based on his twitter vomit, I believe this to be the most accurate representation of Moviebob.

Moldy Taxes posted:

why is it called "male-to-female"? why not "female-to-male"?

I'm getting triggered just thinking about it

BottledBodhisvata posted:

Her videos are generic, but they basically are Feminism 101 and that's all they are. I personally find some of her critiques very shallow, and think that she attacks entire concepts wholesale to be detrimental to her argument--because she's arguing against tropes, she's essentially saying "every instance of X is wrong". It's kind of like TVTropes, but with an even more clear bias. I've posted a few critiques of her videos in this thread, but it's hard to argue against her since, again, she's very basic in what she's saying, and if you accuse her of being unfair, you get battered by people saying "DID YOU EVEN WATCH THE VIDEOS ARE YOU A MALE YOU SHUT UP" and so forth.

I'd have a lot more respect for her if she actually sought out to enter into a dialog or debate with somebody, anybody really--as long as it was an actual debate. She hasn't really responded to any of the criticisms against her as far as I know. And, to her credit, she does make some decent points along the way--there's absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be more empowered female characters and there are a lot of sexist concepts that continue to be recycled in games, primarily with the way women are dressed.

Sarkeesian subscribes to the school of thought that ANY objectification of women is bad, and ANY instance where a woman is admired for her physical attractiveness, or used in a situation where her biological function--pregnancy being a key one--supplements her character is Bad with a capital B. It'd open a dialog if she wasn't so smug about it all, I guess, but that's sort of women's studies majors in general, so I don't think there's any helping her there.

I don't really know why she never steps up to discuss any of this in a forum of some kind though. I dunno if SA would be the place to do it, I'd rather she actually do a livestream debate on some of these issues, or otherwise just have SOMEBODY besides her own drat viewpoint in a video.

Lumpy the Cook posted:

Alright, it is time for an expose on the different connections between various groups in this GamerGate scandal.

The majority of this SJW stuff, at its core, is coming from what is known as "Weird Twitter." (inb4 >KYM http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/weird-twitter) Weird Twitter was initially formed when users of the FYAD subforum on the Something Awful forums decided that the forums were slowly dying (which is true) and took to Twitter to increase their internet presence and be able to interact with more people (largely to harass them). They had created such a hostile environment to newcomers in FYAD that essentially no new blood trickled in, and they literally had to force new people to post there through moderator bullshit, and even then the sole purpose of that was not to get new blood, but for the insular clique who have known each other for more than a decade now, to torment that person. So they needed greener pastures, which they found on Twitter, where they were joined by refugees from Laissez Faire, a FYAD-style subforum which at the end of its lifespan was filled with anime avatar hardline Marxists (think /pol/ but even more extreme, but on the left, and extremely ban-happy. It ultimately fell apart and was resurrected as various offsite forums time and again because they kept falling apart due to drama and users harassing each other).

Anyway this insular group of a few dozen or so people quickly attracted a large following on Twitter by making genuinely amusing Tweets (which had mostly nothing to do with SJW poo poo), and among that following were many indie creators and related SJW types, mostly because those Tweets had SJW-friendly language (the most glaring examples of this language are infantile-sounding insults like "garbagemen" or "piss baby").

However, besides making amusing Tweets, they had another purpose: Harassing people for their own amusement. The former LF parts of Weird Twitter and their largely SJW indie dev follower (and similar people, you get the picture) crowd merely provided SJW issues as a heuristic to find targets to single out and harass. If this in-group had accumulated a following among a different demographic (which is however a rather unlikely scenario, given the initial LF element among them) they would have looked for people to harass based on whatever that demographic valued, rather than SJW issues. It's important to understand that the SJW issues they supposedly care about are merely meant to raise a Twitter mob outside of their small circle. On FYAD itself, they have no issues with throwing around racist and sexist slurs like they're going out of style. They just know how to keep that poo poo off Twitter, since the average FYAD post would give a true SJW a heart attack.

And make no mistake, these people have absolutely no issues with harassment up to and including death threats either. FYAD even managed to make a depressed, possibly autistic man kill himself due to their harassment, a fact that if brought up rather than denying, they will gloat and laugh about. Many of these people were active in Helldump, another Something Awful subforum which existed for the sole purpose of doxxing SA users and digging up as much embarrassing information on them as possible, which went as far as users posting nude pictures of an underaged girl, as well as making fun of users with physical disabilities.

One of the superstars of that subforum was also involved with the attempt at bullying a 10 year-old (who they also doxxed and threatened with death). I say attempt because the 10 year-old shrugged it off like a champ. The guy, btw, should be somewhere in his mid-to-late 30s. This whole episode is well-known, and 4chan has torn the parties involved a new one over it.

Zoe Quinn, by her own admission in mid-August (I believe she tweeted it on August 12th or 15th, it should still be there if she hasn't deleted it), is still an active SA forums user and has been since 2002. It is safe to assume that she is part of this in-group which is at the center of this Twitter shitstorm.

How do I know all this? Simple, I used to be part of it. I wasn't part of the FYAD in-group but one of the people who joined later on Twitter (although I had been posting and lurking on the SA forums for years beforehand, I simply didn't interact with FYAD). The 10 year-old harassment episode opened my eyes, and I used what I know to put 2 and 2 together, and here you are reading the results.

So what does this have to do with the larger SJW community?

Simple: This isn't about gamers, gaming or feminism. The SJW poo poo is simply a smoke-screen which an insular group of people who have known each other for over a decade use to get their truly massive amount of SJW Twitter followers who are not part of that in-group, to join in on harassment, which they get off on. I almost feel bad for legit SJWs who participate in this, they are merely useful idiots. If you are an SJW reading this: You have been tricked, rused, bamboozled. The same people who point you to targets which to attack are the very bullies you proclaim to loathe.

Anyway, how does this tie into games journalism?

When this whole thing broke loose, it got huge overnight, despite constant censorship attempts and fraudulent DMCA takedowns across the internet. Gaming journalists, both directly involved with Zoe and indirectly involved by participating in similarly seedy actions which clearly breach the ethics of journalism needed a way to make this go away or bury the larger issue, and fast. All most of them could do on their end was write articles, but that wouldn't have gotten the needed reaction fast enough.

Luckily, they had connections among this in-group (such as Zoe Quinn possibly being a part of it, as well as other indie devs and related people who follow people from the in-group and are followed back by them) which had, by now, years of experience in raising Twitter lynch mobs and who had the required number of followers among the SJW crowd. Thus, they mobilized them to turn what is a journalistic issue at heart into an SJW issue. And this they gladly did, because it meant getting to harass people.

rizuhbull posted:

Some anonymous person online called me a human being. Obviously this illustrates the pervasive and entrenched hatred of homosexuals in gaming culture, in the same way "retard" speaks of fifteen year old's bigotry towards the special needs populace. Yep. That's definitely it.
I'm lead to believe it doesn't sell. I would think most publishers would force developers to tailor their games to what sells. When you have a game demographic that is mostly straight while males, I don't see how it's surprising that it'd do everything it can to appease them. Unless Anita is offering to buy all those lost copies if they did make games "fair" or whatever, why listen to her? Strong female leads and games that don't use women in sexist ways is great, but unless half gaming population is buying those games, why would you when it's to the detriment of your sales? I don't even give a poo poo about economics but here I am defending capitalism just because the arguments regarding it are so stupid.

I feel really childish talking about something so basic, but I guess it's lost on people. Unless I'm missing something vital, which I doubt. Anita probably knows all this and is just doing this as a job, especially since she admittedly doesn't give a poo poo about games. I don't blame her.