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Fighting Elegy posted:yeah but characters that people tell me are designed "for the female gaze" usually have a personality and admirable traits. in general the whole conversation seems extremely focused on western games, which to some extent i get, but an entire 'documentary series' about feminism in games that ran for 15 years and at no point mentioned otome games is a bit bizarre
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Aug 3, 2023 20:16
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Endorph posted:So people getting as worked up as they did was lame, but people had the exact right reaction to him. If we're specifically talking about death threats, people calling in bomb threats, and basically all the other stuff that chuds did to Anita, I feel like saying that what happened to Jack Thompson was people getting "worked up" is kind of downplaying how much people loving obsessed about the dude. And I mean, he sucks, he was completely wrong on the "games = school shootings" poo poo and he was a pretty garbage human. I just don't buy the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" angle. People sending threats to [sexually assault] Anita and people sending threats to [sexually assault] Jack Thompson's wife are both abhorrant. The fact that Jack Thompson was wrong doesn't make it less so. I mean people made basically unveiled threats about Thompson for attacking their precious, precious games (see also: every gaming webcomic at the time) and were applauded for it so when someone came around and said "oh yeah all your games have sexist poo poo in them and suck", the reaction was already preloaded. Sometimes I think people think gamergate spawned in an absolute vacuum instead of it being this buildup of years of people condoning behavior amongst a crowd growing up on a new burgeoning internet that was changing the way people think and act. It's a conundruum, which is why I go back and forth on whether I agree with the "gamers don't have to be your audience, gamers are over" article that was one of the inflection points in the start of gamergate. I mean, tactically I think it was a bad move but the message of "you know maybe we shouldn't encourage this insane consumer culture bullshit" is at least an interesting thought experiment. It's just a problem when you decide to say that people with "plush mushroom hats and backpacks" are "infantile" "shitslingers"... it doesn't help people get on the side of your argument. Tangentially, people also forget Anita Sarkeesian attacked Doom 2016 for being too violent. But by that point I think people had moved on to whatever else they moved on to, although I'm sure she still got another wave of threats and bullshit. It's still kind of funny though, because again it's basically the same argument although it was done more along the lines of "games are pushing violent hypermasculinity" vs "imma sue this company and get $$$". At least her reason for disliking Doom 2016 was honest and based on something other than a grift. Nuns with Guns posted:FYAD didn't spawn 4chan. There was a crackdown in ADTRW of hentai and pedo bait crap, which led to moot going "I'm going to set up my own anime pedophile den, where free speech isn't illegal." themoreyouknow.gif I really need to brush up on my SA history. It certaintly is, <ahem>, colorful.
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Aug 3, 2023 20:32
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Cutedge posted:If we're specifically talking about death threats, people calling in bomb threats, and basically all the other stuff that chuds did to Anita, I feel like saying that what happened to Jack Thompson was people getting "worked up" is kind of downplaying how much people loving obsessed about the dude. And I mean, he sucks, he was completely wrong on the "games = school shootings" poo poo and he was a pretty garbage human. I just don't buy the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" angle. People sending threats to [sexually assault] Anita and people sending threats to [sexually assault] Jack Thompson's wife are both abhorrant. The fact that Jack Thompson was wrong doesn't make it less so. I mean people made basically unveiled threats about Thompson for attacking their precious, precious games (see also: every gaming webcomic at the time) and were applauded for it My point being that I really don't think the amount of harassment he received was nearly as severe or constant, so it's not a perfect comparison by any means, which makes comparing the two come across as inappropriate. I also don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that Jack Thompson's wife receiving sexual assault threats was okay - only that if you're going to tweet "eat poo poo and die" at someone, it's obviously more morally correct to do it at a lovely bigot than a milquetoast yet well-intentioned youtuber. I think you can probably just say "harassment campaigns are bad because, even if someone did something truly awful and deserves the depth of the public's scorn, people are freaks and don't know when to quit" and leave it at that.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:15
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Endorph posted:in general the whole conversation seems extremely focused on western games, which to some extent i get, but an entire 'documentary series' about feminism in games that ran for 15 years and at no point mentioned otome games is a bit bizarre That's one of the legitimate criticisms that can be laid at Sarkeesian's door: she wasn't as expert on the overall subject of video games as she could or should've been before she made a series of critical videos about it. Hindsight being 20-20, it would've made more sense to pitch the original series as something more like, "As a feminist, I'm not into video games, and here's why." For all that, Sarkeesian was rarely wrong, but her supporting arguments could get a little flimsy. It's also fairly obvious that the original long-term plan with the videos was to use them as a springboard into a production job. I remember a lot of them eventually ended up as "here's Anita's feminist-friendly game pitch." Mr Interweb posted:Are you a Gamer(tm)? That's another piece of the puzzle that doesn't get as much attention. The mid- to late 2000s were the heyday of PR/marketing treating "gamer" as an exalted, special identity, so they could sell you all sorts of branded crap: Game Fuel, Gamer Grub, shirts, hats, etc. I remember a Sony press conference, at what must've been E3 2009, where Kevin Butler, Sony's mascot character at the time, had a whole bit where he talked about being a gamer in the same tone as a cult leader who's about to hand out the cyanide punch. As such, Sarkeesian ended up starting her series about criticizing games at the same point in time where the industry was encouraging fans to treat video games as a crucial part of those fans' identity. Her timing really just couldn't have been worse.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:32
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Tiny Myers posted:I mean, while I am on the side of "nobody deserves death threats and targeted harassment", when you say "unveiled threats" there's a big difference between Gamer Comic #9 saying "jack thompson I'm gonna rip off your head and poo poo down your neck!!! don't gently caress with us!!!" in 2007 versus the kind of threats I linked to in my first post. And you said it yourself that the threats of sexual assault, while abhorrent and inexcusable, were not toward him directly. Meanwhile Ms. Sarkeesian received graphic, detailed threats to her specifically on a pretty much daily basis.  Just...a lot of society straight-up doesn't see women as people, certainly not on the same level as men. It's always been true and very much still is.
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Aug 3, 2023 23:00
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i made the very dumb decision to wade into a GG related tweet thread and lots of them are arguing that allegedly anita made up all the harassment and threats she claimed she received and the FBI proved she was lying? i'm 101% sure these fucks are lying, but anyone know the details?
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Aug 3, 2023 23:36
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Lance of Llanwyln posted:Steam Greenlight To think, now anyone can publish Sex with Hitler 3 and Watching Paint Dry Simulator on Steam. We've come so far. mycot fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 23:37
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Tiny Myers posted:I think you can probably just say "harassment campaigns are bad because, even if someone did something truly awful and deserves the depth of the public's scorn, people are freaks and don't know when to quit" and leave it at that. That's fair and I didn't mean it as much as a "which one was worse" comparison, only in that there are a lot of parallels between the treatment of the two. My point being mostly that the overall gamer culture encouraged people to send threats and make games about killing Thompson and all that poo poo so it kind of set the stage. Sarkeesian got worse treatment for sure, and for a longer period of time. Plus of course she is one of those  so the worst kind of people were doing the harassment on top of that. But my intention was never to say that Sarkeesian and Thompson are comparable in any way other than people hated them for one reason or the other and apologies if it came across in any other way or if I was otherwise being an idiot  Lance of Llanwyln posted:Well, a big part of the reason Anita and Zoe Quinn came under such fire in the first place is because they're women. The story constructed around the latter, was, to my understanding, that she was a talentless hack who slept her way into opportunities she hadn't "earned" - a common trope leveled against women and one that played nicely into the status anxiety experienced by 20-something millennial men at the time. They weren't getting their due, and here was this hussy stealing an opportunity (Steam Greenlight. seriously) from a more deserving (read: male) creator. That the entire narrative was built on libel just didn't matter, and never will to the men who got super invested in "ethics in gaming journalism" What's even more funny about the complete and utter outrage about Zoe Quinn getting "undue" attention with that story that was written about her is that it was a story on Kotaku, a site that the gg people absolutely loathe. So it's like, why give a poo poo then? They're mad that a person they never heard of got a story from a guy who they don't like on a website they refuse to read? Guess they better go on a decades' long crusade then! Mr Interweb posted:i made the very dumb decision to wade into a GG related tweet thread and lots of them are arguing that allegedly anita made up all the harassment and threats she claimed she received and the FBI proved she was lying? i'm 101% sure these fucks are lying, but anyone know the details? Eh, years ago I'm pretty sure I saw poo poo on twitter like that and it was always either "this is a photoshop i can tell by the pixels" kind of allegations, or mostly people not understanding the difference between the timestamps on a photo versus when a photo is posted on twitter ("she posted this literally seconds after she got the message!"). That and I think Milo from breitbart contacted the wrong agency (local PD vs FBI) to find out if Sarkeesian reported anything and they didn't know so he used that to report that she was a liar. And I mean, it's Milo so what can I say there other than worlds biggest piece of poo poo. I don't even know why people would have to find out if she's being harassed from the FBI when you can just search for harassment and find it openly on twitter.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:02
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I remember her making the basic point in one of her early videos about "why does someone always have to come rescue the princess" and since then have thought that someone should do a Prince of Persia style game where you play the imprisoned damsel not waiting to be rescued and busting out via her own agency. Bottom line is overall she's done a ton of good things and I hope she gets some well-deserved peace and recognition.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:56
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negativeneil posted:It was amazing to me at the time that her critiques were so basic and surface level and he simply could not accept that there was even room for critique. It's because it was never about being open to critique. It was about being given a target to vent previously undirected malaise and rage onto. I do hope in stepping back she gets some extra peace out of it all.
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Aug 4, 2023 01:11
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Tiny Myers posted:I think you can probably just say "harassment campaigns are bad because, even if someone did something truly awful and deserves the depth of the public's scorn, people are freaks and don't know when to quit" and leave it at that. Yeah, this is where i'm at- it's not really about how bad the target is, but how psychotic people can get at people they hate. At this point though we're so far beyond it now that if you can get that many people to hate you you'd be a social media superstar. The internet is nuts.
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Aug 4, 2023 01:13
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Tiny Myers posted:In case anyone has forgotten how bad the harassment against her got. gamers sit down
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Aug 4, 2023 01:34
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Crazy Achmed posted:I remember her making the basic point in one of her early videos about "why does someone always have to come rescue the princess" and since then have thought that someone should do a Prince of Persia style game where you play the imprisoned damsel not waiting to be rescued and busting out via her own agency. That's the background behind Marian in River City Girls 2, who's explicitly the same Marian who gets repeatedly kidnapped in Double Dragon. She started working out while she was a captive and eventually got so buff that she could rescue herself. By the time RCG2 starts, she's adventuring solo because the Lee twins retired.
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Aug 4, 2023 05:57
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In hindsight, its pretty hosed up how the whole thing spun out of the control the way it did and got idiots as riled up as it did. At the end of the day she did change the way people think about games, for better or worst.
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Aug 4, 2023 07:57
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As others said in the thread, her content was pretty basic stuff, basically just "Intro to Feminism" and it's wild that things blew up the way they did. I don't know for sure but feminists probably have been talking about video games and their portrayal of women since the dawn of video games or even tabletop games. I'm genuinely curious about why she was the lightning rod of all the hate and insanity that followed her first video. I did a report on her for my feminist theory class back when she first did videos. Her stuff was well done imo even if it might have missed the mark on a couple points and wasn't a very deep dive into the content. For short form videos that were pretty broad stroked, she did a decent enough job. Sad to see she's shutting down but hey 15 years is a good run. Edit: Just because I'm paranoid about my post being misinterpreted, I don't think she staged or made up any of the harassment and threats and everything else. Cowman fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 18:56
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Archer666 posted:In hindsight, its pretty hosed up how the whole thing spun out of the control the way it did and got idiots as riled up as it did. At the end of the day she did change the way people think about games, for better or worst. As people ITT have recapped things I'm starting to realize there were a couple of different storms brewing that just kinda collided right on top of gamers.
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Aug 4, 2023 19:20
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I just realized that we can connect gamergate to donald trump getting elected. the gently caress
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Aug 4, 2023 19:23
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Cowman posted:As others said in the thread, her content was pretty basic stuff, basically just "Intro to Feminism" and it's wild that things blew up the way they did. I don't know for sure but feminists probably have been talking about video games and their portrayal of women since the dawn of video games or even tabletop games. I'm genuinely curious about why she was the lightning rod of all the hate and insanity that followed her first video. This is pretty much my sentiment. I thought her stuff was really well produce, bite-size, and easily digested intro-to-feminism style stuff. If she'd done it for cinema people would have considered it over-done and unremarkable, but she went after the vidya games and it sadly panned out kind of how you'd expect, albeit it a million time more venomous than one would anticipate, with so many of the fans being how they are.
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Aug 4, 2023 20:11
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Cowman posted:I just realized that we can connect gamergate to donald trump getting elected. You really can't, but a lot of people who want to believe their internet drama was important to history, instead of just nerds flaming each other, often say that.
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Aug 4, 2023 20:33
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Cutedge posted:That's fair and I didn't mean it as much as a "which one was worse" comparison, only in that there are a lot of parallels between the treatment of the two. My point being mostly that the overall gamer culture encouraged people to send threats and make games about killing Thompson and all that poo poo so it kind of set the stage. Sarkeesian got worse treatment for sure, and for a longer period of time. Plus of course she is one of those Thanks I figured that was the case. And yeah I'd there's literally one complaint that these people have that you have to be brain dead to agree with, it's that Gamers(tm) would never harass anyone
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Aug 4, 2023 20:34
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Cowman posted:I just realized that we can connect gamergate to donald trump getting elected. Eh… the election between Clinton and Trump was so close that you could hypothetically say that anything that directly or indirectly benefitted Trump was “responsible for his election.”
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Aug 4, 2023 21:02
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Lister posted:You really can't, but a lot of people who want to believe their internet drama was important to history, instead of just nerds flaming each other, often say that. No, there are a few meaningful links you can draw. Steve Bannon started out as a World of Warcraft gold farmer, where he learned the ins and outs of online trolling, before going to Breitbart in 2012. Bannon's the guy who hired Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin are the guys who effectively spun up and branded GamerGate. That, in turn, led to Trump's "meme army" in 2015/2016. We live in a world where a 4chan alternate reality game led to people storming the Capitol building. Hell, we're on the forum that inadvertently spawned 4chan. The Internet makes you stupid, and in 2023, stupid people go out and do crazy poo poo. Shinjobi posted:As people ITT have recapped things I'm starting to realize there were a couple of different storms brewing that just kinda collided right on top of gamers. Yeah, looking back on it, it was a collision of multiple factors. Somebody was always going to end up as the lightning rod there, because the movement needed a hate object to rally around. If it hadn't been Sarkeesian and Quinn, it might've been somebody like Leigh Alexander, Alanah Pierce, or any of the handful of trans women in the gaming press. It was just going to be someone who was being a woman right out loud in public, and it wouldn't have mattered what she had or had not done.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:14
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I got the impression that Alt-Right stuff mostly replaced Gamergate without much relation, by 2016 mentioning Gamergate by name would have already been seen as super passe and out of touch. I remember seeing one of the last gamergaters in the wild and marveling at how they seemed to be the last person to get the memo that it's not actually about Ethics in Games Journalism. edit: Wanderer posted:No, there are a few meaningful links you can draw. Steve Bannon started out as a World of Warcraft gold farmer, where he learned the ins and outs of online trolling, before going to Breitbart in 2012. Bannon's the guy who hired Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin are the guys who effectively spun up and branded GamerGate. That, in turn, led to Trump's "meme army" in 2015/2016. I knew about "the Ethereum founder turned to crypto because he was salty over Warlock nerfs in WOW" but did not know this, huh. mycot fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 21:18
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Wanderer posted:No, there are a few meaningful links you can draw. Steve Bannon started out as a World of Warcraft gold farmer, where he learned the ins and outs of online trolling, before going to Breitbart in 2012. Bannon's the guy who hired Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin are the guys who effectively spun up and branded GamerGate. That, in turn, led to Trump's "meme army" in 2015/2016. There's a whole bunch more people who are now rightwing influencers that got they're start in gamergate. Mike Cernovich (I think he wanted to sue Zoe Quinn or something) and Lauren Chen are the ones that haven't been mentioned I can think of off the top of my head. I think without gamergate Donald Trump would not have been elected but people really loudly and angrily tell me that is not true and I think some of those people might be smarter than me so I keep my mouth shut.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:25
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Wanderer posted:No, there are a few meaningful links you can draw. Steve Bannon started out as a World of Warcraft gold farmer, where he learned the ins and outs of online trolling, before going to Breitbart in 2012. Bannon's the guy who hired Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and Yiannopoulos and Adam Baldwin are the guys who effectively spun up and branded GamerGate. That, in turn, led to Trump's "meme army" in 2015/2016. You are vastly over estimating the effect that memes had on Trump's election, either the nomination or the presidency. Nobody gave a poo poo about that outside of people who were very online and were going to vote conservative anyway.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:26
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Lister posted:You are vastly over estimating the effect that memes had on Trump's election, either the nomination or the presidency. Nobody gave a poo poo about that outside of people who were very online and were going to vote conservative anyway. I think you started from the thesis that "internet poo poo don't matter" and are now disregarding any information that doesn't fit the thesis.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:31
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Fighting Elegy posted:I think without gamergate Donald Trump would not have been elected but people really loudly and angrily tell me that is not true and I think some of those people might be smarter than me so I keep my mouth shut. That might be a bridge too far, but the Steve Bannon connection definitely makes GamerGate, and what it led to, a non-trivial factor. If nothing else, GG was a hallmark moment in the coarsening/polarization of the American media environment, and that's much of what led to Trump's election. If you were going to put together an exhaustive list of all the dominoes that had to fall to get us to 2016, it'd be a mistake to not include GG.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:34
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I dont think gamergate directly got anyone elected, no, but as mentioned previously it saw some right wing nut jobs rise through the ranks to help set the stage moving into 2016. Maybe it would have happened all the same even if it had different talking heads.
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Aug 4, 2023 21:41
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e: eh nevermind actually, pointless addition
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Aug 4, 2023 21:52
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Donald Trump was elected because he ran against a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign and that it's historically difficult for a party to win three consecutive presidential elections. Gas.
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Aug 4, 2023 22:00
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I just meant more that there's a connection not that it was directly responsible  Shinjobi posted:I dont think gamergate directly got anyone elected, no, but as mentioned previously it saw some right wing nut jobs rise through the ranks to help set the stage moving into 2016. Maybe it would have happened all the same even if it had different talking heads. this is pretty much what I meant yea
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Aug 4, 2023 22:20
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gamergate was a slight bellweather for that kind of thing but trump got elected because there were average people who were into him. it didnt get him elected anymore than online lib type stuff got biden elected. this can be proven by the fact that all that stuff still existed and was going as hard as ever but trump lost in 2020.
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Aug 4, 2023 22:29
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I saw two people radicalized by Gamergate. People who weren't crazy about democrats, but hated republicans. Only a videogame related controversy could get them to vote R. Nowadays these people are cool with banning abortion, something that would have been unthinkable to them 10 years ago. I do understand that these two votes (in California no less) did not win Donald Trump the election though. But if it wasn't gamergate that would have radicalized these guys, what would it have been? Would it have been in time for the 2016 election?
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Aug 4, 2023 22:32
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Fighting Elegy posted:I saw two people radicalized by Gamergate. People who weren't crazy about democrats, but hated republicans. Only a videogame related controversy could get them to vote R. Nowadays these people are cool with banning abortion, something that would have been unthinkable to them 10 years ago. I do understand that these two votes (in California no less) did not win Donald Trump the election though.
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Aug 4, 2023 22:47
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yeah thats actually a pretty good point. Gamergate did make them feel a lot more comfortable to accept that they didn't see women as equal, view it as good/manly thing and connect that with a political movement/party though.
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Aug 4, 2023 22:54
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hillary clinton herself - not that hillary clinton is the avatar of feminism but she is a woman - #metoo in 2017, etc, im sure all that stuff would have basically led to the same result.
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Aug 4, 2023 22:58
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Ehh I could directly contradict some of that with my anecdotal evidence but I don't like really talking about alternate history scenarios because it gets impossible to prove. Gamergate radicalized at least two guys I know and thats the world we live in.
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Aug 4, 2023 23:05
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Gamergate happened completely coinciding with a rise of conservatives becoming online and the culture war being more and more charged but you can't go honestly say gamergate was more than a tiny piece of the culture war -- regular reactionaries loved to comment on gamergate stuff because it hated women and made feminists angry and they love seeing women hated and angry. Conservatives becoming online 100% elected Trump though
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Aug 4, 2023 23:12
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Part of me is slightly afraid I could have fallen for that bullshit if I didn't have friends who were in the groups Gamergate hates. There was a short time around that time where I fell for the stupid "look at these Tumblr weirdos" poo poo before realizing that A) the most salacious poo poo was fake as hell (with some exceptions like the Ark project grifters), and B) I shouldn't give a poo poo unless anyone's actually hurt.
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Aug 5, 2023 00:11
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Deki posted:There was a short time around that time where I fell for the stupid "look at these Tumblr weirdos" poo poo before realizing that A) the most salacious poo poo was fake as hell (with some exceptions like the Ark project grifters), and B) I shouldn't give a poo poo unless anyone's actually hurt. "Anti-SJW" is a whole can of worms by itself, heyday Tumblr was insanely toxic and did have bizarre drama but so much of the mock culture that obsessed over it was obviously thinly-veiled hate for being openly gay and trans and wanting to validate the narrative that minorities are unreasonable and hysterical.
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Aug 5, 2023 00:41
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