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Anita Sarkeesian, Creator of "Tropes vs. Women," Driven From Home By Trolls
Sonny Yatsen writes: Anita Sarkeesian, the creator of Tropes vs. Women — a video series exploring negative tropes and misogynistic depictions of women in video games — reports that she has been driven from her home after a series of extremely violent sexual threats made against her. Her videos have previously drawn criticism from many male gamers, often coupled with violent imagery or threats of violence. The Verge story linked has this to say: The threats against Sarkeesian have become a nasty backdrop to her entire project — and her life. If the trolls making them hoped for attention, they've gotten it. They've also inexorably linked criticism of her work, valid or not, with semi-delusional vigilantism, and arguably propelled Tropes vs. Women to its current level of visibility. If a major plank of your platform is that misogyny is a lie propagated by Sarkeesian and other "social justice warriors," it might help to not constantly prove it wrong.
Because she has form. She is known to have lied about being a gamer, and to have lied about the content of games. See about a million youtube discussions thereof for extensive evidence.
I wonder what else will surface in this story?
http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg
Oh gosh, look the screenshots of her evidence tweets came twelve seconds after the tweets themselves, from someone who was not logged in and hadn't done a search.
Almost as if she'd created the account, threatened herself, logged out, hit the back button on her browser, and taken the screenshots just in time for the release of her new video. Never you say? What motivation could she possibly have to pull such a damselling fraudulent stunt you ask? Maybe the over €150,000 of donations she got last time perhaps?
No. My first instinct was that a woman with a track record of lying and twisting/misrepresenting the truth is potentially lying and twisting/misrepresenting the truth.
Damnit. I was going to use some mod points, but I feel like I need to respond here.
Yes, a lot of men die in games. It's not really up for debate.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
I'm a (veteran--13 years, 3 companies) game developer, and I watch each of her videos with a lot of interest. She's not trying to make me feel bad, she's trying to make me pay attention to what I'm doing. I make games to entertain people, not to make a broad swathe of the population feel bad.
I'd like to stop using women as props in our games. I'd like to see more women as protagonists or just interesting characters in general. If there's a good reason to show a woman or a man dead in the game, that will still be okay. But when it happens, I'm going to be running through a little checklist in my head from now on. Was it necessary? Does it advance the game? Is it really a crucial bit of atmosphere, or could we do without it? Would it just be a good idea to hold off on showing this bit of violence given what we know about rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers?
From my perspective as a game developer (even though I'm a programmer), she's not blunting my ability to tell a story, but honing my desire to focus on the important parts of a story and make it better for everyone. This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world. AAA games are huge and expensive to make. We can't afford to be sloppy with our storytelling any more. Players are interested in next generation graphics and AI and all that fancy stuff, but we need more strong critique and scrutiny to bring us up to the next generation of narrative and storytelling that I think they also desire.
(And to the trolls that seem to be lurking in the thread, do you notice how two people can have a discussion without it devolving into name calling and threats? There's zero need for any of the shit she's had to put up with. Adults can have discussions.)