SedanChair posted:

I agree with everything Anita Sarkeesian has ever said.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

To prove gamer cred, obviously.

Wulfolme posted:

I thought that was another group called the Sad Puppies?

Phobophilia posted:

Maybe a little bit of bleed over?

Sad Puppies was only a Thing because of the Rabid Puppies, and the Rabid Puppies were led by Vox Day.

He was one of the first to jump onto the GG bandwagon.

Cingulate posted:

It makes perfect sense though. Certain parts of patriarchy are most dangerous to men, rather than to women. Consider violence; be it war, or murder. In a sense, war and murder are the most masculine things there are. Most people who get murdered are men, most soldiers who are killed are men.

Video games and action movies promote the very thing that is killing men: masculinity.

Similarly, I've seen a bunch of gamers complain about their soft nerdy nature leads to them being bullied. Well, show me the last time you were playing a video game where the hero is a soft nerd, and not a masculine hard-rear end.

Cingulate posted:

Yes. I did not mean to imply every video game ever is Arnold Schwarzenegger 3: The Penis With The Bacon Moustache.

I do have a vague impression video games have gotten more in line with the general Hollywood ideal of violence/masculinity over time. Like, there's still stuff like Tetris, but it's proportionally less. But maybe that's just because one remembers stuff like Frogger and Tetris more than countless attempts at being super masculine from back then.

Cingulate posted:

I'd like to see a study on that, like, really exhaustive.

Jack Gladney posted:

All the specific criticism of Anita Sarkeesian in this thread seems weak as hell and boils down to: poor color timing, slow release of new videos, and collaborating with a man who posts silly things on his twitter. There are lots of sweeping statements like, "she's just as silly as the people who harass her!" without a lot to substantiate that claim.

The backlash to her work seems disproportionate to these concerns, and so some remain curious. What is so poor about her work?

Broniki posted:

You could just mention the fact that anti-Gamergate actually harasses people, doxxes them and sends death threats while Gamergate does not.

Slanderer posted:

I thought people posted his publicly-listed business address (which happened to be his home) and suggested to report him to the California Bar for hiring PIs to stalk people / threatening to doxx people by suing them and releasing the court records.

Meme Emulator posted:

Also exercise has to be one of the easiest things to compare to an RPG. Im sort of shocked there isnt some big nerdy social site where everyone conencts thier iphones to a pedometer and it levels up a character or something

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

The entirety of E3 this year had a focus on the sheer number of playable female leads. This, to some, was seen as their side gaining influence in the industry. Whether or not they were right is entirely speculative.

quote:

How come 2015 is suddenly so infinitely better than 2014, then?

I think there are two reasons for that.

First, I think the bias comes from the fact that there were probably more women on stage than in any previous year. It seems like there were six the last year, and I think we have seen more this year (anyone wants to compare, go ahead, I refuse to watch all the conferences again). And we’re not talking any fake non-gamer/dev speakers here, we’re talking real flesh and blood female developers. Their presence was noticeable, and they were all great.

Additionally, the bias might be amplified by the fact that this year the publishers were smarter about their trailers and gameplay previews. In previous years, most of the time if, say, Ubisoft had a game they wanted to promote, they kept it for their own conference. This year, they did promote such a game at their conference, but prepared something unique and worthy for the platform holders as well. So Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate was present in multiple conferences at E3 2015, and one of these presentations showed a female protagonist we can sometimes play as.

So I think that while games themselves did not really change on the whole, the slight refocus in game marketing might have affected the journalists’ perception of games.

Second, last year, some of gaming press, especially those who love to call themselves progressive, pushed the narrative that games are awful (see the earlier E3 2014 quotes), and that all that gamers want — when they’re not busy being dead — is to push women out of gaming. That didn’t quite work as well as they expected: gamers refused to die and it turned out that no one ever wanted to push women out of gaming.

No one likes admitting they were wrong. The remainings of the narrative, then, had to be reskinned. And so now we have it that the industry “finally listened and grew up”. Even if the change never really comes just because cultural critics crack the whip.

But you know what…

I kind of like this change.

It’s a step, or even a jump in the right direction.

I think celebrating what you like — even if that celebration is inflated and biased — is infinitely better than shaming what you don’t like.

I was happy, then, that the ultra-violent Doom or For Honor were left alone by the press, and this year no one complained about the “severed heads” or the lack of female assassins in Rainbow Six. Instead, with only a few exceptions, the usual suspects simply focused on the positives. And this particular desync between what they say and, well, facts, is one I can live with.

Ddraig posted:

I'm not entirely sure you've read that blog post because it's specifically about Gamergate harassing a woman.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

I imagine anyone who tried would realize that nobody could pay them enough to continue.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I cannot believe I am replying to this thread but you are wildly mischaracterizing her argument in that video, and you are not even logically consistent in your summary of it. You claim she says the games "purpose" is to kill prostitutes and then a sentence later downgrade it to saying she says the game "encourages" it.

EDIT: Neither of which is accurate. She says the use of prostitutes as a prop which can only be interacted with meaningfully with violence creates a reality where the only two possible interactions are to ignore them or to wholesale slaughter them. Both of these outcomes objectify the women in the most literal meaning of the word.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

You disagree with her and then repeat her argument

Whether or not you are "supposed to" in the context of the ideal playthrough doesn't change that the only two potential interactions are to ignore them or to cause violence, which both objectify them.

Meme Emulator posted:

Oh, and every zombie takes 500 hits to kill, and each weapon has about 5 hits of durability on it. Thank god they cemented in the preorders with the fee fee trailer before everyone could start talkin about how bad the game was.

Ddraig posted:

I'm curious if they'll actually mention the Zoe Post when they talk about the Genesis of their movement or if they'll either ignore it or slip it in under the banner of 'unethical journalism'

Popular Thug Drink posted:

This is a ridiculous standard for hobbyist journalism though. You'd need to find a journalist who is really into indie gaming but doesn't have any friends who are indie game devs. It's an impossible standard so you can keep accusing everyone with it.

quote:

Who here hasn’t slept with a PR person or game developer? #AMIRITE
– William O’Neal, editor-in-chief, TechRadar.com

quote:

I would prefer not to be associated with this. It feels wrong to me. I think it feels very off to reach across the fence from journalist to subject in this way. I prefer professional distance, especially given the accusations being levied at us from outside.
– Mike Futter, Game Informer

Popular Thug Drink posted:

BexGu posted:

Nah.... neither side is smelling like roses here. People have been threatened/received death threats before for being Pro-GG.

A college professors was threatened to stop posting about being pro-GG or get ""something sharp in that close up oval office and twist": https://twitter.com/ggfeminist/status/514238397653590016

The standard "I know where you live" threat: https://twitter.com/milky_candy/status/513373137639964672

ErikForeman being told he is going to get his dick cut off: https://archive.is/E7GZL

Mike Cernovich had every single detail of his life put online with instructions on how to file a report to the police/SWAT him.

And that a restaurant that was hosting a GG meetup in Washington, DC had a pretty serious bomb threat against it.

None of this justify GG doing something similar but lets be realistic about the kind of threats/harassment true believers of each side are doing to each other.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

I didn't know that a gamergater was threatened with swatting from an antigamergater, thanks.

ImpAtom posted:

Well, that is the thing I legitimately don't understand.

They talk about ethics and lack of censorship but every single time I see it comes up it is an argument in favor of censorship and poor criticism. By and large it seems to be saying that there is no place for politics in video game journalism which... like, how does this mesh with something like Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line where the politics of the story are so deeply ingrained into it that praise or criticism can't reliably exist without discussing it. What is ethical games journalism and why is it a good thing?

I'm not trying to be a dick, I legitimately want to know what the intended goal of the non-misogynistic GG engine is. What is ethical games journalism?

blackguy32 posted:

I also disagree that Gamergate will go away simply because you do all those things. I don't know if you can be a moderate on a hashtag as virulent as that and I don't think Gamergate came out of nowhere. As he cites Brianna Wu on, this kind of stuff was taking place long before GamerGate was a thing. And I think that now that GG is here, it will be here to stay as cover for that kind of thing.

Still, I do think people should take a look at that article.

ImpAtom posted:

That isn't really what that article ends up saying as near as I can tell. It basically paints 'moderate' GGers as blameless innocent people who only want ethical games journalism without actually citing what ethical games journalism is beyond some pretty extreme examples.

I mean this article basically just says "these people don't have to make any concessions, everyone should concede to them." Which... I don't agree on because I still don't know what they want.

I mean even here and now this conversation is still about Zoe Quinn. Why aren't people discussing Activision or EA or Square-Enix or Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo? Why is a fairly no-name game industry person even being discussed if this is about ethics in game journalism?

Knifegrab posted:

Zoe Quinn is really dumb. The people who harassed her are even dumber.

Everyone is dumb who gives a poo poo about this stuff, make a game, and the quality of your game will be its own merits. Don't make a poo poo game and then bemoan that it wasn't well received because "patriarchy".

ImpAtom posted:

I guess I'm not really clear what the point of it is. That is perfectly standard if perhaps a bit too loose in places for my tastes. If that is GG's end goal then they won before they even started, barring exceptions which are literally always going to be the case in any form of journalism. (Fox New exists after all.)

Solemn Lemons posted:

I`m anti-censorship of any media, which in my opinion has nothing or little to do with all of this.

But reading this thread a bit makes me wonder, should i be worried or is it just alot of shouting?